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BOSSes Anne Ganguza and Tom Dheere examine the state of the voiceover industry a few months into 2025. They discuss the direct impact of political and economic events on booking trends and content. The conversation explores how corporate messaging is adapting to cultural and policy changes, the ongoing role of authenticity, and the evolving, perhaps less threatening, landscape of AI. Ultimately, they offer a message of adaptation, education, and resilience for voice actors navigating the current climate.   00:03 - Anne (Host) Hey bosses, are you new to voiceover and not sure where to start? Join the VOPeeps VI Peeps membership and get access to over 350 hours of pre-recorded classes, a 15% discount on all VOPeeps, guest workshops and free monthly workouts. This membership is perfect for those wanting to get started in the industry. Find out more at vopeeps.com. Slash join dash now.  00:32 - Speaker 2 (Announcement) It's time to take your business to the next level, the boss level. These are the premier business owner strategies and successes being utilized by the industry's top talent today. And successes being utilized by the industry's top talent today Rock your business like a boss a VO boss.  00:54 - Anne (Host) Now let's welcome your host, Anne Ganguza. Hey everyone, welcome to the VO Boss Podcast and the Real Boss Series. I'm your host, Anne Ganguza, and I'm here with the one and only Mr Tom Dheere. Hello, hello, hello, hi, tom. Oh goodness, tom, we're a few months into 2025, and it's been quite a year so far, wouldn't you say I would say yes, it has.  01:13 Lots of disruption going on in the world in so many ways I would say economically, socially, I mean. It's a new administration and I know that we spoke earlier about setting your goals and starting off on the right foot for 2025 and finding out who you are. Now that we're a few months in, I think we should go back and readdress what's happening. What's going on? How are you feeling about the state of things? Let's maybe open it up with the state of our industry, the voiceover industry. How are you feeling the state of voiceover is a few months into 2025?  01:49 - Tom What's interesting about it, Anne, is that your emotional state when you are watching the news or doom scrolling on social media is going to make you feel a certain way about how everything is going and, depending on your political inclination, you may think everything is going wonderfully or you may think everything is going terribly.  02:12 But then there's that pesky little thing called reality, which is the reality of how many auditions am I getting, how often am I booking, how much money am I making? Where are those voiceover bookings coming from? And, based on what's going on in the world, how much of that is directly or indirectly affecting our individual voiceover businesses?  02:39 - Anne (Host) Absolutely, and because we're service-based right. It affects us very much. Right, it affects us because companies are hiring us to, for the most part, entertain or sell. Right, and, depending on how the companies are feeling and companies are reacting to the issues that are going on in the world today, may have a direct impact on our business.  03:01 - Tom Yeah, so just as a point of reference, let's look at 2024. Our business? Yeah, so just as a point of reference, let's look at 2024. One of the major things that happened that had a huge impact on voiceover work was the presidential election, because, distressingly late in 2024, we weren't sure who was running for president on either side of the aisle, much less who their running mates were. That had a massive effect on corporations when it came to advertising budgets and what the content of the advertising would be. So last summer, 2024, july August there was a huge dip in voiceover work across the board because companies didn't know where to put their money.  03:46 - Anne (Host) Except in political maybe.  03:47 - Tom  Except in political.  03:48 And then when September, October, hit, the political campaigns all went crazy and a lot of the advertising got stopped up because so much ad space was being taken up by political advertising.  04:02 There was a noticeable drop in commercials for television and radio because all the political ad buys were taking up all the real estate. So that is one pretty clear, direct example about how what's going on in the real world affected what was going on in the voiceover industry. So let's look at spring of 2025 of what's going on right now is since there's virtually no political ads, as in campaign ads. I mean, there's a smattering of them here and there and a smattering of issue ads, but I didn't notice any more than there usually has been, which means the void that the political ads left got immediately taken up by commercials, left got immediately taken up by commercials. So there seems to be as much work as there was at any given time in recent voiceover history. I agree with you there. But the question is, what is the content and context of the ads and other voiceover genres and what are the casting demands and what are the performance demands for?  05:09 - Anne (Host)  Now also, we're thinking, I think, right now, commercial broadcast style voiceover. When we think about that, I agree with you that, yes, there's as much work, I think, as there ever has been. However, it's the content that might be changing and the context. You're absolutely right, but also there might be in terms of industrial content, like the industries that are advertising, the industries that are hiring voice talent that may or may not be broadcast. Maybe we're talking e-learning, we're talking corporate, we're talking all the different non-broadcast style voiceover. I think, in that realm where I'm seeing I'm not seeing a drop necessarily, but I'm seeing companies looking very carefully at what they're saying and what they want their brand message to be.  05:54 - Tom Yes.  05:54 - Anne (Host) And that is very key for somebody like myself if I produce demos, to make sure that the content is reflective of the culture and the society of the times.  06:06 - Tom Yes, culture definitely has an influence on advertising broadcast and it also has an influence on internal content, e-learning content, corporate industrial content. Actually, I just realized last year I had narrated an app for a large governmental organization, let's just say, and it was about harassment in the workplace and it was a big project and I did it all and the client was thrilled and I got paid and everything was great. Just a few days ago, the client wrote me and said hey, as a result of all of these executive orders that have been stripping away DEI policies and verbiage, I had to record a decent chunk of it all over again with the new policies and whatever we'll call it, awareness of it in mind.  07:01 - Anne (Host) Yeah, that's the biggest thing that I am seeing and, again, we're not here to be political. However, the two of us need to take a realistic look as to okay, so what are companies having to do to maybe adhere to policies? Because companies that maybe depended on support from the government may have to rewrite some policies. They may have to rethink how they're speaking, and that directly impacts a lot of the corporate work that I've done and also corporate training as well I do. The majority of my work in the e-learning aspect is through corporate.  07:34 I do some educational, which I think that also can be touched, but not in such a direct manner Like, let's say, dei or I'm just trying to think like, what other types of topics and support and safety and environmental. Let's think about environmental changes. Right Before, in a lot of corporate, there was a lot of talk about sustainability, talk about climate change. There was a lot of talk about sustainability, talk about climate change. Companies wanted their audiences to hear that they were supporting these things, because that's what mattered to the majority of people, that they wanted to be on board with them. Now, is that a thing when we're talking about alternative energy right, alternate energy are we going to now be talking about drilling and fracking versus, you know, solar power or those types of things.  08:18 - Tom  Yeah, absolutely, and top-down policies are going to have a trickle-down effect, but also, as in if federal laws are changing or being enacted or being repealed, that's going to have a big effect on a lot of the policies of the companies, because they have to be compliant with local, state and federal law to be able to run their business legally and effectively. So, yeah, it will definitely have a top-down effect. The other thing is economic.  08:47 - Anne (Host) Yes, we always have to look at the economics.  08:49 - Tom You always have to look at the economics of it, and we're still seeing what the full effect of all of these tariffs are going to be on multiple countries, which is going to the majority of economics say, regardless of your political bent, that this is going to create an increase in prices of many, many items. Or some items just may not be available in the United States to be imported and there's some based on reciprocal tariffs. There may be items that the United States manufacturers that cannot be exported.  09:23 - Anne (Host) Well, absolutely, and in terms of hiring, and in terms of hiring. In terms of hiring. I do know that I heard from one of my students, canadian students, that is it favorable now to be an American voicing a Canadian brand at this point?  09:38 Or vice versa, or vice versa, and so we have to think about that or any global brand. So it's interesting to really see. I think a lot of us are so in our studio bubbles that we forget how this impacts the industry, and it impacts our jobs. It can directly affect our jobs, and so it's something that we need to keep our eyes open to. And even though I know a lot of people are like I'm off social media or I you know, it's just sometimes it's difficult for people to watch the news I do think that we have to keep ourselves in touch enough to understand where the trends are going and what things are happening if we want to keep our businesses afloat. And now I guess the next question, Tom, is are we doom-scrolling our voiceover industry at this point? I mean?  10:27 - Tom How do you feel about it? There's a lot of hysteria and confusion and frustration and fear and anger on every social media platform that I have seen. Some of it is a healthy discourse, some of it is fear and hate-mongering. Some of it is a healthy discourse. Some of it is fear and hate mongering. Some of it is a cry for desperation and comfort and commiseration. It's a combination of all of those things.  10:44 So the question is do you shut off all of your social media and go take a walk? Sometimes that's a very, very good idea. But, just exactly to your point, anne, we need to keep an eye on what's going on. Also, all of the social media groups that we're on, they're national or international, so we can keep an eye on what's going on in other parts of the country and other parts of the industry and how it may or may not affect us. Like, for example, I just saw recently a social media post Somebody was talking about well, what happens if there's a recession? How is that going to affect the voiceover industry? Now, I don't know if you remember, but 2008, 2009, the great recession oh, I do. I did not remember and I went back and I looked at my numbers. I didn't notice any effect, noticeable effect, on it.  11:29 When COVID hit March of 2020, there was a noticeable dip, but then April it went right back up and 2020 was a pretty good year for me. But paying attention to things like that and you know, instead of being in your own little bubble, about being terrified about everything, but when you're actually doing your own research off of social media and looking for intelligent discourse on social media to find actual facts, and listening to people who've been around the block a few times, like you or I, who was like, yeah, no, the recession was not a big deal and oh, yeah, covid, things bounced back really quickly and, like I said, last year's, well, the strikes, the SAG-AFTRA strikes, the interactive strike, which is still ongoing, unfortunately, but hopefully they'll be able to fight for their rights and protect all of us. When it comes to AI and other bad practices, the voiceover industry seems to be relatively pliant and relatively resilient. Yes, because, no matter what, people are still trying to sell things. People are still trying to buy things.  12:28 I love that. You said that People still need to teach things. You know what I mean.  12:31 - Anne (Host) I mean, we are a company ourselves, right, we want to stay afloat.  12:34 We're right now looking at and if you aren't, you need to be right Always, you need to be looking at how are you going to stay afloat, how is your business going to continue to show progress, move forward, be successful?  12:46 And it just basically comes down to we're evolving. We're evolving with the times, right, and I think that I agree with you wholeheartedly that I don't think there's going to be any less of a demand for voiceover because, as you mentioned, companies still want to exist, they still want to sell a product, and so part of that sell is including a voice to speak the brand and to communicate that sell to others. And so I don't think it's doom scrolling, but I do believe that we need to educate ourselves on what the trends are, and not just the trends on the style of voiceover, although I think that it's good to understand, like, what's out there? How is that message being told? I always maintain that the best performance trend, the best voiceover performance trend to follow, is just be an actor, be a damn actor, right, because if you're an actor, you evolve, you can evolve and change, just like you need to do with your business.  13:44 And I think that you kind of touched on synthetic voices and AI Again, if we were to talk about how do you feel that that's affecting the industry these days? I can tell you, in my opinion, right now, I think that things are working themselves out, hopefully on a more positive note, and I don't think that the fascination is there for me. I'm not seeing the fascination there with voiceover jobs being stolen by AI. I believe that more of the focus needs to be on let's just protect our voices so that they're not being used without our permission and being developed into a synthetic voice. Or, if we have a synthetic voice, make sure that we're getting compensated for it. What are your thoughts?  14:22 - Tom  I generally agree, because everyone who decided that AI is the devil and decided not to get involved in any level of critical thinking or investigating about it, they have not changed their minds. The people that jumped in with both feet are probably still jumping in with both feet. What I think to your point you're saying is that everybody that wanted to give it a sniff, that wanted to try it out, test the water, has done it not just once, but maybe twice, because ChatGPT rolled out November 2022 and now we're in mid 2025. So I think there's been like At least from my observation, there's been like two rounds of companies giving AI a try. The first one was just to, oh, let's see what this is all about.  15:03 And then some were like, oh, this is great, this is perfect. Others are like, no, this is awful. And then there's others who, a year or so later, is like you know what? It's probably gotten two years better. Let's give it another try. And then same thing happens. Some thought, oh, okay, it's good enough now, or it's not good enough now, or making whatever decision. But yeah, the fervor from the consumer end, I think, has settled.  15:26 I think so too, and I think the terror from the voiceover end I think for the most part is settled. There's still questions about it.  15:33 - Anne (Host) Sure, and we've got great organizations fighting for us as well. Nava has been doing a phenomenal job in that regard, and if you're a business and you're not using AI in some capacity to manage your data, you're missing out. You're missing out on the boat, and we did talk about that previously in an episode, tom, you and I. It's just getting better and better at that, but it's not necessarily getting better at speaking your voice synthetically. But data management, I think, is just leaps and bounds and it's integrated in a lot of the products we're using and you may not even know it. It's kind of like.  16:07 I think I mentioned this to you before Back in the day I installed voice over IP phone systems when they first came out and people just said oh my God, they sucked, They'll never work, They'll never last, and ultimately, that's what we do today. I mean, it's all voice over IP. Everything that we're doing is we're communicating, Our phone lines are over data internet lines and it's just that's what's happening. Now. We have voice over IP and we don't even know it. It's seamless. So I believe that the AI data management is being built in seamlessly into things that we use like Google or I think you're using Google Workspace.  16:36 - Tom  I am using Google Workspace and Google Gemini is my favorite AI, google Gemini.  16:39 - Anne (Host) I have ChatGPT. I have a couple other products that do some automated things for me that are under the ChatGPT, and I continually look for tools that can help me to run my business more efficiently. So I don't think that in the voice realm of things. Oh my God. I just said a company.  16:54 - Tom  Naughty, naughty.  16:54 - Anne (Host) I didn't even know In the voiceover world. I don't know if synthetic voices are quite the terror and the scare that they were in the last couple of years.  17:03 - Tom  I still think the same thing is exactly what you and Andy said on that wonderful narratorlife interview that you did, which you said garbage in, garbage out. Good actors are going to make good AIs, bad actors are going to make bad AI are going to make bad AI. And the relevance gap I still think is growing, of people that are lacking in talent or training storytelling training, that are trying to enter the world of voiceover, are just not going to be able to get in. So I think that still stands.  17:28 - Anne (Host) And everybody I talk to we're talking about. Like anything today, if you want to capture someone's attention, right, marketing, wise, right it's all about authenticity. It's all about authenticity. It's all about give the human aspect to you. Even when I write a newsletter, it's like give somebody that vulnerable part of yourself that talks directly to them and doesn't just try to sell them or doesn't just try to, like, promote things. And give that authenticity. And I really believe that, as humans, that's who we are and that's what we have and that is just our strength. And when we are performing voiceover and we are voice actors, I think the more that we can be authentic in whatever genre we are voicing, the better off we are and the more successful we will be.  18:08 - Tom I agree. I had another thought about. Something that we were talking about a little earlier is that unemployment seems to be rising because of all of these federal layoffs.  18:19 Layoffs, yeah, and then as a result of tariffs.  18:20 if prices are going up, they have to maintain profit margins, so sometimes they need to cut labor. So what's been interesting in voiceover is that, as a result of AI, there has been less of the entry-level, lowest budget voiceover work, which means there's less opportunities for people who are entering the voiceover industry, and that may mean some people are not able to have a sustainable voiceover business model, so they're leaving the voiceover industry. However, if employment does keep going up the way that it does, does that mean more people are going to come back who want?  18:55 - Anne (Host) to give voiceover a shot. Yeah, exactly that was my experience when COVID happened.  19:01 And people, how many of my coaching business, I mean I had like tripled business with people who were using the time to learn voiceover and to get into voiceover and to utilize their voice for something good. I mean, I think that's still like. The desire of most people that get into this industry is they want to use their voice to do something good and, of course, make some money. Sure, that's always a key element to be successful in voiceover business. But what other aspects, tom, have we not covered here in this few months, now that we're in 2025? We've talked about, I mean, really, how dependent our industry is on the economy and the message that is out there, the brand that is out there.  19:50 - Tom Right. Yeah, it's dependent and it's independent at the same time, when we are getting into what seems to be a very interesting year on a sociological, social, cultural, political, economic level, what can we as voice actors do? So what should us bosses do? It's the same answer all the time, anne Right.  20:11 - Anne (Host) What do we do? Keep training, keep learning.  20:13 - Tom Keep growing, keep marketing, keep marketing. Keep following industry trends. Continue to have conversations with fellow voice actors. Continue to have conversations with your current and potential clients. Pay attention to what's going on on social media, but don't get sucked in by it. But pay attention, learn, grow, adapt, evolve and educate Educate yourself and educate each other.  20:33 - Anne (Host) Educate, adapt, evolve. I love that. Educate, adapt, evolve. I think that really should be our mantra for this year Educate, adapt, evolve and I think everything will be absolutely fine in this voiceover industry. And also just one thing that I want to make mention is that during those lean times where you may not be finding work or work slows down, it's always important to kind of go back and listen to other voiceover podcast episodes that I've had with Tom, of course, about your business and how to build your business and be successful, as well, as I've had a money series with Daniel Fambul, which talks about the fact that if times are lean for me or I'm considering investing more in my business, which would mean maybe I'm going to get coaching, maybe I'm going to get a new demo, maybe I'm going to get a new website which, by the way, I've done all those things and I've had to make a lot of investments this year, and so it's important to have the mindset right, the mindset of being willing to invest.  21:32 I think that's important being willing to invest in this career If you love this career and this is what you want to do and you want to grow, having the mindset of being willing to invest, and I, right now, in my own business, I've transitioned over to a new website, I'm doing a lot of new things that are on the scary side of things for me. I mean, I think if you're not scared every day, you're not taking a risk every day. And, by the way, this risk is not just a risk performance-wise or strategy-wise, it is a risk financially-wise, because I'm investing in a part of my business that I want to grow, and so it's not easy and it's scary, but it's something that I believe every boss needs to really take a look at and be willing to take a little bit of a risk. Take a look at and be willing to take a little bit of a risk, and I'm thankful that and, tom, we've talked about this I'm thankful that I have a little bit of a nest egg that I can make these investments yeah.  22:26 - Tom So my new mantra will now be if you're not taking risks, you're not trying, and if you're not scared you're not trying hard enough.  22:33 - Anne (Host) Oh, I like that a lot. Yeah, Tom. So I admit that I'm scared. Are you scared? Are you scared every?  22:39 - Tom  day. Am I conscious? Yes, of course I'm scared.  22:41 - Anne (Host) Yeah, what things scare you? I'm just curious what things scare you in running your business?  22:46 - Tom Well, I mean just as a basic normal, semi-normal neurotic human. I still have my imposter syndrome. I hear you I still have my FOMO.  22:55 I'm still afraid that 30 years later, that clients are just going to be like well we don't just like his face anymore and they're just not going to book me and they come back. They all come back, as in you know, most of them come back for all good reasons and other people don't come back for whatever other reason. 99% of the time has absolutely nothing to do with me. But my biggest fear is the fear of being irrelevant, and I've had a couple of times in my voiceover career where I, as a result of very poor business decision-making, I made myself less relevant.  23:28 The jumping off of Voice123 in 2013 and then being off it for seven years made me less relevant as a voice actor because I wasn't paying attention to what was going on in the industry. I was up my own you-know-what about it and making decisions based on fear, ego, insecurity and arrogance and ignorance.  23:47 - Anne (Host) Oh, my God, I just love that. You just you were so authentic with that. That's really wonderful. I mean, I love that you're sharing that with us because that's something that I think everybody can take and really learn from myself included taking these risks that have not always worked out and, yeah, a lot of it is because I was stubborn. I have a little bit of a stubborn streak. I'll admit to you that mine would be stubborn in feeling like what I was doing was the way and there was not another way to do.  24:18 It was the way and there was not another way to do it. And that stubbornness and not allowing myself to open my eyes, especially when because I hire a team of people right, and trying to do everything myself, thinking I was the only person that could do it, being that kind of a person, that control freak which I am that held me back. It was scary to me. I was scared that if I didn't control it myself, that I would lose control and that I wouldn't be able to grow the business. But quite the opposite happened. After all, that, when I allowed myself to be open to collaborating and working with others and it's one of the reasons why I love to collaborate with you, tom, because there's so much power in collaboration together and that is one of the basis is for when you want to run a strong business. I'll never forget Gary Vaynerchuk said hire people who are better than you to do those things and don't be afraid of that. Don't be scared of that and treat them right, because that's going to help you all grow and move forward.  25:07 - Tom Absolutely Surround yourself with smart people who disagree with you is another mantra that I've heard over the years, and it's really really true.  25:14 - Anne (Host) Yeah, yeah, I love it, tom. Thank you so much. I think that last nugget was the best of all out of this episode. I really love talking with you in these podcasts, so thanks again. I'm going to give a great big shout out to our sponsor, ipdtl. You too can connect and network like real bosses. You can find out more at IPDTL.com. Bosses have an amazing week and we'll see you next week. Bye.  25:41 - Speaker 2 (Announcement) Join us next week for another edition of VO Boss with your host, Anne Ganguza, and take your business to the next level. Sign up for our mailing list at voboss.com and receive exclusive content, industry revolutionizing tips and strategies and new ways to rock your business like a boss. Redistribution with permission. Coast to coast connectivity via IPDTL.   

Liberia-born, Tennessee-based artist Mon Rovîa began his career making music more adjacent to alternative R&B. But it was after he stripped his songs back to a simple, binary presentation of voice and ukulele, that his music began connecting deeply via livestreams on TikTok. Fans and big time influencers were drawn to his meditative melodies and spiritually inquisitive, often uplifting lyrics. That led to millions of plays and a sold out tour, including a late January show at the Basement East celebrating his new EP, Act 4 – Atonement. Right Before that show Mon Rovia stopped by WNXP's Sonic Cathedral for a performance and an interview about his incredible journey.

Time Stamps: 00:00:00 Community Guest Intros 00:05:00 The PS5 Pro Continues To "Underdeliver" Says Digital Foundry In Latest Testing 00:45:00 Ubisoft Produced Games Continue To "Underdeliver" & NOW XDefiant Is Being Shut Down In June of 2025.....WOW! + MORE Industry Layoff's and Right Before the Holidays! 01:35:00 Outros and Special Message to the Community --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/craig-ravitch/support

- Monica is beefing with a squirrel - CHris wants to return his socks - Antoine had a show's finale ruined RIGHT BEFORE he watched it

What if I told you that the reason you often give up on enforcing a household rule with your child or teen is because they're using science against you? And what if, by understanding this science, you could finally stop giving up RIGHT BEFORE they give in? In today's episode, I'll show you why you're giving up too soon when your child or teen pushes back on your rules or boundaries...and your young person was just moments away from complying. There's a game-changing concept that will help any parent successfully implement new boundaries and rules. Once you hear it, you'll wonder how you ever managed without it. This episode will explain why so many parents struggle to follow through with new rules and boundaries and provide the key to achieving lasting behavior change in your child or teen. By the end of today's episode, you'll: Understand the critical concept of the "extinction burst" Recognize the four stages of behavior change Have practical strategies to stay consistent and see positive results Imagine feeling like a confident parent when you know to expect pushback from your child or teen - AND you know how to deal with it in a way that makes it a non-issue. For more resources, including links to additional parenting tips and strategies, click here for the podcast episode page. If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to listen to this one: [Episode #63] Redefining Obedience: How To Go From Blind Obedience To Mutual Trust Connect with Dr. Becca Ballinger: Follow me on Instagram for daily parenting tips Browse my library of free parenting resources Gain skills by taking my court-approved parenting and co-parenting classes Sign up for my newsletter to get each episode—and its accompanying free guide—emailed directly to you each Monday morning And always remember, Friend, I believe in you. You've got this.

The station was hosting the Barenakeed Ladies concert this past weekend! While Jared and Squid were backstage, Jason Goodman said something to them that put them into panic RIGHT BEFORE they walked on stage! Listen to hear what Jason Goodman said this time.

In today's episode of Building Texas Business, we have a discussion with Devlin Lyles, President of Improving, about AI's evolving role in business. With his extensive tech leadership background, Devlin offers insightful perspectives on strategically integrating AI and shifting workforce mindsets. He explains how AI enhances personal productivity and compels a transition from manual tasks to advanced system management. Other notable topics include vendor resiliency, learning cultures, and personal growth's influence on business innovation. Wrapping up, Devlin shares his views on AI's future impact through emerging tools and personal assistants that boost productivity. Join us for this enriching exchange at the intersection of technology, leadership experience, and work-life harmony. SHOW HIGHLIGHTS Devlin discusses his transition from a young programmer to a leader in technology, emphasizing the role of AI in changing business strategies and operations. We explore the psychological aspect of AI adoption in businesses, addressing how the workforce adapts to the enhanced productivity and evolving roles that AI tools bring. Devlin makes an analogy between the historical rise of ATMs and their impact on bank tellers, to the current transition from manual task execution to strategic AI system management. We dissect common misconceptions in AI implementation, such as the belief that data must be perfectly curated and the pitfalls of building bespoke AI solutions from scratch. Devlin highlights the importance of focusing on problem-solving over the technology itself, encouraging companies to differentiate between truly valuable AI applications and those simply following trends. The conversation delves into vendor resiliency, with a focus on the legal protection offered by large companies like Microsoft for their AI services. We discuss the cultivation of a learning culture within Improving and the impact personal development has on managing technology and fostering business innovation. Devlin shares insights on the future of AI, such as the potential of a "cloud of things" and personal AI tools that can enhance daily productivity and support memory. We examine the transformative effect of AI on mundane tasks and its potential for significant impact on industries like logistics, supply chain, and manufacturing. Devlin and I reflect on the importance of hobbies and personal interests, such as golf and video games, for maintaining a balanced life while engaging with technological advancements. LINKSShow Notes Previous Episodes About BoyarMiller About Improving GUESTS Devlin LilesAbout Devlin TRANSCRIPT (AI transcript provided as supporting material and may contain errors) Chris: In this episode, you will meet Devlin Liles, President of Improving. Devlin is a leading expert in the application and use of AI for businesses. Devlin shares several helpful ideas relating to AI for businesses and believes that a business's readiness for AI is mostly psychological. Devlin, I want to thank you for taking time to join us today. Why don't we start by just telling us a little bit about yourself and your background and your role with improving Sure. Devlin: So Devlin Lyles. That seems like an odd thing to say. So I'm a technologist by kind of trade and training, so I started writing software when I was very young. I was 8 when I started programming. Chris: My dad got me into it. Devlin: I started my first software company when I was 16 in high school, building used car websites and that kind of thing Right at the kind of dot-com bubble expansion, and so decided I was going to not do that as a career. I was going to become a professional soccer player. That didn't work, so I kind of fell back into it as a hobby and kind of continued on that. Chris: Most programmers think of a professional soccer player as a dream, right yeah absolutely. Devlin: And so I ended up kind of falling back into my hobby as a career and then came up through kind of corporate IT at Tys Foods and then got into IT consulting and been doing that for the last 15 years. So that's a bit about me. Chris: Okay, and let's talk a little bit about improving where you serve as president. Tell us a little bit about what improving does in your role there, and then you know one of the things I really want to focus on, as you know, is things on most people's minds over the last 12-18 months is AI, so it's kind of couched in that context. Devlin: Sure. So my role with improving has kind of evolved over the years. So I actually started as a consultant delivering to our clients and I came in kind of two and a half three years in and so we have an equity share model. So I grew an equity share at improving and then took over as president here in Houston in 2017. My global role for improving is chief consulting officer, so I own client delivery, thought leadership, go-to-market and employee growth kind of that space, and so AI has been a big part of that conversation. Now the interesting thing is I get to live in a time machine somewhat in this space of AI has been a big part of that story for us for five to seven years. The world with chatGPT, kind of making it a part of the zeitgeist, is really catching up, and so it's cool to have these conversations and really talk about it, because a lot of our excitement and like oh, it's going to be utopia from 2017-2018, when there were some big strides being made forward and we get to kind of relive with everybody else. Chris: Interesting. Yeah, so you're living it for the second time. Devlin: Yeah, and it's. The thing is that, going through at the second time, you get somewhat of the hindsight in real time, which is interesting. Yeah, because we ended up helping a lot of customers apply some of these technologies, and technology always has this kind of pull to off the shelf right Systems. We used to pay tens of millions of dollars to build custom right. Think about CRM, a client contact management system, right Almost everybody has today. Chris: Yeah. Devlin: In the 1990s that was a multi tens of millions of dollar project for only the biggest companies to really have a unified customer relationship management system. And today I can go, put in a credit card and sign up for HubSpot or Salesforce or Dynamics right off the shelf. There's this pull to off the shelf that happens in technology, which leads to the middle market and small businesses being able to take advantage of what used to be incredibly expensive technology and that's actually what we're seeing in the AI space is it's driving from. I no longer need 100 million to approach this problem. I can actually apply this for 20 bucks a month, yeah. Chris: It's a great observation and yeah it's so true that it becomes, I guess better, efficient and more economical right Each time, I guess, as technology is with us and develops longer. That's a great kind of segue. I want to just kind of start with what are some of the key factors a business should consider when evaluating their readiness for adopting AI into the business. Devlin: Interesting For adopting AI into the business. Readiness is mostly psychological, because there are pieces in the business today that you can do better. We break this into kind of three parts when we talk to business leaders about this. One is how do you do your job much more effectively, right? What's the superhuman version of Chris? Right, there's AI tools to make that happen. Like, I'm a very well augmented human, I have tools that analyze my notes and make sure that I don't forget things. I've got tools that keep reminders and stuff on my personal network. Now, they're not spamming my friends with, like text messages to buy things, but it's going. Hey, you haven't talked to Bob In two months. Here's what you talked about the last time, so I can reach out to Bob. Hey, man, we haven't caught up. How's your wife doing? How's your son doing? Like those kind of things. That's the superhuman version of me, because I want to stay connected with my friends Just bad at it and so it covers that gap for me. So that's the first part is like that personal productivity side, which is mainly just a resistance to change. That you'd see in any technology adoption. It's psychological, organizational. People have tied their identity to the work they do and so changing that means like an existential crisis sometimes, right? Sure, think about a bank teller when the ATM came out. Right Now, we still employ a lot of bank tellers, but their jobs drastically changed. It's that moment where we're not going to get rid of a bunch of humans and have robots doing those jobs. What we're going to do is change the job of the human to guiding them, controlling and managing the robots. Chris: I think that's an important point to kind of reemphasize for the listeners, because I think so much that's out there. You see these news headlines and articles. I think people think robots are going to take over the world and I think the point you just made that that's not the case. But the role the human will play will adapt and change and while that sounds scary in a vacuum, if you actually take a moment and look back, that's what's happened throughout our evolution, especially in the industrial world and the business world in the United States. Right, jobs have evolved and changed over time, and I've heard you say this before, so this is nothing different. I want you to dig in a little deeper on that to help the listeners understand and maybe some historical points to compare to. So it makes it a little more tangible. Devlin: Absolutely so. Think about the way we did accounting before the PC was invented, right? So before the Apple II, we're talking in the 1970s, right Before computing devices were in everybody's office on everybody's desk, right? The way we did accounting was we managed the book and you wrote entries in and you had somebody checking the math and you had the you know 10 keys sitting there with the stream of numbers coming out of it. Right, and your accounting department was massively larger than it is today. To be able to accomplish that, it had to be right, which was a big overhead for a business to bear. Right, and you had these big accounting firms who would help with economies of scale or whatever. But like, that was really the ballgame, right, and it took a long time to like, close out the books and do tax audits and those kind of things. Now fast forward to the introduction of broad computing power. That sped up that process. We still have accountants, we still have bookkeepers. In most businesses you can close the books on a month in 10 days, 30 days if you've got a lot of moving parts. It's not. Hey, we just closed January. In June, a crude accounting became far more prevalent. We had less financial fraud overall, the stories about it happen more often, but we have less by volume and we're actually getting more insights out of that, because it's no longer just tracking all the pieces but going hey, did you notice last month you had increased expenditures in this area without the increased revenue tied to them? And so we get business insights on top of what we used to get was just transactions. We not only have lower accounting costs, but we then have better outcomes from it. Ai is going to do something similar From a business perspective. It's going to allow us to get. It's going to allow us to get better outcomes or lower our costs, to give us pricing power in the market. Because all technology is labor compression right, what a welder by hand used to take hours to do on the original factory floors and structural integrity of the original cars that we were rolling across an assembly line right. Think 1930s, 1940s. We now have robotic welders who can do in 15 or 30 seconds with far more precision, with less human injury. Right Now, the quality checking, the x-ray and all that is still reviewed by a human to make sure that weld is solid, and even that we're automating some of. But like that, evolution allowed us to produce stronger, faster, cheaper, safer cars. I think we're in that space where AI is largely going to be applied to the problems that are on the edges of humans do a lot of it, but we're not very good at it because, like our bookkeepers, there's that whole notion of human error. Chris: Yeah, not that there won't be computer error as well. Oh, yeah, and so you kind of that's where the check and balance comes in. Devlin: And the idea of technology is just going to solve everything. Hopefully, as a civilization we've moved past right the 1970s to today. I used the 1970s because that was kind of the broad evolution of available computing right To today. Every new technology has created new problems. A joke with our team that yesterday's solutions caused today's problems. And that's a good thing, because, one, we always have problem to solve and, two, we don't have yesterday's problems. So AI being introduced is going to create things like we now need to manage bias, the computer error, right. That's not something we do today very well. When we talk about humans, right, like how do you manage bias at scale? In a thousand person company is like all right, hr and an army of training, but with a computer you can actually try to start tilting at some of these things. Now, does that mean we're going to do it Well, we're going to do it better than we do today. Probably we're going to do it wrong and have to create tomorrow's problems. Chris: Yeah, I love that perspective. So what are some of the obstacles or pitfalls that you've seen that businesses encounter when they're trying to implement technology, and maybe even specifically, obviously specific to AI technology? Devlin: So there are two. One of them is perfectly valid and it's going to be some learning that we have to overcome, and I'm going to start with that one the belief that I have to spend a ton of time and money to correct my data right. Because, traditionally over the last 20 years you've had data engineering and data warehousing and data lakes and, like you, had to clean it and curate it and do all this work. That belief is a little antiquated, right. You can bring in raw data and then actually use a lot of these automated systems AI systems to clean it up with you so that the labor of that is way less scary. Now that's the pitfall most people fall into is all I got to get my data cleaned up before I get any value. And so that ends up raising the price tag of going after these technologies and ultimately keeps companies from getting some of that benefit because they don't want to pay that cost. And then the second pitfall is building your own. And what I mean by building your own is every business has unique challenges and they have their particular flavors, right? It's why, where SAP works for one, but you know, acumatica would be better for somebody else as an ERP system. But you don't have to reinvent the wheel and we keep doing that, right? I was just talking to a friend of mine, houston based company yesterday. 500 million in revenue and we're like talking about one of their AI initiatives. It wasted $6 million, didn't get anything out of it Wow. And we're talking about them like. You can do that with almost off the shelf tools everything you guys were trying to accomplish in about four months for about half a million and the difference is that they try to reinvent all the wheels. We don't need to do that, just like you're not going to build your own email system, right? You don't need to build your own baseline architecture for a large language model. Use one of the foundational ones that's off the shelf and you don't waste a lot of that time and effort. Chris: And that gets you that good way to get started. Devlin: Yeah, it may evolve from there, may evolve from there you may hit a problem where you do need to build your own. Chris: I kind of the rule of thumb I use is if your IT budget doesn't start with a, b, you're probably not building your own machine learning models, so that raises a good question, and that would be how can companies distinguish between an AI solution that actually is going to offer value real value versus just a company following the hype right and being misguided by the solution. Maybe they choose. Devlin: Fall in love with solving the problem, not the tools. So if let's take my company right, we spend a lot of time trying to solve one big problem. That big problem was knowledge. We grow the acquisition We've done 14 acquisitions in 14 years and we always create knowledge silos. And so when we bring in somebody, our current team doesn't know their stories for, like, selling their skill sets, what they're good at, those kind of things, and they don't know all of our stories. And so we had this big knowledge silo gap problem right Right Now. Ultimately, what that means is when a customer goes, hey, do you do X, regardless of what X is, they're going to say no because they don't know the stories. Now, how do I overcome this? I could do training, all right, but then I got to do that training every time we acquire a company and we're doing like we're aiming for two to four acquisitions a year, which means that's not a sustainable thing because of the labor cost. Right, it's like, okay, well, maybe I allow the silos to continue and just accept that's part and parcel of the business. It's possible. Chris: Possible, but you're a miss out on a ton of opportunity. Exactly. Devlin: Or we take all their stories, their case studies, their customer testimonials. We loaded them into what we call echo, which is a AI enabled chatbot, and it literally reads SharePoint. Right, it's not like it's not parsing data. There's no big data engineering effort. It's loading Word documents, PDFs, all this off SharePoint and they just chat with it and they go hey, have we done a deal with a major energy company? And it goes yes, here are the three, they're most relevant to you. And then it embeds the PDF and goes and here's where you find more details, so that the sales team on a sales call can have echo up on another window. Like, hey, have we ever done that? And it goes yes, in this office, here's the people to reach out to that level of knowledge. Access would have cost us thousands of hours of training, Right, and so it's that type of thing. Focus on the problem. Where do you have pain and where are you wasting hours? You don't actually care as a business owner unless you're selling AI as a product, Right. You don't actually care if it's an AI solution, an automation solution or just really clever software. You just want the problem solved, and by not falling in love with the tool, but falling in love with solving the problem. You focus on the right thing Because the value add, the ROI, is all about the problem, not about the tool. Chris: Look, that makes sense. It's easy to remember, for sure, and I mean I think you're right. Devlin: I think most business owners agree. Chris: I just need this problem solved effectively and efficiently. Devlin: By the way, you find these problems by going. What would it take for me to 5x my business today? The things that immediately popped to mind? You're like, oh well, this would break and this would break, and this would break and this would break. That's your list. For me, it's like well, I need five times as many account managers and my accounting staff's got to grow and I'd need better hiring. That's my list. Do I need five times as many account managers or do I need to help automate a lot of the account management and administrator to make them more effective? How do I upskill and get my recruiters leveraging AI, sorting and those kind of things to pull more people into the pipeline? That's my list. By simply going. What would it take to get bigger? Buy a big number. If 5x isn't scary enough, tack a zero on there. Chris: That definitely would be scary. Devlin: So let's, talk about. Chris: There's a lot that's been written and it's something we're doing here ourselves and that's with AI out there. What are best practices that businesses should be considering around policies for using, evaluating, adapting AI technology in the business, ai technology in the business. There's a lot that I think it's probably best practice. There should one. Yes, you should have a policy, but anything you can kind of guide the listeners on on those issues around a competent and well thought out AI policy. Devlin: So it's got a few pieces. Number one data privacy needs to be forefront in that conversation, primarily to protect your business and to protect your competitive advantage. So if your AI usage or acceptable usage policy doesn't include something about how data privacy should be evaluated, that's a big gap. Now your opinions about data privacy are gonna be your company's opinions, but those tools that are cheap and freely available today are largely cheap and freely available so that they can use your data to train a better tool. Is that okay with you? Some people will like yeah, it doesn't matter, and some people are like no, I absolutely can never allow this data out of my control, at which point you gotta choose different tools. So data privacy is number one. Chris: To that point. You may be aware of this and I recently wrote a little, brought it on it, but you had the New. York Times lawsuit saying that all trained on copyrighted material. Trained on copyrighted material, so that's kind of to me somewhat akin to data security and privacy, and that's a whole other issue about copywriting and licensing around information. So we haven't talked with that in a minute. Let's keep on the data or AI kind of policies. And so you said, most important thing, data privacy. What's next? Devlin: Second is vendor resiliency. Now, this is gonna sound a little tough to like the indie developers who are trying to launch their product, but last year in the US there were 6,000 plus tools launched on the AI Hype Wave. Now the punchline to that story is over 4,000 have already failed Already, had to either pivot or gone out of business. Vendor resiliency if you're gonna start pulling these into your business, evaluate the vendor. Are they gonna survive long enough to be valuable to you, or do you now have a broken tool that's no longer being accessible that you've woven into your business? That is gonna drive you towards some of the bigger vendors, the ones that have been around for a while, and, as it kind of should. If you're weaving it into your ops Now for experimentation, use the little players, Like that makes sense to me, but when you're talking about a broad policy, vendor resiliency is gonna be a big thing. The other side of vendor resiliency is how are they going to indemnify you from the inevitable lawsuits in this space? Right? Microsoft, Google, Amazon have all said if you're using our tools inside the license agreement, there's indemnity. Right, that's a pretty big shield, right? Microsoft actually said that they would. If you're using their AI services. They would protect you and defend and pay a settlement if one ends up happening for copyright infringement. So, like the Times article thing won't hit the consumers of those AI tools. Microsoft has stood in front of it and said we're good, that's a big shield. Now if you're a small to mid-market software player, can you put up a shield right Right To your customers? As a customer, I need to start caring about this. And then, lastly, in that policy, some centralized knowledge repository, some centralized store, Because what we found is everybody's play. Everybody's trying, experimenting using these tools. They're wiring in their favorite one. I do this almost on a daily basis. I kick out unapproved tools from meetings that somebody like wired up like a meeting transcriber, listener, bot, and I kick them out of meetings and send a note to whoever did it. I'm like just to be clear not approved. Chris: Right. Devlin: Here's the approved one. Don't use that one and everybody's just so. Expense control and some kind of central review. It doesn't have to be heavy handed. Ours is literally just a let us know when you're experimenting so we can check in on the experiment because it might be something we want to share. Yeah, right, but some kind of central right. Yeah, because a lot of these are SaaS based. A lot of them are out, kind of in the ethos of like knowledge tools, like note taking tools that I use. There would be no way for improving to know that its IP is in that tool if I didn't tell them. And so you've got to. You've got to have kind of a reporting and honor system for the employees to tell you where your data and vendors live. Chris: So one of the things that I know that improving and the leadership and improving which includes you. You've done a great job of building a culture and a company that embraces technology, embraces innovation. What can you share about that experience and that journey at improving to maybe help others understand, you know how they may be able to do the same thing. Devlin: Absolutely so. I have the oddity of looking at this kind of if I look back down the mountain, it seems like it's a long way, but all I can see is looking up the mountain and it still seems insurmountable. So I guess first would be the journey doesn't end. Don't let the size of the mountain scare you, Just take a step Right. For us we have a lot of like growth and planning kind of baked into our employee management model. We call it PATH, that's our employee growth systems, and part of that is maintaining your marketable job skills, literally what we call hard skills right, the marketability of a person to maintain. Because there's this kind of natural degradation If I stop learning, I become less and less valuable because the market moves ahead of me. Right, and so, recognizing that truth and going okay, what are you doing this quarter to grow with technologies? Then we go okay, what new tech are you learning or playing with or experimenting with this quarter? What we have found is, as long as there's a vehicle for them to share that back to the company and make an impact, people are highly engaged If it is just playing over here and then they have to come back over here and do the same thing that they've been doing for 15 years less engagement, and so creating the vehicle in which their experiments can have a long lasting impact on the business created a lot of engagement. And then the other side of it is we recognized a while ago that if you're not growing, you're dying as a business, and that's true for all of our people. It's what we call the plateau of slow death. Like you've just decided to coast that will have an accelerating decline in your value to the business. How do we help people stay on a plateau of slow growth where they're still incrementally investing? Sure, Now for us that's five hours a week because we're a technology company, it moves quick. Right, that might not need to be five hours a week for somebody in manufacturing, distribution etc. But probably an hour a week just reading. Like there's the Wall Street Journal podcast, there's this podcast that's phenomenal for staying abreast of what's happening. Like consume an hour a week of new information for you and your team, and you'd be amazed at what doing that week after week will do to the business. Like it just accelerates. And it sounds very simple. It was one of the first steps we took. Chris: You know that the dedication to being intentional about the learning and self improvement on a weekly basis, I think is amazing that any business right I believe so I am amazed how many business owners and friends I have that work in businesses and they're so busy that they're too busy to survive. I've said here in this firm before and you have to repeat it, and we're all can be victim of it and guilty of it, but busy can't be an excuse. I'm too busy to do X when X is strategic work on how to improve the company or yourself. Busy can't be an excuse, Because if it is, then nothing will ever get done because you always feel too busy right, and so I pay for a lot of tools. Devlin: I'm a well augmented human right. One of those tools is summaries of like business articles and books and all that. And so while I was sitting here waiting for this conversation, I was reading one of those. And it's that overarching approach of like how am I getting value out of those moments, like when a meeting wraps up early, do you sigh in relief and like, walk out and waste 10 minutes? Maybe that's good recovery and you need that for emotional balance. Okay, but is it intentional? Did you go hey, you know what I need emotional balance and chose that. Or did you go? I got 10 minutes. I'm going to read that book summary, or I'm going to read an article, or I'm going to check out what's on HPJ innovation stuff, like those questions. Right, just making the consumption of data an option mentally for all this. This is why I say like, a lot of our barriers are psychological, because the technology is actually not scary Once you start exploring it. It's only scary when it's like Skynet and Terminator from the movies, and so then it's scary and that makes sense. Chris: But let's get this right, let's bring this full circle from the beginning of the conversation. Right what you're talking about and recommending people. Be intentional about that. Self learning, that discipline around self learning and improvement, is really going to be essential as new technologies come online, because we you said earlier right Technology is going to force the worker to adapt and the only way you can adapt is by continuing to learn. So, to be successful alongside technology like AI, it's going to be essential. Devlin: This is actually. I'm a future optimist, and what I mean by that is I think that technology elevates humanity right, Very similar to capitalism. Elevating humanity it has made life better. It's increased longevity, it's done a lot of things. Now, that's not to say technology is perfect and we live in utopia Like, but it is. Technology elevates us, but it makes us do the harder version of life right. Technology allows us to play life on hard mode. So, like social media, I can doom scroll forever, which means I have to own the choice. Right Before that, technology enabled me to stay connected with all my friends. I didn't have to make that choice Right. Right, ai, by taking a lot of the complexity, a lot of the time consuming tasks off my plate, means that all that's left are the difficult tasks, it's the hard mode tasks, and getting really good at the hard mode tasks is the value creation in the future. It's hey, I got to go write this software. The writing of the software, the actual typing, is going to get much easier, just like accounting, just like bookkeeping, just like going through and like automatic scanning of discovery documents in the legal space. Sure, used to be very time consuming Now is being accelerated by AI and automation. So now then, the hard part is understanding what software I need to write and why, understanding what those transactions mean to the business and why, understanding what, in that discovery, is pertinent, important and relevant to the story I'm telling. Right, like all the hard tasks, get left the difficult task, because those are the ones AI is really bad at Right. Chris: Basically for now. So before we wrap this up, I definitely want to ask you your thoughts on regulation and what you think Congress should or shouldn't do around putting some regulations in the AI space. Devlin: So AI regulation is coming, like that's going to be the case. Any sufficiently developed technology ends up getting regulated at some point. Should do. Transparency to empower a educated consumer is phenomenal Like stating if you've baked an ethical bias or a political or religious bias into a model so that the people who are using it can choose, right, that makes sense. Chris: Realize that the output is tilted in some way. Devlin: Right, that's great to know as a consumer. Right, and luckily that's where a lot of the early regulations in this space are tilting. The shouldn't do side of it is dangerously close to that, which is then publish how you built the model to prove that statement, which is a lot like saying give everybody your proprietary trade secrets. Right, there's a reason that open AI stopped publishing a lot of their and here's exactly how we built it, and that's because a whole bunch of other companies took that research that they poured tens of billions of dollars into and created additional models that were almost identical in performance. Right Now they're different and they were developed by different teams and all that. But, like, there's a reason it went from we have one major version of this to we now have 15 publicly available commercial models. Right, that gets dangerous when you start regulating people to destroying their business, and so that's the line I'm hoping we walk the stifled innovation that happens on that second one we're seeing in the EU when they passed the and here's all the restrictions of AI you have to publish your training set and your methodology and all this stuff. It's like awesome, and there was a mass exodus of AI companies from that area. Like yeah, they're like nope, we are not going to, not going to participate if you require us to kill ourselves. Chris: Right. And so we're going to invest time and money in something that they can't then have a return on. Devlin: I mean, if you look at the open AI side of it, this is tens of billions of dollars in decades of research and development and work to make this happen. Imagine if you then had a law that said and you have to enable your competitor, who doesn't have that cost, to then rapidly get to the same point for a 10th Right, and so there's a balance between you want to democratize some of it, you've got to balance the investment side of it, and if you go too far which I believe personal belief that the EU did it just causes a significant drop in investment. Chris: So you know, kind of with that in mind, where do you kind of foresee the evolution of AI over the next five to 10 years? Devlin: We have largely looked at AI as the Jetsons robot or terminator, where it's this one thing that is omnipowerful, omnikable, right, omnipresent. I don't believe that's where we're going. The best minds in this space, of which I get to talk to I am not one of, I beg the difference. Go ahead. They would tell you that it will be a cloud of things like imagine that you're surrounded by Chris's swarm of empowering bots. You've got a bot that helps you manage your schedule. You've got a bot that helps you take notes from a meeting without having to like jot them down, and all of these save you 10, 15, 20 minutes an hour and a half a day. That means somehow Chris is doing 50 hours of work in a eight hour day because you've got this super human capability that's empowered by all of these things. That's where we're headed. I just saw I was playing around with a toolkit that there's been a lot of hype over the last few weeks is the video generator, pica. It's like mid journey or Dolly or stable diffusion for images, but does videos. Chris: Okay. Devlin: Like cinematographic grade quality. The problem is you have to also get really good at understanding camera movements and placement and blocking and all these things that directors have known for decades, and so it's not built for this average consumer. It's built for making folks with that knowledge massively more successful. Right, being able to go and here's a rough of my movie idea. Right. Here's a short of my movie idea for $1,000, not 70. Chris: Right. Devlin: Right, that will accelerate the creative space in movie making, but it's not going to get rid of a need for that knowledge base. Same thing's true with geophysics and well-planning and the energy space. How do we conceptualize all of this and make a human significantly more powerful? So this team that includes a drilling engineer, a geophysicist and all this can plan wells and make financial analysis, and all that in days, not years. Right, that acceleration is where we're going to see it. We're going to see it through these kind of micro enhancements. I carry several of them with me. I've got a note-taking system that maps all of the connected topics that I've been researching and digging into and it's wicked, fun and crazy. But I built a chat system on it that runs on my laptop and so I can ask questions on my notes. I'm like, hey, in my last Vistage meeting there was a speaker who talked about this what were the key takeaways? And it goes. Here's the notes. Here are the key takeaways. It's that kind of empowerment, because human memory is fallible, and so how many of us have wished like I wish I had a better memory. Chris: It doesn't have to live in my head. Yeah, Kind of like what it. There was something five minutes ago I said I needed to do and now I can't remember what it is. How often does that happen? Devlin: I carry around to do this and to do this integrates with it, and so at the end of the day, right before I typically leave the office, I get a reminder set from the automation I hooked up to it. Now it looks at my calendar and goes where's the right point to remind a Devlin to do those things before the end of the day. So like folks literally like I don't know how you do this, I'm like I don't, I'm very well augmented that yeah, you said that more than once. Chris: I know you mean it very well augmented. So I was going to ask you what some of your favorite AI tools are. I think you've shared them just now, but maybe just a quick summary of maybe three or four of your favorite tools for the listeners who were trying to frantically take notes. Devlin: So I for network management. So my personal network management I use clayearth. You literally go to. Clayearth is the URL. I think it's phenomenal and I use that to manage my network. It does not spam or reach out to, it just helps me reach out and stay connected the kind of in my business version of that one is dynamics. We use sales copilot for dynamics. Einstein in Salesforce does the same thing. Chris: So in the business. Devlin: We use a different one because different needs, right? Sure For note taking, I use obsidian. You can use ever note or one note in this same thing and it'll do a lot of the same AI enablement through plug ins and those kinds of things. Chris: And then you mentioned one about just the main of the reminder. Devlin: So I use to do is and power automate. I've combined those two tools. So if you're in the Microsoft stack right, you use office 365 or Microsoft 365, you have access to this one already I didn't know it and so you can go to makepowercom. It's a Microsoft tool. You'll log in with your Microsoft thing and you can describe what you want it to do. I did this yesterday. I was presenting to a group of CEOs on this topic and I was like take the notes, my handwritten notes that I emailed a picture of myself. Take the notes I emailed a picture of to myself, parse them, put the text in my notebook, scan it for action items and put those action items into do list. Literally, that's all I described. And it goes okay, and it's got this massive library of these tiny little tasks and it pulls them all together and goes. Here's the automation that will do that and it writes the rough draft, the prototype of the automation for you and you just click all right, create. And it goes. This is the permissions I'm going to need. Are you good with that? Yep, go. And it's there and it's running. I had to write no code, I had to wire nothing together, it just did it and so we're using this for, like, back office automation all the time. Like, hey, take this output of our financial system, slice it, dice it in this way and it writes the pivot table creation and all that in Excel. Like that's might be half an hour or 45 minutes that I just saved our business partner in accounting, and so it's a lot of these tiny little bots. Chris: Wow. So when you think about AI and how it could be disruptive to industry, what are maybe one of the top two industries you think it's going to be the most disruptive to? Devlin: So oddly, I think logistics, supply chain and manufacturing are probably those two. One, they've typically been under invested in technology and so there's a lot of low hanging fruit. But two, it gives pricing power. Like, imagine that I can compress the labor to accomplish a task. I can now out price my competitors who aren't doing that, and in those two spaces where they're very commoditized prices can't. If you can be 3% cheaper while maintaining your margins, that's the ballgame and you can just put people out of business. So I think those two are going to have massive kind of immediate six to 18 month impact. If you look slightly beyond that, the construction space is huge in this AP great Houston story here has a robot called Dusty that they helped to develop. It takes the construction documents for a high rise and it prints the lay down onto the concrete. It uses basically a Roomba guided by AI. It parses the construction documents and, in color coded paint, prints the lay down. And it reduces the labor of manual labor, construction labor, of building out that building, because they don't have to snap chalk lines and measure everything and everything else, they just follow the color coded thing, which also means I need lower scale labor, which is the labor savings. And so these things are changing the game and changing the pricing power on a lot of these fixed bid contracts. And so you see some interesting spaces where traditionally non technology based business has a lot of low hanging fruit, like fintech and financial services has been heavily invested in technology. Less low hanging fruit there, sure. So the disruptive stuff I think is going to be in those three over the next few years. Chris: Okay, Devlin, this has been such an interesting and fun conversations. Thank you for doing that. I want to just turn just to a little bit of the fun side of things when I have a guest in, and what was your first job, I guess you told us today you were programming, but was that where you get paid to do it? Devlin: No. So my first job there was a pool near our house and I love like there was a cherry seven up, like you got the bottle cap thing and you could earn points and order stuff. Like that moment in time and I my parents like I didn't have enough allowance to like as much cherry seven up as I wanted, right, and so I talked to the owner of the pool that we were a member of near our house into letting me like, do the chlorine and the cleanup and scrub the pool for cash when I was 12. Like this was definitely not legal. And then so like I'm moving buckets of chlorine and doing all this stuff while my friends are playing at the pool, because I was earning $5 a day that I could spend on cherry seven up. Chris: I grew up from an early age right. I love it. Devlin: So hopefully I don't get anybody in trouble. I'm not giving you names of pools, okay. Chris: So what do you prefer Tex-Mex or barbecue? Devlin: Oh, barbecue Hands down. Yeah, I have a massive pit smoker in my backyard Like oh, for real Okay. So we throw a barbecue in Dallas every year for fourth of July, feed like 400 people. We throw one here at our office for Labor Day, memorial Day, which one's at the end of the summer. Chris: Labor Day, labor Day. Devlin: For Labor Day feed like 250 folks. Chris: Like I'm bigger than barbecue. You're serious? All right, I love it. And what do you like to do for fun when you're not out speaking? Devlin: on AI. So I play a lot of golf with my wife and she kicks my butt, or I like video games and stuff like that, and so my brother and I play a lot of video games Very good. Chris: Well, like I said, Dylan, I love the conversations we've had in the past. What you shared today was so enlightening and I know we'll be valuable to those listening, and I said that they probably, like me, took a lot of notes that they'll try to implement into their daily life. So thanks again for being here. Thank you, thank you.

As time rolls on, people go through many new experiences and change. Artists are no exception to this, and their art will change based on their experiences and influences.Instead of being angry about that, we should embrace and understand that artists will explore new sounds and new ideas as life goes on.That is why we have Brendan from Hostile Array is our guest on the Chord Progression Podcast today. On this episode, you will experience:How Hostile Array has evolved their sound over time based on the life experiences of the band, culminating in their new EP Trauma.Brendan's upbringing in the "Christcore" scene and how he found it incredibly hard to succeed in that area.The mindset Brendan had writing the Trauma EP and how he was able to put a positive spin on pain.A deeply impactful episode not to miss, so hit that subscribe button to join the community that constantly shows you new music, allows you to have a place to connect, and be accepted.Find Hostile Array Online:Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/HostileArrayTwitter: https://twitter.com/hostilearrayInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/hostilearray/Tik Tok: https://www.tiktok.com/@hostilearrayYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCrlleLR0p8s_q0VYO1W7eoQ/featuredWebsite: https://hostilearray.comMerch: https://www.storefrontier.com/hostilesupplycoSpotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/3RXY53OclvzLsmP89oaL8G?si=ler-RhYIRo-jiPsFnU-85AApple Music: https://music.apple.com/us/artist/hostile-array/1268777522Thank you to our Sponsor FNX Fitness:Get 20% Off Using Promo Code: CPP20https://fnx.grsm.io/cppFollow us on social media!Facebook:https://www.facebook.com/chordprogressionpodcastTwitter:https://twitter.com/cppodofficialInstagram:https://www.instagram.com/chordprogressionpodcast/YouTube:https://youtube.com/channel/UCqRKZCDMcFHIYbJaLQMfDbQChord Progression Podcast (Spotify):https://open.spotify.com/show/53XWPGrIUvgavKF5Fm6SLkChord Progression Podcast (Apple Podcast):https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/chord-progression-podcast-the-gateway-to-new-rock-and-metal-music/id1454876657Chord Progression Podcast (Amazon): https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/b8dad803-444c-4a73-8aa5-67b4fc43f4baChord Progression Podcast (iHeart Radio):https://www.iheart.com/podcast/269-chord-progression-70632531/Podcast Webpage:https://mysongoftheday.com/my-song-of-the-day-rock-2000-today/chord-progression-podcast/Intro: (0:00)Welcome Brendan from Hostile Array, Right Before the EP Drop: (2:38)Copyright Laws, Disney, and Heavy Music: (6:20)One Dream Hostile Array Has for Trauma EP: (8:01)Difference Between Hostile Array's Sound, From Then to Now: (17:18)Growing Up in the Christ Core Scene: (29:24)Mindset Writing the Trauma EP: (35:11)Using Music in Escapism: (47:22)Putting Music Escapism into Live Setting: (51:52)Pain Might Not Go Away, but We Can Put Positivity to It: (55:48)What is Coming Up The Rest of 2023: (57:45)Kevin's Final Thought: Change Always Happens in Music, Deal With It: (1:02:15)Like, Subscribe, Closing It Out: (1:05:25)

We never did a PJ Podcast for May, and the news this week will be DOMINATED by Apple’s WWDC. Since my podcast airs RIGHT BEFORE the main keynote, let’s hang out and chat about fun geeky stuff! Any crazy predictions for the show? Want to catch up on other gadgets instead? The viewers will help … Continue reading "#SGGQA 301 – PJ Pod – WWDC Pre-Show Hang Out!"

Video Replay on Twitch! We never did a PJ Podcast for May, and the news this week will be DOMINATED by Apple's WWDC. Since my podcast airs RIGHT BEFORE the main keynote, let's hang out and chat about fun geeky stuff! Any crazy predictions for the show? Want to catch up on other gadgets instead? The viewers will help take the wheel on this episode! Let's get our tech week started right! Support SomeGadgetGuy! The complete list of how you can contribute to production on this channel AND get yourself some cool stuff! Patreon, Amazon, Humble Bundle, OnePlus, Audible, Merch, and MORE! https://somegadgetguy.com/2012/07/15/support-somegadgetguy-get-cool-stuff/ SomeGadgetGuy's Gear List: Panasonic G9 https://amzn.to/2E95rKM Panasonic 15mm f/1.7 http://amzn.to/2qWH0UZ Panasonic 25mm f/1.7 http://amzn.to/2ohTzsd SIGMA 16mm f/1.4 https://amzn.to/3J3qHxM RODE Wireless Go II https://amzn.to/3Lm319C Audio-Technica Lavalier https://amzn.to/2WywofM Focusrite 6i6 Audio Interface http://amzn.to/2p5l7py Shure SM57 Microphone http://amzn.to/2oypnLm Cloudlifter CL1 http://amzn.to/2oKN9G5 LED Light Panels http://amzn.to/2oy60ls AJA U-TAP HDMI http://amzn.to/2wfprBF Elgato HD S http://amzn.to/2p95Unu SUBSCRIBE TO #SGGQA! SGGQA Podcast RSS: http://goo.gl/oSUjvi SGGQA Podcast on Spotify: https://goo.gl/uyuSsj SGGQA Podcast Google Play https://goo.gl/ABF7Up SGGQA Podcast iTunes: https://goo.gl/YUcyS7 SGGQA Podcast on Stitcher: http://goo.gl/cyazfY SGGQA Podcast on PlayerFM: https://goo.gl/34B8SG Juan Carlos Bagnell on Twitch – http://Twitch.tv/SomeGadgetGuy Juan Carlos Bagnell on Twitter – http://Twitter.com/SomeGadgetGuy Juan on Instagram – http://instagram.com/somegadgetguy Support SomeGadgetGuy Production: http://amzn.com/w/34V1TR2551P6M Links on this page may be affiliate links which help support production on this website. Support Talking Tech with SomeGadgetGuy by contributing to their tip jar: https://tips.pinecast.com/jar/talking-tech-with-somegadgetgu Find out more at https://talking-tech-with-somegadgetgu.pinecast.co This podcast is powered by Pinecast. Try Pinecast for free, forever, no credit card required. If you decide to upgrade, use coupon code r-c117ce for 40% off for 4 months, and support Talking Tech with SomeGadgetGuy.

Nashville residents Zeneba (Zen) Bowers and Matt Walker, symphony musicians, quit their jobs, sold their home, unloaded their possessions, and moved to Italy. All in 6 weeks. Whew! One would expect sophisticated urbanites, who needed to keep working, would relocate to a cosmopolitan city like Florence or Milan. THAT is not at all what happened. Zen and Matt fell in love with, and moved to, Soriano nel Cimino, a small picturesque and out-of-the-way village 57 miles north of Rome. Join the couple's captivating and amusing story on Episode 135 of Retire There with Gil & Gene.Bowers and Walker wrote I Can't Believe We Live Here: The Wild But True Story of How We Dropped Everything in the States and Moved to Italy, Right Before the End of the World. The couple also authored four guidebooks: (1) Tuscany, Italy: Small-Town Itineraries for the Foodie Traveler; (2) Italy's Alpine Lakes: Small-Town Itineraries for the Foodie Traveler: (3) Emilia-Romagna, Italy: A Personal Guide to Little-Known Places Foodies Will Love; and (4) Ireland: Small-Town Itineraries for the Foodie Traveler. Zen and Matt own and operate Little Roads Europe, creating personal itineraries for travelers who seek to get off the beaten track in Italy and Ireland.  Watch the couple on CBS Sunday Morning playing music on their Italian balcony during the lockdown. 

Would you eat a human body part if that human was begging you to eat their body part? HEY! GET YOUR MIND OUT OF THE GUTTER! For ONCE we aren't talking about sex. Today we are talking about moral dilemmas. Would you fuck your first cousin if you didn't know it was your first cousin until RIGHT BEFORE? Would you unalive someone to live your dream life? Find out what Suzanne and Nikole would do on today's episode of WILD WOMEN RISE! Find more on Jake's questions on the clock app at @jakedeyton1

This week on the Get More Smarter Podcast, the Colorado legislature protected abortion rights RIGHT BEFORE a leaked memo from the Supreme Court shows they're poised to overturn Roe v. Wade...and Colorado Republicans remain on the wrong side of this issue that they were POSITIVE would not be important this cycle (whoopsie!). Later, Christy Powell returns to chat campaign finance numbers for statewide offices and provide an absolutely epic rant on abortion rights that you don't want to miss (jump ahead to the 22:45 mark for that, and bring your earmuffs). 

This week on episode 21 of the Camerosity Podcast you better hide your credit cards and deactivate your eBay accounts as there is a whole lot of GAS coming your way!  Without a special guest, Mike, Theo, Paul, and Anthony were free to discuss all their recent pickups, with everything from Niccas to Noblexes. Joining us were returning callers Mark Faulkner, Jon Gilchrist, Miles Libak, and first time callers Nafis Azad, James Allen, and David Ortega who share with us their Wideluxes, Gallus Derluxes, Miranda Sensorexes, and Kiev rangefinders.   In addition to GAS, we cover controversial topics such as whether it's better to advance your film immediately after each shot or before the next one, what the best flatbed scanning software is, and whether or not Paterson or Stainless reels are everyone's favorite.  Of course there's a lot more, including one of the rarest cameras ever talked about on a Camerosity episode, so be sure to listen through to the end to find out what that is! In two weeks, we will record episode 22 and will welcome special guest, "America's Premier Leica Specialist", Dan Tamarkin from Tamarkin Camera in Chicago, Illinois.  Dan is a huge fan of the show and will be bringing with him a wealth of knowledge about Leica rangefinders and SLRs, so if that's something that you'd be interested in, be sure to join us at 7pm CDT (UTC -5), 8pm EDT (UTC -4) on Monday, March 21st.  (Note that Daylight Savings Time will start on March 13 in the United States, so the time may be different for you in other parts of the world.) This Week's Episode Show and Tell: Theo's Plaubel Makina IIS Anthony Gets an Olympus XA4 and his Crazy eBay Story King Regula and the History of King Nafis Has a Widelux / Taking Cameras Apart Isn't the Same As Putting Them Back Together Using Lasers with Rangefinders / Golf Distance Rangefinders / Watameters / Kodak Field Rangefinder Mark's Tower 24 (Asahiflex IIb) Noblex 135 S Panoramic Camera in Original Box / John Noble / KW Theo's Valentine's Nicca IIIS / Tower 45 (Nicca Type-5) The Story of Why Yashica Bought Nicca / Yashica Pentamatic Miranda Sensorex and the 8-Element f/1.4 Soligor Contaxes and Kievs / Ukrainian Cameras / FED 2 Frame Spacing on Kiev Rangefinders / Cameras Without Sprockets Advancing the Film Right After Each Shot, or Right Before the Next Shot: A Debate Vuescan vs Silverfast vs Epson Scan: A Debate Paul's New Nikkor Lenses - 200-600 f/9.5, 55 f/1.2, and 35 f/2.8 PC / Intrepid 8x10 / Fuji GS645 Gallus Derlux / Foth Derby / Jon Bought 63 Boxes of Cameras / Arguses Exaktas and a Great Wall Mike Accidentally Buys an Exakta with a Metered Prism and a Biotar and it Works Perfectly Developing on Paterson Reels vs Stainless Reels: Yet Another Debate 3D Printed Custom Paterson Shafts for Developing 116, 122, and 130 Roll Film Fuji Fujicaflex TLR - One of the Prettiest TLRs Ever / What's Coming This Year on mikeeckman.com MR9/PX625 Battery Voltage Adapters from 1.5v to 1.35v / CRIS Adapters Nafis has one of Six 20x24 Polaroid Cameras in the World / 20x24studio.com Show Notes If you would like to offer feedback or contact us with questions or ideas for future episodes, please contact us in the Comments Section below, our Camerosity Facebook Group or Instagram page, or email us at camerosity.podcast@gmail.com. The Official Camerosity Facebook Group - https://www.facebook.com/groups/camerositypodcast Camerosity Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/camerosity_podcast/ Nafis Azad - https://www.nafisazad.com/ and https://20x24studio.com/ James Allen - https://www.lomography.com/homes/wv_cactus Jon Gilchrist - Packard-Ideal Shutter Company - https://packardshutter.com/ Mark Faulkner - https://thegashaus.com/ Theo Panagopoulos - https://www.photothinking.com/ Paul Rybolt - https://www.ebay.com/usr/paulkris Anthony Rue - https://www.instagram.com/kino_pravda/ and https://www.facebook.com/VoltaGNV/

Recent events in early 2022 have many people wondering if we really are in the final days before Christ's return. Pastor Mat points out that Daniel Chapter 12 gives us a preview of what is going to happen RIGHT BEFORE and RIGHT AT the time of the end. But where should our focus be? Let's find out in this exciting study.

Right Before the premiere of "Roadhouse Romance" with Tyler Hynes, I had the chance to chat with him. This was my first ever podcast and it is far from perfect, but it was very well-received by the "Hynies," Tyler's incredible fans. Follow Tyler: Website: https://tylerhynes.com/Twitter: https://twitter.com/tyler_hynesFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/TylerJHynesInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/Facebook Groups: https://www.facebook.com/groups/TylerHynesOfficialhttps://www.facebook.com/groups/TylerHynesSpicy

▸▸ Exclusive Download: Future Living™ Framework - How to make your success inevitable and live in your ideal vision of the future - https://bit.ly/2WAJo9n     Every founder feels like giving up RIGHT BEFORE a breakthrough. In this episode, I share 3 mindset switches that will push you to keep going in the hard times when you feel like it's too much.     // Let's connect on...   + Instagram (behind the scenes): instagram.com/danmartell​    + Facebook (live trainings + Q&A): FB.com/DanMartell​    + Twitter (what I'm reading): twitter.com/danmartell​    // Join my exclusive Scaling SaaS Founders Facebook Group: + www.danmartell.com/scaling-saas-founders

So many people have become entrepreneurs during COVID or because of it! One of these new entrepreneurs is Maria Varela, who's business My Layover Box, was founded in March 2020, RIGHT BEFORE we went into lock down! Not great timing for a company based on the joy of traveling. Pandemic or not, the business has barely sold anything. As a fledgling company, Maria needs immediate help to change her business model before it's too late! Listen as Sonja helps Maria broaden her customer base, change her business model, and essentially lay a new foundation for her company!   Lifeline Links: Sonja's Instagram, YouTube, Twitter My Layover Box Instagram, Website SOS with Sonja Rasula is produced in sunny Los Angeles by Heidi Roodvoets and engineered and edited by Zach Schwartz.

This is episode 22 and this is the SECOND part of our interview with Tyler Richards from Dev Mountain. If you missed part one, definitely head back and catch that one — it's the episode RIGHT BEFORE this one. Last week we heard Tyler's origin story and how Dev Mountain came to be. When we left off, Tyler was on top of the world — you heard about his exit from Dev Mountain and how he's taking an active role as an investor. This week we're jumping back to a few of the low points… Tyler talks about expanding too fast, hiring the wrong people, and the lessons he learned along the way. We can't wait to share this episode with you — so let's jump in. ---Learn more about DevMountain here:https://devmountain.comFollow Tyler on LinkedIn here:https://www.linkedin.com/in/tylerjordanrichards---This show is produced by Strides Development, a full-service app development agency.We specialize in taking your ideas and turning them into a finished app in only a few months.If you have an app you're building, we would love to talk to you. You can schedule your free strategy call by clicking here.Make sure you're following Strides:Instagram:https://www.instagram.com/strides.dev/Linkedin:https://www.linkedin.com/in/betzeraustin/

This is PART 2 of our Season 1 recap.If you haven’t listened to part 1, you’ll definitely want to give that a listen before jumping in here. We released it yesterday, so it’s just RIGHT BEFORE this one. In part 1, we talked about episodes 1-9. We chatted about validating your idea, designing your app, and creating a MAGICAL user experience. We talked about the importance of building your team, marketing your app, having the right legal advice, and building a brand. This episode focuses on recapping episodes 10 - 15 and we’re going to cover testing your ideas, getting initial traction, raising money, and financing your big idea… and we also hear from one of our clients Jay Eichelberger who we worked with to launch the FlipFlops food delivery app. Then we finish up with our favorite topic… DEVELOPMENT. ---This show is produced by Strides Development, a full-service app development agency. We specialize in taking your ideas and turning them into a finished app in only a few months. If you have an app you’re building, we would love to talk to you. You can schedule your free strategy call by clicking here.Make sure you’re following Strides:Instagram:https://www.instagram.com/strides.dev/Linkedin:https://www.linkedin.com/in/betzeraustin/ 

This Tuesday morning, the TrendZone checked in on senior citizen DJ's, IKEA woman pleasuring herself and Heinz ketchup puzzles! Robs Did You Know took place as it does every day! The childrens book 'Brenda's Beaver Needs A Barber' was a topic yesterday on the show regarding reactions to funny and crazy things! This led us to explore some other childrens books ridden with inuendos including 'Put Tonys Nuts In Your Mouth' and share them with you! Gov Kathy Hochul joined us to update NYS' status in accordance to NY Pause and potential reopening this Friday. She commented on the work EC Exec Poloncarz has done as well as how she views progress towards getting back to normal. Capt Brian Haun of 914th and 328th Air Refueling Squadron at Niagara Air Base gave us a ring RIGHT BEFORE he got in his aircraft en route to join the flyover of WNY to salute the frontliners! He was rarin to go and gave us some really cool insight on how everything is planned, whats gonna happen and some behind the scenes details. Interior designer and TV actor Nate Berkus joined the show later in the day to talk about his show with Gordon Ramsay and their work on an entire city after a flooding! We also spoke yesterday about how men and women are doing eachothers chores in some instances during the pandemic. It also was discussed how bad men are at folding laundry. This led to some great listener texts and even more talk on the topic. There was a dude in the UK that was busted over the weekend for a petty crime. The funniest and wildest part of the story was that he wasnt caught because of some great police work...he was caught because he farted loud enough for the police to find him.   ONLY AVAILABLE on the Morning Bull Podcast!

Capt Brian Haun of 914th and 328th Air Refueling Squadron at Niagara Air Base gave us a ring RIGHT BEFORE he got in his aircraft en route to join the flyover of WNY to salute the frontliners! He was rarin to go and gave us some really cool insight on how everything is planned, whats gonna happen and some behind the scenes details. ONLY AVAILABLE on the Morning Bull Podcast!

Road Dog: someone who loves every part of the more extreme, touring RockNRoll lifestyle e.g., fixing the van, slinging merchandise after the show, eating Cracker Barrel more than once in a year and sleeping on floors while all your belongings stay in your shoes as you rest so you don't lose anything (tip for beginners): this is Matt Krahula, staple of the NYC songwriting/performing/crushing scene. Sad for us, happy for him: He is moving to Hawaii (!) after just releasing the third Nightmare River Band album, Stormville. Matt has toured the nation playing his own music relentlessly doing all the stuff that road dogs do: making friends in new cities, crushing house shows, drinking gas station coffee--Matt's love of the RockNRoll life is real and infectious. He's a heartfelt, compassionate, aware human who can also be a level 10 rager/life of the party/creator of the party...a dichotomy of personalities. I snagged this RIGHT BEFORE he left and everyone was like 'no going away party' nah baby, you gotta tune into secret famous to get the final hang with the Road Dog HOOGA. love this guy. he's got stories for dayzzzzz...

About 2 months ago... I had the chance of interviewing another billionaire on my top-rated podcast This was exciting!! Beyond my own expectations of what would happen when I launched a couple of years ago... My guest was no other than Naveen Jain And I will be releasing our episode in the coming days #eekk We had a game-changing conversation RIGHT BEFORE the actual interview... Wanted to share with everyone in case it helps you too in building the business and legacy you are striving for ❤️ -- Join the Legacy Driven Entrepreneurs Community (it's FREE): http://www.theinnerchangemaker.com/tribe Are you enjoying the podcast? Listen to the episode here and leave us a review:  Apple: http://apple.co/1JUHcG9 Android: http://bit.ly/2nuoGpl  TuneIn: http://bit.ly/2BjY0gU Breaker: http://bit.ly/2BRwOCb iHeartRadio: http://bit.ly/2BhMr9L Spotify: http://spoti.fi/2BbuWEg Want to grab my NEW audio training? Grab a FREE copy of "How To Be The Leader You Truly Are": http://www.theinnerchangemaker.com/leadership Launching a podcast? Grab my Podcast Creation Roadmap:  http://www.theinnerchangemaker.com/roadmap

LOT'S of Nintendo news dropping RIGHT BEFORE we went live. We also go over the Playstation Plus and Xbox Live free games for the month of February. Nintendo Switch Online finally has a release date. Nintendo also released their quarterly earnings, and year to date sales of Switch outselling WiiU in just under a year's time. EA to drag Star Wars Battlefront 2 right back into a lootbox scandal. Xbox MIGHT NOT want to buy EA or Valve or PUBG Corp. ALL THIS AND MORE on THE ONLY Gaming, Entertainment & Nerd Culture Live Podcast with an actual knife fight (not clickbait).

Right Before one of there biggest shows of the year The Big Bad Boo Bear with Frankie Caddillac on the tech, sit down with Chris Turner for just a little bit to talk about CCW and more.

HEY HEY CINEMA-PUNKERS, AND WELCOME TO A SCATOLOGICALLY GOOD EPISODE OF CINEPUNX!! On this, our most recent effort after an all too long hiatus, we jump in to a realm of film we are only slightly familiar with, the works of Japanese director Takashi Miike. We focus this episode of two films, one older and one new, THE HAPPINESS OF THE KATAKURIS and BLADE OF THE IMMORTAL. More importantly, Josh and I are finally reunited, and most of the episode is about our friend love for each other, so if you you don’t dig on that, back out now. We being with our usual gimmicks, after a quick detour discussing how busy we have been and some of the fun and not fun stuff that has taken up our time. I had a bunch of cool stuff happen at Cinepocalypse Fest  including a live taping of ERIC ROBERTS IS THE FUCKING MAN  featuring “the man” himself, Eric Fucking Roberts!! Shit was cool. On the down side, I need a new job. If you got one hit me up. Josh has been busy as well, not least of which with the new record from his band CROSSED KEYS  !!! Do us both a favor, and post that bandcamp link all over the internets. We get into our usual WACK AND ON TRACK jawn, and then take a break followed by a rather less than knowledgeable discussion of Takashi Miike. Oh, but RIGHT BEFORE that we get into a rather long, and possible boring, talk around the band HOT WATER MUSIC. Skip like ten minutes after the break to miss that. These were maybe two rather RANDOM films to discuss, but we wanted to do one new and one old, and I had never seen either so hence my choice. I was totally stoked on this discussion though, and I hope you enjoy hearing it as much as we enjoyed doing it. HAVE TOPICS YOU WOULD LIKE TO HEAR FROM US ON FUTURE EPISODE? EMAIL OR SOCIAL MEDIA OR COMMENT BELOW! AS ALWAYS WE ARE BROUGHT TO YOU BY LEHIGH VALLEY APPAREL CREATIONS! PLEASE GO CHECK OUT OUR STORE AND GRAB A SHIRT! RATE REVIEW SUBSCRIBE AND DOWNLOAD DOWNLOAD DOWNLOAD ALSO LIKE, CHECK OUT SOME OF THE OTHER SHOWS IN THE FAMILY!!   one last thing: If you are interested in participating in our end of year round up for 2017, simply email us cinepunx(at)gmail The post CINEPUNX Episode 72: “Oh, My, Miike!” THE HAPPINESS OF THE KATAKURIS and BLADE OF THE IMMORTAL appeared first on Cinepunx.

Today's Guest Hero is Dr. Tamsin Lewis. You can find her at curoseven.com or @sportiedoc on Twitter. Hello, my cubicle conscious, open space surveyors, corner office respirators, home den inhalers, a nd coffee shop sighters. My name is Brock Armstrong, and I am… not the Workplace Hero. You see the reason the website for this podcast is www.workplacehero.me and not .com is because this podcast is about making you into a workplace hero and I want you to be reminded of that every time you visit the website, send me an email, or tell a friend about this podcast. And you will, right? Right? Before we dive in, I want to thank everyone who, at the time of this recording, has left a review on iTunes for the podcast. On the Canadian side: Dean Dwyer, elllietown, mijustiin, cawood1 and Elliotonitunes. On the #murican side: alex arrick, tdubs530, MAR150 and ukaserex. From the bottom of my workplace casual heart, I thank you all for your support. And without sounding too needy, if your name wasn’t on the list I just read, it would really help me out if you took a minute or two to give the podcast an iTunes boost. It is a small but meaningful way to show your support for the show. Just go to workplacehero.me/itunes and you will be directed right there! Easy! Ok, on with the topic at hand. I was listening to a Scientific American podcast a while ago and was excited to hear that a new study (released Aug 2016) had been done on how effective plants can be at cleaning the Volatile Organic Compounds from the air. As someone who has worked in extremely tightly sealed office buildings most of my life (you gotta keep that -30 degree Alberta air out somehow) I have often had a plant or two near my desk — but was only going on a hope and a dream that they were actually providing any benefit beyond covering up some coffee stains or overzealous permanent marker manoeuvres. The Scientific American podcast said, and I’m sure we can all agree, that Air pollution outside is easy to spot, hanging over the city, or puffing out of an exhaust pipe. But there's a lot of indoor air pollution, too, even if it's not as obvious. It's caused by volatile organic compounds or VOCs. Vadoud Niri, an analytical chemist at the State University of New York, Oswego says that they can come from building materials like paints, carpet, adhesives, vinyl floors, varnishes, solvents, personal care products, cleaning chemicals, air freshener, and even cosmetics. And that cosmetics part is what caught Niri's attention. One day he went to a nail salon with his wife and he noticed the smell of acetone and since he was doing air analysis at the time, he thought he might be able to do something about this issue. Niri figured one friendly and efficient way to get rid of acetone might be with houseplants. So he reviewed decades of literature and ran his own experiment, using an airtight chamber, and eight VOCs, in concentrations similar to those found in nail salons, against five common houseplants: a jade plant, a spider plant, a bromeliad, a Caribbean tree cactus, and what’s known as a Dracaena plant. Turns out, after a twelve-hour test, it was the bromeliad that gobbled up the most chemicals from the air. And the Dracaena beat out the others, sucking up a whopping 94 percent of the acetone. He presented the results at a meeting of the American Chemical Society, in Philadelphia. The paper is titled: Monitoring volatile organic compound removal by common indoor plants using solid phase microextraction and gas chromatography-mass spectrometry — if you are interested in looking it up… but I will read you some of the abstract now: Air pollution is one of the most important environmental threats to the health of the residents of all communities and volatile organic compounds (VOCs) are among important air pollutants. These compounds are ubiquitous in the natural and industrialized world but are found in the highest concentrations in indoor environments. Some of the chemicals belonging to this group are benign to human health, or even necessary for normal physiological function. However, a substantial proportion of VOCs are detrimental to human health with effects ranging from dizziness and nausea to central nervous system damage, various forms of cancer, and even death. Because of the serious nature of VOCs as a health hazard, many remediation techniques are being developed. Phytoremediation, the use of plants to mitigate environmental pollution, offers one of the most practical solutions regarding cost and efficacy. Five common plants were selected for this study. Three treatment conditions were applied to each plant to isolate active VOC uptake mechanisms; covering the base of the plant in foil, no foil, and the use of a light. Of the five plants; Guzmania lingulata showed the greatest overall VOC uptake in light treatment conditions with more than 80% removal of six of the eight target VOC compounds over a twelve-hour sampling period. All tested plants showed less than 50% removal of dichloromethane or trichloromethane over the twelve-hour sampling period. My office now is literally littered with plants. Some of the plants from the study to clean my air and some that I just like looking at. Which in and of itself gives us some benefits as well. As the author of the study Biophilia: Does Visual Contact with Nature Impact on Health and Well-Being? said (in a rather lackluster scientific way) “It seems worthwhile to encourage interaction with plants, both outdoor and indoor, as this is likely to be a useful environmental initiative with a sound cost-benefit profile.” Enter Dr. Tamsin Lewis (who asked me to tell you guys that she is fighting a bit of a cold so forgive her croakiness). Yeah, I think this concept of indoor pollution is increasingly being recognized as a problem. There are two problems, the circulation of the air and the air conditioning which dries out the skin and the mucus membranes of the nose and the mouth. But it’s lack of air flow and lack of air quality, which can include things like a high content of carbon dioxide, which can effect even how we breathe, for example. So, there are lots of different parts there. It’s ventilation and really how strong the air conditioning would be in the office as well. I am Dr. Tam, as I like to call myself, or otherwise known as @SportieDoc where you can find me on Twitter. I run a company called CuroSeven in the UK which will be relaunching as FIBR Health in a month. Essentially what I do is run a medical and wellness consultancy where we follow a functional medicine model. Where we take people’s information and data and make it meaningful and try to get people on a better path to health and longevity. My background is a Medical Doctor “generalist” then I went into psychiatry and then after that I took time to become an elite triathlete - how that happened is a long story - but I took four years out and raced at the highest level of triathlon and Ironman. It taught me a lot about resilience, taught me a lot about physiology, taught me a lot about psychology and interpersonal relationships, and I have used all of that to change the way I approach my patient care today. I asked Tamsin to sum up the biggest health issues that she sees arising directly from our office jobs. So at the moment we see a lot of people that have... well the main things that I see are people with chronic low energy, I see a lot of people with low libido, I see people who just can’t stay awake in the afternoon, I see people with chronic mild pain issues, lower back pain, that sort of thing. And on a separate point many people with mood and anxiety issues which is compounded by the day to day environment in which most people, a lot of people, we have to be in an office environment and spend a lot of time there. So I would definitely like to address some of the issues that come up on a day to day basis in their environment of their office. Now most of those things on that list didn’t surprise me but you mentioned libido. I don’t want to derail our conversation too much but I don’t think that is something that most people connect with their office job. No! It’s true. I mean it’s complicated because it depends on the relationships with the people you have on your team but certainly, libido comes into it. Probably because of the sitting position. I don’t know if anyone’s ever addressed that, certainly not on your show yet but when people sit, they normally scrunch over slightly, they compress their certain um… genital regions. They change the temperature in the genitals, and that all indirectly can impact the sex organs essentially. So yes, that is one aspect. The other aspect is related to the diurnal variation in light exposure in the office. And we know that light exposure can affect testosterone production. So getting that bright light in the morning is very important for turning on the brain to tell the testes to produce a healthy amount on testosterone. So often when people aren’t getting that blue light exposure from a natural source, or even from an unnatural source like a light box, the testosterone production can go down - in susceptible individuals. I’m not saying this will happen to everyone but it certainly can come up as an issue. I am so happy that Tamsin brought up lighting, which I plan to tackle in a full episode but let's take a quick closer look at that while we are here anyway. There is a recent (at the time of recording this) NY Times article called Light Bulbs That Help You Sleep by Ronda Kaysen that sums some of the issues up nicely. It says that light interferes with our circadian rhythm, the internal clock that tells our bodies when to sleep, when to wake up and when to eat. Stare at a bright, bluish light — like the one from your smartphone, tablet or television — and your body sends a signal to your brain to stop producing melatonin, a powerful hormone that helps you fall asleep. Disruptions to our circadian rhythm can affect weight loss, libido, mood and sleep patterns. And chronic sleep deprivation can increase the risk of cardiovascular disease and even certain cancers. That blue glare is not limited to our electronic devices either. LED bulbs used in desk lamps and ceiling fixtures also emanate blue light, even if it appears to you as white. It doesn’t take a scientist to notice that incandescent bulbs feel soothing, like the light from a candle or campfire, while LED lights often feel like you’re staring at a fricken blowtorch. Dr. Tam and I talked about how lighting is often chosen. I know there are a lot of issues around office lighting which is often chosen because of their low price not because of their high human compatibility. Correct and we do a lot of strip lighting which is just terrible for the brain in general but people don’t think about it, do they? It’s only once you are out of that environment and immersed in the world of wellness and biohacking that you start to look at things more closely and realize that they do in fact impact your health and how you feel on an hour to hour basis. Without getting too deep into lights and wavelengths and stuff like that, what is the issue with those cheaper types of strip lighting? Is it the flickering, the colour intensity, what is it about those lights that is really doing the damage? I think it is both of the things that you mentioned. I think it is also the fact that our bodies aren’t meant to be exposed to that light intensity for that long of periods of time. I think that a short amount in the morning of that blue light is good, but as you say, it isn’t all the right wavelengths. And also that it is literally on all day and there is no variation in the lighting at all. So all of the above. Like I said, there is no change in that lighting quality at all, so that’s definitely one aspect. And that fact that people are in that environment for so long and that is often the only light they see especially in the winter months. So as opposed to the sun moving across the sky and changing colour and position and all that stuff, we’re sitting, static, under these lights that aren’t moving, aren’t varying, aren’t changing. Interesting! And obviously, also you get the impact of the computer light which has well-researched effects on circadian rhythm and secretion of different hormones that are light dependant. So, I bet some of you can guess what your homework is going to be… But I won’t get ahead of myself! One potential solution seems to be to replace (as they say in the New York Times article) the blowtorch with the campfire, especially after sundown. As technology for LED lighting improves, companies are making more dynamic lighting that adjusts as you go through your day. And last spring, Apple introduced the Night Shift function in iOS so users can reduce the amount of blue light emitted from iPad and iPhone screens. A company called Lighting Science has produced a line of what they call “biological bulbs” that give off light meant to work in sync with your circadian rhythm, instead of disrupting it. Philips has a line of smart bulbs called Hue, with preprogrammed settings that can transform light in a room from a warm, reddish glow to a cool, aqua blue one. And this is a cool feature - you can program it to slowly turn the lights on in a bedroom to wake you up in the morning. Which doesn’t help if you are like me and sometimes sleep with a Zorro-like mask on. Ronda concluded her New York Times article with this: With a few bulbs, I transformed the bedrooms in my home into warm, cozy cocoons of glowing yellow light. Although the mood has done nothing to convince the children that their beds are not trampolines, they do seem to drift off to sleep faster. As for me, no amount of soothing light in a bedroom helps if I’m binge watching “The Affair” all night in the living room. But at least it’s a start. And that has been my experience as well. I diligently wear my blue blocking glasses, I have a blue blocking screen protector on my iPad and always have the “Night Shift” feature in iOS enabled but my solid night’s sleep is still offset 50/50 by a crappy night’s sleep. But much like taking a multivitamin, it’s gotta be helping… right? Back to Dr. Tam Ok, so we’ve talked about light and air quality which are things that people don’t feel like they have a lot of control over. But I feel like you might have some solutions for us to minimize the damage from both of those things. Yeah, I encourage people to improve their circadian exposure to light. So I encourage people to have a light box on their desk which they can use in the morning, which emits blue light, and to use that for at least 20 minutes. And we encourage people to get out into the natural light at lunch time if at all possible. Go out into some green space and take some deep breathes - which will tie into the air quality. I also encourage people to install software on their computer or wear blue light blocking glasses any time after 4:00 pm. I wouldn’t encourage that before then because it can make you sleepy. There is software you can get, I know we use f.lux which takes out blue light from the screen. Those are a few things. I also have people use little mini ionizers which improves the local air quality environment around you. You can get them on Amazon - little ionizer boxes. You could encourage your boss to get a larger unit that cleans the air like the HEPA air filter brand - but that is a separate question. But yeah, those are the main things that we would do. How about plants? Would you encourage people to put plants around their desk to improve the air quality? It certainly does, but it’s whether you are allowed to. That’s what we come up against with many people - they aren’t actually allowed to use or have plants in the office for, you know, quote/hashtag #healthandsafety reasons, which is nonsense really. But by all means, if you are allowed to have one, get a plant. Normally this is where I would give you your homework assignment, but instead I asked Tamsin: if she could get you Workplace Heroes to implement one thing into your workspace, right away, what would it be? The least expensive option would be to have the mini ionizer air box on your desk. The second would be to have a stool, like a Salli stool where by everything you do at the desk, that is encouraged by the Salli stool (and I have no affiliate relationship with them I have just used them) I found that it improves people’s health generally on a daily basis. So that is the one I would advocate, changing your sitting position and really encouraging you to think about your posture in front of your desk. So there you have it. We have another expert vote for minimizing our habitual sitting in a static position at our desks. We may feel like the air and light around us are out of our control and that we are at the mercy of the building super intendants but that is not entirely true. With an air filter, some plants and some carefully chosen light bulbs, and maybe a funky pair of yellow glasses, we can become the Hero over our own invisible pollutants. ** Workplace Hero is researched, written, narrated and recorded by me Brock Armstrong with editing help and voice acting from Eleanor Cohen. Podcast logo by Ken Cunningham and music by my old band, The Irregular Heartbeats. Today Heroic idea came from the New York Times article Light Bulbs That Help You Sleep by Ronda Kaysen and Scientific American’s podcast A Green Solution to Improve Indoor Air Quality by Christopher Intagliata. You can find a transcript of today’s podcast at www.workplacehero.me/hidden

We all know that Shahir and Matt are not "Potter-People." So in order to do this film justice, we welcome back Producer extraordinaire Jessica Tucker (@mothatucka) to make sure our spell-power on point. Is this film another classic that JK can add to her already impressive cash-cow-count? Or has the magic fizzled out for this new chapter in the wizarding world? And why the hell did Shahir run into one of the stars of the film RIGHT BEFORE we recorded?!?! Give a listen and get mad ;) Drop us a review on iTunes and write in requests and feedback at onlymoviepodcast@gmail.com or @onlymoviepod. Also if you're in NYC, check out our panel with the Blue Collar Post Collective on the post production technology behind Ang Lee's Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk. https://www.eventbrite.com/e/an-evening-with-the-post-team-of-billy-lynns-long-halftime-walk-tickets-29486670425

When you grow up in communist Bulgaria there s a few things you have to live without. Kiwifruit for one. And bubble wrap. Even today the remnants of Soviet domination hangs over the country to such an extent that still no bubble wrap is available. That s why NOLA garian Boyanna Trayanova, travels with her own supply of bubble wrap when she travels from her home in NOLA to her birthplace Bulgaria. And good thing she did or she would never be playing the giant drum that she wrapped and lugged back after she ran into Max from New York and his friend s mom hooked her up with the drum after Max s friend in New York saw Boyanna playing it in a Bulgarian field on YouTube and called Max and said "let her have it" or words to that effect . You couldn t make this sht up. And then, get this, back in New Orleans Boyanna, who plays drums for everyone in town and has lived here for a decade, suddenly decides to get all Bulgarian now she s got this giant drum and runs into Georgi who is also Bulgarian and plays jazz guitar and then they stumble into Matt who just moved to town to play accordion with the Panorama Jazz Band and Matt, although 100 American is totally Bulgarian ed out and rides a unicycle. Their band is Mahahla. Talking of bizarre and magical coincidences, how about this one Eve Abrams came to town for the first Mardi Gras after Katrina and her accommodations get kind of screwy so her friend s sister very kindly put her up for a couple of nights and who should also be staying there at the emergency crash pad but this super cute guy who was from here but was then living 1 mile away from Eve in Brooklyn. She s married to him now. And he plays in various NOLA non Bulgarian bands with Boyanna. If you ve read this far, you ve got to be thinking there s no way a bunch of people sitting around a table having a few drinks could top that string of coincidences. Okay, well how about this Geoff Douville, co owner of hipster hang The Lost Love Lounge, has a comedy night on Tuesdays no cover and Georgi from Mahala has never been to it. Even though Georgi hangs out at Lost Love once a week, he s never met Geoff. Andrew Duhon has been in Lost Love frequently and never met Geoff either. And how about this Geoff has been playing in the band Egg Yolk Jubilee for 18 straight years and once had his own podcast with a guy who now lives in DC. Eve is also a teacher, she got her first broadcasting gig at This American Life with a story about her school, and back to Geoff s friend the Department of Education is in DC. The coincidences keep piling up. Right Before the bartender cut everybody off, this motley collection stumbled out of Wayfare into the seemingly never ending daylight. It was the best of Thursdays, it was the hottest of Thursdays... Thank God for Hangover Destroyer. Photos on this page by Douglas Engel. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.