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Eric Britton discusses where his nickname "Tuma" come from, getting sponsored at 12 years old, leaving Dogtown for SMA, Kareem Campbell telling Skip Engblom to turn him pro for SMA, ending up in a coma from a mosquito bite, what it was like skating the Venice Pavilion in the 80's, starting "Tuma Skateboard Academy" teaching kids how to skate, his re-issue SMA board coming soon and much more! Timestamps 00:00:00 Eric "Tuma" Britton 00:00:27 Where did the nickname "Tuma" come from 00:03:56 Kareem Campbell told Skip Engblom to turn him pro 00:11:09 Got sponsored at 12 years old 00:15:18 Hanging out on Natas' street as a kid 00:17:34 Getting on Dogtown 00:20:29 Aaron "Fingers" Murray - Venice Pavilion 00:35:30 People filming and taking photos - Block, Chuck Katz & Ray Flores 00:36:32 Dogtown to SMA 00:38:00 Bit by a mosquito and ended up in a coma 00:48:06 Did he call jim Muir to quit Dogtown? 00:58:19 Malibu skate park coming soon 00:59:34 Skating for Vans but wearing Vision Street Wear shoes on Thrasher cover 01:04:11 Teaching kids to skate 01:33:17 What happened with him and SMA 01:40:51 Risk It part 01:42:18 Back on SMA - re-issue board coming soon 01:47:39 Venice Beach rich skate history 01:51:16 His re-issue SMA graphic Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
I did it! I took a chance, followed my gut, and launched something brand new. I told myself what I always tell you guys…Risk It! or Regret It! Introducing my brand-new short-form syndicated radio feature: “Keeping the ‘Live' in Alive! with Debbie Nigro” Proudly sponsored by NativePath Collagen — the stuff that's got me hiking again, baby! For the past 6 months, I've been secretly developing this new ‘thing''. Figuring out what it should be, how it should sound, and who would be open enough to collaborate with me. Why this, why now? Lately, I've found myself diving into wellness like never before. Not just for fun (though some of it is hilarious), but because my biological clock feels more like a ticking time bomb these days. I'm trying to maximize my remaining time on this planet as are many other people I know. I'm constantly researching and talking about mental wellness, physical wellness, nutrition, longevity, and all the weird and wonderful science behind staying vibrant and ALIVE. And sharing it all on my “Wellness Wednesday” segments of The Debbie Nigro Show just wasn't enough anymore. So, I created this new feature — fast-moving, funny, and full of fascinating wellness info — to syndicate nationwide. AND I'm testing it out in real time. The Launch
"Jane Killed Flick" It's the end of a relatively minor era, as we conclude our coverage of Volume 1 of the Red Dwarf Smegazine. Get ready for the cross-over event of the century, as one character from Back to Reality meets another character from Back to Reality, along with about fifty other comic strips of varying quality. We also uncover some scandalous censorship on the news pages, discuss Robert Llewellyn being sodomised by a rabbit, covet tiny cardboard models, deride one of the worst April Fools jokes of all time, and stalk a baby. It's quite the ride. We recommend reading along as you listen; you can find scans of the mag at archive.org or Stasis Leak.Show notes Buy The Thursday Man by Grant Naylor on Amazon! Robert Llewellyn on KYTV - with no actual sodomy, but plenty of slightly less rude antics Limmy and the paper aeroplane Book 'Em and Risk It, an accidentally topical G&TV Norman Lovett plays with his dolls house Cool to do drugs.
Bourbon, badass women, and a bold new brand shaking up the spirits industry? Now that's my kind of conversation! Especially during Women's History Month. On The Debbie Nigro Show, I had the pleasure of chatting with Molly Kingston, the trailblazing founder of Oakley Bourbon—a woman-led brand making serious waves in a traditionally male-dominated industry. And trust me, this story is as smooth and strong as the bourbon itself! A Spirit with Spirit: Inspired by Annie Oakley Molly's inspiration? None other than the legendary Annie Oakley—the sharpshooter and symbol of female empowerment. Just like Annie, Molly had the nerve (and the gut!) to disrupt an industry that didn't see her coming. She invested in rare bourbon barrels, studied the business, and noticed something missing—a bourbon brand that truly spoke to women. Enter Oakley Bourbon—the world's first and only bourbon to launch with a 20-year-old edition. Yep, you read that right. Thousand-dollar bottles sold out in minutes, and collectors are lining up for more. Why Bourbon? Why Now? Women are making their mark in whiskey, and Molly saw an opportunity to create a brand that felt inclusive, stylish, and bold—just like the women who drink it. Oakley Bourbon is all about strength, independence, and community—values that Annie Oakley herself would have raised a glass to. And speaking of collectors, Oakley is the first spirits brand to use Solana Blockchain anti-fraud technology on its bottles—ensuring authenticity for decades. This high-tech touch has serious whiskey enthusiasts clamoring to get their hands on a bottle. More Than Just a Drink—It's a Lifestyle Molly isn't just selling bourbon—she's building a movement. From limited-edition collector bottles to exclusive Royale playing cards that unlock VIP experiences, Oakley Bourbon is about bringing people together over a glass of something truly special. And let's talk about that bottle—designed with women in mind. No clunky, hard-to-hold packaging here. Oakley Bourbon's bottle is elegant, sleek, and made for a woman's grip—but don't worry, gentlemen, you're invited to the party too! What's Next for Oakley? With Collector's Edition 2 on the way and a special summer release in the works, Oakley Bourbon is just getting started. And if Molly Kingston's track record is any indication, the best is yet to come. So grab your fringe jacket, cowboy hat, and a glass of Oakley Bourbon—because this is one brand that's ready to ride into the future. Want to learn more? Head to OakleySprirts.com and get in on the action. And to Molly—cheers to you, your vision, and the women raising a glass to history! Oakley Bourbon: A perfect choice to toast to women who disrupt and innovate. P.S. Obviously Molly agrees with my mantra …“Risk It! or Regret it!” "The Debbie Nigro Show – Where bold conversations meet unstoppable women! Tune in for smart, fun, and fearless chats about business, lifestyle, and trailblazers shaking up industries. Don't miss the latest interviews, insights, and laughs! Listen now."
Segment 1: • Education at Risk: It's not just jingles—are cell phones making kids less engaged and more distracted? • New Policies, Surprising Results: Schools banning phones are seeing fewer fights and less cyberbullying. • More Focus, Less Chaos: Teachers report students are actually paying attention again—coincidence? Segment 2: • Strong Foundations Matter: Studies show faith and family contribute to better academic performance. • Then vs. Now: A math test from 100 years ago would stump most modern students—what changed? • Single Parents and the Struggle: Dedicated parents do their best, but the traditional family structure matters. Segment 3: • Cultural Suicide: Literal suicide rates are rising, birth rates are falling, and the traditional family is being rejected. • Anti-Child Society: Even after the overturn of Roe v. Wade, abortion rates are still climbing. • Legislation Can't Fix the Heart: The real solution isn't politics—it's the regenerating power of the gospel. Segment 4: • Moral Decay: Sexual immorality, church closures, rampant divorce, and truth being subjective—signs of a dying society. • The Task of the Church: Evangelism and discipleship are the only real solutions. • A Glimmer of Hope: Nearly 800,000 downloads of the Bible App in a single day show people are searching for truth. • Band-Aid Solutions: As the world gets heavier, is an emotional support robot really the answer? ___ Thanks for listening! Wretched Radio would not be possible without the financial support of our Gospel Partners. If you would like to support Wretched Radio we would be extremely grateful. VISIT https://fortisinstitute.org/donate/ If you are already a Gospel Partner we couldn't be more thankful for you if we tried!
In this episode of Implant and Risk It, Dr. Jan Bublik tackles the fears and challenges surrounding immediate dental implants. Many dentists are hesitant to try this advanced technique, but Dr. Bublik breaks down the myths, the science behind its success, and how to build confidence in performing the procedure. If you're unsure about immediate implants, this episode will give you the insights and practical tips you need to take your skills to the next level and transform your practice. Restorative Driven Implants -RDI is a premier educational resource that leverages current science-informed curriculum and predictable protocols to advance Dental Practitioners who want to succeed with all aspects of dental implantology. Follow the link to receive 20% off Spear Treatment Planning Workshop Text The Dental Guys your comments and questions: 1-865-544-8954 Subscribe to our Podcast on iTunes: https://goo.gl/WSutrB Want more content like this? Consider subscribing! Be sure to click the bell so you don't miss a video and keep up to date on the latest DG content: http://youtube.com/thedentalguys Instagram: Dental Guys X: https://mobile.twitter.com/thedentalguys Facebook: https://facebook.com/thedentalguys Consider supporting our show sponsors: Choose Dental Crafters Network – where your vision meets innovation! Visit dentalcrafters.net or Call 1-800-472-8302… the Dental Guys to receive 10% off your first case!
We interrupt your Fringe-ing to discuss proposed compensation for businesses along Stony Plain Road, a big budget shortfall and potential tax hike, transit fare increases, and the new owner of the Edmonton Elks.Here are the relevant links for this episode:Stony Plain rejectionCity council rejects grant program for Stony Plain Road businesses struggling through LRT workScheduled LRT work complete on Stony Plain Road, but road to stay closedBudget shortfallEdmonton budget shortfall risks bigger property tax hike in 2025, city warnsTransit faresEdmonton planning to hike transit fares next year to make up for $13M budget shortfallEdmonton ElksNew Edmonton Elks owner says classic 'EE' logo to drive the team's branding New Edmonton Elks owner says classic 'Double E' logo to drive the team's brandingJennifer RiceCourt order stops misconduct sanction hearing for Edmonton Coun. Jennifer Rice until judicial reviewTim CartmellEdmonton councillor wants project management overhaul, claiming delays and 'wasted dollars'From the Taproot newsroomHow a bison head helped change the Pioneers Cabin into the Bison LodgeEdmonton Global's listening tour will lead to change: BruceRapid fireTake a Risk: It's the Most Fringe Thing You Can DoBack to light: The historic Western Cycle neon sign is up in Edmonton againTony Caterina's comment on FacebookThis episode is brought to you by Park Power, your friendly, local utilities provider (and title sponsor of Taproot's Regional Roundup). Park Power offers electricity, natural gas, and internet to homes, businesses, and farms throughout Alberta. Learn more at parkpower.ca.Speaking Municipally is produced by Taproot Edmonton, a source of curiosity-driven original stories, curated newsletters on various topics, and locally focused podcasts, all in the service of informing Edmontonians about what is going on in their community. Sign up to get The Pulse, our weekday news briefing. It's free! ★ Support this podcast ★
Everybody Knows My Show Theme is "Risk It or Regret It!" Whatever IT is for YOU! So, I thought it would be fun to share how I risked getting my first paying radio job after college. It's a memorable story of driving in a thunderstorm at 11 o'clock at night after working all day at another job, to a radio station in an old house in Briarcliff Manor, NY where Howard Stern had worked, to audition for an immediate opening for a news reporter. I invited the guy who called me the next morning to tell me I got the job as the news reporter for WRNW Radio, to come join me in the studio to co-host a show. Ol' pal Gary Axelbank was the then Program Director of WRNW Radio. He's now the host of BronxTalk and Bronx Buzz on BronxNet and he also hosts The Bronx Music Podcast -with Gary Axelbank. He got in touch with me recently, sparked by the theme of my new book out to say he was totally on board with the point of "How to Talk to Strangers Advice From A Professional Stranger Talker". I wrote it to try and spark people to try to have more meaningful conversations 'in person' versus the virtual conversations we've become accustomed to having by texting and email. Even making an actual phone call is becoming a lost art. (These days when I make a phone call and a human answers, I actually get excited!) Gary said, “You know among many reasons that I responded to the point of your book is that I'm a communications professional like you are, and communication is so important, yet people don't talk to each other. I talk to people who I work with and I'm like, you know, we've got to get this guest booked or whatever. I'll tell them, do me a favor, just pick up the phone and find out if they can do it or they can't do it. They say OK I'll send them an email. Send an email? If you send them an email we're going to wait forever. Then you get an email chain where there's a whole discussion about, well, I can't do 12.30, I'll do 1.30 and I've lost track of what's going on. If we picked up the phone, we could get to somebody.” Gary and I are alike in that we intentionally put good energy into engaging people to converse ‘in person' pretty much every day. We both feel it matters a lot, wanted to talk more about why it matters. So we did… in this podcast of my entire show which airs weekdays 11-12noon EST on WGCH Radio in the NY/CT area and airs live globally on the digital livestream on WGCH.com I rarely post a whole show but decided to post this one because we both tell some good stories…. like the day I arrived to work at my usual 5:30am and found a drunk guy sitting on my typewriter. LOL And the day Famous Amos of Famous Amos cookies just walked in to introduce himself with a big box of his ‘new' cookies he was trying to promote. Gary tells a story about when Howard Stern worked there and what happened when he tried to kill a bee in the studio. Ha. We also talked about all the famous people who came from the Bronx. People like Jennifer Lopez (who has my same birthday) and Chazz Palminteri who's stopped by the show in the past and told me I reminded him of his mother Ha! Gary also teaches a course in TV performance and teaches his students that to conduct a great interview they need to ‘listen'. “Well, this is a cool thing that I do. One of the things that we talk about is like when you do an interview, how do you get good depth? You get good depth because you ask a question based on what I say. And then I demonstrate to them, and I do it with them. I ask, you know, where were you born? What are your parents like? To do this, you must be a good listener. I could walk into the pharmacy and talk to the pharmacist, and I could do a half hour right on the spot with that. And why? Because when I ask well, what medication do you sell a lot of? They'll say, we sell diabetes meds. And I'll say, oh, what are the options? And then he'll say, well, these are the options. Why would somebody choose one, and why would somebody choose the other? And I could stand there forever. And it doesn't matter.” We both could talk forever but that's what we do professionally. We both ust want to encourage the rest to you to talk a little more, listen a little more, and make a little more an effort to engage your fellow humans in authentic conversations. Enjoy this podcast of our live conversation on The Debbie Nigro Show. If you'd rather read than listen the audio transcript is below.
Alison drops her brand new unreleased remix of Mau P's "On Again", alongside music from Whethan, John Summit, Elohim, What So Not, Soki, Pauline Herr and more!Don't forget to rate & review on all of your favorite podcast apps! Post your comments on twitter @awonderland #RADIOWONDERLANDTracklist:1. RADIO WONDERLAND OPENER2. Mau P - On Again (Alison Wonderland Remix)3. Elohim - Power of Panic 4. Soki - Without You 5. Elohim - Ticking Time Bomb 6. CLOONEE - SIPPIN YAK (CHROMEBODIED)7. Pauline Herr - Fault Line (feat. Marlhy) 8. Maazel - Take Me Away 9. Łaszewo, Louis The Child & Pluko - Slow 10. SLANDER, Nikademis, Poo Bear - If Tomorrow Never Happens 11. Slow Magic - Waited 4 U (Disco Lines Remix)12. Elohim - Crazy 13. EVAN GIIA - TALKING WALLS 14. Whethan & SHY Martin - PLACE IN MY MIND 15. What So Not, Benson, Lucy Lucy - Lights Go Out 16. John Summit - Tears (with Paige Cavell) 17. Whethan & MKLA - CRAZY4U 18. Whipped Cream - Rewind.. (But I Love You) 19. Soki - Oxygen 20. Megra - Don't Risk It 21. Sonny Fodera - Mind Still [1991 Remix] (feat. Blythe)22. D.O.D - So Much In Love (Sub Focus Remix)
My guest today is Christine Hernandez! Christine is a wife, the mother of a 23 year old, a student in a graduate program for clinical mental health, and the host of the podcast Mental Health: Love It or Risk It. Christine and I talk about the importance of setting boundaries, listening to your body, and knowing what your needs are as an HSP. Connect with Christine: Instagram Mental Health: Love It or Risk It Podcast Download the RECLAIM app, the self-care & boundary setting app for HSPs! Apple Store: https://apps.apple.com/pl/app/reclaim-self-care-for-hsps/id6477355823 Web version: https://reclaim.passion.io Android version coming soon! (Use web version for now) Become a Patreon subscriber for bonuses and to help support the podcast: patreon.com/highlysensitivepodcast Connect with me on Instagram and join The Highly Sensitive Podcast Channel & Boundary & Self-Care Broadcast Channel: @boundariesbylauren Join The Highly Sensitive Podcast on Facebook: www.facebook.com/thehighlysensitivepodcast Join my email list by clicking here to get my free Boundary Setting Workbook for Highly Sensitive People! If you have any ideas for episode topics, if you have any questions for me to answer on the podcast, or if you would like to write an email sharing your story for me to read on the podcast, you can email me at lauren@laurenlasallecoaching.com. You can find out more about my coaching programs, as well as free resources and links to my social media, by visiting my website at laurenlasallecoaching.com. Music by Jeffrey Penn Johnson: musicbyjeffco.com instagram.com/jeffreypennjohnson --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/highly-sensitive-podcast/message
I can't get enough of my friend Alvin Clayton. He is bursting with talent and great energy, and I think he makes the world a more beautiful place through all he does and especially through his art through which he tries to speak to people's humanity. Recently I felt compelled to introduce Alvin to as many people as possible who may not know about him just to be able to see the amazing art he creates. Famous people collect his stuff. People like Robert De Niro and Denzel Washington and Halle Berry just to name a few. Alvin has a fabulous restaurant in New Rochelle, NY called Alvin & Friends which has won many awards. The food is contemporary Caribbean with a Black American South influence, that caters to a discerning customers, and the vibe is always cool with live music often. A self -taught artist inspired by Matisse, Alvin's extraordinarily colorful art literally blasts from the walls of his restaurant. My boyfriend Dave and I often pop in to Alvin's for a drink and we love when Alvin comes over for a hug and hello and pulls out his phone to show us photos of the latest, greatest pieces of art he has created. Every single time I think to myself, my God this guy is ridiculously talented! “Well, I think what I try to do with my art is it speaks to people's humanity. And I think our humanity is very much connected and is a common ground. And I think if you reach to humanity, color becomes out of the picture. You get yourself into that situation. So, what I try to do with my art is to bring the viewer into that moment or that situation and say, wow, you know what, I've experienced that with my friend. And it's not about color because we all experience it.” I don't know how Alvin Clayton does it all. He's married 30 years to a brilliant beautiful woman, has three children, runs a bustling restaurant that is usually packed with interesting people from all walks of life, then goes home and stays up all night painting. He's a good-looking son-of-a-gun too and must not eat all that fabulous food he makes because he's been a professional model for 25 years. Alvin was the first African American to have eight full pages in GQ magazine. He's worked for every catalog you could think of, and done major campaigns for Banana Republic, and has shot for Ralph Lauren. Maybe it's all that worrying he does that keeps him thin. LOL “There could be 99 people in my restaurant having an amazing time and possibly one person that did not have the perfect experience and that would wake me out of my sleep. I mean, I've gotten a bit better on it, but that still bothers me. I'm genuinely people-oriented, and so my whole thing is to seeing people being in a good space and I think that's what I do with my art too. Alvin Try's To Paint Solutions To The Issues Bothering Us “I mean I paint what some of the issues are that are bothering us and dividing us or whatever, but while I'm painting that I'm also thinking okay we know what the bad things are, what are the solutions, right? And so that's always the final chapter of whatever I do, it's solution.” Alvin believes, “We have more in common than we do that separates us”. About His Painting of a Woman with Alzheimer's He Just Showed Me “Yes, so I was sitting next to this woman in the Dr's office, her daughter brought her in actually, she had Alzheimer's and the daughter had to go in for her appointment. She asked me if I could keep an eye on her mom while she was in. I said, of course. And so while she was there, I was looking at her. She was dressed really lovely. You could tell she had style and grace. And there was something about her aura that just seemed to be, you could tell she was a beautiful person even though a lot was missing right now. And she was going into her pocketbook and somehow this image came out that she's searching for a pocketbook of lost memories. And so I took her picture and did this painting with my colors and everything else, I researched what the symbol was for Alzheimer's and so on the pocketbook that she had, instead of having a Saint Laurent or one of the trademarks, I had this insignia for the Alzheimer's Association. Even though the disease is devastating I felt she looked angelic”. My Gift Is Not Art But Rather The Art Of Seeing Opportunities Others Don't After seeing this work of art, Alvin created, it sparked my art of seeing opportunities between people and then bringing them together to make something actually happen instead of just thinking about it or talking about doing it ‘someday'. It's what I really get a kick out of doing for people. My media world is filled with innovative people from many worlds, and I get to know and understand people on a deeper level than most through what I do. These conversations and relationships stick inside my head like Velcro. (I'm always ripping off two separate pieces of Velcro from inside my brain and sticking them together for match lol. Funny I never explained it like that before but makes sense to me.) I'd just done an interview with the Chairmen of an upcoming Alzheimer's Association Gala fundraiser so I introduced the idea of a collaboration where Alvin's Alzheimer's painting could somehow be used to help raise funds for the organization. It's in motion! Enjoy this podcast of our live conversation on The Debbie Nigro Show. In case you haven't noticed ‘Someday' has arrived and when it comes to trying out new ideas you know what I always say … “Risk It or Regret It”! Get in touch if you need to brainstorm who's inside my head that could be a match for whatever you're passionate about. Debbie@DebbieNigro.com Follow @AlvinClaytonArtists on Instagram. While you're at it you can follow me too @therealdebbienigro
Risk: It bears Repeating Anything worth saying is worth repeating. - Humble the Poet We've talked about risk many times in the past. In particular, how you view risk. The reason the conversation bears repeating, other than the fact that I field this topic on the regular, is because it is tied to a strong emotion: anxiety. Not taking a risk is the biggest risk Many people “feel” like the safest way to save money is to hide it under a mattress (ok, not really, but savings accounts are today's mattresses). Why? Watch the news. The stock market ticker runs at the bottom throughout many newscasts. People have market changes pinged directly to their phones. Do you know how often the market fluctuates, daily? If you do, then you know exactly what I am talking about. Do you view taking a risk as losing money? Then this podcast is for you! Join Matt Robison and I this week as we discuss how you should be looking at risk. Spoiler alert: risk isn't losing money, it is losing purchasing power. Risk: How long until retirement? When deciding how to invest, consider the timeframe - it all depends on when you will need to spend the money. 30+ years until retirement: You are just starting in your career, maybe you have one or two young children at home. Your best option for long-term investments are stocks. Over long periods of time (40+ years), stocks have always outperformed any other type of investment. 10-20 years until retirement: Your kids are (mostly) grown, you're paying college expenses, etc. The strategy here is almost the same as above: Stocks are still your best bet for 10+ years of investment. However, you need to balance that with anticipated costs for the next couple of years. For instance, the 529 account for your high school junior should be invested more conservatively than your 401(k). About to retire or retired: Congratulations! Now your main concern is having your money last, being available when you need it, and keeping up with inflation. See below for the Retirement Bucket strategy! These time frames are important when you look at historical market returns. Retirement Buckets Now that you are about to retire, or even better - you have already retired - you need to keep a close eye on your portfolio to ensure it will keep up with your ongoing needs. Cash: Keep the next 1-2 years of expenses in cash and money market funds. You don't want to lose that money! Bonds: The following 2-7 years of expenses can be invested in very safe bonds or bond funds. This will get you some nice return (hopefully!) while not losing value. Stocks: Any money that you plan to spend in 7+ years from now, you can consider investing in low-cost stock index funds. Stocks tend to ourperform over long periods (10+ years) and you want your retirement portfolio to keep up with inflation The first two buckets above (1+2) are your war chest: the money you need to have to cover expenses over the next 5-7 years in case the stock market crashes. Stocks for the Long Run Need more proof that stocks are your best bet? Let's pretend that you were around in 1802 and you were rich. You had a crisp $1 to save. Had you put it under your mattress and pulled it out this year, it would be worth a whopping $.04. Yes, you read that correctly. Four cents. Do you see how the dollars don't make sense? Had you invested that $1 in the stock market, it would now be worth $1,601,184. Here is where the purchasing power comes into play. That dollar bill in 1802 could probably purchase dinner for the whole family. Uh, not so much in 2024! You can see from the chart that a dollar from 1802 has lost so much purchasing power that it can only buy 4.7 cents worth of goods. Bonds have done better, with a modest return from $1 to $1,746. Obviously, stocks far outpace cash
Good Morning! For those fortunate enough, to have skated during the GOAT-era. This gentleman's films, helped usher in a whole new wave of skateboard talent like none other. Legendary Filmmaker- Tony Roberts, was the man behind such classics as "Goin' Off", "Speed Freaks" & the culture-defining ,"Risk It". Each video, a staple in every skaters home. Brought the culture everyone from Lord SALBA, to Ocean Howell. So, no matter what era: this is a must-listen for all filmmakers & skateboarders.alike. Tune in, as Tony talks his early days of film production & DJing. The evolution from movie equipment, to handheld cameras. We discuss skateboarding LEGEND- Tom Knox, filming his part in one day. Growing up, and working with LEGENDARY Filmmaker- Mike McEntire. We talk everything from Cadillac Wheels. the OG ATV- Jeff Kendall, Primitive videos and so much more! With one electrifying ending, this is the episode we've all waited for. Can't thank you enough, Tony! Without, further ado..
We Need a New Dynamic Word for Women Over 50! I know this because I'm one. The existing words suck. 'Woman of a certain age ?' 'Past my prime?' Who the hell says so? I'm ready for my next act and I'll never be out of next acts! Did you know there are 999 adjectives on Google to describe an older woman and they're all rotten. Words like old bag, granny, biddy, and that line I remember hearing a young idiot guy say behind my back once- “she's got a few miles on her.' I shoulda kicked his puny ass right then. Lol . Point is...we seriously need a new upbeat word to describe all the dynamic women making their individual ways through the latter phases of life reinventing, taking chances, having new adventures, and savoring their time invested in ‘life'. We especially need to let the younger women coming up behind us know, it's never over as long as you say so. Lesley Jane Seymour former Editor-in Chief of More Magazine and current Founder of Covey Club, a National and international group of women interested in personal and business growth, was just quoted in a story about women and ageism. She joined me today on my radio show to talk about that piece in The Hill titled “2023 is shaping up to be the Year of the 50+ Woman.” 60 year old Oscar winner Michelle Yeohs acceptance comment was loud. “Ladies, do not let anyone ever tell you you are past your prime”. Ok damnit we won't! Most wise women know the problem is our society that values youth and beauty. That and obnoxious men who don't have mirrors ( sorry to the respectful guys) . I'm talking about the guys who are quick to joke about older women being past their sexual prime. (Sidebar: One peek through the blinds at a woman over 50 having a hot romance night would cure them of that thought but hey that's another story. ) Men who age are celebrated with cool words like ‘silver fox ‘ and ‘dignified older gentleman ‘. There are no positive words for women who age. We need a new word! Women collectively need to put our heads together. How ‘bout WNDY? (Woman Not Done Yet!) Enjoy Lesley Jane Seymour and I gettin' real about all the fabulous 'Women Not Done Yet' on this podcast of our live interview on my radio show. And check out Lesley's Covey Club - you might just want to join. ABOUT MY RADIO SHOW THE DEBBIE NIGRO SHOW 11-12 noon EST WGCH Radio1490 or hit Listen LIVE at WGCH.com Show Interview Podcasts Posted After Here on DebbieNigro.com No Politics - Always Relevant...Always Hopeful...and Always A Little Humor...In Spite Of It All! If You Appreciate The Spirit Of My Show I'd Appreciate A ‘High Five “to my social media pages. Thank You! Follow me on Facebook : The Debbie Nigro Show Follow me on Instagram: @therealdebbienigro Follow Me on Twitter: Debbie Nigro Connect on LinkedIn: Debbie Nigro Sign up for my "Risk It or Regret It!" newsletter here at: DebbieNigro.com
Listen to an engaging story filled episode with lighthearted moments from Adam Bush. He's a Comedian, TV Writer and cancer survivor that grew up in Louisiana and travels the globe sharing stories. Find out how he won a contest to open for Mike Birbiglia on Broadway; how he builds a comedy career in today's world and what's on his TikTok! Discover his writing process; how he disciplines himself daily and how he focuses on building a career leaning on his strengths. Discover how his father's untimely passing made a powerful impact on his life and outlook on grief. As a TV Writer, learn about the the kids' shows he writes for a network based out of LA. Learn how me made his own 1-hour length comedy special filmed and more about his DryBar Comedy special coming out this year. Learn how he maximizes what he can do with his artistic career from where he's based and more! Don't miss what's on his Risk It for the Biscuit podcast and what he's looking forward to the most about coming to the Shenandoah Valley! Plus, be sure to grab your discount for delicious munchies made right here in the Valley in the show notes below. Cheers! Laughers, here's your discount code to enjoy delicious munchies from our sponsor, PrePOPsterous Gourmet Popcorn! Use code LAUGH15 To purchase and use code be sure to visit: https://www.prepopsterous.com/ Adam Bush – See Adam perform - Info & Ticket link also below socials! Website: https://www.adambush.co/ TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@heyadambush YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/heyadambush Instagram: @heyadambush Feb 25th Show in the 2023 X2 Comedy Series at Court Square Theater 41-F Court Square, Harrisonburg, VA USA Doors Open 7pm; Show Starts 7:30pm $20 Advanced | $25 at Door Chris Womack & Dawn Davis Womack, Adam Bush, Noah Miller & Joey I.L.O. https://courtsquaretheater.org/event/x2-comedy-series-2023/ Great group discounts available just contact the theater at 540-433-9189 X2 Comedy Series Season Tickets: https://checkout.square.site/buy/HUQVI44OQHQ3BXW6USNFI3K7 To learn more about X2 Comedy & Buy Tickets to a show: Visit: https://www.x2comedy.com/ Facebook & Instagram: @x2comedy
There are a ton of great original Christmas and Holiday Songs that have not hit the mainstream 'Yet'! (Like My Mrs.Claus Song LOL!) One of those songs is written by Toby Soriero and it's called "Sleigh Bell Blues". It's Rosedale Junction's Delta blues inspired acoustic number of one man's dark sad rambling ode of what Christmas now represents. We need to remember that the holidays with all the focus on merriment, is not all that merry for many. Toby's lyrics in "Sleigh Bell, Blues' speak to one mans' sad lonely emotions about how long it's been since he's heard sleigh bells ring. Poor guy sings that Santa doesnt come around where he is but he wishes he would. Seems Christmas in his town is all about “partying in the barn”, then going home and passing out. Still he's hopeful things might change for him. Written by Toby Soriero (Guitar, resonator, bass, drums, washboard and sleigh bells), Sleigh Bell Blues features vocals by Dgiovahni Denizevahni (Solo artist), piano by Roger Smith (Tower of Power) and harmonica by Trent Williamson (Solo artist). Toby Soriero began playing guitar at the age of nine, having studied under Connecticut-based jazz guitarist, Ron Stebbins. He's had a love for the blues and a passion for simple soulful music ever since. Toby grew up in the golden era of album rock, enamored with a generation of awesome guitar players. The most influential on his playing were Eric Clapton and the Three Kings (B.B., Albert and Freddie). In 2019, as a member of the acoustic blues duo, the Screwtop Sommeliers, Toby made it to the semi-finals of the International Blues Challenge in Memphis, Tennessee. In 2020 Toby said goodbye to Corporate America to focus on making music full time. We wish him well on his fun next act in life. I know a whole lot fo people who'd love to leave their jobs and just make music. I hope they get their chance. Lifes about taking risks to make yourself as happy as possible while youre here and still can. "Risk It or Regret It"! is what I always say. Enjoy my conversation with Toby Soriero on The Debbie Nigro Show and enjoy listening to his original "Sleigh Bell Blues".
This is the time of year you think about getting someone special something special. I was reading about this guy Michael Santoro who I didn't know about who makes the most beautiful things I ever saw. I'm smitten with his talent and his ethics. A MacCase by the guy who designed inside the Gulfstream jet? Who wouldn't want that gift? Michael Santoro is a multi award winning automotive designer artist and entrepreneur. Besides designing for Chrysler and Vector the man actually designed the interior of the Gulfstream Jets! Now with his own company ‘MacCase' Michael has designed gorgeous leather travel bags briefcases and accessories for Apple Products. Class act creations. You'll enjoy hearing his story on this podcast after you hear me ‘stall' a little as I wait for him to show up. He apologized of course. Luckily I stall good. LOL I talk about how on any given day something is going on behind the scenes with everybody it's just a matter of ‘what' it is right? And you just try and dance in between those crazy moments. ************************ Dancing back to my guest, Michael Santoro. Michael spent 6 years as an automotive designer at Chrysler. They recognized his gift of design early and brought him on board to help design some notable cars. The ground breaking, cab-forward exterior design for the 1995 Car of the Year, a first generation Chrysler Cirrus and the Dodge Stratus. Also Michaels designs helped return the 1996-2006 Jeep Wrangler, back to its iconic roots. As a consulting designer for Walter Dorwin Teague in NYC, America's oldest design consultancy, Michael worked for 2 years on design interiors for Boeing Aerospace and the production interior for the Gulfstream G5 aircraft. Michael was a design consultant on the Vector M12 production supercar and Vector M12 "American Anthem" North American International Auto Show show car. Additional projects included the Lamborghini Jota. When he left corporate America to start his own design company his father didn't think it was a smart thing. He thought his son was crazy to leave Chrysler and go to on his own with zero experience. Michael said, “He kept reminding me that I went to art school not business school and that I knew nothing about running a company. Here I am 25 years later and things are still going ok.” Most of us know from experience that when parents make a doubtful or negative comment about your life choices, they can really get under your skin. Should you still listen to their advice? Tough call. Michael said, “I think that its been my experience that whatever my parents tell me to do if I do the opposite I'm doing really well. I'm moving in the right direction in my life. Parents want the best for they kids so they tend to be protective I totally understand that. I know that I'm moving in the right direction if my parents are feeling fearful about a decision I'm trying to make, and then I know I need to go in that direction. (Sounds exactly how my daughter and son-in-law deal with me these days LOL) Michael knew he had to…Risk It or Regret It! “Once the company got up and running and My Dad saw the freedom it brought me and how I could go from concept to production in a matter of weeks he saw the freedom it brought me. He totally understood and he was on board.” “Freedom and Creativity” are two values high on both my own and Michaels' list. Like many creatives, Michaels ideas arrive in the shower, at night in dreams and on napkins at lunch. His dreams are about design and he gives a lot of credit to his training at Pratt in Brooklyn. “They have a very systematic way about thinking about design” said Michael. ( Nice plug for Pratt) Now to the beautiful things he makes with ethically sourced leather from India where cows are beautiful animals treated with love and their body parts only become useful after they pass naturally. It all started In 1999, when Michael Santoro created the Apple-specific case market with the launch of his company, MacCase. I wondered did Michael make a strategic partnership with Apple? Otherwise how could he legally use the word Mac for anything without them? "The company was a few months old when we went to the MacWorld show in San Francisco for the first time. We had one product in the line. We had no idea how the Apple community was going to react to this strange design for Mac iBook case. Luckily, the response was overwhelmingly positive. It was the right product at the right time, a true blue ocean strategies moment. When we got back from the show on Monday morning the phone rang. It was Apple's legal department. "We saw your products at the MacWorld show", the voice said flatly. "I just wanted to congratulate you. You're the first person to figure out how to use the Apple logo without getting sued. Best of luck to you." "It was at the moment I realized we might be on to something." - Michael Santoro, President / Chief Creative Officer Enjoy this great podcast conversation of the live interview with Michael Santoro on The Debbie Nigro Show.
Candles Calm Me Down. I miss the scent of this LEO candle. It's amazing how much scent can change a home and affect your mood. This LEO candle was a gift from a gal I knew back when she was managing and booking recording artists like Jose Feliciano. We reconnected on LinkedIn last year and I found out about her new candle company PhyllisKNewYork. Naturally I thought of her on the subject of ‘The Power of Candles To Calm You Down'. We could all use a truckload. As we move into the chilly season and spend more time inside I thought a refresher course on candle therapy would be timely. Phyllis Keitlen is a world class entrepreneur. Her company The PhyllisKCollection Inc. is one of the fastest growing female owned candle and diffuser companies in the US. Founded by Phyllis Keitlen in 2020 it's more than just a Candle and Diffuser company…it's truly making a difference. The company partners with local and national non-profits to make an impact. Phyllis and the company are about bringing hope for the future. “As the only human sense directly linked to emotions and memories, scent is perhaps the most important facet of a home's aesthetic and start of recovery." Tranquil aromas in a home set a peaceful environment and help you relax, energize or escape the day to day. Yes your mood can be altered by simply lighting a candle. In fact the folks at candle.org put together a chart as a guide for selecting the right scent candle for the right mood. The list includes scents to ease anxiety, disappointment, fear, grief, impatience, loneliness, emotional and mental fatigue, stress and tension. “Scents can have positive effects on mood, stress, reduction, sleep enhancement, self-confidence, and physical and cognitive performance,” says Theresa Molnar, executive director of the Sense of Smell Institute, the research and educational arm of the perfume industry's Fragrance Foundation. Fragrances inhaled go to the brain where the neurological effect can alter mood. They trigger areas in the brain that relate to emotions. https://candles.org/scents-can-have-a-positive-effect-on-your-mood/ Phyllis Keitlen encourages her customers to “shop by mood” and has a whole bunch of scented-themed candles and diffuser fragrances, compatible with personal emotions that feed the soul. She even created uplifting affirmation candles like “I am Grateful”, “I am Worthy”, “I Am Prosperous” “I am Confident” to name a few. “Since I began my journey of meditation and affirmations, wonderful things are transpiring into my life.” Said Phyllis. Her Zodiac candles like my Leo or this Sagittarius for example pair zodiac personality traits with scents that would resonate with each.There are even candle scents to put you in the perfect mood for holidays and this seasons PhyllisKNewYork line features 8 Days Of Hanukkah, 25th Day Christmas Soy Candle, and even a ‘Hippee Xmas' candle. LOL. That should put you in a fun mood. And they truly make a great earth friendly gift. "It has always been extremely important for me to source products with ingredients that are natural and in some cases, organic. You will never find phthalates, parabens, or sulfates in my products, which are also made in the United States. As I continue to expand my line, I will continue to source innovative products that are earth friendly and help improve one's lifestyle"- Phyllis Keitlen Speaking of gifts, it was truly a gift to get to talk with Phyllis Keitlen. Wow is she interesting! Beyond Candles... Phyllis was an innovative knitwear designer for the last 25 years, Her cool t-shirts and separates were often featured in the windows of Bergdorf Goodman and Saks Fifth Avenue. She was acclaimed by Vogue as having made “The Italian Truck Driver's t-Shirt” into fashion chic. That made her a truckload of money. Totally burnt out after that huge success she took a year off to sleep. LOL Somewhere along her career path she came to manage the famous musician, singer and composer Jose Feliciano. Jose has had many international hits including his version of the Doors “Light My Fire” and the Christmas single everybody loves “Felix Navidad'. The back story is just incredible. It was Phyllis' mother Tomi Keitlen who inspired Jose Feliciano and gave him the confidence to risk becoming the star he was born to be in spite of the fact he was born blind. Congenital glaucoma left Jose blind at birth. Phyllis Keitlins' mother Tomi sadly went blind at 33 from the same affliction. But she he was a fighter and was determined to not let her blindness affect her life and what she wanted to do. She got a guide dog, learned how to live on her own, ski, mountain climb, and wrote a book about it all called “Farewell To Fear” that gave a lot of encouragement and hope to people with any kind of handicap. She showed them, “There are ways to work around and through things people say you cant do, you just have to be willing to try and work at it.” Jose Feliciano read that book and asked to meet Tomi Keitlen in person. Phyllis was in High School at the time and went home from boarding school on weekends to her Moms' house in Stockbridge MA. It was there one weekend, she watched Jose Feliciano play guitar and sing for her mother. He was sitting and playing and singing in front of the giant fireplace Phyliss says, when she flipped out and jumped up and said "Mom you've got to manage him!" Her Mom did not. But Jose and Tomi Keitlen became lifelong friends and every weekend Phyllis drove to NY to pick up Jose and bring him up to her Mom's house in MA where he would play for her and she would give him confidence. Fast forward many years, when Phyllis knew her Mom was about to pass, she called Jose Feliciano to ask him to come sing to her Mom one last time. He did. She also asked if he would come some weeks later with his wife and 3 children to her home in Hamptons, to be part of her moms' life celebration. He did. There would be 40 people there and she only wanted him to play one song. He did. It was that day that Joses' wife asked Phyllis if she would manage Jose. Phyllis said I don't know anything about that business. Joses' wife said, but you're a good businesswoman you'll figure it out. And she did . And that's how Phyllis Keitlen became Jose Felicianos' Manager and traveled the world with him. But then Phyllis had to overcome her own challenge. She burnt her arm so badly in a cooking acciddent she had to spend 4 months in a NY hospital and a whole year recovering with skin grafts etc. But Phyllis is back in action because she always gets back in action. Her mother taught her well. Risk It or Regret It! She's creating new candle scents which she does personally with her personal candle scent creator until the scents are perfected. PhyllisKNewYork Candles aren't just any candles. They're awesome. Phyliss Keitlen isn't just any woman. She's awesome. I hope you enjoy listening to this podcast Interview with her from The Debbie Nigro Show as much as I loved talking to Phyllis.
People face increasing dangers from cyber enemies. At the same time, cyber pros are suffering from stress, burnout and "hamster wheel"syndrome. They experience many difficulties every day in easily protecting people and companies from danger.There is a different option. Cyber pros have the opportunity of better work-life balance, more rewarding careers and achieving their personal missions to better protect people and companies – by making cybersecurity as reliable as electricity. How? The same way as other business functions do – with curiosity,critical thinking, system thinking and industrial-strength design thinking. The same way business innovation created products that delight us in daily life.The same way music, sports and cooking bring us joy. The same way military battles are won. It takes learning to think counter intuitively and to change. But there's a twist, business innovators have education,method and coaching at the individual, team and organizational levels.Compared to other business functions, cyber pros are setup to fail. The support system for cyber pros is missing!The good news is, it's readily fixable! That starts with putting people in the center of cybersecurity – empowering cyber pros to more easily protect people from danger, accelerating authentic Zero Trust and making cybersecurity as reliable as electricity. Join us to learn and map-out your action plan. About the speaker: Brian Barnier is the co-founder of Think.Design.Cyber and the think-tank, CyberTheory Institute that bridges the gap between boards,business leaders, cybersecurity leaders and compliance.Brian has pioneered critical, systems and industrial design thinking in the cybersecurity discipline and the use of life-like scenario analysis to address critical issues of evolving threats/attacks, eliminate bad methods that cause breaches, waste money and resources and burnout cyber pros,affecting culture and retention.He is the author of The Operational Risk Handbook (Harriman House, Great Britain, 2011) used as a textbook by the London Institute of Banking & Finance. In 2020, Brian's paper with expert Prachee Kale,"Cybersecurity: The Endgame -- Part 1" was honored as the 2020 Article of the Year in the Taylor and Francis EDPACs journal. Brian has earned coveted achievement awards from two of ISACA's most significant chapters. In 2021, he earned the highly distinguished Joseph J. Wasserman Award presented by ISACA New York Metro Chapter. In 2015, he received the V. Lee Conyers Award from ISACA Greater Washington DC.Deep in professional guidance, he is a co-author of ISACA's Risk IT and COBIT, and the Shared Assessments Program. ISACA's IT Audit Framework 2020 points to his work in risk assessment. He is one of the first three "Fellows" of OCEG -- the Open Compliance & Ethics Group – the organization that created "Governance, Risk and Compliance." Prachee Kale is the co-founder of Think.Design.Cyber, a Founding Executive Fellow of CyberTheory Institute and a multi-disciplinary professional with a 17 year, "4D" career spanning: Cybersecurity& Tech, Business Strategy, Diversity & Inclusion and Executive Coaching.Prachee's current work is focused on 1) coaching introverted cyber professionals (who account for 60%+ of cyber workforce) to build their brand and become strong leaders without changing their personalities and, 2)bringing critical, systems and design thinking to cybersecurity organizations so they can accelerate Zero Trust implementation, drive demonstrable business outcomes and cost savings, improve culture and reduce burnout.Her article "Cybersecurity: The End Game Part 1" in the Taylor and Francis EDPACs journal was honored as "2020 Article of the Year."In cybersecurity, she has managed strategic investments of over $150 million, reduced spend by 20+%, eliminated antagonistic culture and demonstrated 90% retention rate for more than 3 years Prachee's business strategy experience comes from working on business and ops/tech transformations, enterprise risk and regulatory mandates, in management consulting and the World Bank.As a leader in the DEI dept., she is accelerating diversity and ESG initiatives. Prachee is the Executive Sponsor for the Women Leaders program focused on increasing representation of women of all backgrounds.She earned an M.S. in Bioinformatics from George Washington University, which is about building tech for biological research. She wrote code, conducted scientific experiments on HIV viruses, and did PCR tests (yep,those). Think invasive viruses, the pandemic and cybersecurity!
Alaina Schwartz Will Take You To 7 Figure Success. I was drawn to her profile on LinkedIn which read, Alaina Schwartz , JD - Elite Performance Coach. “Purpose Driven Multi 6-7 Figure Founders & CEOs: It's Time To Play Bigger” etc. However she really got my attention with this line she wrote. “Create Unf*ckwithable Confidence”. Yeah baby ! Now that's a gal I wanted to connect with. So I did and she's my guest today here on The Debbie Nigro Show Interview Podcast Series. Alaina Schwartz is the creator of the 6 into 7 Figures Method. She helps high performance individuals work 30 hours less a week, 3X their income, and make the epic impact they're here to make all by tapping into their inner genius. Alaina is no stranger to having it all, losing it all, and getting it back and more. She's gone from being a lawyer & high salaried exec in the music industry, making mid 6 figures, to major personal life crisis involving her marriage, her health, her kid and finances. From a sizeable nest egg to almost $100G in debt. Convinced she'd climb out she found teachers and coaches that taught her what got her forward. They showed her how to tap into her inner 'genius'. That's how she mastered ‘The Invincible Playbook' that she now uses to help others. Caution: This is a high energy conversation that might cause you to risk something extraordinary. Risk It! or Regret it! That's what I always say.
This Episode Is Sponsored By BetterHelp.com. I love sharing their message because I'm all about making sure everybody's brains are healthy and attitudes are good. When you need to talk to somebody but not just anybody, there are trained therapists at betterhelp.com to help. We all Have Things We Do Besides The Things We Do Doing a little something different today on this show/podcast. Sharing a few more laughs with long time buddy and laugh partner Charlie Ponger who I invited in to the studio to share some excerpts of what we work on outside this show. Charlie had a fun idea for a podcast and busted my chops to come do it with him. It's called ‘The Official Seenagers'. Dedicated to the over 50 crowd who ain't goin' down any time soon, and dedicated to all those coming up behind us to let them know they'll still be having fun long into the future with the right attitude. We produce this podcast in a bunker location called the ‘Pongerosa'. We're speaking to a demo we feel is under-served. Those who've been around awhile but have so much more ahead. We remind everybody, anything's still possible, and that it's never too late for anything. Today you'll hear excerpts from 'The Official Seenagers' podcast shows that make us laugh. Launched Nov 2021, without a clue as to what it would become, we've done over 50 shows of what we call 'comedy improv'. We're figuring it out along the way. A work in progress and we think less is more so most episodes are short like 15 -20 minutes. Followed my own advice, "Risk It or Regret It". Today we're sharing tidbits of what we've been doing. Did you know we have ‘Seenager Correspondents' around the country? Today you'll hear from LuLu weighing in from San Raphael, CA We also have “Write INS”. Todays clip ? You Know You're A ‘Seenager' When... (Senior Teenager) Lots of laughing at ourselves that's for sure. If we don't laugh this is not going to be funny. About things like falling over putting on our underwear, etc. Oh wait until you hear what's going on with 'Seenagers' In Florida. Our Canadian Correspondent reported in. The colored loofahs mean what? Then there's The Funnies Report: As in ... Who's On Injured Reserve This Week? Seenagers have ridiculous accidents. We through in some relevant news: GEN X Fears Supporting Boomer Parents. 50% of gen X not financially prepared to look after parents if they had to. Talk some Grandparent stuff: My 3 year old Granddaughter packed up all her clothes in a suitcase and told her parents she was leaving them to come live with me. She thinks I'm more fun. Ha. Speaking of fun, did you know 'Seenagers' are trying to have as much fun as humanly possible but have no patience when they blow a body part in the process? Example: I did a backward lunge. Then a Dr. gave me a 'boot' for my sprained foot ligament. Looked like it would be hot. Decided I'd rather limp than wear it. So I limped. Should have paid more attention to the health update from from CNN, on how to avoid soft tissue injury. Finally 'Seenagers' still have great love affiars going on, although a 'touch' different then when we were teenagers. So I re-wrote the words to Dion's 1959 hit song 'Teenager In Love'. My version is called 'Seenager In Love" which you'll get to hear on this episode even though I can't sing. Who cares, we're having fun. Hope you'll catch the fun vibe too. Enjoy this podcast
I Heard The Divine whisper a voice to my ears, it said Risk It all. And then I checked my phone and it was 6:21 AM. At that moment I watched reality change and then the mission became a challenge. When one gets put through the fire and taken out, he becomes more durable to the challenges presented to them. In this episode, I talk about the journey and what it takes when you make sacrifices in your life. I also, paint a picture and create a mentality that will help one navigate through their journey when sacrifices are required
In this episode, we cover: Aaron talks about starting out as a developer and the early stages of cloud development at RBC (1:05) Aaron discusses transitioning to developer advocacy (12:25) Aaron identifies successes he had in his early days of developer advocacy (20:35) Jason asks what it looks like to assist developers in achieving completion with long term maintenance projects, or “sustainable development” (25:40) Jason and Aaron discuss what “innersource” is and why it's valuable in an organization (29:29) Aaron answers the question “how do you keep skills and knowledge up to date?” (33:55) Aaron talks about job opportunities at RBC (38:55) Links Referenced: Royal Bank of Canada: https://www.rbcroyalbank.com Opportunities at RBC: https://jobs.rbc.com/ca/en TranscriptAaron: And I guess some PM asked my boss, “So, Aaron doesn't come to our platform status meetings, he doesn't really take tickets, and he doesn't take support rotation. What does Aaron do for the Cloud Platform Team?”Jason: [laugh].Jason: Welcome to Break Things on Purpose, a podcast about reliability, learning, and building better systems. In this episode, we talk with Aaron Clark, Director of Developer Advocacy at the Royal Bank of Canada. We chat with him about his journey from developer to advocate, the power of applying open-source principles within organizations—known as innersource—and his advice to keep learning.Jason: Welcome to the show, Aaron.Aaron: Thanks for having me, Jason. My name is Aaron Clark. I'm a developer advocate for cloud at RBC. That is the Royal Bank of Canada. And I've been at the bank for… well, since February 2010.Jason: So, when you first joined the bank, you were not a developer advocate, though?Aaron: Right. So, I have been in my current role since 2019. I've been part of the cloud program since 2017. Way back in 2010, I joined as a Java developer. So, my background in terms of being a developer is pretty much heavy on Java. Java and Spring Boot, now.I joined working on a bunch of Java applications within one of the many functions areas within the Royal Bank. The bank is gigantic. That's kind of one of the things people sometimes struggle to grasp. It's such a large organization. We're something like 100,000… yeah, 100,000 employees, around 10,000 of that is in technology, so developers, developer adjacent roles like business analysts, and QE, and operations and support, and all of those roles.It's a big organization. And that's one of the interesting things to kind of grapple with when you join the organization. So, I joined in a group called Risk IT. We built solely internal-facing applications. I worked on a bunch of stuff in there.I'm kind of a generalist, where I have interest in all the DevOps things. I set up one of the very first Hudson servers in Risk—well, in the bank, but specifically in Risk—and I admin'ed it on the side because nobody else was doing it and it needed doing. After a few years of doing that and working on a bunch of different projects, I was occasionally just, “We need this project to succeed, to have a good foundation at the start, so Aaron, you're on this project for six months and then you're doing something different.” Which was really interesting. At the same time, I always worry about the problem where if you don't stay on something for very long, you never learn the consequences of the poor decisions you may have made because you don't have to deal with it.Jason: [laugh].Aaron: And that was like the flip side of, I hope I'm making good decisions here. It seemed to be pretty good, people seemed happy with it, but I always worry about that. Like, being in a role for a few years where you build something, and then it's in production, and you're running it and you're dealing with, “Oh, I made this decision that seems like a good idea at the time. Turns out that's a bad idea. Don't do that next time.” You never learned that if you don't stay in a role.When I was overall in Risk IT for four, almost five years, so I would work with a bunch of the teams who maybe stayed on this project, they'd come ask me questions. It's like, I'm not gone gone. I'm just not working on that project for the next few months or whatever. And then I moved into another part of the organization, like, a sister group called Finance IT that runs kind of the—builds and runs the general ledger for the bank. Or at least for a part of capital markets.It gets fuzzy as the organization moves around. And groups combine and disperse and things like that. That group, I actually had some interesting stuff that was when I started working on more things like cloud, looking at cloud, the bank was starting to bring in cloud. So, I was still on the application development side, but I was interested in it. I had been to some conferences like OSCON, and started to hear about and learn about things like Docker, things like Kubernetes, things like Spring Boot, and I was like this is some really neat stuff.I was working on a Spark-based ETL system, on one of the early Hadoop clusters at the bank. So, I've been I'm like, super, super lucky that I got to do a lot of this stuff, work on all of these new things when they were really nascent within the organization. I've also had really supportive leadership. So, like, I was doing—that continuous integration server, that was totally on the side; I got involved in a bunch of reuse ideas of, we have this larger group; we're doing a lot of similar things; let's share some of the libraries and things like that. That was before being any, like, developer advocate or anything like that I was working on these.And I was actually funded for a year to promote and work on reuse activities, basically. And that was—I learned a lot, I made a lot of mistakes that I now, like, inform some of the decisions I make in my current role, but I was doing all of this, and I almost described it as I kind of taxed my existing project because I'm working on this team, but I have this side thing that I have to do. And I might need to take a morning and not work on your project because I have to, like, maintain this build machine for somebody. And I had really supportive leadership. They were great.They recognize the value of these activities, and didn't really argue about the fact that I was taking time away from whatever the budget said I was supposed to be doing, which was really good. So, I started doing that, and I was working in finance as the Cloud Team was starting to go through a revamp—the initial nascent Cloud Team at the bank—and I was doing cloud things from the app dev side, but at the same time within my group, anytime something surprising became broken, somebody had some emergency that they needed somebody to drop in and be clever and solve things, that person became me. And I was running into a lot of distractions in that sense. And it's nice to be the person who gets to work on, “Oh, this thing needs rescuing. Help us, Aaron.”That's fantastic; it feels really good, right, up until you're spending a lot of your time doing it and you can't do the things that you're really interested in. So, I actually decided to move over to the Cloud Team and work on kind of defining how we build applications for the cloud, which was really—it was a really good time. It was a really early time in the bank, so nobody really knew how we were going to build applications, how we were going to put them on the cloud, what does that structure look like? I got to do a lot of reading and research and learning from other people. One of the key things about, like, a really large organization that's a little slow-moving like the bank and is a little bit risk-averse in terms of technology choices, people always act like that's always a bad thing.And sometimes it is because we're sometimes not adopting things that we would really get a lot of benefit out of, but the other side of it is, by the time we get to a lot of these technologies and platforms, a bunch of the sharp edges have kind of been sanded off. Like, the Facebooks and the Twitters of the world, they've adopted it and they've discovered all of these problems and been, like, duct-taping them together. And they've kind of found, “Oh, we need to have actual, like, security built into this system,” or things like that, and they've dealt with it. So, by the time we get to it, some of those issues are just not there anymore. We don't have to deal with them.Which is an underrated positive of being in a more conservative organization around that. So, we were figuring there's a lot of things we could learn from. When we were looking at microservices and, kind of, Spring Boot Spring Cloud, the initial cloud parts that had been brought into the organization were mainly around Cloud Foundry. And we were helping some initial app teams build their applications, which we probably over-engineered some of those applications, in the sense that we were proving out patterns that you didn't desperately need for building those applications. Like, you could have probably just done it with a web app and relational database and it would have been fine.But we were proving out some of the patterns of how do you build something for broader scale with microservices and things like that. We learned a bunch about the complexities of doing that too early, but we also learned a bunch about how to do this so we could teach other application teams. And that's kind of the group that I became part of, where I wasn't a platform operator on the cloud, but I was working with dev teams, building things with dev teams to help them learn how to build stuff for cloud. And this was my first real exposure to that scope and scale of the bank. I'd been in the smaller groups and one of the things that you start to encounter when you start to interact with the larger parts of the bank is just, kind of, how many silos there are, how diverse the tech stacks are in an organization of that size.Like, we have areas that do things with Java, we have areas doing things with .NET Framework, we have areas doing lots of Python, we have areas doing lots of Node, especially as the organization started building more web applications. While you're building things with Angular and using npm for the front-end, so you're building stuff on the back-end with Node as well. Whether that is a good technology choice, a lot of the time you're building with what you have. Even within Java, we'd have teams building with Spring Boot, and lots of groups doing that, but someone else is interested in Google Guice, so they're building—instead of Spring, they're using Google Guice as their dependency injection framework.Or they have a… like, there's the mainframe, right? You have this huge technology stack where lots of people are building Java EE applications still and trying to evolve that from the old grungy days of Java EE to the much nicer modern ways of it. And some of the technology conversations are things like, “Well, you can use this other technology; that's fine, but if you're using that, and we're using something else over here, we can't help each other. When I solve a problem, I can't really help solve it for you as well. You have to solve it for yourself with your framework.”I talked to a team once using Vertex in Java, and I asked them, “Why are you using Vertex?” And they said, “Well, that's what our team knew.” I was like, “That's a good technology choice in the sense that we have to deliver. This is what we know, so this is the thing we know we can succeed with rather than actually learning something new on the job while trying to deliver something.” That's often a recipe for challenges if not outright failure.Jason: Yeah. So, it sounds like that's kind of where you come in; if all these teams are doing very disparate things, right—Aaron: Mm-hm.Jason: That's both good and bad, right? That's the whole point of microservices is independent teams, everyone's decoupled, more velocity. But also, there's huge advantages—especially in an org the size of RBC—to leverage some of the learnings from one team to another, and really, like, start to share these best practices. I'm guessing that's where you come into play now in your current role.Aaron: Yeah. And that's the part where how do we have the flexibility for people to make their own choices while standardizing so we don't have this enormous sprawl, so we can build on things? And this is starting to kind of where I started really getting involved in community stuff and doing developer advocacy. And part of how this actually happened—and this is another one of those cases where I've been very fortunate and I've had great leaders—I was working as part of the Cloud Platform Team, the Special Projects group that I was, a couple of people left; I was the last one left. It's like, “Well, you can't be your own department, so you're part of Cloud Platform.” But I'm not an operator. I don't take a support rotation.And I'm ostensibly building tooling, but I'm mostly doing innersource. This is where the innersource community started to spin up at RBC. I was one of the, kind of, founding members of the innersource community and getting that going. We had built a bunch of libraries for cloud, so those were some of the first projects into innersource where I was maintaining the library for Java and Spring using OIDC. And this is kind of predating Spring Security's native support for OIDC—so Open ID Connect—And I was doing a lot of that, I was supporting app teams who were trying to adopt that library, I was involved in some of the other early developer experience things around, you complain this thing is bad as the developer; why do we have to do this? You get invited to one of the VP's regular weekly meetings to discuss, and now you're busy trying to fix, kind of, parts of the developer experience. I was doing this, and I guess some PM asked my boss, “So, Aaron doesn't come to our platform status meetings, he doesn't really take tickets, and he doesn't take support rotation. What does Aaron do for the Cloud Platform Team?”Jason: [laugh].Aaron: And my boss was like, “Well, Aaron's got a lot of these other things that he's involved with that are really valuable.” One of the other things I was doing at this point was I was hosting the Tech Talk speaking series, which is kind of an internal conference-style talks where we get an expert from within the organization and we try to cross those silos where we find someone who's a machine-learning expert; come and explain how TensorFlow works. Come and explain how Spark works, why it's awesome. And we get those experts to come and do presentations internally for RBC-ers. And I was doing that and doing all of the support work for running that event series with the co-organizers that we had.And at the end of the year, when they were starting up a new initiative to really focus on how do we start promoting cloud adoption rather than just people arrive at the platform and start using it and figure it out for themselves—you can only get so far with that—my boss sits me down. He says. “So, we really like all the things that you've been doing, all of these community things and things like that, so we're going to make that your job now.” And this is how I arrived at there. It's not like I applied to be a developer advocate. I was doing all of these things on the side and all of a sudden, 75% of my time was all of these side projects, and that became my job.So, it's not really the most replicable, like, career path, but it is one of those things where, like, getting involved in stuff is a great way to find a niche that is the things that you're passionate about. So, I changed my title. You can do that in some of our systems as long as your manager approves it, so I changed my title from the very generic ‘Senior Technical Systems Analyst—which, who knows what I actually do when that's my title—and I changed that to ‘Developer Advocate.' And that was when I started doing more research learning about what do actual developer advocates do because I want to be a developer advocate. I want to say I'm a developer advocate.For the longest time in the organization, I'm the only person in the company with that title, which is interesting because then nobody knows what to do with me because I'm not like—am I, like—I'm not a director, I'm not a VP. Like… but I'm not just a regular developer, either. Where—I don't fit in the hierarchy. Which is good because then people stop getting worried about what what are titles and things like that, and they just listen to what I say. So, I do, like, design consultations with dev teams, making sure that they knew what they were doing, or were aware of a bunch of the pitfalls when they started to get onto the cloud.I would build a lot of samples, a lot of docs, do a lot of the community engagement, so going to events internally that we'd have, doing a lot of those kinds of things. A lot of the innersource stuff I was already doing—the speaking series—but now it was my job formally, and it helped me cross a lot of those silos and work very horizontally. That's one of the different parts about my job versus a regular developer, is it's my job to cover anything to do with cloud—that at least, that I find interesting, or that my boss tells me I need to work at—and anything anywhere in the organization that touches. So, a dev team doing something with Kubernetes, I can go and talk to them. If they're building something in capital markets that might be useful, I can say, “Hey, can you share this into innersource so that other people can build on this work as well?”And that was really great because I develop all of these relationships with all of these other groups. And that was, to a degree, what the cloud program needed from me as well at that beginning. I explained that this was now my job to one of my friends. And they're like, “That sounds like the perfect job for you because you are technical, but you're really good with people.” I was like, “Am I? I guess I am now that I've been doing it for this amount of time.”And the other part of it as we've gone on more and more is because I talk to all of these development teams, I am not siloed in, I'm not as tunneled on the specific thing I'm working with, and now I can talk to the platform teams and really represent the application developer perspective. Because I'm not building the platform. And they have their priorities, and they have things that they have to worry about; I don't have to deal with that. My job is to bring the perspective of an application developer. That's my background.I'm not an operator; I don't care about the support rotation, I don't care about a bunch of the niggly things and toil of the platform. It's my job, sometimes, to say, hey, this documentation is well-intentioned. I understand how you arrived at this documentation from the perspective of being the platform team and the things that you prioritize and want to explain to people, but as an application developer, none of the information that I need to build something to run on your platform is presented in a manner that I am able to consume. So, I do, like, that side as well of providing customer feedback to the platform saying, “This thing is hard,” or, “This thing that you are asking the application teams to work on, they don't want to care about that. They shouldn't have to care about this thing.” And that sort of stuff.So, I ended up being this human router are sometimes where platform teams will say, “Do you know anybody who's doing this, who's using this thing?” Or finding one app team and say, “You should talk to that group over there because they are also doing the same thing, or they're struggling with the same thing, and you should collaborate.” Or, “They have solved this problem.” Because I don't know every single programming language we use, I don't know all of the frameworks, but I know who I asked for Python questions, and I will send teams to that person. And part of that, then, as I started doing this community work was actually building community.One of the great successes was, we have a Slack channel called ‘Cloud Adoption.' And that was the place where everybody goes to ask their questions about how do I do this thing to put something on Cloud Foundry, put it on Kubernetes? How do I do this? I don't understand. And that was sometimes my whole day was just going onto that Slack channel, answering questions, and being very helpful and trying to document things, trying to get a feel for what people were doing.It was my whole day, sometimes. It took a while to get used to that was actually, like, a successful day coming from a developer background. I'm used to building things, so I feel like success because I built something I can show you, that I did this today. And then I'd have days where I talked to a bunch of people and I don't have anything I can show you. That was, like, the hard part of taking on this role.But one of the big successes was we built this community where it wasn't just me. Other people who wanted to help people, who were just developers on different dev teams, they'd see me ask questions or answer questions, and they would then know the answers and they'd chime in. And as I started being tasked with more and more other activities, I would then get to go—I'd come back to Slack and see oh, there's a bunch of questions. Oh, it turns out, people are able to help themselves. And that was—like that's success from that standpoint of building community.And now that I've done that a couple times with Tech Talks, with some of the developer experience work, some of the cloud adoption work, I get asked internally how do you build community when we're starting up new communities around things like Site Reliability Engineering. How are we going to do that? So, I get—and that feels weird, but that's one of the things that I have been doing now. And as—like, this is a gigantic role because of all of the scope. I can touch anything with anyone in cloud.One of the scope things with the role, but also with the bank is not only do we have all these tech stacks, but we also have this really, really diverse set of technical acumen, where you have people who are experts already on Kubernetes. They will succeed no matter what I do. They'll figure it out because they're that type of personality, they're going to find all the information. If anything, some of the restrictions that we put in place to manage our environments and secure them because of the risk requirements and compliance requirements of being a regulated bank, those will get in the way. Sometimes I'm explaining why those things are there. Sometimes I'm agreeing with people. “Yeah, it sucks. I don't want to have to do this.”But at the same time, you'll have people who they just want to come in, write their code, go home. They don't want to think about technology other than that. They're not going to go and learn things on their own necessarily. And that's not the end of the world. As strange as that sounds to people who are the personality to be constantly learning and constantly getting into everything and tinkering, like, that's me too, but you still need people to keep the lights on, to do all of the other work as well. And people who are happy just doing that, that's also valuable.Because if I was in that role, I would not be happy. And someone who is happy, like, this is good for the overall organization. But the things that they need to learn, the things they need explained to them, the help they need for success is different. So, that's one of the challenges is figuring out how do you address all of those customers? And sometimes even the answer for those customers is—and this is one of the things about my role—it's like the definition is customer success.If the application you're trying to put on cloud should not go on cloud, it is my job to tell you not to put it on cloud. It is not my job to put you on cloud. I want you to succeed, not just to get there. I can get your thing on the cloud in an afternoon, probably, but if I then walk away and it breaks, like, you don't know what to do. So, a lot of the things around how do we teach people to self-serve, how do we make our internal systems more self-serve, those are kind of the things that I look at now.How do I manage my own time because the scope is so big? It's like, I need to figure out where I'm not moving a thousand things forward an inch, but I'm moving things to their completion. And I am learning to, while not managing people, still delegate and work with the community, work with the broader cloud platform group around how do I let go and help other people do things?Jason: So, you mentioned something in there that I think is really interesting, right, the goal of helping people get to completion, right? And I think that's such an interesting thing because I think as—in that advocacy role, there's often a notion of just, like, I'm going to help you get unstuck and then you can keep going, without a clear idea of where they're ultimately heading. And that kind of ties back into something that you said earlier about starting out as a developer where you build things and you kind of just, like, set it free, [laugh] and you don't think about, you know, that day two, sort of, operations, the maintenance, the ongoing kind of stuff. So, I'm curious, as you've progressed in your career, as you've gotten more wisdom from helping people out, what does that look like when you're helping people get to completion, also with the mindset of this is an application that's going to be running for quite some time. Even in the short term, you know, if it's a short-term thing, but I feel like with the bank, most things probably are somewhat long-lived. How do you balance that out? How do you approach that, helping people get to done but also keeping in mind that they have to—this app has to keep living and it has to be maintained?Aaron: Yeah, a lot of it is—like, the term we use is sustainable development. And part of that is kind of removing friction, trying to get the developers to a point where they can focus on, I guess, the term that's often used in the industry is their inner loop. And it should come as no surprise, the bank often has a lot of processes that are high in friction. There's a lot of open a ticket, wait for things. This is the part that I take my conversations with dev teams, and I ask them, “What are the things that are hard? What are the things you don't like? What are the things you wish you didn't have to do or care about?”And some of this is reading between the lines when you talk to them; it's not so much interviewing them. Like, any kind of requirements gathering, usually, it's not what they say, it's what they talk about that then you look at, oh, this is the problem; how do we unstuck that problem so that people can get to where they need to be going? And this kind of informs some of my feedback to the systems we put in place, the processes we put in place around the platform, some of the tooling we look at. I really, really love the philosophy from Docker and Solomon Hykes around, “Batteries included but removable.” I want developers to have a high baseline as a starting point.And this comes partly from my experience with Cloud Foundry. Cloud Foundry has a really great out-of-the-box dev experience for lots of things where, “I just have a web app. Just run it. It's Nginx; it's some HTML pages; I don't need to know all the details. Just make it go and give me the URL.”And I want more of that for app teams where they have a high baseline of things to work with as a starting point. And kind of every organization ends up building this, where they have—like, Netflix: Netflix OSS or Twitter with Finagle—where they have, “Here's the surrounding pieces that I want to plug in that everybody gets as a starting point. And how do we provide security? How do we provide all of these pieces that are major concerns for an app team, that they have to do, we know they have to do?” Some of these are things that only start coming up when they're on the cloud and trying to provide a lot more of that for app teams so they can focus on the business stuff and only get into the weeds when they need to.Jason: As you're talking about these frameworks that, you know, having this high quality or this high baseline of tools that people can just have, right, equipping them with a nice toolbox, I'm guessing that the innersource stuff that you're working on also helps contribute to that.Aaron: Oh, immensely. And as we've gone on and as we've matured, our innersource organization, a huge part of that is other groups as well, where they're finding things that—we need this. And they'll put—it originally it was, “We built this. We'll put it into innersource.” But what you get with that is something that is very targeted and specific to their group and maybe someone else can use it, but they can't use it without bending it a little bit.And I hate bending software to fit it. That's one of the things—it's a very common thing in the corporate environment where we have our existing processes and rather than adopting the standard approach that some tool uses, we need to take it and then bend it until it fits our existing process because we don't want to change our processes. And that gets hard because you run into weird edge cases where this is doing something strange because we bent it. And it's like, well, that's not its fault at that point. As we've started doing more innersource, a lot more things have really become innersource first, where groups realize we need to solve this together.Let's start working on it together and let's design the API as a group. And API design is really, really hard. And how do we do things with shared libraries or services. And working through that as a group, we're seeing more of that, and more commonly things where, “Well, this is a thing we're going to need. We're going to start it in innersource, we'll get some people to use it and they'll be our beta customers. And we'll inform it without really specifically targeting an application and an app team's needs.”Because they're all going to have specific needs. And that's where the, like, ‘included but removable' part comes in. How do we build things extensibly where we have the general solution and you can plug in your specifics? And we're still—like, this is not an easy problem. We're still solving it, we're still working through it, we're getting better at it.A lot of it's just how can we improve day-over-day, year-over-year, to make some of these things better? Even our, like, continuous integration and delivery pipelines to our to clouds, all of these things are in constant flux and constant evolution. We're supporting multiple languages; we're supporting multiple versions of different languages; we're talking about, hey, we need to get started adopting Java 17. None of our libraries or pipelines do that yet, but we should probably get on that since it's been out for—what—almost a year? And really working on kind of decomposing some of these things where we built it for what we needed at the time, but now it feels a bit rigid. How do we pull out the pieces?One of the big pushes in the organization after the log4j CVE and things like that broad impact on the industry is we need to do a much more thorough job around software supply chain, around knowing what we have, making sure we have scans happening and everything. And that's where, like, the pipeline work comes in. I'm consulting on the pipeline stuff where I provide a lot of customer feedback; we have a team that is working on that all full time. But doing a lot of those things and trying to build for what we need, but not cut ourselves off from the broader industry, as well. Like, my nightmare situation, from a tooling standpoint, is that we restrict things, we make decisions around security, or policy or something like that, and we cut ourselves off from the broader CNCF tooling ecosystem, we can't use any of those tools. It's like, well, now we have to build something ourselves, or—which we're never going to do it as well as the external community. Or we're going to just kind of have bad processes and no one's going to be happy so figuring out all of that.Jason: Yeah. One of the things that you mentioned about staying up to speed and having those standards reminds me of, you know, similar to that previous experience that I had was, basically, I was at an org where we said that we'd like to open-source and we used open-source and that basically meant that we forked things and then made our own weird modifications to it. And that meant, like, now, it wasn't really open-source; it was like this weird, hacked thing that you had to keep maintaining and trying to keep it up to date with the latest stuff. Sounds like you're in a better spot, but I am curious, in terms of keeping up with the latest stuff, how do you do that, right? Because you mentioned that the bank, obviously a bit slower, adopting more established software, but then there's you, right, where you're out there at the forefront and you're trying to gather best practices and new technologies that you can use at the bank, how do you do that as someone that's not building with the latest, greatest stuff? How do you keep that skills and that knowledge up to date?Aaron: I try to do reading, I try to set time aside to read things like The New Stack, listen to podcasts about technologies. It's a really broad industry; there's only so much I can keep up with. This was always one of the conversations going way back where I would have the conversation with my boss around the business proposition for me going to conferences, and explaining, like, what's the cost to acquire knowledge in an organization? And while we can bring in consultants, or we can hire people in, like, when you hire new people in, they bring in their pre-existing experiences. So, if someone comes in and they know Hadoop, they can provide information and ideas around is this a good problem to solve with Hadoop? Maybe, maybe not.I don't want to bet a project on that if I don't know anything about Hadoop or Kubernetes or… like, using something like Tilt or Skaffold with my tooling. That's one of the things I got from going to conferences, and I actually need to set more time aside to watch the videos now that everything's virtual. Like, not having that dedicated week is a problem where I'm just disconnected and I'm not dealing with anything. When you're at work, even if KubeCon's going on or Microsoft Build, I'm still doing my day-to-day, I'm getting Slack messages, and I'm not feeling like I can just ignore people. I should probably block out more time, but part of how I stay up to date with it.It's really doing a lot of that reading and research, doing conversations like this, like, the DX Buzz that we invited you to where… I explained that event—it's adjacent to internal speakers—I explained that as I was had a backlog of videos from conferences I was not watching, and secretly if I make everybody else come to lunch with me to watch these videos, I have to watch the video because I'm hosting the session to discuss it, and now I will at least watch one a month. And that's turned out to be a really successful thing internally within the organization to spread knowledge, to have conversations with people. And the other part I do, especially on the tooling side, is I still build stuff. As much as, like, I don't code nearly as much as I used to, I bring an application developer perspective, but I'm not writing code every day anymore.Which I always said was going to be the thing that would make me miserable. It's not. I still think about it, and when I do get to write code, I'm always looking for how can I improve this setup? How can I use this tool? Can I try it out? Is this better? Is this smoother for me so I'm not worrying about this thing?And then spreading that information more broadly within the developer experience group, our DevOps teams, our platform teams, talking to those teams about the things that they use. Like, we use Argo CD within one group and I haven't touched it much, but I know they've got lots of expertise, so talking to them. “How do you use this? How is this good for me? How do I make this work? How can I use it, too?”Jason: I think it's been an incredible, [laugh] as you've been chatting, there are so many different tools and technologies that you've mentioned having used or being used at the bank. Which is both—it's interesting as a, like, there's so much going on in the bank; how do you manage it all? But it's also super interesting, I think, because it shows that there's a lot of interest in just finding the right solutions and finding the right tools, and not really being super-strongly married to one particular tool or one set way to do things, which I think is pretty cool. We're coming up towards the end of our time here, so I did want to ask you, before we sign off, Aaron, do you have anything that you'd like to plug, anything you want to promote?Aaron: Yeah, the Cloud Program is hiring a ton. There's lots of job openings on all of our platform teams. There's probably job openings on my Cloud Adoption Team. So, if you think the bank sounds interesting—the bank is very stable; that's always one of the nice things—but the bank… the thing about the bank, I originally joined the bank saying, “Oh, I'll be here two years, and I'll get bored and I'll leave,” and now it's been 12 years and I'm still at the bank. Because I mentioned, like, that scope and scale of the organization, there's always something interesting happening somewhere.So, if you're interested in cloud platform stuff, we've got a huge cloud platform. If you're in—like, you want to do machine-learning, we've got an entire organization. It should come as no surprise, we have lots of data at a bank, and there's a whole organization for all sorts of different things with machine-learning, deep learning, data analytics, big data, stuff like that. Like, if you think that's interesting, and even if you're not specifically in Toronto, Canada, you can probably find an interesting role within the organization if that's something that turns your crank.Jason: Awesome. We'll post links to everything that we've mentioned, which is a ton. But go check us out, gremlin.com/podcast is where you can find the show note for this episode, and we'll have links to everything. Aaron, thank you so much for joining us. It's been a pleasure to have you.Aaron: Thanks so much for having me, Jason. I'm so happy that we got to do this.Jason: For links to all the information mentioned, visit our website at gremlin.com/podcast. If you liked this episode, subscribe to the Break Things on Purpose podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or your favorite podcast platform. Our theme song is called, “Battle of Pogs” by Komiku, and it's available on loyaltyfreakmusic.com.
Malcolm Tullett – The Thoughtful Leader with Mindy Gibbins-Klein Episode 052 Leadership responsibilities for safety in the workplace with Malcolm Tullett This episode is especially helpful for business owners and employees. Malcolm Tullett runs Risk and Safety Plus, a company that advises organizations, from small to blue chip on health and safety matters. As a former Senior Operational Fire Officer, Malcolm understands the challenges of protecting the wellbeing and safety of staff and their workspaces. That understanding also includes how to safely re-engage employees returning to the workplace after working remotely. In Malcolm's book, Risk It, he discusses safety and the responsibility of leaders to understand what is required of them, especially as thoughtful leaders. In our conversation, we discuss: Why reentering the workplace means considering and understanding various perspectives. Dealing with the resistance of people not wanting to return to physical work locations. The meaning behind the phrase duty of care. Leaders provide solutions in collaboration with the workforce. A case study to understand the causes of executive and worker burnout. A specific example of poor planning equating to poor performance. How a leader might make quick and correct decisions. Here's to your Thought Leadership Journey! Connect with Malcolm: Website: https://riskandsafetyplus.com/ Amazon Book: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Risk-your-intuition-revolutionise-taking/dp/1784529451 Connect with Mindy: URL: https://www.mindygk.com/ Twitter https://twitter.com/mindygk Facebook https://www.facebook.com/mindy.gibbinsklein LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/mindygibbinsklein/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Today Rev. Dr. Steve Cordle joins our host Paula Koch as they talk about what it means to be part of a Small Group and the life-changing impact these can have just as it was in the time of Wesley. Steve is the author of The Church in Many Houses, Hear It. See It. Risk It., and A Jesus Shaped Life.
An indepth study of the Fall accounts in Genesis 4-5 and Moses 4-5. This lesson focuses on stages of faith, Lucifer's rebellion, temptation, the Fortunate Fall, Eve's courageous decision, risking death for a greater life, hiding from Heaven, coats of skins, Cain and Abel, and more. 0:00 Introduction 2:07 Introducing the Fall 4:09 Stages of Faith 15:48 Proving Contraries 19:34 The Fall of Lucifer 38:00 Tempting Eve 43:38 Preserving Agency & Accountability 51:04 The Evolution of Sin 57:20 Adam's Choice & Eve's Proposal 1:04:13 The Fortunate Fall 1:13:00 Beguiled? Deciding Alone 1:18:50 Willing to Risk It 1:26:17 Hiding their Nakedness 1:37:14 Curses as Blessings in Disguise 1:42:44 And He Shall Rule Over Thee 1:51:15 Thorns & Thistles, Sweat & Bread 1:56:09 Eve as Mother 1:59:31 Coats of Skins 2:01:38 Cherubim: Time to Prepare 2:11:16 Learning the Law of Sacrifice 2:25:13 The Real Fall 2:28:49 Faith to Have a Family 2:35:03 Cain & Satan 2:43:07 Cain & Abel 2:49:52 Cain's Posterity 2:55:22 Redemption from the Fall 2:57:56 Artwork from Eden
Gods heart for His church is family, a people on a mission, who are His disciples growing, influencing and reproducing themselves. Seems so simple! We discuss what are the obstacles to this picture of simplicity. Maybe the one major problem, is TRUST. Do we actually trust God, truth people. Trust involves our heart. But we are so risk adverse as a generation, that we protect or control. What would it look like to RISK It is God? To know that our capacity is only as much as our deepest wound. Will Jesus really meet me in that space, so that I can begin to Trust again and live in the simplicity of the Gospel. Speaker: Heath van Staden Scripture: Proverbs 23:26, Proverbs 3:5-6, Ephesians 2:10, John 17:8
C'est la rentrée ! Retour de l'équipe au complet pour un podcast plutôt chill, où on vous annonce la couleur de cette 14ème saison et où on débriefe nos coups de coeurs de l'été (festivals, musique, bouffe, cinéma, gentiane ... ). Garanti 100% bonne humeur et gros son qui tâche ! Playlist : Motörhead / Motorhead, Thy Art Is Murder / Death Squad Anthem, Windhand / Grey Garden, Converge & Chelsea Wolfe / Blood Moon, Misantropic / Raise the Gallows, Wage War / Fury, Herzel / Unis dans la Gloire, Vautours / La Grande Saignée , ASG / Crosses, Planet Of The Dead / Gom Jabbar, Bütcher / 45RPM Metal, Etxegina / Nosotros los Etxegina, Risk It! / Cross to Bear
My gal pal Lisa who lives far from me had missed me during Covid. She texted me to come join her for some networking fun at a place called Pinstripes in Norwalk, CT. Her gal pal Sherry who I love, had taken over the Director Of Sales position there. I'd never heard of Pinstripes. Sounded to me like it might be a baseball joint or sports venue. I love my pal Lisa and she told me to bring my other half Dave, and Dave and I said what the heck and went for a change of pace. I'm so glad we did. We had so much fun and were so impressed with the place (not a baseball joint) I thought some of you might want to check it out. 'Pinstripes' Bocce Bowling and Bistro entertainment venues started in Chicago and they're expanding around the country. They're all about best in class food and experiential entertainment. Norwalk, CT is their 13th location. 5 more locations are opening in N.J. and Florida. Founder and CEO Dale Schwartz was just quoted in Forbes as saying the plan is open 100 more over the next 10-15 years. The Pinstripes we went to was up on the rooftop of the brand new Norwalk, CT mall I'd heard so much about but never seen. Needless to say Malls are now betting on 'experiences' more than shows to draw a crowd. Whoever decorated Pinstripes needs to come to my house and decorate for me. Such a cool vibe. 'Pinstripes' in this case refers to the kind you might see in 'classy Italian suits'. So it's no surprise the place is classy and the Italian American food is made from scratch. Great food and wine and drinks, but family friendly too. Love the choice of high and low tables and comfortable bars to dine at. You can also be served at the bowling lanes while sitting in comfortable leather couches. And there are 3 cool Bocce courts inside and one outside and the outdoor area also has a fire pit. Let's talk about Bowling. I love it. I was once a kick ass bowler but it's been 8 years since I bowled, mostly because the last time I did I snapped a body part. My then date (Dave) had to lend me his late mothers cane still in his trunk to get me out of the alley. I miss bowling and heard my own advice in my head, “Risk It or Regret It!" so I stirred up some good commotion by being first to say let's bowl! Before you knew it everybody had bowling shoes on whether they were good or not, and we all had a ball. Bowling is great for camaraderie. Pinstripes encourages local businesses to use the place for that purpose. The Norwalk location has 23 luxury lanes with full service so that's a nice way to business bond. Now let's talk Bocce. Did you know Bocce is the 3rd most participated sport in the world? Way back my typically low key Italian Grandma Garfield surprised everybody when she made the local newspapers as a contender for the Annual Sambuca Romana Bocce Tournament. I found the ripped clipping. (1981I think) Grandma didn't play any sports so we had no idea she was a Bocce babe. That's the thing about Bocce. Anybody of any age or ability can play it, and anybody can be good at it. It's a marquee sport in the Special Olympics. Bocce as a Special Olympics sport provides social contact. Don't' know how to play bocce? No problem. Pinstripes puts out instructions and the staff will also explain how to play. The balls by the way are light, not heavy like bowling balls. Pinstripes In Norwalk, CT is a 27,000 square foot full service Italian American bistro restaurant with lots of space for the current #1 participation sport in the world …social distancing. They do weddings, bridal showers, baby showers, bar mitvahs and catering and they have a roof top patio. The bowling lanes can be semi private or private for any occasion including corporate team building. You'd think from this conversation with Pinstripes Sherry Wyatt that I hadn't been anywhere exciting in a year. I loved the fun of re-connecting with my friend and loved the whole fun experience and wanted to share it. “People are missing not just dining but reconnecting with friends and family,” Dale Schwartz Founder and CEO of Pinstripes (FORBES)
Risk It! or Regret It! Whatever 'It' Is For You I Always Say. For Jim Campbell 'IT' was getting Bernie Madoff to talk to him and only him from prison to reveal for the first time and bizarrely the last time, the 'Untold Story Behind The Most Notorious Ponzi Scheme In History." That's the name of Jim Campbell's book he worked on for ten years. Bernie Madoff died in prison 2 weeks after Jim finally released the book. Today Jim joins me for an incredible conversation about what nobody else knew. Reminder: In June 2009 to avoid trial Bernie Madoff pleaded guilty to 11 Federal crimes for defrauding up to 16,000 investors of 4.8 billion dollars. Their original investments were worth close to 19.5 billion. Madoff was sentenced to 150 years in prison. What motivated Bernie Madoff to launch the biggest Ponzi scheme in history? The man who basically had the Gold Seal of Approval from every major investor as well as wealthy individuals and families ? Jim Campbell in his first book ever, got the last word on this story about the man who built great wealth for many people and destroyed the well being and lives of many people without regret. Jim will admit he will never completely know why both the Madoff family members and Madoff himself decided to trust him to investigate and tell the story of who knew or didn't know what was going on for years on the 17th Floor of the Lipstick Building in NYC. Jim's book reveals incredibly that Bernie Madoff ran an honest business on 19th floor of the Lipstick building that was very ethically run by top caliber people. However, on the always 'locked' 17th floor of the same building, only young naive and unsophisticated workers being paid tons of money they couldn't make anywhere else were allowed. It was a total fraud from day one. None who worked on the 17th floor knew they were operating a Ponzi scheme that would become the biggest criminal enterprise in history. The general perception of this human and financial tragedy was also that his family HAD to know. Jim Campbell gathered information that even the FBI did not have, to PROVE that Bernie Madoff's wife and his two sons did not know. In fact, when Bernie Madoff came clean to his sons about the Ponzi scheme they immediately turned him in to authorities and never spoke to him again. Very tragically and likely from the stress of it all, both sons passed away. One from cancer the other from suicide. Bernie Madoff's wife Ruth survives and lives quietly in CT. Jim shares their very real conversations in his book. The personal family tragedy was also a financial tragedy that destroyed many other families and individuals who trusted Bernie with their life savings as well. Totally insane this Ponzi scheme went on for so long as Jim Campbell also speaks to the fact that the SEC missed this incompetence for 40 years! There's great insight in this book as to how Bernie Madoff's brain could operate in two complete separate worlds at the same time. PS I know Jim Campbell personally and like him very much from crossing paths often in the same radio studio over the years. Jim's nationally syndicated radio show 'Business Talk with Jim Campbell' is known for his hard hitting interviews of leading figures from the world of business, politics and sports. I know Jim's integrity so I happily agreed to promote his incredible book. Right after we locked in an interview date, the biggest coincidence in the world happened to Jim who just finished working on this book after 10 years! Bernie Madoff died in prison and CBS Sunday morning was interviewing him in his backyard. As of this post Jim now has a Hollywood agent who told him Netflix is making an offer on his book. I should mention the first agent Jim got tried and could not get anyone interested in his book. Life's like that.
Cannabis Conversations Are Picking Up And There's A Company Gearing Up To Pick It Up And Drop It Off To You Anywhere It's Legal In the U.S. Two years ago while on vacation in Montana a magazine at a rest stop called WOMEN & WEED caught my eye and peaked my curiosity so I bought it. I just finished reading it LOL. The story of one woman stuck with me. The one about Claudia Post. Claudia Post is a driving force in the cannabis industry and a professional in the 'driving' industry. She's about to smash her two passions together. Claudia is the President of MOST, a full-service cannabis consulting, marketing, and design firm in Philadelphia, and also the CEO of Green Bar Supply Co. purveyor of the finest quality CBD infused ingredients. Eleven years ago, Claudia's son (a famous glass artist named Snic Barnes) told her the cannabis industry was about to 'blow up' and she should parlay her amazing business skills into it. What skills? Claudia built and ran a multi-million dollar transportation company with 12 warehouses up and down the East Coast. Her courier service, started with one location and four employees and grew to having up to 2000 drivers on the road at any one time. This woman obviously knows a few things about logistics! Claudia has moved many things medical during her career, including human organs for operations. She's served on every trade association board in her industry and has a network of relationships across the country. She knows how to get things done. She knows the rules. She knows the laws. So now what? Combining her passions and compassion! Claudia and her company of professionals hope to soon be delivering medical cannabis to patients nationwide. "Discreet secure and compliant delivery" is the company tag line. Though Cannabis is not federally legal, it is legal in many states and so it's likely the company will morph into the recreational market as well. Should be interesting to see how her story rolls...and it was sure interesting to chat about it all with Claudia who fits right in with the spirit of my show which is..."Risk It! or Regret It!" If you're curious about the cannabis industry and women in cannabis this conversation should peak your interest. mostcg.com
Welcome to our service here at Everlife! This is the last part of our Risk It series. There have been many empowering words and last weeks was no exception. ENJOY Speaker: Jaiden Hall If you are interested in attending a service or finding out more, please visit us at https://www.everlife.church/
Welcome to our service here at Everlife! This is the last part of our Risk It series. There have been many empowering words and last weeks was no exception. ENJOY Speaker: Jaiden Hall If you are interested in attending a service or finding out more, please visit us at https://www.everlife.church/
Here is the first part of our new Risk It series! Today Shaphan speaks on finding courage. Enjoy the new series! Speaker: Shaphan Williams. If you are interested in attending a service or finding out more, please visit us at https://www.everlife.church/
We finally have some new footy content to pour over, with round 2 done and dusted! Tune in as Matt and Christian deep dive into everything from Gawn vs Goldy, the must-have man with the mullet plus answer your questions and play Risk It for the Biscuit.
Es ist geschafft. Folge 1 im Kasten. Ca 76 "ähms" hab ich erfolgreich rausschneiden können. Danke an Final Prayer, dass ich einige Sekunden vom Song "Wartime" nutzen darf. Es geht um Risk It und um Hardcore. Zukunft, Vergangenheit, Gegenwart. to pummel = verprügeln, mit den Fäusten bearbeiten Genannte Bands: Absolve - fb.com/absolvehc Worst Doubt - fb.com/worstdoubthc Pain - fb.com/canufeelthepain Stolen Mind - fb.com/stolenmindhardcore Angst - fb.com/angsthc Ill Blood - fb.com/Illbloodvie Belief - fb.com/beliefstraightedge Demolition - fb.com/demolitionhc Demonwomb - fb.com/Demonwomb Combust - fb.com/CombustNYHC Never Ending Game - tinyurl.com/y9abspve Ekulu - ekulu.bandcamp.com Pummel - fb.com/pummelhardcore
THE MUSIC: The Ones – When We Get Together THE TOPICS: Andrew Cuomo Accepts Christian Siriano’s Offer to Make Masks For Coronavirus fight Wendy Williams Is ‘Willing to Risk It’ In Order to Get Back to Work People Are Having Mixed Reactions to Learning Ellen DeGeneres Is Secretly Mean The View co-host Meghan McCain Announces […]
"In music it's just 'easier' if you can also have, like, a modelling contract on the side — and that's the same with many other industries. Often, there's such a risk in investing in somebody that [labels] just need to check boxes... in order for [an artist] to be worthy of investment. I think if those ideas were [less narrow] then what people chose to invest in would be more interesting." — Katie Stelmanis, AustraIf you didn't already know: Burn Out is now a bi-weekly podcast! There will be a new episode every other week. Please subscribe if you haven't already, and rate, review, and share!This episode has been sitting on ice for months. Katie Stelmanis, aka Austra, is one of my favourite musicians. Shortlisted for the Polaris Prize in 2011 for the band's debut album, Feel It Break, Austra has since released two more records — with a fourth on the way, May 1. It's called HiRUDiN, after the peptide secreted by leeches that helps blood to coagulate, and delves into the real shit: the way we are in relationships. Katie says that she wanted to make a more insular record after her last album cycle, which found her being asked to comment on U.S. politics, but also because she saw flaws in her own approach. Queen of revision. This one is technically also a solo project, created in collaboration with a bunch of new and exciting collaborators. We also talk about the bloodsucking all musicians must submit to in order to gain access to the powers that be and how to get through a fallow period (with the help of food).Austra: austra.fyiFirst track: "Risk It" c/o AustraTheme song: "Dark Beings" by LALOriginal music provided by Jahmal PadmoreSupport this work
This week we live in the taboo, the messy, and the sometimes woo woo. That’s right: We’re on the rag, riding the crimson wave….we’re BLEEDING love. Valarie Merced (aka The Blood Queen) schools us on why it’s important for her to bleed on her lovers. From seeing her mother’s menstruation to the safeties and physiological response during menstruation, this episode is for people with vulvas AND those who enjoy them. Hell, how often do we get to talk about period and period sex? Strap on your Thinx and your Diva cups, it’s gonna get red. PLUS we challenge you to post a selfie with a “Simba” blood mark on your forehead & use #isourlovebleeding. Will this be the next ice bucket challenge? ...probably not. But... why not? Follow Val's magazine PRECIPICE on instagram: @precipicemagazine We love hearing from you for questions, blood stories, or advice: Email us at isourlovepod@gmail.com ------~ Follow us on social media ~------- The show: @isourlove_____ Lola Jean: @lolajeandotcom Classes & Instruction: lolajean.com Stephen Penta: @thereluctantsexpert This weeks' end of episode song is "Risk It" by Austra Our official theme songs are composed & recorded by our good friends at hyperballadmusic.com
If you want to dominate your market, here’s an inexpensive tip: Head down to your local Goodwill and buy a used version of the classic board game Risk… It seems that you don’t need AI, Machine Learning sims, or dozens of third-party load-tested and validated forecast models to predict how your business will perform in the next 24 months. Sometimes you just need to remember how you played a game that many of you probably haven’t picked up since you were 12. Risk was a board game that taught many of us about basic market dominance…each player sits and views a map of the world where each player has a finite number of armies placed randomly in a territory. The goal is to budget – and risk – your armies to conquer your neighbor’s landmass – while also leaving some troops to defend the territories you already have won from attacks that soon come on other fronts. The player who conquers all the armies on the map is the winner. No less of a result than we’ve talked about on these episodes. Consider that at the outset of every turn you simply ask yourself, “What am I going to risk in order to boot somebody out of a territory, so that I can dominate it from which I can launch another campaign when I'm strong enough to dominate and adjacent territory?” It’s the same theory in business – except deploying real dollars and resources vs placing your surplus of plastic pieces in Greenland (never a good idea). If you and your leadership team just played Risk all day long, I guarantee you will see traits and ideas and lessons to be applied to your current business. Because this math and exercise in risk and reward – and you’ve really got to do that kind of fundamental math if you haven’t already done so – is kind of like the game theory of business that must be done before we can figure out the real role of sales.So let’s jump right into this episode of the Market Dominance Guys entitled – Parker Brothers gave me my MBA. Market Dominance Guys is produced by ConnectAndSell and UncommonProConnectAndSellConnectAndSell allows your sales reps to talk to more decision-makers in 90 minutes than they would in a week or more of conventional dialing. Your reps can finally be 100% focused on selling since all of their CRM data entry and follow-up scheduling is fully automated within ConnectAndSell’s powerful platform. Your team’s effectiveness will skyrocket by using ConnectAndSell’s teleprompter capability as they’ll know exactly what to say during critical conversations. Visit, ConnectAndSell.com Uncommon Pro - Selling a big idea to a skeptical customer, investor, or partner is one of the hardest jobs in business, so when it’s time to really Go Big, you need to use an Uncommon methodology to gain attention, frame your thoughts, and employ a sequencing that is familiar to convince others that your ideas will truly change their world. Through Uncommon Pro’s modern and innovative sales, scripting, and coaching toolset, we offer a guiding hand to ambitious Sales Leaders and their determined teams in their quest to reach market dominance. Today is the day things change. It’s time to get “uncommon” with uncommonpro.com.
Risk… It’s always good to take a risk
Episode 124, featuring Territories, Die My Demon, Coldside, Momentum, Risk It, Good Riddance, 9 Shocks Terror, South Class Veterans, Atreyu, and Prong. Eric of Anonymous and Suburban Hell Kill co-hosts, we play bands a bunch of hardcore, some Demons Run Amok releases, and we continue our Metal picks to finish the show.
Are you willing to RISK IT all? For greatness? For success? For happiness? For anything? This is a really intense episode and a must listen.
Ruth 3:1-18 Have you ever played Risk? It’s a game that brings out the worst in people who try to take over the world. Ruth is playing Risk, only for the sake of Naomi. Her bold actions have so far have paid off for her and for Naomi but now she is about to take the risk of her lifetime. Will she succeed or fail? What exactly is this story she has fallen into? The post Tenacious Love Risks It All appeared first on Pine Lake Covenant Church.
"Steven has done a wonderful job of balancing the promises, perils, and how-to prescriptions of engineering peak states such as ‘flow.’" - Tim Ferriss, #1 New York Times best-selling authorI don't really know how this happened but I had the chance to interview one of the peak performance great's of our time. Steven's worked with people like Elon Musk, Peter Diamandis, Sir Richard Branson, Ray Kurzweil, Arianna Huffington, and even Bill Clinton.Steven's written 9 Bestselling books like The Rise of Superman, Stealing Fire, Tomorrowland and Bold. 4 New York Times (NYT) Bestsellers, translated into 40 languages, and 2 Pulitzer prize nominations...I've been fascinated with FLOW ever since I decided a few years to make a major change in my life. Which involves picking up many new habits and getting rid of old ones that no longer serve me.The secret to doing that ...without much resistance is entering a state of FLOW.You're going to enjoy this!Flow is defined as an optimal state of consciousness where we perform our best and we feel our best but people that I was studying at the time have figured out how to use it to really amplify performance.*following is research from the Flow Genome Project*“Flow” is the term used by researchers for optimal states of consciousness, those peak moments of total absorption where self vanishes, time flies, and all aspects of performance go through the roof.In 2008, Johns Hopkins neuroscientist Charles Limb used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to examine the brains of improv jazz musicians in flow. He found the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, an area of the brain best known for self-monitoring, deactivated. Self-monitoring is the voice of doubt, that defeatist nag, our inner critic. Since flow is a fluid state—where problem solving is nearly automatic—second guessing can only slow that process. When the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex goes quiet, those guesses are cut off at the source. The result is liberation. We act without hesitation. Creativity becomes more free-flowing, risk taking becomes less frightening, and the combination lets us flow at a far faster clip.A team of neuroscientists at Bonn University in Germany discovered that endorphins are part of flow’s cocktail and, as other researchers have determined, so are norepinephrine, dopamine, anandamide, and serotonin. All five are pleasure-inducing, performance-enhancing neurochemicals, upping everything from muscle reaction times to attention, pattern recognition and lateral thinking—the three horsemen of rapid-fire problem-solving.17 Triggers to Enter the State of FLOWThe following 17 flow state triggers come from research undertaken by the Flow Genome Project lead by Steven Kotler and Jamie Wheal. There are 4 groups of Flow Trigger: (4) Psychological; (3) Environmental; (9) Social and; (1) Creative.Psychological TriggersIntensely Focused Attention – One of the primary purposes of flow state is to help you focus on a particular task, however, to hack into the flow state in the first place, you must be in a position that allows you to strongly focus your attention to your goals. This also means multi-tasking is out. Flow demands singular and solitude action.Clear Goals – When you have clear goals, your mind doesn’t have to wonder what to do next. You know what you’re doing and why you’re doing it. Also, don’t focus on the finish line, focus on running the race, the NOW, the present moment. Many are getting distracted by their past, future, or self. Focus on the clarity of your goals. It gives you certainty.Immediate Feedback – This trigger is a partner with clear goals. Clear goals tell us what we’re doing, immediate feedback tells us how to do it better. If we know how to improve performance in real time, the mind doesn’t go off in search of clues for betterment.The Challenge/Skill Ratio – You may have heard about the concept of stress curve where there is a scale of low stress and low performance. At the other end, is the high stress and low performance but in the middle of the scale is the optimal level of stress correlating to peak performance. The Flow Challenge/Skill ratio exists near (but not on) the midline between boredom and anxiety. We need a progressive balance between boredom and anxiety or tension and relaxation. If you can keep yourself in that sweet spot, then you can drive attention into the present and maximize the amount of flow in your sports career.Environmental TriggersHigh Consequences – If your neck is on the line then you are driven into the zone. An athlete, big wave surfer, for example, may need to drop into a 50-foot wave to pull this trigger. But the shy guys may only need to cross the room and speak to an attractive woman to pull this trigger. This doesn’t always mean physical danger, this can also be an emotional, mental and social risk. You must be willing to take risks. It’s that sense of adventure and potential for failure that will drive you.Rich Environment – This means an environment with lots of novelty, unpredictability, and complexity. Novelty means surrounding yourself with a rich environment that involves finding things that will catch and keep your attention. Unpredictability means being able to step outside your comfort zone and facing the unknown. While complexity means increasing the depth and breadth of your knowledge by seeking out information from many different sources or viewpoints.Deep Embodiment – This means total physical awareness. When you can harness the power of your whole body paying attention to the task at hand, you will feel unstoppable. This also means paying attention to multiple sensory streams at once. Not only our 5 senses but also our proprioception and vestibular awareness.Social TriggersSerious Concentration – In extreme sports, for example, concentration is highly required or injury or even death could happen. You need to be aware of your teammates and opponents. If they lose focus and start thinking about what it is for dinner, or other things, they’ll quickly be overrun. It can also help to ensure that everyone has their maximum attention to the here and now. Blocking off other distractions.Shared, Clear Goals – Groups need to be clear about what their collective goal is in order for the flow state to be achieved. Group flow is a progressive balancing act. Creating a goal that provides enough focus so each team member can tell when they are close to a solution, but one that is open enough for creativity to exist.Good Communication – A group flow needs constant communication. The conversation must flow forward. Listen closely to what being said, accept it, and build upon it. Nothing blocks flow more than ignoring or negating a group member.Familiarity – A sports team may compose of a group with different languages, cultures, and belief but everyone needs to be familiar with each other. Everyone needs to share a common language, a shared knowledge base and communication style based on unspoken understandings. There must be unity, in thoughts and in action. Everyone must be on the same page, and, when novel insights arise, momentum is not lost due to the need for a lengthy explanation.Equal Participation and Skill Level – When you have a team with an equal role in the project, flow is most likely to happen in your group. Teamwork is the key, and everyone must be involved. All members should have similar skill levels.Risk – It applies to groups in the same way that it applies to individuals. When there is an element of risk, people are more motivated to work hard and make things happen. Without challenges, the tasks may appear boring. There’s also no creativity without failure, and there’s no group flow without the risk of failure. This risk can’t be just physical, it also applies to mental, creative, etc.Sense of Control – It’s important to combine autonomy (being free to do what you want) with competence (being good at what you do) in group flow. Whatever the sports situation you are in, getting to choose your own challenges and having the necessary skills to surmount them is beneficial.Close Listening – When you are listening closely to the present conversation, your responses will flow, and conversation will progress naturally. Innovation shouldn’t be blocked in a group flow. But if one or more team members are talking simultaneously, you keep yourselves away from listening to what is really said and working from there.Always Say Yes – Now, don’t mistake this for always saying yes to everything. This means that interactions should be additive more than argumentative. This element is about being open to trying new things, even if they sound like a bad idea. All input into the group should be additive, not negative. The goal is the momentum, togetherness, and innovation that comes from intensifying each other’s ideas and actions.Creativity Triggers“Creativity triggers flow, then flow enhances creativity.”If you look under the hood of creativity, what you see is:Pattern Recognition – the brain’s ability to break down existing patterns, colors, data, shapes, movements, sounds, concepts, successes, risks, failures, etc., and create new ideas using those patterns by linking new ideas, andRisk-Taking – the courage to bring those new ideas into the world. Will the new concept be well received or will it be scanned? All creativity requires an element of risk and courage.LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/mark-metry/Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/markmetry/Twitter - https://twitter.com/markymetryMedium - https://medium.com/@markymetryFacebook - https://www.facebook.com/Humans.2.0.PodcastMark Metry - https://www.markmetry.com/Humans 2.0 Twitter - https://twitter.com/Humans2Podcast
The boys sit down to answer your AFL Fantasy questions from twitter and play another round of Risk It for the Biscuit.
What is that next tip or idea that will take your brand to the next level? It could be just around the corner! It’s time for another session of Ask Scott here on The Amazing Seller Podcast! On this episode, you’ll hear Scott share his thought of the week and address questions submitted by listeners like you. Scott covers topics including tips on how to connect with a Social Media influencer, securing a test order for your product, dealing with products on Amazon’s prohibited list and much more. You don’t want to miss out on this helpful episode! Don’t Give Up As you are putting in all this time and effort to build up your ecommerce business, do you ever feel like you are about to give up? Does your goal feel like it’s getting further and further each day instead of closer? On this episode of The Amazing Seller, Scott delivers some motivation and inspiration that could be just what you need to keep going. Scott came across a helpful saying that has really resonated with him, “The moment you are ready to quit is usually the moment right before a miracle happens, don’t give up!” Doesn’t that hit home for you? Make sure you check out this episode to get more helpful insights like this one from Scott! How to Approach a Social Media Influencer Do you have a great product that you know just needs the right person to promote it? It might be time for you to reach out to an influential personality on Instagram or YouTube. But you might be thinking, “Where do I even start to approach a personality like that?” You are in luck! On this episode of The Amazing Seller, Scott goes over a helpful strategy and approach that removes the unknowns and helps you get started. If you think the time is right for your brand, don’t delay! Listen to this episode and get the info you need to push forward so you can see the growth you’ve been looking for! Is a Prohibited Product worth the Risk? It can be really difficult to find the perfect product to start selling on Amazon. It’s not impossible but when you find a product that has a lot of potential, you don't’ want to pass it up too easily. So what do you do when you find out that a perfect product you found is actually on Amazon’s prohibited list? On this episode of The Amazing Seller, you’ll hear from Scott as he goes over his advice for dealing with products listed on Amazon’s prohibited list. You don’t want to deal with one of those products without getting the input from someone like Scott. Make sure to grab a pen and paper for this episode! OUTLINE OF THIS EPISODE OF THE AMAZING SELLER [0:03] Scott’s introduction to this episode of the podcast! [4:30] Scott shares his thought of the week. [8:00] Sometimes you need to take a break and have fun! [12:00] Question #1: How do I start with my first product without placing a huge order? [17:00] Question #2: Is there a standard way and time to approach an influencer? [26:30] Question #3: Should I proceed with a product that is on Amazon’s prohibited list? [34:00] Take one step at a time! RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE www.theamazingseller.com/ask www.theamazingseller.com/dallas www.aliexpress.com www.alibaba.com www.theamazingseller.com/workshop www.theamazingseller.com/293 www.theamazingseller.com/152