Podcasts about states

Send a textIl presidente “pacifista” che dice di aver risolto 8 guerre, che ha vinto le elezioni dichiarando mai più guerre americane e si è fatto dare il Nobel dalla venezuelana che l'ha vinto per davvero, il 28 febbraio, senza autorizzazione del congresso come previsto dall'art 1 della costituzione americana e in violazione di tutte le regole del moribondo diritto internazionale, ha attaccato e bombardato l'ottavo paese negli ultimi dodici mesi, questa volta insieme ad Israele. Oggi cerchiamo di capire i perché e le possibili conseguenze geopolitiche, militari ed economiche di questa ennesima guerra scatenata dagli Stati Uniti in Medio Oriente. Fate girare l'episodio ad amici e parenti e sottoscrivete al programma su tutte le app musicali dove ci trovate sotto la voce "Vera America"Real America, il podcast su tutto ciò che è America per gli Italiani in giro per il mondo!

The war with Iran was predictable on the basis of the commentary flowing from the mouths of religious bigots for years. The Secret Teachings radio and Ground Zero collude for a friday simulcast with special guests Sean Hazlett and David Oates. Iran has been repeatedly accused of religious fanaticism, oppressing women, terrorism, and possessing WMD. Yet all of these things are expressed, allowed, carried out, or possessed by the United States and Israel. When Marco Rubio, President Trump, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth and the lot talk about the apocalypse, evil, and crusades, you can be ensured that the administration of peace did not come to bring an end to hostilities, but a sword to start them.*The is the FREE archive, which includes advertisements. If you want an ad-free experience, you can subscribe below underneath the show description.

Muchos dueños de negocio en Estados Unidos se hacen la misma pregunta cuando llega la temporada de impuestos: ¿existen inversiones que realmente ayuden a pagar menos impuestos? En este episodio, Miguel Gómez, planeador financiero que trabaja con empresarios y dueños de negocio, explica qué hay de cierto detrás de las inversiones que prometen beneficios fiscales. Hablamos de algunas de las más mencionadas, como proyectos de oil & gas y real estate, por qué pueden generar deducciones fiscales y, sobre todo, los riesgos que muchas veces no se explican cuando se presentan estas oportunidades. También exploramos una alternativa mucho más estructurada y común para empresarios: los planes de retiro corporativos. Aunque no eliminan impuestos, pueden ser una herramienta poderosa para diferir impuestos y construir patrimonio a largo plazo. Si eres dueño de negocio, emprendedor o empresario en Estados Unidos, este episodio te ayudará a entender mejor:Qué inversiones pueden generar beneficios fiscalesCuándo estas estrategias pueden tener sentidoQué señales de alerta debes considerar antes de invertirY por qué una buena estrategia fiscal empieza con buenas decisiones de inversiónPorque al final, una mala inversión con una buena deducción sigue siendo una mala inversión.____________________________Dinero en Español es una producción de Dinero Coaching, LLC_____________________________Sophronia Wealth Advisors (“Sophronia”) is a registered investment advisor offering advisory services in the States of Texas, California and in other jurisdictions where exempted. Registration does not imply a certain level of skill or training.  This communication is for informational purposes only and is not intended as tax, accounting or legal advice, as an offer or solicitation of an offer to buy or sell, or as an endorsement of any company, security, fund, or other securities or non-securities offering.This communication should not be relied upon as the sole factor in an investment making decision. The information herein is provided “AS IS” and without warranties of any kind either express or implied. To the fullest extent permissible pursuant to applicable laws, Sophronia Wealth Advisors (referred to as “Sophronia”) disclaims all warranties, express or implied, including, but not limited to, implied warranties of merchantability, non-infringement, and suitability for a particular purpose.All opinions and estimates constitute Sophronia's judgement as of the date of this communication and are subject to change without notice. Sophronia does not warrant that the information will be free from error. The information should not be relied upon for purposes of transacting securities or other invest

Amazon introduces a new agentic AI tool designed for healthcare. States signal plans to invest Rural Health Transformation Fund grants in value-based care initiatives. And Eli Lilly launches a direct-to-employer platform for weight loss drugs. That's coming up on today's episode of the Gist Healthcare Podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Bob Lazar Documentary | Añjali The UFO Experiencer Añjali (Angelia Lynn Johnston), a self-described former defense intelligence official, claimed in 2021 that she discovered a hidden extraterrestrial base in the Mojave Desert. The Claim: Añjali stated she met "higher beings" in a hidden base inside a mountain in the Mojave Desert on January 21, 2018.Alleged Initial Contact at Mojave Mountain (Pre-Public Disclosure)States the retired official invited her to his property in the Mojave Desert. Refers to them and Wayne and TriciaClaims he had previously encountered beings inside a mountain on or near the property.Claims she encountered multiple beings inside:Tall white beings.A mantis-type being.Grey-type beings.The "Council": While the provided results do not explicitly use the term "council" in the context of the desert meeting, they refer to her meeting with "higher beings" or "aliens".States communication was telepathic rather than verbal.Claims beings conveyed messages about human consciousness evolution and an impending shift.Proposed Disclosure: In 2021, Añjali announced plans to lead a group of scientists and an astronaut to this location to meet these beings, promising this would happen before the end of 2021.  Añjali Press Conference LIVE IN DCTT Productions Youtube Link: https://www.youtube.com/live/VgIZJtJ3AjQ?si=vlHe2XUAaJFwSFsmS4 Bob Lazar The Bob Lazar StoryS4: The Bob Lazar Story is an upcoming 2025 documentary film directed by Luigi Vendittelli and produced by Project Gravitaur. It focuses on the claims made by Bob Lazar, who alleges he worked on reverse-engineering extraterrestrial spacecraft at a secret site known as "S4" located near Area 51 in the Nevada desert.It combines archival footage, new interviews, and, for the first time, detailed digital reconstructions and a high-fidelity replica of the craft Lazar claims to have worked on.Secret Government Job (1988–1989) – Bob Lazar claims he was recruited to work at a hidden installation called S-4, located near Area 51.Mission: Reverse-Engineer Alien Craft – Lazar says his assignment was to help analyze and reverse-engineer nine recovered extraterrestrial spacecraft stored in hangars built into the side of a mountain.Gravity-Based Propulsion – According to Lazar, the craft used a propulsion system that bends gravity rather than producing thrust, allowing them to move silently and perform extreme maneuvers.Element 115 Power Source – He claimed the reactor inside the craft used Moscovium as a fuel source to generate gravity waves and power the propulsion system.Alien Origin Briefings – Lazar says briefing documents suggested the craft originated from a star system called Zeta Reticuli, a binary star system about 39 light-years from Earth.Security and Compartmentalization – He claimed scientists at S-4 worked in highly compartmentalized teams, meaning each person only understood a small piece of the technology.Going Public in 1989 – Lazar revealed his story through interviews with investigative journalist George Knapp on KLAS-TV, initially appearing under the pseudonym “Dennis.”Government Erasure Allegation – Lazar says after he went public, his education and employment records were erased to discredit him and hide the program.Bob Lazar film trailer via Interstellar on XLink: https://x.com/InterstellarUAP/status/2028974954377822461?s=20Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-tempest-universe--4712510/support.Follow the #podcast on YouTube: https://youtube.com/@thetempestuniverse

Bob Lazar Documentary | Añjali The UFO Experiencer Añjali (Angelia Lynn Johnston), a self-described former defense intelligence official, claimed in 2021 that she discovered a hidden extraterrestrial base in the Mojave Desert. The Claim: Añjali stated she met "higher beings" in a hidden base inside a mountain in the Mojave Desert on January 21, 2018.Alleged Initial Contact at Mojave Mountain (Pre-Public Disclosure)States the retired official invited her to his property in the Mojave Desert. Refers to them and Wayne and TriciaClaims he had previously encountered beings inside a mountain on or near the property.Claims she encountered multiple beings inside:Tall white beings.A mantis-type being.Grey-type beings.The "Council": While the provided results do not explicitly use the term "council" in the context of the desert meeting, they refer to her meeting with "higher beings" or "aliens".States communication was telepathic rather than verbal.Claims beings conveyed messages about human consciousness evolution and an impending shift.Proposed Disclosure: In 2021, Añjali announced plans to lead a group of scientists and an astronaut to this location to meet these beings, promising this would happen before the end of 2021.  Añjali Press Conference LIVE IN DCTT Productions Youtube Link: https://www.youtube.com/live/VgIZJtJ3AjQ?si=vlHe2XUAaJFwSFsmS4 Bob Lazar The Bob Lazar StoryS4: The Bob Lazar Story is an upcoming 2025 documentary film directed by Luigi Vendittelli and produced by Project Gravitaur. It focuses on the claims made by Bob Lazar, who alleges he worked on reverse-engineering extraterrestrial spacecraft at a secret site known as "S4" located near Area 51 in the Nevada desert.It combines archival footage, new interviews, and, for the first time, detailed digital reconstructions and a high-fidelity replica of the craft Lazar claims to have worked on.Secret Government Job (1988–1989) – Bob Lazar claims he was recruited to work at a hidden installation called S-4, located near Area 51.Mission: Reverse-Engineer Alien Craft – Lazar says his assignment was to help analyze and reverse-engineer nine recovered extraterrestrial spacecraft stored in hangars built into the side of a mountain.Gravity-Based Propulsion – According to Lazar, the craft used a propulsion system that bends gravity rather than producing thrust, allowing them to move silently and perform extreme maneuvers.Element 115 Power Source – He claimed the reactor inside the craft used Moscovium as a fuel source to generate gravity waves and power the propulsion system.Alien Origin Briefings – Lazar says briefing documents suggested the craft originated from a star system called Zeta Reticuli, a binary star system about 39 light-years from Earth.Security and Compartmentalization – He claimed scientists at S-4 worked in highly compartmentalized teams, meaning each person only understood a small piece of the technology.Going Public in 1989 – Lazar revealed his story through interviews with investigative journalist George Knapp on KLAS-TV, initially appearing under the pseudonym “Dennis.”Government Erasure Allegation – Lazar says after he went public, his education and employment records were erased to discredit him and hide the program.Bob Lazar film trailer via Interstellar on XLink: https://x.com/InterstellarUAP/status/2028974954377822461?s=20Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-tempest-universe--4712510/support.Follow the #podcast on YouTube: https://youtube.com/@thetempestuniverse

This week, Carmen and Andrea dig into a chaotic stretch of news: U.S. military action in Iran and Ecuador, the limits of the 25th Amendment, and the growing sense that the country is being run by people wildly unprepared for the power they hold. They talk honestly about the rage, exhaustion, and moral whiplash so many people are feeling as cruelty becomes policy - from border‑camp conditions to the normalization of violence and dehumanization. Andrea opens up about the emotional toll, and Carmen grounds the conversation in clarity, accountability, and the reminder that wanting justice is not the same as abandoning your own ethics.The two also break down the Texas primary - James Talarico's win, Jasmine Crockett's grace, and the voter‑suppression tactics that signal what's ahead for November. It's raw, unfiltered, and deeply human. A conversation about power, consequences, and what it means to stay awake in a moment designed to wear people down.Thank you for stopping by. Please visit our website: All About The Joy and add, like and share. You can now watch the livestream version of the show on YouTube at @CarmenLezeth You can also support us by shopping at our STORE - We'd appreciate that greatly. Also, if you want to find us anywhere on social media, please check out the link in bio page. Music By Geovane Bruno, Moments, 3481Editing by Team A-JHost, Carmen Lezeth DISCLAIMER: As always, please do your own research and understand that the opinions in this podcast and livestream are meant for entertainment purposes only. States and other areas may have different rules and regulations governing certain aspects discussed in this podcast. Nothing in our podcast or livestream is meant to be medical or legal advice. Please use common sense, and when in doubt, ask a professional for advice, assistance, help and guidance.

Edie Falco talks life, career and new makeup campaign; US torpedoes Iranian warship as war with Iran spreads; '50 States in 50 Weeks' visits Kansas Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Senator John Kennedy is a bad caricature of a southern gentleman and he masquerades around Capitol Hill as a folksy “just asking questions” kind of fella. In reality, he’s a wealthy, elite, fraud with a $20 million net worth who attended Oxford. Despite representing the poorest state in America, this Louisiana senator took his allotted time at a hearing with the Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to review how poverty is calculated and take issue with it. So this is our response. Resources Senator John Kennedy: Kennedy questions Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on poverty data in Senate Banking Committee USAFacts: What is the poverty rate in Louisiana? World Population Review: Poorest U.S. States 2026 The Data Center: Health as resilience capacity in New Orleans: The critical role of community-based collaborations Prison Gerrymandering Project: Federal Census policy harms Louisiana’s democracy — but state lawmakers can fix it Wikipedia: John Kennedy (Louisiana politician) Buzzfeed News: John Kennedy Is America’s Folksiest Senator. Some People Who Know Him Say It’s An Act. Quiver Quantitative: Senator John Kennedy has filed a new financial disclosure - here’s what we see UNFTR Resources Video: Senator Questions Poverty Calculations | Here's Why That's INSANE Essay: John Goober Kennedy: The Louisiana Senator Thinks Poor People Are Faking It. -- If you like #UNFTR, please leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts and Spotify: unftr.com/rate and follow us on Facebook, Bluesky, and Instagram at @UNFTRpod. Visit us online at unftr.com. Become a member at unftr.com/memberships. Buy yourself some Unf*cking Coffee at shop.unftr.com. Visit our bookshop.org page at bookshop.org/shop/UNFTRpod to find the full UNFTR book list, and find book recommendations from our Unf*ckers at bookshop.org/lists/unf-cker-book-recommendations. Access the UNFTR Musicless feed by following the instructions at unftr.com/accessibility.Support the show: https://www.unftr.com/membershipsSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In our news wrap Thursday, a group of states is suing the Trump administration over its planned 15% global tariff, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told Latin American countries to step up their fight against drug cartels and Cuban officials say Washington's oil blockade of the island is at least partly to blame for a widespread blackout that left millions in the dark. PBS News is supported by - https://www.pbs.org/newshour/about/funders. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy

It's Thursday, March 5th, A.D. 2026. This is The Worldview in 5 Minutes heard on 140 radio stations and at www.TheWorldview.com.  I'm Adam McManus. (Adam@TheWorldview.com) By Jonathan Clark 9 Nigerian Muslims on trial for killing 200 Christians Nine Fulani Muslim herdsmen are on trial in Nigeria for participating in the massacre of over 200 Christians in the country last year. Christian Daily International reports this is a rare case of prosecution against the Fulani herdsmen. The prosecution comes as the United States is calling on the country to combat Christian persecution. The U.S. is considering a bilateral agreement with Nigeria to protect Christian communities there and eliminate jihadist terror.  Psalm 7:9 says, “Oh, let the wickedness of the wicked come to an end, but establish the just; for the righteous God tests the hearts and minds.”  Nigerian Anglicans reject the homosexual agenda of Church of England Speaking of Nigeria, the Global Anglican Future Conference is meeting this week in the West African country.  The movement of conservative Anglican churches, mainly in Africa and Asia, supports Biblical sexuality. The group has effectively broken off from the Anglican Communion led by the Church of England.  Sarah Mullally is set to become the first female archbishop of Canterbury in the Church of England. Sadly, she supports blessings for homosexual couples.  The Global Anglican Future Conference now plans on appointing its own leader who will represent Biblical values. The conservative group says it represents 85 percent of the world's practicing Anglicans. Christian teacher vindicated for refusing to say inaccurate pronouns In the United States, an Indiana school district agreed to pay $650,000 in a religious freedom lawsuit. Brownsburg Community School Corporation forced John Kluge, a Christian music teacher, to resign for not using biologically incorrect pronouns.  David Cortman with Alliance Defending Freedom commented on the case. He said, “After almost five and a half years, common sense has prevailed at Brownsburg. … Schools should learn that refusing to accommodate religious employees can be illegal and expensive.” Red state families having more babies than blue state families The Institute for Family Studies reports that the women in red states are birthing more babies than those in blue states since the COVID-19 pandemic. The 20 states that voted Democrat in 2024 saw a decline in people in their 20s and kids under 10 compared to 2019. Meanwhile, Republican-leaning states often had cheaper housing and tended to attract parents with young kids. States like Idaho, South Carolina, Florida, and Tennessee saw a 10% increase in married families with young children over the last five years. States like California, New York, and Illinois saw a decline in such families.  Trump cut federal workforce by 12% The federal government's civilian workforce shrunk by over 380,000 people during the first year of President Donald Trump's second term.   That's a 12% workforce reduction between September 2024 and January 2026. The U.S. Office of Personnel Management reported the numbers yesterday. Scott Kupor, the director of the agency, said, “This effort ensures taxpayer dollars support a workforce that delivers efficient, responsive and high-quality services.” Mortgage rate fell to 5.98% Mortgage rates fell below six percent for the first time in years. The average 30-year fixed mortgage rate fell to 5.98 percent last week. It has not been that low since September 2022. Recent rates peaked at 7.8 percent in October 2023. Mortgage rates have been coming down slowly since the Federal Reserve began cutting its benchmark interest rate last year.  Only 4% of American adults have Biblical worldview And finally, Dr. George Barna released his latest survey on Biblical worldview. Sadly, only four percent of U.S. adults have a Biblical worldview. That's unchanged compare to 2023 and down from 12 percent in 1994. Most Americans, over eight in ten, may believe some Biblical principles but often think and live in ways that conflict with the Bible. Also, only two percent of young adults have a Biblical worldview. The survey noted, “Despite the increased attention given to faith matters after the Charlie Kirk murder, and the growth in church attendance and individuals purchasing Bibles immediately after that incident, there is no hint of improvement when it comes to Biblical worldview.” However, Dr. Barna wrote, “We reached a low point—4%— in 2023. The fact that we have not plumbed new depths since then hopefully suggests that we have bottomed out and are in line to experience positive growth in biblical thought and action.” Romans 12:2 says, “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove the good and acceptable and perfect will of God.” Close And that's The Worldview on this Thursday, March 5th, in the year of our Lord 2026. Follow us on X or subscribe for free by Spotify, Amazon Music, or by iTunes or email to our unique Christian newscast at www.TheWorldview.com.  Plus, you can get the Generations app through Google Play or The App Store. I'm Adam McManus (Adam@TheWorldview.com). Seize the day for Jesus Christ.

Edie Falco talks life, career and new makeup campaign; US torpedoes Iranian warship as war with Iran spreads; '50 States in 50 Weeks' visits Kansas Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan will honor Rob Reiner at the Oscars, the best dinosaur characters of all-time and we find out the Soup of the Day!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Send a textConversations with Big Rich welcomes fabricator, racer, and shop owner Cameron Chin—an off-road lifer who broke stereotypes to build a career around cars. Born and raised in Houston, Cameron cut his teeth on a rough '67 Mustang, studied studio art at UT Austin, and dove headfirst into off-roading by co-founding the Longhorn Off-Road Club. After early shop experience and the dot-com bust, he launched Crawltex (2006), helping grow Texas' wheeling scene with everything from bolt-ons to axle and engine swaps.Cameron shares first desert race memories supporting a Hooters-backed team at the Baja 500, a white-knuckle Rally America win as a co-driver, and candid thoughts on King of the Hammers. A move to Las Vegas for his wife's NICU career led to Nefarious Customs, where he expanded into high-end restomods and desert builds. Now back in Texas, Cameron juggles shops in Vegas, Austin, and the Houston area, focusing on frame-off Scouts, a tube-chassis LS-swapped Porsche Targa for his dad, classic Chevy and Camaro builds, and more—while nurturing his kids' budding interest in motorsports Support the show

Who dares to make predictions in the current landscape? We do!  Our Predictions are back. Will our track-record continue on a high or will we be fundamentally wrong? Listen in to our Predictions for 2026 Navigation: Intro What will 2026 be all about? AI, AI and … more AI The big Hardware movements Of Start-ups and VCs Regulatory & Geopolitical Headwinds… and the Wars Fintech, Crypto and Frontier Tech Conclusion Our co-hosts: Bertrand Schmitt, Entrepreneur in Residence at Red River West, co-founder of App Annie / Data.ai, business angel, advisor to startups and VC funds, @bschmitt Nuno Goncalves Pedro, Investor, Managing Partner, Founder at Chamaeleon, @ngpedro Our show:   Tech DECIPHERED brings you the Entrepreneur and Investor views on Big Tech, VC and Start-up news, opinion pieces and research. We decipher their meaning, and add inside knowledge and context. Being nerds, we also discuss the latest gadgets and pop culture news Subscribe To Our Podcast Bertrand Schmitt Introduction Welcome to Tech Deciphered Episode 74. That would be an episode about some predictions about 2026. What will be 2026 all about? I guess this year is probably starting with a bang. We saw the acquisition of xAI by SpaceX. We saw an acquisition from Grok by NVIDIA. What’s your take about what would be the big themes in 2026? I guess it would be for sure about AI and space. Nuno Goncalves Pedro What will 2026 be all about? Yeah. I predict a year that will be a little bit more of a year of reckoning in some way. There will be a lot of things that I think we’ll start seeing through. The fact that we are in the midst of an amazing transformational era for technology, the use of AI, but at the same time, obviously, a ridiculous bubble that is going alongside it as we’ve discussed in previous episodes. I think that we’ll start seeing some early reckonings of that, companies that might start failing, floundering, maybe a couple of frauds along the way, etc. I’ll tell you what I will not make many predictions about today, which is geopolitics. Geopolitics, I will not make predictions at all. Who the hell knows what’s going to happen to the world this year in 2026? I don’t dare making any predictions on that. Back to things where I would make predictions. I think on AI, we’ll have a little bit of reckoning. We’ll talk about it a little bit more in detail during this episode. Interesting elements around the hardware and physical space. Physical space, we just dedicated a full episode to it. We won’t go into a lot of details on that, but definitely on the hardware side, we’ll talk a little bit more about it. The VC landscape is going through an incredible transformation. We’ll talk about it today as well and some of our predictions for this year. What will happen to the asset class? It seems to be transforming itself dramatically. Obviously, that has a very direct impact on startups, so we’ll talk about that as well. And then to close a little bit the chapter on this, we will address some regulatory and geopolitical, let’s call it, headwinds without making maybe too many complex predictions. We shall see. Maybe by that time of the episode, we will be making some predictions. You guys should stay and listen to us, and maybe we will actually make some predictions about the geopolitical transformations that we will see this year in the world. Then last but not the least, we’ll talk about fintech, crypto, frontier tech, and a couple of other areas before concluding the episode. A classic predictions’ episode. We normally have a pretty good track record on some of these, but right now, the world is going a bit interesting, not to say insane. Bertrand Schmitt Yes, and going back to some news, Groq technically was not acquired, but, practically, it’s as if it got acquired. I’m talking about Groq, G-R-O-Q. The AI semiconductor company focused on inference AI, and it was late December. It was a way to end the year. This year, we started again with an acquisition of xAI by its sister company, SpaceX. I guess that’s where we are starting. AI, AI and … more AI We are going to start on AI. That’s definitely the big stuff. Everything these days, I guess, is about AI or has to have some connection with AI, or it doesn’t matter. I think every company in the world has seen that. You have to have the absolute minimum on AI strategy. You better execute on this strategy and show results, I would say. For the companies that were not AI native, you truly have to have a way to transform yourself. I guess at some point, the stretch might be too much, and it’s not really reasonable. Then you maybe better stay on what you are doing, especially if you’re in tech, you better be moving faster to AI. Nuno Goncalves Pedro Just to highlight, and I think throughout the episode, you’ll see that there’re obviously a lot of implications that would manifest themselves into capital markets. I mean, we’ll specifically talk about VCs and startups later on. But the fact that everything needs to be AI, the fact that there’s so much innovation happening right now, in my opinion, and this is maybe the first pre-topic to AI, is we’ll see a tremendous increase in M&A activity this year across the board. I mean, we’ve seen already some big acquihires we mentioned in some of our previous episodes, but we’ll see a lot more activity on M&A this year. Normally, that’s a precursor to the opening of capital markets. I predict also that there will be a reopening of the IPO market that never really reopened last year, to be honest. M&A, a lot more, reopening of the IPO market. Normally, it happens in the second or third quarter of the year. That’s what my M&A friends tell me. First quarter of year, everyone’s figuring out stuff. Then last quarter of the year, things should be more or less closed. Maybe the third quarter is the big quarter. We shall see. But definitely, as a precursor to our conversation today, I think we’ll see a lot of M&A, and we’ll see reopening of the IPO mark. Bertrand Schmitt I guess last year was not as big as you could expect on M&A given the tariff situation announced in April and May. I mean, it became quite tough to do IPO in such market conditions. Definitely, we can hope for something dramatically different in 2026. I guess talking about public markets and IPO, I guess the big one everyone is waiting for is SpaceX. SpaceX getting even more interesting with its xAI acquisition. Nuno Goncalves Pedro Do you think that because of the acquisition, it’s more likely that it will happen this year, or because of the acquisition, it’s less likely that it will happen this year? Bertrand Schmitt That’s a good question. My guess is the acquisition of xAI is all about xAI needing more financing and cheaper financing. This acquisition is a pathway to that. SpaceX being a much bigger company, a company that is also making much more revenues. I could bet that there is higher probability that, actually, SpaceX will go public in order to finance itself. At the same time, will it have enough time to prepare itself for the IPO given this acquisition just happened? Can they do that in 6 months? I mean, if anyone can do it, I guess it’s Elon Musk. It’s a strategy to present an even more attractive company with an even more interesting story, a story of vertical integration from AI to space. I guess the story as it’s presented itself right now, it’s one about having your AI data centers in space. Because in space, you have much better solar energy production with solar panels. You have a perfect cooling situation because you are in space. Thanks to Starlink, you have the mean to communicate between the satellites and with Earth itself. I think if someone can pull up a story like AI data center in space, I guess Elon Musk can. There is, of course, a lot of questions about is it practical? Is it economical? Yes. I certainly agree. I’m not clear on the mass, and can you make it work? Again, I mean, Elon Musk single-handedly, with SpaceX, managed to transform the space market on its head. I mean, they are the biggest satellite launching company in the world. They have the most satellites in the world. I mean, I’m not sure I would bet against him, and I guess I would probably believe that he could pull up something. Time frames, different story. The 2-3 years data center in space for AI as cheap as on Earth, I have more trouble with that one. I mean, it’s a usual suspect with Elon Musk. You promise something unachievable in a few years, but, ultimately, you still manage to reach it in 5 or 10. Again, I would not bet against the strategy. Nuno Goncalves Pedro Yeah. I’ve talked to a couple of space experts, people that have launched rockets, and have worked JPL, NASA, and a couple of other places, etc. For what it’s worth, their feedback is, “No way in hell, and we’re decades away.” We’ll see. I mean, to your point, Elon has pulled very dramatic stuff. Not as fast as he normally says he’s going to pull it, but within a time span that we all see it. Difficult to bet against him. In terms of actually the prediction, maybe to respond to the prediction as well, will SpaceX IPO? I’m going to make a prediction that has a very high likelihood of missing the mark, but I think Tesla’s going to buy and merge them both into it. It’s going to become a public company through Tesla. That’s my hypothesis. Bertrand Schmitt No. That’s supposed to be it. That’s how you solve that. Nuno Goncalves Pedro And Elon controls the whole universe. X, xAI, Tesla, SpaceX, all under one umbrella beautifully run. And SolarCity is well in there, of course, so wonderful. Bertrand Schmitt That’s possible. Certainly, you are not the only one thinking Tesla will acquire or merge with SpaceX. To remind everyone, Tesla is around 1.3, 1.5 trillion market cap. Depending on the day, SpaceX seems to be valued at similar range, 1.2, 1.3 trillion. It looks like it’s the most valued private company at this stage. These are companies of similar size, so that’s one piece of the puzzle. When you think about the combined company, we could be talking about a 3 trillion entity. Playing right here with the biggest companies in the marketplace today. Nuno Goncalves Pedro With a couple of tweets from Elon, it will rapidly get to 4 to 5 trillion. Bertrand Schmitt That’s so tricky. Nuno Goncalves Pedro Yes. On AI and back to AI, one thing I think that we’re about to see is this will probably be the year of agentic AI. Obviously, we predict a lot of growth on that side of the fence, in particular on the enterprise B2B side. We see a lot of opportunities coming through. From our perspective, at least at Chamaeleon, we generally believe that there’s going to be a lot of movements on agentic AI. It’s also going to be probably the year of the first big fails of agentic AI that will be newsworthy. There will be some elements about that loop and how it gets closed that will happen. I think we might see some scandals already. We’re already seeing the social network of bots talking to bots. We will see other scandals going on this year even in the consumer space and in the bot to bot space, which we now can talk about or in the AI agent to AI agent space. My prediction is we will see some move forwards. There’ll be some dramatic funding rounds along the way. We’ll see a couple of really cool things out of the gates coming out that are really impressive, but we’ll also see the first big misses of the technology stack. I don’t think we’ll go fully mainstream yet this year, so it’s probably maybe something more for 2027 along the way. That would be my prediction again. I think enterprise will lead the way. We’ll definitely see a lot of stuff on consumer as well that is cool. Then we’ll all have our own personal assistance in our hands, basically, literally in our phones. Bertrand Schmitt Going back to agentic AI, we also started the year with some pretty dramatic move. I mean, the launch of Clawdbot, renamed OpenClaw. I mean, this stuff took fire in like a week or 2. It was coded by just one person who actually didn’t even code the product but used AI to build the product, 100% used AI, proposing some new ways also to leverage AI to do coding. He has a pretty unique approach. It’s not vibe coding. I would say it’s a better way to do that. Then the surprising evolution with the launch of a social network for AI agents, Moltbook. I mean, this stuff, probably there is some fake in it. But at the same time, I think it’s quite impressive because it’s the first time we see truly 100,000 plus agents communicating directly to each other. Yeah. I mean, that’s the first time we see surfacing the possibility of some sort of hive mind on the Internet. It’s pretty surprising. Right now, all of this is a hack done in a few days. By end of year, by 2 years, 3 years, we might discover that, actually, the best approach to AI might not be the AI assistant like we are doing today, but a combination of hundreds of thousands of AI working closely together. We might be witnessing the first sign of new intelligence in a way. Nuno Goncalves Pedro Things like this social network might either be Skynet, the beginning of Skynet. They might be the beginning of Her, or they might just be a fad and nothing really happens. It’s just interesting to see what these agents are doing. Bertrand Schmitt Totally. Nuno Goncalves Pedro Obviously, there are real and clear and present dangers of some of the integrations of AI we’re seeing in the market. Interesting enough, and I’ll ask you for your prediction a bit, Bertrand. I think we’ll probably see the first big mishap of AI being used in some infrastructural decision in the age of AI. I mean, we’ve seen AI issues in the past and software issues in the past. We talked in previous episodes about that as well. Mishaps of software that have led to people dying. But I think probably the first big mishap will happen this year as well. Very public mishap of the use of AI and serve its interactions with infrastructure or something that’s very platform related, etc, that will have big impact that everyone will notice. That’s my prediction for the year as well. We’ll have the first big oops moment, as I would call it, for AI in this new age of full on AI. Bertrand Schmitt I would say first some perspective. I think today, people are not using AI directly for life and death decision, at least not that I’m aware. We’re not going to let AI fly a plane, for instance, tomorrow so you can be, reassured. At the same time, given there is such a race to AI, there definitely might be some mistakes. We were talking about the social network for AI agents, Moltbook. Apparently, all the keys used to secure the AI were shared by mistake because it was not properly locked down. We can see that indirectly, mistakes will be made for sure. Two, it’s highly probable that some people will trust AI too much to do some stuff, and this stuff might not work and might have some grave consequence. Hopefully, there is not so much of this. Hopefully, it’s mostly AI used for the good. But you’re right. I mean, at some point, the more we use the technology, the more there would be issue. I mean, it’s highly probable. Nuno Goncalves Pedro That will lead me to another prediction, which is, and we’ll talk about more of it later, but it probably will lead to the first significant movement in terms of regulatory environment certainly in the US at some point if it happens in the US in particular, where there will be some movement that will be like, “Hey, you guys can’t do this anymore.” Because this will probably emerge from mismanaged interfaces. From systems having access to stuff that they shouldn’t have access to in the first place. Talking a little bit more about what’s happening in AI. You’ve already mentioned some of the issues that relate actually to security and cybersecurity. We keep talking about AI. We keep talking about all these infrastructure pieces and platforms that are being built. I think we’ll have a lot more incidents like the one you just mentioned where things will be shared that shouldn’t have been shared, where people will break systems and get into it, etc. Let’s see where that takes us, which is a little bit ironic because, obviously, with AI, the promise is that cybersecurity becomes more robust as well because there’re agents working on our behalf on the cybersecurity side. There’s also agents working on the other side. Bertrand Schmitt It’s a constant race. It’s the attackers, defenders. Each time you have new technology, you have a new race to who is going to attack or defend the best. Each new wave of technology, it’s an opportunity to challenge the status quo. Nuno Goncalves Pedro The attackers have been winning, and I feel they’ll continue winning in 2026. I think it’s going to still be a year of attack. We’ll see more and more breaches, more and more stuff that will happen. Bertrand Schmitt I don’t know if they will win. I mean, it’s normal that they win once in a while. For sure, some infrastructure is not updated as it should. Some stuff are not managed as it should, so there will always be breaches. I don’t know if things are dramatically going to change because, again, everyone who cares who is going to update his infrastructure with AI for defense. There is no question that you have no choice. We will see. That I don’t know. For sure, AI will be used to attack directly with AI. Maybe you’re able to do bigger, larger scale attack. Or thanks to AI, you are simply able to create new type of attacks more easily. AI can be used behind the scene as a way to prepare and organise new type of attacks, even if it’s not used directly live in the battle. Nuno Goncalves Pedro One topic that we’ll come back to later is the geopolitics of everything, but maybe more broadly. On the geopolitics of AI, it’s very clear that we have an arms race going on. Obviously, the US on the one hand, China on the other hand is the two extremes, putting tremendous amount of capital into data centers just at the base of that infrastructure. Chipset development, chipset access, a huge theme in terms of the export restrictions, etc, that are being forced by the US. I think it will continue. From a European standpoint, obviously, they’re stuck between a rock and a hard place, to be very honest. Let’s see what happens on that side of the fence. My view of the world is that certainly from a US and China perspective, we’re going to see a lot more movements in 2026, like big movements. The Chinese movements we always see in delay.  It takes us a couple of months, sometimes even more than that to understand exactly what’s going on. I think we’re going to see some huge moves this year in terms of the States, the United States of America, and China really pouring capital into the creation of the next big winners around AI. I think the US is obviously more visible. We see a lot of these companies. We’ve just discussed xAI and its acquisition by SpaceX or merger. I don’t know what they’re calling it exactly. Effectively, on the China side, the movements I think are already very big. As I said, it will take a while to figure out exactly what those moves are. One thing that I propose is that at some point, China will have very little dependency on chipsets from the US. I’m not sure it’s going to happen this year, but I think the writing is on the wall. Irrespective of any other geopolitical issues that is coming to the fore at this moment in time. That’s one of the key areas or in arenas of fight. Bertrand Schmitt It makes sense. If you are China, you will look at what happened. You would think that you cannot just depend on the largest of one country. It makes rational sense, the same way it makes rational sense for the US to limit exports to China because there is value to delay some peer pressure that could use these technologies for good but also for bad. If you were an ally of the US, that would be one thing. But when you are not an ally of the US, that certainly should be a different perspective. Maybe one last point concerning agents, I think there will be a lot that will revolve around coding. We can see OpenAI with Codex. We can see Cloud with code. There was, of course, [inaudible 00:18:28] that was trying to be big on agentic coding. I think agentic coding was one of the big transformation in 2025 and is going to get bigger in 2026. I think for a lot of people who do coding, there was a radical transformation in terms of what you can achieve, what you can do, how much you can trust AI to help you code. I start to think we might see this year, the replacement of not just one AI replace one coder, but one AI replace a full team because of the new ability to manage that at scale. Coding might be a common activity where you are going to think about outcomes, think about objective, think about how you organise, but not really coding by itself anymore. A big change, like you used to code, directly your hand on the stuff, but step by step, everyone is going to become a manager of agent. I think in one year, we saw enough transformation to think that in the coming year, the transformation can be even more dramatic. Nuno Goncalves Pedro The big Hardware movements Now switching gears to hardware. Obviously, a lot of movements in 2025 and over the last few years. One piece of thesis that we’ve had long-standing at Chamaeleon is that we will see the emergence of AI devices. Some of them have been tremendous failures as we discussed in the past. I predict that we’ll have a couple of really interesting full stack AI devices in the market this year. Why does that matter? Because, as many of you know, obviously, there’s compute that can happen in data centers and cloud infrastructure all over the world, but also there’s compute that can happen at the edges. The more you can move to the edges and the more you can create devices that actually allow you to have user experiences that are very distinctive at the edge, the more powerful some of these devices might become. I predict Apple will not be the first to launch anything on this. I predict probably OpenAI, after the acquisition of IO, will maybe not launch something this year, but will announce something this year. I’ll step back on that prediction. They’ll announce something this year, but maybe not launch. But we’ll start seeing some devices that have some interesting value in the market, probably devices that are AI devices, but they are very focused on very specific user flows, and so very much adequate to specific activities. I won’t make a prediction on that, but I think areas that would make sense for that to happen would be obviously around fitness, health, et cetera, et cetera, where we already have the ascendancy of products like Oura Ring and others out there. Definitely, that’s one area that might have quite a lot of developments. I think AI-first devices, devices that are very focused on compute at the edges, providing user flows that are AI-enabled to end users, we’ll see a lot more of that and a lot more activity this year. Again, I don’t think Apple will be necessarily ahead of the game. Again, maybe OpenAI will give us something to at least think about and look forward to. Bertrand Schmitt First, I’m not sure it will be that transformational because if it’s not in your phone, in your pocket, there is only so much you can do with it, and there is only so much computing power you will have. I’m doubtful it would be really impactful this year. Nuno Goncalves Pedro I feel we’ve been discussing this shift of paradigm in input and output. For me, some of these devices could lead to that shift. Because, again, a mobile phone is not a great long-term paradigm for the usage that we have because it’s really constrained by the screen. The screen is really what takes most of the battery life away. If we didn’t have that screen, what could we do? If we have the block that is as big as a mobile phone, and it didn’t have a screen, it was just compute, that’s a mini computer, a microcomputer. Bertrand Schmitt That’s a fair point, but I don’t see that transformation this year. That’s really more my point. I can see that you can have AI-enabled smart glasses, and it’s clear there is a race to AI-enabled smart glasses. My point is more to go beyond the gadget, it would take quite a while. It would need to have cameras. It would need to analyse what you see. It would need to hear what you hear. Again, it might come, but then at some point, it would be okay, what do you do with it? We have the example of the movie Her. That’s showing Her what it could be. There are definitely possibilities. It’s clear that if you take the big VR headset like the Apple Vision Pro, there is a failure from that perspective in the sense that I think it’s a great, amazing device. The big problem is that it’s doing way more that makes sense. I think there will be a clearer separation between your smart AR glasses that has to be light, that has to be always unconnected, and that’s primarily there to help you make sense of the world around you. The true VR headset that doesn’t really require much in terms of AI, and it’s just there to immerse you in a different world. For this, we know, unfortunately, in some ways, that there is not a lot of demand for it. Maybe there is little demand because you are too hidden in your own world. The technology is not working well enough yet. There are a lot of reasons. But I think Apple trying to do both at the same time, AR and VR, with the Vision Pro, was a pretty grave structural mistake. I think we would see a clearer line of separation between the two. There is bigger market opportunity for AR glasses. That, I certainly agree. There is opportunity to connect that to a computing device. As you talk about, your glasses are your screen, your phone becomes something in your pocket connected to your glasses. Nuno Goncalves Pedro For me, Apple has their way of doing things. From the perspective of what you said, they normally really plan their devices. Even if it’s a big shift in terms of a new area, like they tried with the Vision Pro, and we criticised them for launching it as a device that should have been more of a dev device that they really launched as a full-on device, but that’s their playbook, classically. I think Apple needs to change how they put products out and how they experiment with those products, et cetera. I think they have enough money to be doing everything all the time and figuring it out. If they don’t want to put it out, then they need to do a lot more hell of testing internally with their silos, but they should be playing across all these arenas, VR, AR, everything. They just should put devices out that are either ready for prime time, or they should call it something else. They should call it like this is a dev device or whatever it is. Bertrand Schmitt I agree with you. My complaint is more that it was marketed as a consumer device when it was not. It was a true developer device. Two, they tried to mix the two at once, and it made no sense. No one is going to walk in their home or in the street with their Vision Pro on their head. You have to be deranged, quite frankly, to have use cases like this. I think that for me is a crazy mistake from a company like Apple that prides itself in pure UI, pure user interface, very well-designed device for one specific use case, not mixing the two use cases. We still don’t have Macs with a touchscreen, you know?  We still don’t have an iPad with a good OS that makes use of this great hardware. For some strange reason, they decided to mix everything in the Vision Pro with a device that weighs a ton on your head and is so uncomfortable. That’s why, for me, I’m like, “Guys, what is wrong? Why did you let this team run crazy?” I hope at some point, Apple will go back to the drawing board. My understanding is that that’s what they are doing. They are going to have two devices, one smart glasses, an evolution of the Vision Pro, just focus on VR. They might actually abandon the concept of the pure VR-oriented headset. Because, from a market size perspective, it might not be big enough for Apple, quite frankly. Nuno Goncalves Pedro I read on all of the above, and people at this point was like, “Why are then players like Samsung and others not doing it. LG, et cetera?” Because those players historically have not invented new categories. They’re amazing at catching up once the category is invented, and then they scale the hell out of it, and that’s what these companies have been exceptional at. I wouldn’t see a dramatic innovation, I think, in terms of devices coming from any of the big ones on that side of the fence. Not to disrespect them in any way, but I think that’s not been their playbook ever. Again, if the origination doesn’t come from a start-up or from an Apple, I don’t see those guys going after it. My bet is that we’ll see some start-up activity and, again, hopefully, some announcement from IO now within the OpenAI world. Bertrand Schmitt I would slightly disagree with you. I see where you are coming from. But take the Samsung Galaxy Note, that sudden much bigger headphone that no one was doing that was launched by Samsung, at some point, it forced Apple to launch an iPhone Max. Let’s look at the Z Fold that Samsung launched 7 years ago, copied by everyone. Now Samsung launching a trifold. Apple has still not launched their foldable phone. I think there is a mix, actually, of sometimes- Nuno Goncalves Pedro For me, that’s not a proper new category. It’s still a mobile phone. It just happens to have a screen that folds in half. Bertrand Schmitt The iPhone was still a mobile phone, you could argue.  Nuno Goncalves Pedro No. I think the iPhone was…  I could actually agree with you on that point. Maybe Apple is not as innovative in that case. I think what Steve Jobs was exceptionally good at in terms of his ability as this master product manager was to be an exceptional curator of user flows and user experiences, and creating incredible experiences from devices based on that. That was his secret sauce. Could you say, “Wasn’t all of this stuff already around?” It was. You just put it all together very neatly and very nicely. But if you’re talking about significant shifts in how a category is done, the iPhone was a significant shift in how the category was done. The Fold is still an interesting device. I actually have a Fold right now in front of me. The 7 that you highly recommended to me that we both got, the Z Fold 7. I think they do amazing devices. I don’t think they normally are the most innovative players. Then, when they come to innovation, it comes from technology edges. Obviously, they have Samsung Display, there’s a bunch of other things. They had the ability to do foldable screens in-house themselves. Bertrand Schmitt I don’t disagree with you. I think there is an interesting situation where some companies have some strengths, another one has some strengths. My worry with Apple is that this was not demonstrated with the Vision Pro. The Vision Pro was a hot pot of technologies barely integrated together, with use cases absolutely not well-defined and certainly not something that makes sense for most of us. There is a question of has Apple lost it? While Samsung actually keeps doing their own stuff, that, yes, might be more minor improvements, but at least they are doing it. Because it looks like Apple is missing the train on even the minor improvements. By the way, you might not be aware, but Samsung launched its Vision Pro competitor. Interestingly enough, it might be a better product in some ways, being much lighter and much more comfortable. Nuno Goncalves Pedro We should play around with that and report back to our listeners. Of Start-ups and VCs Moving to venture capital and the startup ecosystem and what’s happening there, I think it is very much a bifurcated environment, and it’s bifurcated for both VCs and for startups. If you’re a startup in the AI space, and you have the hottest team since sliced bread, and you can create FOMO at the speed of light, you can raise ridiculous rounds. Five hundred million at the $3 billion, or $4 billion, or $5 billion valuation, and you still haven’t really even started. First round, you can raise 500 million. That’s back to the whole discussion on Bubble and where are we, et cetera. Some of these companies might actually become huge, some of them might not. But definitely, we are seeing really the haves and have-nots on the startup ecosystem with incredible teams raising a lot of money very, very early on or mid-stage if they’ve already existed for a while, and then the rest not being able to raise. We see a lot of non-necessarily AI sectors, some of the areas of SaaS that don’t necessarily have AI in it, or fintech, or the consumer space that are really, really struggling. If you don’t have an AI story for your startup right now, it’s extremely difficult to raise money unless your numbers are just the best numbers ever. That’s, I think, the first part of the element of bifurcation that we’re seeing today. The second element of bifurcation that we’re seeing today in terms of fundraising is for VCs themselves, and really propelled by the large VC firms raising more and more capital in recent orbits, announcing 15 billion across funds raised. Lightspeed, I think, had made an announcement a couple of weeks ago as well. They’ve raised a bunch of money as well. The big guys are all raising a lot of money. At some point in time, the question some of you might ask is, “These VCs are redeploying more and more money if they have a couple of billion for a VC fund. How does that look like? Is that still VC?” My perspective, I’ve shared before in some of our previous episodes, is that that’s no longer venture capital. At that point in time, we’re talking about something else. Private equity hedge funds, if you want to call them, maybe funds that are really driven by growth investment or late-stage investment. If you have a couple of billion under management, you’re not going to make your returns by writing a $3 million check in a series seed and leading that round.  That has implications for everyone in the ecosystem. It has implications for smaller funds that obviously have a lot more difficulty in raising capital. It’s difficult to differentiate. Last but not least, also for startups that really continue searching for that capital that is out there. Andreessen Horowitz, for example, runs Speedrun, which is a great program for companies around consumer in particular. Initially, it was a lot for gaming. But at some point in time, Andreessen Horowitz could decide that they don’t want to invest more in you. They just put money from Speedrun, which is obviously a very small check compared to the very large checks they could write mid to late stage and that will have an effect on you as a startup. What happens at that point in time if Andreessen Horowitz is not backing you up in later stages? More than that, what happens if I can’t get these big funds interested in me? Are the small funds still valuable to me? Punchline, my view is yes. Obviously, we’re a smaller fund, so there’s parochial interest in what I’m saying. Small funds can still create a ton of value for you, also in terms of credibility, ability to accompany you in those first stages of investment, and the ability to bring other larger investors later down the road as well. There’s definitely a big movement happening in terms of the fundraising for VC funds, which we shouldn’t neglect, which is the big guys are raising a lot more capital and are therefore emptying the market to smaller funds that are having more and more difficult raising at this point in time. We had discussed that there would be a need for concentration in the industry, that micro funds would need to concentrate, and we didn’t have the space for so many micro funds as we had around. But the way it’s happening is extremely dramatic at this moment in time. I think it will continue through 2026. Bertrand Schmitt Remember a few years ago, with the rise of AI, there was more and more of the question about, “What’s the point of SaaS at this stage?” Because SaaS was around for 15 years. Basically, how do you come up with something new that was not already tested, validated by the market? How do you bring something new? We say this was reinforced to the power of 10. If your product is not clearly built from the ground up for a new use case enabled by AI, anyone could then might have built your product 5, 10 years ago, and therefore, why now has no clear answer, and it’s a big problem. I’m still surprised myself to still see some entrepreneurs where you talk to them about AI because you don’t see them in the deck, and they explain to you, “It’s not yet there,” and you’re like, “What’s wrong with you guys?” Fine. Do whatever you want. Do a small business and whatever, but don’t think you can come up pitch and raise without an AI story. The second category is people who come with an AI story, but you can feel very quickly, I guess you saw that many times, Nuno, where just a story layered on top with little credibility. It’s not better. It’s not enough to just have a story. Your business needs to be radically built differently or radically proposing some brand-new use cases that were impossible to solve 5 years ago. Nuno Goncalves Pedro To stack up on that, absolutely in agreement. If you’re just adding to the story, and it’s an afterthought, and you’re just trying to make the story somehow gel, once you go into one or two layers of due diligence, your investors will very quickly realise that you’re not really AI-first or dramatically AI-enabled or whatever. It’s just you’re sort of stacking something on top of another thesis. It needs to make sense from the product onwards. It’s not just, let’s just put it together with chewing gum, and magically, people will give you money. It was true also if we remember the good old crypto blockchain days, where everyone’s investing in crypto. A lot of stories that didn’t make much sense. In that sense, it’s not very different. I would go one step further. I think in the world of the VC winter that we’re a little bit in, where it’s more and more difficult if you’re a smaller fund to raise your fund at this moment in time, there’s a lot of sources of distinctiveness still talked about, like proprietary networks, access to deal flow, fast track record, all that stuff that really, really matters. But our bet continues at Chamaeleon continues being that you need to be AI-first as a VC fund yourself. You need to have core advantages in using not only readily-available AI tools or third-party available AI tools, data sources, technology stacks, but actually building your own stack over time, which is what we did with Mantis at Chamaeleon. Again, just to reinforce that, I think we’re at the beginning of that stage. We, Chamaeleon, are ahead of the game, but we think that the rest of the market will have to move towards that as well. Still, to be honest, very surprising to me to see that many significant large players are doing very little still around some of these spaces. They have data scientists. They’re running some tools. They’re running some analysis and all that stuff, but it’s still, again, back to the point I was making for startups, all glued up with chewing gum. It doesn’t all come together nicely, which it does need to from a platform standpoint. Bertrand Schmitt It’s quite surprising. I agree with you that some VC funds might think that they can do business as usual in that brand-new world. It’s difficult to believe. Nuno Goncalves Pedro Maybe moving a little bit toward the capital formation piece. We already discussed the M&A space really accelerating. We’ve also discussed the IPO market and some predictions on that. Secondaries, there’s obviously a lot of liquidity coming from secondaries from mid to late stage. I think it will continue throughout the rest of 2026. A lot of activity in buying, selling in secondaries as some asset managers are becoming more distressed, as some very high net worth individuals and family offices are becoming more distressed as well, at the same time, where there’s a lot of opportunities to potentially arbitrage around some investments. I believe a lot of money will be made and lost this year by decisions made this year, just to be very, very clear in terms of equity, purchases, et cetera. Exciting year ahead of us. Definitely a very, very interesting market ahead of us. Secondaries, M&A, growth, and late-stage investing, also, early-stage investing will continue just for those that were wondering. Last but not least, the public markets, the IPO market as well. Bertrand Schmitt One of the big questions for the IPO market would be, will SpaceX go public? Would it be good for the startup ecosystem? Because suddenly that they go public, it would be to raise money. If they raise money, will there be any money left for anybody else? That would be an interesting test of the market. For sure, it would be proof that market are risk on financing a new IPO like this one. Or as you said, maybe there is no IPO, and it’s a merger with Tesla. Time will tell. Nuno Goncalves Pedro Regulatory & Geopolitical Headwinds… and the Wars Moving maybe to our topic of regulation and geopolitical headwinds, as we’re seeing … definitely not tailwinds. The Google antitrust verdict and, obviously, the remedies are expected to come forward now, and a lot of people are saying, “There are some risks of structural separation.” What do you think? Is it cool, but nothing will happen in the end dramatically? Alphabet or Google? I’m not sure, actually. It’s Google LLC. I think that’s the case. It’s The United States versus Google LLC. Bertrand Schmitt I’m not sure. Personally, I’m not a big fan. I think there needs to be a better way to manage some anticompetitive behavior. I’m not a big fan. There was this temptation to do that for Microsoft 25 years ago. Look at what happened. No one needed to buy Microsoft to leave space for others. I see the same with Google, and I guess they are happy to not be the number 1 in AI today, but to have an open AI in front of them. Even if they are doing a great job, by the way, to move forward and go faster and faster. Personally, quite impressed now with some of what they have released. Gemini 3 is doing great from my perspective. I’m not a big fan of this. I think to be clear, it’s important that bigger companies don’t behave anticompetitively, but at the same time, we need to find the right approach where it’s not about breaking these companies, and it’s also not about forbidding them to do acquisitions. Because then you end up with what NVIDIA just did with a $20 billion acquihire IP licensing type of acquisition, because they didn’t want to have the uncertainties. They didn’t want to wait 1–2 years in order to acquire the people and the technology, so they organised it in a different way. But I don’t like that. I think they should be able to acquire companies without facing so much uncertainty. To be clear, it’s not new. Uncertainty when you are Google, NVIDIA, or others, it happens. It has happened for a decade plus, 2 decades. I think there needs to be, for sure, some safety valves. At the same time, we want an efficient capital market. An efficient capital market need companies that can acquire other companies. If you don’t do that efficiently, it will be worse for the entrepreneurs, it will be worse for the investors, it will be worse for everybody. I think we have not reached a good equilibrium from my perspective. We need more efficient acquisition process. And at the same time, we need to also enforce faster anticompetitive behavior. Because what you talk about concerning Google, this is a case that was what? That is 10 years old. You see what I mean? This is way too long. If you’re a startup, you are dead by then. It’s like the story of Netscape facing Microsoft. They were dead long after the fact. I think we need a different approach. I’m not sure the best answer. I’m not sure we’ll get a better approach. There are probably too many vested interest. My hope is that it will get better with this current administration because, certainly, the past administration was very anti acquisition and efficient markets. Nuno Goncalves Pedro We’ve talked about the European Union AI Act a bunch of times, so I don’t want to spend too many cycles on that. The only effect that I would say is we are seeing in very slow motion the splitting of the Internet. I once had Tim Berners-Lee, by the way, shouting at me that we were going to break the Internet when we were applying for the .mobi top-level domain. I was part of that consortium that eventually did get the .mobi top-level domain, and I had him shouting at us. But, apparently, this is going to split the Internet, Tim. So in case you’re listening. Because it will create all these different rules. If your data is relating to consumers there, then it’s treated in a different way, and The US is… Well, obviously, we have the case of California with its own rules and laws. I don’t know. I feel we’re having a moment of siloing that goes beyond economic and geopolitical siloing. It will also apply to the digital world, and we’ll start having different landscapes around it. We’ll see how this affects global expansion of services, for example, around AI, particularly for consumer, but I don’t foresee anything dramatically positive. Recently, we had the whole deal around TikTok finally having a solution for their US problem where there’s now a US conglomerate magically that owns it. The conglomerate doesn’t magically own it, they just straight up own it for the US. But it was driven by many of these concerns around data ownership. Where’s the data? Where is it based? I think a lot of other concerns that have to do with the geopolitics of China, obviously, being the basis of ByteDance, the owner of TikTok, that still is a significant owner, by the way, in TikTok in US. Then also the interest in the economics of making money out of something as powerful as TikTok, to be honest, in The US. Just to be clear, I don’t think this was all about the best interests of consumers. It was also about money. Just follow the money. Bertrand Schmitt There are for sure, some powerful interest at play. But let’s be clear. I think one is data, as you rightfully said, but the other one is algorithm. It’s not as if China is authorising any competitor on its territory. They have blocked access to most of the Internet platforms from the US, either finding new rules or just trade blocking them. So I don’t think it’s fair competition. You don’t want some of that data in China about the US or European consumer. Three, it’s about the algorithm. If suddenly, you are a foreign power, and you can as we know in China, you better follow what’s required of you from the Chinese Communist Party. You cannot take a chance with influencing other stuff like elections in other countries. It’s fair from the US perspective. One could even argue it’s fair from a Chinese perspective to want that. I think the only one in the middle who doesn’t really know what they want is Europe because on one side, they want to benefit from American platforms, on the other end, they want to have some controls. On the other end, they don’t create the environment for startups to flourish. So in that weird situation where they have to accept some control by the big US providers and either provider of underlying infrastructure or provider of consumer business facing services. Then they try to regulate them. But I think they are misunderstanding the power relationship, and I think some of this regulation would get some blowback, at least by the current administration. Just, I believe, this morning, there was some news around X being under a criminal investigation in France. This is not going to end well for the French startup and VC ecosystem. This is not going to end well for France and Europe when you depend so much from your American friends. Nuno Goncalves Pedro Regulation will be weaponised. Regulation constraints around exports, all of this will be weaponised geopolitically, and the bigger guys will normally win. I think that’s normally what we’ve seen. Just on TikTok just to… And you guys, if you’re listening to us, just see if you see a pattern here, but obviously, 19.9% still owned by ByteDance of the TikTok entity in the US. It was initially said that 80% of the TikTok entity is owned by non-Chinese investors. Initially, people were saying US investors, and then they changed it to non-Chinese because MGX, I think, has 15% of it. MGX is based in the UAE, connected obviously to Mubadala, the Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund. Silver Lake is in there, I think, with 15% as well. Oracle as well with 15%. Those three are the big bucket owners together, 45%. Silver Lake having collaborated with MGX before, and I’m sure a lot of connectivity there. Then you still see a pattern in this in terms of shareholders. If you don’t, then just Google it. Dell Family Office, Vastmir Strategic Investments, which is owned by billionaire Jeff Yass, Alpha Wave Partners, obviously involved with a bunch of things like SpaceX and Klarna, Virgoli, Revolution, which is Steve Case’s, a former founder of AOL, is also in there. Meritway, which is managed by partners, I think, of Dragonair. Vinova from General Atlantic, an affiliate of General Atlantic. Also, NJJ Capital, which I believe is Xavier Nil, the French billionaire that founded Iliad. Mostly American, I think, if the math is correct. 80% non-Chinese, which was what mattered, I think, in many cases. But do see if you saw a pattern in most of those investors. I won’t say anything more than that. Maybe moving to other topics, maybe just to finalise on regulation and geopolitics. In geopolitics, we should talk about wars if we predict anything. Not that we are nasty and one want to be negative, but what the hell is going on? Will we have ending to the wars we already have ongoing or not? But before that, the struggles on the App Stores, I think, will continue both for Apple and for Google Play Store. The writing’s on the wall, the EU keeps pushing it dramatically and Apple keeps just doing stuff. I’m on the board of an App Store company. Apple just creates all these things that basically make you not really… It doesn’t work. You can’t provision then an App Store on Apple devices. On iPhones, et cetera. We’ll see how that will continue going, but I feel the writing’s on the wall. Both Apple and Google will have to open up a bit more of their platforms. I’m not sure it will have a huge impact in the medium to long term, but definitely we need to see more openness in access to apps as given by the two big platform owners, Apple and Google, out there. Bertrand Schmitt Let’s be clear. Google is way more open than Apple. We both have Android devices. You can install alternative app stores. It’s a different ballgame by very far. Nuno Goncalves Pedro Google does other nasty stuff. It’s public. You can check which board I’m a part of. You can see what that company has done towards Google over time. But to your point, yes. It is true that Google has been more open than Apple, but Google has done their own things. Just to be very clear, so I’ll just leave that caveat bracketed there for people to think about it and maybe read a little bit about it as well. Bertrand Schmitt I can say that, me, from my perspective, that path of total control that Apple has been going through on all their devices, that includes macOS, pushed me to, over the past 2, 3 years, to completely live and abandon the Apple ecosystem. I just couldn’t accept that level of control, that golden handcuff approach of the Apple ecosystem, each their own obviously, they are golden, their handcuffs, but they are still handcuffs. Personally, that pushed me way more to Linux, Android, Windows, back to Windows after all these years. I just couldn’t stand it anymore. I want to pick my devices. I want to pick what I install on them, and I don’t want to be controlled like this by just one entity for all my tech devices. For me, at some point, it was just not acceptable anymore. It’s still very warm, very golden handcuffs, but for me, they were just handcuffs at this stage. Yes, what they are doing with the App Store is very typical of that mindset. I think it’s quite sad because I think it started with good intention in some ways. “We need a new computing paradigm, we need to make things smoother and safer,” but it has really become a way to control your clients. For me, it has reached a point where it’s just way too much. Nuno Goncalves Pedro There’s obviously the great power comes great responsibility that uncle Ben told Spider-Man or Peter Parker. But there’s also with great power comes shitload of money, and control. So it’s like, “Yeah. Should we open the server? Do we want to delay opening it up?” “Yeah.” Anyway, it is what it is. Maybe let’s end on the more difficult note of the episode, which is going to be around wars. What’s our prediction? Will we have an end to the Gaza situation with Israel? Will we have an end to Ukraine and, obviously, Russia? What will happen in Iran? Those are the three big, big conflicts right now. Then, obviously, if we want to add just bonus points, what’s going to happen to Greenland, and what’s going to happen to Taiwan, and what’s going to happen to Venezuela? Let’s throw the whole basket in there. We’ve never had like… Let’s talk about all these territories and all these countries. At some point in time, I’m saying this in a light manner, but it’s obviously more tragic than it should be light, and people are dying, and there’s a lot of implications of all of that that is happening right now. Do you have any predictions, Bertrand, for this year? Bertrand Schmitt No. It’s tough to predict on an individual basis. I think on a more bigger picture basis is on one side, obviously, the rise of China on one side. You have also the rise of other countries like India, while very indirectly connected to some of these conflicts are still part of the game, buying oil from Russia, for instance. At the same time, I think overall, the US is more clear about with the sheriff in town. I think it’s good because in some ways, you cannot pay for the goods, you cannot have such a massive advantage versus nearly every other country on earth and just not be clear about who is the boss in some ways. As a result, what are the rules of the game and how it should be played? The US is not alone, obviously, you have China, you have Russia, you have India, you have Europe. You have different other countries. But at some point, it’s not good when countries are not rational and are not clear. I think I prefer the current situation where things are more clear and where you have to assume responsibilities about what you are doing. It’s time to be rational again about how the world behave. Yes, the concept of power and balance of power. I think there has been that dream, maybe mostly coming from Europe, about the end of history. I think that’s simply not the case. It’s not the end of history. It’s still about the balance of power. It has always been about the balance of power. If you are dumb enough to think it was not about that anymore, I just have a bridge to nowhere to sell you. I don’t have specific prediction, but I think it’s clear there is a new sheriff in town. There is a new doctrine about the Western Hemisphere that has been in some ways resurrected on the [inaudible 00:51:35] train, and I think we’ll see more of it. I think at this point, the biggest question is for the Europeans. What do they want to do? Because right now, their position of being a dwarf militarily while being a pretty big giant economically, I don’t think it works. Nuno Goncalves Pedro I agreed on everything that you said. I do have predictions. I’ll stick a flag on the ground just with my predictions. Bertrand Schmitt Good luck. Nuno Goncalves Pedro They are mostly positive. I do think we’ll see an end or, for the most, end to the two big conflicts, the one in Gaza and the one in Ukraine. I think Ukraine will end up in readjustment of territory and splitting between Russia and the Ukraine, but the end of hostilities, I think that we will see an end to the conflict in Gaza also with a readjustment on what that will mean for the Palestinian territories and the Palestinians in general. That I’m not sure, but I feel that there will be an end to those two big conflicts. Iran, I have no clue. I will not put a stick on the ground that I have no clue. There are so many things that could go wrong there. I’ve been reading some really interesting thoughts about even some aggressive thoughts that this might be the time to really change regimes in Iran and for the US to have a bit more of an aggressive stance. I really don’t have a perspective. Obviously, there’s a lot at stake there. Then, if we talk about the other parts, Greenland, I will not opine too much on. Maybe we’re done for now. Maybe there’ll be some other concessions to the US that weren’t already there in the ’50s. Taiwan, I won’t bet either. I’m sad to say I think it might happen at some point in time, but I’m not sure when and what would drive it. Last but not the least, Venezuela is my only really negative prediction. I feel it will continue to be a significant dictatorship as it was before managed enough by other people with the difference now that it has a tax to be paid to the US in the form of oil of some sort, etcetera, and maybe gas, maybe other things as well that it didn’t have before. That’s probably my most negative prediction for the coming year on the geopolitical side. Bertrand Schmitt Without going into detail, I would mostly agree with what you shared. At least that makes sense. But as we know, it’s not always what makes sense, but what might happen. I can tell you 100% I would not have guessed this operation against Maduro. This was so well done, well executed, and shocking at the same time that it’s… I think it shows that it’s hard to guess some of this stuff because there are certainly some new ways to wage limited war, for instance. So it’s certainly interesting, and we certainly need to get used to pretty bombastic statements. But for Venezuela, I don’t think it can be worse than what it was before. I’m probably more optimistic that gradually it can get better. Nuno Goncalves Pedro Just to put perspective on why we’re not making predictions on some of these elements, I think this is a funny story, but I was in Madeira. Actually, first time I was in Madeira, although I’m originally from Portugal. I’ve never been to the islands. Obviously, as you guys know, or some of you might know, there’s a lot of connection between Madeira and Venezuela. There’s a lot of immigration from Madeira Islands to Venezuela. One of my Uber or Bolt drivers there in Madeira was Venezuelan. Was born in Venezuela, but Portuguese descent, et cetera. He was telling me this was still last year. Late last year. Because I told him I lived in US, et cetera, and he was like, “Oh, hopefully, Trump will get Maduro out of there.” In my mind, I was like, “Dude.” No disrespect to the gentleman, but it’s like, “Okay. Mike, your perspective on geopolitics is maybe a little bit exaggerated.” And a couple of days later, we know what happened. When geopolitical decisions are better predicted by some probably very astute Uber drivers, you’re like, “Maybe I shouldn’t make a bet. I have no clue what’s going to happen, no clue what’s going to happen in Greenland, et cetera.” Anyway, a couple of predictions on that element. Bertrand Schmitt That’s why it’s so right. You have to be careful with the prediction, but it doesn’t remove the fact that I think nations and companies that have to play a global game have to understand in some ways what is the game, what are the powers in place, what could happen potentially, but also be realistic. Not be about wish and dreams, but more about, what’s the power relationship? Who has the money? Who has the means? Who has the capacity to do this or that? Because if you start that way, at least the scope of what’s possible, what’s reasonable is more and more clear more quickly. Some stuff like happened with Maduro, I would never have predicted, but for sure, if there’s one country that can do this sort of stuff, it’s the US. I’m not sure anyone has a technology and the means in terms of support infrastructure to do something like this. It’s tough to predict what will happen a year from now for any specific country, but I think that even trying to get a better understanding about the forces in play and their capacity and understanding and accepting that at some point, it’s all about real politic and relationship of power, the more your eyes would be wide open about what’s possible versus simple, wishful thinking. Nuno Goncalves Pedro Fintech, Crypto and Frontier Tech Moving maybe to our last section around fintech, crypto, and frontier tech. For me, just two very quick predictions, views of the world. I think on the frontier tech side, I won’t make a prediction. I will just tell you all to go and listen to our episodes, the one on infrastructure, which is immediately prior to this one, and the episodes that we’ve had around a couple of other topics including AI, what’s the future of your children, because I think they illustrate a lot of the points that we’re seeing and manifesting themselves over the next year and over the next 2 or 3 years as well beyond that. I feel those tomes are complete in and out of themselves, so you can just go and listen to them. Then my second comment is on crypto. I feel crypto has become of the essence, particularly under the current administration in the US, very favored. Obviously, we are now in a world where crypto is just part of the economic system, and I think we’ll see more and more of that emerging, and in some ways, crypto is becoming mainstream. Question is what blockchains will be the blockchains of the future? Obviously, there’s a bunch of bets put out there. We, ourselves, as Chamaeleon, have one investment in one of the significant bets in the space. But besides that, who’s going to win or not, we feel that we’re past the crypto winter. It’s now mainstream days, and we’ll see a lot more activity in there. Bertrand Schmitt I must say with crypto, I’m a bit confused. As you say, we are past the crypto winter. There is much less uncertainty in regul

️ Grab the 5-day INFP tutorial and join 5,000+ people getting rare weekly insights → http://geekpsychology.com/infp-5day▶️ Ready to go deeper? Check out the Evolve Community at http://evolve.geekpsychology.comI cried too much at my wedding.At least, that's what my ESTP friend told me. Friends and family from different decades, different continents. My wife's family from Japan. Mine from the States. I was overwhelmed. Happy. Present.And I cried.For years before that, I thought something was fundamentally wrong with me. I was slow at Subway when I was 16. My boss made sure I knew it. I was called Eeyore in math class. In basketball, I missed a shot in practice and someone yelled at me. So I quit everything. All the sports, Boy Scouts, every club.I became smaller because I thought I was broken.Then I found out I was an INFP.And for the first time, it made sense. The sensitivity wasn't a defect. The slowness wasn't failure. The depth, the overthinking, the emotional abundance... it wasn't wrong. It was just wiring.But here's what I see happening now: people discover their type, feel that same relief I did, and then immediately start hating it again. They read the descriptions online and decide "sensitive" means "weak." They see "idealist" and hear "unrealistic." They take the thing that finally explained them and turn it into another reason to feel broken.I tried that too. I spent years trying to be cold. Stoic. Efficient. Emotionless. And I felt horrible.It wasn't until I stopped fighting my wiring that things changed. I let myself be vulnerable. Emotional. Aware. I cried at my wedding and didn't apologize for it.Your sensitivity isn't weakness. It's the reason you can sit with someone in pain when everyone else has left. Your slowness isn't failure. It's you making sure your actions reflect who you actually want to be.So ask yourself: has hating your personality type actually helped you? Or has it just made you smaller again?You finally found the explanation. Don't turn it into another weapon against yourself.00:00 Why INFPs Immediately Hate Their Type03:07 The Pattern That Makes You Feel Broken05:16 What If Your 'Flaws' Are Actually Superpowers?09:11 Are You Playing the Wrong Game?11:58 The Times Your Sensitivity Actually Saved You13:22 Why You Started Criticizing Yourself15:59 The Exhaustion of Fighting Your Wiring18:38 What If You Spent 10 Years Being Someone Else?21:44 You're Not That Identity Label23:27 Has Hating Yourself Ever Actually Helped?

Piano music courtesy of Harpeth Presbyterian Church. Closing Banjo music courtesy of Banjo HangOut Alabama Jubilee,, used with permission. In September (17 87), during the ratification of the Constitution,  Delaware's lone delegate voted “No”

The midterm elections kicked off in earnest with primary contests in Texas, North Carolina and Arkansas. There was some confusion at the polls, and the results led to sharp words, a few upsets and more questions about the elections still to come. Geoff Bennett reports. PBS News is supported by - https://www.pbs.org/newshour/about/funders. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy

Topics discussed on today's show: Gas Prices, Denny's Sausage, 13 Pound Baby, States the Tip the Most, Getting into Heaven, Good News, History Quiz, Rene's Bean, TikTok Tarot, Billy Joels House, Guess Who, Twisted Bach, Applegate & Pitt, Kissing Partners, First Kiss, Kiss Songs, Get The Fake Out, Jim Breuer, and Apologies.

Get ready for a wild ride on The Other Side of Midnight as Lionel tackles the looming threats of globalism, breaking down the UN's Agenda 21, the World Economic Forum, and the push for restrictive carbon taxes and social credit scores. The temperature rises with a heated breakdown of "restorative justice" and the controversial trend of non-carceral prosecution championed by lenient district attorneys. Throw in a spirited debate about protecting kids from algorithmic smartphone brainwashing, and top it all off with a spectacularly baffling, laugh-out-loud phone confrontation with a real-life "sovereign citizen" who believes the city of Chicago is a private corporation, statutes are "private law," and that threatening to sue his own brother somehow outsmarted the IRS. Entertaining, informative, and totally unpredictable! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The boys showed up with no plan… and somehow covered everything. On this episode of Team of Rivals, we ease into Spring Training with the appropriate level of skepticism (which is to say: none). We also explore a question Cubs fans may not be emotionally prepared for: Where could Ian Happ play next? Hypothetically. Probably. Jurickson Profar's PED suspension becomes a jumping-off point for a broader conversation about accountability, baseball history, and why this stuff still manages to surprise people. Then we take a hard left turn into Chicago football as Drew Dalman's sudden retirement leaves the Bears with an unexpected hole at center… because of course it does. We break down what it means and how concerned fans should be (answer: it's the Bears). We wrap with Ron's Soccer Minute, where he recounts a week so bad it crossed international borders. Across the pond. Here in the States. Misery without a passport. No rundown. No structure. Just Cubs, Cardinals, Bears, and a little global suffering. Leave a 5-star review. Tell a friend. Preferably one who overreacts to Spring Training.

States are increasingly regulating ultra-processed foods (UPFs) — and West Virginia's new law banning additives in school foods (with broader statewide application coming soon) offers a window into how consumer protection intersects with public health. In this episode, we go over key takeaways from our recent webinar, exploring the debate over UPFs, what makes a product “ultra-processed,” the constitutional and evidentiary challenges facing such laws, and why regulators and advocates are pushing this agenda.

Two start-ups a couple of years apart became the inspiration for each other to get better and better and better. Dave Young: Welcome to the Empire Builders Podcast, teaching business owners the not-so-secret techniques that took famous businesses from Mom-and-Pop to major brands. Stephen Semple is a marketing consultant, story collector and storyteller. I’m Steven’s sidekick and business partner, Dave Young. Before we get into today’s episode, a word from our sponsor, which is, well, it’s us. But we’re highlighting ads we’ve written and produced for our clients, so here’s one of those. [AirVantage Heating & Cooling Ad] Dave Young: Welcome back to the … Wait, what? Gosh, you told me the title, and I have some thoughts, and I forgot the name of the podcast there for a second. Welcome back to the Empire Builders Podcast. Stephen Semple: We’re doing two together here, Dave, Firestone and Goodyear. Dave Young: Stephen Semple’s over there. I’m Dave Young. And this morning we’re talking about Goodyear and Firestone, both? Stephen Semple: Yes, together. Dave Young: Because it’s kind of one thing now, right? Stephen Semple: No, they are separate. Dave Young: Was it? Stephen Semple: They’re separate. Dave Young: No, they’re separate. Stephen Semple: The story is so intertwined between the two of them. I couldn’t figure out a way to break it. But it’s almost kind of like when we did Hertz Avis, like they’re so interlinked. Dave Young: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Stephen Semple: Yeah. So we’re doing it as a single podcast, the two of them. Dave Young: All right. Where do we start? Stephen Semple: Well, what’s interesting is they were both started within two years of each other, both in Akron, Ohio. So Goodyear was founded on August 28th, 1898 in Akron, Ohio by Frank Seiberling. And today they’re the third-largest tire maker in the world with about 18 billion in sales. And Firestone was founded in August, two years later by Harvey Firestone in Akron, Ohio. And in 1988, Firestone was purchased by Bridgestone for $2.6 billion. Dave Young: That’s the one. That’s the one I was [inaudible 00:02:51] yeah. Stephen Semple: Yeah, and Bridgestone today is number two behind Michelin with Goodyear being number three. So both really, really big, really big companies. Dave Young: And in 18 when? Stephen Semple: So 1898 was Goodyear, and 1900 was Firestone. Dave Young: And this is before, this is before mass production of automobiles. Stephen Semple: Yes. Yes. Because if you go back to Episode 35 where we talk about Ford, 1908 is the Model T. So it’s pre-model T. Dave Young: Yeah. So which came first, the tire or the car? Stephen Semple: Well, because there were tires on carriages. Dave Young: No, that’s true. All right. Stephen Semple: And today Michelin is the largest in the world. So if you want to learn about Michelin, go back to Episode 27, because it’s also really interesting how Michelin grew their business. But so we’re dealing with Goodyear and Firestone. Dave Young: All right. So Goodyear- Stephen Semple: And if you think about it, you’re right. Most of the transportation at this time when these companies started were either horse-and-carriage or bicycles. That’s what basically people were using. And Harvey Firestone, he grew up on a farm and went to a business school and was a carriage salesman in Detroit. And at this time, the use of natural rubber is expanding due to vulcanization being created. Because before vulcanization, natural rubber was not very durable. It would crack and all these other things. And carriage wheels were basically a wood wheel with a metal rim around it, no give, a hard ride. Dave Young: Right. Yeah, yeah. I mean, even a rim made of rubber would be better than a rim made of steel. Stephen Semple: Right. So basically he’s a carriage salesman. What he realizes is that what we should do is we should put rubber, instead of steel around the wheel, and that would make a smoother ride. So he leaves Detroit, moves to Akron, Ohio, because Akron, Ohio at the time is the center of the rubber industry. Dave Young: Okay. Why is that? Stephen Semple: I think it had to do with just the fact there was a couple of companies that sprung up in the area. There was the resources in terms of water and a few things along that lines. Dave Young: And the rubber barons came in [inaudible 00:04:56]. Stephen Semple: But there was a lot of that that was happening with … Look, you see it in technology. A couple of companies happen and then … Dave Young: Yeah, there’s this- Stephen Semple: It attracts the talent, it attracts the people, it attracts the investment. Dave Young: There’s this synergy that happens. It was before the word existed. Stephen Semple: Yeah, basically. So he creates and starts selling a wagon wheel that has a solid rubber tire. And so he’s doing these solid tires, and he starts seeing the market shifting to a pneumatic tire. So a tire with a tube in it. Dave Young: With the air inside it. Yeah. Stephen Semple: And he’s also starting to see car sales increasing so he decides to do that. Because even though it’s a niche, he’s seeing it as growing, and he didn’t really get great traction on the wagon tire. But the first pneumatic auto tire is this thing called a Clincher. The tire is attached to the rim by these metal hooks, but these metal hooks can kind of become a bit of a problem. They can tear the tire, things along that lines. So he decides to make, Firestone decides to make a superior car tire, and he creates this new rim and tire system that’s basically better than the Clincher tire. But the problem, at this point, is the rim is part of the car. Basically, it’s hard to change all that. So who’s willing to- Dave Young: Every car has a different one and … Yeah. Stephen Semple: Right. So what he does is, is he approaches Henry Ford because he hears the Model T is coming out, and Firestone undercuts the Clincher to get a foothold in the industry. He says, “Look, I’m just going to come in with a really cheap price. That’s how I’m going to get into there.” And he gets an order for 2,000 units, $110,000 order, and he’s basically betting everything on the ability to deliver on this order. Okay? Dave Young: Wow. Okay. Stephen Semple: Now, enter Goodyear, a little bit of Goodyear history. So I mentioned Goodyear was founded by Frank Seiberling, and Frank had tried several businesses with no success, but he saw the rubber industry as an area for growth. Younger brother joins, and they need a name, and what the inventor of vulcanized rubber was Charles Goodyear. So they decided to call the tire company Goodyear after Charles Goodyear. Dave Young: Just associate yourself with that. Yeah. Stephen Semple: Yeah. Now- Dave Young: Did Charles, was he in on it, or did they just named it after? Stephen Semple: They just named it Goodyear. Dave Young: Okay. You can do that, huh? Stephen Semple: I guess. They were able to. Dave Young: All right. Stephen Semple: So they’re buried in debt, things aren’t going so great, but what they wanted to do is the big growth around this time was bicycles. So they create a vision to create a new type of tire for the bicycle, because it’s a huge craze at the turn of the century, turn of a couple of centuries ago. So there’s like 300 manufacturers of bicycles in the United States, including the Wright Brothers. Dave Young: Right. Yeah. Stephen Semple: But again, they were solid tires. And what these guys created was a pneumatic tire, what Goodyear has created was a pneumatic tire for bicycles because it’s way more comfortable than a solid tire, right? Dave Young: Way more comfortable. Yeah. Stephen Semple: Yeah. So they’re all in and this has to work, but here’s the problem. Bicycle sales stop because, essentially, everyone who wants one has one. So bicycle sales kind of collapsed. And so they’re struggling here, and what they decide to do is they look at the auto business, and they go, “Hey, the auto business is going over there, and we could create a better tire than a Clincher.” Dave Young: Yeah. [inaudible 00:08:24] Stephen Semple: Great. And so who do they decide to approach? They decide to approach Henry Ford because they hear about this Model T coming out. But Ford has already done a deal with Firestone, right? But Goodyear says, “We got an advantage. Here’s the problem. Their tire, the Goodyear tire, Clincher tires will also work on a Goodyear rim. Clincher tires will not work on a Firestone rim.” And here’s what Goodyear says to Ford, says, “You got a problem. Because if somebody needs a new tire, not everywhere had access to Firestone tires, but everybody has access to Clincher tires. So, therefore, our solution is better.” So basically, Ford cancels the deal with Firestone and goes with Goodyear. Dave Young: Oh, no. Stephen Semple: And basically says to Firestone, “I need you to make Clincher tires, which has almost no money in it for Firestone because they got to pay a licensing deal with Clincher. Isn’t it interesting in all of this, Clincher clearly didn’t innovate because we’ve never heard of Clincher before this moment? Dave Young: Oh, right. Yeah. I mean, terrible name, but- Stephen Semple: Clearly didn’t innovate. Dave Young: Right, didn’t figure out that we don’t need these metal things. Stephen Semple: Because they’re clearly the leader at the time, and we don’t hear them any longer. Dave Young: Yeah, yeah. So they had a lead in the market, but … Stephen Semple: So 1908 comes out, the Model T comes out. It’s Goodyear tires on the Model T, Episode 35, go back and learn about the Model T, and Goodyear takes out ads that Goodyear tire is better. By 1909, all GM cars are Goodyear tires. By 1910, Goodyear is doing like four million in sales, which is like 30 million today. Firestone is not done. Dave Young: Yeah. Stephen Semple: So back to Firestone, they see these Goodyear ads, and they figure we’ve got to get a competitive advantage over Goodyear. We’re going to go back to 1908, go back a couple years. The auto industry, tire industry is exploding. The streets are getting clogged with cars, lots of dust, no rules, chaos, and tires are completely smooth. There’s no tread. Dave Young: Okay. Yeah. That’s … Stephen Semple: And they’ve been all sorts of thing people are putting rivets in, metal, all this other stuff to try to create some sort of traction on these tires, right? Especially as the speed of the cars are getting faster. And what Firestone did, they did a lot of research to make traction. And what they discover is let’s do raised sections. Let’s put treads on the tire. Dave Young: Right. Okay. Well, I mean, there you go. Stephen Semple: Works way better. And what they decide to do, they call it the Firestone Non-skid- Dave Young: Stay tuned, and we’re going to wrap up this story and tell you how to apply this lesson to your business right after this. [Using Stories To Sell Ad] Dave Young: Let’s pick up our story where we left off and, trust me, you haven’t missed a thing. Stephen Semple: And what they decide to do, they call it the Firestone Non-skid, and they put that as the pattern on the tread. So if you look down onto a muddy road, what you would read is Firestone Non-skid. Isn’t that awesome? Dave Young: That’s so smart. I love that. Stephen Semple: So basically the ad is on the ground. They sell- Dave Young: Yeah, because it’s written in the mud. It’s written in the snow. Stephen Semple: It’s written in the mud, written in the snow, written on the ground, right? So they sell like 40,000 units in the first year. And now Goodyear starts to feel the pressure from Firestone on the non-skid tire. So they’re like, okay, what are we going to do here? So what Goodyear comes out with is a diamond pattern because it actually has better grip than letters. And at the same time, it’s still unique because they’re the only ones that have a diamond pattern. And they market it as, and I thought this … You know how we always love this whole idea of attaching the familiar to the unfamiliar? They market it as the first all-weather tire. Dave Young: All weather. Yeah. Stephen Semple: Right? Goodyear then, who was ahead of Firestone with this tire, and at this time, all the tire manufacturers are targeting the manufacturers. They’re trying to get in with the manufacturers. Dave Young: Yeah, yeah. Stephen Semple: And it’s 1910. Firestone’s doing three million in sales compared to Goodyear’s four million. But what about consumers and replacement? What would make their lives better? This is the question Firestone starts to ask because it was really hard to change the tire at that time because early tires were attached to the rim, and the rims were permanently attached to the axle. So you couldn’t just remove the wheel and replace it with another wheel. What Firestone creates is a rim called a demountable rim. It’s this novel idea that you could just take the rim off. Dave Young: Wow. Okay. That’s great. Stephen Semple: And risk of tire failure was high. So guess what this created? The whole idea of a spare, and now anyone can change a tire- Dave Young: Nice, yeah. Stephen Semple: … because you’ve got an extra tire. You could just take the rim off, put the new rim on, and you’re all good to go. And this gets so popular that car companies are now creating ways to carry a spare, a rim and a pump, because now anyone can change tire by themselves. By the end of the decade, all Model Ts have a spare. And guess what? Imitators, including Goodyear, jump onto this idea. It’s 1916. Dave Young: Sure. Stephen Semple: Firestone’s selling $44 million. Goodyear is 100 million and now the largest company in the world. So Firestone is still trailing Goodyear. World War I happens. April 1917, this huge mobilization campaign happens. Goodyear and Firestone have to pivot to wartime production. Firestone’s doing rubber boots and all these other things. Goodyear has been pulled into this top secret plan. They’re going to create an aircraft called a blimp. Dave Young: The blimp? Ooh, okay. Stephen Semple: And you know what’s funny? I always wondered, why does Goodyear have a blimp? Because Goodyear was involved in the crating of the blimp. Isn’t that cool? Dave Young: Right. Yeah, that’s good to know. Stephen Semple: So they’re both making lots of money. The blimp is the Goodyear blimp. We now still see it at football games and all this other stuff, right? And Goodyear’s expanding like crazy because of the war effort, and November 11th, 1918, the war suddenly ends. The war ending in World War I hurt a lot of businesses like Indian motorcycles, Goodyear, because what a lot of people don’t realize, unless you look back into history, that the war ended really abruptly. So much so that even the Allies, if you go back and read the history about World War I, we’re unsure whether to accept the surrender of Germany. No battle in World War I happened on German soil. It all happened in France. And how World War I ended is Germany basically did this one final assault where they threw everything at it and was basically it didn’t work, and they surrendered. And everyone was like, “What do you mean the war’s over?” But the problem is Goodyear thought the war was going to continue for a while longer and had a lot of debt and had done lots of expansion and were in serious trouble. In 1921, Goodyear had 85 million in debt. And so they had to bring in somebody to help refinance the business and part of the refinancing included Frank and his brother being removed from running the business. So in May 13th, 1921, they both resigned, the businesses gone to others. Firestone, they still remain involved with the business. By the 1920s, cars are going faster, and Firestone does one more really big innovation. And that’s the balloon tire, which is a wider, bigger tire, flatter tire, lower pressure, smoother ride. Six months, they sell 25,000 tires a week, and that’s really the precursor to the modern tire. Dave Young: The radial-type tire. Stephen Semple: Yeah. Dave Young: Yeah. That’s really cool. Yeah, war does weird things. I mean, in addition to blowing things up. Stephen Semple: Yeah, it does weird things. But the thing is, when I looked at Firestone and Goodyear, to me, what was really interesting was there’s no way you could kind of talk about one without the other because it really is a story of innovation, innovation, innovation. Dave Young: It really is a case of your competition makes you better, right? Because it went back and forth with both of them. Stephen Semple: It did go back and forth with both of them. Dave Young: Right? And the one that lost out was Clinker because they thought they didn’t need to innovate. Stephen Semple: Right. Right. They were the one that’s been lost to history as these two … Because they had, they were the market leader, and then these two coming along out-innovating each other, totally, like I had never even heard of them as a tire company. Lost to history. Dave Young: Me, neither. Stephen Semple: Yeah. Clincher. Dave Young: Clincher. It sounds medical. It’s such a cool story. I have one experience with Goodyear to tell you about. Stephen Semple: Sure. Dave Young: Back 2020 or so. Gosh, has it been that long? Really has. 20 years ago or so, I was in the motor press guild, automotive journalist, and auto manufacturers and tire manufacturers would take journalists on these trips, these junkets. And I got to go on one for Goodyear. They flew us down to Dallas and then flew us out to San Angelo on Mark Cuban’s 757. San Angelo, Texas is where the Goodyear proving ground is. So they have one of these big 10-acre, five-acre lakes that’s only a quarter of an inch deep or half in it. They can control it. It’s just a giant bed of asphalt that they can control the depth of the water. So we got to drive … We probably compared Goodyear to Firestone tires. Stephen Semple: Probably. Dave Young: You drive this pickup on a slalom course on the water with the new Goodyear tire, and then drive it with the competitor’s tire. It’s like, oh boy, the difference. But it was a fun trip. I also got to drive that same day out on the Goodyear proving grounds. They had one of those mining haul trucks. Stephen Semple: Oh, wow. Yep. Dave Young: Right. The three-story tall mining haul truck, and I got to drive that thing. Stephen Semple: I was going to say, did you get to do a 180 on it? Did you get it to do a 360? Dave Young: No, they didn’t let us drive that out onto the wet track, but that was fun. I mean, there’s a big tire. I think at the time, that tire weighed 20,000 pounds and cost $20,000. That’s what I remember about it. Stephen Semple: And it’s interesting when you think about tires because tread pattern and rubber compound and things like that are all the things that really impact performance. And yet the world’s largest manufacturer of tires became famous with an ad where they put a baby in the tire along with the slogan, So Much Rides on Your Tires, right? Dave Young: Yeah, yeah. Stephen Semple: But coming back to one of the ones I love with the whole Firestone thing was putting the name in the tread pattern. I thought that was just … Dave Young: Yeah, I think it’s great. It’s really smart and innovative from an advertising point of view, but as Goodyear proved, easy to knock down. It’s like, well, obviously a proper tread pattern- Stephen Semple: Is better? Dave Young: … is better than the word Firestone for keeping your car on the road. But- Stephen Semple: But again, it was so interesting because Firestone then, or sorry, Goodyear then even recognized by the diamond pattern, they still became unique because they were the first one with the diamond pattern. So it was this very interesting back and forth between these two companies. Dave Young: They were like the cartoon, the sheepdog and the coyote. They’d clock in and fight all day, and then clock out. And I would guess that the Goodyear and the Firestone, there were probably people going back and forth between one company and the other. They probably had the top secret. We hate each other, but the investors, whole different story. Stephen Semple: Well, it was funny. There was one thing I read about where basically if you were in the Firestone offices or foundry or whatever, you were not allowed to say the word Goodyear. And when you were in the Goodyear one, you were not allowed to say the word Firestone. Like it would’ve really been a massive rivalry when you consider the two companies, like how remarkable is this that two companies found within two years of each other, like almost exactly two years of each other in the same city- Dave Young: And then live in the same city. Stephen Semple: … went on to become number two and number three in the tire business. The one that became number one- Dave Young: Kellogg’s and Post. Stephen Semple: … was across the pond in Europe, right? Completely separated from this battle. Dave Young: Yeah. Yeah. Well, thank you for this tiring story. Stephen Semple: You had to go there, didn’t you? Dave Young: Oh, gosh, I shouldn’t have done that, but I did. I did do it. I’m looking forward to the next episode of the Empire Builders Podcast, Stephen. Stephen Semple: All right. Dave Young: Thank you. Stephen Semple: Okay. Thanks, David. Dave Young: Thanks for listening to the podcast. Please share us, subscribe on your favorite podcast app and leave us a big, fat, juicy five-star rating and review at Apple Podcasts. And if you’d like to schedule your own 90-minute Empire Building session, you can do it at empirebuildingprogram.com.

Tax-filing season is well underway, and yet many states are still figuring out whether to conform to or decouple from provisions in last year's GOP-led tax overhaul, especially the deductions and other breaks for corporate taxpayers. The upshot is one of the more complicated filing periods in recent years. Corporate taxpayers are watching which states reject federal tax policy changes, such as those related to immediate expensing for research and development or property investments. Just in the past week, lawmakers in Republican-controlled states like Florida and Democrat-led states like Oregon moved ahead in decoupling from some of those corporate tax provisions to preserve billions of dollars in state revenue. Then there's the unique situation in Washington, DC, where a local law severing the city's tax code from more than a dozen provisions in the 2025 federal tax rewrite was met with Congress's formal disapproval. That set off a dispute between Capitol Hill and city leaders over whether the district's decoupling measure is in effect. (DC officials say it is.) Most of all, corporate taxpayers are looking for clarity from the states as they plan their filings, Scott Roberti, a managing director focusing on state and local tax in EY's national tax practice, says on this week's episode of Talking Tax. Roberti tells Bloomberg Tax editor Benjamin Freed that so far, at least 17 states have issued some sort of guidance on the conformity issue. Roberti hopes the remainder finish up soon in time for the end of filing season and quarter-end accounting. Do you have feedback on this episode of Talking Tax? Give us a call and leave a voicemail at 703-341-3690.

We're back in Italy and ready for the Milano Cortina 2026 Paralympics to start!  Between the Games, Alison went back to the States for some much-needed rest. Jill went to Lausanne, Olympic city, where she spent some time at the Olympic Museum and explains why it's a must-visit.  After a long and surprising travel day, Jill made it to Venice, where TKFLASTAN House will be for the Paralympics. She also got to visit the Team USA processing center, which is a magical experience for their Paralympians.  Alison arrived in Italy just in time to catch the Paralympic flame celebration happening in Venice, and we share the highlights of that adventure. Plus, wheelchair curling got underway today. We have the results from the first round of mixed doubles, featuring TKFLASTANI Steve Emt. Keep our Flame Alive! We podcast about the Games all year. If you appreciate the independent voice that we provide, please consider supporting us today. Go to http://flamealivepod.com/support to learn about our one-time and ongoing patronage options (as well as the bonus content for our patrons).   For a transcript of this episode, please visit http://flamealivepod.com.   Thanks so much for listening, and until next time, keep the flame alive!     *** Keep the Flame Alive: Obsessed with the Olympics and Paralympics? Just curious about how Olympic and Paralympic sports work? You've found your people! Join your hosts, Olympic aunties Alison Brown and Jill Jaracz for smart, fun, and down-to-earth interviews with athletes coaches, and the unsung heroes behind the Games. Get the stories you don't find anywhere else. Tun in weekly all year-round, and daily during the Olympics and Paralympics. We're your cure for your Olympic Fever! Call us: (208) FLAME-IT. ***     Support the show: http://flamealivepod.com/support Bookshop.org store: https://bookshop.org/shop/flamealivepod Become a patron and get bonus content: http://www.patreon.com/flamealivepod Buy merch here: https://flamealivepod.dashery.com Hang out with us online: Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/flamealivepod Insta: http://www.instagram.com/flamealivepod Facebook Group: hhttps://www.facebook.com/groups/flamealivepod Newsletter: Sign up at https://flamealivepod.substack.com/subscribe VM/Text: (208) FLAME-IT / (208) 352-6348      

What are prediction markets, and are they the next evolution of investing?In this episode of the Alternative Investing Advantage Podcast, Alex Perny sits down with Matt Ober of Social Leverage to explore the rapid rise of prediction markets. They discuss how platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket are changing the landscape of finance, why Robinhood's integration could be a major unlock, and how regulation will shape the future of this emerging asset class.Matt explains how prediction markets differ from traditional sports betting, how liquidity providers participate, and why institutional players may enter the space. The conversation also explores regulatory risks, compliance considerations, and where the real investment opportunities may lie — including infrastructure, data analytics, and picks-and-shovels plays rather than direct platform bets.They also zoom out to discuss broader venture trends, the impact of AI on fintech and SaaS, and how efficiency gains are reshaping early-stage investing.If you want to understand where prediction markets fit into the broader financial ecosystem, this episode delivers a grounded, institutional perspective.00:00 Intro to Prediction Markets01:10 Matt Ober's Hedge Fund Background02:23 Social Leverage & Early-Stage Investing04:33 What Are Prediction Markets?06:23 How Prediction Markets Differ from Sports Betting07:35 Regulatory Landscape (CFTC vs States)09:40 Will States Push Back?11:03 Institutional Adoption Potential14:27 Where Is the Investment Edge?17:53 Liquidity Providers & Market Infrastructure22:34 Should Investors Buy the Platforms?25:21 Picks-and-Shovels Opportunities27:43 Long-Tail Market Potential31:01 Are Prediction Markets Overcrowded?34:59 Broader Venture Capital Trends36:45 AI's Impact on SaaS and Fintech40:28 Where Private Equity Is Shifting44:17 The Future of Lean, AI-Native Companies45:18 How to Connect with MattSubscribe to our YouTube channel and join our growing community for new videos every week.If you are interested in being a podcast guest speaker or have questions, contact us at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Podcast@AdvantaIRA.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠.Learn more about our guest, Matt Ober:https://www.linkedin.com/in/obermattjLearn more about Advanta IRA: https://www.AdvantaIRA.com/ https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/advanta-irahttps://www.linkedin.com/company/Advanta-IRA/https://twitter.com/AdvantaIRA https://www.facebook.com/AdvantaIRA/ https://www.instagram.com/AdvantaIRA/#PredictionMarkets #Fintech #VentureCapital #Investing #Robinhood #Kalshi #Polymarket #AlternativeInvesting #AIInvesting #FinancialMarkets

Today on America in the MorningTrump-Merz Meeting Talks Trade & Iran On Tuesday, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz met with President Trump at the White House as the President thanked the German people for their support with the American air strikes in Iran, but the President also had some criticisms for two key European allies.  John Stolnis has the details from Washington.   Who Will Lead Iran Saudi Arabia intercepted two Iranian cruise missiles and nine drones, and Israel also shot down a number of missiles and drones fired from both Iran and Lebanon.  Four of the six US soldiers killed during a drone strike in Kuwait have been identified – all were part of the same Army reserve unit from Iowa.  Correspondent Ed Donahue reports there's only speculation so far as to who will emerge as the new leader of Iran, and there's still serious issues with trying to evacuate American citizens from several Middle East nations.   Primary Day Primaries were held Tuesday in three states including Texas.  Correspondent Clayton Neville reports from Dallas.    Father Convicted For Son's School Shooting A Georgia man has been convicted in his connection to a 2024 high school shooting by his son that killed two students and two teachers.  Correspondent Lisa Dwyer reports.   Labor Department Trouble Two top aides of Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer were forced out amid internal investigations of misconduct claims within the department.   The Strip Club Promotion Sports teams have promotions all the time, but an unusual one in Atlanta is under scrutiny.  A former NBA player is among those criticizing an NBA team's upcoming promotion with a strip club.  Correspondent Gethin Coolbaugh reports.   Latest In The Middle East The Pentagon has identified four of the six US service members killed in an Iranian drone strike in Kuwait.  The four soldiers identified were all assigned to the 103rd Sustainment Command, an Army Reserve unit out of Iowa.     Stranded In The Middle East With the war in the Middle East starting with no notice, people have found themselves stranded in a number of nations.  Correspondent Julie Walker reports on Europeans and Americans stuck overseas because of the Iran war – audio courtesy of the UK's Sky News.   Gas Prices Spike With no ships traversing the Strait of Hormuz, oil is barely moving out of the Middle East, and that is impacting the price at the pump here at home.  Triple-A reports the nationwide average price of a gallon of unleaded gas spiked to $3 dollars 11 cents, up 12 cents in one day   Noem On The Hot Seat Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem faced daunting scrutiny during a Senate hearing on Capitol Hill.  Ed Donahue reports the senators took aim at the DHS handling of events in Minnesota, as well as the number of deportations and arrests.   Too Many Candidates California Democrat Party Chair Rusty Hicks is making a rare public appeal to struggling gubernatorial candidates ahead of the primary election filing deadline, saying if you don't have a “viable path” to victory in November, don't run.    Congestion Pricing Stays Driving in certain parts of Manhattan will still cost extra because of congestion pricing, thanks to a New York judge's ruling on Tuesday.  Joan Jones reports on a Trump administration lawsuit turned away by a court.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

1. Operation Epic Fury – Day 3 The U.S. and Israel continue coordinated strikes on Iranian military targets. Iranian missiles, drones, and aircraft have been intercepted across the Middle East and Eastern Mediterranean. 2. Netanyahu Rejects Claims of Dragging U.S. Into War Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu states it’s “ridiculous” to claim Israel pushed the U.S. into war. Praises Trump as a strong leader acting independently based on American interests. Emphasizes Iran’s threat as “50 North Koreas” and committed to America’s destruction. 3. U.S. Intelligence: Imminent Threat Secretary of State Marco Rubio says Iranian attacks on U.S. assets were imminent. Intelligence indicated Iran planned retaliation if Israel struck its missile program. U.S. wants to prevent Iran from rebuilding missile or drone capabilities. 4. Saudi Arabia Involved Saudi Defense Ministry reports intercepting and destroying eight Iranian drones. Two drones struck the U.S. Embassy in Saudi Arabia, causing a fire but no injuries. 5. Vice President JD Vance: “No Multi-Year War” Says Trump will not allow another Iraq/Afghanistan‑style conflict. Emphasizes a clear objective: Iran must not gain or rebuild nuclear capabilities. Claims this mission avoids the “mission creep” of past wars. 6. Netanyahu Describes Trump’s Longstanding Focus on Iran Says Trump identified Iran’s nuclear ambitions as a “clear and present danger.” Describes joint U.S.-Israeli operations (“Midnight Hammer” and “Rising Line”) targeting missile sites. States negotiations failed, leaving military action as the only option. 7. Pentagon Statement by Pete Hegseth Addresses U.S. service members directly in a highly motivational speech. Frames the conflict as a generational turning point since 1979. Emphasizes: “Peace through strength” Lethality and unity of purpose Confidence in the President’s leadership Promises no endless wars and praises America’s military capability. Please Hit Subscribe to this podcast Right Now. Also Please Subscribe to the The Ben Ferguson Show Podcast and Verdict with Ted Cruz Wherever You get You're Podcasts. And don't forget to follow the show on Social Media so you never miss a moment! Thanks for Listening X: https://x.com/benfergusonshowYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@VerdictwithTedCruzSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Renue Healthcare https://Renue.Healthcare/ToddYour journey to a better life starts at Renue Healthcare. Visit https://Renue.Healthcare/Todd Bulwark Capital https://KnowYourRiskPodcast.comBe confident in your portfolio with Bulwark! Schedule your free Know Your Risk Portfolio review. Go to KnowYourRiskPodcast.com today. Bonefrog https://BonefrogCoffee.com/ToddGet the new limited release, The Sisterhood, created to honor the extraordinary women behind the heroes. Use code TODD at checkout to receive 10% off your first purchase and 15% on subscriptions.LISTEN and SUBSCRIBE at:The Todd Herman Show - Podcast - Apple PodcastsThe Todd Herman Show | Podcast on SpotifyWATCH and SUBSCRIBE at: Todd Herman - The Todd Herman Show - YouTubeIn Romans, God is described as giving people over to their sinful desires. Here's why I believe God has done the same thing to those who run these one-party ruled states…Episode links:First “openly” “trans” lawmaker admits to sickening child sex charges involving kids as young as 3Local News Report: The first “openly” “trans” lawmaker, a Democrat, pleads guilty to child sex charges involving kids as young as 3-years old.NEW: The co-founder and creator of the Squatty Potty, the unicorn poop rainbow unicorn stool seen on Shark Tank, has been federally indicted and arrested for allegedly buying and receiving child porn*graphy.DID YOU KNOW? WA Dems are adding $2 billion in spending to the budget & imposing an income tax, claiming we have a budget shortfall, but gave thousands of dollars from the state's art commission to Rain City Jacks? WA doesn't have a revenue problem it has a spending problemCalifornia serial child rapist granted parole admitted having pedophilic fantasies as recently as 2021Winston-Salem DoorDash Driver Flirts With 12-Year-Old Boy—He's a Registered Sex Offender. DoorDash driver Giavontae Deangelis Archie was dropping off an order to a 12-year-old boy and proceeded to flirt with him. “You are beautiful, are you taken?”A predator is apprehended while babysitting two infants. The same individual was caught online saying disturbing, inappropriate things…and when confronted face to face, denied it all. Total denial. But the evidence doesn't lie. Screenshots. Messages. Digital footprints. It's all there.“There is exactly one First Lady in history who met sex trafficker and raper of children and good friend of Donald Trump, Jeffrey #Epstein, and today, Republicans on the House Oversight Committee decided to question a former First Lady who NEVER MET Jeffrey Epstein instead of the First Lady currently occupying the White House, who was friends with Jeffrey Epstein and his convicted sex trafficking co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell.Bill Clinton is smiling while looking back through old Epstein photos & nodding over memories His attorney snatches them out of Bill's hands.Steve Gill, a former advisor to the Clinton administration blows the whistle, claiming that Hillary Clinton and Bill Clinton both visited Zorro Ranch multiple times to meet with Jeffrey Epstein. He says there is evidence, including photos of her with Epstein. He is not suicidal.Dear @FBI and @FBIDirectorKash there is a Logitech cloud server that has recordings from cameras on Epstein's island (installer Jermaine Ruan now works for the USVI Bureau of Corrections), the kind that Epstein couldn't destroy. Not to do your job, but can you subpoena it?

In this episode of The Psychedelic Podcast, Paul F. Austin speaks with Jodi Lomask, an artist, choreographer, and creative guide whose work bridges art, science, embodiment, and psychedelic experience. Find full show notes and links here: https://thethirdwave.co/podcast/episode-345/?ref=278  They explore how psychedelic experiences can be approached as acts of creative design shaped by context and environment. Jodi shares insights from decades of immersive performance work and discusses flow, embodied intelligence, psychological safety in groups, and the differences between microdosing and vision quests. Jodi Lomask is an artist and founder of Capacitor, a performance company exploring the intersection of dance, science, and consciousness. Through Creative Journey, she supports individuals and teams in cultivating creative flow and embodied insight. Highlights: Designing psychedelic experiences intentionally Embodiment and integration Flow states and healing Psychological safety in group work Microdosing versus vision quests Episode Links: Creative Journey Jodi's website   Episode Sponsors: The Practitioner Certification Program by Third Wave's Psychedelic Coaching Institute. The Microdosing Practitioner Certification at Psychedelic Coaching Institute. Golden Rule - Get a lifetime discount of 10% with code THIRDWAVE at checkout Disclaimer: This content is for educational, informational, and entertainment purposes only. We do not promote or encourage the illegal use of any controlled substances. Nothing said here is medical or legal advice. Always consult a qualified medical or mental health professional before making decisions related to your health. The views expressed herein belong to the speaker alone, and do not reflect the views of any other person, company, or organization. Third Wave occasionally partners with or shares information about other people, companies, and/or providers. While we work hard to only share information about ethical and responsible third parties, we can't and don't control the behavior of, products and services offered by, or the statements made by people, companies, or providers other than Third Wave. Accordingly, we encourage you to research for yourself, and consult a medical, legal, or financial professional before making decisions in those areas. Third Wave isn't responsible for the statements, conduct, services, or products of third parties. If we share a coupon code, we may receive a commission from sales arising from customers who use our coupon code. No one is required to use our coupon codes.

Money feels volatile. The headlines feel dramatic. And for many women, investing still feels intimidating. In this powerful conversation, accredited financial counselor and investor Tess Waresmith returns to cut through the noise. She unpacks the truth about market crashes, why the economy and the stock market are not the same thing, and the simple compound interest math that can turn a small monthly contribution into a million-dollar legacy. This episode offers grounded perspective and practical next steps to help you move from fear to financial clarity. If you have any questions about this episode or want to get some of the resources we mentioned, head over to LesleyLogan.co/podcast https://lesleylogan.co/podcast/. If you have any comments or questions about the Be It pod shoot us a message at beit@lesleylogan.co mailto:beit@lesleylogan.co. And as always, if you're enjoying the show please share it with someone who you think would enjoy it as well. It is your continued support that will help us continue to help others. Thank you so much! Never miss another show by subscribing at LesleyLogan.co/subscribe https://lesleylogan.co/podcast/#follow-subscribe-free.In this episode you will learn about:The importance of financial independence for women.How to prepare your finances for an inevitable market crash.The "bucket strategy" for organizing short-term vs. long-term funds.Comparing the 2000 dot-com bubble to today's AI trends.Why learning to invest takes weeks, not a finance degree.Episode References/Links:Wealth With Tess – https://wealthwithtess.com/savvyFree Financial Independence Mini-Course - https://www.moneyconfidentclub.com/3daysfiTess Waresmith Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/wealthwithtess1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History by Andrew Ross Sorkin - https://a.co/d/0h4yDFDvGuest Bio:Tess is an Accredited Financial Counselor® and the founder of Wealth with Tess, a financial education platform and community, that helps millennial women build wealth using simple investing strategies. Her mission is to help women gain agency over their money so they can retire comfortably and have options to live life on their terms. After losing thousands by working with the wrong financial advisor in her early 20s (a fiduciary by the way), Tess rewrote her financial story. She immersed herself in the world of personal finance and wealth building, and by 35, she went from a net worth of $0 to $1 million, all as a single woman. Today, Tess is a sought-after financial expert, featured by Forbes, CNBC and Business Insider. Her free investing workshops have drawn thousands of attendees, and hundreds of women have transformed their financial futures through her straightforward and supportive learning programs. Her approachable, no-jargon investing tips inspire a growing community on Instagram at @wealthwithtess. Whether you're short on time or new to investing, Tess is proof that you don't need Wall Street-level expertise to build wealth, you just need to decide it matters and get some judgement free education. If you enjoyed this episode, make sure and give us a five star rating and leave us a review on iTunes, Podcast Addict, Podchaser or Castbox. https://lovethepodcast.com/BITYSIDEALS! DEALS! DEALS! DEALS! https://onlinepilatesclasses.com/memberships/perks/#equipmentCheck out all our Preferred Vendors & Special Deals from Clair Sparrow, Sensate, Lyfefuel BeeKeeper's Naturals, Sauna Space, HigherDose, AG1 and ToeSox https://onlinepilatesclasses.com/memberships/perks/#equipmentBe in the know with all the workshops at OPC https://workshops.onlinepilatesclasses.com/lp-workshop-waitlistBe It Till You See It Podcast Survey https://pod.lesleylogan.co/be-it-podcasts-surveyBe a part of Lesley's Pilates Mentorship https://lesleylogan.co/elevate/FREE Ditching Busy Webinar https://ditchingbusy.com/Resources:Watch the Be It Till You See It podcast on YouTube! https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCq08HES7xLMvVa3Fy5DR8-gLesley Logan website https://lesleylogan.co/Be It Till You See It Podcast https://lesleylogan.co/podcast/Online Pilates Classes by Lesley Logan https://onlinepilatesclasses.com/Online Pilates Classes by Lesley Logan on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCjogqXLnfyhS5VlU4rdzlnQProfitable Pilates https://profitablepilates.com/about/Follow Us on Social Media:Instagram https://www.instagram.com/lesley.logan/The Be It Till You See It Podcast YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCq08HES7xLMvVa3Fy5DR8-gFacebook https://www.facebook.com/llogan.pilatesLinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/lesley-logan/The OPC YouTube Channel https://www.youtube.com/@OnlinePilatesClasses Episode Transcript:Tess Waresmith 0:00  Money is not good, bad, evil. It is just a tool. Are there billionaires that are assholes, of course, but that doesn't mean that money is a bad thing. We should all be working to acquire it, because if we have more flexibility, independence and freedom, we're going to be better for the people around us. We're going to make a better impact.Lesley Logan 0:17  Welcome to the Be It Till You See It podcast where we talk about taking messy action, knowing that perfect is boring. I'm Lesley Logan, Pilates instructor and fitness business coach. I've trained thousands of people around the world and the number one thing I see stopping people from achieving anything is self-doubt. My friends, action brings clarity and it's the antidote to fear. Each week, my guest will bring bold, executable, intrinsic and targeted steps that you can use to put yourself first and Be It Till You See It. It's a practice, not a perfect. Let's get started. Lesley Logan 0:56  All right, Be It babe, we are gonna talk about the financial times. Don't turn this away. I know you wanna go, la, la, la, la, la, when we talk about money, and I think I said that the last time we had the amazing Tess Waresmith on. But I really want, I want you to know that like after talking with her and hearing her voice and hearing her perspective on all the uncertainty when it comes to money, when it comes to the stock market, when it comes to the economy, she always helps me put it all in the most amazing perspective. And I want that for you as well. And I also want you to have all the things that you want to have. And if you're like, oh Les, I'm good, we also talk about that too. We also talk about what like if you are good, why it's so important for you to have this information and to know what to do with it. So, here's Tess Waresmith. Lesley Logan 1:42  All right, Be It babe, I am thrilled to have this guest back, because, to be honest, I just love hearing her speak. I actually there's very few people online that I am like absolutely 100% have to watch everything they post, because I learned so much. I learned so much from her, and I wanted to have her back so we can learn some more, because the financial investment is always uncertain, but it feels more uncertain now than it ever did before. So Tess Waresmith, welcome back. Will you tell everyone who you are and what you rock at?Tess Waresmith 2:08  Thank you. Thank you for having me back. I am an accredited financial counselor, an investor, and I would say more colloquially, I am an advocate for women and people having more money so that they can do what they want, when they want, with who they want, and eventually retire comfortably and have the flexibility, yeah, to do whatever you want with your life. That is my goal. Lesley Logan 2:28  Yeah. Well, I mean, I think we're on the same path in different ways. Like, I don't know money the way you know money, but I'm like, I want women to have, like, I want them to be a priority in their life, so that they have a body that will take them everywhere they want to go. Because, you know, so I and for a lot that may require is like having financial independence and abilities to do things that can care for themselves, they advocate for themselves. And so money does, people can hate it or love it, but it does make the world go round. It is this energy that we need to understand. So, you know, we've had you on the pod before, so you guys, we'll definitely link in the show notes, and you will learn so much. But you know, as we record this, I'll say what when we're recording this, because I think it's helpful. We just got out of the longest shutdown, the crazy times we're recording November, so it's probably come out in 2026 in the beginning. But like, people are scared. I think people are freaking out. Like I coach businesses all the time, and where my predictions are is that the group fitness aspect of things is being affected, because that's the amount of those are the people whose paychecks are being affected, those people whose the cost of groceries going up, it affects their luxury spending, which I don't think fitness should be luxury, but their luxury spending on fitness is changing. And so I'm seeing these changes. Can we talk like, where do you want to start, Tess? Should we talk with, like, what is like is always uncertain, and it just and we're like, we're making it up that it's more uncertain today?Tess Waresmith 3:50  It's a great question. I mean, I want to, like, double tap on one thing you said, where before we even, like, get into this conversation. If, when Lesley said, if money is, like, good or bad? Like, money is a tool. It's not either. And so if you are somebody that's like, oh, I hear this a lot from women, they're like, oh, I don't need to make that much money or, like, I don't want to have too much because it's bad, or I feel greedy. If you're that person, we probably need you to have more money so that you can make a bigger impact, donate to causes you care about. You're probably a good person, if you're thinking about it that way. So I need you to just park that and rewrite a new story that's money is not good, bad, evil. It is just a tool. Are there billionaires that are assholes, of course, but that doesn't mean that money is a bad thing. We should all be working to acquire it, because if we have more flexibility, independence and freedom, we're going to be better for the people around us. We're going to make a better impact. If you're an asshole, you're going to be with money or without. So I just want to, like, start there, because I think, I think that is such a useful excuse to be like, I'm not going to focus on my money. I like, don't need more and just like, the reality is, like, if you're saying that I probably need you to have more. Yeah, know what I mean, because.Tess Waresmith 5:04  You're gonna do better things with it, like, I couldn't agree more. Like, I was listening to a business guy, a coach doing not a business coach. He's like, an actual, like, life coach type of thing. And he was finding how people are like, oh, I'm good. Like, I don't, I don't want to. I feel like if me wanting more is bad when other people have so little. And he's like, right, but you playing small is never going to give them anything. Right? So, like that to your point, like, if you're the, if you're the woman, listen, is going, like, I'm really good. Like, I don't need more. We need you to have more, because you will give it to the right people. You will spend it at the right businesses. You're not the ass hole. So, we need that. Yeah, I agree.Tess Waresmith 5:41  Yeah, yeah. So I've been thinking about that a lot more and more, especially as we roll into this economy where we have so much information and so much access and visual representations of under resourced people, and we're seeing that all the time. So it's easy to feel like, you know, well, I'm doing better than this person, and this isn't something I should focus on. The other thing that people don't realize is, if you learn more of the basics, you get to impact the people around you, and not all of them are doing well, either, like I have some really close friends that I've grown up with that are in much better financial positions, that came from nothing, that grew up in really bad homes and with no money, parents in jail. They're doing better because I am a money nerd, and I force them to talk about this stuff, and so, like, I think that it's just important to remember that this is like a fundamental unfortunately in this country, are the rights to like, food and housing is not guaranteed. We need money for those things. So if you have more than you need, great, give it to somebody that doesn't. So yeah, I could go on and on about that.Lesley Logan 6:44  Yeah, yeah. I know it's like, I think, like, it's really interesting, right? I just saw someone post because, again, we're recordimg in November. Somebody posted like, should you be doing, like, Black Friday, Cyber Monday sales? And as a Pilates business coach, I tell Pilates studios all the time, don't fucking do it. You have a service-based business. You don't have the margins to do the discounts that stores have, so you can't copy what stores are doing, and the big stores put those margins in. So guess what? When it's 40% off, it's because when it was full price, you're paying more than they needed you to pay. They have, it's built in, right? As a small business owner, do I do it? Yes. Why? Because I have a product that I can do it on, I have digital products I can do it on, and I'm only doing it this one time a year. While y'all want to have a discount, that's what people want. So like, I'm like, here's the game. I can acquire new customers with it. I can reward my loyal customers who've been with me a long time with these things. But I don't have to participate in this game. But we are currently, right now, recording in the States, in the United States, where housing and medical care and all these things are not guaranteed. And so you do need to have an awareness of how to make money and how to invest money so you can have those luxuries. So going to who what you're an expert at, and talking about these things like, I think people who have a lack of understanding of how money works and investment works, this is when they start to freak out. You know, like we all know, that as soon as they start to see that these big people are pulling their shares out of this, or pulling their shares of this, all of a sudden people start to freak out and pull their shares, and we become a very predictive death spiral. So what should we know? What should we be paying attention to if we are investing? Should we should we not invest right now? Like, what's the?Tess Waresmith 8:24  Yeah, yeah, all great questions and very real and honest questions. So I appreciate that. So I want to start with the fact that the economy and the stock market are not the same thing. It's easy to feel like they are, because we hear so much about the stock market, it's a super exciting piece of information and news for the media to to constantly bring up. And so a lot of times we see these things like, are we in an AI bubble? Are we going to have a recession? Is the stock market going to collapse? Or the stock market is collapsing when it goes down one day, or crashing or whatever. And so I think it's important to remember that those are two different things. The economy right now. There's a lot of issues in the economy. There's a there's a lot of data. Like, just to, like, nerd out for a second, and I'll make this like, as non jargony as possible. So stay with us. So, so first of all, there's, there's things called leading and lagging indicators in the economy, and leading indicators are typically things that are going to influence what the stock market might do in the future. And then there's lagging indicators that kind of show what the business cycle is doing in the past. And all of this to say is that there's so many factors that influence the stock market, and right now, we're in a place where we are getting bombarded with information that is favorable for the stock market and not favorable for the stock market all at the same time. So let me give you some examples. AI obviously has massive potential. It's driving incredible returns in 2025 so right now, when we're recording this this year, the returns on AI investment in the stock market have been outstanding. And if you are invest, even if you're investing in just something like a US stock market fund that holds a bunch of stocks in the US or some of you might know what the S&P 500 is, which is the top 500 US, largest stocks that are publicly traded if you're investing in the US stock market, you're investing in AI right now, and you've probably benefited from that, whether you know it or not, if you have a 401K or an IRA, let me tell you this, it should be up. Also, if it's not, shoot me a message, please. So that's one piece of the economy. At the same time, consumer sentiment isn't great. Healthcare costs are going up. Things are more expensive. We have not solved our inflation problem. A ton of layoffs are happening. We're adding jobs in some sectors, removing them from others. So it's important to remember that while all of those economic factors are going to influence the stock market, they are not the stock market. They are two different things. So that's the first thing I want to say. The second thing I want to say is that the stock market, I'll be very interested to see what happens when this podcast episode is released, to be honest. Because right now, we are in a place where the stock market has gone up over the last three years, significantly. 2024 '25 phenomenal years. However, we have a very hard time predicting what's going to happen in the stock market and how long the stock market will continue to go up before it eventually comes down. I'm telling you right now, it will for sure come down at some point to a lower place than we are at now. The stock market never goes up indefinitely. And so for those of you that are really nervous about investing, you're hearing, hearing and seeing all this news that we're like, we're in a bubble. There's going to be a stock market crash, doom and gloom, like maybe zombies or solar flares, like whatever dramatic things they can add to this conversation about investing, it's important to remember that the stock market actually goes in cycles. So it goes up pretty regularly, it hits a peak, it contracts, and then it hits a floor. And that cycle happens over and over and over again. And so we all get really surprised when we start focusing on our money and paying attention to investing, or even just start to get a little bit more nervous about retirement if we're in our 40s, and we're approaching that and we're realizing, oh, we should have paid more attention to this. All of a sudden, when we start to see this news, we go, oh my gosh, like the stock market's going to crash. The stock market has crashed a lot over the last 100 years. We see a correction and a correction is when the stock market comes down by roughly 10% the word correction comes from the prices of stocks actually like coming down being corrected. So we see that like every three to four years, it's very, very common. So one of the things that I can tell you and your listeners is that we should not be worried about a crash. We should expect one. It's part of the price of entry. If you want to build wealth, just like if you become a business owner, you learn a lot about yourself. It's a crash course in personal development. You have, like, ugly cry days, and then your best revenue day, like, three months later. And then everything you build crashes like and over and over. You're in this cycle of building, three steps forward, two steps back. That's business, right? Stock market's going to be the same thing. So what I highly suggest is, whenever you see news, if there's any kind of emotional or sensational twinge to it, that is your one, that should be a signal to you that that's probably clickbait. Yes, first of all, the news wants to write stock market crash, because you're going to click on that, because you're going to be like, Oh God, that sounds scary. So what I love to do, as an accredited financial counselor and an investor, and I will share a lot more about this through Instagram and upcoming YouTube videos, is that we need to understand that the stock market goes in cycles, and this is expected, and the more we can learn and understand the history of that, it's going to make us more confident in how we're investing. And so I'll give you an example for any of our listeners that are lived in 2008 right? The 2008 financial crisis. If you don't know, the stock market dropped like 50% it was abysmal, super bad. People lost a lot. But when people say they lost everything, they didn't lose their money in the stock market, if they didn't sell what they were invested in, if they were invested in 2008 when the stock market crashed and they waited five years, their money would have returned to the same amount it was at, and then over the next 10 years, would have ended up growing significantly and tripling in value like crazy. So the point of all this is there's two things we need to understand. The economy and the stock market are not the same thing. It's going to go in cycles. And if we're investing for the long term, we have 10, 20, 30 years to weather these cycles. It's going to happen. The more we can educate ourselves, the more we can stay calm during these moments.Lesley Logan 15:13  Okay, first of all, you just somehow always know how to, like, calm me down and make me, like, not nervous. Like, I feel like the I'm like, okay, great. So I'll just give I'll just find some more money to put in there. But also, like, I feel, I'm not gonna lie, I feel like I've never heard someone explain that the economy and the stock market are not the same thing. Like, I'm sure you've said it to me and I like, but there I'm hearing it for the first time, and it's like, well, that explains why, when the stock market was great and the economy, people were like, people aren't feeling the economy was great, and so people are confusing the two. And also I want to highlight that I do remember 2008 I actually became a very successful Pilates instructor during the time that people were canceling cable because I was selling something people wanted to invest like they wanted to invest in themselves. They wanted to take some time. They wanted they were thinking how they're putting their dollars. And so it doesn't they don't always had to be bad when they do figure itself out, and you are right, if people are in it for the long haul, then you're going to weather this. And I think it's hard, because the only people who talk about money around us are typically uncles and granddads and like other men, and they make it sound negative all the time, and we aren't always educated in what that looks like. And so then it's like, oh, it's really bad. But we have, there's a lot of cycles in life that we get more confident in, don't we remember? Like, we all remember our first time we got our female cycle. That was really scary, that was a lot. Then there was years of figuring it out, and then you become an adult, and sometimes you're still surprised it comes. Tess Waresmith 16:38  Tha't ssuch a good comparison.Lesley Logan 16:38  Like, it's right, yeah, but we have, like, it's this thing, and like, we have to dread it, and then it comes, and then all of a sudden, we got all the good hormones because it came, and then it's like, this great time. And so it's like, we live in cycles all the time, and if we know when to like you, the one difference is that, unfortunately, the stock market isn't on a 20-day day or 32-day cycle, I mean if it's good, but we don't know when it's going to happen. We know it is going to happen. So I love the way that you addressed that you say that it's like, okay, so then what's the attitude we want to have when it comes? How? What are we what? What is? What are some things that we can, like, plan for when that happens, so that we can not listen to the noise and the clickbait and be in fear and instead make proactive decisions? And so I guess my question is to you, like, when the stock market crashes, what is your process?Tess Waresmith 17:27  Yeah, yeah. So a lot of it is about preparation. And again, the first the acknowledgement, like we talked about, that's going to happen, knowing that we can say, okay, what do we want our finances to look like, to weather this storm, and there's some very specific things we can do to get ahead of this. So the first thing I would say is that if you are investing in the stock market, that should be money that you don't need, I'm going to say, depending on your risk tolerance the next three to five years. So now might be a good time, because there is so much uncertainty, politically, socially, financially, economically, like, yeah, it's a crazy time. I mean, it's always kind of a crazy time. I think now with social media, we probably get bombarded with it more than we used to. But I will say that, like that is an important thing to remember. Is, like, one of the things I love to tell people, people ask me what they should do with their money, and I always flip that around, and I want to say, what do you want your money to do for you? So let's say a crash is coming. What we want is to make sure we have enough money in the interim while the market is being crappy. So that means having maybe a little bit more of a buffer in savings, maybe adding to your high yield savings account. In the same breath, the money that you're investing in a retirement account like an IRA or a 401(K), you have to remember you're probably not going to touch that money for another 10, 20, 30 years, depending how old you are listening to this, those accounts don't even let you withdraw until you're 59 and a half without penalty, with the exception of Roth contributions, which are have already been taxed. We can come back to that if you have questions on that. But essentially, for the most part, just to like, simplify this, your retirement accounts are meant to be for retirement. So if you have money invested in those accounts, and we have a stock market crash in 2026 it doesn't actually affect your day to day life at all, because you're not going to be using that money in the next immediate future. And even if, even if you are retiring next year, that sucks. It's, it's a bummer, right? That sucks if that happens, and I really hope it doesn't happen to any of you. But even that said, in your first year of retirement, are you going to drain your entire 401(K) and IRA to live? Probably not. You're going to take a portion of that. And if you are prepared, you already have your next few years expenses. Right in savings. So one of the big misses, and like very simple financial organization, is thinking about your money in buckets. What do you need in the short term? What do you need in the long term? And then there's like a little bit of a middle gray area, like maybe you want to buy a house in five to 10 years. Should you invest that money in, like a flexible investing account, like a regular brokerage account? Maybe. It depends on your risk tolerance. You know that likelihood of the stock market being up after five years is roughly 90% based on historical data, so pretty good odds. Is it guaranteed? No. So I think that that's the way we've got to think about it is like, what's the intention for our money? And I'll tell you right now. Lesley, like I for sure, have more money in cash right now. I have a couple of rental properties. I need to make sure I can cover those expenses. The other reason I have that is I so I don't do any dumb shit and take my money out of my investing accounts, because I don't need it. Because even as somebody that is very well educated on the economy, on the stock market, an accredited financial counselor. These things are always going to still be emotional and psychological. So that's the first thing is, like, make sure you have some savings. The second piece of this is understand how your money is invested in the first place, and so learning the basics of investing and making sure that you are investing in a bunch of different stocks and different geographies is really, really valuable. It's called diversification, aka putting your eggs in different baskets. And you can learn about this in hours, making sure that your money is not just all invested in Nvidia or Meta if you're picking one stock, putting all your money in it, I think that's a terrible investing strategy. You could become really wealthy, or you could lose a lot. That's actually Lesley, how you lose everything is when you put all your eggs in one basket. So the other important thing to remember is when we diversify appropriately and invest in US stocks and international stocks. The whole point of that is to create a portfolio that can weather these dramatic downturns. So I think it's like two things. It's like making sure we have our money in the right places to weather the storm, and then our money is invested, understanding how that's diversified across different stuff, so that when one sector collapses, or if there is an AI bubble, not all your money is in AI, so you have different stuff. And thankfully, there's easy ways to do that.Lesley Logan 22:30  Yeah, I think, I think that these are all good reminders. And I also love that, like, the vulnerability of like, yes, even you an expert, there's emotions, because with social media, there's these crazy titles on things that are meant to get you riled up and freaking out, and then you do something stupid when, if you were sane and rational, you would go, hold on. Wait a minute. What? So we're recording this in November, and I said to Brad (inaudible) at the gym, I said, oh, that Peter Thiel guy, like dropped all of his stock, and Tesla and a bit, and Nvidia what is that? And he and I, and I was like, do you think he's like, trying to fuck with things, like, right (inaudible) he's not getting enough attention. But at any rate, like, Brad goes, oh, well that. I hope people don't read too much into that, because that could really scare some people to do some stupid stuff. And it's like you start to realize, like, oh, like, when you could just get yourself away from the title and get yourself away from some things, you can go start to see as a bigger picture. You take a deep breath and you can do these things. I do. I do think that a lot of people, even you know, just in the way that I coach people in their Pilates business, I see them doing drastic changes because they're they're reacting, as opposed to giving themselves a runway that allows them to take a deep breath and figure out, like, what's the next best thing to do.Tess Waresmith 23:44  Yeah, such a good example that Brad brought up. I saw that exact article, and actually three people messaged me about that, which is so funny that you bring that up. I have another great example of this. And there was an author, Andrew Sorkin, who wrote a book on the dot-com bubble when the internet started, and there were all these internet companies popping up all over the place. And then, of course, there was a stock market crash right after that, because there are all these companies that weren't set up for success in the long term in the era of the internet. And so he was drawing some similarities, and all these news publications said, author of dot-com bubble book says we're in the same situation that we were in in 2000 and that's not really exactly what he said. He said there were some similarities, but I can tell you about some differences. So first of all, in the dot-com bubble, the Internet was new, there weren't companies that were huge and integrated into this new technology in the way we are now, and so some of the biggest investment in AI is Meta, Google, like Microsoft, these companies that are so big and so profitable and so established, even if AI just like stopped being a thing tomorrow, they're not going anywhere. So it's a totally different economic business landscape than it was in 2000. Sure, there are some similarities. There was internet hype. Now there's AI hype. Yeah, you could draw them, but a lot of the AI investment is in these mega companies that are so well-resourced that it's very unlikely that we'll see, like an entire bubble and all these there will, for sure, be AI companies that don't do well, but it's a totally different situation in a lot of ways. So that's a good example of, like, how things can be skewed to scare people.Lesley Logan 25:36  Yeah, and I think I love you brought that up because I remember one of the one of my old business coaches, he had mentioned something was probably, it was a podcast, probably during the pandemic when we were all kind of worried. But it might have been a little after, to be honest. So I'm not going to get the dates correct on this, but he mentioned, you know, people are worried about a recession right now. And let me, let me, it must have been two years into the pandemic, because I'm now thinking, remember, I was driving to Vegas, but he said, let's just look at what the recession was in 2008 and when we knew we're in a recession, and actually how quickly we actually started to get out of it. And so, like, the, it's about the and you can correct me if I'm wrong, Tess, but it's like, you have two quarters in a row where things are declining, and then it's like, okay, the economy is retracting, and this is going on. By the time we were actually going up, it had been like another quarter was a little bit but like, things started to turn around. Now, it took a long time for people to feel that turning around, of course, he said. But the other thing we have to know is today, people's incomes are a bit more diversified as well. Not everyone is working for the same big companies. A lot of people have their own businesses. We have people who have a bit more ability to, Oh, this isn't making any money over here. I can make money over here. Not to say that we are, we all can't be hurt by this. But something that I remind myself of is like I am at the time of of 2008 I was only teaching people private one on one sessions in-person today where I'm at I have in-person stuff. I've got retreat stuff. I've got this online thing over here. Now can things retract? Absolutely, but one of those things might actually be more in demand, and I can lean more over there. And so I do think that we can take some emotions out of it and start to go we are all in a different place than we were, because we've learned from different things, and maybe we have to just start to keep in mind, like, what the people writing the headlines want us to do, which is react and have emotion because they because they have to sell ads so they can stay alive. Tess Waresmith 27:34  Yeah, totally. It's, that is a fantastic point and really important to remember, especially for business owners. And then the other thing I would say is, like controlling what we can control, like you just gave us a great example of what we can control. We can control our businesses. We can create new streams of revenue. You know, I love this quote that's like, there's never a lack of resources, only a lack of resource for people like the amount of like free information on the internet that you can find to help you create stuff, make money. It's out there. The other thing we can control is making sure that during these times we're not going into debt. So just making sure you're not spending more than you make that is a super simple tip to survive any kind of recession or stock market crash. And then the other thing I'll say is to look at it as, and this is harder, because it's counterintuitive, but as a massive opportunity. There are a lot of people that became very wealthy after 2008 because they saw the stock market crash and they went, Well, shit, this whole thing is on sale. I am going to invest as much as I possibly can, and as the market recovered, they saw phenomenal returns over the next five years or so. So that's another reason why this education and conversations like this are so valuable, is because, yes, it happens, yes it sucks, it doesn't feel good, but it's also a massive opportunity, if we understand that this goes in cycles, so just another, another way to frame it that's hopefully a little helpful.Lesley Logan 29:05  Yeah, I know that's like, I mean, that's the thing that I don't think enough people understand, because no one talks about it, right? No one talks about, like, after the Great Depression, who got really, really rich from that, and how they did it. No one talks about how after the dot-com even then there was, like, there was different people do benefit, and we do swing back up. And I think we tend to, maybe it's because of how our brains are wired. We look at, we look for the negative, and then we we live in fear, and then we do things based off fear, as opposed to, like, getting on top of the mountain and having a bigger perspective and understanding, like, what is going on and what, what, you said it the best, what can we control? And we can't control. I we can't we cannot control the stock market, unfortunately. We don't have that power yet, maybe, but we can control, like, how we prepare ourselves. And I think that's really, I think that's really key. So you talked about the different buckets you talked about, so preparing ourselves. As it would be as just to reiterate it, just make sure I heard them all, you know, not spending more than we have, so easy, making sure we have a bit more cash on hand, not just to weather any storms, but also sounds like so we can, like, take part of the garage sale that's gonna happen and then diversifying what we are invested in, so it's not all in one area and things like that. I guess I would also say, like, what would your wish be for every woman listening about their level of educating themselves on investments and money? Like, is this something they have to do weekly, daily? Can they do a crash course? Like, how much should they be thinking about this? Because I'm sure they're also thinking, okay, guys, on top of this, I have to think, you know, because, there is a lot going on. There's there's the worry that they have about the people down the street who aren't making enough. There's the the political stuff that's going on. There's a lot that they have to educate themselves on. Like, how much should they be thinking about this?Tess Waresmith 30:52  Yeah, it's such a great question. I'm gonna say it's less than you think once you get a basic education. So I would say the level of information that you should have about investing and the stock market and retirement accounts is roughly the same as getting your driver's license and learning the rules of the road and how to stop at stoplights, please, hopefully you're doing that, and how to put gas in your car, right? Like, like basics, right? Like, when you learn to drive, at first it was hard. You had to practice a little bit, but then you have it, and it's not going anywhere. That is the level of understanding that you have to have about finances in the stock market. So some things you should know are all the things we talk about, your personal cash flow, how money comes in and out of your life, what accounts you can use to build wealth. There's accounts that help you save on taxes, like 401(K)s and IRAs and ones that are just flexible regular accounts, both are great for different reasons. And then you should also know the basics of how to choose investments inside those accounts. And the type of investments that I think everyone should understand the basics of are not the kind of things that you have to go in and tweak every single week. In fact, the best type of investing is investing in funds that hold hundreds or thousands of stocks so these are usually index funds or index ETFs, exchange traded funds. This is just jargon for investments that hold a bunch of different stocks at once. And if you can learn that, and you can learn how to select ones that represent the market, the average return of the market over time is roughly 10% so even if you invest in the most simple way, and you just buy a fund that holds all the stocks that are publicly traded, you could, based on historical data, get the average return of the market at 10% that is like the minimum. That's what you have to learn. And that takes, like, weeks, not months, years, not a finance PhD. It takes you deciding that this matters and deciding that you want to retire comfortably, you want to have the flexibility to pivot, start a new business, do whatever you want, travel to Bali, Cambodia, whatever, like, that's why this matters. It's investing doesn't matter because of investing. It matters because of all those other awesome things you get to do with your life. So I would say, if you dedicated, like, and don't tell me you don't have enough time because you do like, like, half an hour on a Saturday morning, if you like, pick something and you watch some YouTube videos on it, it could change your life in like two or three months. So that's like, high level. I think people think it's going to be way harder than it actually is to learn the basics. And then once you've set up your system where you have money coming in from your business or job, some of that money might go to debt. Some of it goes to your savings some of it goes to your investing accounts. Guess what? All of that can be automated. You can just have an automatic transfer to your Roth IRA that goes directly into a simple fund that holds a bunch of stocks. You can automatically pay off your debt. You can automatically add a little bit more to your high yield savings accounts. Once you set up that system, the maintenance is negligible. There are accounts that I have not touched in over a year, and they're doing fine. Is there a point, at some point when you build more wealth that you might want to talk to somebody get some strategy for sure, of course, but if you understand the basics of what I just explained, which, again, takes weeks, not months, hours, not years. Once you learn the basics, then what you can do is find the right kind of help that's not going to screw you over with a bunch of hidden fees. You understand how the system works, so you can get help that's effective and not hemorrhaging money from your investing accounts, which is a very common problem I see all the time. So that's what I would say. I would say it's less hard than you think, reading two books and taking a course, setting aside time to watch some YouTube videos like being diligent in that way can honestly change your life so much faster than you think. The hardest part is deciding that this matters and then making a commitment to learn. That's the hardest part, actually, learning, it's not that hard.Lesley Logan 35:03  Oh, I love that so much. Okay, something that you do that I want to highlight real quick before, I mean, we could talk forever, but you are aunt. I'm an aunt. You do something epic for your niece, correct? Tess Waresmith 35:13  Yes. Lesley Logan 35:14  Can we, like, should we? Can we talk a little about, like, setting things up for, like, the shares? Tess Waresmith 35:19  Sure. Yeah, yeah. So one of the great math I'm going to say the best mathematical equation on the planet is compound interest, right? So that's why we're investing, because we invest a little bit, it grows and then we get that same return on that money, and then it just continues to grow and grow, right? That's the snowball effect of investing. That's why we're doing it. So if you start investing when somebody's young, or investing for a kid when they're young, the amount of money it takes to completely change their life is so much smaller than you think. So my niece was born this year, so she's zero. I'm not a parent. That's how you know I'm not a parent. I just said zero. Lesley Logan 36:04  It's all right, you didn't say it. So that's good. But yes, I know it's true. And then they talk in months for a long time, and I'm like, you know, we got to get to a year, and then I would be great. Tess Waresmith 36:14  Yeah. So let's say I already told you the average return of the stock market is 10% if I invest for my niece, little little Frida, not it. Little Frida like 100 bucks a month until she's 18, she will have roughly $54,000 given the average return of the stock market. Nothing like crazy, just the average return of the stock market. So that's pretty good, right? But what we don't remember is what happens after that, like, if she just leaves that account alone. So let's say I contribute $100 until she's 18 into an account. It could be a tax advantaged account. There are education accounts, but let's just say it's like a regular investing account, and I contribute that amount, and she's got $54,000 by the time she's 18. What I'm going to tell little Frida is girl just like, leave it there, make your own money, do whatever you want and leave it there for 30 years. Because if you do that, she's going to have roughly a million dollars in 30 years. And I contributed roughly, I don't know, whatever 100 like, month for. Lesley Logan 37:21  I would just say about $18,000 but maybe a little more, because it's 12, there's 12 months in a year. Tess Waresmith 37:24  Yeah, yeah, not a lot. The whole point is not a lot. Lesley Logan 37:27  Yeah, yeah.Tess Waresmith 37:28  So that's like, that's insane to imagine, right? $100 for 18, $100 a month for 18 years, and then it just sits that $54,000 just sits for 30 years. Lesley Logan 37:39  No added money. Tess Waresmith 37:40  She's, no added money. She's a guaranteed millionaire. I don't even have to support her in retirement. I already did. So so like that is, that is the power of compound interest. And I will say also, I'm glad she brought that up, because if you need a motivator to learn this, and you're a parent or you have nieces, this has to be your motivator. Because even if you're not in a place where you can invest $100 a month for your kid. No shame in that. What is so much more valuable than doing what I just told you is learning the basics for yourself, learning how to put on your own mask first, before assisting others so that you can teach your own little Frida the basics of what I just taught you, because if they learn how to do it, and they're contributing 50 bucks a month, 100 bucks a month, they're also going to be a millionaire in retirement. Tess Waresmith 38:03  Yeah, yeah. Love you so much. Okay, we're going to take a brief break and then find out how people can work with you, because I'm sure that's where they're at. They're like, I don't need a random YouTube person. I need you. Tess Waresmith 38:18  Sounds good. Lesley Logan 38:18  All right, Tess, where do you hang out? Where can they stalk you in the best way? Because you're gonna teach them all the ways and where and do you have courses? Do you have anything that they can work with you on? Tess Waresmith 38:48  Yes, absolutely. So I hang out on Instagram a lot @wealthwithtess is my Instagram handle, so follow me there. I also think if this conversation was helpful, I highly recommend that you grab my free investing guide. It has a ton of information of what we just talked about today, and it's going to help you, step by step, start thinking through this process of how to organize your money and start investing. And there's some great examples in there. So that is free, and that's at wealthwithtess.com/savvy S-A-V-V-Y wealthwithtess.com/savvy there's a free investing guide there. Honestly, I'd start there. That's a great place to get information. And then I'm always offering free workshops and opportunities to learn, and I share those so once you download that, you'll get on my email list. And I share information weekly and try to help you stay calm during the AI bubble madness that we're in. Lesley Logan 39:39  I feel so calm, you're like a cortisol little like control objection. You you know the drill. We have the bold, executable, intrinsic, targeted steps people can take to Be It Till They See It. What do you have to add to the amazing advice you've already given us?Tess Waresmith 39:53  I might have said this last time, but I'm gonna say it again. No one cares about your money more than you do. They just don't. So if you care about your money. What you're going to do after this is you're going to go into the show notes, download that free guide and spend 20 minutes reading it, and you're then you're going to pick a next step. That's what you got to do. You got to take action. You can't just listen to people talk about money. You got to do something with what you're learning. Lesley Logan 40:13  Yeah, I love that so much, because I do think people like, okay, check, thought about my money, right? And also like, then take an action that goes along with it. You're epic. I love you so much. I can't wait. We'll have to just make this, like, figure out a way to, like, an annual wealth with Tess, tell us how we're doing. Tell us what's up. You guys, what are you going to do with these tips in your life? Wealth with Tess, wants to know. I want to know so and also share this with all your friends. Because I actually do think when the biggest, this is a little tangent side story, but years ago, when I lived in LA those was so many emails were hacked, and what a lot of female actresses learned is they're making very little money compared to their male counterparts. And one of the things that came out of that is, well, women don't talk about how much they make enough. They don't talk about money enough. And I do think that if our friendships could go deeper into those ways. And it's not a flashy thing. It's an actual thing that allows us to educate ourselves of how much we can make in different areas. There would be less of a wealth gap. There would be more information, because we just don't know how much people are making at different places. And so make this be the start of the conversation about money with your friends, so you can have deeper, wealthier relationships. And until next time, Be It Till You See It. Lesley Logan 41:22  That's all I got for this episode of the Be It Till You See It Podcast. One thing that would help both myself and future listeners is for you to rate the show and leave a review and follow or subscribe for free wherever you listen to your podcast. Also, make sure to introduce yourself over at the Be It Pod on Instagram. I would love to know more about you. Share this episode with whoever you think needs to hear it. Help us and others Be It Till You See It. Have an awesome day. Be It Till You See It is a production of The Bloom Podcast Network. If you want to leave us a message or a question that we might read on another episode, you can text us at +1-310-905-5534 or send a DM on Instagram @BeItPod.Brad Crowell 42:05  It's written, filmed, and recorded by your host, Lesley Logan, and me, Brad Crowell.Lesley Logan 42:10  It is transcribed, produced and edited by the epic team at Disenyo.co.Brad Crowell 42:14  Our theme music is by Ali at Apex Production Music and our branding by designer and artist, Gianfranco Cioffi.Lesley Logan 42:21  Special thanks to Melissa Solomon for creating our visuals.Brad Crowell 42:24  Also to Angelina Herico for adding all of our content to our website. And finally to Meridith Root for keeping us all on point and on time.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/be-it-till-you-see-it/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Click here to share your favorite car, car story or any automotive trivia!“Every car tells a story, and those stories reveal exactly who we are.” In this episode, Doug and Dave welcome professional corporate and lifestyle photographer Marla Aufmuth into the virtual garage. While Marla has documented landmark cultural events for brands like Nike and TED Talks, her heart belongs to the air-cooled Volkswagen community.

Indian Muslims Showing True Colours - Amit Shah's Directive to States | चुन चुन कर सब को Iran भेज दो

Jem's rocking top-tier muffs that isolate a screaming spindle while the guys talk one-click Kanban card glory. They discuss the magic of good- documentation, fighting AI amnesia with markdown, and the logistics of shipping PS2 kits to the States. From bike-ride domain buys to handling trade apathy, it's a heavy look at refining the systems that keep a modern shop running.Watch on YoutubeDISCUSSED:✍️ Comment or Suggest a TopicCommunication in the trades, what the actual fuck? ꘎Are you driving Cursor remotely? ꘎Dylan got good muff recommendation ꘎Gemini Lead Interview Youtube @Justin Brouillette HA Dashboard for Bambuinput.buttonAirShop upatesNew Docs site

On today's episode of That Was Us, we're diving into Season 5, Episode 5: A Long Road Home. The Pearsons confront long-held truths as Kate reckons with a painful chapter from her past, Kevin and Madison face growing uncertainty about their future, and Randall is shaken by new information about his birth mother that challenges everything he thought he knew. Plus, Mandy, Chris, and Sterling chat with Vien Hong who played the character of Hai! Vien talks all about his 20 year hiatus from acting, his family's brave journey to the States, what returning to acting through This Is Us means to him, and so much more! That Was Us is produced by Rabbit Grin Productions. Music by Taylor Goldsmith and Griffin Goldsmith. ------------------------- Support Our Sponsors: - Try Zip Recruiter for free at https://ZipRecruiter.com/TWU. ZipRecruiter. The smartest way to hire. - This episode is sponsored by/brought to you by BetterHelp. Your emotional wellbeing matters. Find support and feel lighter in therapy. Sign up and get 10% off at https://BetterHelp.com/TWU. - Head to Walmart today to try a bar or stock up on 4 cartons of your favorite flavors, like Blueberry Pie and Salted Peanut Butter, sold exclusively at Walmart. Check out https://Walmart.com to find a store near you! -------------------------

*Notice* Podcasting will be on Monday And Tuesday From now on. I have to do what works for me. Thank you for understanding.Thank you for all for the blessings

Today on America in the MorningIran Hits US Embassy In Riyadh Iran is retaliating for the air strikes against targets inside their borders with attacks of their own on U.S. and Israeli targets in neighboring countries, including the US Embassy in Saudi Arabia, broadening the scope of the conflict.  John Stolnis has the latest from Washington.   Hegseth Says No Endless War America woke up Monday with a press briefing held by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and General Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the Pentagon to discuss what Hegseth said will not be an endless war.  Washington correspondent Sagar Meghani reports the Trump administration is rebutting concerns the Iran war could spiral into a bigger regional fight.   Evacuate Now The US State Department urged American citizens to depart immediately from countries and territories throughout the Middle East after Iran widened their scope of attacks.  Correspondent Julie Walker reports travelers have been stranded in a number of nations as the Middle East conflict spreads, and governments including the US are scrambling to bring citizens home.   SCOTUS Rules On NY Congressional Map The Supreme Court on Monday announced that it would keep in place a New York congressional map, overruling a judge who had found that the map violated the Constitution by diluting the power of Black and Latino voters.   Primary Day Voters in several states including Texas will vote in the primaries as midterm elections ramp up nationwide.  Correspondent Clayton Neville reports.   Will Iran Go Iran was scheduled to be a part of the 2026 World Cup played in the US, but their participation is now in doubt which could cause headaches for soccer's governing body.  Correspondent Gethin Coolbaugh reports.   Trump Talks Iran President Trump says the war with Iran could last as long as five weeks, and called the US and Israeli action the last best chance to address the Iranian nuclear and ballistic missile program.  Washington correspondent Sagar Meghani reports on the lead-up to the president's decision to take America to war.   Congress Briefed On War Congress continues to react to U-S-Israeli strikes on Iran after leaders were briefed by the top military officials.  Correspondent Clayton Neville reports.   Latest On Texas Shooting Authorities in Texas say the gunman who opened fire outside an Austin bar, killing two people and wounding 14, was not on their radar before the attack that authorities are treating as an act of terrorism tied to Iran.  Jennifer King reports. Cuba Discusses Attack The Cuban government has displayed a lot of arms that it claims was on the Florida speedboat that got into a fatal firefight with Cuban soldiers last week.  Correspondent Rich Johnson reports that a US Senator is saying that the regime change that the United States facilitated in Venezuela and Iran could happen next in the Communist nation 90 miles from the Florida Keys.   Guthrie Back In Arizona Now one month since she went missing, an emotional return to Nancy Guthrie's Arizona home by members of her family, including NBC Today Show host Savannah Guthrie.  Correspondent Ed Donahue reports.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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How do you build a creative life that spans music, writing, film, and spiritual practice? Alicia Jo Rabins talks about weaving multiple creative strands into a sustainable career and why the best advice for any creator might simply be: just make the thing. In the intro, backlist promotion strategy [Written Word Media]; Successful author business [Novel Marketing Podcast]; Alliance of Independent Authors Indie Author Bookstore; Bones of the Deep – J.F. Penn This podcast is sponsored by Kobo Writing Life, which helps authors self-publish and reach readers in global markets through the Kobo eco-system. You can also subscribe to the Kobo Writing Life podcast for interviews with successful indie authors. This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn Alicia Jo Rabins is an award-winning writer, musician, performer, as well as a Torah teacher and ritualist. She's the creator of Girls In Trouble, a feminist indie-folk song cycle about biblical women, and the award-winning film, A Kaddish for Bernie Madoff. Her latest book is a memoir, When We Are Born We Forget Everything. You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights, and the full transcript is below. Show Notes Building a sustainable multi-disciplinary creative career through teaching, performance, grants, and donations Trusting instinct in the early generative stages of creativity and separating generation from editing Adapting and reimagining religious and cultural source material through music, writing, and performance The challenges of transitioning from poetry to long-form prose memoir, including choosing a lens for your story Making an independent film on a shoestring budget without waiting for Hollywood's permission Finding your creative voice and building confidence by leaning into vulnerability and returning to the practice of making You can find Alicia at AliciaJo.com. Transcript of the interview with Alicia Jo Rabins Joanna: Alicia Jo Rabins is an award-winning writer, musician, performer, as well as a Torah teacher and ritualist. She's the creator of Girls In Trouble, a feminist indie-folk song cycle about biblical women, and the award-winning film, A Kaddish for Bernie Madoff. Her latest book is a memoir, When We Are Born We Forget Everything. So welcome to the show, Alicia. Alicia: Thank you so much. I'm delighted to be here. Joanna: There is so much we could talk about. But first up— Tell us a bit more about you and how you've woven so many strands of creativity into your life and career. Alicia: Yes, well, I am a maximalist. What happened in terms of my early life is that I started writing on my own, just extremely young. I'm one of those people who always loved writing, always processed the world and managed my emotions and came to understand myself through writing. So from a very young age, I felt really committed to writing. Then I had the good fortune that my mother saw a talk show about the Suzuki method of learning violin—when you start really young and learn by ear, which is modelled after language learning. It's so much less intellectual and much more instinctual, learning by copying. She was like, that looks like a cool thing. I was three years old at the time and she found out that there was a little local branch of our music conservatory that had a Suzuki violin programme. So when I was three and a half, getting close to four, she took me down and I started playing an extremely tiny violin. Joanna: Oh, cute! Alicia: Yes, and because it was part of this conservatory that was downtown, and we were just starting at the suburban branch where we lived, there was this path that I was able to follow. As I got more and more interested in violin, I could continue basically up through the conservatory level during high school. So I had a really fantastic music education without any pressure, without any expectations or professional goals. I just kept taking these classes and one thing led to another. I grew up being very immersed in both creative writing and music, and I think just having the gift of those two parts of my brain trained and stimulated and delighted so young really changed my brain in some ways. I'll always see the world through this creative lens, which I think I'm also just set up to do personally. Then the last step of my multi-practice career is that in college I got very interested in Jewish spirituality. I'm Jewish, but I didn't grow up very religious. I didn't grow up in a Jewish community really. So I knew some basics, but not a ton. In college I started to study it and also informally learned from other people I met. I ended up going on a pretty intense spiritual quest, going to Jerusalem and immersing myself after college for two years in traditional Jewish study and practice. So that became the third strand of the braid that had already been started with music and writing. Torah study, spiritual study, and teaching became the third, and they all interweave. The last thing I'll say is that because I work in both words and music, and naturally performance because of music, it began to branch a little bit into plays, theatre, and film, just because that's where the intersection of words, performance, and music is. So that's really what brought me into that, as opposed to any specific desire to work in film. It all happened very organically. Joanna: I love this. This is so cool. We are going to circle back to a lot of this, but I have to ask you— What about work for money at any point? How did this turn into more than just hobbies and lifestyle? Alicia: Yes, absolutely. Well, I'm very fortunate that I did not graduate college with loans because my parents were able to pay for college. That was a big privilege that I just want to name, because in the States that's often not the case. So that allowed me to need to support myself, but not also pay loans, which was a real gift. What happened was I went straight from college to that school in Jerusalem, and there I was on loans and scholarship, so I didn't have to worry yet about supporting myself. Then when I came back to the States, I actually found on Craigslist a job teaching remedial Hebrew. It was essentially teaching kids at a Jewish elementary school who either had learning differences or had just entered the school late and needed to be in a different Hebrew class than the other kids in their grade. That was my first experience of really teaching, and I just absolutely fell in love with it. Although in the end, my passion is much more for teaching the text and rituals and the wrestling with the concepts, as opposed to teaching language. So all these years, while doing performance and writing and all these things, I have been teaching Jewish studies. That has essentially supported me, I would say, between 50 and 70 per cent. Then the rest has been paid gigs as a musician, whether as a front person leading a project or as what we call a sideman, playing in someone else's band. Sometimes doing theatre performances, sometimes teaching workshops. That's how I've cobbled it together. I have not had a full-time job all these years and I have supported myself through both earned income and also grants and donations. I've really tried to cultivate a little bit of a donor base, and I took some workshops early on about how to welcome donations. So I definitely try to always welcome that as well. Joanna: That is so interesting that you took a workshop on how to welcome donations. Way back in, I think 2013, I said on this show, I just don't know if I can accept people giving to support the show. Then someone on the podcast challenged me and said, but people want to support creatives. That's when I started Patreon in 2014. It was when The Art of Asking by Amanda Palmer came out and— It was this realisation that people do want to support people. So I love that you said that. Alicia: It's not easy. It's still not easy for me, and I have to grit my teeth every time I even put in my end-of-year newsletter. I just say, just a reminder that part of what makes this possible is your generous donations, and I'm so grateful to you. It's not easy. I think some people enjoy fundraising. I certainly don't instinctively enjoy it, but I have learned to think of it exactly the way that you're saying. I mean, I love donating to support other people's projects. Sometimes it's the highlight of my day. If I'm having a bad day and someone asks for help, either to feed a family or to complete a creative project, I just feel like, okay, at least I can give $36 or $25 and feel like I did something positive in the last hour, even if my project is going terribly and I'm in a fight with my kid or something. So I have to keep in mind that it is actually a privilege to give as well as a privilege to receive. Joanna: Absolutely. So let's get back into your various creative projects. The first thing I wanted to ask you, because you do have so many different formats and forms of your creativity—how do you know when an idea that comes to you should be a song, or something you want to do as a performance, or written, or a film? Tell us a bit about your creative process. Because a lot of your projects are also longer-term. Alicia: Yes. It's funny, I love planning and in some ways I'm an extreme planner. I really drive people in my family bonkers with planning, like family vacations a year in advance. In terms of my creativity, I'm very planful towards goals, but in that early generative state, I am actually pure instinct. I don't think I ever sit down and say, “I have this idea, which genre would it match with?” It's more like I sit on my bed and pick up my guitar, which is where I love to do songwriting, just sitting on my bed cross-legged, and I pick up my guitar and something starts coming out. Then I just work with that kernel. So it's very nebulous at first, very innate, and I just follow that creative spirit. Often I don't even know what a project is, sometimes if it's a larger project, until a year or two in. Once things emerge and take shape, then my planning brain and my strategy brain can jump on it and say, “Okay, we need three more songs to fill out the album, and we need to plan the fundraising and the scheduling.” Then I might take more of an outside-in approach. At the beginning it's just all instinct. Joanna: So if you pick up your guitar, does that mean it always starts in music and then goes into writing? Or is that you only pick up a guitar if it's going to be musical? Alicia: I think I'm responding to what's inside me. It's almost like a need, as opposed to, “I'm going to sit down and work.” I mean, obviously I sit down and work a lot, but I think in that early stage of anything, it's more like my fingers are itching to play something, and so I sit down and pick up my guitar. Sometimes nothing comes out and sometimes the kernel of a song comes out. Or I'm at a café, and I often like to write when I'm feeling a little bit discombobulated, just to go into the complexity of things or use challenging emotions as fuel. I really do use it as a—I don't know if therapeutic is the word, but I think it maybe is. I write often, as I always have, as I said before, to understand what I'm thinking. Like Joan Didion said—to process difficult emotions, to let go of stuck places. So I think I create almost more out of a sense of just what I need in the moment. Sometimes it's just for fun. Sometimes picking up a guitar, I just have a moment so I sit down and mess around. Sometimes it's to help me struggle with something. It doesn't always start in music. That was a random example. I might sit down to write because I have an hour and I think, I haven't written in a while. Or I do have an informal daily writing thing where I'll try to generate one loose draft of something a day, even if it's only ten pages. I mean, sorry, ten words. Joanna: I was going to say! Alicia: No, no. Ten words. I'm sorry. It's often poetry, so it feels like a lot when it's ten words. I'll just sit down with no pressure, no goal, no intention to make anything specific. Just open the floodgates and see what comes out. That's where every single project of mine has started. Joanna: Yes, I do love that. Obviously, I'm a discovery writer and intuitive, same as you. I think very much this idea of, especially when you said you feel discombobulated, that's when you write. I almost feel like I need that. I'm not someone who writes every day. I don't do ten lines or whatever. It's that I'll feel that sense of pressure building up into “this is going to be something.” I will really only write or journal when that spills over into— “I now need to write and figure out what this is.” Alicia: Yes. It's almost a form of hunger. It feels to me similar to when you eat a great meal and then you're good for a while. You're not really thinking of it, and then it builds up, like you said, and then there's a need—at least the first half of creativity. I really separate my generation and my editing. So my generative practice is all openness, no critique, just this maybe therapeutic, maybe curious, wandering and seeing what happens. Then once I have a draft, my incisive editing mind is welcome back in, which has been shut out from that early process. So that's a really different experience. Those early stages of creativity are almost out of need more than obligation. Joanna: Well, just staying with that generative practice. Obviously you've mentioned your study of and practice of Jewish tradition and Jewish spirituality. Steven Pressfield in his books has talked about his prayer to the muse, and I've got on my wall here—I don't talk about this very often, actually — I have a muse picture, a painting of what I think of as a muse spirit in some form. So do you have any spiritual practices around your generative practice and that phase of coming up with ideas? Alicia: I love that question, and I wish I had a beautiful, intentional answer. My answer is no. I think I experience creativity as its own spiritual practice itself. I do love individual prayer and meditation and things like that, but for me those are more to address my specifically spiritual health and happiness and connectedness. I'm just a dive-in kind of person. As a musician, I have friends who have elaborate backstage rituals. I have to do certain things to take care of my voice, but even that, it's mostly vocal rest as opposed to actively doing things. There's a bit of an on/off switch for me. Joanna: That's interesting. Well, I do want to ask you about one of your projects, this collaboration with a high school on a musical performance, I Was a Desert: Songs of the Matriarchs, and also your Girls in Trouble songs about women in the Torah. On your website, I had a look at the school, the high school, and the musical performance. It was extraordinary. I was watching you in the school there and it's just such extraordinary work. It very much inspired me—not to do it myself, but it was just so wonderful. I do urge people to go to your website and just watch a few minutes of it. I'm inspired by elements of religion, Christian and Jewish, but I wondered if you've come up against any issues with adaptation—respecting your heritage but also reinventing it. How has this gone for you. Any advice for people who want to incorporate aspects of religion they love but are worried about responses? Alicia: Well, I have to say, coming from the Jewish tradition, that is a core practice of Judaism—reinterpreting our texts and traditions, wrestling with them, arguing with them, reimagining them. I don't know if you're familiar with Midrash, but just in case some of your listeners aren't sure I'll explain it. There's essentially an ancient form of fanfic called Midrash, which was the ancient rabbis, and we still do it today, taking a biblical story that seems to have some kind of gap or inconsistency or question in it and writing a story to fill that gap or recast the story in an interestingly different light. So we have this whole body of literature over thousands of years that are these alternate or added-on adventures, side quests of the biblical characters. What I'm doing from a Jewish perspective is very much in line with a traditional way of interacting with text. I've certainly never gotten any pushback, especially as I work in progressive Jewish communities. I think if I were in an extremely fundamentalist community, there would be a lot of different issues around gender and things like that. The interpretive process, even in those communities, is part of how we show respect for the text. When I was working with the high school—and I just want to call out the choir director, Ethan Chen, who has an incredible project where he brings in a different artist every two years to work with the choir, and they tend to have a different cultural focus each time. He invited me specifically to integrate my songwriting about biblical women with his amazing high school choir. I was really worried at first because most of them are not Jewish—very few of them, if any. I wanted to respect their spiritual paths and their religious heritages and not impose mine on them. So I spent a lot of time at the beginning saying, this project has religious source material, but essentially it is a creative reinterpretive project. I am not coming to you to bring the religious material to you. I'm coming to take the shared Hebrew Bible myths and then reinterpret those myths through a lens of how they might reflect our own personal struggles, because that's always my approach to these ancient stories. I wanted to really make that clear to the students. It was such a joy to work with them. Joanna: It's such an interesting project. Also, I find with musicians in general this idea of performance. You've written this thing—or this thing specifically with the school—and it doesn't exist again, right? You're not selling CDs of that, I presume. Whereas compared to a book, when we write a book, we can sell it forever. It doesn't exist as a performance generally for an author of a memoir or a novel. It carries on existing. So how does that feel, the performance idea versus the longer-lasting thing? I mean, I guess the video's there, but the performance itself happened. Alicia: I do know what you mean. Absolutely. We did, for that reason, record it professionally. We had the sound person record it and mix it, so it is available to stream. I'm not selling CDs, but it's out there on all the streaming services, if people want to listen. I do also have the scores, so if a choir wanted to sing it. The main point that you're making is so true. I think there's actually something very sacred about live performance—that we're all in the moment together and then the moment is over. I love the artefacts of the writing life. I love writing books. I love buying and reading books and having them around, and there's piles of them everywhere in this room I'm standing in. I feel like being on stage, or even teaching, is a very spiritual practice for me, because it's in some ways the most in-the-moment I ever am. The only thing that matters is what's happening right then in that room. It's fleeting as it goes. I'm working with the energy in the room while we're there. It's different every time because I'm different, the atmosphere is different, the people are different. There's no way to plan it. The kind of micro precision that we all try to bring to our editing—you can't do that. You can practice all you want and you should, but in the moment, who knows? A string breaks or there's loud sound coming from the other room. It is just one of those things. I love being reminded over and over again of the truth that we really don't control what happens. The best that we can do is ride it, surf it, be in it, appreciate it, and then let it go. Joanna: I think maybe I get a glimpse of that when I speak professionally, but I'm far more in control in that situation than I guess you were with—I don't know how many—was it a hundred kids in that choir? It looked pretty big. Alicia: It was amazing. It was 130 kids. Yes. Joanna: 130 kids! I mean, it was magic listening to it. And yes, of course, showing my age there with buying a CD, aren't I? Alicia: Well, I do still sell some CDs of Girls in Trouble on tour, because I have a bunch of them and people still buy them. I'm always so grateful because it was an easier life for touring musicians when we could just bring CDs. Now we have to be very creative about our merch. Joanna: Yes, that's a good point because people are like, “Oh yes, I'll scan your QR code and stream it,” but you might not get the money for that for ages, and it might just be five cents or whatever. Alicia: Streaming is terrible for live musicians. I mean, I don't know if you know the site Bandcamp, but it's essentially self-publishing for musicians. Bandcamp is a great way around that, and a lot of independent musicians use it because that's a place you can upload your music and people can pay $8 for an album. They can stream it on there if they want, or they can download it and have it. But, yes, it's hard out there for touring musicians. Joanna: Yes, for sure. Well, let's come to the book then. Your memoir, When We Are Born We Forget Everything. Tell us about some of the challenges of a book as opposed to these other types of performances. Alicia: Well, I come out of poetry, so that was my first love. That's what I majored in in college. That's what my MFA is in. Poetry is famously short, and I'm not one of those long-form poets. I have been trained for many years to think in terms of a one-page arc, if at all. Arc isn't even really a word that we use in poetry. So to write a full-length prose book was really an incredible education. Writing it basically took ten years from writing to publication, so probably seven years of writing and editing. I felt like there was an MFA-equivalent process in the number of classes I took, books I read, and work that went into it. So that was one of my main joys and challenges, really learning on the job to write long-form prose coming out of poetry. How to keep the engine going, how to think about ending one chapter in a way that leaves you with some torque or momentum so that you want to go into the next chapter. How many characters is too many? Who gets names and who doesn't? Some of these things that are probably pretty basic for fiction writers were all very new to me. That was a big part of my process. Then, of course, poets don't usually have agents. So once it was done, I began to query agents. It was the normal sort of 39 rejections and then one agent who really understood what I was trying to do. She's incredible, and she was able to sell the book. The longevity of just working on something for that long—I have a lot of joy in that longevity—but it does sometimes feel like, is this ever going to happen, or am I on a fool's errand? Joanna: I guess, again, the difference with performance is you have a date for the performance and it's done then. I suppose once you get a contract, then for sure it has to be done. But memoir in particular, you do have to set boundaries, because of course your life continues, doesn't it? So what were the challenges in curating what went into the book? Because many people listening know memoir is very challenging in terms of how personal it can be. Alicia: Yes, and one thing I think is so fascinating about memoir is choosing which lens to put on your story, on your own story. I heard early on that the difference between autobiography and memoir is that autobiography tries to give a really comprehensive view of a life, and memoir is choosing one lens and telling the story of a life through that lens, which is such a beautiful creative concept. I knew early on that I wanted this to be primarily a spiritual memoir, and also somewhat of an artistic memoir, because my creativity and my spirituality are so intertwined. It started off being spiritual, and also about my musical life, and also about my writing life. In the end, I edited out the part about my writing life, because writing about writing was just too navel-gazing. So there's nothing in there about me coming of age as a writer, which used to be in there, but that whole thing got taken out. Now it's spiritual and musical. For me, it really helped to start with those focuses, because I knew there may be things that were hugely important in my life, absolutely foundational, that were not really going to be either mentioned or gone deeply into in the book. For example, my husband teases me a lot about how few pages and words he gets. He's very important in my life, but I actually met him when I was 29, and this book really mainly takes place in the years leading up to that. There's a little bit of winding down in the first few years of my thirties, but this is not a book about my life with him. He is mentioned in it. That story is in there. Having those kinds of limitations around the canvas—there's a quote, I forget if it was Miranda July, but somebody said something like, basically when you put a limitation on your project, that's when it starts to be a work of art. Whatever it is, if you say, “I'm taking this canvas and I'm using these colours,” that's when it really begins, that initial limitation. That was very helpful. Joanna: It's also the beauty of memoir, because of course you can write different memoirs at different times. You can write something about your writing life. You can write something else about your marriage and your family later on. That doesn't all have to be in one book. I think that's actually something I found interesting. And I would also say in my memoir, Pilgrimage, my husband is barely mentioned either. Alicia: Does he tease you too? Joanna: No, I think he's grateful. He is grateful for the privacy. Alicia: That's why I keep saying, you should be grateful! Joanna: Yes. You really should. Like, maybe stop talking now. Alicia: Yes, exactly. I know. Marriage, memoir—those words should strike fear into his heart. Joanna: They definitely should. But let's just come back. When I look at your career— You just seem such an independent creative, and so I wondered why you decided to work with a traditional publisher instead of being an independent. How are you finding it as someone who's not in charge of everything? Alicia: It's a great question. The origin story for this memoir is that I was actually reading poetry at a writing conference called Bread Loaf in the States. This was 16 years ago or something. I was giving a poetry reading and afterwards an agent, not my agent, came up to me and said, you know, you have a voice. You should try writing nonfiction because you could probably sell it. Back to your question about how I support myself, I am always really hustling to make a living. It's not like I have some separate well-paying job and the writing has no pressure on it. So my ears kind of perked up. I thought, wait, getting paid for writing? Because poetry is literally not in the world. It's just not a concept for poets. That's not why we write and it's not a possibility. So a little light turned on in my brain. I thought, wow, that could be a really interesting element to add to my income stream, and it would be flexible and it would be meaningful. For a few years I thought, what nonfiction could I write? And I came up with the idea of writing a book about biblical women from a more scholarly perspective, because I teach that material and I've studied it. I went to speak to another agent and she said, well, you could do that, but if you actually want to sell a book, it's going to have to be more of a trade book. So if you don't want an academic press, which wouldn't pay very much, you would have to have some kind of memoir-like stories in there to just sweeten it so it doesn't feel academic. So then I began writing a little bit of spiritual memoir. I thought, okay, well, I'll write about a few moments. Then once I started writing, I couldn't stop. The floodgates really opened. That's how it ended up being a spiritual memoir with interwoven stories of biblical women. It became a hybrid in that sense. I knew from the beginning that this project—for all my saying earlier that I never plan anything and only work on instinct, I was thinking as I said that, that cannot be true. This time, I actually thought, what if, instead of coming from this pure, heart-focused place of poetry, I began writing with the intention of potentially selling a book? The way my fiction writer friends talked about selling their books. So that was always in my mind. I knew I would continue writing poetry, continue publishing with small presses, continue putting my own music out there independently, but this was a bit of an experiment. What if I try to interface with the publishing world, in part for financial sustainability? And because I had a full draft before I queried, I never felt like anyone was telling me what to write. I can't imagine personally selling a book on proposal, because I do need that full capacity to just swerve, change directions, be responsive to what the project is teaching me. I can't imagine promising that I'll write something, because I never know what I'll write. But writing at least a very solid draft first, I'm always delighted to get notes and make polish and rewrite and make things better. I took care of that freedom in the first seven years of writing and then I interfaced with the agent and publisher. Joanna: I was going to say, given that it's taken you seven to ten years to do this and I can't imagine that you're suddenly a multimillionaire from this book. It probably hasn't fulfilled the hourly rate that perhaps you were thinking of in terms of being paid for your work. I think some people think that everyone's going to end up with the massive book deal that pays for the rest of their life. I guess this book does just fit into the rest of your portfolio career. Alicia: Yes. One of the benefits of these long arcs that I like to work on is, one of them—and probably the primary one—is that the project gets to unfold on its own time. I don't think I could have rushed it if I wanted. The other is that it never really stopped me from doing any of my other work. Joanna: Mm-hmm. Alicia: So it's not like, oh, I gave up months of my life and all I got was this advance or something. It's like, I was living my life and then when I had a little bit of writing time—and I will say, it impacted my poetry. I haven't written as much poetry because I was working on this. So it wasn't like I just added it on top of everything I was already doing, but it was a pleasure to just switch to prose for a while. It was just woven into my life. I appreciated having this side project where no one was waiting for it. There were no deadlines, there was no stress around it, because I always have performances to promote and due dates for all kinds of work. It was just this really lovely arena of slow growth and play. When I wanted a reader, I could do a swap with a writer friend, but no one was ever waiting for it on deadline. So there's actually a lot of pleasure in that. Then I will say, I think I've made more from selling this than my poetry. Probably close to ten times more than I've ever made from any of my poetry. So on a poetry scale, it's certainly not going to pay for my life, but it actually does make a true financial difference in a way that much of my other work is a little more bit by bit by bit. It's actually a different scale. Joanna: Well, that's really good. I'm glad to hear that. I also want to ask you, because you've done so many things, and— I'm fascinated by your independent film, A Kaddish for Bernie Madoff. I have only watched the trailer. You are in it, you wrote it, directed it, and it's also obviously got other people in, and it's fascinating. It's about this particular point in history. I've written quite a lot of screenplay adaptations of my novels, and I've had some various amounts of interest, but the whole film industry to me is just a complete nightmare, far bigger nightmare than the book industry. So I wonder if you could maybe talk about this, because it just seems like you made a film, which is so cool. Alicia: Oh yes, thank you. Joanna: And it won awards, yes, we should say. Alicia: Did we win awards? Yes. It really, for an extremely low-budget indie film, went far further than my team and I could ever have imagined. I will say I never intended to make a film. Like most of the best things in my life, it really happened by accident. When I was living in New York— I lived there for many years—the 2008 financial collapse happened and I happened to have an arts grant that gave a bunch of artists workspace, studio space, in essentially an abandoned building in the financial district. It was an empty floor of a building. The floor had been left by the previous tenant, and there's a nonprofit that takes unused real estate in the financial district and lets artists work in it for a while. So I was on Wall Street, which was very rare for me, but for this year I was working on Wall Street. Even though I was working on poems, the financial collapse happened around me, and I did get inspired by that to create a one-woman show, which was more of a theatre show. That was already a huge leap for me because I had no real theatre experience, but it was experimental and growing out of my poetry practice and my music. It was a musical one-woman show about the financial collapse from a spiritual perspective, apparently. So I performed that. I documented it, and then a friend who lives in Portland, Oregon, where I now live, said, “I'm a theatre producer, I'd like to produce it here.” So then I rewrote it and did a run here in Portland of that show. Essentially, I started to tour it a little bit, but I got tired of it. It was too much work and it never really paid very much, and I thought, this is impacting my life negatively. I just want to do a really good documentation of the show. So I wanted to hire a theatre documentarian to just document the show so that it didn't disappear, like you were saying before about live performance. But one of the people I talked to actually ended up being an artistic filmmaker, as opposed to a documentarian. She watched the archival footage, just a single camera of the show, and said, “I don't think you should do this again and film it with three cameras. I think you should make it into a feature film. And in fact, I think maybe I should direct it, because there's all this music in it and I also direct music videos.” We had this kind of mind meld. Joanna: Mm. Alicia: I never intended to make a film, but she is a visionary director and I had this piece of IP essentially, and all the music and the writing. We adapted it together. We did it here in Portland. We did all the fundraising ourselves. We did not interface with Hollywood really. I think that would be, I just can't imagine. I love Hollywood, but I'm not really connected, and I can't imagine waiting for someone to give us permission or a green light to make this. It was experimental and indie, so we just really did it on the cheap. We had an amazing producer who helped us figure out how to do it with the budget that we had. We worked really hard fundraising, crowdfunding, asking for donations, having parties to raise money, and then we just did it and put it out there. I think my main advice—and I hear this a lot on screenwriting podcasts—is just make the thing. Make something, as opposed to trying to get permission to make something. Because unless you're already in that system, it's going to be really hard to get permission to make it. Once you make something, that leads to something else, which leads to something else. So even if it's a very short thing, or even if it's filmed on your phone, just actually make the thing. That turned out to be the right thing for us. Joanna: Yes, I mean, I feel like that is what underpins us as independent creatives in general. As an independent author, I feel the same way. I'm never asking permission to put a book in the world. No, thank you. Alicia: Exactly. We have a vision and we do it. It's harder in some ways, but that liberation of being able to really fully create our vision without having to compromise it or wait for permission, I think it's such a beautiful thing. Joanna: Well, we're almost out of time, but I do want to ask you about creative confidence. Alicia: Hmm. Joanna: I feel I'm getting a lot of sense about this at the moment, with all the AI stuff that's happening. When you've been creating a long time, like you and I have, we know our voice and we can lean into our voice. We are creatively confident. We'll fail a lot, but we'll just push on and try things and see what happens. Newer creators are struggling with this kind of confidence. How do I know what is my voice? How do I know what I like? How do I lean into this? So give us some thoughts about how to find your voice and how to find that creative confidence if you don't feel you have it. Alicia: I love that. One thing I will say is that I always think whatever is arising is powerful material to create from. So if a lack of confidence is arising, that's a really powerful feeling to directly explore and not just try to ignore. Although sometimes one has to just ignore those feelings. But to actually explore that feeling, because AI can't have that, right? AI can't really feel a crisis of confidence, and humans can. So that's a gift that we have, those kinds of sensitivities. I think to go really deep into whatever is arising, including the sense that we don't have the right to be creating, or we're not good enough, or whatever it is. Then I always do come back to a quote. I think it might have been John Berryman, but I'm forgetting which poet said it. A younger poet said, “How will I ever know if I'm any good?” And this famous poet said something like—I'm paraphrasing—”You'll never know if you're any good. If you have to know, don't write.” That has been really liberating to me, actually. It sounds a little harsh, but it's been really liberating to just let go of a sense of “good enough.” There is no good enough. The great writers never know if they're good enough. Coming back to this idea of just making without permission—the practice of doing the thing is being a writer. Caring and trying to improve our craft, that's the best that we can have. There's never going to be a moment where we're like, yes, I've nailed this. I am truly a hundred per cent a writer and I have found my voice. Everything's always changing anyway. I would say, either go into those feelings or let those feelings be there. Give them a little tea. Tell them, okay, you're welcome to be here, but you don't get to drive the boat. And then return to the practice of making. Joanna: Absolutely. Great. So where can people find you and your books and everything you do online? Alicia: Everything is on my website, which is AliciaJo.com, and also on Instagram at @ohaliciajo. I'd love to say hello to anyone who's interested in similar topics. Joanna: Brilliant. Well, thanks so much for your time, Alicia. That was great. Alicia: Thank you. I love your podcast. I'm so grateful for all that you've given the writing world, Jo.The post Creative Confidence, Portfolio Careers, And Making Without Permission with Alicia Jo Rabins first appeared on The Creative Penn.

You don't have to venture to the People's Republic of California to hunt the elusive valley (aka California) quail. They mutter and flutter throughout the West, and I'll share some thoughts on these wily game birds based on my three decades of chasing the little buggers. I'll outline typical and atypical habitats, bird behavior, hunting tactics and a few western towns that can serve as jumping-off points for your next hunt. I'll share my observations on their daily routine, and some less-common places you might find them. The rest is up to you. Insider editions are brought to you by CableGangz tie-out systems. [Take 10% off your next order at CableGangz.com with the promo code CG10.]

In episode 248 of America Adapts, host Doug Parsons is joined by Professor Mark Nevitt of Emory University School of Law to unpack the repeal of the Clean Air Act's Endangerment Finding and what it means for climate governance in the United States. Long considered the legal backbone of federal climate regulation, its rescission raises fundamental questions about agency authority, the role of the courts, and the durability of federal climate policy. Mark explains the legal theory behind the repeal, how it intersects with Supreme Court precedent, and what likely comes next in federal court. The conversation also explores the practical implications of regulatory instability — from increased climate litigation to the shifting balance between federal, state, and local responsibility. For listeners working in adaptation, public policy, infrastructure, law, or risk management, this episode offers a clear look at how legal shifts at the federal level can reshape the broader climate landscape — and why adaptation efforts must continue regardless of political volatility. Transcript for this episode here.  Key Themes Covered in This Episode What the Endangerment Finding actually did under the Clean Air Act Why Massachusetts v. EPA mattered The legal basis for the repeal How the repeal affects federal climate regulation The role of the Supreme Court and administrative law What happens next in federal court More emissions and rising adaptation costs States and cities filling the federal vacuum The growing role of climate litigation Adaptation continuing — but in a more fragmented system Previous appearances by Mark Nevitt on America Adapts Destroy, Rebuild, Repeat: How to Break the Climate Disaster Cycle with Mark Nevitt Climate Change and the Legal System: Why the U.S. Constitution Needs to Adapt with Law Professor Mark Nevitt Climate Adaptation Predictions for 2025: What the Experts Say For Educators & Students The structure and limits of federal agency authority The interaction between executive action and judicial review How Supreme Court doctrine reshapes environmental governance Federalism and the division of climate authority between states and Washington Legal uncertainty and its impact on infrastructure and long-term planning Climate governance in periods of institutional instability The evolving role of courts in climate policy disputes Risk management when regulatory frameworks shift abruptly Professors are welcome to assign this episode or excerpts in syllabi. Who Should Listen to This Episode Climate adaptation and resilience professionals navigating shifting federal policy State and local government officials responsible for long-term planning Urban and regional planners integrating climate risk into infrastructure decisions Insurance, reinsurance, and financial sector professionals assessing regulatory volatility Corporate risk, legal, and strategy teams tracking climate governance shifts Environmental law and public policy scholars following administrative law developments Funders and foundations evaluating the durability of climate investments Climate communicators explaining governance instability to broader audiences   ClimateTech Connect Conference Mentioned in the Episode! ClimateTech Connect Registration Use code: AAVIP for 25% discount off ticket prices   Support for America Adapts helps make episodes like this possible, including more international conversations on how adaptation is unfolding globally. All donations are now tax deductible! Check out the America Adapts Media Kit here! Subscribe to the America Adapts newsletter here. Listen to America Adapts on your favorite app here!   Facebook, Linkedin and Bluesky: https://www.facebook.com/americaadapts/ https://bsky.app/profile/americaadapts.bsky.social https://www.linkedin.com/in/doug-parsons-america-adapts/ Doug Parsons and Speaking Opportunities: If you are interested in having Doug speak at corporate and conference events, sharing his unique, expert perspective on adaptation in an entertaining and informative way, Now on Spotify! List of Previous Guests on America Adapts Follow/listen to podcast on Apple Podcasts. The 10 Best Sustainability Podcasts for Environmental Business Leadershttps://us.anteagroup.com/news-events/blog/10-best-sustainability-podcasts-environmental-business-leaders For more information on this podcast, visit the website at http://www.americaadapts.org and don't forget to subscribe to this podcast on Apple Podcasts.   Podcast Music produce by Richard Haitz Productions Write a review on Apple Podcasts ! America Adapts on Facebook!   Join the America Adapts Facebook Community Group. Check us out, we're also on YouTube! Subscribe to America Adapts on Apple Podcasts Doug can be contacted at americaadapts @ g mail . com

States have become increasingly active participants in merger enforcement, often conducting independent analyses and, at times, intervening alongside federal agencies in high-profile cases. What goes into states' analyses and decisions to intervene? Anthony Mariano, Chief of the Antitrust Division at the Massachusetts Office of the Attorney General, speaks with Lexi Michaud and Anora Wang about how states approach merger enforcement in parallel with the DOJ and FTC, the importance of independent state scrutiny, and, using the HPE–Juniper transaction to guide the discussion, how the Tunney Act promotes transparency and public interest oversight of federal settlements. With special guest: Anthony Mariano, Antitrust Division Chief, Massachusetts Office of the Attorney General Hosted by: Lexi Michaud, Fried Frank and Anora Wang, Arnold & Porter

Mark Meckler reacts to a viral clip from the State of the Union and its important implications for the 2026 elections. Then, he dives into intriguing changes in Artificial Intelligence and the corporate media landscape, as well as an update on the latest from the Convention of States movement. NOTE: This episode was recorded prior to the campaign in Iran. Ask Mark Anything Open Letter to Trump Sign the Petition

American Spirit With The Men's and Women's Olympic Hockey teams bringing the gold back to the States, celebrations are in order. Is Jared sold on the festivities?  Tough Love From youth sports to everyday life, what is an acceptable approach to provide guidance to the younger generation? Seeing Double Hollywood celebrities range far and wide, but none can replicate the magic of Jim Carey. Has the world-renowned "Pet Detective" been compromised or cloned??!  Like Share Comment Subscribe and Review!!

ALERTE BREAKING NEWS Fifty States passe en mode "actu chaude" !!Les missiles américains et israéliens ont frappé l'IranDonald Trump a justifié son attaque dans un discours Un discours de 8 minutes dans lequel il a rappelé le point de départ de la GROSSE TENSION entre les deux paysC'était le 4 novembre 1979Ce jour-là, 300 étudiants iraniens ont pris en otage 66 personnes dans l'ambassade américaine de TéhéranUne prise d'otage qui va durer 444 jours !!Un moment de bascule dans l'histoire des États-UnisMais aussi dans l'histoire des relations internationalesMais aussi dans l'histoire de FIFTY STATESQui n'avait encore jamais raconté cette histoireC'est chose faite.Bon épisode !Hébergé par Audiomeans. Visitez audiomeans.fr/politique-de-confidentialite pour plus d'informations.

Every state has a food its known for and on this episode we explore it!

On this episode of The Federalist Radio Hour, John Hart, CEO of government transparency nonprofit Open the Books, joins Federalist Senior Elections Correspondent Matt Kittle to discuss ballooning Medicaid fraud in states like Pennsylvania and analyze the fight to expose the loopholes that lead to taxpayer-funded waste.Read more about Open the Book's role in exposing Medicaid fraud here and here.The Federalist Foundation is a nonprofit, and we depend entirely on our listeners and readers — not corporations. If you value fearless, independent journalism, please consider a tax-deductible gift today at TheFederalist.com/donate. Your support keeps us going.

Michael B. Jordan and Ryan Coogler talk road to Oscars; Midterm election threat; '50 States in 50 Weeks' visits Oregon Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices