Podcasts about Slack

Tune in as the team discusses: Why land investing can be less expensive and less risky than traditional real estate How investors can start with as little as $100–$1,000 using land arbitrage What land arbitrage means and how investors make the spread on monthly payments Why $2,000–$7,000 can support mailers, wholesale deals, and early passive income How a $10,000–$20,000 budget allows investors to buy multiple smaller properties instead of one big deal Why larger budgets should still start with a measured approach before scaling The importance of building proof of concept before hiring VAs or overbuilding systems How GeekPay, LG Pass, Google Voice, Slack, and Zamplo can help manage a land business Why pricing, better images, and creative marketing can help move properties in slow areas How lower returns like 2x or 3x can still create strong momentum for new investors TIP OF THE WEEK Scott: Use land arbitrage to test a county before committing serious money. One good LandArb property can help you prove demand, practice marketing, and create quick momentum.Mike: If you have more capital, do not deploy it all at once. Pull out a small amount, get mailers going, close a few deals, and then pour fuel on the fire once the process is working.Jon: Make your property listings pop. Better images, sharper descriptions, and creative positioning can help a slow-moving property attract more buyers. WANT MORE? Enjoyed this episode? Dive into more episodes of AOPI to discover how to build real passive income through land investing. UNLOCK MORE FREE RESOURCES: Get instant access to my free training, a free copy of my Bestseller Dirt Rich Book, and exclusive bonuses to accelerate your land investing journey—CLICK HERE "Isn't it time to create passive income so you can work where you want when you want, and with whomever you want?"

I'm a big believer in the value of consistency over time. And having a solid routine that works for you/your life can be a huge piece of staying consistent. But every once in awhile, you may find going rogue is the best thing you can do... Join the new Diz Runs community on Slack: http://dizruns.slack.com Love the show? Check out the support page for ways you can help keep the Diz Runs Radio going strong! dizruns.com/support Become a Patron of the Show! Visit Patreon.com/DizRuns to find out how. Subscribe to the Diz Runs Radio Find Me on an Apple Device dizruns.com/itunes
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Brandon talks with OpenObserve's Prabhat Sharma and Shani Shoham: why observability is still broken, how they fixed it, and where AI takes it next. Watch the YouTube Live Recording of Episode 576 Show Links OpenObserve OpenObserve on GitHub Series A and Observability 3.0 announcement blog post Launching OpenObserve OpenObserve 2-Minute Demo Download OpenObserve Contact Prabhat Sharma LinkedIn: hiprabhat Twitter/X: @hiprabhat Contact Shani Shoham LinkedIn: shanishoham Twitter: @shohams SDT News & Hype Join us in Slack. Get a SDT Sticker! Send your postal address to stickers@softwaredefinedtalk.com and we will send you free laptop stickers! Follow us: Twitch, Twitter, Instagram, Mastodon, BlueSky, LinkedIn, TikTok, Threads and YouTube. Use the code SDT to get $20 off Coté's book, Digital WTF, so $5 total. Become a sponsor of Software Defined Talk! Special Guests: Prabhat Sharma and Shani Shoham.

Tom Austen is the founder of Pelotan, the world's first sun performance brand, and co-founder of Chance, a trail running apparel brand he's building with pro athlete and serial entrepreneur Christian Meier. Both brands are based in Girona, Spain — a two-square-kilometer pocket of world-class endurance athletes, cafes, and startups that's become the Boulder of Europe. In this conversation, Tom walks through how Pelotan went from a sunburn problem on training rides to winning two Tour de Frances with Team Sky in its first year, and how the brand is now pioneering something entirely new: treating the sun as a performance variable rather than just a health risk. He also gets into the Chance origin story, why cross-pollination across categories is the key to building something original, and what it's like to run two high-growth startups at the same time from a city of 100,000 people. Show Notes: Popfly for Athletes/Creators: https://popf.ly/secondnaturecreators Popfly for Brands: https://popf.ly/secondnaturebrands Tom Austen: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tomausten1/ Pelotan: https://pelotan.cc/ Chance Running: https://chancerunning.com/ Second Nature - Sea Otter Episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hLk1LGIthPc Christian Meier: https://www.instagram.com/christianmmeier/ The Gartner Hype Cycle: https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnwerner/2024/07/18/the-trough-of-disillusionment-and-four-outliers-on-the-gartner-hype-cycle/ Pelotan Apres Aftersun: https://pelotan.cc/products/pelotan-apres-200ml Pelotan App for Second Nature listeners: https://pelotan.cc/secondnature Broken Arrow Skyrace: https://www.brokenarrowskyrace.com/ Lael Wilcox: https://www.instagram.com/laelwilcox/ BPC - Brand, Product, Content: Nomio: https://drinknomio.com/ Adidas World Cup ad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJJY53qhJe0 Nike - Airport soccer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mGalnbiGDW4 Insta360 GO Ultra: https://store.insta360.com/product/go-ultra Join us on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/second-nature-media Meet us on Slack: https://www.launchpass.com/second-nature Follow us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/secondnature.media Subscribe to our newsletter: https://www.secondnature.media Subscribe to the YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@secondnaturemedia

In this episode of The Ross Simmonds Show, Ross breaks down why founders often over-focus on perfecting the product while underinvesting in the most important part of business: getting customers to buy. He shares 20 practical customer acquisition tactics covering owned channels, outreach, community building, audience engagement, strategic partnerships, personal branding, and frictionless buying experiences. Key Takeaways and Insights: 1. Shift Your Mindset Around Sales - Stop treating every “no” as personal rejection and start seeing it as progress toward a “yes.” - Customer acquisition requires courage, repetition, and strategic thinking—not a massive budget. - Founders need to understand customer nuance, buying behavior, and how to create urgency around their offer. 2. Own Your Audience with Email - Build and maintain an email list so you can communicate directly with prospects and customers. - Make every email valuable enough to inspire, educate, entertain, or give subscribers a competitive edge. - Avoid using email only for product updates or blog announcements; turn it into a trusted resource. 3. Build a High-Value Resource Hub - Create a website section filled with useful tools, guides, quizzes, calculators, and interactive content. - Use gated resources and community features to capture leads and build deeper audience engagement. - Watch for social referral traffic as a signal that your content is valuable enough to share. 4. Create Communities Around Your Market - Build private Slack, Discord, Facebook, or Reddit communities where your ideal customers can gather. - Use these spaces to collect feedback, test ideas, host sessions, and create word-of-mouth momentum. - Stay close to your most engaged community members—they may become your strongest customers. 5. Master Personalized Outreach - Cold email still works when it is researched, relevant, and written for one specific person. - Use LinkedIn, company updates, investor reports, and business context to make outreach feel human. - Ask for feedback or a short conversation instead of immediately pushing for a demo or sale. 6. Leverage Your Existing Network - Reach out to past colleagues, classmates, and professional connections who may now be in relevant roles. - Ask for specific warm introductions and make it easy by writing the intro message for them. - Schedule no-pitch coffee chats to build awareness, gather market research, and create future evangelists. 7. Show Up Where Your Audience Already Spends Time - Participate in Reddit, Medium, Hacker News, Quora, Facebook groups, Slack communities, and X with value-first engagement. - Study the culture of each platform before posting so your contributions fit naturally. - Use podcasts, influencers, guest posts, webinars, and co-marketing to access already-established audiences. 8. Use Strategic Partnerships to Generate Leads - Build referral partnerships with complementary businesses that already serve your ideal customers. - Offer commissions, kickbacks, or revenue share to incentivize partners to send qualified leads. - Create co-branded content or guest content to borrow trust and reach from established audiences. —

Episode 113 is live! With Jeff still out in the field, Grant and Tres take over the controls for a classic freewheeling episode packed with staff brief shenanigans, college football talk, Bitcoin updates, Texas Tech headlines, lifting questions, creatine myths, training mistakes, upcoming Strength Co. projects, Wisconsin adventures, and plenty of the organized chaos that makes The Okay Podcast what it is. If you've ever wondered whether supplements matter, what gym mistakes are actually holding people back, this episode is for you.Podcast Hosts:Grant Broggi: Marine Veteran, Owner of The Strength Co. and Starting Strength Coach.Jeff Buege: Marine Veteran, Outdoorsman, Football Fan and LifterTres Gottlich: Marine Veteran, Texan, Fisherman, Crazy College Football Fan and LifterJoin the Slack and Use code OKAY:⁠https://buy.stripe.com/dR6dT4aDcfuBdyw5ks⁠Check out BW Tax: ⁠https://www.bwtaxllc.com⁠BUY A FOOTBALL HELMET:⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.thestrength.co/mrhelmet/?utm_source=The+Okay+Podcast&utm_medium=Podcast&utm_campaign=Okay_Pod⁠Timestamps: 00:00 - Intro08:52 - Staff Brief18:19 - Outlying Stations24:18 - Most Overrated Lift31:19 - Creatine41:08 - Dad Splits44:12 - Wisconsin49:20 - PCS01:00:47 - College World Series01:08:15 - Texas Tech Debate01:16:38 - Sick Kids & Being A Dad01:23:34 - New Trees01:33:13 - Chili Cook Off Recap01:39:04 - Ghost Tours

This month I continued to scale Pokémon at Walmart, but it feels like it may be nearing a breaking point due to the massive quantities of accounts that have been created in the last few months. We also went on a trip to southern Japan, Guam, and Manila, including several FHR properties, which ended up being a lot of fun!For more information on the Patreon and private Slack group, head over to churninglife.com.

Hey folks, Alex here, and welcome to a BIG MODEL week! We finally got Mythos (well almost)! Let me catch you up! This week started with WWDC26 from Apple, and Max Weinbach, who was in the room at Apple Park and actually has access to some of the new features including an all new SIRI AI, joined us to break down what could be the most used AI in the world very soon. At first I was skeptical, but he convinced me that the new Siri is actually good! Then, we saw the ultimate model drop: Anthropic finally shipped Mythos (X, my system card thread, benchmarks). Same weights, two names: Mythos 5 is the unrestricted version that only Project Glasswing partners get, Fable 5 is what the rest of us get, wrapped in the heaviest guardrails I've ever seen ship on a frontier model. It's state of the art on nearly every benchmarkThe model that was “too dangerous to release” is now... well, released, but with the heaviest guardrails we've seen. More on this later. Peter Gostev from Arena.ai joined us to break down the new model. Last but definitely not least, Google released a real-time translation model, that our friend Thor Schaeff from DeepMind demoed live, while we all spoke in different languages and it translated us in REAL TIME. It was really cool, definitely check that out. There's quite a few more things, like Loop Engineering Alpha, Swyx came by to talk about FrontierCode, OpenAI confirmed our suspicions that the anti-datacenter social media posts could be a concerted effort by groupds links to the Chinese government and much more. Let's dive in! ThursdAI - Let me catch you up, every week!

Thanks so much for listening! For the complete show notes, links, and comments, please visit The Grey NATO Show Notes for this episode:https://thegreynato.substack.com/p/379-slack-crew-a-2026-1The Grey NATO is a listener-supported podcast. If you'd like to support the show, which includes a variety of possible benefits, including additional episodes, access to the TGN Crew Slack, and even a TGN edition grey NATO, please visit the link below.Support the show

With just days left until the USMNT kicks off its World Cup campaign in Los Angeles against Paraguay, Jason went live to take stock of the team. TBSS Chief Correspondent Jonathan Taylor Tannenwald (support Jon's work by subscribing to the Philadelphia Inquirer) joins the show from Irvine, where he's covering the USMNT camp ahead of World Cup kickoff. Jonathan gives some insight into key US defender Chris Richards' status for the World Cup opener before he and Jason open a discussion about a few of Mauricio Pochettino's pending choices for his World Cup lineup. Then the Rodius arrives to give some national team thoughts and his DEFCON for the tournament outlook. Jared didn't just come for USMNT analysis, though: he brought a game. The Gamemaster puts Jason and Jonathan through two rounds of a "closest total" game you'll have to hear to understand. Support the show by joining The Best Soccer Show Patreon. You get access to an incredible Slack community and bonus content from Jason (and occasionally Jared). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Get your free travel insurance quote with Faye! https://milestomemories.com/go/faye-travel-insurance/ Chase just refreshed the Sapphire Preferred and buried a bombshell in the fine print. On this episode of MTM Travel Shawn and Mark break down everything Chase changed: the $95 fee stays, you get new 3X categories on gas, EV charging and vacation rentals, plus a doubled $100 hotel credit. The catch? The Sapphire Preferred and Ink Business Preferred lose 1:1 Hyatt transfers and drop to 4:3 on October 1. We cover whether the refresh is still worth it, why the $795 Reserve is now the only way to keep 1:1 Hyatt, why Bilt just won, and what you should actually do before the changes hit Monday. Mark's full breakdown is linked below. Let us know where Chase ranks in your points lineup now. Episode Guide: 0:00 – Chase drops a Hyatt bombshell 0:22 – Shawn in Casablanca + airport travel tips 3:33 – Inside the new Sapphire Preferred (and the 4:3 Hyatt cut) 6:35 – Bonus categories & why Chase is devaluing points 8:40 – The $795 Reserve push, Mark's article & the Oct 1 timeline 12:27 – Will this finally hurt Hyatt? 16:18 – Chase's fault or Hyatt's? Plus why Bilt won 19:44 – Shawn's points strategy going forward 22:48 – Mourning the old Hyatt & should you apply before Monday? ✈️ Track your travel credit cards for free

Welcome to the second episode of Inside the Badger Den!This series is your backstage pass to Ad Badger, where we bridge the gap between powerful Amazon PPC software and high-level advertising strategy.In this episode, we don't just show you the tools; we show you the "why" behind them. We dive deep into our brand-new Custom Algorithm Feature to help you mix your own "algorithm cocktails" using smart If/Then/When rules. Plus, we're breaking down advanced negative filters for search terms, and how to utilize our new CPO (Clicks Per Order) metric to see how many clicks it typically takes to land an order across your campaigns and keywords. Also featured in our opening segment: BuyBox Checker! We are introducing their new multi-channel alerts (email, Slack, WhatsApp, SMS, Zapier, n8n, webhook). Plus, Ad Badger members get an exclusive 40% discount - check it out here.We'll see you Inside the Badger Den!

This episode isn't about communication theory. It's not a framework you have to go home and figure out how to apply. This is us, mid-work, showing you the exact words we use when something goes sideways — when creative feedback is vague, when a deadline is at risk, when someone's overwhelmed and needs the team to jump in. It started with a message from someone in our community after the last episode. She said what we do is book-worthy — and asked us to get even more specific with the language. So Amber, Joanna, and Lilly sat down with actual scenarios and real-life examples, including a few moments that happened in the 48 hours before we hit record. You'll hear the Delegation Solution framework in action, why the positive sandwich is still on the table, and the behind-the-scenes story of Joanna saying "our list" in a Slack message — and what Amber made of it. This one is for the business owner who already knows communication is important, but wants to hear what it actually sounds like when a team does it well. The specifics are here. Come take what works.

When Tina Roth Eisenberg moved to New York in 1999 as a new designer, she kept asking herself the same question: where are my people? Eighteen years ago, she answered it by starting Creative Mornings—a free breakfast lecture series that has since grown into what she describes as the world's largest face-to-face creative community: 252 cities, 70 countries, and more than a thousand volunteers gathering with around 25,000 people every month. Or, as she puts it, “church for creativity.” Visit our Susbtack for bonus content and more: https://designbetterpodcast.com/p/tina-roth-eisenberg-creative-mornings But Creative Mornings is just one thread in Tina's story. She's the voice behind Swiss Miss, the beloved design blog she's kept up for 21 years; the founder of FRIENDS, a creative coworking community in Brooklyn; and the creator of Tattly, the designer temporary tattoo company that started as a joke and turned into a business. In our conversation, Tina shares what she's learned about building communities that scale on trust rather than control, why she measures success in “return on friendship,” and how playful side projects increase “the surface area for luck to find you.” We also talk about commitment as a creative practice, raising creative kids, and why she believes the future isn't lonely—it's hyperlocal. Bio Tina Roth Eisenberg is a Swiss-born, Brooklyn-based designer and serial founder—though many know her simply as "swissmiss," after the design blog she started in 2005 as a personal visual archive, which grew into a popular design journal drawing an average of a million unique visitors a month. Raised in Speicher, Switzerland, and shaped by Swiss design (and, as she puts it, a lot of fresh mountain air), she completed her design studies in Geneva and Munich before moving to New York in 1999. She is the founder of CreativeMornings, the world's largest face-to-face creative community, with monthly talks in 252 cities across 70 countries; the founder of Tattly, the designy temporary tattoo company; co-creator of the to-do app TeuxDeux; and founder of FRIENDS, a creative coworking space in Brooklyn. She lives in beautiful Fort Greene, Brooklyn, with her two children, Ella and Tilo, who teach her about current memes and TikTok. Books & Links mentioned: CreativeMornings.com Creative Quests, Sam Furness Dark Forest,Yancey Strickler Nanowrimo Swissmiss Yancey Strickler: Creative Mornings talk from May 2025 Vacation With An Artist Creative Mornings Field Trips Creative Morning Clubs The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World *** Premium Episodes on Design Better This ad-supported episode is available to everyone. If you'd like to hear it ad-free, upgrade to our premium subscription, where you'll get an additional 2 ad-free episodes per month (4 total). Premium subscribers also get access to the documentary Design Disruptors and our growing library of books. New premium subscriber benefit: we've launched a private Slack workspace…join now to connect with designers, product leaders & creative practitioners in our community. And get a behind-the-scenes pass to every episode with The Roundup, where each week we bring you insights and actionable tactics from recent episodes. You'll also get access to our monthly AMAs with former guests, ad-free episodes, discounts and early access to workshops, and our monthly newsletter The Brief that compiles salient insights, quotes, readings, and creative processes uncovered in the show. And subscribers at the annual level now get access to the Design Better Toolkit, which gets you major discounts and free access to tools and courses that will help you unlock new skills, make your workflow more efficient, and take your creativity further. Upgrade to paid Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Watch Us On YouTube! Announcing a new, ongoing benefit for annual subscribers of our Slack community. Annual subscribers receive a free Points Path Alerts subscription OR a 30% discount on Points Path Pro. Airline passenger rights are back in the spotlight, and Europe may be making one of the strongest consumer protection programs even stronger. This week, Ed is joined by Julian Kheel from Points Path to discuss proposed updates to EU261 passenger compensation rules, including new requirements that could force airlines to proactively tell travelers when they're entitled to compensation. They also explore JSX's new premium route between New York and Florida, whether semi-private flying is becoming more mainstream, and why loyalty programs continue to evolve in unexpected ways. Plus, Alaska Airlines signals interest in expanding its loyalty ecosystem, OneWorld adds a new hotel partnership, American Airlines appears to be making award pricing changes with Air Tahiti Nui, and Delta rolls out a new checked bag benefit that may not be quite as generous as it first appeared.   Get hydrated like Ed in Vegas with Nuun Use my Bilt Rewards link to sign-up and support the show! If you enjoy the podcast, I hope you'll take a moment to leave us a rating. That helps us grow our audience! If you're looking for a way to support the show, we'd love to have you join us in our Travel Slack Community.  Join me and other travel experts for informative conversations about the travel world, the best ways to use your miles and points, Zoom happy hours and exciting giveaways. Monthly access Annual access Personal consultation plus annual access We have witty, funny, sarcastic discussions about travel, for members only. My fellow travel experts are available to answer your questions and we host video chats multiple times per month. Follow Us! Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/milestogopodcast/ TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@milestogopodcast Ed Pizza: https://www.instagram.com/pizzainmotion/ Richard Kerr: https://www.instagram.com/kerrpoints/ ✈️ What We Cover in This Episode ✈️ EU261 passenger compensation updates • Proposed changes to Europe's passenger rights rules • Why communication may become a bigger focus • Could the U.S. ever adopt something similar? ✈️ The challenge of airline accountability • What happens when flights are delayed or canceled • Enforcement versus policy • Making passengers whole versus getting them moving ✈️ JSX launches a new New York–Florida route • Teterboro to Naples service begins this fall • The appeal of semi-private flying • Why JSX continues to challenge traditional airlines ✈️ Loyalty programs keep expanding • OneWorld partners with Taj InnerCircle • Extending elite benefits beyond airlines • Why travel ecosystems matter ✈️ American Airlines and Air Tahiti Nui awards • Reports of new dynamic pricing • What travelers are seeing so far • Potential impact on AAdvantage value ✈️ United's credit card award discounts • Large mileage discounts for cardholders • A powerful acquisition strategy • How it compares to Delta's approach ✈️ Alaska Airlines wants more flexibility • Discussion around transferable points • Bank of America's potential role • The upside and downside for Mileage Plan members ✈️ Delta expands checked bag benefits • A second free checked bag for some cardholders • Why the change is more limited than expected • Who stands to benefit most        ⏱️ Episode 440 Timestamps 3:35 – EU261 passenger compensation changes explained 7:51 – Should the U.S. adopt similar passenger protections? 12:05 – JSX launches Teterboro–Naples service 18:50 – OneWorld partners with Taj InnerCircle 22:40 – American and Air Tahiti Nui award pricing changes 25:44 – Why partner award pricing may be evolving 27:34 – United's surprisingly large award discounts for cardholders 29:20 – Slack community and Points Path updates 32:07 – Alaska Airlines discusses transferable points 36:31 – Delta's new checked bag benefit arrives      

Enjoy the What's Bruin Show Network!Multiple shows to entertain you on one feed:Support WBS at Patreon.com/WhatsBruinShow for just $2/month and get exclusive content and access to our SLACK channel.Twitter/X: @whatsbruinshow        Instagram: @whatsbruinshowCall the What's Bruin Network Hotline at 805-399-4WBS (Suck it Reign of Troy)We are also on YouTube HEREGet Your WBSN MERCH - Go to our MyLocker Site by Clicking HEREWhat's Bruin Show- A conversation about all things Bruin over drinks with Bruin Report Online's @mikeregaladoLA, @wbjake68 and friends!Subscribe to the What's Bruin Show at whatsbruin.substack.comEmail us at: whatsbruinshow@gmail.comTweet us at: @whatsbruinshowWest Coast Bias - LA Sports (mostly Lakers, Dodgers and NFL) with Jamaal and JakeSubscribe to West Coast Bias at wbwestcoastbias.substack.comEmail us at: WB.westcoastbias@gmail.comTweet us at: @WBwestcoastbiasThe BEAR Minimum - Jake and his Daughter Megan talk about student life and Cal Sports during her first year attending UC Berkeley.Subscribe to The BEAR Minimum at thebearminimum.substack.comEmail us at: wb.bearminimum@gmail.comTweet us at: @WB_BearMinimumPlease rate and review us on whatever platform you listen on.

WHAT IFWhat if you've done everything right — the climb, the grind, the sacrifices — and the exhaustion you feel isn't a personal failing, but proof that the system was never designed for you to win? Meghan French Dunbar spent over a decade interviewing more than 1,000 leaders to find the ones who figured out how to succeed without destroying themselves — and what she found will change how you define the whole game.SUMMARY & GUEST INTROMeghan French Dunbar is the co-founder of Conscious Company Magazine, creator of the World Changing Women Summit, TEDx speaker, Forbes and Fast Company contributor, host of the podcast Unbehaved, and author of This Isn't Working — a book born from her own collapse on the floor mid-panic attack and the two years of soul-searching that followed. After interviewing nearly 100 additional leaders for the book, Meghan identified a clear, research-backed playbook used by grounded, thriving women at the top — and it looks nothing like what we've been sold. Her work sits at the exact intersection of Erica's mission: naming what's broken, refusing to accept it as normal, and giving women a real path forward.INSIDE THE EPISODEThe panic attack that started it all. Meghan hits the floor of her guest room in 2017 — CEO, six months of runway left, 85-pound dog on her heels — and what she did the next morning says everything about the trap high-achieving women are in.The intrinsic vs. extrinsic success split. The one mindset shift every grounded, thriving leader Meghan interviewed had made — and the University of Rochester research that proves it's not just philosophy, it's survival.What "enough" actually looks like in practice. Meghan and her husband built a concrete definition of enough for their family — and how they use it as a hard line when a case or contract threatens to cross it. This is not abstract. This is a system.The ideal life statement exercise. Before you can change anything, you have to write down what you actually want. Meghan walks through why most people have never done this — and what happens when their current life and their ideal life don't match at all.For the woman who can't just quit. The long-game strategy Meghan got from the women she interviewed, including the internal play one leader ran inside a global consulting firm that gave her an exit ramp years later — without blowing up her life.Your boundaries are modeling behavior. "You cannot expect people to respect your boundaries if you don't respect them yourself." Meghan no longer has work email or Slack on her phone. Full stop. And she explains exactly why that matters for every person on your team.The stat that stops the room. 70% of people say their manager or boss has as much or more impact on their mental health than their spouse. If you lead people, this one is not optional listening.RESOURCES & LINKSBook: This Isn't Working by Meghan French DunbarWebsite: meganfrenchdunbar.comPodcast: Unbehaved with Meghan French DunbarLinkedIn: Meghan French DunbarHer Collective: Send Erica a DM. She'll invite you to sit in on a live Her Collective session as her personal guest. No pressure, no strings attached. BUY THE BOOK - Glass Ceilings and Sticky FloorsConnect with me on LinkedInBe a Book Launch Insider!!!My FREE 5x5 Starter Kit for LinkedInFREE WEEKLY SUCCESS PLANNERJoin our Facebook Group! Find me on InstagramCheck out our PINS on PinterestAnd YES - I'm on TikTok!

Jeremy Hirshberg on Leadership, Burnout, Meaning, and Why Your Boss Shouldn't Sound Like ChatGPTJeremy Hirshberg — organizational psychologist, leadership consultant and executive coach  for Organizational Solutions, founder of Kaleidoscope Collaborative, and host of Resiliency Rounds and The Good Life, Reconsidered — joins the podcast for a wide-ranging conversation on AI, leadership, resilience, and what happens when technology starts moving faster than the human nervous system. Drawing on his work at the Center for Creative Leadership and Booz Allen Hamilton, Jeremy explores how organizations can integrate AI without losing empathy, creativity, psychological safety, or their collective soul.We discuss burnout, “AI theater,” executive anxiety, emotional intelligence, adaptability, meaning-making, and why the future belongs not simply to companies with the best technology — but to those combining high AI capability with being fully human. This taps into an interdependent cultural framework. Along the way we ask uncomfortable questions: What work should humans still own? What decisions should never be delegated to AI? Can mindfulness survive Slack notifications? And is your company innovating… or just panic-Googling the future with better branding?Credits:River is High, Ticketless TravelerCarl Reisman, guitar, singer, and songwriterJenny Goodwine, vocalsJames Singleton, bassJohnny Vidocovich, drumsDave Easley, steel guitarProduced by Morgan Orion Reismanfor more information, carlreisman@gmail.comCopyright 2025WCMI networking group A networking group for mindfulness-focused clinicians dedicated to learning together & collaborating for more information click here

#354: How do you build a consent system for someone who is dead? How do you clone a voice so it cannot be turned into a deep fake? Miles Spencer built a company around those exact questions. Reflekta.ai lets you talk to a reflection of someone who has passed. His own father reads a bedtime story to his granddaughter every night and talks it through until she falls asleep, eight years after he died. Is this just deep fake with better branding? What happens when the AI goes off the rails and asks grandpa for the three numbers on the back of a credit card? Miles has an answer for each one, and most of them land on the same line: you built it, you paid for it, it never leaves your four walls. Nothing gets scraped. There are only two public reflections on the entire platform. The voice of his dad came from a ten-second voicemail found on a relative's phone five years after he was gone, and last month that voice had 9,000 conversations. More than half the stories on Reflekta are from people who are still alive. ALS and Alzheimer's patients getting it all down while they still can. Founders who want their values to outlast them. And that last group is where it gets interesting for anyone who runs a company. New hires talk to the founder during onboarding. Ask a question about the business and the founder answers. SOPs, handbooks, the whole thing, in the voice of the person who built it. Miles calls the framework SoulTech, starting from the emotional weight of the product instead of bolting ethics on at the end. Agree with the premise or not, the stack underneath is less exotic than it sounds: multi-cloud, RAG, three voice vendors swapped by time of day, 110 days from idea to launch. Darin's verdict by the end is honest. The dead-relative part is still not his jam. But the founder who never leaves the building, the one who onboards every new hire forever? That one he gets.   Miles' contact information:  LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/milesspencer/   YouTube channel: https://youtube.com/devopsparadox   Review the podcast on Apple Podcasts: https://www.devopsparadox.com/review-podcast/   Slack: https://www.devopsparadox.com/slack/   Connect with us at: https://www.devopsparadox.com/contact/

Chris Erler bootstrapped ComX from €10,000 and unemployment benefits to €20 million in revenue in four years, becoming a first mover in B2B digital sales in Europe. He sold to private equity at multiples he never imagined. Then the company went through insolvency, and he walked away with nothing the second time around.In this episode, Chris and I get into what it feels like when your first company works on the first try, and what that kind of velocity does to you as a person. We talk about how his ego shifted as the money came in, what it was like to go from founder to employee inside a PE structure, and how his body literally broke down from stress he didn't even register. His spine was deteriorating for a year and he was answering Slack messages in a hospital at 11pm before he even acknowledged something was wrong.We also talk about what the insolvency felt like, how failure carries a completely different stigma in Europe than it does in the US, and why he's now building Erler Ventures to help founders scale without burning out along the way.This is a conversation about the full ride: the highs, the exit, the unraveling, and what success actually means after you've been through all of it. If you've ever built something that started taking more from you than it gave, this one is for you._______(01:05) What "doing things differently" meant growing up in Austria(02:30) What drove him to start his first company(05:00) The goal was financial freedom, not a big idea(07:30) It worked on the first try: €20M in four years(10:15) What that velocity felt like emotionally(12:15) "I tried to spend money. I didn't like it."(14:15) The dopamine kick and the ego trap(15:45) The body breaks: hospital at 11pm, answering Slack(18:15) The PE deal changed everything(19:30) "My why was not there, and that crushed me"(22:30) What the exit money actually felt like(24:30) The shift from founder to employee(25:45) Watching ComX go from acquisition to insolvency(28:30) Why failure carries shame in Europe but not the US(32:00) Building Erler Ventures: helping founders not burn out(35:00) "If your body doesn't work, nothing is fun"Show notes:Find show notes of each episode on ProfitLed.fm. Connect with our host:Follow Melissa on LinkedIn where she shares stories & lessons from her founder journey weekly.Connect with Melissa at melissakwan.com and subscribe to  'your founder next door', Melissa's weekly newsletter on what it's like to build a company without an abundance of resources and friends in high places.Follow @themelissakwan on Instagram and YouTube where she shares short videos of business advice and other truth-bomb sound bites.This podcast was brought to you by eWebinar:Find out how you can turn pre-recorded videos into interactive experiences with chat so you can run your demos, onboarding calls, and training sessions on autopilot, 24/7, without being there. Hop into a demo at eWebinar.com, no salesperson required.

Our Favorite Things: Romans 12:21- Ken WetmoreAs part of the Our Favorite Things series, featuring favorite Bible verses chosen by church members, this message explored Romans 12:21 and the call to overcome evil with good. Through the example of Jesus, it reminds us that love, forgiveness, and grace are more powerful than revenge and retaliation.Let us know your thoughts by reaching out and joining the conversation with your questions and comments using the information below:

WHAT IFWhat if you've done everything right — the climb, the grind, the sacrifices — and the exhaustion you feel isn't a personal failing, but proof that the system was never designed for you to win? Meghan French Dunbar spent over a decade interviewing more than 1,000 leaders to find the ones who figured out how to succeed without destroying themselves — and what she found will change how you define the whole game.SUMMARY & GUEST INTROMeghan French Dunbar is the co-founder of Conscious Company Magazine, creator of the World Changing Women Summit, TEDx speaker, Forbes and Fast Company contributor, host of the podcast Unbehaved, and author of This Isn't Working — a book born from her own collapse on the floor mid-panic attack and the two years of soul-searching that followed. After interviewing nearly 100 additional leaders for the book, Meghan identified a clear, research-backed playbook used by grounded, thriving women at the top — and it looks nothing like what we've been sold. Her work sits at the exact intersection of Erica's mission: naming what's broken, refusing to accept it as normal, and giving women a real path forward.INSIDE THE EPISODEThe panic attack that started it all. Meghan hits the floor of her guest room in 2017 — CEO, six months of runway left, 85-pound dog on her heels — and what she did the next morning says everything about the trap high-achieving women are in.The intrinsic vs. extrinsic success split. The one mindset shift every grounded, thriving leader Meghan interviewed had made — and the University of Rochester research that proves it's not just philosophy, it's survival.What "enough" actually looks like in practice. Meghan and her husband built a concrete definition of enough for their family — and how they use it as a hard line when a case or contract threatens to cross it. This is not abstract. This is a system.The ideal life statement exercise. Before you can change anything, you have to write down what you actually want. Meghan walks through why most people have never done this — and what happens when their current life and their ideal life don't match at all.For the woman who can't just quit. The long-game strategy Meghan got from the women she interviewed, including the internal play one leader ran inside a global consulting firm that gave her an exit ramp years later — without blowing up her life.Your boundaries are modeling behavior. "You cannot expect people to respect your boundaries if you don't respect them yourself." Meghan no longer has work email or Slack on her phone. Full stop. And she explains exactly why that matters for every person on your team.The stat that stops the room. 70% of people say their manager or boss has as much or more impact on their mental health than their spouse. If you lead people, this one is not optional listening.RESOURCES & LINKSBook: This Isn't Working by Meghan French DunbarWebsite: meganfrenchdunbar.comPodcast: Unbehaved with Meghan French DunbarLinkedIn: Meghan French DunbarHer Collective: Send Erica a DM. She'll invite you to sit in on a live Her Collective session as her personal guest. No pressure, no strings attached. BUY THE BOOK - Glass Ceilings and Sticky FloorsConnect with me on LinkedInBe a Book Launch Insider!!!My FREE 5x5 Starter Kit for LinkedInFREE WEEKLY SUCCESS PLANNERJoin our Facebook Group! Find me on InstagramCheck out our PINS on PinterestAnd YES - I'm on TikTok!

Send us Fan MailThe Salesforce job market is finally showing a pulse, but it is not a comeback story. We sit down with Sasha Semyonova, a leading tech journalist at Salesforce Ben, to unpack what the latest hiring signals really mean for Salesforce careers, from admins and developers to architects and ISVs. If you have been watching job boards fill up with “unicorn” roles and deflating salaries, you are not imagining it, and we explain why it keeps happening.We talk candidly about the realities candidates face right now: market saturation, ghost jobs, layoffs, and the growing influence of AI on staffing decisions. Sasha shares what she is seeing across the Salesforce ecosystem, including the shift toward specialized specialists who can blend platform knowledge with business analysis, architecture thinking, and practical AI skills. We also dig into why blasting out AI-generated resumes is a losing strategy for most people and how being undeniably human can still cut through the noise when everyone else looks the same on paper.Then we look ahead. Headless Salesforce, a Slack-first workflow, Agentforce, and rapid UI changes are reshaping how users interact with the platform and what employers will expect next. For ISVs and partners, we cover the pressure to build agent-oriented solutions and the simple question that matters most: what do customers actually want from AI?Subscribe for more honest market breakdowns, share this with someone job hunting in Salesforce, and leave a review with your biggest question about where the ecosystem is headed next.

Get your free travel insurance quote with Faye! https://milestomemories.com/go/faye-travel-insurance/ American Airlines is quietly blocking last-minute partner award space, Alaska is raising its partner and phone booking fees on July 1, and Shawn just had a really bad "five-star" stay at the Grand Hyatt Athens. On this episode of MTM Travel, Shawn and Mark break down the AA award change and who it actually hurts, the Alaska fee increases and how the Summit card can offset them, and a brutal play-by-play of a Hyatt stay gone wrong — slow undersized elevators, road-noise "motel" rooms, burned eggs, no elite recognition, and a manager who hid in the back — all against a flawless stay at the Hyatt Regency Barcelona. Plus why lounges are cracking down on taking food and drinks, the role of private-equity cost-cutting, and how Hyatt only displays its good TripAdvisor reviews. Let us know your own Hyatt experiences down below, and we'll be back Thursday with more travel news. Episode Guide: 0:00 Welcome to MTM Travel 0:19 – Welcome back: Barcelona vs. Colombia (and the "Barthelona" debate) 1:33 – American Airlines blocks last-minute partner award space 5:30 – Alaska raises partner & phone booking fees (July 1) 8:40 – The decline of Hyatt 9:17 – Grand Hyatt Athens: a "five-star" disaster 15:21 – Hyatt Regency Barcelona done right 18:46 – Hyatt's rapid expansion & all-inclusive slide 21:00 – Every problem is a chance to win (or lose) a customer 25:35 – Why can't you take food and drinks from the lounge anymore? 28:18 – Hyatt only shows its good TripAdvisor reviews 30:09 – Final thoughts & what's coming Thursday ✈️ Track your travel credit cards for free

In this episode of The Impostor Syndrome Files, we talk about the pressure high achievers put on themselves and the fears that often drive that pressure beneath the surface. My guest this week is Brendan Cournane, attorney, endurance athlete and author of Seeking Serenity.Brendan shares stories from his decades in law, including the decision to close a major deal on the same day his daughter was born because he feared being seen as unavailable or less committed. He reflects on how stress, expectations and the need to prove ourselves can shape the choices we make at work and in life.In our conversation, we explore the connection between fear and overachievement, why asking for help feels so difficult for many professionals and how self-awareness helps us respond more intentionally under pressure. Brendan also shares why he believes harmony is a more useful goal than balance. Finally, we discuss the role expectations play in impostor syndrome and why understanding our motives, fears and core values is essential to finding greater clarity, steadiness and fulfillment.About My GuestBrendan Cournane is a Certified Professional Coach (CPC) and world-class endurance coach with over 35 years of expertise. After finding his path to recovery in 1989 and discovering the transformative power of running through qualifying for the 100th Boston Marathon in 1995, Brendan learned that mindfulness practice and being true to oneself are integral to achieving happiness and success. He believes and practices the philosophy that “Happiness is a present attitude, not a future condition.”As Chairperson of the Chicago Bar Association Committee on Lawyer Well-Being and Mindfulness and Co-President of the Mindfulness in the Law Society, Illinois Chapter, Brendan specializes in helping professionals facing stress, transition, and burnout. He has been a training coach for charity marathon teams participating in races around the world, including Chicago, Marine Corps, Disney, Dublin, Rome, Paris, London, Stockholm, Berlin, Tokyo, and Antarctica.Through his professional development coaching practice, speaking engagements, and training programs, Brendan offers his lived experience, strength, and hope as a catalyst for others seeking to live healthy, fulfilling lives while maintaining balance in even the most challenging times.~Connect with Brendan:Website: https://www.coachbrendan.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/brendan-cournane-professional-development-coaching~Connect with Kim and The Impostor Syndrome Files:Join the free Impostor Syndrome Challenge:https://www.kimmeninger.com/challengeLearn more about the Leading Humans discussion group:https://www.kimmeninger.com/leadinghumansgroupJoin the Slack channel to learn from, connect with and support other professionals: https://forms.gle/Ts4Vg4Nx4HDnTVUC6Join the Facebook group:https://www.facebook.com/groups/leadinghumansSchedule time to speak with Kim Meninger directly about your questions/challenges: https://bookme.name/ExecCareer/strategy-sessionConnect on LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/kimmeninger/Website:https://www.kimmeninger.com

Being ghosted in sales feels modern, but the problem is ancient. You meet someone at a networking event, have a positive conversation, follow up politely and then hear nothing but crickets. The danger is not only losing the opportunity. The greater risk is either giving up too early or following up so badly that you create brand damage. Professional salespeople need a follow-up rhythm that is persistent, respectful and defensible.  Why do buyers ghost salespeople after a good conversation? Buyers often ghost salespeople because they are overwhelmed, distracted or drowning in messages, not necessarily because they lied about being interested. The professional response is to assume the buyer is busy before assuming bad intent. Executives, managers and business owners receive a tsunami of emails, LinkedIn messages, calendar alerts, Teams notifications, Slack pings and social media updates every day. In Japan, the United States, Europe and across Asia-Pacific, post-pandemic hybrid work has increased digital noise and lowered tolerance for poor follow-up. Younger professionals are also often more text-based because written messages reduce confrontation and create an easy escape route: no reply. The problem is that no sales come from silence. Do now: Treat ghosting as a signal to follow up better, not as permission to disappear. Should salespeople keep following up after no response? Salespeople should keep following up if they genuinely believe they can help the buyer, but the tone must be respectful and benefit-led. Persistence is professional only when it serves the buyer. A second follow-up should acknowledge the buyer's busy schedule and apologise for adding to their inbox. Then it should restate the business benefit clearly. This protects the salesperson from sounding like a pest because the reason for the contact is not desperation, commission or pressure. The reason is value. For B2B sales teams, SMEs and multinational account managers, the question is simple: can this solution help the client improve revenue, productivity, leadership, customer retention or competitive performance? If yes, follow-up is part of service. Do now: In the second email, write briefly, apologise for the inbox intrusion and restate the buyer-centred benefit. How many follow-up emails are reasonable before moving on? Four thoughtful follow-ups are reasonable before concluding that silence probably means no. After that, the salesperson should move on and invest energy in a better buyer. The first message follows the original conversation. The second message politely restates the value. The third can use a slightly different version of the same buyer-focused message. The fourth should be short, unobtrusive and easy to answer. Dean Jackson's famous nine-word email formula is useful here: "Are you still interested in doing something with…?" The blank can reference the solution, business issue or opportunity discussed. This works because it is brief, non-threatening and forces a simple decision. Do now: Build a four-touch follow-up sequence before the meeting, not while emotionally reacting to silence. What should salespeople write in a follow-up email? Salespeople should write follow-up emails that are short, personal and anchored in the buyer's benefit. The goal is not to shame the buyer into replying, but to make responding easy. Forwarding the previous email can be useful, but it can also feel like a subtle accusation: "I wrote to you, and you ignored me." A stronger message starts with humanity. One useful habit is to begin with "Thanks…" because it reminds the salesperson to acknowledge the person before the business point. Another practical technique is to use the buyer's personal name as the subject line. "Tanaka san" or "Taro san" feels more human and lighter than a heavy corporate subject such as "Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Proposal Follow-Up." Do now: Use the buyer's name, open with thanks and make the message easy to read in under 30 seconds. How can salespeople avoid damaging the brand with follow-up? Salespeople avoid brand damage by making every follow-up defensible, polite and connected to helping the buyer succeed. The buyer should feel pursued professionally, not pestered selfishly. People dislike spam because it is irrelevant, impersonal and endless. Sales follow-up becomes dangerous when it feels the same. The salesperson's defence is a clear service mindset: "My commitment is to help your business succeed, and I wanted to make sure you had the option to consider whether this makes sense." That framing works across Japanese business culture, Western B2B sales and relationship-based markets because it respects choice while demonstrating responsibility. The buyer can still say no, but the seller has not abandoned them prematurely. Do now: Prepare your explanation for follow-up before anyone challenges you on it. What should salespeople say when criticised for too much follow-up? Salespeople should calmly explain that consistent follow-up is part of serving customers properly. The answer must be prepared in advance because improvising under criticism often sounds defensive. A strong response might be: "I am sure you teach your own sales team the importance of serving customers, and that means doing the follow-up consistently and properly. That is why you are hearing from me. We are here to help your business beat your rivals and do better." This is a powerful reframe. Many executives privately wish their own salespeople were more persistent, organised and dedicated. The key is confidence without arrogance. The seller is not apologising for professionalism; they are explaining it. Do now: Write and rehearse your follow-up pushback response so it sounds natural, calm and buyer-centred. Conclusion: When does ghosting mean no? Ghosting does not automatically mean no after the first unanswered email. It may mean the buyer is busy, distracted, overwhelmed or buried under digital noise. The professional salesperson keeps going with tact, humility and a clear business reason. After four follow-ups, however, silence is probably the answer. At that point, move on and find a new buyer. The rule is simple: always allow the buyer to say "no" for themselves. Do not second-guess them by failing to follow up. Equally, do not damage your brand by chasing forever. FAQs Is being ghosted in sales always a rejection? No, being ghosted often means the buyer is overloaded, distracted or has lost track of the message. Salespeople should assume busyness first and rejection later. What is the best subject line for a follow-up email? A personal name is often the strongest subject line because it feels human and easy to open. For Japanese buyers, using polite forms such as "Tanaka san" can be appropriate depending on the relationship. How many times should I follow up with a buyer? Four respectful follow-ups are a practical limit before treating silence as a no. After that, the salesperson should move on to better-qualified opportunities. What should I say if a buyer complains about my follow-up? Explain that your follow-up is based on helping their business and giving them the option to decide. Keep the tone calm, respectful and focused on value. Author Bio Dr. Greg Story, Ph.D. in Japanese Decision-Making, is President of Dale Carnegie Tokyo Training and Adjunct Professor at Griffith University. He is a two-time winner of the Dale Carnegie "One Carnegie Award" and recipient of the Griffith University Business School Outstanding Alumnus Award. As a Dale Carnegie Master Trainer, Greg is certified to deliver globally across leadership, communication, sales and presentation programmes, including Leadership Training for Results. He has written several books, including three best-sellers — Japan Business Mastery, Japan Sales Mastery and Japan Presentations Mastery — along with Japan Leadership Mastery and How to Stop Wasting Money on Training. His works have been translated into Japanese, including Za Eigyō（ザ営業）, Purezen no Tatsujin（プレゼンの達人）, Torēningu de Okane o Muda ni Suru no wa Yamemashō（トレーニングでお金を無駄にするのはやめましょう）and Gendaiban "Hito o Ugokasu" Rīdā（現代版「人を動かす」リーダー）. Greg also publishes daily business insights on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter, and hosts six weekly podcasts. On YouTube, he produces The Cutting Edge Japan Business Show, Japan Business Mastery and Japan's Top Business Interviews, which are followed by executives seeking success strategies in Japan.

Warum sind wir eigentlich ständig beschäftigt, aber trotzdem nie wirklich fertig? Zwischen To-Do-Listen, E-Mail-Inbox, Slack, Kalendern, Social Media und den berühmten Man-müsste-mal-Aufgaben entsteht schnell das Gefühl, dass Produktivität vor allem aus Reagieren besteht. Genau hier setzen wir an und sprechen darüber, warum Zeitmanagement oft gar kein Zeitmanagement ist, sondern Selbstverwaltung, Priorisierung und ein ziemlich ehrlicher Blick auf den eigenen Alltag.In dieser Episode ist Dirk Deimeke zu Gast, Systems Engineer bei der Swisscom, Open-Source-Enthusiast, Podcaster und Buchautor. Mit ihm diskutieren wir Methoden wie Getting Things Done, Inbox Zero, Time-Blocking, Eat the Frog und die Zwei-Minuten-Regel. Wir sprechen über Doomscrolling, Digital Wellbeing, Benachrichtigungen, persönliche To-Do-Systeme, Notizen-Chaos, Kalenderpflege und die Frage, warum Tools selten das eigentliche Problem lösen. Außerdem geht es um Gewohnheiten, Reviews, Overcommitment, Stressbewältigung, Work-Life-Balance für Wissensarbeit und darum, wie du einen Methoden-Mix findest, der wirklich zu deinem Workflow passt.Wenn du dich schon mal gefragt hast, wie du fokussierter arbeitest, weniger vergisst, bewusster priorisierst und trotz Job, Side Projects, Open Source, Podcast, Familie oder Tech Community nicht komplett im Task-Berg versinkst, dann ist diese Folge für dich. Oder anders gesagt: Vielleicht brauchst du kein neues Tool, sondern nur den Mut, mal einen Task zu löschen.Unsere aktuellen Werbepartner findest du auf https://engineeringkiosk.dev/partnersDas schnelle Feedback zur Episode:

More Americans are falling back on artificial intelligence for tasks that involve reading. ABC's Jim Ryan tells us more.

Keith talks with data-driven investor Neal Bawa, the "mad scientist of multifamily," about why apartment values have dropped 20%–30% while single-family prices have stayed resilient.  They break down how interest rate shocks, the homeowner lock-in effect, and a wave of new multifamily supply are reshaping returns for today's investors.  Keith and Neal also dissect the build-to-rent model—who it really serves, how apartment oversupply is pressuring its rents, and why pending legislation could upend the space.  Neal closes with a specific, data-backed timeline for when multifamily rents and values may finally turn the corner, giving listeners a concrete roadmap instead of vague market guesses. Resources: Grocapitus Website - https://www.grocapitus.com Multifamily U's Free eBook: Location Magic - https://multifamilyu.com/lp/location-magic-ebook/ Multifamily U's Investor Club – https://multifamilyu.com/club Episode Page: GetRichEducation.com/609 For access to properties or free help with a GRE Investment Coach, start here: GREmarketplace.com GRE Free Investment Coaching: GREinvestmentcoach.com Get mortgage loans for investment property: RidgeLendingGroup.com or call 855-74-RIDGE  or e-mail: info@RidgeLendingGroup.com Invest with Freedom Family Investments.  For predictable 10-12% quarterly returns, visit FreedomFamilyInvestments.com/GRE or text  FAMILY to 66866  Unlock truly passive real estate income—visit flockhomes.com/GRE today to see if your properties qualify for a 721 exchange with Flock Homes. To get in the best physical, mental, and professional shape of your life, go to DanielThomasHind.com and apply for Daniel's intensive 1-on-1 coaching for burnt-out entrepreneurs and executives. Will you please leave a review for the show? I'd be grateful. Search "how to leave an Apple Podcasts review"  For advertising inquiries, visit: GetRichEducation.com/ad Best Financial Education: GetRichEducation.com Get our wealth-building newsletter free— GREletter.com  Our YouTube Channel: www.youtube.com/c/GetRichEducation Follow us on Instagram: @getricheducation Complete episode transcript:   Keith Weinhold  0:00   Keith, welcome to GRE. I'm your host, Keith Weinhold. The single-family real estate market is steady, but with apartment building values down 20 to 30% since 2022 when will the multifamily Armageddon end? We ask our qualified guest, and how will slowing birth rates in immigration affect real estate? And more today on Get Rich Education. You know, Mid South Home Buyers, that top Memphis turnkey provider. I learned that a secret weapon behind their explosive growth is more than just you buying their properties, it's an executive coach for nine years now, their CEO, Terry Kerr, and his COO, Pat Nix, have worked privately with a coach who I've now learned from too, and he doesn't market himself online anywhere. After 12 years behind the scenes, that coach is now making himself available exclusively for GRE listeners. His name is Daniel Thomas Hind. If you're a hard-charging business owner or investor who wants to get in the best shape of your life, physically, mentally, and professionally, you can fill out an application for a free consult. This is private one on one coaching for those willing to go to uncommon lengths to achieve uncommon results. Thanks to Daniel, we've all become better leaders, better operators, and better men. It started by showing up for ourselves. Now it's your turn. Go to Daniel Thomas hind.com H I N D, that's Daniel Thomas hind.com and sign up before Spotsville Flock homes helps multifamily owners exit the operator grind, whether it's your six plex or a 50 unit apartment, through a 721 exchange. This defers your capital gains tax. It's a strategy long used by institutions. Now you can swap tenants and toilets for passive income and zero management. Request your initial valuations. See if your property qualifies at flockhomes.com/gre That's F L O C K homes dot com slash G R E.   Neal Bawa  2:13   You're listening to the show that has created more financial freedom than nearly any show in the world. This is Get Rich Education.   Keith Weinhold  2:29   Welcome to GRE from Valencia, Spain to Valencia, California, and across 188 nations worldwide. America's favorite shaved mammal on a microphone is back with you for another wealth building week. I'm Keith Weinhold, and you're listening to Get Rich Education. The world's biggest problems are the world's biggest businesses. That's not a coincidence, and that's why we discuss housing here. And there's been a chronic shortage of affordable housing last month at a commencement speech, Harrison Ford, yes, the guy that played both Han Solo and Indiana Jones, talked about how a fulfilling life has both passion and purpose. Passion is what gets you out of bed in the morning, purpose is what helps you sleep at night, you and I. We can bring this mindset to our lifestyle, to the business we do, and to our investing. Treating tenants well is what helps real estate investors sleep well at night. While we're doing well, we can be doing good too. Multifamily syndicators keep failing, going out of business, and losing all of their investors' money due to mortgage rate resets. It just keeps happening. What this really means, that these groups that pooled together investor money to buy apartment buildings, largely that were set up in 2022 and earlier keep blowing up almost fully due to the fact that interest rates reset higher. Some of them had a fixed rate for five years. Well, rates spiked four years ago, and that's why a lot of them have yet to blow up, and these apartments have lost so much value that no one will refinance them, you know. Even if that apartment operator increased the net operating income over the years, even if rents went up, it doesn't matter. So, you still haven't heard the last of it. Do you remember a couple years ago, when a lot of people in the apartment space, they were saying just stay alive till 25 and that nonsense, like if you keep your head above water until 2025 oh well, then rates are certainly going to fall, and everyone's going to be okay. Well, 2025 is long gone.    Keith Weinhold  5:01   Mortgage rates haven't fallen in any significant way, so that survive until 25 thing or whatever mantra derivative people used that was a farce, like I've said on the show here for years. You cannot predict interest rates, so I didn't make the call that they were going to go up or down at all, because you can't predict them, but so many people said, oh, rates will fall substantially by now, no way, you just can't make that assumption, you've got to take history over hunches, and all of that, a lot of those multifamily deals 100% depended. depended on refinancing at favorable rates, and that's exactly why they failed. A surefire way to look foolish is to predict interest rates. We'll talk more about the multifamily Armageddon with today's guest. I also want to get into what's called the 21st century road to housing act, because that became one of the most hotly debated housing policy provisions this year. And what this is, is a Senate bill, and it would require certain large institutional investors that develop these bills to rent single family communities. It would force them to sell those homes to individual buyers within seven years. So, in other words, what a big firm could do is build a neighborhood of rental homes, lease them for up to seven years, but they couldn't hold on to them any longer than that. They couldn't hold them indefinitely as rentals, this bill is not aimed at you, the individual investor. It is aimed at big institutions, and what I mean by that is that's generally defined as owning 350 or more homes. That's what we're talking about here. Small landlords and mom and pop investors are not the target, it targets corporate portfolios, and this means groups whose names you've probably heard of, like Blackstone, First Key Homes, Progress Residential, and Invitation Homes. They are some of the heavyweights that the government is looking to clamp down on, so whenever you hear someone talk about big Wall Street landlords, that is who they're talking about. Now, some groups are pretty worried about the 21st Century Road to Housing Act, like the NHB, that's the National Association of Home Builders, and a lot of multifamily groups are concerned, and why is that? Well, the effect is it could dramatically reduce new housing production.   Keith Weinhold  7:44   See, a big institution like First Key Homes or Blackstone, they wouldn't want to even get into this business anymore. They wouldn't want to build big build to rent communities anymore if they have to sell them all within seven years. See, they want to buy and hold for the long term, kind of like what you and I are doing, because you and I know that owning a group of selective buy and hold single family rentals is a really profitable place to be, but so if they don't want to build, then that creates a reduction in supply, which could make prices go up, and then obviously hurt those trying to afford their own home. Well, that would defeat the purpose of this whole thing. I mean, my gosh, this always seems to happen when government gets involved. So, the 21st Century Road to Housing Act could limit supply, which is the exact opposite of its intent to get first-time home buyers into their first home, and if this passes, it does have bipartisan support. This lower supply, then yes, indeed puts upward pressure on prices. Just amazing. So then it could actually go on to help the everyday mom and pop investor, like you and I, that already owns property, the individual at last check, though they're looking to pass a version that still restricts some of these giant institutions from getting into build to rents, but yet it does not have that seven year sale requirement. What's really important to remember here is that Washington, they're looking to stifle big Wall Street players from the rental market, which could reduce supply. They're not targeting individual investors. The context that's important is that these groups, they own 10s of 1000s of homes, they don't own hundreds of 1000s, and they don't own a million, so it's a really small percentage of the housing market, whatever direction policy breaks, then the headlines that it creates are just greater in magnitude than the effect on the market is. It's an important frame of reference here. Let's meet this week's guest. This week we're welcoming back a guest that we haven't heard from in a year or two in real estate circles. He is popularly known as the mad scientist of multifamily. He's quite an in-demand speaker. He has a $500 million multifamily portfolio that he essentially shares with over 1300 investors. He's sharp, a good educator, and a straight shooter. That's why he's here. It's a warm welcome back to Neal Bawa.   Neal Bawa  10:32   Thanks for having me on the show again. It's delightful to be here, and so many interesting things to talk about in the world these days.   Keith Weinhold  10:38   There really are.. I don't know if we can get it all in, Bawa is spelled B A W A. Neal, I want to get to your future housing market outlook later. How you think the future looks, including when multi families quasi Armageddon might end. But first, you're known as a data driven real estate guy. Tell us about that, and how being data driven makes you profitable.   Neal Bawa  11:03   I see concern, and I'll tell you why. The single family and multifamily market have been atrociously incredibly divergent since the first quarter of 2022 They have not tracked yet each other at all, even though if you look at the last 50 years, they tend to track each other. So you know, 2008 was a Armageddon for single family, Armageddon for multifamily, and they both sort of came up in 2012 2013 and then they had a really good time until Covid.   Keith Weinhold  11:30   Yeah,   Neal Bawa  11:31   but the second quarter of 2022 is when Fed started raising rates, and since then we've sort of slid - multifamily has gone down in terms of pricing between 20 and 30% depending upon the metro, you know, and depending upon whether it's new construction, new construction assets have gone down more than 30% and existing assets that are filled up have gone down by 20 to 30% depending upon the metro. So, metros that have a large amount of supply, closer to 30% decline in value, the metros that have less supply probably closer to 20% decline in value, right.   Keith Weinhold  12:03   Demand demand has been pretty resilient. It's more of a supply story.   Neal Bawa  12:06   It's a huge supply story, right. So, if you look at, you know, occupancy, essentially what's happened is there was so much supply that came in that really people started on those projects in 2022 maybe they didn't start a construction until 2023 they didn't finish construction until 2025 so they started leasing up in 2025 They had to give offer concessions two months, sometimes three months free, and so that pushed down the rents in 2025. And they're not done, because you typically can't rent an apartment in six months. If it's brand new, it's going to take you about 18 months to rent it, and sometimes 24 months, and so it's affected our rents in 2025 it's affecting our rents in 2026. Now it's unlikely to affect it in 2027 but we'll go there, you know, at a later stage. But at the moment, we, what we've seen is negative rent growth in the United States for multifamily for the last 12 to 15 months, and what I think is going to be negative rent growth in Q of this year and Q2 of this year, so Q1 was negative, Q2, which we are in now, is likely to be negative or flat now. Single family, on the other hand, has gone in a different direction, which has been very difficult to understand, and I believe it's taken me a while to really understand this, but I think I've finally figured it out. Single family prices are not down since 2022 which makes no sense at all, because the average mortgage in the United States today is almost double, almost double, not quite double, but almost double of what it was in at the beginning of 2022 when interest rates were about 3.3 3.4% Right now we're sitting around, you know, six and a half percent interest rates, so not quite doubled interest rates, but they've obviously gone up a fair bit, and as a result, your average, you know, mortgage has almost doubled, but home prices haven't dropped, which makes no sense if you really think about it, because home prices are a factor of demand, and they're also a factor of people's ability to pay, so if all of a sudden within four years you're paying, the mortgage is doubled, then less people are going to be able to buy, but it stayed up, the market has stayed up, and the biggest reason it stayed up is because of what is known as the lock-in effect. So, the US market typically has a million new homes every year, and there's more than a million existing homes that are transacted, right? So, it's an open market, it's a perfect competition market, but it hasn't been perfect competition for the last four years, because so many people locked in ridiculously low interest rates.    Neal Bawa  14:28   Perfect example, in 2021 and 2022 I have a 15 year mortgage at 1.75% If I sell my house back to myself, my mortgage quadruples, quadruples, right, because it goes from 1.75% to six and a half percent, so I can't even imagine even think about leaving my home, right, because it's just such a perfect loan. Most people don't have anywhere near 1.75% but there's lots of people with more mortgages in the 3% three and a half percent, and 4% range that basically can't go anywhere, and because those homes are not coming into the market. The last three years the market has had this unusual not enough supply factor, and that's been keeping prices up. That is ending. That is ending, because what we've been tracking is the percentage of homes in the United States that have low mortgages. Low is simply defined as anything under four and a half percent, and that percentage is going down each quarter, because you know divorces happen, deaths happen, you know people move for jobs, and so every time that happens, that locked in rate goes away, because you sell your home and move on, and so for a while that lock in effect was predominant, it was controlling everything, but as time has gone on, interest rates were higher in 2324 2526 For also almost four years have passed since the rate started going up. So each quarter the percentage of homes in the US that have these low interest rates has slowly moved down, and we're almost back to a normal timeframe.   Neal Bawa  15:53   And this is causing the single family market to not have a conniption, but we're starting to see a balancing of the market, where it's not just a buyer's market anymore, in some places it's actually seller's market, some places it's a buyer's market. So we're now starting to see home prices drop in number of markets in the United States. I can't say that they've dropped in super majors, but we're seeing a flattening out effect of home prices in most metros in the US, and there should be a flattening effect. Just to be blunt, I mean, obviously I own a bunch of single-family homes, so I just wanted them to keep going up for selfish reasons. But if you think about it, we had huge home price growth in like 30 plus percent in number of years, 2021 22 and even 23 and during those years, salaries only went up by two to 3% a year. In one year, they went up by 4% and rents also went up like crazy. There was a 2021 was 15% rent growth year. So, at some point, there had to be an adjustment, and we are in that period of adjustment where single family prices are basically flat on a national basis. Yes, going up in the San Francisco Bay Area because of AI, and going up in a couple other technology-heavy metros because of AI, but otherwise fairly flat, and I don't expect that to change for the next year. So, my forecast is next 12 to 18 months, home prices in the US are going to be flat on a nominal basis, they're going to be down on an inflation-adjusted basis, but you know, because of the Iran, more inflation's three and a half percent, so home prices should go up three and a half percent. So, if they stay where they are, well, they're really dropping three and a half percent.   Keith Weinhold  17:29   Yeah, before this year began, I released our forecast, it was for 2% nominal home price appreciation in the one to four unit space for the US this year, and I still like how that looks. There's so much to unpack with what you just talked about. In my view, there's nothing unusual at all that when mortgage rates rose sharply a few years ago, that home prices rose as well. Why? Because actually, that's what usually happens, which is counterintuitive to most people. In all of our lifetimes, residential real estate prices have only fallen significantly one time, that was around 2008 due to a number of unusual circumstances. The only thing that's a bit different this time is, of course, how fast rates increased in 2022 and 2023 and people wondering if residential real estate prices could still keep up, and they certainly have, but yeah, you brought up this dichotomy, this bifurcation about how the apartment market and the one to four unit space kind of separated from each other in 2022 or 2023 That's what's so interesting.   Neal Bawa  18:36   I do want to point out a couple things, though, and I don't want to be a Pollyanna here and talk about negative stuff, but I think that there's big difference between 2008 and that timeframe and where we are today, and that difference is, and it has multiple parts. Not all of your audience is aware of this. Until about 2012 the United States had very reasonable birth rates. You know, we were one of those countries that had avoided the debacle that Japan, Korea, China, and a number of other countries are seeing South Korea being the absolute worst, where basically they were producing one baby per generation, where you need about 2.2 babies just to kind of keep your population where it is, right, and the US was unusually high in that, and that we were still above that threshold, which meant that our population would continue to grow and not fall. Now, there was two reasons our population was growing: One, we had more than 2.2 babies per household, and second, we had a very significant amount of legal and a very significant amount of illegal or undocumented immigration. Right, so we had both of those pipelines today. All three of those have flipped, so the United States now basically looks like Korea or China or Japan in that every household is producing about one and a half babies, which means that our population growth, which hasn't stopped yet, because it takes a while for these things to catch. Up is likely to stop, like it's, and at some point decline again. Luckily, we're not there yet. The US is a fairly young population, unlike Japan, which is one of the oldest populations in the world. So, it'll, we'll still continue to see population growth, but there is no doubt. And you can ask Chat GPT, right? How has population growth in the United States slowed over the last 20 years.    Neal Bawa  19:22   Make me a graph, and it will make you a very nice graph, and you'll very clearly see there's a slowdown in population growth. The second part is both documented and undocumented immigration. It's my estimate that since this administration took over, somewhere between half 1,000,001 million people have left the United States. Now it's very difficult to get an actual number, as you can imagine. A number of these people were undocumented, so we didn't really know how many there were to begin with. And a number of them, when they left, they also left by an undocumented rate, that you know, path. So we've lost a bunch of those people, and also the people that have stayed in the country, we've lost a number of them in the workforce. Here's a perfect anecdote, Keith. About 33% of the construction workforce in the United States was undocumented, one in three. In Texas, as much as 40%   Keith Weinhold  19:45   Yeah, that's huge.   Neal Bawa  19:45   It's very significant. Number of those people don't show up for work anymore. I don't think they've left the US, at least I don't think so. But they don't show up for work anymore, because that's how they get caught, right. So, what we've seen is that the construction workforce in the United States has become been decimated over the last 12 months, and the impact is much greater in the second half of 2025 than the first half. Why? Because even though they wanted to do ICE enforcement, they just simply didn't have enough agents, enough facilities, enough judges. When the second half of last year, they sort of started catching up on that, hiring more agents, getting more facilities, getting more judges, and so we started to see a real challenge there. I have properties in 10 markets in the US, and what I can say is about seven of those markets, mostly Southern markets, I am beginning to see dropping occupancy related to this phenomenon. I'm seeing a reduction, and so markets like Georgia and Texas, Florida are more hit than my northern markets like Idaho. I haven't seen any impact at all, but these southern markets, multiple properties, multiple metros, I'm seeing this - people, mostly of Spanish, Mexican origin, not renewing leases. I don't know what they're doing. I don't know if they're sleeping in their cars. I don't know if they're basically just, you know, staying with mom or staying with, you know, some other family. But I'm seeing a very, very big pullback in my leases tied to this, and occupancy is dropping in those markets that are heavily Hispanic. And so I'm seeing the impact of that on landlords, but I also know that there's an impact on the US at all, and overall demand on rentals, whether it's single family or multifamily. This is a significant impact, because I don't think that the Republicans are going to make a U-turn on this. I don't want to get political, but you know, stating the obvious.   Keith Weinhold  19:45   Yes, United States had its biggest birth year in 2007 when there were more than 4 million babies born. The average age of the first time homebuyer today is 40 years old. If that holds true, that peak would take place in 2047 And then, yes, to your point about changes in immigration, yes, it sounds like a potentially a reduction in demand with what you're talking about, with some vacancies, and also maybe a reduction in supply when you have fewer construction workers to build these places as well, we're talking about building properties. Neal, I want to talk to you about the build to rent space. Somewhat is build to rent better than traditional real estate? I think that's what we really want to know. And for those that don't know, build to rent means when you construct a property where from day one that construction project is built for a tenant, not an owner occupant. I see a lot of pros and cons there. Can you talk to us about the trade-offs between build to rent and traditional real estate?   Neal Bawa  19:52   Yeah, if you think about it, it's a really terrible word, built to rent, because if you think about the word built to rent should be apartments, right, but actually doesn't mean apartments, right? So, built to rent actually means single family or town homes that were built to rent out, right? And then you're like, why don't they just said built to rent apartments and town homes? Well, you know, was too long an acronym, and we suck at acronyms anyway. But BTR, or built to rent, is essentially building single family or town homes, but specifically building them to rent, and it doesn't include any apartments at all, right? And the reason why the BTR market was growing in the last five or six years is that roughly 18 million American families can no longer afford to buy starter single family homes, you know, and by starter I mean, small old single-family homes. That's how Americans usually started, you know, in their 20s and 30s. They would buy these homes, some of them, but they would fix up, and then they over time, in their 30s, late 30s and 40s and 50s, they would upgrade, and then at starting the 50s, it would flatten out, and then the 60s, they would start to downgrade, right? That's been a typical thing that's happened in America for 56 5070, years. Well, that is, cannot happen anymore. And it broke in 2022 until 2022 It was a normal cycle beyond 2022 because interest rates almost doubled, and the mortgages almost doubled, but the incomes only increased by 10 to 20% There became this orphaned generation of Americans, roughly 18 million families, that simply cannot afford to buy that starter home, and they are now forever renters. They don't know it. They think that they're going to catch up at some point, but five minutes with an Excel spreadsheet, I could prove it to them that they're not going to catch up.    Neal Bawa  25:35   Maybe one in 100 families would see a very large increase in income, and that would result in them catching up, but for the most part, as a group, these 18 million families, they're forever enters as a group that didn't exist before 2021 right. It's entirely because of this outrageous increase in mortgages, while not seeing a drop in home prices, that led to this, and so those orphan families, they actually earn pretty well, so these are families that make 70, 80, $90,000 in mid markets. They make over $100,000 if they're living on the coasts or in expensive markets, and they still can't buy that, you know, starter home. And so they don't want to live in apartments. I have lots of apartments, old ones, new ones, and I want these people to live there, but they don't want to live there, and so they've been looking for an option, and that option has been developers like me building communities of 200 300 townhomes or single family homes with a small little yard, and then basically from day one, instead of selling them, renting them out, and then once you're done renting out the whole community with 200 tenants, then you sell that to an apartment company. You know, there's lots of apartment companies in the US that have 100,000 units. Well, they want to buy these because the turnover is lower. So, what happens is most of these town homes and single-family homes for rent. Families come in, and they typically rent for three to five years before they move, whereas in on my apartments I lose 40% of my tenants each year. So, if I have 200 tenants, I lose 80 of them every year, and I have to basically go back, clean up those units, deal with the vacancy. But when I have townhome communities like my Idaho Falls townhome community. I lose a tenant at roughly every four years, and so, as you can imagine, profitability goes up when turnover goes down, right?   Neal Bawa  27:31   Because you don't have that cost of turnover and vacancy, and so eventually those large landlords that are holding 100,000 units figured out, I like this, what Neal Bawa is doing, he's building these 200 townhomes, I want to buy these from him when they're rented. I don't want to build them, I don't want to lease them up, I just want to buy them when they're stabilized. And so BTR became that name for that marketplace where developers would build townhomes and single families, rent them out, and then sell them to institutional, and it was some—   Keith Weinhold  27:56   People think of fabulous institutionalization of the starter home.   Neal Bawa  28:00   And in many ways it is, because what happened is, for a while, these institutional players, like Blackstone and BlackRock, they were like, we are just going to go out and buy 50,000 single-family homes, and that's going to be the institutionalized. Well, that worked really well if you bought in 2008 2009 2010 2011 because you got them bought them at a discount, but when they started buying them in 2015, 16, 17, 18 at ever higher prices, they didn't make any money. So the vast majority of these public funds that were created to buy large amounts of single family have failed if they've purchased anything in the last seven or eight years. If they bought before that, they made huge amounts of money. Family homes are so expensive that basically buying them for rental did not make sense, so these companies have now pivoted to saying we'll only buy communities that have 100 or 200 or 300 of these homes, because then we get the benefits of having centralized leasing, centralized property management, centralized maintenance, and I don't have homes spread all over the metro, they're all in one place, and I can make more profit from that. In theory, that's been good, and you might think that I'm bullish on BTR, but I'm actually today bearish on BTR for one single reason. About seven months ago, Republicans started talking about a bill - I don't know what the name of the bill is, but what this bill does is it forces builds to rent developers like me within seven years of building the property to sell all of the homes in that property to single family tenants, not to Blackstone, not to Blackrock, but to single family tenants. Hasn't passed yet, but it passed the Senate with an 8910 vote, which means that both Democrats and Republicans wanted to vote for this. If it passes the House, and because Donald Trump himself is very heavily opposed to it, he's made it very clear he doesn't like this. He's a developer, obviously. It hasn't passed the House yet, but if it passes the house, that will destroy the build to rent market. No one will ever build build to rent, because the worst possible thing is I build this, and within seven years I have to actually sell it to individual buyers. If I do that, my banks are going to hate me and not give me loans to build BTR anymore. Obviously, there's going to be some grandfathering to the communities that I'm building now, or maybe even build the ones that I'm building in 2027 maybe grandfathered. It usually is, because you know, Congress never does anything retroactively, and they give you a year or two, but if it passes, it's doomsday for BTR. I hope it doesn't happen, but that's the way it's looking, because it's bipartisan. Bipartisan bills are more likely to pass   Keith Weinhold  30:40   Now for the mom and pop investor, the individual investor build to rents have obvious appeal due to your point about the lower turnover, lower maintenance costs on a new build, lower insurance costs often on a new build, and then there's the tenant appeal to a new build as well, but of course there is that investor downside. I think a lot of investors are aware of their thin initial cash flow that they're going to have on build to rent, but you know, Neal, another downside with build to rent, I think a lot of investors don't look at is, hey, just how many of these things are they building? Are they building 500 of them? Do I have some overbuild risk if I buy into this community that could suppress occupancy and rents for a while.   Neal Bawa  31:21   What we've seen is that when Built to Rent started out in 2017-2018 it was its own asset class. It wasn't competing with apartments, it wasn't competing with single family rentals, it was just its own thing. However, in the last two or three years, as more and more apartments flooded the marketplace, we had a glut. It moved away from that. It basically started getting affected, and the rent started falling, just like any other portion of the market. You know, think of it as three portions of market. There's the built to rent, which I described, you know, brand new single family homes, town homes per rent. There's the apartments, both brand new and existing, and there's the single family rentals, right, which there are millions of. What we are seeing now is it's become one market, right? All of them are affecting each other, and the apartments, which have a huge amount of glut, there's a massive amount of new apartments that have come in in the last two years, are really pushing the rents down for single family, they're pushing that rents down for BTR. So, at this point, what I would say to people that have this concern, Keith, is simply look at incoming apartment supply, because if you're in a marketplace, and I'll give you examples of really good markets that are crushed right now. If you're in a market that has a lot of incoming supply, whether you buy a single family rental, a quadplex, a 50 plex that's an apartment, or 100 unit BTR, you're going to suffer for rent growth if you have a lot of incoming supply in 2026 and that is across the board in every market in the US. Huntsville, Alabama is, in my opinion, one of the most interesting markets in the US for 5 year, 10 year growth, right?    Neal Bawa  32:54   If I had to say you don't need a loan, it's just your own cash, no investors, where would you put money in? It would be at the top of my list, not at the very top. Idaho Falls is definitely the number one market in the US in my list, but Huntsville is up there. But right now, do you know what rent growth in Huntsville is? Minus 2% negative 2% Why? Because there's 6000 units coming into a market that's, you know, 1/5 or 1/10 the size of Phoenix, right. It's 1/10 the size of Dallas, but it has half the units of Dallas or Phoenix coming in, and so rent growth is negative there. So, what I would say is today absolutely everyone that is an investor should understand that we live in the magic world of AI, and you should be talking with Chat GPT about incoming supply for any market that you're interested in, and using that to make your decisions, because all of these markets merged, BTR, new apartments, old apartments, single family, everything has emerged in the last 24 months, where they're all affecting each other, and if there's too much supply of any one kind, it's affecting all of the other markets, and that's the message that I have. And none of this is like you have to go buy a $25,000 software like Costar today. Chat GPT is your costar.   Keith Weinhold  34:11   You're listening to Get Rich Education. We're talking with the mad scientist of multifamily, Neal Bawa, where we come back, including what he thinks about recovery for the beleaguered multifamily market. I'm your host, Keith Weinhold. 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What I like is that their team walks you through how it all works, so you can decide if it aligns with your portfolio and income goals. Every investment carries risk, and nothing is guaranteed, but with a track record of consistent on-time investor payouts, they built real credibility. Go to freedomfamilyinvestments.com to book a clarity call, or text family 268 66 That's Family 266 866    Speaker 1  36:00   This is the star of the A E Show, The Real Estate Commission. Todd Rollette. Listen to Get Rich Education with my friend Keith Weinhold, and don't quit your daydream.   Keith Weinhold  36:20   Welcome back to Get Rised Education. We're talking with Neal Bawa, a really sharp multifamily syndicator who's also highly data driven. And Neal, tell us more about the beleaguered multifamily market that had those aforementioned problems really cropping up in 2022 and we had a lot of supply and spiking rates. What does it look like for the path to recovery for the US multifamily market?   Neal Bawa  36:45   Luckily, demand is strong, and even though occupancies have dropped, typically the multifamily market, the large multifamily market in the US, tends to be between 95 and 96% occupied. Okay, and right now we're on 93% so that all that incoming supply means that about 7% of our apartments in the US are empty at the moment, we're trying to fill them, and we are seeing that occupancy drop, not across just new apartments that are leasing up, but also drop in class B and class C. We've also seen a huge increase in concessions, so I studied this quite obsessively, and I can tell you that 2026 in some markets is the recovery year, but not across the board in the United States, and the reason for that is sentiment. Once renters get used to huge amounts of concessions, it's like a drug, it takes a little while before you wean those renters off of those drugs, and so there's that hit right now. Every renter program,   Keith Weinhold  37:44   Everyone wants their freebie for good.    Neal Bawa  37:46   Yeah, exactly. It's like, hey, what, you're not giving me two months free? Hey, what, you're not even offering me one month free? It takes a while for that expectation to happen, because there's such a huge amount of concessions in the US. So, to me, there are a few markets, usually the smaller markets or very fast growing markets, where there's a recovery in 2026 but otherwise 2027 The first half of 2027 is recovery. The second half of 2027 is fast rent growth in a lot of markets. Why? Because remember, interest rates have been high since 2023 A lot of projects were started in 2022 went into construction in 23 came to market in 25 and 26 Lease ups are happening in 25 and 26 By early mid 27 these are all leased up, right? The second half of 2027 there isn't a lot of delivery in any of these big markets, because to deliver in the second half of 27 you would have started construction in that second half of 2025 and I counted those permits market by market. There's just not a lot, because by that time everyone knew that projects were not getting funded, everyone knew that interest rates were high, so there wasn't a lot of supply of new starts in the apartment market in the second half of 25 so there's not going to be a lot of delivery in the second half of 27 and all of the existing stuff would have been leased by then. So 2026 is one of those years where we could still see more concessions in the second half of 2026 I still see rent growth for apartments to be flat. You mentioned single family might be a little bit higher. It tends to be a little bit higher than apartments in terms of rent growth, but I think flat rent growth for 2026 is what I'm projecting. I'm projecting small rent growth in the first half of 2027 for most markets, and then I'm projecting robust rent growth, call it 3% or greater on an annualized basis, in the second half of 2027 and I'm projecting that most markets in the US that are not seeing a population drop, so count out places like Detroit are going to see a very aggressive rent growth, four or 5% rent growth, that's aggressive in our world, in 2028 28 and 29 are shaping up to be. Supply deficit years, years where supply is well under demand.   Keith Weinhold  40:05   It's pretty easy to project completions when you just go ahead and look at starts, and really, what you're counting is the story of absorption.   Neal Bawa  40:14   Yep, and what's nice about apartments is you can actually build a single family home in about nine months, right, but you can't build apartments in less than 24 months. There's just so much permitting issues, there's so many delivery issues, fire code issues, and so we have a crystal ball on the multifamily side that we are now getting better at using. I don't think the industry was very good at this in 2022 but now we're really all obsessed with how many permits does my metro have, and how many permits does my state, and how many permits does the US have? And everyone that I know in the industry that's data driven knows that there's a massive glut now, maybe a little bit of a glutton that remaining portion of 2026 equilibrium in 27 and a huge, huge supply deficit in 28 and 29 So everything that I'm doing is based on this, and this crystal ball actually works because of that two year gap between shovels in the ground and delivery,   Keith Weinhold  41:10   and it sounds like you've recommended Chat GPT as a go-to source for investors to look into these things, that happens to be my favorite one as well, and you are well, maybe it's a bit too much to say, but it almost feels like to me pioneering with the way that you use AI. In fact, I know before our show today you were running some other things in the background that made me wonder, hey, am I talking to the real Neil or the clone Neil? I know I've got the real Neil here, but why don't you tell us about how you're using AI to make data-driven decisions in real estate?   Neal Bawa  41:40   Sure, so the first thing is that we've completed our journey with the low hanging fruit of AI. Every single person in our company is fully trained on how to use Chat GPT. Most of our research-related processes are automated. For example, 100% of our investor updates are now written by Chat GPT. What we do is we go into our property manager meetings on Mondays or Tuesdays sit down with them, beat them up, and the transcript is then taken by our team in the Philippines. They take that transcript and put it into a pre-trained Chat GPT string, it's called a custom GPT, and the string took a while to train, but now that it's trained, all it needs is a transcript. We just copy paste it in, we don't give it any instructions, and it outputs a really wonderful investor update, right. And so our updates for our investors are 99% written by AI. Of course, we'll go in and add our comments at the end of the process. So we've automated investor updates, rent comps, so you know if we are underwriting a new property today, what we do is we simply go into a Google file and copy paste the address and hit enter roughly once a minute. A software, which is written by AI - we're not coders, but the software knows how to write code - it checks the file, if it sees a new address, it goes in there, grabs the address, and then it basically goes to apartments.com rent.com realtor.com and all of these places, and checks the rents for this particular property in two mile radius. It eliminates all the ones that don't match, like you don't want to match the rents of a 1970 or 80s built property with a brand new 25 built property. Those are not comps, it's not comparable. So it basically is very careful, it keeps a radius range of two miles, and also basically is a property of the same kind, you know, like it never matches up a three story property with a 10 story property. Those don't match, one of them obviously is more of a central business district or downtown sort of thing, and so it basically grabs all of those rent comps and then puts them into a file and posts in a Slack channel. Usually it takes it about 1213 minutes to do that, and so whoever put that address in about 12 minutes later goes into the Slack channel and says, "Hmm, these are all my rent comps, right? And boom, now you're basically, you have all these ready rent comps. So, what we've done is, we've automated a significant portion of what we are doing with both our property managers and inside the company with acquisitions and things like that, we're also scraping massive amounts of data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics website, which we just couldn't deal with that data before, and building very beautiful, very interactive dashboards. We don't use Chat GPT for that. We find for dashboarding a tool called Claude, which is by a company called Anthropic, is much better, so we have currently over 150 interactive dashboards that Claude has created that update in real time and give us access to data. If anything, I find that we are in this incredible time where decision making has become much easier, as long as you spend time with these tools. So, in our company we have an absolute mandate that no one has broken for the last year. One year per day, people must program, and by programming we mean issuing common language instructions to tools and build dashboards and build software that automates our work. Have we laid off anyone because of this? I mean that. Be the next obvious question. The answer is no, because it's made it easier for us to serve a much larger audience, so it's easier to grow your company. We just are not hiring anyone, and we haven't hired anybody for the last 18 months, so we have a hiring freeze, but at the same time all of our people are employed because they're they're now much more valuable. So everyone in our company is now a programmer, and even though that sounds weird, it's completely true.   Neal Bawa  45:24   Every single person in our company writes code, and they write code by talking with Cloud Code or talking with Chat GPT, and then Chat GPT, of course, does the actual code writing, but people have become very, very good at answering questions and saying, "I want a dashboard like this, turn these radio buttons into drop boxes, and give me the last month, and last three months, and last 12 months, and do this, and do that, and connect this, and I also want to host this on a server, but I want to make sure that only I can see it. I need a password added. Imagine 1000 of these conversations happening in our company every day. Yeah, that's interesting. And what you just described   Keith Weinhold  46:00   there at Gro Capitas is somewhat of a microcosm for what's happening in the broader economy, where we've been in this low high or low fire environment for quite a while. Well, Neal, as we're winding down here, we recently had a new Fed chair come in. It seems incomprehensible to me that there could possibly be any rate cuts. I don't know how we could responsibly make a rate cut with all these inflationary layers. We had the pandemic, and then terrorists, and then the Iran war, and the energy shocks, and all these bottled up supply chains. What are your thoughts with regard to the Fed?   Neal Bawa  46:29   I still think that we'll get one rate cut, and that rate cut will be based on political pressure. So, for the first time ever, I have seen the Fed break into factions, so if you look at the latest Fed meeting, which happened, you know, there was dissent, there were two clear factions, so the Fed is becoming less data driven and more faction driven, and I think that one of the factions, which obviously wants rate cuts to go down, is going to triumph at some point later in the year, but until we get past the incredible increase in inflation because of the Iran war, I don't think that faction is going to win. Right, there's three or four people in that faction, that's not enough votes to get past the others. So I'm predicting no rate cuts until Q4 of this year. If the Fed was entirely logical, there should still not be a rate card in Q4, but I think it'll happen because there's political pressure.   Keith Weinhold  47:25   The preservation of independence is key. Neil Bhawa, this has been great, and a lot of people learn from you. You're a brilliant educator, as well as what you're doing in the multifamily space, and a lot of other places. So, if someone wants to connect with you, learn more about what you do. What's the best way for them to do that?   Neal Bawa  47:43   So we built a website called Multi Family University. It's completely free. There is no subscription. There's no upsell. We do not have an educational product, but what we do is each year we have 8-12 webinars that we create with their extraordinarily good looking thanks to the use of AI. Yay, and we share them with an audience, and usually between 5000 and 1000 people attend our webinars each year, of which roughly 1% become investors with us. The rest, the remaining 99% just continue to get free access to data, and we cover every imaginable real estate topic: Single family, multifamily, industrial hotels, self storage, Airbnb, and even controversial topics outside of real estate, like climate change or impact of climate change and impact of AI. So you know, multifamily university is the best place you can go to, multifamily you.com/club It's a free club, and it's free forever.   Keith Weinhold  48:42   Neal, it's been valuable to our audience. Thanks so much for coming back out of the show.   Neal Bawa  48:46   Thanks for having me.   Keith Weinhold  48:53   Oh, a terrific, wide-ranging chat with Neal. There, yes, this interesting 2022 divergence between single family and multifamily, the slowing birth rate, and how that won't really catch up with real estate in a big way for perhaps 20 plus more years. How single family rentals beat multifamily on the basis of tenant retention, and a lot more that we covered there, and he's got a good data driven timeline for apartments being back in favor by 2027 and 2028 After the interview, Neil and I chatted some more off Mike, and he would like to come back on the show next year. We're probably going to have him, because we have a lot more to talk about at that time. We can see if the multifamily market is really healing. Also, did you pick up on this? I wonder why, for his own home he would get a 15 year mortgage at 1.75% interest, so I'll have to ask him about that. That's surely a fantastic interest rate, but a 15 year loan rather than a 30 year that maybe he could have gotten at two and a half percent at the time. Well, 15 year probably. Is not the best use of capital, because it increases your equity position rapidly. When instead, those dollars could have been out in the market earning an actual return somewhere else. But he's a smart guy, he must have an answer. We can talk about that at that time. We've got a lot of terrific shows coming up here on the GRE podcast, specific learning episodes, where it's just me teaching you, as well as new guests and returning guests too. Until next week, I'm your host, Keith Weinhold. Don't quit your daydream.   Speaker 2  50:35   Nothing on this show should be considered specific personal or professional advice. Please consult an appropriate tax, legal, real estate, financial, or business professional for individualized advice. Opinions of guests are their own. Information is not guaranteed. All investment strategies have the potential for profit or loss. The host is operating on behalf of Get Rich Education LLC exclusively.    Speaker 2  51:03   The preceding program was brought to you by Your Home for Wealth Building, getricheducation.com.  

New new free shows will be back very soon, but remember that we've been back doing weekly content on our Patreon page for a while during the free show hiatus, covering the Jerry Lawler/Stacy Carter 2001 WWE departure and eventual divorce, the WWE Network launch, and the "Clique Curtain Call." We're also starting an in-depth series on TNA getting cancelled by Spike TV and Destination America this week, which promises to be epic. In the meantime, though, here's the unreleased episode from three months ago. Will episode #544 ever be fully re-edited and re-released? We don't know. But enjoy episode #545, which is new to everyone!Kris and David (from three months ago) are back (three months ago) as we discuss the week that was February 28-March 6, 1989. Topics of discussion include:The possibility of state athletic commissions getting more involved with regulation of pro wrestling thanks to Vince McMahon testifying that they were "sports entertainment" in New Jersey.Ric Flair re-upping his contract with the NWA for three more years as the promotion is undergoing a major overhaul in every way, but not necessarily in the most positive ways.Talk of the NWA's TV product needing major changes, especially in production and overall quality.Giant Baba's questionable booking of Ricky Steamboat when he comes over as the NWA World Heavyweight Champion, as well as the original plans for the NWA Champion on this tour.A great look at Stampede Wrestling from this time period, with Ed Whalen and Bulldog Bob Brown on commentary, Brown getting involved way too much, the "retirement" of Dynamite Kid, and the greatness of Lethal Larry Cameron.Invader #1 returning to action in WWC after being acquitted on all charges in the Bruiser Brody murder case.Terry Funk's insane promo from FCW TV.Bill Dundee taking over the book in Continental and Steve Beverly shares his thoughts on what needs to be done better in that territory.Lance Russell's final TV show on WMC before leaving for the NWA…sort of, because it doesn't actually feature Lance, and we explain why that happened.The same show also featuring the debut of Ronnie P. Gossett, who causes lots of chaos before he meets Jerry Lawler.Eric Embry finding a way to get back in a World Class ring at the expense of referee Harold T. Harris.Larry Zbyszko talking about being the real world champion on AWA TV.Ted DiBiase revealing the Million Dollar Belt on WWF TV.All of this and so much more on a solid episode of BTS!!!Timestamps:0:00:00 Regulation0:27:34 NWA/WCW0:53:28 Int'l: AJPW, NJPW, AJW, Stampede, All-Star/Tomko, EMLL, Torreon, & WWC1:29:49 Classic Commercial Break1:33:22 Halftime (from three months ago)2:16:48 Other USA: ICW (Savoldi), FCW, Fuller/Polk ECHL team, Continental, CWA/Memphis, WCCW, AWA, POWW, WWA/Geigel, & Portland3:31:53 WWFTo support the show and get access to exclusive rewards like special members-only monthly themed shows, go to our Patreon page at Patreon.com/BetweenTheSheets and become an ongoing Patron. Becoming a Between the Sheets Patron will also get you exclusive access to not only the monthly themed episode of Between the Sheets, but also access to our new mailbag segment, a Patron-only chat room on Slack, and anything else we do outside of the main shows!If you're looking for the best deal on a VPN service—short for Virtual Private Network, it helps you get around regional restrictions as well as browse the internet more securely—then Private Internet Access is what you've been looking for. Not only will using our link help support Between The Sheets, but you'll get a special discount, with prices as low as $1.98/month if you go with a 40 month subscription. With numerous great features and even a TV-specific Android app to make streaming easier, there is no better choice if you're looking to subscribe to My AEW and other region-locked services.For the best in both current and classic indie wrestling streaming, make sure to check out IndependentWrestling.tv and use coupon code BTSPOD for a free 5 day trial! (You can also go directly to TinyURL.com/IWTVsheets to sign up that way.) If you convert to a paid subscriber, we get a kickback for referring you, allowing you to support both the show and the indie scene.To subscribe, you can find us on iTunes, Google Play, and just about every other podcast app's directory, or you can also paste Feeds.FeedBurner.com/BTSheets into your favorite podcast app using whatever “add feed manually” option it has.Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

CJ Gustafson sits down with Marten Abrahamsen, CFO of Vercel, at the NYSE to talk about running finance inside a hypergrowth AI company. They cover AI use cases in finance, rev rec, forecasting, KPI dashboards, PLG, consumption pricing, and Marten's “speeding tickets vs. parking tickets” framework for moving fast without losing control.—SPONSORS:Brex is an intelligent finance platform with AI-powered agents that capture expenses automatically, enforce policy before the spend happens, and close your books in minutes instead of weeks. 35,000+ companies like OpenAI, Coinbase, Anthropic, and DoorDash already run on Brex. It's time to get Brex AF. Learn more at https://www.brex.com/metricsAleph is a modern FP&A platform built for teams that want more than another planning tool. By connecting your ERP, CRM, and other systems into one trusted data layer with AI workflows, Aleph helps you move faster with real-time insights. Get a personalized demo at https://www.getaleph.com/runRightRev is an automated revenue recognition platform that lets your product team ship new pricing without asking finance for permission, and your sales team close deals without creating downstream chaos. Check out their free tool at calculator.rightrev.com It scores your rev rec process, shows what's exposing you to risk, and tells you exactly where to focus before it bites you in the rear end. Check it out at https://calculator.rightrev.comRillet is an AI-native ERP built for modern finance teams that want to replace NetSuite and close faster. With revenue recognition, close management, multi-entity support, and native Stripe and Salesforce integrations, Rillet helps scaling companies run their finance stack in one place. Hundreds of teams, including Windsurf and Mercor, use Rillet to make the zero-day close real. Book a demo at https://www.rillet.com/cjEY has been part of Silicon Valley since it was just a valley, helping the most successful names in tech go from startup to exit to megacap. With teams across strategy, tax, audit, and transactions, EY helps you get your financials right early, long before your investors start asking for it. You build the next big thing, and EY will help you build it right. Learn more at https://www.ey.com/techstartupsSpendHound cuts your SaaS and AI spend by up to 30% using real pricing benchmarks across 10,000 vendors, so you always know what fair pricing looks like before your next renewal. Rated #1 on G2 in SaaS spend management, it's free forever for teams up to 1,000 employees. Sign up by June 12th and get $500 just for getting started. Go to https://www.spendhound.com/cj—LINKS: Mostly Talent: https://mostlymetrics.typeform.com/to/cLTxtAsNGuest: https://www.linkedin.com/in/martenabrahamsen/Company: http://vercel.com/CJ: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cj-gustafson-13140948/Mostly metrics: https://www.mostlymetrics.com—TIMESTAMPS:0:00 Speeding tickets vs. parking tickets3:21 Visa IPO in the financial crisis5:09 Going public has changed6:45 Private market: 22–24 trillion9:03 More or fewer public companies?9:48 Sponsors — Brex | Aleph | RightRev13:04 KPI dashboard on your phone14:12 Revenue flux via Slack and Notion15:37 RevRec tool: green, yellow, red17:56 V0 is a job requirement19:43 Speeding tickets vs. parking tickets20:33 Sponsors — Rillet | EY | SpendHound23:49 Very few one-way doors25:02 Finance in hypergrowth25:39 Three-scenario planning27:00 Honest with the board31:00 PLG + consumption at Vercel33:32 What Marten checks every morning34:03 Why RPO doesn't work here35:36 Holiday usage is up37:10 ICP shifted to solo developer39:22 Capital allocation in a fast market41:32 Growth compounds; margin can't43:22 SaaS gross margins: spicy take44:24 Cash-burning AI: 2026 vs. 202147:29 Are some hypergrowth cos destroying value?50:00 Lightning round50:11 Bank of Ireland mix-up51:10 Don't punt problems forward52:04 Finance software stack52:38 Expensed an oven53:12 Credits

Ali quit his job a few months after ChatGPT launched, convinced AI would eat labor marketplaces like Upwork. With no co-founder and no code, he collected $12K from real customers—using a faked demo and a cloned voice. Then he pitched 100 VCs in 10 days and got 47 straight 'no's.In this episode, Ali breaks down how he banked $12K in revenue before writing a single line of code, how a $20/month Slack community drove Amigo's first $1M in ARR, and why he churned every existing customer to go all-in on $100K+ healthcare enterprise deals.Why You Should ListenWhy validation only counts when dollars exchange hands.How a $20/month paid community turned into $1M in ARR.Why he refunded every customer and churned 100% of his revenue.Why founders must sell the first $2M themselves before hiring an AE.Keywords startup podcast, startup podcast for founders, product market fit, finding pmf, AI agents, healthcare AI, enterprise sales, pre-seed fundraising, community-led growth, customer validation, pivot, Amigo AIChapters00:00:00 Intro00:08:37 From Upwork to Starting Amigo00:13:30 $12K in Revenue Before Writing Code00:23:24 Pitching 100 VCs in 10 Days00:30:20 47 No's—Then FOMO Took Over00:37:12 The $20/Month Community Behind the First $1M00:45:47 Churning 100% of Revenue on Purpose00:01:49 The Moment of True Product Market FitSend me a message to let me know what you think!

New new free shows will be back very soon, but remember that we've been back doing weekly content on our Patreon page for a while during the free show hiatus, covering the Jerry Lawler/Stacy Carter 2001 WWE departure and eventual divorce, the WWE Network launch, and the "Clique Curtain Call." We're also starting an in-depth series on TNA getting cancelled by Spike TV and Destination America this week, which promises to be epic. In the meantime, though, here's the unreleased episode from three months ago. Will episode #544 ever be fully re-edited and re-released? We don't know. But enjoy episode #545, which is new to everyone!Kris and David (from three months ago) are back (three months ago) as we discuss the week that was February 28-March 6, 1989. Topics of discussion include:The possibility of state athletic commissions getting more involved with regulation of pro wrestling thanks to Vince McMahon testifying that they were "sports entertainment" in New Jersey.Ric Flair re-upping his contract with the NWA for three more years as the promotion is undergoing a major overhaul in every way, but not necessarily in the most positive ways.Talk of the NWA's TV product needing major changes, especially in production and overall quality.Giant Baba's questionable booking of Ricky Steamboat when he comes over as the NWA World Heavyweight Champion, as well as the original plans for the NWA Champion on this tour.A great look at Stampede Wrestling from this time period, with Ed Whalen and Bulldog Bob Brown on commentary, Brown getting involved way too much, the "retirement" of Dynamite Kid, and the greatness of Lethal Larry Cameron.Invader #1 returning to action in WWC after being acquitted on all charges in the Bruiser Brody murder case.Terry Funk's insane promo from FCW TV.Bill Dundee taking over the book in Continental and Steve Beverly shares his thoughts on what needs to be done better in that territory.Lance Russell's final TV show on WMC before leaving for the NWA…sort of, because it doesn't actually feature Lance, and we explain why that happened.The same show also featuring the debut of Ronnie P. Gossett, who causes lots of chaos before he meets Jerry Lawler.Eric Embry finding a way to get back in a World Class ring at the expense of referee Harold T. Harris.Larry Zbyszko talking about being the real world champion on AWA TV.Ted DiBiase revealing the Million Dollar Belt on WWF TV.All of this and so much more on a solid episode of BTS!!!Timestamps:0:00:00 Regulation0:27:34 NWA/WCW0:53:28 Int'l: AJPW, NJPW, AJW, Stampede, All-Star/Tomko, EMLL, Torreon, & WWC1:29:49 Classic Commercial Break1:33:22 Halftime (from three months ago)2:16:48 Other USA: ICW (Savoldi), FCW, Fuller/Polk ECHL team, Continental, CWA/Memphis, WCCW, AWA, POWW, WWA/Geigel, & Portland3:31:53 WWFTo support the show and get access to exclusive rewards like special members-only monthly themed shows, go to our Patreon page at Patreon.com/BetweenTheSheets and become an ongoing Patron. Becoming a Between the Sheets Patron will also get you exclusive access to not only the monthly themed episode of Between the Sheets, but also access to our new mailbag segment, a Patron-only chat room on Slack, and anything else we do outside of the main shows!If you're looking for the best deal on a VPN service—short for Virtual Private Network, it helps you get around regional restrictions as well as browse the internet more securely—then Private Internet Access is what you've been looking for. Not only will using our link help support Between The Sheets, but you'll get a special discount, with prices as low as $1.98/month if you go with a 40 month subscription. With numerous great features and even a TV-specific Android app to make streaming easier, there is no better choice if you're looking to subscribe to My AEW and other region-locked services.For the best in both current and classic indie wrestling streaming, make sure to check out IndependentWrestling.tv and use coupon code BTSPOD for a free 5 day trial! (You can also go directly to TinyURL.com/IWTVsheets to sign up that way.) If you convert to a paid subscriber, we get a kickback for referring you, allowing you to support both the show and the indie scene.To subscribe, you can find us on iTunes, Google Play, and just about every other podcast app's directory, or you can also paste Feeds.FeedBurner.com/BTSheets into your favorite podcast app using whatever “add feed manually” option it has.Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

Thanks Pressable for supporting the show! Get your special hosting deal at https://pressable.com/wpminuteBecome a WP Minute Supporter & Slack member at https://thewpminute.com/supportThis episode of The WP Minute+ podcast features Matt's chat with Beaver Builder's Robby McCullough. They discuss the evolution of Beaver Builder, including its recent AI integrations. You'll find takes on the current sentiment within the WordPress community, the importance of open source, and how to adapt in the age of AI. Robby also shares his thoughts on user expectations and the future of web design. Takeaways:Beaver Builder is evolving with AI integration.The Assistant Pro plugin is still operational but has been integrated into Beaver Builder.The WordPress community often engages in ‘drama farming' with negative narratives.AI is being explored in WordPress core, showing a new direction.Open-source ethos remains strong in the WordPress community.User expectations for AI tools need to be managed effectively.AI can enhance design but should not replace human creativity.The baseline for web design is improving compared to the past.Beaver Builder aims to provide a cohesive design experience with AI.Important Links:Beaver Builder: Twitter/X | WebsiteConnect with Robby: Twitter/XThe WP Minute+ Podcast: thewpminute.com/subscribe ★ Support this podcast ★

Meaghan Latella got laid off twice before 30 — first from ESPN, then from a startup mid-pandemic — and landed her next job in 10 days the second time around. Not because the market got easier. Because her mindset did. Meaghan is a career coach, founder of Tide Shift Coaching, and one of Krysta's college friends turned first-ever Spread client. This episode covers layoffs, the consultant's mentality that changes everything in interviews, and what it looks like to build a coaching business from the ground up — with the receipts to prove it. In this episode we dive into:• Why doing nothing is the smartest first move after a layoff• The LinkedIn post Meaghan almost didn't write that led to a job offer in 10 days• How scarcity vs. abundance mindset determines who finds you — in a job search and in business• What founder-led marketing looks like when it actually works (hint: this episode is a live example)The Layoff Playbook Nobody Teaches You• Getting laid off from ESPN at 22 with no frame of reference for what a layoff even means — and the panic spiral that follows• Why fear-based job searching (applying to everything, interviewing for roles you don't want) is why the first search took four months• The mindset shift that separates a 4-month search from a 10-day one: knowing the layoff isn't about you before you open the laptop• The 72-hour rule — process before you reach out, because desperation has an energy and it shows up in everythingThe Consultant's Mentality• Why Meaghan skipped applications entirely in 2020 and wrote a LinkedIn post instead — and what happened in the first three hours• The interview reframe: you're not there to convince them you deserve the job, you're there to show them how you'd solve their problem• The dating parallel — auditioning for the role repels the very thing you're after• Standards, opinions, and the "freedom number": the traits that signal to the right people that you're worth betting onWhen the Business Finally Clicks• What it looks like when three years of content, clarity work, and offer iteration compound into a best month ever — without feeling like you tried that hard• How Krysta and Meaghan overhauled Tide Shift's offer from short retainers to a 10-week intensive with a Slack community — and why the clarity session is now the non-negotiable gateway• Three new clients in one week from a Facebook comment, a LinkedIn post, and a referral chain — what that proves about consistency over conversion tactics• The permission slip: your ideal client is allowed to evolve, your offer is allowed to change, and your revenue goal doesn't have to match someone else's definition of successThis conversation is proof that the relationships you build in college, the layoffs you survive, and the posts you almost don't publish are all quietly working for you — even when you can't see it yet. Whether you're staring down a layoff, stuck in a job that isn't it, or building a business that hasn't fully clicked, this episode will reframe the setback and show you what the next move looks like.For more on entrepreneurship mindset and career clarity, check out Krysta's most recent solo episode, "The One Thing You Keep Leaving Off Your Schedule."Follow Krysta:⁠@thekrystahuber⁠⁠@thefitnessfyx⁠⁠⁠@thespreadmktg ⁠Connect with Meaghan:LinkedIn: Meaghan Latella — her most active platformInstagram: @tideshift_coaching for career pivot content and coaching info

This final instalment of Sass lays a strong foundation for our return to developing statically generated websites with Jekyll. We learn how to deeply customise and integrate Bootstrap into our own styles. As is often the case, Bart starts by describing the different techniques that can be used to customise Bootstrap with Sass, and then ties it all together with a worked example. We now have the tools to use Bootstrap, even if our website uses a content management system like WordPress. You can find Bart's fabulous tutorial shownotes and the audio podcast at pbs.bartificer.net. Read an unedited, auto-generated transcript with chapter marks: PBS_2026_06_06 Join our Slack at podfeet.com/slack and look for the #pbs channel, and check out our pbs-student GitHub Organization. It's by invitation only but all you have to do is ask Allison! Join the Conversation: allison@podfeet.com podfeet.com/slack Support the Show: Patreon Donation Apple Pay or Credit Card one-time donation PayPal one-time donation Podfeet Podcasts Mugs at Zazzle NosillaCast 20th Anniversary Shirts Referral Links: Setapp - 1 month free for you and me 15% off Carbon Copy Cloner Wispr Flow - 1 month free for you PETLIBRO - 30% off for you and me Parallels Toolbox - 3 months free for you and me Learn through MacSparky Field Guides - 15% off for you and me Backblaze - One free month for me and you Eufy - $40 for me if you spend $200. Sadly nothing in it for you. PIA VPN - One month added to Paid Accounts for both of us CleanShot X - Earns me $25%, sorry nothing in it for you but my gratitude

AI agents can now connect to every tool your employees use. The problem is that connecting them and trusting them are two completely different things, and most enterprises have figured out the first without solving the second. Oren Michaels, co-founder and CEO of Barndoor AI, joins Craig Smith to explain why that gap is the defining challenge of the agentic enterprise era. His framework is simple and sharp: agents are like enthusiastic interns. They will absolutely do something when you ask them to. Whether it's what you intended is another matter, and when an agent can act across Salesforce, Slack, email, and calendar simultaneously, the blast radius of a misunderstood instruction is far larger than anything a human intern could cause. The conversation covers the 100,000 agent problem - the reality that each agent handling a discrete task needs its own set of rules about what it's allowed to do, and that number scales to a size no human team can govern manually - and why traditional identity management systems were never built for the failure modes AI agents create. The new threat isn't bad actors getting in; it's authorized people using allowed tools with agents that still do the wrong thing. Barn Door's governance layer sits between the agent and the tools it can access, specifying exactly what each agent is permitted to do in each context, and Venn brings that same capability to individuals who want to understand what's possible before their organizations catch up. This is one of the most practically useful conversations available about what enterprise AI governance actually looks like. Subscribe to Eye on A.I. for weekly conversations with the people building and deploying the future of AI.

Send us Fan MailYou can stare in the mirror every day and still miss the one thing that is holding you back: how you come across to other people. That gap is where leadership blind spots live, and it is why an outside perspective is one of the highest-leverage tools for entrepreneurs, business owners, and sales leaders who have to make fast decisions under pressure.We talk about what it means to build a “holistic perspective” and why most of us default to our own angle instead of considering how a team member, customer, or partner experiences the same situation. When you are the one carrying the weight, it is easy to confuse confidence with clarity. A strong mentor or coach helps you widen the frame, spot patterns you cannot see alone, and make decisions that actually match the future you say you want.We also dig into decision fatigue and the constant noise of modern work: messages, Slack, notifications, and nonstop inputs that keep you stuck in mental conversations that go nowhere. The simple shift is having the right people around you who can reflect, take notes, and tell you the truth. That outside feedback can change your direction faster than another productivity hack.If you want help finding the right support system and turning goals into a real plan, listen now. Subscribe for more Five Minute Friday ideas, share this with a friend who needs honest feedback, and leave a review so more leaders can find the show. To Reach Jordan:Email: Jordan@Edwards.Consulting Youtube:https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC9ejFXH1_BjdnxG4J8u93ZwFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/jordan.edwards.7503Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jordanfedwards/Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jordanedwards5/Hope you find value in this. If so please provide a 5-star and drop a review.Complimentary Edwards Consulting Session: https://calendly.com/jordan-edwardsconsulting/30min 

Gary is joined by his former England teammate Terry Butcher to discuss his powerful new documentary, Butcher: Invisible Wounds. Terry opens up about the devastating loss of his son, Chris, and explains how sharing his story in the documentary has helped him cope with his grief and continue the healing process. The pair also look back on Terry's remarkable football career, from the glory years at Ipswich Town and Rangers to his unforgettable experiences with England. They revisit some of the most iconic moments in English football history, including the infamous "Hand of God" match against Argentina, the Italia '90 World Cup campaign that saw England come closer than any side since 1966 to lifting the trophy and Terry's legendary blood-soaked performance against Sweden that became one of the game's most enduring images. Butcher: Invisible Wounds airs on ITV4 on Tuesday 9 June at 10pm. Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey is in cinemas July 17. Book tickets from June 15. Join The Players Lounge: The official fantasy football club of The Rest Is Football. It's time to take on Gary, Alan and Micah for the chance to win monthly prizes and shoutouts on the pod. It's FREE to join and as a member, you'll get access to exclusive tips from Fantasy Football Hub including AI-powered team ratings, transfer tips, and expert team reveals to help you climb the table - plus access to our private Slack community. Sign up today at therestisfootball.com. https://therestisfootball.com/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=episode_description&utm_content=link_cta For more Goalhanger Podcasts, head to www.goalhanger.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Rick Watson and Jessica Lesesky sit down to unpack a busy stretch across tech, shipping, and commerce. They open with Anthropic's confidential IPO filing, submitted to the SEC on June 1st, and what it signals about the AI lab's trajectory. After a $65 billion Series H that pushed its valuation to $965 billion, Anthropic now sits ahead of OpenAI on that measure, and Rick and Jessica dig into how it got there: a revenue run rate that climbed from roughly $10 billion a year ago to about $47 billion by May 2026, helped by a developer-first bet through Claude Code that has made it a serious contender for enterprise spend.The Watson Weekly Weekend episode is sponsored by Avalara. Its Agentic Tax and Compliance automates behind-the-scenes work for ecommerce brands, enabling accurate checkout tax calculation, clearer tariff and duty visibility, and fewer customer surprises. Avalara integrates with platforms like Shopify, BigCommerce, and WooCommerce. Learn more at avalara.watsonweekly.comFrom there the conversation turns physical. USPS and DHL have signed a multi-year contract valued at well over $10 billion, with DHL handling pickup, sorting, and transport while USPS covers final-mile delivery. It lands at an awkward moment for the Postal Service, which posted a $9.5 billion loss in fiscal 2025 and whose Postmaster General has warned of a possible cash crisis within a year absent action from Congress.The last segment covers Salesforce's push to wake up a commerce cloud that had been growing under 2%. The reported Contentful acquisition (somewhere in the $1 to $1.5 billion range) fits a long pattern that runs through MuleSoft, Tableau, Slack, and PredictSpring. Rick and Jessica close on whether the integrated Agentforce suite can hold up against focused players like Shopify.

In today's episode of Scaling UP! H2O, host Trace Blackmore sits down with workplace resilience expert and U.S. Marine veteran Tiffany Wentz‑Root to decode how different generations show up in the industrial water treatment industry. From the Silent Generation's post‑war loyalties through Baby Boomers' commitment to long hours, Gen X's distrust of corporate loyalty, Millennials' desire for purpose and feedback, and Gen Z's demand for emotional literacy, the conversation illustrates how each cohort was shaped by historical and technological upheaval. The discussion reframes "hustle culture" and argues that a focus on mental health and values alignment can increase retention and performance. Generations and the events that shaped them Tiffany explains that generations are roughly 20–30 year cohorts defined by shared formative experiences. The Silent Generation (1928‑45) endured the Great Depression and World War II; Baby Boomers (1946‑64) were taught loyalty and stability; Gen X (1965‑80) witnessed mass layoffs and became fiercely independent; Millennials (1981‑96) were helicopter parented and accustomed to participation trophies; and Gen Z (1997‑2012) grew up online, socializing via games and apps and weathering school shootings and a pandemic. These histories explain why Baby Boomers and Gen X equate "hard work" with hours logged, whereas Millennials and Gen Z measure effort by pride, alignment and emotional impact. Gen Z's exposure to constant online crises makes them the "anxious and afraid generation" with record rates of anxiety and depression, highlighting the need for supportive leadership.   Hustle culture versus emotional literacy The conversation challenges the idea that toughness equals success. Wentz‑Root stresses that leaders must "stop prizing strength" and recognize that feeling and processing emotions is hard work. She advocates for environments where people can bring their whole selves to work rather than suppressing feelings in order to conform to traditional hustle culture. She notes that Gen Z sees phone calls as "prehistoric" and prefers to communicate via apps like Snapchat or Discord, so older professionals should adapt their communication style—using fewer capital letters, punctuation and more emojis or GIFs—to avoid appearing angry or dismissive. For water treatment companies seeking to recruit young professionals, she urges them to articulate company values and support mental health, because Gen Z will leave if work doesn't align with their skills or passions. Practical strategies for leaders and organizations To bridge the generational divide, Wentz‑Root proposes creating a "social contract": a collaboratively defined set of values, behaviors and communication norms that are revisited regularly. Such agreements encourage teams to discuss how they prefer to give and receive feedback, when to use Slack versus meetings, and what good work looks like across ages. She also recommends structured cross‑mentorship, matching senior employees who are nearing retirement with junior colleagues based on skills rather than age, so institutional knowledge isn't lost. She cautions against judging younger staff as entitled or weak; rather, leaders should ask why behaviors exist and treat differences as strengths. Lastly, she reminds Baby Boomers and Gen Xers that sharing decades of hard‑earned experience with Gen Z isn't charity—it's how you build a legacy and ensure the industry thrives. For water‑treatment professionals, recognizing that "different doesn't mean wrong" can unlock better collaboration, innovation and resilience. By replacing judgment with curiosity, establishing social contracts and mentorship programs, and adapting communication to younger workers, leaders can turn generational tension into an asset. Listen to the full conversation above. Explore related episodes below. Stay engaged, keep learning, and continue scaling up your knowledge! Timestamps 02:32 — Trace Blackmore introduces the episode and sets the context: exploring generational dynamics in the industrial water treatment community 09:20 — Tiffany Wentz‑Root introduces herself as a Marine Corps veteran and therapist who helps corporations improve communication, empathy and resilience. 15:07 — Definition of a "generation" and how cohort boundaries from Silent Generation to Gen Alpha are defined 18:06 — Examination of how Baby Boomers were taught loyalty and work stability, Gen X learned independence after witnessing mass layoffs, and Millennials received participation trophies and craved feedback 00:24:33 — Wentz‑Root calls for leaders to stop equating strength with suppressing emotion; feeling and processing emotions is difficult work 25:02 — Gen Z is described as the anxious and afraid generation with record levels of anxiety, depression and suicide, shaped by school shootings and constant online news 27:03 — Contrasting COVID experiences: Trace led a team through uncertainty, while Tiffany's son saw the lockdown as "awesome" because he stayed home playing games. 28:41 — Discussion of how Gen Z socializes through apps like Snapchat, Discord and Steam; texting is archaic and phone calls are "prehistoric" 32:09 — Panel reflections: Baby Boomers and Gen X define hard work by hours worked, Millennials by pride in results, and Gen Z by alignment with skills and passions 33:37 — Tiffany emphasizes that "different doesn't mean wrong," urging listeners to see younger workers' needs as strengths 40:26 — Introduction of social contracts: teams co‑create values, behaviors and communication norms to bridge generational expectations 42:42 — The role of cross‑generational mentorship; match people by skill and career stage, not age, and leverage Gen Z's expertise with tech and communication platforms 01:13:26 — Trace's closing reflections: in male‑dominated, hustle‑driven industries, ignoring emotions isn't sustainable; sharing knowledge now ensures a legacy and a thriving future   Quotes "We need to stop prizing strength first and foremost. We need to understand that emotions are very difficult to face. To feel your feelings, to name them, to process them—that's hard" "When I asked, 'What's your definition of hard work?' the baby boomer said, 'I put in a lot of hours.' Gen X said, 'I put in a lot of hours.' Millennials said, 'I get the job done and I'm proud of it.' Gen Z said, 'It's when the work that I've done aligns with my skills and my passions, and I feel good about what I did'" "Judgment kills curiosity … When I see someone of a different generation with a different way of communicating, I automatically go, 'That's bad, that's weird.' Instead, I want you to step into curiosity and say, 'Why would they do that? What happened in their life that shaped them to be this person?'"   Connect with Tiffany Wentz-Root Phone: (425) 359-5088 Email: tiffany@resilientroots.com Website: resilientroots.com  LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tiffanywentz-root/    Guest Resources Mentioned  Generational Diversity Outline  Bridging the Gap: Navigating Generational Diversity at Work 17776: What football will look like in the future by Jon Bois Pity the Reader: On Writing with Style (Paperback) by Kurt Vonnegut (Author), Suzanne McConnell (Author) Washington's Farewell: The Founding Father's Warning to Future Generations by John Avlon   Scaling UP! H2O Resources Mentioned  AWT (Association of Water Technologies)  Scaling UP! H2O Academy video courses  Submit a Show Idea  The Rising Tide Mastermind    Words of Water with James McDonald Today's definition is an ion with a net negative charge, formed when an atom or molecule gains one or more electrons. Examples include bicarbonate, chloride, and sulfate. Can you guess the word or phrase?   2026 Events for Water Professionals  Check out our Scaling UP! H2O Events Calendar where we've listed every event Water Treaters should be aware of by clicking HERE.   

Introducing Russell Aaron I didn't learn WordPress at a fancy college or career academy. I graduated from the University of YouTube. My internship was the Las Vegas WordPress Meetup and WordCamp Vegas. The rest I learned building mortgage company platforms, working for casinos, inside managed WordPress hosts, and at some of the best WordPress development and support shops on the planet. Show Notes For more on Russell, check out his website: https://russellenvy.com Transcript: Topher DeRosia: All right. Here we go. Hey folks. Russell Aaron: And three, two, one. Topher DeRosia: Hey folks. Welcome to Hallway Chats. I’m Topher, and I’m here with Russell Aaron. I assume I pronounced that right, because it’s not that hard, but you never know. Russell Aaron: You know, so many people call me Aaron. They’ll tag me and they go, “Thanks, Aaron.” And I’m like, “You know, it’s Russell, but it’s cool.” Topher DeRosia: Yeah, nice. All right. Well, I saw a post on LinkedIn the other day from you talking about podcasts having the same people on episodes all the time. I thought, “Oh, I gotta have that guy on my podcast.” Because then you can’t go on any other ever again, because then you’ll be that guy. Russell Aaron: Maybe. Topher DeRosia: So, I snooped a little. You live much closer to me than I expected. Have we met? Did we meet at a WordCamp? Russell Aaron: I think we met at WordCamp Ann Arbor one year. Topher DeRosia: Oh, okay. I went to a whole bunch of those. Russell Aaron: Yeah. I think I spoke 2018, something like that. Topher DeRosia: Yeah. I was probably there. Russell Aaron: Yeah. Topher DeRosia: All right. So tell me where you live, what you do, all that kind of stuff. Russell Aaron: I currently reside in Indianapolis, Indiana, and I am just freelancing as of right now. You know, I live in a pretty small town where it’s kind of old school WordPress, if you will. Anyone who is worth their salt keys will remember a day when websites were not responsive or a business has a cousin of a friend of a brother who builds websites and, “Hey, he’s working on it,” and three years later, there’s still no new website. I kind of live in a town where I’m kind of getting back to my grassroots, where I stay up late at night with my insomnia, and I will roll up to a business and I will say, “Your new website can look like this today. If you pay me this much money, I will install it today, and this is your new website.” And it’s got your updated menu, and it’s responsive, and it works on mobile, and we can connect it to AppPresser and make it an app and stuff like that. So I’m kind of reliving the glory days of what I remember WordPress to be. Topher DeRosia: I’m also freelancing right now, sort of by choice, sort of not by choice. Somebody I’m married to would rather I had regular pay and insurance. Russell Aaron: Heard that. Topher DeRosia: Are you in the same boat, or did you do this on purpose? Russell Aaron: I did this on purpose. I was not working for the man, but I was working with some people. I’m over the tiny little granular things that somebody can fire you over. Like they’re watching if your mouse moves or they’re watching if you haven’t logged in. There’s just no more trust, I feel like, in so many cases. And so I know that I can do things better on my own, and I’m going to. Topher DeRosia: I have to admit, I love the freelance life. It is pretty special. Russell Aaron: Right. It’s almost like… what’s that movie? The 40-Year-Old Virgin, where they are making a website and they’re like, “Hey, Spider-Man 3’s on in five minutes. Let’s go watch it.” Like they totally ignore their job and they just go watch this movie now. It’s kind of like that. Topher DeRosia: Yeah. Yeah. For me, it’s doing stuff with my wife. She has a day job, but it has kind of chaotic hours and not specific days of the week. And so I work when she does, which sometimes is Saturday and Sunday, and then I just don’t on Tuesday and Thursday. That’s pretty great. Russell Aaron: I’m kind of in the same boat. My wife has a wonderful job, and she is with a great group, and she does global advocacy. I mean, she just deals with people that are happy with the product, and she keeps them happy. She does lots of stuff like that. I’m kind of the same thing, where their company is now starting to get into AI, and they have so many questions, and I’m over here building things with AI and doing things like that. So I’m not exactly consulting, but my ideas are going into their company through my wife. Topher DeRosia: My wife works at a grocery store, and they have a cash machine they use in the back office that runs Linux. Russell Aaron: Oh, wow Topher DeRosia: And the IT guys had to come in and do some work on it, and she saw the screen and she’s like, “Oh, is that Linux?” And I’m like, “Who are you, and what do you know?” Super nerd. So what’s your company name? Do you have one, or is it just WP Pro Support? Russell Aaron: WP Pro Support. Topher DeRosia: WP Pro Support. Okay. Do you concentrate more on support, or do you build more? Russell Aaron: I have been doing support since 2011. I formed my very first support company, and I launched it the same day that Shane Sanderson launched Maintainn. My buddy, who you might know, John Hawkins, I was at the Vegas WordPress Meetup Group, and I had the idea in Vegas WordPress Meetup Group where there’s 70 people sitting right here behind me and they all want help. And I was like, “How do I do this?” So I built my first thing where I gave everybody free-for-life support, and they were my test group, if you will. And they helped me work out my bugs and tickets, and they helped me work out how I actually operate and do stuff like that. Then when I launched it, literally that day, John goes, “Wait, have you seen this?” And we had no idea about each other, but we literally launched them the same day. Fast forward three years down the road, I ended up working for Maintainn when it was owned by WebDevStudios. But everything I’ve done in WordPress has been support, whether I’ve worked for a mortgage company, a casino in Vegas, hosting with Liquid Web, doing stuff with NerdPress or AppPresser. Everything I’ve done is support. That’s really where my passion is because I remember what it’s like being a first timer. I think that there is a huge market potential here of people are always going to be new. I don’t care who you are. There’s always somebody new walking in the door, and there has to be a person who will sit down and say, “Come here, I’ll hold your hand.” And I am that person. I always try to look at WordPress from that lens is if a new person is looking at this today, are they going to be happy? Are they going to be confused? And I go from there. So currently today I’m transitioning away from support as we know it, where you write a ticket and then somebody on the other end is like, “Hey, I fixed your site,” or whatever. And I’m transitioning to a new product that I’m working on. So I’m going to be getting away from traditional support, but I’m still going to be doing things in the support space, if that makes sense. Topher DeRosia: Yeah, that makes sense. When I first got into WordPress, it was 2010, and custom post types were brand new. Russell Aaron: Right? Topher DeRosia: And I was out of my element with WordPress. I did not know what I was doing, but I did know PHP, and no one else knew post types yet. So when it comes to that, I was on an equal footing, and that was my way in. That was my leverage. I made a lot of money in the early days just building custom post types. Russell Aaron: Custom post types and single-posttype.php or whatever. Yeah. Topher DeRosia: So I was a competent PHP guy who didn’t know WordPress. And I feel like we’re in kind of the same transition space right now with AI, where we have tons of competent WordPressers who don’t really know AI yet. I think there’s a great space for that, teaching our friends, teaching everybody we’ve known for 10 years in WordPress. You know what I mean? Russell Aaron: I do. That’s one of the things that I really love about WordPress is that… let’s take the new 7.0 that just came out, I think it re-leveled the playing field. Before this came out, there were people that were ahead of others when it comes to patterns or blocks or the command palette and stuff like that. But now I think with this, we’re back to an even playing field because every… I mean, not exactly. There’s still some people who know AI a lot better than others, but you’re always five minutes ahead of somebody and five minutes behind somebody else. Topher DeRosia: Oh, yeah. Russell Aaron: But I do think that with 7.0, a new level playing field has come out. And now is the time to start learning, or you got to wait until 7.1 comes out where that new level playing field comes out. But that’s what I love about WordPress is that it continues to happen. Like you said, CPTs. I still love CPTs. I think they’re one of my favorite things. I look at all of these features, you know, page builders, another time when the playing field was leveled again. Now you learn page builders and then shortcodes and then this and then that. I think that’s the one gift that WordPress keeps giving is that you might be out of date six months from now, but then 7.1 comes out and you’re caught right back up. Topher DeRosia: Right. Yeah. And while you’re five minutes ahead, you quick do a WordCamp talk. Russell Aaron: Yes. Yeah. Topher DeRosia: For that long, you know more than other people, right? Russell Aaron: At least it’s on video, right? Topher DeRosia: Right. I was an expert for a minute and a half. Russell Aaron: That was my 15 minutes of fame. Topher DeRosia: What is your WordCamp life like these days? When was the last one you went to? Russell Aaron: The last one I went to was in Vegas, 2018. It was at the Plaza Hotel, which I worked at. When John was putting that together, in Vegas we had a wonderful space, and it was called The Innevation Center, and it was at a data facility called Switch. And they donated so much to us, and we are so grateful to them. And then they kind of had a change in their policy where they weren’t doing things, and then they overpriced how much it would cost to hold events and stuff like that. I was working at a hotel, and so we had this giant convention space, if you will. And so because I was able to pull some strings, we got a great, great discount, all food paid for. I mean, all of it. So that was my last WordCamp. The after party was on top of a pool deck, and there was pickleball courts, and there was a pool, and there was an open bar. I mean, it was rad. That was my last one. I have kids now. My kids are seven and eight and so my WordPress travels have slowed. No, I’m sorry. I take it back. WordCamp US last year was my last one, where we went scorched earth. That’s what I call it. I call it WordCamp scorched earth. Topher DeRosia: I was there for that one. I used to go to a lot every year. Go to- Russell Aaron: Five, six? Topher DeRosia: Five and 10. But since COVID, I think maybe just US every year. It’s weird to just go to one. Russell Aaron: It is. And just US, it’s almost like we used to have what I used to call regional events, where I lived in Vegas, I would hit up WordCamp Orange County, then I’d hit up San Diego, then we’d hit up LA, and then we’d make our way up to Portland, and then maybe if San Francisco did one, and then Phoenix. I did all my regional stuff. And then every once in a while I would venture… I mean, I love WordCamp Minneapolis. Love the people up there. Love so much about that event. Used to do that a lot. What’s the one in Ohio that I used to go to? Topher DeRosia: In the teens, there were five in Ohio. And being in Michigan, I used to just cruise down there. Russell Aaron: It’s a three-hour, three-and-a-half-hour drive, huh? Topher DeRosia: Yeah. Russell Aaron: About that. Yeah. Topher DeRosia: At the time, I was working for a company that was paying me to go to WordCamps. I had to make the case for each one, but it was a really simple case for all the Ohio ones because I didn’t need a plane ticket. I just drive over there. It’s like five in Ohio. There was Ann Arbor, there was Detroit, there was Grand Rapids, there was Chicago. I mean, there was almost 10 WordCamps within a three-hour drive of me. Russell Aaron: That’s beautiful. Topher DeRosia: It’s just not there anymore. Russell Aaron: I was very fortunate to work for companies like WebDevStudios, where I could tell them, “Hey, I got into WordCamp Minneapolis. I’m going to speak there.” And because I’m speaking there, they would reimburse me X amount of dollars for something, and then they would sponsor the WordCamp, and then they would make a thing out of it. I mean, I was very fortunate in being able to do that. Then I worked with a really great company called NerdPress, and they are a fantastic group of people that do the same thing. And then I ventured out into different straits, and it was very much different. I’ll say that much. Topher DeRosia: Yeah. Those are good times. Russell Aaron: It’s almost like… the way that I put it is it’s like we all graduated. We all did our four years of college, we all graduated, and now we went to our temp jobs or we went to our internships. Like the band broke up. Topher DeRosia: Yep. Yeah, it is a lot like that. I have seen generations of WordPressers. There was all the crew before 2010 that were downloading zip files and hacking themes to even get them to run. Then there was after 2010, and custom post types were new and stuff. And then there’s the whole Gutenberg generation that never experienced all that crazy theme stuff. Russell Aaron: I mean, you tell people that child themes were so new that people didn’t even grasp the concept of a child theme, and today it’s so baked in. It’s not even something that people think about. It’s just you install this and the child theme, and it’s a thing. But I remember writing those by hand. Topher DeRosia: Yeah. No kidding. Then to a certain extent, not even having child themes anymore because nothing is stored on the file system. Russell Aaron: I love it. I love it. In my very first WordCamp talk in Vegas 2012, I made a prediction that everything was powered by the theme. Everything used to… I mean, that’s as far as I go back is every template was the same. It was left column, right sidebar, header, and every page, whether you liked it or not, looked like a blog post. And it wasn’t full-width, responsive. I remember a lot of that. And then corporate themes came out, and then cupcake themes came out, then lawn company themes came out, and then the rise of Envato and stuff like that. That’s a good name for a band, The Rise of Envato. Topher DeRosia: I’d go see them. Russell Aaron: But all that stuff comes out. And then you look at it now and it’s like, that seems so far away. I still remember the day that I learned about child themes, and I’ve never forgotten that. And I think, coming back full circle, that’s why I stay in this beginner support space because I’m kind of keeping that nostalgia around, I guess. Topher DeRosia: Yeah. There’s a lot of joy in watching people’s eyes light up when they get it. Russell Aaron: That’s the best part is just telling people what’s possible. When they’re frustrated with something and you go, “Oh, hey, Gravity Forms can do that.” And they’re like, “Wait, what?” And I’m like, “Yeah.” And they can also do… And I just start naming stuff. And I show all 50 extensions that they have and they’re just like, “Wait, what?” And I’m like, “Yeah.” I’m like, “This starts getting radical when you’re into it.” Topher DeRosia: There’s something I miss from old WordPress that I don’t see in modern WordPress. It might not be a thing. And that is dramatic new styling with a theme the instant you install it. My wife is not a computer person and does not care about computers. She loves design stuff. There was a time we used Winamp. Russell Aaron: Wow. Topher DeRosia: And she loved getting skins for Winamp. And she would download 30 in a day and try them all out. And then when I set her up for the blog the first time and showed her the theme repo on .org, this is in 2011, she would literally spend a day just downloading theme after theme after theme. Russell Aaron: Same way. Topher DeRosia: And you just install it and poof, your site looks amazingly different. These days, I mean, you install something like Kadence or GeneratePress or Ollie or any of them, really, and it’s kind of a blank canvas. Russell Aaron: It’s very minimalist. It’s very minimalist. Topher DeRosia: I miss the ability to say, “I feel like making a change today,” and two minutes later, your site looks completely different because you’re using… Russell Aaron: Couldn’t agree more. Couldn’t agree more. I mean, I look back at old pictures from when I would host the meetup group in Vegas, and there’s pictures of me talking, and then on the screen behind me is my old site, and it was this old layout. I bought the theme from Envato because I was just fascinated with it. It was everything that I wanted it to look like. But same thing is now when you change your theme from this one to that one, that dark grunge kind of thing is gone, and now you’ve got this bootstrap-looking thing or whatever. I agree with you. I think that comes from my days of being in MySpace. That’s how I got started with all this. So you could change your MySpace template like that, and I think that’s where it comes from, at least for me. Topher DeRosia: I haven’t even looked into it. Can you make a Gutenberg-based blog theme that has a very striking look and just release it? And then, I don’t know, just release a whole bunch of them like in the old days? Theme shops had 35 themes for sale, and they all looked different because they were all totally different themes. Russell Aaron: I remember there was a day on Envato where it was the same theme, it was just rebranded. So it was like theme name 1.0, and it was called Atlas. And then it’s the same theme but in orange, and now it’s 1.2, and it’s called Dungeon or something. And then we have 1.3 again. Same theme, same framework, but each version was named something different. It made that developer look like they had five different products instead of just one over and over. Now you look at something like a page builder, and it’s like, “We’ve got 500 different templates in one thing.” I can’t do that. I think that’s too much for me. Topher DeRosia: It’s like the days of the CSS Zen Garden. Russell Aaron: Right. Topher DeRosia: HTML is the same, CSS changes. Before I used WordPress, I built my own blog system. Russell Aaron: Oh, wow. Topher DeRosia: It never got super advanced, but I used it for 10 years. One of the things you can do in your HTML is register alternate stylesheets. It’s the same tag, it’s just an alternate word in there. And then in Firefox, at least, you can go under “view Page Style”, and they would all be listed there, and you can just choose different themes. I figured out the JavaScript, even though I didn’t know JavaScript. I figured out the JavaScript to make a little dropdown box in my sidebar so my visitors could say, “Oh, I want to change my theme here.” I never figured out how to do that in WordPress because everything was so tied to style.css. I didn’t know how to make a different one be the main one. But that’s something else I miss in WordPress is the ability to just so dramatically and dynamically change your design because your content is structured so well. Russell Aaron: You know, not only that, but I really liked the websites where there was a demo, and then it gave you a basic username. The username was demo, the password was demo. But then the one thing I never figured out was how every 24 hours the site would just reset. So somebody can go in there and they could do whatever they wanted to do. They could create their own pages. They could create their own blog posts. And for 24 hours, there was a page called Russell’s Awesome. But then after 24 hours, it would just reset. I always thought that was so cool, but I could never figure out how to do that. Topher DeRosia: Oh, yeah. And everybody was editing all at the same time, within that 24-hour period. Russell Aaron: I have since restructured my website. I use the block theme from WebDevStudios. I kind of feel like that’s where I got my education from. I was somebody who kind of dabbled around in WordPress, and then when I went to go work with them for three years, they had a set of standards that I couldn’t even fathom to begin with. But then as we built things and I saw how their machine works, how their business revolves, I was like, “You know, for me, this is the way that I like to do things, is the way that they like to do things.” And so my new website… I mean, not new website, but it’s my new theme, I actually had AI build it for me. I had Claude. I was using… It’s by ThemeIsle. Neve. I was using Neve, one of my favorite themes. Love them. So I was using that, and then my site was kind of all over the place. It was an “I’ll teach you how to do this”. That’s kind of the main focus of my site is I will jump on a call with you, and whatever questions you have, I’ll sit here for five hours with you if you want. I will teach you and until you get it. But then I also had this section about band names that were just… earlier when we were talking about the rise of Envato, you know, like I would have a section on my blog where you could create a new band name and then I had all these random blog posts. And so my website was kind of like this potluck, if you will, just like this random stuff. And I was like, you know, I want to be doing something else. I think my website needs to change. And I have those old blog posts still, but they’re hidden. So now with my new theme, I had AI look at my old site and say, this is what I think we should do. I picked out some colors and over like five days, I had it build me five different HTML pages, like completely different, you know? And then I started giving AI and I said like, “Okay, I want to look like this.” And then I was like, well, okay, I like this and I like this, but I also like this from this other site.” So I started feeding it information and like when the HTML came out, I had 12 different templates. I had my blog posts, I had my archive, but I had everything built in HTML. And the cool thing about the WDS block theme is that it serves everything as an HTML page. So I literally just took AI and said, “Take these HTML pages, bake them into how this theme does it,” and bam, my site came up. I had it done in maybe two days. Topher DeRosia: Wow. Russell Aaron: And then after that, I had it take all of those HTML pages and create me patterns. So now I can go in, and when I go into my full site editor, I can go to patterns, I have all my homepage patterns, my blog patterns, I sliced everything up, and they’re all WordPress native blocks. So I can literally go in and change the coloring on any page I want instead of having to edit the HTML or anything. And now that I have that, I feel this sense of freedom where I’m not worrying about an update coming tomorrow, if my update is gonna break or I don’t have to read a changelog that is not specific anymore. I can’t stress how much I love not having to read changelogs or the lack of changelogs. I mean, I’m fully happy with how things have come out. And over time, I’m gonna keep fine-tuning it, but I’m pretty much where I’m at right now. With all of this new technology that’s come out, I’ve really kind of found my love again for WordPress. I was kind of in a slump where I just wasn’t really doing anything. Now I take my son and we’ll drive down to Louisville, Kentucky. He rides BMX. So while he’s racing, I will literally have Claude Code open on my computer and I will log into the Claude app on my phone and I can keep sitting there having the same conversation. So this new thing that I’m building, I can still do it while I’m sitting there watching him race or while I’m doing something else. I was just like, this is fantastic. And then my wife will drive home and I’ll just sit there and I talk into my phone, I literally put the microphone on and I’ll be like, “You know, I don’t like that. And here’s my thoughts about this.” And you know, my phone dictates all of that and then I send it to my computer through the app and it just keeps spinning things up. Then by the time I get home, I have a new version that I can demo or I have a new version that I can test. I mean, I am just so fascinated by it. Topher DeRosia: That’s cool. Were we at WebDev at the same time? Russel Aaron: I don’t think so. Topher DeRosia: I was there just over three years ago. Russel Aaron: I was there 2015 through 2018. Topher DeRosia: Oh, yeah. I came much later. I was only there for like two months. Russell Aaron: Oh, wow. Sometimes that’s the way it goes. Topher DeRosia: Yeah. They were gonna get a big contract that hired a bunch of people and two months later didn’t get the contract and let us all go. Russell Aaron: As much as I hate that, that also taught me that the people that do great work or the people that show up every day and are putting in more than they’re getting out, those are usually the people that stay in companies like that. That really changed my work ethic. I used to be somebody who wanted to be not lazy, but I didn’t wanna be pressed for time or having to go, go, go and having to be on all the time. Now, I’m the opposite. Now, I’m like, now that I’ve done that, I kind of earn for that stretch for a little bit. I mean, you were just saying that how you’ve transitioned to where you are. I was watching a Barstool Sports interview with a guy who runs a pizza shop in… it’s either New Jersey or New York. The guy’s only open Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday. And he’s only open nine to six or something like that. And he built that business… well, it’s been in his family for like 60 years or something. He has one of the last original pizza ovens ever. But anyways, the point is, is that he lives at the pizza place, that’s where his entire life is, but he built the business around his life. I’m doing the same thing where if I wanna literally go jump on my bike right now and go for a two-mile ride, I’m gonna go do that. And I don’t have to feel like, hey, you’re not logged in and we’re not tracking your mouse. Like what’s happening? How come you’re not on Slack? You know what I mean? I’m not tied down to that. And I can’t stress that enough of like, that is where I wanna be. Topher DeRosia: Yeah. Yeah, it is a good life. We are at about the time to wrap it up. Okay. So I’m gonna do that. Where do you hang out online? Russel Aaron: Where do I hang out online? Topher DeRosia: Are you in any common WordPress Slacks? Russel Aaron: I’m on the main WordPress Slack sometimes. I tend to watch more than I do involve anymore. A long time ago, I used to be very vocal and I used to be not afraid to walk in to a room guns blazing. With the big cultural shift that happened in WordPress, I tend to just sit back now and be more self-reserved. So I post on my website, russellenvy.com. I’m on LinkedIn. I’ve been utilizing Reddit a lot too. I think for me, Reddit is a place where I kind of disagree with the fact that you can hide behind a pseudonym, but I do like the brutal honesty that people will have because they are hiding behind something and they will say, dude, this flat out sucks. Or they’ll be like, Hey, this is great, but it would be cool if, or somebody can be like, “Hey, that already exists. You’re not doing anything new.” I do like that. Because it kind of not puts me in my place, but it shows me either how connected or disconnected I am to what I think I’m doing. And so Reddit is a very great place. I mean, everything is russellenvy.com except for Twitter or X, whatever you want to call it. Topher DeRosia: All right, cool. Russel Aaron: Where do you hang out at? Topher DeRosia: I am in probably 40 slacks, but the vast majority of them, I don’t look at. I’m there so that someone can ping me. I’m in a couple of slacks in India. Okay. I’m in the WordPress Italian community Slack. Russel Aaron: That’s interesting. Topher DeRosia: Post status make, of course there’s a hero press Slack. I have my own company Slack, my local meetup has a Slack. There’s just a lot of them. I wouldn’t say I’m super active on any of them. I just occasionally interact with somebody. I use my own company Slack to invite my clients in when we talk there. Russel Aaron: Right. Do you find yourself reading things more than, you know… from the outsider looking in, I post a lot and it looks like I post a lot… I mean, especially on LinkedIn, but I’m always consuming more than I’m posting. Do you find yourself doing that? Like where you’re… maybe not keeping up with the trades anymore, but like, you know… I used to read maybe 1,500 blog posts a week and then… what was that service where you could like save…? I used to have a service where you could save articles and then that way, late at night, I would just read, you know, maybe 10 or 15 of them a night. But now I look at things like Reddit where I see… I just look at somebody who’s going on there and asking for help. Again, it’s a standard WordPress person that, hey, I’m new to this, I don’t know how, and I’m looking at it and I’m just like, how can we make that better? That’s kind of where I’m at these days. Topher DeRosia: I don’t read a whole lot in Slack. It really is for my convenience. I’m pretty active with my RSS reader. I follow a lot of stuff. Russell Aaron: Oh, wow. Topher DeRosia: Because I don’t wanna go chase it all down all over the internet. So, you know, there’s that. I’m on LinkedIn a fair amount, Facebook a little bit. I’m on Mastodon and Blue Sky mostly just to post stuff. It’s funny, I have more followers… No, let me say it this way. Mastodon, I have the fewest followers, but the most engagement from those followers. Russell Aaron: Isn’t that interesting? Topher DeRosia: Yeah, I’ll post something and I’ll get some favorites or reposts or whatever. Blue Sky, I get almost nothing at all, despite the fact that I have like a thousand followers there. Russell Aaron: But Blue Sky is a community that is fast-moving. I almost compare it to anything Meta has, which is you can post today right now and in three minutes you’re 785 posts down. That’s what I really love about Reddit is that I posted something about this AI team that I’m building that I give away for free on GitHub, and so for like five days, I was the number two post on that subreddit. And the volume that I saw from that. I mean, Reddit really loves human writing. If you go in there, you post something that somewhat seemingly might suggest that you had AI do anything with it, they will just downvote it. But if you write original and you write from the heart and stuff, like your stuff skyrockets there. I’ve learned a lot from Reddit because of that. Topher DeRosia: That’s really cool. Russell Aaron: It’s interesting. Topher DeRosia: Yeah. All right, well, thanks for chatting with me. Russell Aaron: Thank you for the time. Topher DeRosia: And now you can’t be on anybody else’s podcast. Russell Aaron: I’m actually starting my own, sir. Topher DeRosia: Are you? All right. Russell Aaron: I have, like you said, the reason why we started this is because you saw something from me that says, “I’m tired of the indie circuit,” if you will. I put out a LinkedIn post, I don’t know, maybe a month ago at this point and I asked people if they wanted to be on a show. So I have WP Roundtable. I got that from Kyle Mahler, a person who I love in WordPress more than I can express. One of the best people on the planet, I feel like. I was thinking about starting that up again, because we don’t have WP Watercooler anymore. We don’t have anything like that. That’s kind of where I got my start from. But again, I also identify that that’s kind of the problem is that every Monday or Friday I was on a show and I was one of the people that you would see constantly. And so I was sitting there thinking and I was like, what doesn’t the space have? What kind of show do I wanna watch? Because I don’t watch shows when they come out, do you? Topher DeRosia: No. Russell Aaron: I always watch them maybe four weeks down the road at like 2:30 in the morning when I have nothing going on. And by that point, the information is almost stale. I mean, the way that anything works these days. And there’s a few that I might watch maybe within 48 hours of coming out, but at this point, there is something… a new idea that myself and… the guy’s actually an automatician. And so it’s actually kind of interesting because we don’t wanna say anything that would put him in a position to where he’s saying something bad about the company he works for, but I’m also the person where I get to say something to the person who works at Automattic to maybe incite some change. So we are working on something like that, but it’s not going to be an interview show. It is not going to be something where you tune it out or you put it on a 2.5 playback speed just to get through it. You know what I mean? And that’s really what the emphasis of my post was about is that so many of the interviews go that way. Topher DeRosia: Yeah. Are you familiar with wppodcasts.com? Russell Aaron: Yes. Topher DeRosia: Okay, good. So when you get it started up, submit it there. Russell Aaron: That’s a place. I’m very fascinated by Gary Vaynerchuk. Are you familiar with Gary V? Topher DeRosia: No. Russell Aaron: I watch something Gary V every day. That guy makes me feel like I’m lazy every single day, but he is also one of the people that says like, “Hey, you’re 40, you’re still just a baby.” A lot of people feel like I should be two kids, a house, marriage, this, that, and because I’m not, I’m behind the ball. And he’s one person that’s like, “Listen, you’re still a kid.” And he’s like, “You’re 40, I’m 40, and you have 10 years until you’re 50.” And even then you’re still so young to where you can generate something again and from 50 to 60, you can now do. That kind of mentality really moved me around. Why I bring that up is, I’m trying not to post on the same places that everybody else is. I wanna find that new venture. Substack is a great one. And they also have a way to release podcast episodes through them. So they can actually be your entire engine. So like you don’t have to host them on different places and stuff like that. So I’m looking for different plays like that. Topher DeRosia: All right, cool. Well, I look forward to hearing about it when it comes out. I’m sure you’ll post on LinkedIn. Russell Aaron: Yes, yeah. Topher DeRosia: All right. All right then, well, I will maybe find you on Slack or Reddit or someplace. Russell Aaron: Slack, Reddit, LinkedIn. Either way, please keep in touch. First of all, it’s great to see somebody familiar in the space. It’s great. I mean, just talking about the old days, I could sit here and do it forever. Topher DeRosia: All right, I’ll see ya. Russell Aaron: Have a good one. Topher DeRosia: All right, so that was the end of the podcast. If you could send me a headshot. And yep, that’s the one. Cool. And any links you want in the liner notes. Russell Aaron: Cool. Topher DeRosia: And two or three sentences about you and what you do and whatnot. Russell Aaron: Cool. I noticed that you… are you trying to revive Hallway Chats? Or is it something that when you just find something interesting, you’re like, hey, I’ll go do that. Topher DeRosia: That’s it right there. Russell Aaron: Okay. Sure, sure. Topher DeRosia: There was a time when it was a weekly podcast and now it’s a whenever I feel like it podcast. Russell Aaron: I love it. I think that’s the biggest reason why I’m trying to do something different is I really dislike watching a podcast. The first thing they do is they come on and they go, “Hey, welcome to WP whatever. Hey, sorry we didn’t post this week. I was bit…” If you are gonna say you’re gonna post every Wednesday at one, that’s on you. But I do not like when things start off with an apology. Like just get to it. Because I’m not watching it Wednesday at one. I mean, unless you’re Joe Rogan, or unless you are somebody who has a huge following that people will watch you live because it’s important. Otherwise, it’s just consumable stuff, you know? Topher DeRosia: Yeah. For years, I posted it Heropress weekly on Wednesday without fail. I would ignore my family to go get it done. Then I was talking to Morton Rand Hendrickson. You know him? Russell Aaron: Uh-huh. Topher DeRosia: Yeah, he’s a huge fan of Heropress. And I said to him, “Do you read every week?” He’s like, “Oh no, not at all.” He’s like, “Oh, I thought you really liked it.” And he said, “Oh, I love it. But I don’t have time to read every week.” Every few months I’ll get depressed about the WordPress community and I’ll go read 10 essays. And then one time I was at WordCamp Ann Arbor, probably the same one you were at and Josepha came to me and said that… she was kind of a sounding board for employees that come to her and said, “Listen, I’ve been working support all day and people suck and I’m depressed and I hate life.” And she would just listen for a while and then at the end they would say, “Okay, I’m gonna go read a bunch of Heropress and I’ll feel better.” And it really changed my perspective of what I was making. I wasn’t making a weekly publication. I was making an archive, a collection to be used as a tool, a library. Russell Aaron: I’m gonna say this poorly, but it’s almost like you are creating a support help hotline where it’s like, if you’re on the verge of blowing up your website, please call this number. We’ll talk you down from it. It’s almost like you’re building that. Topher DeRosia: That’s funny. Russell Aaron: That’s interesting. And then now you’re just selective about it or you’re so far- Topher DeRosia: I’m less aggressive about finding essayists and less insistent that they get it to me by a certain time. Like I would find somebody and say, listen, I need it by Sunday on this date. And they were like, “Okay.” And that worked for a while. Russell Aaron: Oh, before, before. Okay. Topher DeRosia: Yeah. But now I’ll find somebody… No, I don’t go looking as often. Russell Aaron: You’ll maybe find something that somebody wrote and you’ll be like, “Hey, are you interested in doing this?” Topher DeRosia: Yes. And I don’t find people as often. I used to find my people on Twitter and I’m not on there anymore. Russell Aaron: Like by personal choice? Topher DeRosia: Yeah. Russell Aaron: Okay. Topher DeRosia: I just left Twitter. Russell Aaron: Oh, wow. You feel like your life improved? Topher DeRosia: Yes and no. Russell Aaron: Okay. Topher DeRosia: I feel the loss of what Twitter was. And it’s not there anymore. It’s just gone. Russell Aaron: Especially around WordCamp and stuff like that. That used to have to be the place that you’d be on, you know? Topher DeRosia: The Twitter I loved doesn’t exist anymore. And so, yeah, I feel that loss. Russell Aaron: I need a t-shirt that says that. Topher DeRosia: Yeah. Wow. I’m in the process of making a printable store. Printable? Printful. Printful store. Russell Aaron: Cool. Topher DeRosia: With Woo, to make a video with. I need to make a bunch of products. Maybe I’ll make one of those. Russell Aaron: It’s interesting. Wow. You just flat-out left X. Do you feel like with Heropress, it was… and again, this is why I made that post, is that people almost see it like they can make the rounds. And it’s like, well, I haven’t gone there yet. And so they’re gonna submit something to you because they’re gonna get some press out of it. And it’s not so much what’s best for your brand or it’s not best for your website. They just see it as, well, I’m gonna get some exposure there. Do you feel like it used to be that? Topher DeRosia: No. I’ve gotten maybe two or three submissions ever like that. And a couple of them, I was able to say, “No, that’s not what we’re about. It’s this other thing, what Heropress is actually about.” And they’re like, “Oh, well, okay, that’d be great.” And they do that. And maybe one or two people have said, “I built this great company and everyone should come use my company.” Like, no, not so much. Russell Aaron: Interesting. Topher DeRosia: And that’s the end of it. Russell Aaron: I remember back in, I wanna say like 2013, people used to call each other out and be like, why are you giving the same speech at WordCamp Miami, WordCamp Minneapolis, WordCamp San Diego. And that’s kind of where I was at with that same LinkedIn post. It’s like, I really, really enjoy watching Matt Cromwell’s show, but the guy that he just had on also was on Jonathan Denwood and was also on this one. It was also on, I was like, I’ve already seen this. Maybe I get three more percent information that wasn’t in that last, or because Matt knows a little bit more about personal stuff in WordPress or building a business, he might have some more insight there, but it’s like, I’ve already heard this and I’m kind of already over it. And that’s kind of where I was at is you don’t have to just say, I’m gonna do this one and that’s it. But it’s almost like, you’re making yourself not… what’s the word. Not credible because you’re going around and saying the same thing and it’s just, you’re not doing anything different than a blog post could have done. Topher DeRosia: You know what I mean? I don’t feel too bad about repeating WordCamp talks because, especially at small camps, because a lot of people are just gonna go to their local camp and never go to another one. And unless they cruise.tv, they’re not gonna see it. I struggle a little bit with podcasts because I’ve been asked a lot over the last 10 years to come on a podcast and talk about the story of WordPress. And it’s the same story every time, you know? And so, I’ll try to mix it up a little bit, give different information that I’ve never given before, that sort of thing. But it is something I think about and struggle with a little bit. Russell Aaron: What do you struggle with about it? Topher DeRosia: I don’t wanna just say the same thing over and over again. You know, I don’t want people to go, oh, Topher’s on another podcast episode. Oh, I’ve heard this story. I don’t need to be on this episode. Fortunately, it’s been around long enough that I can give a brief synopsis of the beginning and talk about stuff that’s happened in the last couple of years. Russell Aaron: Right. Topher DeRosia: Which is gonna be really different from the podcast episode I was on in 2020. Russell Aaron: You know? Right. Topher DeRosia: It’s an interesting dilemma when you have one story to tell and everybody wants you to tell it. How do you deal with that? Russell Aaron: Well, I’ve noticed that too. It is like, you know, I’ll watch [Insert Famous Name Here], and they have a podcast, and they’re interviewing, again, [Insert Famous Name Here], and that person was also just on That Famous Name and That Famous Name. I actually saw somebody, it’s like almost a year ago, and they were just like, “Do you want me just to say this so your show has this speech in it or are you genuinely asking me?” Because, you know, like you want this story so you can post it on your social media. But I’ve already given that story 15 different times because they wanted it for their own, you know? And it’s almost going that way where I kind of respect it in a way because you don’t want to post other people’s content. But I also feel like I’m tired of saying the same shit over and over again. It’s interesting, man. Topher DeRosia: Yeah, that’s a dilemma. Russell Aaron: So you’re just like kicking back and… are you building something for you that you think is gonna scale or are you trying to get away from WordPress? That’s kind of where I’m at right now. Topher DeRosia: Yes and no. I have always wanted to… I’ve always been better with people than code. I’m a life coach. Russell Aaron: Yeah. I did not know that about you. Topher DeRosia: I love talking to the client more than coding. I love helping people learn things. And so those skills could be anywhere in WordPress, but also could be anywhere outside of WordPress. So I’m looking for those jobs and they are not out there. Russell Aaron: Right. Topher DeRosia: So here we are. Russell Aaron: I’m to the point now where my son, he’s eight, but he races BMX, like actual bikes and stuff. And so there’s a college here in Indianapolis and it’s one of the best cycling schools in the country. And there’s like five Olympians that practice every Tuesday and Thursday and they’re right in our back door. These are people that have a great social following, but they don’t post very well. They have a brand name, but they don’t have a website. So I’m noticing that every new space that I go into, it’s kind of like I get to jump back into WordPress again, where it’s like, hey, I just built a website for this BMX track in Louisville, Kentucky. It’s one of the best tracks in the country by everybody that has ever raced in a sport, they all vote that it’s one of the best, but they don’t have a website period. I just went through this where they have a guy, he’s their treasurer and he’s like, “Well, I’m an AI software guy.” And I’m like, “Well, how come you don’t have a website?” And he’s like, “Well…” And I’m like, “Listen, I submitted a new version of a we… literally, I uploaded it to my Russell website or to my Russell Envy site and I just put it in a sub-folder and I was like, “Your website could look like this today.” I was like, “For free. I don’t want anything from you. No free anything.” I was like, “I want to donate this to you because I want to grow the sport.” And the guy’s like, “I wanted to build it and React.” And I’m like, “Well, why didn’t you?” And the guy’s like, “Uh.” And I’m like, “I have free hosting for life from WPEngine.” And I was like, “I won’t charge you guys ever. I will host a site. I have free with AppPresser. I’ll build you guys an app where you guys can send push notifications.” And the guy’s like, “Well, I want to have a lot of control and say over it.” And I was just like, “All right, you know what?” And then I built my own. Now I own a domain all about their BMX track and now they’re calling me going, “We should have went with you.” I’m to the point now where I’m nice. And then it’s just like, “Dude, I’m 10,000 miles over you and I’m going to go this way.” Liquid Web did that to me. Liquid Web brought me in and they were like, “We’re going to…” I was supposed to be the OG stellar WP. They brought me in, I was hiring all my friends and I was bringing in people and we were building something. And then they called me and they were like, “Well, you can either be a level two support person or you could just not work here.” And I was like, “Well, I don’t work here anymore.” And they were like, “Well, wait, hang on.” And I literally hit “click” and I have never logged on since. Topher DeRosia: That’s funny. Russell Aaron: I’m in that same boat where, you know, I don’t have to work for you. You know what I mean? Like, fuck, I’m 40. I should be doing something on my own anyway. I kind of wish I had… what was WP 101? Sean did that for all those years. I wish I would have done that. Or every week, I should have had some YouTube about talking about something and maybe I could have monetized that, but I’m not behind the ball. I let the ball slip is what I feel like. Topher DeRosia: It’s not too late to start. I picked that up when Sean, quit and I’ve got a YouTube channel with a bunch of stuff on it. I published one today. Russell Aaron: Oh wow. It’s just interesting things that you think about, or is it like educational, like tutorials? Topher DeRosia: It’s educational tutorials, but stuff that I find interesting. Like today I made a desktop wallpaper for WordCamp Europe. Russell Aaron: Nice. Topher DeRosia: And I did it by going to their webpage in my browser and using the console to hack the HTML and CSS until it looked like a screen, a wallpaper. Russell Aaron: That’s fucking cool. Topher DeRosia: So I published it right before I’d started talking to you, like minutes before that. And it has three views. Russell Aaron: Woohoo. Topher DeRosia: But a couple of weeks ago I did one called fun and games in the terminal. And it’s how to play Tetris in the terminal and how to make a choo-choo train go across your screen when you type LS wrong. And it has 784 views right now. Russell Aaron: That’s awesome. Topher DeRosia: I did one on how to brighten a photo. I did a series. I’m working on a series called Topher learns how, or I talk to people who know how to do things that I really should know how to do, but don’t. I talked to Scott Kingsley Clark about pods, which has been around forever, but I’ve never used. I talked to Donata about Termageddon, because I know it’s important, but I have stayed away because I don’t understand and it’s scary. Russell Aaron: Termageddon. I’ve never heard that. Topher DeRosia: Oh. You know the little cookie consent things, privacy policies and whatnot? Russell Aaron: Yeah. Topher DeRosia: So when you sign up with term again, you pay a surprisingly low monthly fee and they have a human get on the phone with you and talk through your requirements of where you live, your legal stuff. Like, are you in Europe? Are you in California? Where are you? Where are your customers, your viewers? Then you drop in a short code for your privacy code and for the cookies and they keep them up to date based on how the laws change. So you don’t have to pay attention to, Oh, did California make some crazy new law about cookies? What do I need to do to update my site? It’s really, really great. So I did an interview with her. Russell Aaron: $12 a month or $119 a year. Topher DeRosia: Yeah. Russell Aaron: What is the point of having a privacy policy if you don’t pay extra for limiting your liability? Wow. That’s amazing. Topher DeRosia: It is. Russell Aaron: That’s someone just thinking outside the box. Topher DeRosia: Yeah. I have a couple of videos where I was given an account at a hosting company that I’ve never used and videoed logging in for the first time and getting to a website. Russell Aaron: Oh, wow. Just from first login to setting everything up to now you have something production. Wow. Topher DeRosia: Yeah. Specifically not reading the docs. Russell Aaron: Oh, just trying to brute force your way through it. Topher DeRosia: Yeah. Russell Aaron: That’s smart, dude. Topher DeRosia: It’s partly about… well, they may have wonderful docs. It may be super easy to do if you read all the docs. I don’t want to read the docs. Russell Aaron: Me neither. Topher DeRosia: Clickety clickety click, I have a website. So I did GreenGeeks. I did honesthosting.io. I did X cloud. So that’s the kind of stuff I’m doing. Russell Aaron: That’s interesting. That is something that, that Gary V talks about a lot is that it used to have to be where you are this WordPress brand and you do just this and all your videos could only be about that. Anytime you stepped outside the box, people were like, “Why am I watching this?” And today now we’re to finally to where my website would probably actually thrive is it’s so random. It’s just something out of my head and one thing can skyrocket and it’s like hitting the jackpot, you know? That’s interesting. Topher DeRosia: Another thing I did is I made a site called topher.how and because I realized I had never really made stuff in my own channel. I’ve been blogging for decades, making videos, WinningWP. I have over a hundred videos on WinningWP. Russell Aaron: WinningWP? Topher DeRosia: Yeah. Russell Aaron: Did you start that when Charlie Sheen started doing Winning? Topher DeRosia: No, no, no, no. But I was thinking, boy, I’d love to have all this stuff on my own website, but I don’t want to go find it all and copy paste posts. And then I realized nearly every place I’ve ever made content has RSS for their authors. Russell Aaron: Yeah. Topher DeRosia: And so I found the sites, found my author RSS feed and started piping them into WP all import. And now topher.how has all my content from the last 15 years on a dozen different sites, doesn’t more than a dozen different sites, all my videos, all my posts, everything on wordpress.tv, all that stuff. So it’s kind of a portfolio. Yeah, so you can go to topher.how and see all my stuff. Russell Aaron: That was actually one thing that I was really proud of was that my entire WordPress journey is documented on somebody else’s project. So, like you go to WPwatercooler and my resume, what is great about it is that it is not me who can edit those videos, it is not me who can master them. Those words are there. Those words are me. You want to know my qualifications in WordPress, there’s all my shit. For me, I was like, “That’s actually pretty sick. You know what I mean?” Topher DeRosia: Yeah. Russell Aaron: Wow. Topher.how. Oh, dude, do you know who Jeffrey Zinn is? Topher DeRosia: No. Russell Aaron: Oh God. Him and Brandon Dove they have Pixel Jar. Have you ever heard of Pixel Jar? Topher DeRosia: Maybe. Russell Aaron: They’re big West coasters. I’ll tell you that much. He just wrote me, “He literally just said, dude, how do you find the time to write so much on LinkedIn? I enjoy all your stuff, but mostly I’m blown away by the volume.” Topher DeRosia: Nice. Russell Aaron: I’m going to write him back and just tell him the truth. But you know, it’s all thought man. Interesting. Topher, I’ve had a lot of fun. Am I taking up your time? Topher DeRosia: I should get back to work. Russell Aaron: All right, sir. Have a good one. Topher DeRosia: All right. I’ll see ya. Russell Aaron: Bye. Topher DeRosia: Bye.

Podcast Hosts:Grant Broggi: Marine Veteran, Owner of The Strength Co. and Starting Strength Coach.Jeff Buege: Marine Veteran, Outdoorsman, Football Fan and LifterTres Gottlich: Marine Veteran, Texan, Fisherman, Crazy College Football Fan and LifterJoin the Slack and Use code OKAY:⁠https://buy.stripe.com/dR6dT4aDcfuBdyw5ks⁠Check out BW Tax: ⁠https://www.bwtaxllc.com⁠BUY A FOOTBALL HELMET:⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.thestrength.co/mrhelmet/?utm_source=The+Okay+Podcast&utm_medium=Podcast&utm_campaign=Okay_Pod⁠Grant Broggi and Tres Gottlich are joined by Strength Co. member and University of Georgia alum Adam Yale for a wide-ranging conversation. Along the way they discuss SEC football culture, life in California versus the Deep South, starting strength training later in life, military humor, college baseball, church, entrepreneurship, and the surprising business potential of "hose cups." Timestamps:00:00 - Intro06:22 - Staff Brief15:08 - Adam's Lifting & Finding The Strength Co. 35:15 - Hose Cups41:07 - Sandbags44:40 - UGA54:30 - Best Garden Hose?01:01:18 - America 250 Plates01:08:55 - Sports01:20:32 - Tustin Chili Cook-Off01:30:12 - OKAY ADAM! 01:38:37 - Sign Off

You finally get into the work only you can do.Then a Slack message. An email. A customer on fire.And the morning's gone. You're pulled back out.The work that moves your company keeps slipping to the edges of your day.The fire gets your best focus instead.It happens again tomorrow. And the day after that.You tell yourself it's just the job. You're the one who has to catch it.It feels faster. It feels like the responsible call.Adam Spector has backed over 200 startups.He sees a trade almost every founder makes without noticing.You're not behind because you're not working hard enough.Your sharpest hours keep going to work that was never yours to carry.About Adam SpectorAdam Spector is the founder of Chore, a 45-person back-office operations company for fast-scaling founders. He has invested in over 200 startups, including 14 that hit unicorn status. As a four-time founder, he has lived both sides of the table. He built Chore around a simple read on why founders stay swamped.Inside the EpisodeWhy the cheaper, faster choice is the one costing you the mostWhat the fastest fix today is quietly teaching your team to doThe quiet trade you make every time you say "I'll just do it"This Episode Is ForFounders pulled off their best work by the fires that land on themHands-on operators who default to "I'll just do it" because it feels faster and more responsibleLeaders who suspect their team waits on them more than it should, and aren't sure whyGuest LinksChore: https://www.hirechore.com/Adam Spector on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adamspector2/What To Do NextShareSend this to the founder who's stuck doing the work that lands on them instead of the work they're best at. Ask them: "what are you holding onto that keeps you from your best work?" They'll feel seen. And they'll thank you for naming the thing that was quietly holding them and their company back.Connectwith Dr. Yishai on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dryishai/Let's ChatBook your free Ceiling Break Session on his LinkedIn page to get the shift yourself.ABOUT THE PODCASTYou were built for speed.But right now you feel slower than you look on paper.Most founders try to outwork that slow-down.It only burns them out.Your mind is the only machine your company doesn't upgrade.So leaders keep pushing against the wrong thing.Hosted by doctor of psychology and executive coach Dr Yishai Barkhordari.DISCLAIMERThis content is for informational purposes only and does not replace medical, psychological, legal, or financial advice. It is not therapy, clinical advice, or coaching guidance. All examples and stories are illustrative. Some examples or stories are composites. Results vary based on personal effort, context, and market conditions.Always consult qualified professionals before making decisions that impact your business, health, or well-being. © 2026 Yishai Barkhordari. All rights reserved.

Scott Lackey grew up as a free-range kid roaming the woods and building forts, convinced he had all the time in the world. Then three questions from three people in the span of two weeks turned everything upside down. What followed was a winding path through the military, a failed invention, a Ponzi scheme, and a long list of promises he kept breaking to himself — until one sleepless night during Covid changed the trajectory of his life.In this episode of Fine Is a 4-Letter Word, host Lori Saitz sits down with Scott to unpack the stories behind his upcoming book, including why crossing the finish line is never the actual victory, how military service wired him differently than the civilian world could handle, and why the Ironman he completed wasn't really about endurance at all.Scott shares the moment he realized broken promises to himself were the root of his unrest, and why learning to listen to your inner voice, whether you call it God, instinct, or something else entirely, changes how you move through every challenge.Key Topics Covered:How Scott's free-range upbringing shaped his sense of adventure and created the blind spots that nearly derailed his early adult lifeThe two-week period where three questions from a coach, a teacher, and his father forced him to think about the future for the first timeHow an Army commercial became the clearest sense of direction he had ever feltServing with the 1st Infantry Division in Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait, and why four years of military service were irreplaceableThe Wire Dog invention he built in the desert, the $10,000 Ponzi scheme that ended the dream, and what those failures actually taught himWhy Scott believes the gifts are always in the pain, and how that principle shaped his leadership philosophyThe danger of taking advice from people who have nothing at stake in your decisionHow broken promises to yourself erode self-trust, and the internal wake-up call that led him to register for the IronmanThe practices Scott uses to stay connected to his inner voice, including journaling, fasting, long workouts, and meditationWhat the Ironman's question 'What are you willing to sacrifice?' ultimately revealed to him If you've ever felt stuck at 'fine' and couldn't put your finger on why, this conversation will hit close to home.GUEST BIO: Scott Lackey Scott Lackey is a US Army veteran, entrepreneur, Ironman athlete, and author whose life story reads like a series of pivot points, each one forced by failure, chance, or a voice he couldn't quite ignore. He grew up in rural America, joined the Army after seeing a TV commercial that spoke to something he couldn't articulate, and served with the 1st Infantry Division across Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait.After leaving active duty, Scott pursued an entrepreneurial dream built around an invention he'd prototyped in the desert, only to have it derailed by a Ponzi scheme. What followed was years of building, failing, learning, and ultimately creating something worth sustaining. His upcoming book draws on all of it, examining why failure and pain carry more lasting value than the victories people celebrate, and why the hardest promises to keep are often the ones made in private, to yourself.Scott completed a full Ironman (140.6 miles) after a period of quiet internal reckoning during Covid, a decision he kept to himself for six weeks because he didn't yet trust himself to follow through. He's a husband, father, and dedicated student of what it means to live with integrity to your own inner compass.Connect With Scott:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/scottlackey1/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thescottlackey/Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/people/Thescottlackey/X: https://x.com/thescottlackeyYou may find some of the topics in his top 10 most requested keynotes of topical interest. Link on his website: https://scottlackey.com/speaking/Another area of possible interest is his published short stories: https://scottlackey.com/published-work/Subscribe to Fine Is a 4-Letter Word wherever you listen to podcasts.Invitation from Lori:This episode is sponsored by Zen Rabbit.Smart business leaders know trust is the foundation of every great workplace. And in today's hybrid and fast-moving work culture, trust isn't built in quarterly town halls or the occasional Slack message. It's built through consistent, clear, and HUMAN communication.Companies and leaders TALK about the importance of connection and community. And it's easy to believe your organization is doing a great job of maintaining an awesome corporate culture. Because you've got annual all-hands and open door policies, and “fun" team-building events.But let's be real. Leaders who are serious about building real trust are finding better ways to strengthen culture, create connection, and foster community.That's where I come in. Forward thinking companies are hiring me to produce internal/private podcasts. To bring leadership and employees together through authentic stories, real conversations, and meaningful connections. Think of it as your old-school printed company newsletter - reinvented for the modern workforce. I KNOW, what a cool idea, right?!If you run, work for, or know of a company that wants to upgrade communication, facilitate connections, build community, and maintain culture, let's chat. Message me at Lori@ZenRabbit.com.Because when people feel heard, they engage.

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

Watch Us On YouTube! Announcing a new, ongoing benefit for annual subscribers of our Slack community. Annual subscribers receive a free Points Path Alerts subscription OR a 30% discount on Points Path Pro. Sometimes travel planning goes perfectly. Sometimes a sick child cancels an international trip less than 48 hours before departure. This week, Richard shares the story of how a long-planned family trip to London unraveled at the last minute, what he learned while canceling flights, hotels, and activities, and how a father-daughter staycation in New York City helped salvage the weekend. The conversation also dives into using AI to build family travel itineraries, including how Richard used Claude to create a detailed London plan complete with maps, transit instructions, and daily schedules. Ed recounts a frustrating travel day involving delayed flights, rental car headaches, and the challenges of fixing travel disruptions even with top-tier airline status. Plus, Richard takes a chance on Frontier's GoWild Pass, Ed reports more positive experiences with Hilton Diamond Reserve treatment, and the guys react to a jaw-dropping United seat assignment price for an economy flight to Europe.     Get hydrated like Ed in Vegas with Nuun Use my Bilt Rewards link to sign-up and support the show! If you enjoy the podcast, I hope you'll take a moment to leave us a rating. That helps us grow our audience! If you're looking for a way to support the show, we'd love to have you join us in our Travel Slack Community.  Join me and other travel experts for informative conversations about the travel world, the best ways to use your miles and points, Zoom happy hours and exciting giveaways. Monthly access Annual access Personal consultation plus annual access We have witty, funny, sarcastic discussions about travel, for members only. My fellow travel experts are available to answer your questions and we host video chats multiple times per month. Follow Us! Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/milestogopodcast/ TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@milestogopodcast Ed Pizza: https://www.instagram.com/pizzainmotion/ Richard Kerr: https://www.instagram.com/kerrpoints/ ✈️ What We Cover in This Episode ✈️ Richard's canceled London trip • A last-minute illness changes everything • Unwinding flights, hotels, and activities • Lessons from travel plans that fall apart ✈️ A father-daughter New York staycation • Park Hyatt New York • Eloise Tea at The Plaza • Creating travel memories closer to home ✈️ Using AI to build better itineraries • Planning London with Claude • Maps, transit routes, and daily schedules • How AI is changing trip planning ✈️ Why travel disruptions remain frustrating • Flight delays and limited information • Rental car reservation challenges • The reality of fixing travel problems in real time ✈️ Hilton Diamond Reserve update • Additional stays since qualifying • Surprising recognition and amenities • Early impressions of the program ✈️ Frontier's GoWild Pass experiment • Richard buys the promotional pass • How availability really works • Whether the value proposition holds up ✈️ Alaska's new Iceland service • Seattle to Reykjavik on a 737 MAX • Narrowbody flights across the Atlantic • Would either of them actually book it? ✈️ Bank of America Preferred Rewards changes • New qualification requirements • Why longtime users may lose value • What it means going forward ✈️ United's eye-opening seat assignment pricing • Economy Plus pricing to Europe • Standard economy seat costs • The surprising economics of seat selection    ⏱️ Episode 439 Timestamps  0:48 – Richard's London trip is canceled at the last minute 6:12 – What happens when a family trip falls apart 8:34 – The father-daughter New York staycation 10:58 – Using AI to build travel itineraries 17:07 – Travel disruption headaches: delays, rentals, and rebooking 25:48 – Hilton Diamond Reserve delivers another surprise 28:03 – Richard buys Frontier's GoWild Pass 34:31 – Alaska launches Seattle–Iceland service 37:19 – Bank of America Preferred Rewards changes 38:58 – United's shocking $329 seat assignment fee        

The season's final quiz is here, and it's make-or-break for Alan. The topic: the Brazilians with the most Premier League appearances. With only one victory to his name all season, can he finally topple Micah and salvage some pride before the curtain falls? Join The Players Lounge: The official fantasy football club of The Rest Is Football. It's time to take on Gary, Alan and Micah for the chance to win monthly prizes and shoutouts on the pod. It's FREE to join and as a member, you'll get access to exclusive tips from Fantasy Football Hub including AI-powered team ratings, transfer tips, and expert team reveals to help you climb the table - plus access to our private Slack community. Sign up today at therestisfootball.com. https://therestisfootball.com/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=episode_description&utm_content=link_cta For more Goalhanger Podcasts, head to www.goalhanger.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices