Podcasts about Structure

Let's face it - marriage is a lot of hard work! Sometimes the daily grind, responsibilities, challenges, finances, and conflicting values, conspire to make you want to give up. Where do you find hope to keep going and stay faithful to your commitment? In this message, Chip brings a simple, very doable plan to help you find hope. This is a practical, how-to explanation of how to have a marriage that works - for both of you! Don't miss it!Biblical practices great marriages have in common:LoveHopeJesus gives hope to His bride, the Church:John 14:1-21Hope is a picture of the future that says, what we are doing today is going to produce a better tomorrow.Principles:Long-term planning provides HOPE and PERSPECTIVE to overcome short-term pain and challenges.Great plans provide a specific PATH and create HOPE for tomorrow and forever.Hope rises and falls with how we keep our PROMISES.Practical implications:If you fail to PLAN, you plan to FAIL.If you don't have a plan, you don't have HOPE.Tools for transformation:1. ClarityYou are a trophy of God's grace – you share hope when you share your brokenness.Assignment: Add 10 years – see the goal, plan to get there.2. Structure – work together on:FinancesCalendars3. If necessary, get outside helpBroadcast ResourceDownload MP3Message NotesAdditional Resource MentionsI Choose Love BookConnect888-333-6003WebsiteChip Ingram AppInstagramFacebookTwitterPartner With UsDonate Online888-333-6003

Hope is great! But how do you actually get hope? What provides hope, in a marriage relationship, when you've made the commitment and you're in it for the long-haul? Where do you find that sustaining, motivating optimism that helps you look forward to your future together? Chip's got the answer in this program.Biblical practices great marriages have in common:LoveHopeJesus gives hope to His bride, the Church:John 14:1-21Hope is a picture of the future that says, what we are doing today is going to produce a better tomorrow.Principles:Long-term planning provides HOPE and PERSPECTIVE to overcome short-term pain and challenges.Great plans provide a specific PATH and create HOPE for tomorrow and forever.Hope rises and falls with how we keep our PROMISES.Practical implications:If you fail to PLAN, you plan to FAIL.If you don't have a plan, you don't have HOPE. Tools for transformation:1. ClarityYou are a trophy of God's grace – you share hope when you share your brokenness.Assignment: Add 10 years – see the goal, plan to get there.2. Structure – work together on:FinancesCalendars3. If necessary, get outside helpBroadcast ResourceDownload MP3Message NotesAdditional Resource MentionsI Choose Love BookConnect888-333-6003WebsiteChip Ingram AppInstagramFacebookTwitterPartner With UsDonate Online888-333-6003

There are not many aspects this week.There is only… everything.We are in the thick of endings. Not tidy endings. Not Instagram-quote endings. The kind that feel like collapse. The kind that feel like crisis. The kind that ask you to sit very still in the dark and listen.This is eclipse week.This is the first Saturn–Neptune conjunction in Aries.This is the Year of the Fire Horse.Bold action. Rapid innovation. Dramatic societal change. Spiritual acceleration.You may not see mass awakening on the surface.But I assure you — it is happening.The old world is cracking. And when systems crack, nervous systems feel it first.So this week is not about performance.It is about listening.

Sherwin Wu leads engineering for OpenAI's API platform, where roughly 95% of engineers use Codex, often working with fleets of 10 to 20 parallel AI agents.We discuss:1. What OpenAI did to cut code review times from 10-15 minutes to 2-3 minutes2. How AI is changing the role of managers3. Why the productivity gap between AI power users and everyone else is widening4. Why “models will eat your scaffolding for breakfast”5. Why the next 12 to 24 months are a rare window where engineers can leap ahead before the role fully transforms—Brought to you by:DX—The developer intelligence platform designed by leading researchersSentry—Code breaks, fix it fasterDatadog—Now home to Eppo, the leading experimentation and feature flagging platform—Episode transcript: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/engineers-are-becoming-sorcerers—Archive of all Lenny's Podcast transcripts: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fo/yxi4s2w998p1gvtpu4193/AMdNPR8AOw0lMklwtnC0TrQ?rlkey=j06x0nipoti519e0xgm23zsn9&st=ahz0fj11&dl=0—Where to find Sherwin Wu:• X: https://x.com/sherwinwu• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sherwinwu1—Where to find Lenny:• Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com• X: https://twitter.com/lennysan• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/—In this episode, we cover:(00:00) Introduction to Sherwin Wu(03:10) AI's role in coding at OpenAI(06:53) The future of software engineering with AI(12:26) The stress of managing agents(15:07) Codex and code review automation(19:29) The changing role of engineering managers(24:14) The one-person billion-dollar startup(31:40) Management lessons(37:28) Challenges and best practices in AI deployment(43:56) Hot takes on AI and customer feedback(48:57) Building for future AI capabilities(50:16) Where models are headed in the next 18 months(53:35) Business process automation(57:22) OpenAI's ecosystem and platform strategy(01:00:50) OpenAI's mission and global impact(01:05:21) Building on OpenAI's API and tools(01:08:16) Lightning round and final thoughts—Referenced:• Codex: https://openai.com/codex• OpenAI's CPO on how AI changes must-have skills, moats, coding, startup playbooks, more | Kevin Weil (CPO at OpenAI, ex-Instagram, Twitter): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/kevin-weil-open-ai• OpenClaw: https://openclaw.ai• The creator of Clawd: “I ship code I don't read”: https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-creator-of-clawd-i-ship-code• The Sorcerer's Apprentice: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sorcerer%27s_Apprentice_(Dukas)• Quora: https://www.quora.com• Marc Andreessen: The real AI boom hasn't even started yet: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/marc-andreessen-the-real-ai-boom• Sarah Friar on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sarah-friar• Sam Altman on X: https://x.com/sama• Nicolas Bustamante's “LLMs Eat Scaffolding for Breakfast” post on X: https://x.com/nicbstme/status/2015795605524901957• The Bitter Lesson: http://www.incompleteideas.net/IncIdeas/BitterLesson.html• Overton window: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window• Developers can now submit apps to ChatGPT: https://openai.com/index/developers-can-now-submit-apps-to-chatgpt• Responses: https://platform.openai.com/docs/api-reference/responses• Agents SDK: https://platform.openai.com/docs/guides/agents-sdk• AgentKit: https://openai.com/index/introducing-agentkit• Ubiquiti: https://ui.com• Jujutsu Kaisen on Crunchyroll: https://www.crunchyroll.com/series/GRDV0019R/jujutsu-kaisen?srsltid=AfmBOoqvfzKQ6SZOgzyJwNQ43eceaJTQA2nUxTQfjA1Ko4OxlpUoBNRB• eero: https://eero.com• Opendoor: https://www.opendoor.com—Recommended books:• Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs: https://www.amazon.com/Structure-Interpretation-Computer-Programs-Engineering/dp/0262510871• The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering: https://www.amazon.com/Mythical-Man-Month-Software-Engineering-Anniversary/dp/0201835959• There Is No Antimemetics Division: A Novel: https://www.amazon.com/There-No-Antimemetics-Division-Novel/dp/0593983750• Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future: https://www.amazon.com/Breakneck-Chinas-Quest-Engineer-Future/dp/1324106034• Apple in China: The Capture of the World's Greatest Company: https://www.amazon.com/Apple-China-Capture-Greatest-Company/dp/1668053373—Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email podcast@lennyrachitsky.com.—Lenny may be an investor in the companies discussed. To hear more, visit www.lennysnewsletter.com

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Tired of writing blog posts no one reads? Let's fix that. In this episode, I'm walking you through the exact steps to format your blog posts so that people actually want to read them. We're talking real strategies, tactical steps, and zero fluff. If writing makes you nervous, or you feel like no one's clicking through your content, this episode is your starting point. This is part four in our blogging series, and we're covering why structure matters, how to make posts scannable, and how to use headings the right way for both your reader and Google. PLUS—our very first listener question! Sabrina asks about Wix vs. WordPress, and I give you a full breakdown on which is better for long-term growth and monetization. Check Out the Episodes in Our Blogging Series: 381: How to Pick the Right Blog Platform Based on Your Goals 386: What to Write on Your Blog as an Influencer: Your Guide to Content Pillars, Keywords, & Calendars 392: Is Blogging Still Worth It? Yes—Here's How to Get Consistent Traffic   Find It Quickly: 01:31 - Blog Writing Confidence and Structure 02:36 - Formatting Tips for Readable Blog Posts 07:17 - Using Headings for SEO and Readability 12:09 - Final Tips and Encouragement 18:26 - Listener Question: Wix vs WordPress   Mentioned in this Episode: Ask Bree: thrivetogether.blog/askbree Boldfluence: thrivetogether.blog/boldfluence Siteground: siteground.com BigScoots: bigscoots.com 381: How to Pick the Right Blog Platform Based on Your Goals  

In this episode of Sales POP!, supplement industry veteran John Smiddy (New to Marketers) reveals the strategies behind his $100M+ in client revenue. Key takeaways for 2026:  AI-first optimization: Structure your product data for AI recommendation engines, not just search engines. Consumers are buying through ChatGPT conversations now. Amazon launch strategy: Start on Amazon to build instant credibility and reviews. Smiddy's data shows conversion rates of 5%+ for new brands- better than most DTC sites. Differentiation is critical: Generic formulations fail. Partner with experts to create proprietary blends backed by clinical validation and third-party testing. Balance AI with authenticity: Use AI for research and optimization, but keep your creative human. Customers can spot AI-generated content instantly.

This podcast features Gabriele Corso and Jeremy Wohlwend, co-founders of Boltz and authors of the Boltz Manifesto, discussing the rapid evolution of structural biology models from AlphaFold to their own open-source suite, Boltz-1 and Boltz-2. The central thesis is that while single-chain protein structure prediction is largely “solved” through evolutionary hints, the next frontier lies in modeling complex interactions (protein-ligand, protein-protein) and generative protein design, which Boltz aims to democratize via open-source foundations and scalable infrastructure.Full Video PodOn YouTube!Timestamps* 00:00 Introduction to Benchmarking and the “Solved” Protein Problem* 06:48 Evolutionary Hints and Co-evolution in Structure Prediction* 10:00 The Importance of Protein Function and Disease States* 15:31 Transitioning from AlphaFold 2 to AlphaFold 3 Capabilities* 19:48 Generative Modeling vs. Regression in Structural Biology* 25:00 The “Bitter Lesson” and Specialized AI Architectures* 29:14 Development Anecdotes: Training Boltz-1 on a Budget* 32:00 Validation Strategies and the Protein Data Bank (PDB)* 37:26 The Mission of Boltz: Democratizing Access and Open Source* 41:43 Building a Self-Sustaining Research Community* 44:40 Boltz-2 Advancements: Affinity Prediction and Design* 51:03 BoltzGen: Merging Structure and Sequence Prediction* 55:18 Large-Scale Wet Lab Validation Results* 01:02:44 Boltz Lab Product Launch: Agents and Infrastructure* 01:13:06 Future Directions: Developpability and the “Virtual Cell”* 01:17:35 Interacting with Skeptical Medicinal ChemistsKey SummaryEvolution of Structure Prediction & Evolutionary Hints* Co-evolutionary Landscapes: The speakers explain that breakthrough progress in single-chain protein prediction relied on decoding evolutionary correlations where mutations in one position necessitate mutations in another to conserve 3D structure.* Structure vs. Folding: They differentiate between structure prediction (getting the final answer) and folding (the kinetic process of reaching that state), noting that the field is still quite poor at modeling the latter.* Physics vs. Statistics: RJ posits that while models use evolutionary statistics to find the right “valley” in the energy landscape, they likely possess a “light understanding” of physics to refine the local minimum.The Shift to Generative Architectures* Generative Modeling: A key leap in AlphaFold 3 and Boltz-1 was moving from regression (predicting one static coordinate) to a generative diffusion approach that samples from a posterior distribution.* Handling Uncertainty: This shift allows models to represent multiple conformational states and avoid the “averaging” effect seen in regression models when the ground truth is ambiguous.* Specialized Architectures: Despite the “bitter lesson” of general-purpose transformers, the speakers argue that equivariant architectures remain vastly superior for biological data due to the inherent 3D geometric constraints of molecules.Boltz-2 and Generative Protein Design* Unified Encoding: Boltz-2 (and BoltzGen) treats structure and sequence prediction as a single task by encoding amino acid identities into the atomic composition of the predicted structure.* Design Specifics: Instead of a sequence, users feed the model blank tokens and a high-level “spec” (e.g., an antibody framework), and the model decodes both the 3D structure and the corresponding amino acids.* Affinity Prediction: While model confidence is a common metric, Boltz-2 focuses on affinity prediction—quantifying exactly how tightly a designed binder will stick to its target.Real-World Validation and Productization* Generalized Validation: To prove the model isn't just “regurgitating” known data, Boltz tested its designs on 9 targets with zero known interactions in the PDB, achieving nanomolar binders for two-thirds of them.* Boltz Lab Infrastructure: The newly launched Boltz Lab platform provides “agents” for protein and small molecule design, optimized to run 10x faster than open-source versions through proprietary GPU kernels.* Human-in-the-Loop: The platform is designed to convert skeptical medicinal chemists by allowing them to run parallel screens and use their intuition to filter model outputs.TranscriptRJ [00:05:35]: But the goal remains to, like, you know, really challenge the models, like, how well do these models generalize? And, you know, we've seen in some of the latest CASP competitions, like, while we've become really, really good at proteins, especially monomeric proteins, you know, other modalities still remain pretty difficult. So it's really essential, you know, in the field that there are, like, these efforts to gather, you know, benchmarks that are challenging. So it keeps us in line, you know, about what the models can do or not.Gabriel [00:06:26]: Yeah, it's interesting you say that, like, in some sense, CASP, you know, at CASP 14, a problem was solved and, like, pretty comprehensively, right? But at the same time, it was really only the beginning. So you can say, like, what was the specific problem you would argue was solved? And then, like, you know, what is remaining, which is probably quite open.RJ [00:06:48]: I think we'll steer away from the term solved, because we have many friends in the community who get pretty upset at that word. And I think, you know, fairly so. But the problem that was, you know, that a lot of progress was made on was the ability to predict the structure of single chain proteins. So proteins can, like, be composed of many chains. And single chain proteins are, you know, just a single sequence of amino acids. And one of the reasons that we've been able to make such progress is also because we take a lot of hints from evolution. So the way the models work is that, you know, they sort of decode a lot of hints. That comes from evolutionary landscapes. So if you have, like, you know, some protein in an animal, and you go find the similar protein across, like, you know, different organisms, you might find different mutations in them. And as it turns out, if you take a lot of the sequences together, and you analyze them, you see that some positions in the sequence tend to evolve at the same time as other positions in the sequence, sort of this, like, correlation between different positions. And it turns out that that is typically a hint that these two positions are close in three dimension. So part of the, you know, part of the breakthrough has been, like, our ability to also decode that very, very effectively. But what it implies also is that in absence of that co-evolutionary landscape, the models don't quite perform as well. And so, you know, I think when that information is available, maybe one could say, you know, the problem is, like, somewhat solved. From the perspective of structure prediction, when it isn't, it's much more challenging. And I think it's also worth also differentiating the, sometimes we confound a little bit, structure prediction and folding. Folding is the more complex process of actually understanding, like, how it goes from, like, this disordered state into, like, a structured, like, state. And that I don't think we've made that much progress on. But the idea of, like, yeah, going straight to the answer, we've become pretty good at.Brandon [00:08:49]: So there's this protein that is, like, just a long chain and it folds up. Yeah. And so we're good at getting from that long chain in whatever form it was originally to the thing. But we don't know how it necessarily gets to that state. And there might be intermediate states that it's in sometimes that we're not aware of.RJ [00:09:10]: That's right. And that relates also to, like, you know, our general ability to model, like, the different, you know, proteins are not static. They move, they take different shapes based on their energy states. And I think we are, also not that good at understanding the different states that the protein can be in and at what frequency, what probability. So I think the two problems are quite related in some ways. Still a lot to solve. But I think it was very surprising at the time, you know, that even with these evolutionary hints that we were able to, you know, to make such dramatic progress.Brandon [00:09:45]: So I want to ask, why does the intermediate states matter? But first, I kind of want to understand, why do we care? What proteins are shaped like?Gabriel [00:09:54]: Yeah, I mean, the proteins are kind of the machines of our body. You know, the way that all the processes that we have in our cells, you know, work is typically through proteins, sometimes other molecules, sort of intermediate interactions. And through that interactions, we have all sorts of cell functions. And so when we try to understand, you know, a lot of biology, how our body works, how disease work. So we often try to boil it down to, okay, what is going right in case of, you know, our normal biological function and what is going wrong in case of the disease state. And we boil it down to kind of, you know, proteins and kind of other molecules and their interaction. And so when we try predicting the structure of proteins, it's critical to, you know, have an understanding of kind of those interactions. It's a bit like seeing the difference between... Having kind of a list of parts that you would put it in a car and seeing kind of the car in its final form, you know, seeing the car really helps you understand what it does. On the other hand, kind of going to your question of, you know, why do we care about, you know, how the protein falls or, you know, how the car is made to some extent is that, you know, sometimes when something goes wrong, you know, there are, you know, cases of, you know, proteins misfolding. In some diseases and so on, if we don't understand this folding process, we don't really know how to intervene.RJ [00:11:30]: There's this nice line in the, I think it's in the Alpha Fold 2 manuscript, where they sort of discuss also like why we even hopeful that we can target the problem in the first place. And then there's this notion that like, well, four proteins that fold. The folding process is almost instantaneous, which is a strong, like, you know, signal that like, yeah, like we should, we might be... able to predict that this very like constrained thing that, that the protein does so quickly. And of course that's not the case for, you know, for, for all proteins. And there's a lot of like really interesting mechanisms in the cells, but yeah, I remember reading that and thought, yeah, that's somewhat of an insightful point.Gabriel [00:12:10]: I think one of the interesting things about the protein folding problem is that it used to be actually studied. And part of the reason why people thought it was impossible, it used to be studied as kind of like a classical example. Of like an MP problem. Uh, like there are so many different, you know, type of, you know, shapes that, you know, this amino acid could take. And so, this grows combinatorially with the size of the sequence. And so there used to be kind of a lot of actually kind of more theoretical computer science thinking about and studying protein folding as an MP problem. And so it was very surprising also from that perspective, kind of seeing. Machine learning so clear, there is some, you know, signal in those sequences, through evolution, but also through kind of other things that, you know, us as humans, we're probably not really able to, uh, to understand, but that is, models I've, I've learned.Brandon [00:13:07]: And so Andrew White, we were talking to him a few weeks ago and he said that he was following the development of this and that there were actually ASICs that were developed just to solve this problem. So, again, that there were. There were many, many, many millions of computational hours spent trying to solve this problem before AlphaFold. And just to be clear, one thing that you mentioned was that there's this kind of co-evolution of mutations and that you see this again and again in different species. So explain why does that give us a good hint that they're close by to each other? Yeah.RJ [00:13:41]: Um, like think of it this way that, you know, if I have, you know, some amino acid that mutates, it's going to impact everything around it. Right. In three dimensions. And so it's almost like the protein through several, probably random mutations and evolution, like, you know, ends up sort of figuring out that this other amino acid needs to change as well for the structure to be conserved. Uh, so this whole principle is that the structure is probably largely conserved, you know, because there's this function associated with it. And so it's really sort of like different positions compensating for, for each other. I see.Brandon [00:14:17]: Those hints in aggregate give us a lot. Yeah. So you can start to look at what kinds of information about what is close to each other, and then you can start to look at what kinds of folds are possible given the structure and then what is the end state.RJ [00:14:30]: And therefore you can make a lot of inferences about what the actual total shape is. Yeah, that's right. It's almost like, you know, you have this big, like three dimensional Valley, you know, where you're sort of trying to find like these like low energy states and there's so much to search through. That's almost overwhelming. But these hints, they sort of maybe put you in. An area of the space that's already like, kind of close to the solution, maybe not quite there yet. And, and there's always this question of like, how much physics are these models learning, you know, versus like, just pure like statistics. And like, I think one of the thing, at least I believe is that once you're in that sort of approximate area of the solution space, then the models have like some understanding, you know, of how to get you to like, you know, the lower energy, uh, low energy state. And so maybe you have some, some light understanding. Of physics, but maybe not quite enough, you know, to know how to like navigate the whole space. Right. Okay.Brandon [00:15:25]: So we need to give it these hints to kind of get into the right Valley and then it finds the, the minimum or something. Yeah.Gabriel [00:15:31]: One interesting explanation about our awful free works that I think it's quite insightful, of course, doesn't cover kind of the entirety of, of what awful does that is, um, they're going to borrow from, uh, Sergio Chinico for MIT. So he sees kind of awful. Then the interesting thing about awful is God. This very peculiar architecture that we have seen, you know, used, and this architecture operates on this, you know, pairwise context between amino acids. And so the idea is that probably the MSA gives you this first hint about what potential amino acids are close to each other. MSA is most multiple sequence alignment. Exactly. Yeah. Exactly. This evolutionary information. Yeah. And, you know, from this evolutionary information about potential contacts, then is almost as if the model is. of running some kind of, you know, diastro algorithm where it's sort of decoding, okay, these have to be closed. Okay. Then if these are closed and this is connected to this, then this has to be somewhat closed. And so you decode this, that becomes basically a pairwise kind of distance matrix. And then from this rough pairwise distance matrix, you decode kind of theBrandon [00:16:42]: actual potential structure. Interesting. So there's kind of two different things going on in the kind of coarse grain and then the fine grain optimizations. Interesting. Yeah. Very cool.Gabriel [00:16:53]: Yeah. You mentioned AlphaFold3. So maybe we have a good time to move on to that. So yeah, AlphaFold2 came out and it was like, I think fairly groundbreaking for this field. Everyone got very excited. A few years later, AlphaFold3 came out and maybe for some more history, like what were the advancements in AlphaFold3? And then I think maybe we'll, after that, we'll talk a bit about the sort of how it connects to Bolt. But anyway. Yeah. So after AlphaFold2 came out, you know, Jeremy and I got into the field and with many others, you know, the clear problem that, you know, was, you know, obvious after that was, okay, now we can do individual chains. Can we do interactions, interaction, different proteins, proteins with small molecules, proteins with other molecules. And so. So why are interactions important? Interactions are important because to some extent that's kind of the way that, you know, these machines, you know, these proteins have a function, you know, the function comes by the way that they interact with other proteins and other molecules. Actually, in the first place, you know, the individual machines are often, as Jeremy was mentioning, not made of a single chain, but they're made of the multiple chains. And then these multiple chains interact with other molecules to give the function to those. And on the other hand, you know, when we try to intervene of these interactions, think about like a disease, think about like a, a biosensor or many other ways we are trying to design the molecules or proteins that interact in a particular way with what we would call a target protein or target. You know, this problem after AlphaVol2, you know, became clear, kind of one of the biggest problems in the field to, to solve many groups, including kind of ours and others, you know, started making some kind of contributions to this problem of trying to model these interactions. And AlphaVol3 was, you know, was a significant advancement on the problem of modeling interactions. And one of the interesting thing that they were able to do while, you know, some of the rest of the field that really tried to try to model different interactions separately, you know, how protein interacts with small molecules, how protein interacts with other proteins, how RNA or DNA have their structure, they put everything together and, you know, train very large models with a lot of advances, including kind of changing kind of systems. Some of the key architectural choices and managed to get a single model that was able to set this new state-of-the-art performance across all of these different kind of modalities, whether that was protein, small molecules is critical to developing kind of new drugs, protein, protein, understanding, you know, interactions of, you know, proteins with RNA and DNAs and so on.Brandon [00:19:39]: Just to satisfy the AI engineers in the audience, what were some of the key architectural and data, data changes that made that possible?Gabriel [00:19:48]: Yeah, so one critical one that was not necessarily just unique to AlphaFold3, but there were actually a few other teams, including ours in the field that proposed this, was moving from, you know, modeling structure prediction as a regression problem. So where there is a single answer and you're trying to shoot for that answer to a generative modeling problem where you have a posterior distribution of possible structures and you're trying to sample this distribution. And this achieves two things. One is it starts to allow us to try to model more dynamic systems. As we said, you know, some of these structures can actually take multiple structures. And so, you know, you can now model that, you know, through kind of modeling the entire distribution. But on the second hand, from more kind of core modeling questions, when you move from a regression problem to a generative modeling problem, you are really tackling the way that you think about uncertainty in the model in a different way. So if you think about, you know, I'm undecided between different answers, what's going to happen in a regression model is that, you know, I'm going to try to make an average of those different kind of answers that I had in mind. When you have a generative model, what you're going to do is, you know, sample all these different answers and then maybe use separate models to analyze those different answers and pick out the best. So that was kind of one of the critical improvement. The other improvement is that they significantly simplified, to some extent, the architecture, especially of the final model that takes kind of those pairwise representations and turns them into an actual structure. And that now looks a lot more like a more traditional transformer than, you know, like a very specialized equivariant architecture that it was in AlphaFold3.Brandon [00:21:41]: So this is a bitter lesson, a little bit.Gabriel [00:21:45]: There is some aspect of a bitter lesson, but the interesting thing is that it's very far from, you know, being like a simple transformer. This field is one of the, I argue, very few fields in applied machine learning where we still have kind of architecture that are very specialized. And, you know, there are many people that have tried to replace these architectures with, you know, simple transformers. And, you know, there is a lot of debate in the field, but I think kind of that most of the consensus is that, you know, the performance... that we get from the specialized architecture is vastly superior than what we get through a single transformer. Another interesting thing that I think on the staying on the modeling machine learning side, which I think it's somewhat counterintuitive seeing some of the other kind of fields and applications is that scaling hasn't really worked kind of the same in this field. Now, you know, models like AlphaFold2 and AlphaFold3 are, you know, still very large models.RJ [00:29:14]: in a place, I think, where we had, you know, some experience working in, you know, with the data and working with this type of models. And I think that put us already in like a good place to, you know, to produce it quickly. And, you know, and I would even say, like, I think we could have done it quicker. The problem was like, for a while, we didn't really have the compute. And so we couldn't really train the model. And actually, we only trained the big model once. That's how much compute we had. We could only train it once. And so like, while the model was training, we were like, finding bugs left and right. A lot of them that I wrote. And like, I remember like, I was like, sort of like, you know, doing like, surgery in the middle, like stopping the run, making the fix, like relaunching. And yeah, we never actually went back to the start. We just like kept training it with like the bug fixes along the way, which was impossible to reproduce now. Yeah, yeah, no, that model is like, has gone through such a curriculum that, you know, learned some weird stuff. But yeah, somehow by miracle, it worked out.Gabriel [00:30:13]: The other funny thing is that the way that we were training, most of that model was through a cluster from the Department of Energy. But that's sort of like a shared cluster that many groups use. And so we were basically training the model for two days, and then it would go back to the queue and stay a week in the queue. Oh, yeah. And so it was pretty painful. And so we actually kind of towards the end with Evan, the CEO of Genesis, and basically, you know, I was telling him a bit about the project and, you know, kind of telling him about this frustration with the compute. And so luckily, you know, he offered to kind of help. And so we, we got the help from Genesis to, you know, finish up the model. Otherwise, it probably would have taken a couple of extra weeks.Brandon [00:30:57]: Yeah, yeah.Brandon [00:31:02]: And then, and then there's some progression from there.Gabriel [00:31:06]: Yeah, so I would say kind of that, both one, but also kind of these other kind of set of models that came around the same time, were kind of approaching were a big leap from, you know, kind of the previous kind of open source models, and, you know, kind of really kind of approaching the level of AlphaVault 3. But I would still say that, you know, even to this day, there are, you know, some... specific instances where AlphaVault 3 works better. I think one common example is antibody antigen prediction, where, you know, AlphaVault 3 still seems to have an edge in many situations. Obviously, these are somewhat different models. They are, you know, you run them, you obtain different results. So it's, it's not always the case that one model is better than the other, but kind of in aggregate, we still, especially at the time.Brandon [00:32:00]: So AlphaVault 3 is, you know, still having a bit of an edge. We should talk about this more when we talk about Boltzgen, but like, how do you know one is, one model is better than the other? Like you, so you, I make a prediction, you make a prediction, like, how do you know?Gabriel [00:32:11]: Yeah, so easily, you know, the, the great thing about kind of structural prediction and, you know, once we're going to go into the design space of designing new small molecule, new proteins, this becomes a lot more complex. But a great thing about structural prediction is that a bit like, you know, CASP was doing, basically the way that you can evaluate them is that, you know, you train... You know, you train a model on a structure that was, you know, released across the field up until a certain time. And, you know, one of the things that we didn't talk about that was really critical in all this development is the PDB, which is the Protein Data Bank. It's this common resources, basically common database where every biologist publishes their structures. And so we can, you know, train on, you know, all the structures that were put in the PDB until a certain date. And then... And then we basically look for recent structures, okay, which structures look pretty different from anything that was published before, because we really want to try to understand generalization.Brandon [00:33:13]: And then on this new structure, we evaluate all these different models. And so you just know when AlphaFold3 was trained, you know, when you're, you intentionally trained to the same date or something like that. Exactly. Right. Yeah.Gabriel [00:33:24]: And so this is kind of the way that you can somewhat easily kind of compare these models, obviously, that assumes that, you know, the training. You've always been very passionate about validation. I remember like DiffDoc, and then there was like DiffDocL and DocGen. You've thought very carefully about this in the past. Like, actually, I think DocGen is like a really funny story that I think, I don't know if you want to talk about that. It's an interesting like... Yeah, I think one of the amazing things about putting things open source is that we get a ton of feedback from the field. And, you know, sometimes we get kind of great feedback of people. Really like... But honestly, most of the times, you know, to be honest, that's also maybe the most useful feedback is, you know, people sharing about where it doesn't work. And so, you know, at the end of the day, it's critical. And this is also something, you know, across other fields of machine learning. It's always critical to set, to do progress in machine learning, set clear benchmarks. And as, you know, you start doing progress of certain benchmarks, then, you know, you need to improve the benchmarks and make them harder and harder. And this is kind of the progression of, you know, how the field operates. And so, you know, the example of DocGen was, you know, we published this initial model called DiffDoc in my first year of PhD, which was sort of like, you know, one of the early models to try to predict kind of interactions between proteins, small molecules, that we bought a year after AlphaFold2 was published. And now, on the one hand, you know, on these benchmarks that we were using at the time, DiffDoc was doing really well, kind of, you know, outperforming kind of some of the traditional physics-based methods. But on the other hand, you know, when we started, you know, kind of giving these tools to kind of many biologists, and one example was that we collaborated with was the group of Nick Polizzi at Harvard. We noticed, started noticing that there was this clear, pattern where four proteins that were very different from the ones that we're trained on, the models was, was struggling. And so, you know, that seemed clear that, you know, this is probably kind of where we should, you know, put our focus on. And so we first developed, you know, with Nick and his group, a new benchmark, and then, you know, went after and said, okay, what can we change? And kind of about the current architecture to improve this pattern and generalization. And this is the same that, you know, we're still doing today, you know, kind of, where does the model not work, you know, and then, you know, once we have that benchmark, you know, let's try to, through everything we, any ideas that we have of the problem.RJ [00:36:15]: And there's a lot of like healthy skepticism in the field, which I think, you know, is, is, is great. And I think, you know, it's very clear that there's a ton of things, the models don't really work well on, but I think one thing that's probably, you know, undeniable is just like the pace of, pace of progress, you know, and how, how much better we're getting, you know, every year. And so I think if you, you know, if you assume, you know, any constant, you know, rate of progress moving forward, I think things are going to look pretty cool at some point in the future.Gabriel [00:36:42]: ChatGPT was only three years ago. Yeah, I mean, it's wild, right?RJ [00:36:45]: Like, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's one of those things. Like, you've been doing this. Being in the field, you don't see it coming, you know? And like, I think, yeah, hopefully we'll, you know, we'll, we'll continue to have as much progress we've had the past few years.Brandon [00:36:55]: So this is maybe an aside, but I'm really curious, you get this great feedback from the, from the community, right? By being open source. My question is partly like, okay, yeah, if you open source and everyone can copy what you did, but it's also maybe balancing priorities, right? Where you, like all my customers are saying. I want this, there's all these problems with the model. Yeah, yeah. But my customers don't care, right? So like, how do you, how do you think about that? Yeah.Gabriel [00:37:26]: So I would say a couple of things. One is, you know, part of our goal with Bolts and, you know, this is also kind of established as kind of the mission of the public benefit company that we started is to democratize the access to these tools. But one of the reasons why we realized that Bolts needed to be a company, it couldn't just be an academic project is that putting a model on GitHub is definitely not enough to get, you know, chemists and biologists, you know, across, you know, both academia, biotech and pharma to use your model to, in their therapeutic programs. And so a lot of what we think about, you know, at Bolts beyond kind of the, just the models is thinking about all the layers. The layers that come on top of the models to get, you know, from, you know, those models to something that can really enable scientists in the industry. And so that goes, you know, into building kind of the right kind of workflows that take in kind of, for example, the data and try to answer kind of directly that those problems that, you know, the chemists and the biologists are asking, and then also kind of building the infrastructure. And so this to say that, you know, even with models fully open. You know, we see a ton of potential for, you know, products in the space and the critical part about a product is that even, you know, for example, with an open source model, you know, running the model is not free, you know, as we were saying, these are pretty expensive model and especially, and maybe we'll get into this, you know, these days we're seeing kind of pretty dramatic inference time scaling of these models where, you know, the more you run them, the better the results are. But there, you know, you see. You start getting into a point that compute and compute costs becomes a critical factor. And so putting a lot of work into building the right kind of infrastructure, building the optimizations and so on really allows us to provide, you know, a much better service potentially to the open source models. That to say, you know, even though, you know, with a product, we can provide a much better service. I do still think, and we will continue to put a lot of our models open source because the critical kind of role. I think of open source. Models is, you know, helping kind of the community progress on the research and, you know, from which we, we all benefit. And so, you know, we'll continue to on the one hand, you know, put some of our kind of base models open source so that the field can, can be on top of it. And, you know, as we discussed earlier, we learn a ton from, you know, the way that the field uses and builds on top of our models, but then, you know, try to build a product that gives the best experience possible to scientists. So that, you know, like a chemist or a biologist doesn't need to, you know, spin off a GPU and, you know, set up, you know, our open source model in a particular way, but can just, you know, a bit like, you know, I, even though I am a computer scientist, machine learning scientist, I don't necessarily, you know, take a open source LLM and try to kind of spin it off. But, you know, I just maybe open a GPT app or a cloud code and just use it as an amazing product. We kind of want to give the same experience. So this front world.Brandon [00:40:40]: I heard a good analogy yesterday that a surgeon doesn't want the hospital to design a scalpel, right?Brandon [00:40:48]: So just buy the scalpel.RJ [00:40:50]: You wouldn't believe like the number of people, even like in my short time, you know, between AlphaFold3 coming out and the end of the PhD, like the number of people that would like reach out just for like us to like run AlphaFold3 for them, you know, or things like that. Just because like, you know, bolts in our case, you know, just because it's like. It's like not that easy, you know, to do that, you know, if you're not a computational person. And I think like part of the goal here is also that, you know, we continue to obviously build the interface with computational folks, but that, you know, the models are also accessible to like a larger, broader audience. And then that comes from like, you know, good interfaces and stuff like that.Gabriel [00:41:27]: I think one like really interesting thing about bolts is that with the release of it, you didn't just release a model, but you created a community. Yeah. Did that community, it grew very quickly. Did that surprise you? And like, what is the evolution of that community and how is that fed into bolts?RJ [00:41:43]: If you look at its growth, it's like very much like when we release a new model, it's like, there's a big, big jump, but yeah, it's, I mean, it's been great. You know, we have a Slack community that has like thousands of people on it. And it's actually like self-sustaining now, which is like the really nice part because, you know, it's, it's almost overwhelming, I think, you know, to be able to like answer everyone's questions and help. It's really difficult, you know. The, the few people that we were, but it ended up that like, you know, people would answer each other's questions and like, sort of like, you know, help one another. And so the Slack, you know, has been like kind of, yeah, self, self-sustaining and that's been, it's been really cool to see.RJ [00:42:21]: And, you know, that's, that's for like the Slack part, but then also obviously on GitHub as well. We've had like a nice, nice community. You know, I think we also aspire to be even more active on it, you know, than we've been in the past six months, which has been like a bit challenging, you know, for us. But. Yeah, the community has been, has been really great and, you know, there's a lot of papers also that have come out with like new evolutions on top of bolts and it's surprised us to some degree because like there's a lot of models out there. And I think like, you know, sort of people converging on that was, was really cool. And, you know, I think it speaks also, I think, to the importance of like, you know, when, when you put code out, like to try to put a lot of emphasis and like making it like as easy to use as possible and something we thought a lot about when we released the code base. You know, it's far from perfect, but, you know.Brandon [00:43:07]: Do you think that that was one of the factors that caused your community to grow is just the focus on easy to use, make it accessible? I think so.RJ [00:43:14]: Yeah. And we've, we've heard it from a few people over the, over the, over the years now. And, you know, and some people still think it should be a lot nicer and they're, and they're right. And they're right. But yeah, I think it was, you know, at the time, maybe a little bit easier than, than other things.Gabriel [00:43:29]: The other thing part, I think led to, to the community and to some extent, I think, you know, like the somewhat the trust in the community. Kind of what we, what we put out is the fact that, you know, it's not really been kind of, you know, one model, but, and maybe we'll talk about it, you know, after Boltz 1, you know, there were maybe another couple of models kind of released, you know, or open source kind of soon after. We kind of continued kind of that open source journey or at least Boltz 2, where we are not only improving kind of structure prediction, but also starting to do affinity predictions, understanding kind of the strength of the interactions between these different models, which is this critical component. critical property that you often want to optimize in discovery programs. And then, you know, more recently also kind of protein design model. And so we've sort of been building this suite of, of models that come together, interact with one another, where, you know, kind of, there is almost an expectation that, you know, we, we take very at heart of, you know, always having kind of, you know, across kind of the entire suite of different tasks, the best or across the best. model out there so that it's sort of like our open source tool can be kind of the go-to model for everybody in the, in the industry. I really want to talk about Boltz 2, but before that, one last question in this direction, was there anything about the community which surprised you? Were there any, like, someone was doing something and you're like, why would you do that? That's crazy. Or that's actually genius. And I never would have thought about that.RJ [00:45:01]: I mean, we've had many contributions. I think like some of the. Interesting ones, like, I mean, we had, you know, this one individual who like wrote like a complex GPU kernel, you know, for part of the architecture on a piece of, the funny thing is like that piece of the architecture had been there since AlphaFold 2, and I don't know why it took Boltz for this, you know, for this person to, you know, to decide to do it, but that was like a really great contribution. We've had a bunch of others, like, you know, people figuring out like ways to, you know, hack the model to do something. They click peptides, like, you know, there's, I don't know if there's any other interesting ones come to mind.Gabriel [00:45:41]: One cool one, and this was, you know, something that initially was proposed as, you know, as a message in the Slack channel by Tim O'Donnell was basically, he was, you know, there are some cases, especially, for example, we discussed, you know, antibody-antigen interactions where the models don't necessarily kind of get the right answer. What he noticed is that, you know, the models were somewhat stuck into predicting kind of the antibodies. And so he basically ran the experiments in this model, you can condition, basically, you can give hints. And so he basically gave, you know, random hints to the model, basically, okay, you should bind to this residue, you should bind to the first residue, or you should bind to the 11th residue, or you should bind to the 21st residue, you know, basically every 10 residues scanning the entire antigen.Brandon [00:46:33]: Residues are the...Gabriel [00:46:34]: The amino acids. The amino acids, yeah. So the first amino acids. The 11 amino acids, and so on. So it's sort of like doing a scan, and then, you know, conditioning the model to predict all of them, and then looking at the confidence of the model in each of those cases and taking the top. And so it's sort of like a very somewhat crude way of doing kind of inference time search. But surprisingly, you know, for antibody-antigen prediction, it actually kind of helped quite a bit. And so there's some, you know, interesting ideas that, you know, obviously, as kind of developing the model, you say kind of, you know, wow. This is why would the model, you know, be so dumb. But, you know, it's very interesting. And that, you know, leads you to also kind of, you know, start thinking about, okay, how do I, can I do this, you know, not with this brute force, but, you know, in a smarter way.RJ [00:47:22]: And so we've also done a lot of work on that direction. And that speaks to, like, the, you know, the power of scoring. We're seeing that a lot. I'm sure we'll talk about it more when we talk about BullsGen. But, you know, our ability to, like, take a structure and determine that that structure is, like... Good. You know, like, somewhat accurate. Whether that's a single chain or, like, an interaction is a really powerful way of improving, you know, the models. Like, sort of like, you know, if you can sample a ton and you assume that, like, you know, if you sample enough, you're likely to have, like, you know, the good structure. Then it really just becomes a ranking problem. And, you know, now we're, you know, part of the inference time scaling that Gabby was talking about is very much that. It's like, you know, the more we sample, the more we, like, you know, the ranking model. The ranking model ends up finding something it really likes. And so I think our ability to get better at ranking, I think, is also what's going to enable sort of the next, you know, next big, big breakthroughs. Interesting.Brandon [00:48:17]: But I guess there's a, my understanding, there's a diffusion model and you generate some stuff and then you, I guess, it's just what you said, right? Then you rank it using a score and then you finally... And so, like, can you talk about those different parts? Yeah.Gabriel [00:48:34]: So, first of all, like, the... One of the critical kind of, you know, beliefs that we had, you know, also when we started working on Boltz 1 was sort of like the structure prediction models are somewhat, you know, our field version of some foundation models, you know, learning about kind of how proteins and other molecules interact. And then we can leverage that learning to do all sorts of other things. And so with Boltz 2, we leverage that learning to do affinity predictions. So understanding kind of, you know, if I give you this protein, this molecule. How tightly is that interaction? For Boltz 1, what we did was taking kind of that kind of foundation models and then fine tune it to predict kind of entire new proteins. And so the way basically that that works is sort of like instead of for the protein that you're designing, instead of fitting in an actual sequence, you fit in a set of blank tokens. And you train the models to, you know, predict both the structure of kind of that protein. The structure also, what the different amino acids of that proteins are. And so basically the way that Boltz 1 operates is that you feed a target protein that you may want to kind of bind to or, you know, another DNA, RNA. And then you feed the high level kind of design specification of, you know, what you want your new protein to be. For example, it could be like an antibody with a particular framework. It could be a peptide. It could be many other things. And that's with natural language or? And that's, you know, basically, you know, prompting. And we have kind of this sort of like spec that you specify. And, you know, you feed kind of this spec to the model. And then the model translates this into, you know, a set of, you know, tokens, a set of conditioning to the model, a set of, you know, blank tokens. And then, you know, basically the codes as part of the diffusion models, the codes. It's a new structure and a new sequence for your protein. And, you know, basically, then we take that. And as Jeremy was saying, we are trying to score it and, you know, how good of a binder it is to that original target.Brandon [00:50:51]: You're using basically Boltz to predict the folding and the affinity to that molecule. So and then that kind of gives you a score? Exactly.Gabriel [00:51:03]: So you use this model to predict the folding. And then you do two things. One is that you predict the structure and with something like Boltz2, and then you basically compare that structure with what the model predicted, what Boltz2 predicted. And this is sort of like in the field called consistency. It's basically you want to make sure that, you know, the structure that you're predicting is actually what you're trying to design. And that gives you a much better confidence that, you know, that's a good design. And so that's the first filtering. And the second filtering that we did as part of kind of the Boltz2 pipeline that was released is that we look at the confidence that the model has in the structure. Now, unfortunately, kind of going to your question of, you know, predicting affinity, unfortunately, confidence is not a very good predictor of affinity. And so one of the things that we've actually done a ton of progress, you know, since we released Boltz2.Brandon [00:52:03]: And kind of we have some new results that we are going to kind of announce soon is kind of, you know, the ability to get much better hit rates when instead of, you know, trying to rely on confidence of the model, we are actually directly trying to predict the affinity of that interaction. Okay. Just backing up a minute. So your diffusion model actually predicts not only the protein sequence, but also the folding of it. Exactly.Gabriel [00:52:32]: And actually, you can... One of the big different things that we did compared to other models in the space, and, you know, there were some papers that had already kind of done this before, but we really scaled it up was, you know, basically somewhat merging kind of the structure prediction and the sequence prediction into almost the same task. And so the way that Boltz2 works is that you are basically the only thing that you're doing is predicting the structure. So the only sort of... Supervision is we give you a supervision on the structure, but because the structure is atomic and, you know, the different amino acids have a different atomic composition, basically from the way that you place the atoms, we also understand not only kind of the structure that you wanted, but also the identity of the amino acid that, you know, the models believed was there. And so we've basically, instead of, you know, having these two supervision signals, you know, one discrete, one continuous. That somewhat, you know, don't interact well together. We sort of like build kind of like an encoding of, you know, sequences in structures that allows us to basically use exactly the same supervision signal that we were using to Boltz2 that, you know, you know, largely similar to what AlphaVol3 proposed, which is very scalable. And we can use that to design new proteins. Oh, interesting.RJ [00:53:58]: Maybe a quick shout out to Hannes Stark on our team who like did all this work. Yeah.Gabriel [00:54:04]: Yeah, that was a really cool idea. I mean, like looking at the paper and there's this is like encoding or you just add a bunch of, I guess, kind of atoms, which can be anything, and then they get sort of rearranged and then basically plopped on top of each other so that and then that encodes what the amino acid is. And there's sort of like a unique way of doing this. It was that was like such a really such a cool, fun idea.RJ [00:54:29]: I think that idea was had existed before. Yeah, there were a couple of papers.Gabriel [00:54:33]: Yeah, I had proposed this and and Hannes really took it to the large scale.Brandon [00:54:39]: In the paper, a lot of the paper for Boltz2Gen is dedicated to actually the validation of the model. In my opinion, all the people we basically talk about feel that this sort of like in the wet lab or whatever the appropriate, you know, sort of like in real world validation is the whole problem or not the whole problem, but a big giant part of the problem. So can you talk a little bit about the highlights? From there, that really because to me, the results are impressive, both from the perspective of the, you know, the model and also just the effort that went into the validation by a large team.Gabriel [00:55:18]: First of all, I think I should start saying is that both when we were at MIT and Thomas Yacolas and Regina Barzillai's lab, as well as at Boltz, you know, we are not a we're not a biolab and, you know, we are not a therapeutic company. And so to some extent, you know, we were first forced to, you know, look outside of, you know, our group, our team to do the experimental validation. One of the things that really, Hannes, in the team pioneer was the idea, OK, can we go not only to, you know, maybe a specific group and, you know, trying to find a specific system and, you know, maybe overfit a bit to that system and trying to validate. But how can we test this model? So. Across a very wide variety of different settings so that, you know, anyone in the field and, you know, printing design is, you know, such a kind of wide task with all sorts of different applications from therapeutic to, you know, biosensors and many others that, you know, so can we get a validation that is kind of goes across many different tasks? And so he basically put together, you know, I think it was something like, you know, 25 different. You know, academic and industry labs that committed to, you know, testing some of the designs from the model and some of this testing is still ongoing and, you know, giving results kind of back to us in exchange for, you know, hopefully getting some, you know, new great sequences for their task. And he was able to, you know, coordinate this, you know, very wide set of, you know, scientists and already in the paper, I think we. Shared results from, I think, eight to 10 different labs kind of showing results from, you know, designing peptides, designing to target, you know, ordered proteins, peptides targeting disordered proteins, which are results, you know, of designing proteins that bind to small molecules, which are results of, you know, designing nanobodies and across a wide variety of different targets. And so that's sort of like. That gave to the paper a lot of, you know, validation to the model, a lot of validation that was kind of wide.Brandon [00:57:39]: And so those would be therapeutics for those animals or are they relevant to humans as well? They're relevant to humans as well.Gabriel [00:57:45]: Obviously, you need to do some work into, quote unquote, humanizing them, making sure that, you know, they have the right characteristics to so they're not toxic to humans and so on.RJ [00:57:57]: There are some approved medicine in the market that are nanobodies. There's a general. General pattern, I think, in like in trying to design things that are smaller, you know, like it's easier to manufacture at the same time, like that comes with like potentially other challenges, like maybe a little bit less selectivity than like if you have something that has like more hands, you know, but the yeah, there's this big desire to, you know, try to design many proteins, nanobodies, small peptides, you know, that just are just great drug modalities.Brandon [00:58:27]: Okay. I think we were left off. We were talking about validation. Validation in the lab. And I was very excited about seeing like all the diverse validations that you've done. Can you go into some more detail about them? Yeah. Specific ones. Yeah.RJ [00:58:43]: The nanobody one. I think we did. What was it? 15 targets. Is that correct? 14. 14 targets. Testing. So we typically the way this works is like we make a lot of designs. All right. On the order of like tens of thousands. And then we like rank them and we pick like the top. And in this case, and was 15 right for each target and then we like measure sort of like the success rates, both like how many targets we were able to get a binder for and then also like more generally, like out of all of the binders that we designed, how many actually proved to be good binders. Some of the other ones I think involved like, yeah, like we had a cool one where there was a small molecule or design a protein that binds to it. That has a lot of like interesting applications, you know, for example. Like Gabri mentioned, like biosensing and things like that, which is pretty cool. We had a disordered protein, I think you mentioned also. And yeah, I think some of those were some of the highlights. Yeah.Gabriel [00:59:44]: So I would say that the way that we structure kind of some of those validations was on the one end, we have validations across a whole set of different problems that, you know, the biologists that we were working with came to us with. So we were trying to. For example, in some of the experiments, design peptides that would target the RACC, which is a target that is involved in metabolism. And we had, you know, a number of other applications where we were trying to design, you know, peptides or other modalities against some other therapeutic relevant targets. We designed some proteins to bind small molecules. And then some of the other testing that we did was really trying to get like a more broader sense. So how does the model work, especially when tested, you know, on somewhat generalization? So one of the things that, you know, we found with the field was that a lot of the validation, especially outside of the validation that was on specific problems, was done on targets that have a lot of, you know, known interactions in the training data. And so it's always a bit hard to understand, you know, how much are these models really just regurgitating kind of what they've seen or trying to imitate. What they've seen in the training data versus, you know, really be able to design new proteins. And so one of the experiments that we did was to take nine targets from the PDB, filtering to things where there is no known interaction in the PDB. So basically the model has never seen kind of this particular protein bound or a similar protein bound to another protein. So there is no way that. The model from its training set can sort of like say, okay, I'm just going to kind of tweak something and just imitate this particular kind of interaction. And so we took those nine proteins. We worked with adaptive CRO and basically tested, you know, 15 mini proteins and 15 nanobodies against each one of them. And the very cool thing that we saw was that on two thirds of those targets, we were able to, from this 15 design, get nanomolar binders, nanomolar, roughly speaking, just a measure of, you know, how strongly kind of the interaction is, roughly speaking, kind of like a nanomolar binder is approximately the kind of binding strength or binding that you need for a therapeutic. Yeah. So maybe switching directions a bit. Bolt's lab was just announced this week or was it last week? Yeah. This is like your. First, I guess, product, if that's if you want to call it that. Can you talk about what Bolt's lab is and yeah, you know, what you hope that people take away from this? Yeah.RJ [01:02:44]: You know, as we mentioned, like I think at the very beginning is the goal with the product has been to, you know, address what the models don't on their own. And there's largely sort of two categories there. I'll split it in three. The first one. It's one thing to predict, you know, a single interaction, for example, like a single structure. It's another to like, you know, very effectively search a space, a design space to produce something of value. What we found, like sort of building on this product is that there's a lot of steps involved, you know, in that there's certainly need to like, you know, accompany the user through, you know, one of those steps, for example, is like, you know, the creation of the target itself. You know, how do we make sure that the model has like a good enough understanding of the target? So we can like design something and there's all sorts of tricks, you know, that you can do to improve like a particular, you know, structure prediction. And so that's sort of like, you know, the first stage. And then there's like this stage of like, you know, designing and searching the space efficiently. You know, for something like BullsGen, for example, like you, you know, you design many things and then you rank them, for example, for small molecule process, a little bit more complicated. We actually need to also make sure that the molecules are synthesizable. And so the way we do that is that, you know, we have a generative model that learns. To use like appropriate building blocks such that, you know, it can design within a space that we know is like synthesizable. And so there's like, you know, this whole pipeline really of different models involved in being able to design a molecule. And so that's been sort of like the first thing we call them agents. We have a protein agent and we have a small molecule design agents. And that's really like at the core of like what powers, you know, the BullsLab platform.Brandon [01:04:22]: So these agents, are they like a language model wrapper or they're just like your models and you're just calling them agents? A lot. Yeah. Because they, they, they sort of perform a function on behalf of.RJ [01:04:33]: They're more of like a, you know, a recipe, if you wish. And I think we use that term sort of because of, you know, sort of the complex pipelining and automation, you know, that goes into like all this plumbing. So that's the first part of the product. The second part is the infrastructure. You know, we need to be able to do this at very large scale for any one, you know, group that's doing a design campaign. Let's say you're designing, you know, I'd say a hundred thousand possible candidates. Right. To find the good one that is, you know, a very large amount of compute, you know, for small molecules, it's on the order of like a few seconds per designs for proteins can be a bit longer. And so, you know, ideally you want to do that in parallel, otherwise it's going to take you weeks. And so, you know, we've put a lot of effort into like, you know, our ability to have a GPU fleet that allows any one user, you know, to be able to do this kind of like large parallel search.Brandon [01:05:23]: So you're amortizing the cost over your users. Exactly. Exactly.RJ [01:05:27]: And, you know, to some degree, like it's whether you. Use 10,000 GPUs for like, you know, a minute is the same cost as using, you know, one GPUs for God knows how long. Right. So you might as well try to parallelize if you can. So, you know, a lot of work has gone, has gone into that, making it very robust, you know, so that we can have like a lot of people on the platform doing that at the same time. And the third one is, is the interface and the interface comes in, in two shapes. One is in form of an API and that's, you know, really suited for companies that want to integrate, you know, these pipelines, these agents.RJ [01:06:01]: So we're already partnering with, you know, a few distributors, you know, that are gonna integrate our API. And then the second part is the user interface. And, you know, we, we've put a lot of thoughts also into that. And this is when I, I mentioned earlier, you know, this idea of like broadening the audience. That's kind of what the, the user interface is about. And we've built a lot of interesting features in it, you know, for example, for collaboration, you know, when you have like potentially multiple medicinal chemists or. We're going through the results and trying to pick out, okay, like what are the molecules that we're going to go and test in the lab? It's powerful for them to be able to, you know, for example, each provide their own ranking and then do consensus building. And so there's a lot of features around launching these large jobs, but also around like collaborating on analyzing the results that we try to solve, you know, with that part of the platform. So Bolt's lab is sort of a combination of these three objectives into like one, you know, sort of cohesive platform. Who is this accessible to? Everyone. You do need to request access today. We're still like, you know, sort of ramping up the usage, but anyone can request access. If you are an academic in particular, we, you know, we provide a fair amount of free credit so you can play with the platform. If you are a startup or biotech, you may also, you know, reach out and we'll typically like actually hop on a call just to like understand what you're trying to do and also provide a lot of free credit to get started. And of course, also with larger companies, we can deploy this platform in a more like secure environment. And so that's like more like customizing. You know, deals that we make, you know, with the partners, you know, and that's sort of the ethos of Bolt. I think this idea of like servicing everyone and not necessarily like going after just, you know, the really large enterprises. And that starts from the open source, but it's also, you know, a key design principle of the product itself.Gabriel [01:07:48]: One thing I was thinking about with regards to infrastructure, like in the LLM space, you know, the cost of a token has gone down by I think a factor of a thousand or so over the last three years, right? Yeah. And is it possible that like essentially you can exploit economies of scale and infrastructure that you can make it cheaper to run these things yourself than for any person to roll their own system? A hundred percent. Yeah.RJ [01:08:08]: I mean, we're already there, you know, like running Bolts on our platform, especially on a large screen is like considerably cheaper than it would probably take anyone to put the open source model out there and run it. And on top of the infrastructure, like one of the things that we've been working on is accelerating the models. So, you know. Our small molecule screening pipeline is 10x faster on Bolts Lab than it is in the open source, you know, and that's also part of like, you know, building a product, you know, of something that scales really well. And we really wanted to get to a point where like, you know, we could keep prices very low in a way that it would be a no-brainer, you know, to use Bolts through our platform.Gabriel [01:08:52]: How do you think about validation of your like agentic systems? Because, you know, as you were saying earlier. Like we're AlphaFold style models are really good at, let's say, monomeric, you know, proteins where you have, you know, co-evolution data. But now suddenly the whole point of this is to design something which doesn't have, you know, co-evolution data, something which is really novel. So now you're basically leaving the domain that you thought was, you know, that you know you are good at. So like, how do you validate that?RJ [01:09:22]: Yeah, I like every complete, but there's obviously, you know, a ton of computational metrics. That we rely on, but those are only take you so far. You really got to go to the lab, you know, and test, you know, okay, with this method A and this method B, how much better are we? You know, how much better is my, my hit rate? How stronger are my binders? Also, it's not just about hit rate. It's also about how good the binders are. And there's really like no way, nowhere around that. I think we're, you know, we've really ramped up the amount of experimental validation that we do so that we like really track progress, you know, as scientifically sound, you know. Yeah. As, as possible out of this, I think.Gabriel [01:10:00]: Yeah, no, I think, you know, one thing that is unique about us and maybe companies like us is that because we're not working on like maybe a couple of therapeutic pipelines where, you know, our validation would be focused on those. We, when we do an experimental validation, we try to test it across tens of targets. And so that on the one end, we can get a much more statistically significant result and, and really allows us to make progress. From the methodological side without being, you know, steered by, you know, overfitting on any one particular system. And of course we choose, you know, w

We meet Amos, a borderland herdsman called by God to confront a prosperous yet unjust Israel under Jeroboam II. As we read Amos 1–2, we trace God's roar over the nations and the sharper charge against Israel for exploiting the poor and silencing truth.• Amos as an ordinary herdsman, not a career prophet• Context of Jeroboam II's success and spiritual decline• Structure of Amos: oracles, poems, visions• Oracles against nations for cruelty and betrayal• Charges against Judah for rejecting the law• Expanded indictment of Israel's injustice and idolatry• God's covenant reminders and gifts rejected• Image of the roaring lion and the weight of judgment• Call to speak truth to power with humility and courage• Tension and unity of loving God and fearing GodSend Mike a quick message! (If you seek a reply, instead please contact through Outloudbible.com) At outloudbible.com, you can find free resources to help you study the Bible. And while you're there, send us a message to say hi, or start a conversation about having us at your church or event. If Outloud Bible has been a valuable part of your understanding of the Bible, please consider supporting the ministry by visiting outloudbible.com.Support the showCheck out outloudbible.com for helpful study resources, and to discover how to bring the public reading of God's word to your church, conference, retreat, or other event.

Random workouts get random results.If training feels inconsistent, progress will too. Structure is not restrictive. It is what keeps the body strong and injury-free.Welcome to the Happy, Healthy, Strong Podcast — hosted by Adam Lane. This show explores what real, sustainable health looks like through supportive nutrition, intentional movement, and habits that build strength without extremes.Episode HighlightsIn this episode, Adam Lane explains why following a structured fitness program is essential for progress, longevity, and injury prevention.He breaks down the risks of piecing together random workouts and shares personal experiences from programs like Squat October, Dead Summer, and Ventuary. The focus is clear: specific goals, consistent effort, and a plan that fits real life lead to better strength and long-term health.Episode OutlineWhy random workouts often lead to stalled progress.The difference between general activity and goal-driven training.Lessons learned from CrossFit-style programming.The importance of focusing on specific lifts or movement patterns.Skiing with his kids and why avoiding injury matters more with age.Overview of Squat October and daily squat progression.Dead Summer and building hinge strength safely.Ventuary and focused upper body training.How to balance structured training with a busy adult schedule.Why flexibility within a plan still matters.Episode Chapters00:00 Intro00:05 The Importance of a Structured Fitness Program02:54 The Risks of Hodgepodge Fitness Approaches04:18 The Benefits of Following a Program06:47 Balancing Fitness with a Busy Life08:55 The Importance of Consistency and FlexibilityAction TakenCommit to a specific, structured fitness programConsider working with a coach to build a tailored training planConclusionStructured training creates direction. It reduces guesswork, lowers injury risk, and builds strength that lasts. Progress does not come from doing more. It comes from doing the right things consistently, with a clear plan behind them.CTAListen, follow, and share the episode.Supporting InformationFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/oakstrengthInstagram: @oakstrengthThank you for listening. Hope this episode helped clarify what focused training really requires. Stay consistent, stay smart, and keep building strength that supports real life.

The Chicago Bulls aren't just losing games — they're becoming hard to watch. Is this tanking? Or is it simply dysfunction?On today's episode of Chicago Bulls Central, Haize breaks down why the Bulls' current direction (or lack thereof) is more concerning than the losses themselves. Tanking may be happening — but without real development or structure, what's the actual goal?We dive into:Why the Bulls look like they're bottoming out to avoid the Play-InWhy this doesn't feel like a multi-year rebuildThe bigger issue: no clear developmental planPatrick Williams playing more minutes than Matas Buzelis

Insights and comments could be sent to Jonathan@thepararshapodcast.comThey will be addressed during our daily classes to enhance the discussion.For Parasha & Navi Special Classes, please visit:Apple podcast link:https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-parasha-podcast/id1525436805Spotify link:https://open.spotify.com/episode/6w6PD5kC5vi9qqJ8VDU0JV?si=939c0262383e4c1cFor Navi classes, please visit:Apple podcast link:https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-navi-podcast/id1549133051Spotify link:https://open.spotify.com/episode/2WxjXKNXllLVr9p1enQIc8?si=71de5d3ff961455dFor Tehillim classes, please visit:Apple podcast link:https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-tehillim-podcast/id1588773372Spotify link:https://open.spotify.com/show/79ooU0LqW7FF8Zh5YfJAkp?si=a33c064f60374646For Ketuvim classes, Please visit:Apple Podcast link:https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-ketuvim-podcast/id1734069288Spotify link:https://open.spotify.com/episode/5pMd7hhOBAb1Oy2RhWMX0H?si=8da277c698b94890 #Parasha #Navi #Torah #Bible #Wisdom #psalms #songs #Tehillim     

Break through your Keto or low carb plateau, book a call with Robert Sikes here: https://www.ketobodybuilding.com/callYou have been lied to about building muscle. The old bodybuilding diet of eating six high carb meals a day might be destroying your health and your gains. In episode 858 of the Savage Perspective Podcast, host Robert Sikes is joined b Mark Ennis to reveal the truth about ketogenic bodybuilding. Mark explains how he used a carnivore diet to get into incredible shape for his competition without the hunger, energy crashes, and terrible rebound weight gain that plagues most bodybuilders. He and Robert discuss why the fitness industry often gives bad advice, and they share a much smarter way to train and eat for lifelong health and strength. This episode will show you how to finally build the body you want without sacrificing your well being.Follow Mark on IG: https://www.instagram.com/fitnessbeyondtime01Get Keto Brick: https://www.ketobrick.com/Chapters:0:00 - The TRUTH About Bodybuilding Diets (Keto vs. Carbs)0:41 - Mark Ennis's Return & His First Bodybuilding Prep1:32 - How to Conquer a Bodybuilding Prep Without Starving2:41 - The Ketogenic Advantage: Backstage at a Bodybuilding Show4:20 - Is It Possible to Win a Bodybuilding Show on a Keto Diet?6:14 - Why Keto Isn't More Popular in Bodybuilding7:02 - The Biggest Post-Show Dieting Mistake8:24 - Carb-Fueled vs. Fat-Fueled: Backstage Energy Levels9:25 - The RIGHT Way to Approach Bodybuilding for Health10:06 - "Bulking" vs. Getting Fat: The Post-Show Reality11:02 - The Dark Side of High-Carb Diets in Professional Rugby13:05 - The Health Risks of Extreme Impact Sports14:04 - A New Perspective on Aging and Longevity14:47 - Why You Should Ignore "Body Image" Advice in the Gym15:43 - The TRT & Weight Loss Drug Epidemic: Chasing the "Easy Button"16:34 - How to Boost Testosterone Naturally Before Considering TRT17:23 - The SHOCKING Shift Away From High-Fat Keto18:03 - Are Carbohydrates ESSENTIAL for Energy?19:04 - Does the Keto Diet Get Better Over Time?19:39 - Do You Need Carbs to Build Muscle? (The Insulin Debate)20:43 - How I Built Muscle with ZERO Carbohydrates for 6 Years22:22 - The 3 Things Your Body ACTUALLY Needs to Build Muscle22:54 - High-Volume vs. High-Intensity Training: Which is Better?23:59 - The Perfect Workout Duration for Maximum Gains24:34 - Should You Lift Heavy or Focus on Form? (The Deadlift Example)26:25 - How to Find the Perfect Training Style for Your Body27:03 - Are You Overtraining? The #1 Sign You Need a Break28:18 - Important Message from Host Robert Sikes30:04 - How Often Should You Take a Deload Week for Muscle Growth?30:33 - The Danger of Combining High Frequency & High Volume Training31:45 - Why You're Not Building Muscle (Even If You're Lean)32:16 - What is Reverse Dieting and Why Is It Crucial?34:30 - How to Structure a Fat Loss Phase for Long-Term Success35:40 - Why You're Always Sabotaging Your Own Progress36:23 - The "Holiday Diet" Cycle: Why Quick Fixes Always Fail37:21 - Do Calories Matter? A New Way to Look at Weight Loss39:29 - Why "Eat As Much As You Want" is TERRIBLE Advice40:32 - The Problem with the Modern Carnivore Diet43:07 - Is a High-Protein Carnivore Diet a Mistake?44:03 - How I Use Protein-Sparing Fasts for Rapid Fat Loss45:47 - The TRUTH Behind Carnivores Adding Carbs Back46:41 - The Problem with "Fitness Influencer" Marketing47:50 - Why I'll Never Chase Viral Content or "Clout"50:24 - Why Is There So Much Hate & Division in Nutrition?51:24 - The Problem with Celebrity & Influencer Diets52:45 - The Unspoken Truth About Health & Wealth54:16 - Why Your Mindset About Aging is WRONG55:23 - Can You Get Strong Without Lifting Weights?57:36 - Finding Your "Why": The Ultimate Motivation for Health59:03 - What's Next for Mark Ennis? (New Book & Events)1:01:25 - The Shocking Price of Beef & Lab-Grown Meat in Ireland1:02:34 - Where to Find More from Mark Ennis

Secret Law Firm Tax Structure for Partners U.S. law firm owner doing $300k–$2M/year? Get a free Law Firm Profit & Tax Checkup where I review your books and tax setup and highlight a few ways similar firms are keeping more of what they earn. Book your checkup here: https://bigbirdaccounting.com

 SHOW NOTESWe keep losing. Not because we don't care enough or try hard enough—but because we're organizing all wrong. This episode unpacks the brutal truth about why massive protests accomplish almost nothing, while quiet, local organizing builds real power. We examine two movements that launched in the 1980s—DARE and MADD—and reveal why one fizzled into irrelevance while the other changed America. The difference? Structure over spectacle.Climate organizing faces the same trap. Decades of fighting what people want has put us at war with human nature itself. Meanwhile, the evidence is clear: people respond to solutions that are cheaper, cleaner, and better—not moral lectures about sacrifice. We explore what happened when clean energy became the economically smart choice, and why the movement must shift from preventing development to enabling clean development.Finally, we confront the purity test problem. The Women's March mobilized millions, then collapsed under ideological litmus tests. Meanwhile, conservatives quietly built the most powerful grassroots network in America by welcoming everyone who'd support their candidates—no other requirements. Big tents win. Small circles lose. The research is unambiguous. This episode reveals what actually works, backed by data, stories, and unflinching honesty about where progressive organizing has gone wrong.A CALL TO ACT Full IndexTRUMPING TRUMP Resource GuideACTIVISM AND COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT    Community Engagement: Step-up Participation in Climate Action    Community-led Climate Action Planning     Tools for Eco-Organizers

Identity fraud spiked 148% in 2025 as AI democratized identity fabrication. Financial institutions now face a fundamental question: Are you dealing with a real human? Heka Global is addressing this with web intelligence—analyzing digital footprints like connected applications rather than traditional signals. In this episode of BUILDERS, I sat down with Idan Bar Dov, Co-Founder & CEO of Heka Global, to explore how his company created a fourth layer in the anti-fraud stack and why legacy identity verification systems are becoming liabilities rather than assets. Topics Discussed:  The emergence of "fraud as a service" and why consumer-facing attacks replaced traditional enterprise breaches  How web intelligence works: validating identity through connected applications and digital footprints  The anti-fraud tech stack: credit bureaus, biometrics, transaction analytics, and web intelligence as distinct layers  Why heads of fraud expand budgets rather than replace vendors, and what causes solutions to get kicked out  The partnership sales model: navigating vendor management complexity and red tape in financial institutions  Why 10-person dinners and fraud simulations outperform traditional enterprise marketing  How Barclays and Cornerback backing solved the chicken-and-egg problem for a data product  Why specific fraud prevention messaging (account takeover, synthetic identities) beat investor credibility GTM Lessons For B2B Founders: Target ICP based on liability exposure, not just industry fit: Heka narrowed beyond "financial institutions" to lenders who bear immediate losses from fraud—companies like LendingPoint, Avant, and Upstart. These buyers feel the pain acutely versus institutions with reimbursement terms who can deflect liability. Idan's insight: "We need the client to feel the pain just as much as we see it. That means we want them to see the liability." Map your ICP not just by vertical or size, but by who internalizes the economic impact of the problem you solve. Frame your product as a new stack layer, not a competitive replacement: Heka positioned web intelligence as the fourth distinct layer after credit bureaus, biometrics, and transaction analytics. This became their second pitch deck slide, showing logos of each category. The result: buyers stopped comparing Heka to existing vendors and started evaluating complementary value. When entering mature markets, resist the urge to claim you're "better than X"—instead, define where you fit in the existing architecture and why that layer didn't exist before. Abandon spray-and-pray for sub-1,000 TAM markets: Heka tested Lemlist flows with targeted LLM personalization and saw zero pipeline from it. Idan's take: "When you're selling to maybe a thousand financial institutions, that's it. You can be super specific when you target them." For enterprise plays with small addressable markets, allocate zero budget to automated outbound. Focus entirely on warm introductions, relationship nurturing, and becoming known to every relevant buyer through content and community. Leverage investor networks to break data product cold-starts: Data products face a critical barrier—you need customer data to prove value, but need proven value to get customers. Heka solved this by bringing on Barclays and Cornerback as investors who vouched for the team's capability to "do magic and create a new layer." Their backing convinced risk-averse financial institutions to pilot. If building a product requiring customer data for training or validation, prioritize strategic investors who can credibly de-risk early adoption for target buyers. Build trust through teaching, not pitching: Heka hosts dinners and fraud incident simulations with ~10 heads of fraud per session. Critical detail: they never pitch Heka in these forums. Idan explained the approach focuses on "building a community around Heka and how people engage with your product and you being a thought leader while listening." In high-trust categories, educational forums where you facilitate peer learning without selling create stronger pipeline than direct pitching. Structure partnerships with active enablement and incentive alignment: Idan's key lesson: "Partnerships are not synonymous to distribution channels." Heka requires partner sales teams to join early customer conversations to learn the pitch, provides detailed API and output training, and ensures partners get extra compensation for selling non-core products. Without this, partners lack motivation to prioritize your solution. Structure partnerships as true collaborations requiring ongoing enablement investment, not passive referral channels. A/B test credibility signals versus technical specificity: Idan assumed messaging around Barclays backing would crush, while specific fraud prevention content (account takeover, synthetic identity detection) was an afterthought. The data showed 10x better response to technical specificity. The lesson: sophisticated buyers in technical categories respond to precise problem-solving over brand credibility. Test whether your audience values "who backs us" or "exactly what we do" before defaulting to investor logos and validation. //  Sponsors: Front Lines — We help B2B tech companies launch, manage, and grow podcasts that drive demand, awareness, and thought leadership. www.FrontLines.io The Global Talent Co. — We help tech startups find, vet, hire, pay, and retain amazing marketing talent that costs 50-70% less than the US & Europe. www.GlobalTalent.co // Don't Miss: New Podcast Series — How I Hire Senior GTM leaders share the tactical hiring frameworks they use to build winning revenue teams. Hosted by Andy Mowat, who scaled 4 unicorns from $10M to $100M+ ARR and launched Whispered to help executives find their next role. Subscribe here: https://open.spotify.com/show/53yCHlPfLSMFimtv0riPyM

In this installment of the Sell Side Master Class, Ryan and Mike break down deal structure, the terms behind the headline enterprise value and why structure can matter as much as (or more than) price. They walk through the most common components of consideration in IT services M&A: cash at close, earnouts, seller notes, and rollover equity, including where each can create upside and where hidden risk lives. Mike explains why earnouts often get an unfair reputation, what “good” earnout design looks like, and why indexing to revenue is typically safer than profit. They also cover how seller notes work (and why they're subordinated to bank debt), what rollover equity really means in a PE-backed deal, and the “often missed” lever of working capital, including how sellers can accidentally leave money on the table without the right guidance. Tune in as we talk Deal Structures 101.DEAL STRUCTURES WE DISCUSS:Cash at close: The portion of the purchase price you receive when the deal closes. In the episode, this is framed as the most straightforward form of consideration and the “baseline” sellers compare other components against.Earnout: A contingent payment you can earn after closing if the business hits agreed performance targets. Mike explains that earnouts often work best when they're indexed higher on the P&L (commonly revenue, sometimes gross margin) and structured with a “lane” or prorated payout range instead of an all-or-nothing cliff. Example from the episode's concept: if revenue lands within a defined band around the forecast, you receive a proportional earnout payout.Seller note: Seller financing where the seller effectively becomes a lender to the buyer for part of the purchase price. The transcript describes this as the seller “acting like the bank,” typically with interest, and notes that it is usually subordinated to senior bank debt. Example conceptually: you receive part of the price over time as principal plus interest rather than all at close.Rollover equity: The seller reinvests a portion of proceeds into the new ownership structure, keeping equity in the business post-transaction. In the episode, this is discussed as the “second bite of the apple,” often seen in PE-backed deals where the seller participates in future upside at a later liquidity event.Working capital adjustment: A structural mechanism that sets a working capital “target” at close and adjusts the seller's proceeds up or down depending on whether the company delivers more or less working capital than agreed. The transcript emphasizes this as an often-overlooked lever and discusses that many owners are overcapitalized, meaning working capital can meaningfully impact what the seller takes home if negotiated correctly.Mixing structures to optimize EV and share risk: The episode repeatedly frames structure as a way to balance risk between buyer and seller and sometimes increase headline enterprise value. Example concept: a buyer may offer a higher total value if some portion is contingent (earnout) or deferred (seller note) versus paying the entire amount in cash at close. OTHER EPISODES IN THIS SERIES:Part 1. Knowing When It's Time to Sell: Listen now >>Part 2. Get Your House in Order: Listen now >>Part 3. Valuation Drivers: Listen now >>Part 4. What is my Take Home? Listen now >>Part 5. It Takes a Village. Listen now >>Part 6. The First 30 Days of a Process. Listen now >>Part 7. Finding the Right Buyer. Listen now >> Listen to Shoot the Moon on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.Buy, sell, or grow your tech-enabled services firm with Revenue Rocket.

Starting a law firm doesn't automatically make you a business owner—designing one does. In episode #600 of the Lawyerist Podcast, Stephanie Everett and Zack Glaser kick off a four-part series on how to design a law firm intentionally, rather than defaulting into a business you didn't mean to build.  They unpack the biggest myths lawyers believe when starting a firm, why being a good lawyer isn't enough to create a sustainable business, and how relying on personal heroics instead of structure quietly traps firm owners over time. Stephanie breaks down the three constraints that cause most firms to struggle, the three distinct paths law firms can take, and the key questions lawyers should ask early to align their business model with the life and career they actually want.  Listen to our other episodes on Law Firm Strategy & Business Design.  #583 – From Survival to Strategy: Scaling Your Law Firm Finances, with Bernadette Harris Apple | Spotify | LTN  #575 – From Overwhelmed Lawyer to Strategic Law Firm Owner, with Chad Fox Apple | Spotify | LTN  #570 – Uncover Your Firm's Journey with the New Small Firm Scorecard™, with Stephanie Everett Apple | Spotify | LTN  #568 – How to Build a Law Firm You Can Sell, with Victoria L. Collier Apple | Spotify | LTN    Have thoughts about today's episode? Join the conversation on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, and X!    If today's podcast resonates with you and you haven't read The Small Firm Roadmap Revisited yet, get the first chapter right now for free! Looking for help beyond the book? See if our coaching community is right for you.    Access more resources from Lawyerist at lawyerist.com.  Subscribe to Lawyerist Podcast: https://play.megaphone.fm/xrm0mqp4tqwi0ozntiu41g Chapters / Timestamps:   00:00 – Introduction  01:15 – Why This Isn't About “Starting” a Law Firm  03:45 – The Biggest Myth Lawyers Believe About Firm Ownership  06:50 – Heroics vs. Structure  10:30 – The Three Constraints That Trap Law Firm Owners  12:45 – Every Firm Is Choosing a Business Model (Whether You Realize It or Not)  14:30 – The Three Paths Law Firms Take  18:55 – When Your Goals and Design Don't Match  20:55 – How Clients Actually Buy Legal Services  23:30 – What Breaks If Demand Doubles  25:00 – Clarity Beats Certainty  29:15 – What to Do in the First 30 Days  33:40 – Where to Go Next  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Wed, Feb 11 8:15 PM → 8:32 PM Event has not yet finished but it is a structure fire Radio Systems: - Tippecanoe County

The opposite of quitting is recommitting. And sometimes that means you need a spelled-out roadmap to help you define what steps you can take to recommit to recovery. Today's episode is different. I'm not speaking in theoretical terms or giving advice I wouldn't follow myself. I'm sharing exactly what I would do if I was trapped in an eating disorder right now. The actual steps. The concrete path forward. The golden nugget roadmap I would follow myself. Whether you're experiencing a relapse, stuck in your recovery, or wish you could go back and tell your younger self what to do—this episode is your clear, actionable guide. In this episode, you'll discover: The 6-step roadmap I'd follow if I was trapped in an eating disorder today Why relapse is normal and doesn't mean you've failed Step 1: Recognition and acceptance—how to get out of denial faster Step 2: Immediate outreach—breaking the isolation that keeps you stuck Step 3: Implementing structure—what to do RIGHT NOW to support yourself Step 4: Investigating triggers—what's really driving this beneath the surface Step 5: Developing a crisis response plan—how to create lasting recovery Step 6: Reconnecting with your WHY—the values your ED is violating What I wish I could tell my younger self 15+ years ago Why recovery isn't about perfection—it's about progress How to recommit to your best self starting TODAY If you're in the trenches, if you've relapsed, if you're struggling—this roadmap is for you. Not theory. Just honest, practical steps. THE 6-STEP RECOVERY ROADMAP STEP 1: RECOGNITION AND ACCEPTANCE The hardest step: Admitting where you are is no longer where you want to be. If I was relapsing today, I know I'd experience a strong pull toward denial. I might tell myself: "I'm just being more careful about what I eat" "I'm having a few bad days" "I can handle this on my own" What I'd do instead: ✅ Name what's happening - Get out of denial faster ✅ Ask myself: Am I skipping meals? Preoccupied with food thoughts? Anxious around mealtimes? Weighing myself? ✅ Practice self-compassion - Not excusing the behavior, but acknowledging eating disorders are complex illnesses, not personal failures ✅ Say to myself: "This is really hard. I don't have to do this alone." This step creates the foundation to move forward in ACTION instead of sitting in denial. STEP 2: IMMEDIATE OUTREACH Eating disorders thrive in isolation. My counter-attack would be CONNECTION. What I'd do: ✅ Contact someone I trust - In my case, my mom. I'd say: "I'm struggling with my thoughts and behaviors. I need support." ✅ Get professional help immediately If I had a treatment team: Contact them and say "I'm experiencing relapse. I need an appointment ASAP." If I didn't: Call primary care doctor, get a referral, look into local ED treatment centers ✅ Get accountability - Schedule meals, keep appointments with myself, check in with someone Key truth: Don't wait until things get "bad enough." Early intervention makes a tremendous difference. Breaking isolation doesn't mean everyone needs to know. It means strategically connecting with people who can provide support. STEP 3: IMPLEMENTING STRUCTURE What I'd put in place immediately: ✅ Regular eating patterns - Have a plan ready, no reinventing the wheel during vulnerable times. Use the same meals daily to reduce decision fatigue. ✅ Clean up social media & entertainment Unfollow accounts that trigger comparison or food obsession Avoid shows glorifying thinness or dieting Curate recovery-supportive content Join communities like Her Best Self Society (HerBestSelfSociety.com) ✅ Set clear boundaries with exercise - Temporarily pause formalized exercise, focus on gentle movement (This requires support—I couldn't do this alone) ✅ Document thoughts & feelings - Not to be perfect, but to increase awareness of patterns and triggers. Rebuild trust with body and mind. Structure = support. Not rigidity, but safety. STEP 4: INVESTIGATING TRIGGERS Eating disorders aren't just about food or weight. What's really happening beneath the surface? Questions I'd ask myself: ❓ What changes in my life have happened recently? (Transition, loss, increased responsibility, relationship change) ❓ What emotions am I struggling to manage? ❓ What am I trying to numb, distract from, or control? ❓ What needs aren't being met right now? ❓ What external pressures am I responding to? ❓ What beliefs am I believing about my worth, body, or identity? The truth: Eating disorders flare during periods of change and loss of control. Understanding triggers helps you heal beyond just the behaviors—you learn to process emotions in healthier ways. STEP 5: DEVELOPING A CRISIS RESPONSE PLAN Lasting recovery requires more than just putting out fires. What I'd create: ✅ Coping strategies - Tools to use when urges arise ✅ Relapse prevention plan - Document early warning signs, high-risk situations, actions to take ✅ Support system - Who to call, when, and why The sustainable plan is about building a life where: The eating disorder becomes less necessary and less powerful Recovery feels like moving TOWARD something meaningful Not just running away from illness Work with someone to determine exactly what support you need and put that planning in place. STEP 6: RECONNECTING WITH YOUR WHY The most important step: Remember what the eating disorder is stealing from you. What I'd do: ✅ Identify the values my ED violates The ED promises control, safety, worth. But it actually undermines: freedom, joy, creativity, authenticity, relationships, purpose. ✅ Compile a list: What has this ED taken from me? Holidays ruined Relationships lost Moments with loved ones missed Energy wasted Dreams on hold Future opportunities destroyed ✅ Ask: What present moments is it stealing RIGHT NOW? What future opportunities will be destroyed if I don't fix this? ✅ Dream beyond the disorder - What do I want my life to look like? Who is my BEST self? If I could go back 15+ years and tell my younger self: "You're gonna go through this godawful period, but on the other side is MAGICAL. You'll experience things you never would've allowed—wonderful relationships, contributions to the world, PURPOSE. Start dreaming NOW of the vision beyond this disorder." KEY QUOTES FROM THIS EPISODE

Have you ever wondered if you're "too late" because dating has never worked the way it seems to work for everyone else?   My client Liz joined Main Character Dating at 38 having never been in a long-term relationship. She felt behind, alone, and unsure how to even do dating.   What shifted for Liz inside Main Character Dating was hope.   No more dating shame.   And an action plan that helped her move toward the right dates with self-trust and support.   In this episode of The Feminist Dating Show, Liz shares how dating went from something she avoided to something that finally felt possible.   In this conversation, Liz shares how: Dating went from something she avoided to something that felt possible Community helped her realize she wasn't the only one Structure and feedback helped her interrupt old patterns She started dating with clarity, courage, and direction   Her words say it best: dating feels possible now.   If you've ever thought "Is it always going to be like this?" — this one's for you.   And I also want you to know this:   Main Character Dating is open for enrollment right now. This is my year-long group coaching program for anyone who hasn't found a romantic relationship (or the right one), and wants a joyful dating life that makes the right relationship inevitable.  

In this episode of the Rocket Chiro Podcast, Jerry Kennedy dives into one of the biggest mistakes chiropractors make in business and marketing: trying to copy someone else's path to success. You are not the chiropractor you heard speak at a seminar. You are not the person you follow online. You are not even the chiropractor down the street. Your skills, personality, finances, family situation, timing, and opportunities are all different, and ignoring those differences dramatically lowers your chances of success. This episode breaks down why cookie-cutter strategies often fail, why context matters more than tactics, and how to make progress by being honest about your situation and playing the hand you're actually dealt. Key Topics Covered Why copying other chiropractors rarely works How differences in skills, finances, family, and timing shape outcomes The danger of seminar success stories and online comparisons Why "If I can do it, anyone can do it" is a misleading idea How lack of context leads to frustration and burnout The Big Three Framework Jerry introduces three foundational factors that determine meaningful progress: Interest What you are genuinely interested in, not what looks good or sounds impressive. Skill What you are capable of executing well right now, along with the skills you still need to develop. Opportunity Your real-world circumstances, including finances, location, relationships, timing, and access to resources. The overlap of interest, skill, and opportunity is where the greatest potential for meaningful change exists. What Creates Long-Term Progress Short-term change requires interest, skill, and opportunity. Long-term success adds two more elements: Structure Clear systems, standards, and guardrails that remove guesswork and allow you to measure what's actually working. Consistency Boring, repetitive execution over time that compounds results. Structure does not have to look the same for everyone, but everyone needs it. Hard Truths Chiropractors Need to Hear Stop pretending to be more successful than you are Stop copying practices that don't match your reality Stop forcing niches and patient types you don't enjoy Stop relying on motivation instead of discipline Honesty is the starting point for real progress. Practical Takeaways Be honest about your interests, skills, and opportunities Start from where you are, not where someone else is Learn principles and strategies, not just scripts Understand why something works so you can adapt when it stops working Show up prepared to think for yourself, not just follow instructions Final Thoughts You cannot start from a better place without first starting from where you are. Your choices are to start now or let things get worse and start later. Understanding principles, concepts, and strategies is far more valuable than blindly following a formula. When you know why something works, you gain the ability to adapt, adjust, and make better decisions over time. Play the hand you're dealt, build structure around it, stay consistent, and move forward.     Resources Mentioned • Rocket Chiro chiropractic websites and local SEO: https://rocketchiro.com/best-chiropractic-websites/ • Website and SEO review requests at RocketChiro.com: https://rocketchiro.com/contact/chiropractic-practice-assessment/ • NEXT Step chiropractic business coaching: https://rocketchiro.com/chiropractic-coaching/  

Send a textIn this insightful episode of The Wealth Vibe Show, host Vinki Loomba sits down with Cherif Medawar, a seasoned real estate investor and asset protection strategist. Cherif unveils the powerful asset protection strategies he has developed over the years to safeguard wealth, particularly in the real estate world. Key Takeaways:Understanding Asset Protection: Cherif explains that asset protection is more than just hiding wealth—it's about structuring your assets properly to prevent losing everything in the event of a lawsuit. The Power of Liens in Asset Protection: Cherif reveals how using liens on properties and businesses can create a safeguard, ensuring that if a lawsuit results in a forced sale.Wyoming LLC Strategy: Learn why Cherif recommends setting up a Wyoming LLC, which provides unique charging order protection that shields assets from lawsuits and creditors.Structure for Success: Cherif shares how his asset protection system can be seamlessly integrated into an investor's portfolio, allowing them to secure real estate, trading accounts, and businesses with minimal risk. Practical Insights: For business owners and investors, Cherif breaks down how to set up this structure without the need for expensive, complicated legal advice.Get personalized advice on protecting your wealth with Cherif Medawar's Asset Protection Program. Book a consultation here: https://go.appointmentcore.com/book/QexNj2 Ready to implement Cherif's asset protection strategy? Take advantage of this special offer and secure your wealth today: https://td689.infusionsoft.com/app/manageCart/addProduct?productId=961 Episode Timestamps:00:00 - 02:00: Meet Cherif Medawar and the concept of asset protection.02:00 - 10:00: Why it's more than just hiding assets.10:00 - 15:00: How strategic liens help protect wealth in lawsuits.15:00 - 20:00: The best structure for asset protection and why it works.20:00 - 25:00: How to protect real estate, businesses, and personal assets.25:00 - 30:00: Real-life Examples: How Cherif's structure saved clients millions.30:00 - 35:00:  Setting up the ideal asset protection system.35:00 - 43:00: Special Offer: Cherif explains how listeners can access his asset protection system at a special rate.

364. Lost Motivation as a Mom? Get Your Flow Back with These 3 Tips | Routines, Schedules, Time Blocking, Time Management, Organization, Goals, Habits, Planning, Planners, Plan, Vision Boards, Mom Life, Parenting Tips, Moms, Motherhood, Home Organization, OrganizingEpisode 364. Lost Motivation as a Mom? Get Your Flow Back with These 3 TipsFeeling unmotivated, scattered, or like your days have lost all structure?If yesterday felt productive and today feels heavy, you're not alone—and you're not failing.In this episode, I'm sharing three simple, supportive planning shifts that help moms rebuild structure, regain momentum, and create calm days without burning out. These are the exact tools I use inside the High Five Motherhood planning framework to move from survival mode into maintenance—and eventually thrive mode.This episode is about planning with intention, not pressure.In This Episode, You'll Learn:1. Why Weekly Foundations Come Before To-Do ListsWeekly Foundations are the 5–8 priorities that hold your life together—things like self-care, family time, home management, work, faith, and rest.When these are placed in your calendar first, everything else starts to feel lighter and more doable.You'll learn:What counts as a weekly foundationWhy fewer priorities = more consistencyHow foundations help you stay out of burnout2. How Daily Anchors Create Structure Without RigidityInstead of forcing a strict schedule, daily anchors use what's already happening—wake-up times, meals, school drop-offs, nap time, and bedtime—to create natural rhythm in your day.You'll learn:What daily anchors areHow they set start and stop times for your dayWhy anchors help when motivation is low3. How the THRIVE Method Helps You Time Block with FlexibilityUsing the THRIVE Method, each day flows through six simple time-block themes instead of a rigid hour-by-hour plan:T – Time & ProductivityH – Home ManagementR – Rest, Recreation & RelationshipsI – Impact & IncomeV – Value YourselfE – Empower OthersThis method helps you balance your energy across the week—not cram everything into one day.If Mom Life Feels Unstructured Right Now…This episode will help you:Understand why motivation comes and goesCreate structure that supports your energyStop over-planning and start planning what actually mattersBuild momentum one gentle step at a timeYou don't need a perfect plan.You need a supportive one.Resources Mentioned:✨ FREE Weekly Planning ChecklistStart planning with clarity and intention—without overwhelm.

HEADLINE: From Big Bang to Radio Astronomy. GUEST: Govert Schilling. SUMMARY: Schilling explains dark matter's essential role in cosmic structure formation and highlights Albert Bosma's radio astronomy work confirming galactic rotation anomalies.2023

How do you ensure your data visuals are consistently effective—and on brand? In this episode, SWD data storyteller, Simon Rowe chats with Maxine Graze, Senior Data Visualization Engineer at King, about the process of building data visualization style guides. They explore why “structure liberates,” how to balance aesthetics with usability, and why stakeholder feedback is critical. Whether you're designing for dashboards or decks, you'll walk away with ideas on how to bring clarity and consistency to your data storytelling.Related Links:datavizstyleguide.com – Explore open-source data visualization guidelinesBetter Data Visualizations by Jonathan Schwabish – The book that sparked Maxine's journeyStorytelling with Data Resources – Tools, tips, and templates from the SWD team

Stroke Effects: What a Hemorrhagic Stroke Did to Jake Stroke effects aren't always obvious. Some show up immediately. Others arrive quietly, long after the hospital discharge papers are signed. For Jake, the stroke effects didn't end when his life was saved; they began there. Four months after a hemorrhagic stroke, Jake can walk, talk, think clearly, and hold a conversation that's thoughtful, articulate, and reflective. To someone passing him in the street, he might look “lucky.” But stroke effects don't ask for permission to be visible. They live beneath the surface, shaping movement, sensation, pain, identity, and recovery in ways few people prepare you for. This is what stroke did to Jake. The Stroke Effects That Came Without Warning Before his stroke, Jake's life was full and demanding. A husband. A father of four. An administrator coordinating drivers and operations. Active. Fit. Always moving toward the next opportunity. But in hindsight, the stroke effects were quietly signaling their arrival. Jake experienced severe headaches with a rapid onset. Nausea. Vomiting. Visual disturbances. At the time, they were dismissed as migraines. His blood pressure had been flagged as “pre-high” years earlier while living overseas, but after returning to Canada, he found himself without a regular doctor in an overloaded medical system. These were early stroke effects masquerading as manageable inconveniences. When the hemorrhagic stroke finally hit, it did so decisively, affecting the right side of his body, disrupting speech, movement, sensation, and cognition all at once. What Stroke Did to His Body One of the most misunderstood stroke effects is how specific and strange the deficits can be. Jake didn't just “lose strength.” He lost motor planning. When he tried to write the letter T, his brain sent the wrong instruction. Instead of a straight downward line, his hand looped as if writing an L. The muscles worked. The intention was there. The signal was wrong. To retrain that connection, he didn't practice ten times. He practiced thousands. This is one of the realities of stroke effects: recovery isn't about effort alone, it's about repetition at a scale most rehab programs don't explain clearly enough. Post-Stroke Pain: The Stroke Effect No One Warns You About If there's one stroke effect that dominates Jake's day-to-day experience, it's pain. Not soreness. Not discomfort. Neuropathic pain. Jake describes it as: Burning sensations Tingling Tightness, like plastic strapping wrapped around his limbs At its worst, a “12 out of 10” pain, like being tased while his hand is on fire This kind of post-stroke pain often resets overnight. One morning, he wakes up and feels almost normal. The next, the pain returns without warning, severe enough to stop him in his tracks. This is a stroke effect that confuses survivors and clinicians alike because it doesn't follow logic, effort, or consistency. It simply exists. And for many survivors, it's one of the hardest stroke effects to live with. The Non-Linear Reality of Stroke Effects Stroke recovery doesn't move forward in a straight line. Jake learned this quickly. One week brings noticeable gains. The next feels like a regression. Then progress returns quietly, unexpectedly. This non-linear pattern is itself a stroke effect. Early on, these fluctuations feel frightening. Survivors worry they're “going backwards.” But over time, patterns emerge. Rest days aren't failures. They're part of recovery. Silent healing days matter just as much as active ones. Understanding this changed how Jake viewed his recovery and how he measured progress. Identity Loss: An Overlooked Stroke Effect Some stroke effects don't show up on scans. Jake wasn't defined by his job, but work still mattered. Structure mattered. Contribution mattered. After the stroke, uncertainty crept in. Would he return to the same role? Could he handle the same responsibility? Should he? Stroke effects often force people to renegotiate identity, not because they want to, but because they must. The question shifts from “What do I do?” to “Who am I now?” For many survivors, this is one of the most emotionally demanding stroke effects of all. Recovery Begins With Action, Not Permission While hospitalized, Jake made a decision. He wouldn't wait passively. He brought in notebooks. Pencils. Hand grippers. Hair clippers. He practiced shaving, writing, and gripping, no matter how long it took. If writing the alphabet took all day, that was the day's work. By discharge, his writing had moved from scribbles to cursive. This wasn't luck. It was intentional engagement with stroke effects, meeting them head-on instead of avoiding them. What Stroke Effects Teach Us Jake's experience reveals something important: Stroke effects are not just medical outcomes. They are lived realities. They affect: How your body moves How pain shows up How progress feels How identity shifts How hope is tested And yet, understanding stroke effects, naming them, and normalizing them can reduce fear and isolation. That's why conversations like this matter. You're Not Alone With These Stroke Effects If you're early in recovery, you might recognize yourself in Jake's story. If you're years in, you might recognize where you've been. Either way, stroke effects don't mean the end of progress. They mean the beginning of a different kind of journey, one that rewards patience, repetition, and perspective. If you want to go deeper into recovery insights, lived experience, and hope-driven guidance: Learn more about the book here: The Unexpected Way That a Stroke Became the Best Thing That Happened Support the podcast and community here: Recovery After Stroke Patreon Final Thought Stroke effects don't define who you are, but they do shape how you recover. Jake's story reminds us that recovery isn't about returning to who you were. It's about learning how to live fully with what remains and discovering what's still possible. Disclaimer: This blog is for informational purposes only and does not constitute medical advice. Please consult your doctor before making any changes to your health or recovery plan. Living With Stroke Effects You Can't Always See Jake reveals the stroke effects that remained after the hospital—pain, motor issues, fatigue, and how he's navigating recovery four months on. Highlights: 00:00 Introduction and Background 05:10 Health Awareness and Signs 16:56 Personal Health Journey and Challenges 23:11 Recovery Process and Emotional Impact 38:28 Attitude Towards Recovery 46:30 Long-Term Recovery and Reflection 55:06 Work and Identity Post-Stroke 01:07:40 Pain Management and Coping Strategies 01:16:16 Community and Shared Experiences Transcript: Introduction and Background Bill Gasiamis (00:00) Today’s episode is one that really stayed with me long after we finished recording. You’re going to meet Jake, a stroke survivor who is very early in recovery and navigating the reality of what stroke actually does to a person long after the emergency has What makes this conversation so powerful isn’t just the hemorrhagic stroke Jake experienced. It’s how openly he talks about the stroke effects that followed. The pain, the confusion. the nonlinear recovery and the parts of stroke that are hard to explain unless you’ve lived them. I won’t give away Jake’s story that’s his to tell, but I will say this. If you’re early in recovery or you’re trying to make sense of symptoms that don’t quite fit the brochures or discharge notes, there’s a good chance you’ll hear something in Jake’s experience that feels confronting and reassuring at the same time. Now, before we get into the conversation, want to pause for a moment and say this, everything you hear, the interviews, the hosting, the editing exists because listeners like you help keep this podcast going. When you visit patreon.com slash recovery after stroke, you’re supporting my goal of recording a thousand episodes. So no stroke survivor has to ever feel like they’re navigating this if you’re looking for something you can lean on throughout your recovery or while supporting someone you love my book, the unexpected way that a stroke became the best thing that happened is available at recovery after stroke.com slash book. It’s the resource I wished I’d had when I was confused, overwhelmed and trying to understand what stroke had done to my life. all right. Now let’s get into the conversation with Jake. Bill (01:40) Jake Bordeaux, welcome to the podcast. Jake (01:42) Hi Bill, how are you this evening? Bill (01:44) I’m very well my friend. It is morning here. Just gone past 9am. We had a late night last night. We went to the opera and we saw Carmen. Jake (01:57) Hmm. How’s that? Bill (01:59) And for those who haven’t seen it, it’s in French and you have to read the subtitles because it has subtitles. I couldn’t read them because I was just a little too far. So I was squinting the whole night. But it’s a great opera, it was a great show, but we got home late so I’m quite tired. Jake (02:20) I couldn’t imagine that. Luckily I do speak French. So I wouldn’t need the subtitles, but that’s something I was afraid of actually, you know, coming out of the stroke is I was afraid almost that I had forgotten how to speak French or that I’d forgotten how to speak both languages. But luckily I speak ⁓ English and French. Bill (02:40) With a name like Bordeaux, I would definitely expect you to at least have some idea of French. Jake (02:45) Yes, indeed, sir. Half English and half French. I’ve been using that largely to my advantage. I’d been working up here in Northern Ontario with Federal Express. So I was working in administration here and sort of coordinating the management and the drivers being the liaison during the two during the day. so, you know, anytime the drivers might have equipment that needs any kind of repair or any kind of issues they might come up with on road as well as when they leave the station and when they come back into the station, I’m the guy that they would deal with. Bill (03:22) Wow, that’s cool. So tell me what was life like before stroke for you? What were you up to? What kind of things did you do? How did you spend your time? Jake (03:33) Well, life has had a lot of ups and downs for me in the last year’s bill. So, ⁓ I had been living for many years in, in Hong Kong and I’m originally from Canada and, I was born in the seventies, born in Ontario here. And by 2009, I had had various, you know, done grit, various career, choices or opportunities, job opportunities here. And I decided to. try my hand at a little something overseas. ⁓ I had an opportunity with a fellow Canadian named Noah Fuller who brought me over wanting to show me how to get into the watch business. And being two ⁓ enthusiasts, you know, being, ⁓ you know, I’d say we were into watch modification, watch restoration, and we were wanting to get a little bit more into building custom parts and building out custom watches. ⁓ working with various ⁓ people, military groups, et cetera, at working on their watch project. So he asked me to come to Hong Kong, learn everything that he knew about the business, and hopefully show me what I was gonna get into over there. That worked out, and while I was over there, I met my wife, I love my wife, I’m still with her. Stroke Effects: Health Awareness and Signs I got together with my wife in 2009 when I had first arrived in Hong Kong and I got married to her in 2010. During that time, Noah unfortunately passed away, so I lost my business partner, but the business continued to grow. So over the years, the business grew with my wife and I running that on our own. ⁓ Unfortunately, maybe it got some of the attention on the world stage. There’s been a lot of political, we’ll say issues in Hong Kong and leading into the pandemic, business was already suffering. ⁓ Once the pandemic hit and Hong Kong was locked down for a ⁓ big chunk of time. that really affected our business and took it down. By the time the pandemic had played its way out, our life over there was looking like it wasn’t panning out the way we’d wanted it to. And a lot of the opportunities that had been unfolding for us all of a sudden came to a close. ⁓ So we moved back to Canada. about two years ago and I started working up here and thinking about our next business opportunity. I’m a lot like you and I’m never really satisfied with what I’m doing and I kind of want to reach for the next thing and I kind of want to reach for more. So I like to work a lot. So while I was working on getting the next thing started, I was working with Federal Express. My days would be really, really busy. I would get up quite early in the morning and I’d chop wood here. I have a dog that I like to walk. I have a golden retriever. I have four children. So I have three girls and a boy and they’re ranging from four years old to 14 years old. They’re all in school. And of course, I was working full time at Federal Express and ⁓ working towards the next thing. So I guess life was pretty active. Bill (07:27) Pretty helpful. Did you have any sense that, you know, with regards to your health, things might take a turn? Was there any information coming to you that you might see now kind of in hindsight and go, well, that was probably a sign. Jake (07:45) Yeah, Bill. So I’ve watched a lot of your podcasts and I found them particularly helpful, especially a lot of the ones relating to hemorrhagic stroke. ⁓ Reason being that’s what happened to me. So ⁓ I had a hemorrhagic stroke ⁓ and it took out a large part of ⁓ my capabilities, I guess, mobility on my right side. So a lot of my body that’s affected is my right side. ⁓ Now, when I got back here from Hong Kong to Canada, unfortunately, I came here to a little bit of an overloaded medical system, to say the least. So I’m hoping that maybe some of what we’re talking today might help people who are in Canada if they suffer the ⁓ same thing as I did to try and get them on track for us, get them back into recovery. ⁓ When I arrived here, the system was overloaded. I didn’t have a doctor. So unfortunately, while I had been warned for several years that I had pre high blood pressure and ⁓ the doctors in Hong Kong had been, you know, monitoring my blood pressure and keeping a pretty close eye on things after arriving here in Canada, that wasn’t a case. And so you know, it would look now that I think about it, that I was having some warning signs. I was having headaches and I’d say that some of those headaches were pretty severe. ⁓ The headaches would come on like a, like a very fast, ⁓ fast onset headache. I would get very nauseated very quickly. ⁓ And then sort of, would, I’d vomit the headache. would pass. At first, I thought I was getting migraine headaches. I’d had one when I was a lot younger. But ⁓ these were coming with some visual disturbance. I was having this horrible headache. was having nausea. So all the things you might expect from a migraine, except that it was going away within minutes and all of a sudden I was back at work. you know, in hindsight, that definitely was ⁓ a warning flashes. And ⁓ had I had a proper physician, if I had somebody watching out for me, they may have caught that. I don’t know, there’s no way for us to know that. So what I would say is, if anybody’s having pretty high blood pressure, keep an eye on that. I would say my blood pressure when I had the stroke was quite high. And if I had been monitoring that, I might’ve been on top of it. So would you like to hear about the day that it happened or? Bill (10:45) Yeah, I would in a moment. So with the blood pressure in Hong Kong, were you being monitored and also medicated or was it just you were being monitored? Bill Gasiamis (10:56) We’ll get back to Jake’s story in just a moment. I want to pause for a second and ask you something important. Why do you listen to this podcast? For many people, it’s because they finally hear someone who understands what they’re going through or because they learn something that helps them make sense of their own stroke effects without feeling overwhelmed or alone. And here’s the part most listeners never really think podcast only exists because people like you help keep it There’s no big company behind it. No medical organization funding the work. It’s just me, a fellow stroke survivor doing everything I can to make sure these conversations are available for the next person who wakes up after a stroke and doesn’t know what comes One of the biggest challenges after stroke is finding reliable information without spending years searching, reading and second guessing yourself. That’s why I want to mention turn2.ai. Turn2 isn’t a sponsor, it’s a tool I personally use. If you choose to sign up using my affiliate link, you’ll get 10 % off and I’ll receive a small commission and no extra cost to you. That commission helps support the podcast and keep these conversations free. What Turn2 does is simple but powerful. It saves you time. Instead of spending years trying to track down research, discussions and updates about stroke, Turn2 brings relevant information straight to you. If you’re already dealing with fatigue, pain or cognitive overload, saving time and mental energy matters. And if you want to go deeper on your recovery journey, you can also grab my book, The Unexpected Way That a Stroke Became the Best Thing That Happened at recoveryafterstroke.com slash book. If this podcast has helped you feel understood even once, consider supporting the mission in whatever way feels right for you. All right, let’s get back to Jake. Jake (12:46) No, so I wasn’t being medicated for high blood pressure at all. was kind of these, well, it’s not quite severe enough to really do anything about it, so we’ll just keep an eye on it. ⁓ I did have pre-existing ⁓ medical issues. When I was quite a lot younger, I had suffered from ⁓ what some people might call Crohn’s disease or an inflammatory bowel issue. and I had some back pain. But other than that, I wasn’t really on any other types of medications. I wasn’t on any kinds of blood pressure medications, any kind of heart medications. ⁓ I wasn’t on any kind of antidepressants or anything like that. ⁓ I would say that I was pretty much feeling like I was in fairly good shape. haven’t gained or lost a heck of a lot of weight since the stroke. So what you see is what you get. wasn’t overweight. I wasn’t eating a lot of junk. I don’t smoke cigarettes. So. Bill (13:56) Yeah. One of those things. I know what you mean. Like I’ve been diagnosed with high blood pressure in the last six months and headaches. Jake, I’ve had headaches for years. I’m talking maybe four or five years. And at the beginning, they were intermittent. They would come and go similar to what you mentioned. And I would be able to get through the day. And I thought they were migraines, although nobody really convinced me that they were migraines. I couldn’t really say. That sounds familiar if I look up what migraine is and all the people who I’ve ever asked about a migraine, it never sounded like, I was never convinced by it. And then a little while ago, was at home, excuse me, I was at home with my wife, feeling really unwell. Did my, checked my blood pressure and it was about 170 over 110, 120, somewhere there. And that was, I knew that’s way too high, know, previously. I’ve checked my blood pressure maybe on the on perfect day and it was 120 over 80. So for me that was pretty serious. We went to the hospital because of all my history and they said your blood pressure is high. It’s probably a migraine causing you to have a migraine which is then causing your blood pressure to go high rather than the other way around. They didn’t say it’s high blood pressure is causing the migraine and or the headache. And then they put me on some migraine medication and they said, if we give you this migraine medication, it’s going to knock you out. You’re going to sleep, but you should wake up without a headache. Well, I woke up with a headache. The migraine medication didn’t do anything. So within a couple of weeks of that particular hospitalization and then going to my general practitioner, he prescribed me a blood pressure medication, came to start on it’s called to help keep the blood pressure down. Now I’m trying to get to the bottom of why do I have high blood pressure? That’s the part that’s frustrating me, because no one can tell you why you have high blood pressure unless they check your arteries and they’re half clogged or you’ve got some other issues with your heart or something like that. And I don’t have any of those issues. So now ⁓ it’s one of those things. It’s kind of like, well, you have high blood pressure. It might be something that runs in your family. When I check with my dad, my dad says that he has high blood pressure. My dad’s 84. So it’s like, you know, and he says, I started taking blood pressure medication at around 50, which is my age. But that’s still, that’s not good enough for me. Like I’m still not comfortable with, well, your dad did. So you are, and then therefore, just move on with life, take this tablet and then move on. Now I’m happy to take the tablet because I do not want to have another hemorrhagic stroke. I’m very comfortable taking a tablet to prevent that, right? No trauma, no traumas. Personal Health Journey, Stroke Effects, and Challenges But ⁓ it’s a very interesting place to find myself in after going through all the three brain hemorrhages that I’ve already had since 2012, brain surgery, learning how to walk again. Now I’ve had enough. I don’t want… I don’t want to be doing this anymore, even though I am finding myself here and I’m tackling it. Part of me is going, man, this is too much. Why do we need to go through this now? Jake (17:29) Yeah, I wanted to ask you something actually, maybe if you’ve had the same, you brought something back to mind here, is that one thing I did have, again, in hindsight, I had visual disturbance. in 2018, my grandmother, bless her shit, my grandmother passed away and I was abroad and I took it pretty hard. was largely raised by my grandfather, my grandmother. And I took it, it was very emotional. And ⁓ when I was grieving, I had an episode where I had a rather bad headache. And again, I had one of these feelings, like I thought I had a migraine headache. Maybe I did, or maybe we’re reading something into it. But coming out of that, I had a visual problem. And it was one of my eyes. in my right eye, you know, again, I have my issues now with my right hand side. My right eye had gotten quite blurry. I was having ⁓ issues with my vision in my right eye. And ⁓ a doctor had decided that, well, maybe it’s a form of macular degeneration. And he decided to do a laser surgery. at the time in Hong Kong. However, it didn’t have any effect. It didn’t help me out at all. And the only thing that helped that was time. And I wonder again now if the reason why treating the eye didn’t take any effect is because he should have been treating or looking at the brain. I think that maybe the issue might have been a small stroke to begin with. and I didn’t realize it at the time. Bill (19:25) That sounds very plausible, right? That’s I think probably a very logical conclusion to get to. Sometimes, you you hear people lose their vision and the way they discovered they’ve had a stroke is they’ll go to the ophthalmologist and they’ll say, I can’t see. And the guy will go, well, your eye looks perfect. I there’s nothing wrong with your lens. There’s nothing wrong with the macula. The eye pressure is fine. Everything’s fine. And that definitely suggests that there is a ⁓ neurological issue of some kind, right? So it’s like, next step is go to the hospital, get it checked out. But ⁓ yeah, well, there’ll be no way of knowing, but I science, I had similar kind of things happen about a year and a half before my first bleed. was at our local football here, which ⁓ my team made the what we call the grand final. There’s usually a playoff series and then the last two teams get to the final game of the year and then the one that wins wins the championship. And my team made it and I was there cheering them on, screaming my head off, you know, just being a really passionate supporter and went home that weekend with a massive headache that lasted about five days and ended up in hospital. They did a lumbar puncture. They checked for a brain hemorrhage or anything along those lines and they didn’t find anything and they also didn’t find the faulty blood vessel that later would cause the first brain hemorrhage. But when I speak to people about it, everyone will say, well, we’ll never know, Bill. There’s no way of knowing whether they were linked. But in my mind, it’s pretty logical to conclude that that first massive five day headache was a sign that something wasn’t right in my brain. And although they had that suspicion of that, they didn’t know what they were looking for. So they couldn’t find the faulty blood vessel. just did a scan, a CT, sorry. Yeah, they just did a CT to actually see if there was any visible signs of a tumor or a bleed or something like that. And since there wasn’t, they weren’t able to diagnose the faulty blood vessel that would later. ⁓ bleed three times. Jake (21:55) That’s incredible, by the way, the three times thing, and that’s got to take a lot of strength to get through. ⁓ I don’t know if I had mentioned to you, how recent this has been. So ⁓ one thing that I’ve noticed with your podcast is that most of the guests who are on have had a considerable amount of time elapse in between when the event has taken place and when they’ve been able to get back lot of their capabilities, a lot of their abilities. So how long exactly did it take you to get back to the stage or the state that you’re in now? Bill (22:36) I would say that I had, ⁓ well, the first three years were tumultuous because every time I was on the road to recovery after the first bleed, then the second bleed happened, that was six weeks apart. And then after the second bleed, I was really unwell. ⁓ Memory issues, couldn’t type an email, couldn’t read, couldn’t drive, couldn’t work. Recovery Process and Emotional Impact angry, really angry. I was probably in that state for the best part of about six to nine months. And then it started to ease and settle down as the blood vessel stopped bleeding. And then the, and then the blood in my head started to dissipate and kind of dissolved, I suppose. And I think I thought everything was going fine. So between February, 2012 and November, 2014, that’s when I had the next bleed November, 2014. the third one. And then when I woke up from that, I had to learn how to walk again. So by the time I got to February 2015, I had been three years in you know, in the dungeon, you know, getting just smashed around by stroke again and again and again, and then brain surgery, then learning how to walk again. And I think personally, I turned the tide maybe at around 2018, 2019. So it took another three to four years for me to feel like even though I’m living with all these deficits, I have got enough of my cognitive function back, my physical function back to be able to go back to my painting company, which had been on pause for a number of years. yeah, so all up, you know, from first bleed, Jake (24:25) incredible. Bill (24:30) to back to the painting company, you know, it seven years. It was quite a long time. And I hear people have similar kind of stories about five, six, seven years. They’re still dealing with everything that the stroke caused, but they have some kind of a turn, like for the better, some kind of like a shift in whether it’s mindset, whether it’s emotionally or whether it’s physically, they have kind of some. Like a fork in the road moment where things change for the better. Jake (25:03) That’s incredibly inspiring for me. So yeah, you give me a lot of hope because I’ve been going through a lot and I’ve only been at this for four months now. so I had this stroke in late July and upon getting into the hospital, again, I wasn’t able to talk. I wasn’t able to use my, couldn’t move my right hand side at all. ⁓ I wasn’t able to go to the washroom, any of the things. I was basically left with kind of like ⁓ a blank slate and everything that I’ve gotten back has been pretty rapid. So I’m really extremely thankful for that, especially that, given that hemorrhagic strokes are rare, ⁓ consequences seem to be more severe and more often fatal. So, yeah, I’ve only been at this for a few months, Bill (26:10) Yeah, I was gonna ask what was it what happened on the day of the strike? What was it like? Jake (26:16) Yeah, so on the day of the stroke, let me get back there for just a second. Right, so on the day of, it was a pretty regular day and I had got up, it was a beautiful day, it was July. ⁓ My family had been on a trip recently, they’d gone to the nation’s capital and visited my family and I was happy to have them back. I just bought my wife a new bike and ⁓ I tuned it up. The dog had been out and I was starting work at 2 p.m. So I was about to go in for 2 p.m. and see the drivers for the whole second part of their day until the closing. ⁓ And I ⁓ was biking into work. again, I was incredibly active. ⁓ So I was biking to work and it would be generally about a 15 minute bike ride and it’s a lot of uphill, et cetera. And some of the route is through some residential areas and even some pathways that go through the woods. Again, I live in Canada and in particular in Northern Ontario in quite a small town named Kirkland called Kirkland Lake, which is a gold mining town. we’re in a gold mining boom right now. And so yeah, I was biking to work, feeling pretty good. ⁓ When I got to work, or when I was just getting to work, I was pretty close to being late ⁓ after messing around with the kids a little bit. And so I pushed myself a little bit harder than I usually do. ⁓ I got to work right on time. I got in a little bit winded. And I started getting my equipment together, got all of my equipment and headed to my office and headed to the window where I’d be greeting all of the drivers as they come into the station. And I started to feel a little bit dizzy. So my thinking was though, I probably just pushed it a little too hard and I probably should have had a drink of water. So I grabbed a drink of water. And ⁓ I sat back down at my desk and the first drivers started to come in. And as they started to come in, I started to feel like it was hard ⁓ to keep track of what they were saying. I was having a hard time concentrating and that’s really not like me. Usually I’m able to concentrate on four children, a wife, a pet, myself. And when I’m at work, I’m able to deal with the whole station full of FedEx workers, drivers, et cetera. So I started asking the drivers, can you just leave your things with me? I’m going to put them aside for a few minutes until I’m back in the game here. I think I’ve winded myself a bit. I’m just going to chill. And the equipment started to pile up, because it was one driver, two drivers. three drivers. And as this was starting to go on, I was looking over at a lady who was working next to me in the office. ⁓ And ⁓ I’m very lucky that she was there. And ⁓ I’ll let you know why in a second. But ⁓ I started to look at her and I started to look at the drivers. And I think at that point, she looked at me and ⁓ it struck her there’s something really not right with Jake. So she came over and started to ask me some questions and she started to try and direct the drivers away from me so that maybe they’d stop asking questions. And it became pretty apparent to her real quick ⁓ that I was having a stroke. Now, thankfully, this lady’s not usually sitting in the office next to me. It was one of those things where she just happened to be there this day and she happens to work with the fire brigade here. and she works with first responders and she’s incredibly well educated as far as first aid and strokes and heart attacks, et cetera. So she was able to recognize what was going on with me right away. ⁓ She had management and she had everybody ⁓ take a look at me and they had the first responders coming right away. The emergency crew showed up within minutes. and they started asking me all the appropriate questions and they started lifting me out of there and driving me away. So I got to work, I guess, at about 2 p.m. That was when my shift started. And ⁓ by 2.25, ⁓ my wife was walking home from the neighborhood park with our kids and heard an ambulance. go by here, not realizing it was me. I’d been taken off in the ambulance. They brought me to a nearby town and then they airlifted me to Sudbury, Ontario. I guess in our nearby town, they determined that yes, I was having a stroke. They did a very quick preliminary scan. They sent me to Sudbury, Ontario, where they started doing more scans and figured out exactly what was going on. Although the medical system had failed me and I didn’t have a doctor going into it, when the rubber hit the road there, they had it together and they got me the appropriate help as fast as possible. That’s probably what helped me to get my recovery online so quick. Bill (32:18) definitely does the time that you take to get to hospital makes a massive difference. That was a good outcome considering everything that was going wrong at the time. So then how does the hospital stay go? How long are you in the hospital and how does it play out? Jake (32:37) Yeah, so I arrived in in the hospital in in Sudbury and I was there for for a few days so ⁓ yeah, I was there for a few days and in that time my My ⁓ my wife and ⁓ one of my good friends one of our children there They managed to come and see me and from what they say I was incoherent at the time So I guess I was still able to talk ⁓ but what was coming out of me was a lot of garbled nonsense. I’ve seen some of your guests say, I thought I was saying, can you please hand me my bag and I need you to bring, and all that was coming out was sort of, blah, blah, blah, blah, like it wasn’t making any sense at all. ⁓ So I was in there for days. And once they had me stabilized in ⁓ Sudbury, Ontario, they decided to transfer me and I had my choice between a couple of different towns. So I would say that by the 25th, 24th, 25th, I was stabilized and I was heading to Sudbury on the 25th. ⁓ Once I arrived in Sudbury, I think I was visited, ⁓ by my folks and my wife and kids. And then I was sent to Timmins, Ontario for my actual recovery. So it was pretty fast. I had the stroke on the 21st and by the 26th, I was in Timmins where I’d spend the rest of my ⁓ recovery time. Bill (34:27) How did they deal with leaking blood vessel? Jake (34:30) ⁓ They didn’t. So they had determined that they were going to probably do a surgery. When they were taking me into the hospital, they had told me that there was a ⁓ brain hemorrhage, ⁓ that it was leaking, that they were going to be monitoring it, that it would be likely there would be a surgery, and that I should probably be be prepared not to make it through. ⁓ So I guess, you know, they gave me some hope. I mean, they told me that we can hope for the best, but they were quite honest with me at the time in saying you might be going for the rest of your life ⁓ wearing diapers or unable to talk. ⁓ And it’s quite probable that you might not make it out of this. Uh, so they monitored it and they continued to bring me while I was in the Sudbury for scans and they continued to monitor the situation. Um, but they didn’t do any surgery. So, uh, I was put on medications to bring the blood pressure down, to keep the blood pressure down. And, uh, and I was placed on those while I was in, in hospital. And I continued to. recover all the way through August. And by the end of August, I had come back home. ⁓ while I was in hospital, I was only visited twice because it was far away from, from my home. And, ⁓ I’m honestly, Bill, I’m glad. ⁓ I was really happy. I was able to see my, my, my wife and kids by phone, obviously, you know, the wonders of modern technology. ⁓ but I was left with a lot of time on my own to reflect and I was left with a lot of time on my own to get better. you know, one of the things I decided once I got to the hospital was I’m not going to spend any time in the lounge. I’m not going to spend any of the time with the other patients who are ⁓ in here, nothing against them or anything like that. But the very first thing I did, was I started to try and find more information about what exactly happened to me and ⁓ what are my chances of getting better and what gives me the best chances. And what I came up with was I had better start working on my recovery immediately. yeah, so one of the very first things that I did is I got my notebook into me. notebook, got pencils, I got a pencil sharpener, I got one of those, ⁓ you know, hand gripper ⁓ exercise, you know, for your hands. ⁓ And I got a razor blade, and I got my wife and kids to bring in a hair trimmer. And I decided that no matter how long it was going to take me to shave, I was going to do that on my own. no matter how long I thought I’m in here, I don’t have anything else to do today. If it’s going to take me all day to cut my hair and shave my face, I’m going to do that. ⁓ If it takes me all day to do the, write the alphabet down, I’m going to get through that. And I went from again, ⁓ scribbles from just scribbles and barely being able to hold onto the pencil to, ⁓ by the time I left the hospital, I was writing in perfect cursive. Attitude Towards Recovery Bill (38:22) Yeah, that’s brilliant. I love that attitude. That attitude is probably ⁓ something that holds people in very, like creates a great outcomes for people, regardless of how much the stroke has affected them, regardless of how bad their deficits are, you know, regardless of what version of stroke they caught, they, they had to experience. And this is what I was doing when I was in rehab as well. So I did the same thing when I came back from hospital. So My first stay, I came back and we were on the internet checking, you know, is a blade in the brain? What is all this stuff? What does it all mean? Trying to get some answers. The second time, ⁓ six weeks later, I was searching for what kind of food should I be eating? If I’ve had a stroke, what should I be avoiding, et cetera? That was pretty cool to find out and learn, wow, there is actually a protocol that you can ⁓ take that supports your brain health instead of one. that doesn’t support your brain health. So that was pretty awesome. And then ⁓ in rehab, I was searching YouTube for videos about neuroplasticity. was searching videos for ⁓ anything that had to do with recovery of a neurological challenge, et cetera. And it was just way better than being ⁓ sort of worrying about my own situation and focusing on me like. internalizing it, you know, I was externalizing it and becoming proactive and I found, ⁓ and I found some great meditations. So I’m lying there. I can’t walk. I’m very sleepy. I need to sleep most of the time because I’m exhausted from all of the rehab. I’ll put on a meditation and just let it do its thing in the background while I was healing, resting, you know, recuperating. ⁓ so I think that approach just changes the way that your body responds as well because your body wants to step up to the plate. If you set an intention, we’re going through the healing process, this is the path that we’re gonna take, the body follows. If you go through the other part, if you take the different path and go, well, things are not going good for us, we’re doing it really tough, we’re feeling sorry for ourselves, we’re not gonna put any extra effort in. the body’s going to go, no, I’m listening. I’ll do exactly what you want. And you get the results that, that your intention has set. Right. So I think that’s brilliant. The way that you went about that and not interacting with other people. kind of get that too, because it can bring you down. Like seeing other people doing it hard can bring you down. And also ⁓ sometimes other people’s attitudes can rub off as well. And they can bring you down if They’re feeling bad about this situation and you don’t want to be around people who are going to ruin your vibe. Doesn’t matter who they are or where they are. Jake (41:27) Right. And one thing that where I think the hospitals and doctors and therapy where I think they really let us down is something that I believe it was on one of your podcasts and someone talking about neuroplasticity is that when we do something for therapy, we should be doing it thousands of times. We shouldn’t be doing it a few times. I think where we’re let down is like, ⁓ for instance, I went for my physiotherapy today and I find it helpful and I definitely do go, I would recommend it to anybody. But we will do each of these exercises 10 times. Do this 10 times, do this 10 times, do this 10 times. But what we’re failing to see is that, you know, To really make those connections, need to do things hundreds or thousands of times. ⁓ I have a, know, a, for instance, for you, you know, I mentioned the writing. So a place where I have an incredible block is, ⁓ I will go to try and begin something, particularly where I’m going to write something down and I’ll have the intention of writing one thing and something different will come. So, I would try and begin a word with the letter T and instead of beginning by going up and then straight down and crossing my T, instead I’m doing a loop like it’s an L. So in order to, you know, retrain, sort of get that, get that connection made, to go and start doing words that begin with the letter T. Bill (43:17) I have Jake (43:24) and a lot of times, mean like thousands of times before I could sit down and write a letter T. if people are feeling like they’re not getting anywhere or it’s not coming along for them and they are doing the exercises, I would say don’t give up and do them more. Don’t give up and do them less, do them more. Bill (43:33) Wow. Jake (43:53) ⁓ If you’re going to be doing something like walking, if you’re finding that difficult, then I think maybe if you walked around the block on Tuesday, go another 10 steps further and do that for the following week and always just keep adding to it because it does get better. And I don’t know about you, do you find Bill like I know one of your recent guests mentioned that it was a challenge for him to deal with how non-linear the recovery is. And I think that only hearing that from other people allowed me to accept that. Because a lot of the time I’ll feel like I’m doing great and things are incredibly better. And then maybe I have a week where I’m doing in respects, I’m doing worse than I was when I was in hospital. And I think that that’s really hard to deal with. you have that too, or did you find that? The non-linear kind of feeling? Yeah. Bill (44:55) Indeed, and then what happens four months, five months, six months, 10 months, is you start seeing the pattern and the pattern is, okay, I’ve made some inroads, okay, here’s the quiet time or the downtime coming and then you feel better about it because it’s not a big deal. You see the pattern and you notice it and it’s less frustrating because that’s actually, it appears as though you’re doing nothing to your head. Your head might be going, oh, I’m not doing anything. Long-Term Recovery and Reflection sitting on my butt, I’m not able to get through a day of physical exertion or anything like that. I must be going backwards. Well, in fact, your body’s just doing a different version of recovery and it looks different. It looks still and it looks silent and it looks fatigued, but it isn’t going backwards. It’s just a different phase and it needs all of it. You need to do that silent, still, quiet, fatigued resting one. And then you need to do the one which is to whatever extent you can, full on, full out, doing too much, going too far, ⁓ over-exerting yourself. And they kind of, you can’t have one without the other. You have to have them both. And ⁓ if you understand that, then you don’t get anxious or upset about it or bothered about it. And you start playing the long game. You stop focusing on today, I didn’t have a lot of effort, but… If I reflect on my last six months or nine months, there was maybe only seven days that I was really low or didn’t feel great. The rest were better days or I felt okay or whatever it was. if you start playing when you’re only four months out, it’s hard to play the long game. But when you get to a year or 12 months out, you look back and reflect, you can see that majority of what you were doing was getting. outcomes that were favorable and therefore, you know, and therefore you can sort of be okay with the quiet days, rest, the rest of all those. I used to go to loud events, whether they were a concert, a family event, a party, wedding, whatever. If they were long drawn out days, I would have to plan for the next day to be completely a write off, nothing on the calendar. No going anywhere, seeing anybody, doing anything so that I could rest properly and get my brain back online so that I could have a good day, the third day, you know? And that’s how we did it for many, many years. And I remember one time when the shift came, when I said to my wife, I am not doing anything tomorrow. You make sure that whatever you do, you do without me. You’re going to go and do your thing, but I’m not going to be involved. And then waking up in the morning and going, hey, I feel fantastic. What are we doing today? And she’s like, I didn’t plan for you, but okay. ⁓ let’s get the ball rolling on something. So we did something minor, but it was more than nothing. And that was my, okay. My moment of things are shifting and I’m able to recover overnight with a good night’s sleep quicker than I was. doing previously. Jake (48:19) That’s great. That’s great. Yeah. A lot of this, I really appreciate talking to you and I appreciate hearing your guests who have been at this a lot longer than I have. ⁓ I’m incredibly encouraged by how well I’ve done so far, but it’s also, there’s a lot of questions. ⁓ For instance, I’m in this stage where I don’t know, Bill, if I’m going to make it back to the same job as I was doing before, don’t know whether it’s reasonable to think that. Right now I’m doing, you know, going through all the steps that I need to go through and doing all the evaluations that I need to do. ⁓ But I’m not sure what the outcome is going to be. And that’s a little bit hard because I’m, you know, like most people who are entrepreneurs or, you know, have large families, we like to have an element of control, you know, with things. So it’s been hard to just sort of sit back here and not know what’s coming along. As far as work goes, I don’t know. Luckily, you know, I have a building here where I do own the building and I do have commercial space downstairs. So maybe I have the option to now use that space for myself. And ⁓ maybe I’ll have to be, maybe I’ll be forced to go back into. entrepreneurship and open my own business. Maybe going back to work ⁓ is not the path for me. We’ll have to wait and see. Bill (49:56) It will emerge. You’ll get a sense of it. I had ⁓ three years where I worked for another organization and it was a completely different field and they were, the role was a very entry level administrative role. Very, we’re talking a role that would probably be replaced by AI now. ⁓ So we, I was doing that for three years and what was good about planning and trying to get back to that level of effort and work was that it served a purpose. And part of the purpose was talking to people, traveling, ⁓ doing work on the computer. It was retraining me as I was getting comfortable with the role, getting used to traveling, getting back to being in loud environments, et cetera. So it was difficult, was tiresome, it was challenging, but it was… kind of like its own therapy. And when it served its purpose after three years, I was done. I just said, okay, I’m out of here. going back to running my own business again. And I’ll be, I’ll do that as slowly or at my own pace in any other way that I can so that ⁓ I create the whole, all the rules around the amount of hours that I attend, the type of work that I take on. You know, so if I was too tired to work the following week, I would just tell my clients I’m busy for a week and I can book you in two weeks down the road, you know. So that was what was good about going back to my business. And also what was good about going back to a job for somebody else because their expectations, you know, working for a corporation, the expectations are far lower than the ones that we put on ourselves when we’re working. for ourselves. So I know some people think working for a corporation is really stressful and all that kind of stuff. And it probably is. No. But I mean, I was barely working six hours a day. Whereas working for myself six hours a day that the day’s just starting, you six hours. You haven’t even hit lunchtime yet. So it’s interesting to think about work and how ⁓ and how you can use it as a therapy. Jake (52:23) It is well, I mean the difference for me is that I was actually in that role that you’re explaining right now when I had the stroke so I I’d gone through a whole bunch of very difficult things in Hong Kong and upon coming back here to Canada, I was almost feeling like I I had a lot of stress going on and I had a lot of things that I needed to sort out and ⁓ there was a lot of things that we need to settle with the kids. There was all sorts of stuff that needed to be done. So the job that I was working was actually, it was already fulfilling that role that you explained. I was having that less responsibility. was going in for a specific amount of hours that they were letting me know. So that was exactly it. was an administration job, but it was really not close to the amount of responsibility that I was used to having. ironically, now that this has happened to me, it might be the amount of control that I have over the amount of worked that might be an advantage after going to stroke. I’d be interested to see or to hear more about ⁓ how people deal with the change that comes with the different type of work they might be forced into, forced out of, and how they deal with that. Because I think that a lot of people deal with, ⁓ they think of their employment or they deal with their life in this sort of way, like people often ask, especially in Asia. What do you do? The first thing that people do if you’re in Hong Kong is they hand you a business card. They call it a name card there. And the very first thing that you do when you meet somebody before you even speak is you hand them the card and you each examine each other’s cards. So this idea of like, what I do is who I am. And I, and I think that when you have something like this happen to you often what you do must change. when you’re identifying with what you do, you’re sort of declaring that as your title, who you are, I would imagine that’s pretty tough. Luckily, I wasn’t tied to Federal Express, thankfully. Work and Identity Post-Stroke Bill (55:00) Yeah, I hear you. is, people will work as a lawyer for 20 years or 30 years, have a stroke, and then it’s like, well, who am I now? What am I now? And that’s the challenge with working and identifying as the work that you do. know, those days are gone in theory. You know, you don’t get named John lawyer anymore. You don’t get named John banker. anymore, you you don’t get the your surname from the occupation that you do back in the day, you know, Baker, carpenter, plumber, you know, all those people, they were their entire job, they did it for 3040 5060 years, that was what they did. And then when they couldn’t work anymore, well, they still identified as john plumber, because they had the name, the name was given to them or John Carpenter or whomever. The thing about it is now with jobs being so ⁓ not long term anymore, you get a job or you go to a particular employer and then two, three years you’re in another role or another title, et cetera, ⁓ or you’ve moved up the corporate ladder, et cetera. Well, if you’ve never even done that, if you’ve only ever worked and you haven’t explored your interests, ⁓ hiking, walking, running, playing ball, ⁓ becoming a poker player, ⁓ whatever, whatever it is other than my job, you’re very, it’s understandable that it’s very narrow how you can explain to somebody how you occupy your time. Like what do you do? Well, I do plumbing, but I also do poker. ⁓ I do this, but I also do that. I’m that guy. Like when you ask me, sometimes I will literally be in a painting outfit, not so often now, but my painting clothes, and then I’ll take them off and I’ll sit in front of the computer and I’ll record a podcast episode. And then at the end of the day, I’ll be doing a presentation somewhere, speaking publicly on a particular topic at the moment. My favorite topic is post-traumatic growth. When somebody asks me, what do you do? If they know me, they know I do podcasting. They know I do painting. They know I do speaking. They know I’ve written a book. ⁓ they know all these things about me. If they don’t know me, depending on which room I’m in, I’m a podcaster. If I’m in one room, I’m an author. If I’m in another room, if I’m in another room, I’m a painter and so on. And what that allows me to do is. not be tied down to my entire existence being about only one thing, because I think that would be boring as, and I would hate to be the guy that only knows something about painting, how to paint the wall fantastically. mean, great, maybe, but not really rewarding, and not a lot of ⁓ spiritual and existential growth in painting a wall. I solve a problem for you, but I haven’t gained anything. other than money for me. It’s not really, you know, it’s not my cup of tea anymore. Now I get to have a podcast, I get to make way less money out of a podcast episode and yet reach hundreds and thousands of people and feel really amazing about that. And what that does is that fills up my cup. That allows me to fill up my cup on the down days where I’m not earning a living. And then it allows me to go earn a living. and then not feel like all I’m doing is working and going through the maze all day every day and just being on the constant cycle of the boredom and the sameness and all that kind of stuff. So I sprinkle a little bit of this and that into my life so that I don’t have ⁓ the same day twice because I can’t cope with the same day three times. Twice is a real bad sign for me. If there’s a third day coming, that’s gonna be the same as yesterday. I’m not up for that, I don’t want to know about it. Jake (59:21) Right. Well, that also helps with your recovery. I think like, as you say, you do a lot of different things and that helps a lot. Right. So, you know, one, for instance, is, know, the, of the first things I started to think of when I was in the hospital in Sudbury and thinking of getting home is my gosh, it’s going to start getting cold soon. Winter’s going to hit. And I really have to start getting that wood all stacked. Right. So So, you know, here I am, I’m benefiting from it now. I burn wood all winter, but, ⁓ you know, I spent a lot of my rehab ⁓ stacking wood. And I mean, that’s incredibly great physiotherapy, right? Whether you’re stacking wood or like you said, you made me think when you’re talking about painting, I’m thinking about like the karate kid, right? Like with wax on wax on paint on, this is the kind of stuff that gets you out of one particular mold. And with your brain sort of like focused on recovering in one single area, you can recover in all these different areas. And I think they contribute to like a big picture of your recovery. Bill (1:00:34) I agree with that. It’s exactly right. It’s you know standing on the ladder which I do less of these days because I Felt off about a year and a half ago. So standing on the ladder and Getting down the ladder holding a paint can and applying paint ⁓ Putting drop shades down and picking up tubs of paint, you know ⁓ That whole every part of that physical activity is using a different part of the brain. Writing a book, even if it’s only 10 minutes a day, writing half a page or 10 paragraphs or whatever it is, that uses a different part of the brain. ⁓ Public speaking, that trains and uses a different part of the brain. Everything that I do definitely kind of helps to rewire the brain in many, different ways and supports my ongoing recovery and… ⁓ is and the idea behind it amongst other things, the idea behind it from a neurological kind of perspective is that it activates more of the brain. The more of the brain that’s activated, the more chance you are of creating new neuronal pathways and having ⁓ more options for healing or recovery. And then it works emotionally for me, it works mentally for me. Do you know, so I get… the emotional fitness and the mental fitness out of it. Speaking on the podcast, meeting people gives back. you know, that serves my, I need to serve other people purpose. Do you know, like, it’s just so much, everyone ⁓ who knows me kind of knows that I wear a lot of hats. I kind of. I kind of like, I do it. I show people like when they’re saying, what are you up to today? I’ve been wearing a lot of hats today. And if I’m not wearing a hat, like I pretend that I put another one off or just took one off when I’m sitting with them or talking with them. It’s crazy how many things I do. And about the only hat I would prefer not to wear right now is I prefer to put the painting hat down. and just hand that over to somebody else and just go, I think that part of my life’s done and I’ll move on to other things. Jake (1:02:57) If you don’t mind, have one, there’s one more thing that right now that I’d like to mention just before I forget. Is that all right? All right. All right. So the only other thing, the thing that I’ve been dealing with myself and I don’t know how many people deal with it or don’t deal with it. I know that not everybody does. don’t, I deal with a lot of post, uh, post stroke pain. So while I don’t have Bill (1:03:04) Yeah, of course. Jake (1:03:25) ⁓ the misfortune of losing use of my feet or losing use of my hand. I mean, it’s limited. do therapy, but I’m able to use my hands. I’m able to write and all this. But coming along with that is an incredible amount of ⁓ burning, tingling ⁓ sort of ⁓ feelings like there is ⁓ almost like the, know, if you can think of newspapers when they’re delivered in a bundle and they’ve got this kind of plastic strapping around it. ⁓ It’s usually it’s yellow, you know, this sort of plastic strapping. I feel often like that is wrapped around my arms, like it’s wrapped around my leg. I deal with a lot of this kind of stuff, unfortunately. So again, I mean, I’m not going to sit here and whine about it because again, ⁓ I can walk, I can do all the things that I need to do and I’d rather have that than what I do. But I’m wondering if it’s really common for a lot of people to have this, you know, post stroke pain. Bill (1:04:44) If 10 was the worst pain you’ve ever experienced in your life, that’s like we’re talking about 10 is somebody’s cut your limb off ⁓ and one is no pain at all. Like where would the pain be for you? Jake (1:05:00) Well, thankfully, again, thankfully ⁓ I’ve had some progress in this. So when I first came to, when I was first starting to get all the feeling back, ⁓ I started to notice that some feeling wasn’t coming back. But while I was in the hospital, I was on quite a lot of medication. So I was on some pretty heavy painkillers. ⁓ I think hydro-morphone, things like this. And I came off of those when I was coming home and a lot of the feelings started coming back. I would say that some days and at some times that pain can be what I would say maybe it’s a 12 out of 10. Like it’s bad. at some points I’ve been left doing nothing but be able to just really just sit there and cry. I’m going to be honest with you. And the pain could be quite severe. Now luckily those days are few and far between. It’s not all the time. ⁓ And here’s the deal. The thing that’s very strange with the post stroke pain or the intensity of it is that it’s like going to sleep or it’s like the start of a new day, the beginning of a new day is like a reset button’s been hit. So for instance, I could wake up on a Monday and I could be hit with the worst pain that I’ve ever had in my life. It feels literally like I’m being hit with a taser gun on the right side of my body and that while somebody’s hitting it with the taser gun, they’ve lit my hand on fire. And, ⁓ And then the very next day after I’ve gone to sleep, I woke up and I’ve had the rest. I wake up almost scared to move because for me, sort of when I wake up and I haven’t moved yet, it’s almost like nothing’s happened to me. It’s like I wake up and I don’t know that I’m numb. don’t know that I’m in pain. don’t know that all this is going on. And then I start to move and sometimes I can sit there and feel a relief. Think, wow. There’s nothing severe going on. This is pretty good and it’s going to be a great day. Or sometimes I can be struck with a type of debilitating pain that I can’t even describe. Yeah. Pain Management and Coping Strategies Bill (1:07:34) Well, what you’re describing is very common. I know a lot of people going through post stroke pain. ⁓ It is a thing. I have a very minor version of exactly the thing that you described about how the tightness and things wrapped around ⁓ your hand, like the newspaper. that’s kind of what I feel on my left side, the whole left side all the time and the burning and tingling sensation all the time. And okay, on my worst days, these days, like it’s probably, you know, I know, it’s probably a four and a terrible one would be a five, but it doesn’t get there much. And what I’ve noticed is that the, either I’ve become more tolerant of it or my my pain has decreased in my awareness. Like I’m aware of the fact that my limb is in the state that it’s in. And sometimes I’ll go to get a massage to get the muscles loo

Self-determination throughout your team: it sounds simple, but implementing it effectively could give your startup a razor-sharp competitive edge.In this episode, Chris and Yaniv unpack the 'Recursive Principle of Self-Determination', a framework for designing autonomous startups that maximize agency at every layer of the business. They explore how high-agency decisions shape product strategy, engineering, go-to-market, fundraising, teams, and culture, and why AI is accelerating the shift toward founder empowerment. In this episode, you will:* Understand the concept of recursive self-determination and why it applies across the entire startup stack* Identify low-agency decisions that slow innovation (agencies, misaligned partners, restrictive funding)* Design products that increase customer empowerment by reducing friction, cost, and dependency* Evaluate tech stack and vendor choices based on incentive alignment and long-term control* Apply high-agency go-to-market strategies by selling directly to customers* Structure teams as cross-functional, autonomous squads that move fast and learn faster* Leverage AI as a force multiplier for founder and team agencyThe Pact Honor the Startup Podcast Pact! If you have listened to TSP and gotten value from it, please:Follow, rate, and review us in your listening appSubscribe to the TSP Mailing List to gain access to exclusive newsletter-only content and early access to information on upcoming episodes: https://thestartuppodcast.beehiiv.com/subscribe Secure your official TSP merchandise at https://shop.tsp.show/ Follow us here on YouTube for full-video episodes: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCNjm1MTdjysRRV07fSf0yGg Give us a public shout-out on LinkedIn or anywhere you have a social media followingKey linksThis episode of the Startup Podcast is sponsored by Vanta. Vanta helps businesses get and stay compliant by automating up to 90% of the work for the most in demand compliance frameworks. With over 200 integrations, you can easily monitor and secure the tools your business relies on. For a limited time offer of US$1,000 off, go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://⁠www.vanta.com/tsp⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠.This episode of the Startup Podcast is sponsored by .tech domains. Forget weird prefixes and creative misspellings; the availability for .tech domains is simply way better than .com. For a clean and memorable name, go to https://⁠get.tech/tsp.Get your question in for our next Q&A episode: https://forms.gle/NZzgNWVLiFmwvFA2A The Startup Podcast website: https://www.tsp.show/episodes/Learn more about Chris and YanivWork 1:1 with Chris: http://chrissaad.com/advisory/ Follow Chris on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrissaad/ Follow Yaniv on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ybernstein/Producer: Justin McArthur https://www.linkedin.com/in/justin-mcarthurIntro Voice: Jeremiah Owyang https://web-strategist.com/

​​Join our champion program: mark@themomentumcompany.comAttend a Thriving Leader event: https://thriving-leader-2026.lovable.app/Instagram: @the.momentum.companyLinkedIn: /momentum-companyIn this episode of The Intentional Agribusiness Leader, Mark sits down with Landon Bunderson, Chief Science Officer at Nano Yield, for a thoughtful conversation about intentional leadership, organizational clarity, and how innovation actually works inside a growing agribusiness.Landon leads both science and marketing at Nano Yield—a combination that forces constant clarity. His definition of intentionality is simple but demanding: say fewer things, repeat them often, and never lose sight of why the company exists. At Nano Yield, everything ladders up to one goal—making the sales team's job easier by ensuring customers clearly understand the value of the people and the products.One of the central themes of the episode is the power of repetition in leadership. Landon explains that effective leaders don't constantly reinvent their message. Instead, they identify the few things that matter most and put them on repeat. Just like a political stump speech, clarity is built through consistency—not novelty. Leaders don't need more ideas; they need sharper focus.The conversation also explores what Nano Yield actually does and why “nanotechnology” doesn't need to be scary. Landon breaks down nano-scale delivery in simple terms, explaining how their technology improves the efficiency of fertilizers and crop inputs by helping nutrients reach plant cells more effectively. The result is better performance, less waste, and improved outcomes for growers.From there, the discussion shifts to culture and growth. Having been with Nano Yield for over a decade, Landon shares how culture has evolved as the company has scaled. He describes culture through a family analogy—clear expectations, consistent communication, defined boundaries, and increasing autonomy over time. When people know what's expected and feel trusted, they thrive.Mark and Landon dive into the realities of hiring and growth, including one of the hardest leadership challenges: realizing when someone is in the wrong role. Landon frames these moments not as failures, but as necessary course corrections—helping people move on to roles where they can truly succeed.Another key insight from the episode is the idea that people don't actually thrive in total freedom—they thrive within clear boundaries. As companies grow, systems and processes become essential not to restrict people, but to support them. Structure creates stability, and stability enables innovation.The episode closes with a discussion on creativity and problem-solving. Landon recommends the book Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert, emphasizing that creativity isn't about reinventing everything—it's about approaching challenges with curiosity and courage. That creative muscle, when paired with disciplined execution, becomes a powerful leadership advantage.This conversation is a reminder that intentional leadership isn't loud or flashy. It's focused, repeatable, human, and deeply practical.Listen if you are:A leader trying to create clarity in a fast-growing organizationBalancing innovation with executionStruggling with focus, messaging, or alignment across teamsBuilding culture while scaling people, systems, and productsCurious about how technology and leadership actually intersect in ag

Episode 119: Still Learning: How My Teachings Have Evolved Through Lived Experience After seven years of living in a 24/7 DOM/sub dynamic and several years of teaching, Andrew shares how his understanding of the concepts he teaches has deepened and evolved. Growth means being willing to reconsider what you thought you knew, and in this episode, Andrew opens up about the nuances he's discovered through lived experience. In this episode, Andrew explores: Masculine Emotion: Why letting her see you in your emotional process builds intimacy, not polarity loss. The difference between using her as your therapist versus letting her witness your humanity. Feminine Chaos Redefined: Two definitions of chaos and why one represents disorder while the other holds pure potential. How a woman moves from emotional reactivity to embodied calm. Slowing Down on the Inside: Why an externally slow life doesn't matter if you're still racing internally. How your tension as a man blocks her ability to relax and receive. The Role of Fear: Why most relationships are actually between each other's conditioning and programming. How fear protects itself and why you can't force your way through it. Structure vs. Containment: The critical difference that changes everything. Why applying structure to her crushes her spirit, and what she actually needs instead. Individual Healing: Why the work is always individual. How healing yourself transforms the relationship without trying to fix it. This episode offers hard-won wisdom for anyone committed to growth in their dynamic and their life. Resources: Get all of Andrew's free guides, training, and resources at: infinitedevotion.com/free-resources Ready to go deeper? Explore our blog, courses, and coaching at https://InfiniteDevotion.com Follow us on Instagram: https://instagram.com/_InfiniteDevotion Subscribe to our OnlyFans for exclusive content: https://dawnofdesire.net

Pastor Allan McCullough

Episode 276-NJ’s New Felony Dingus Law  Also Available OnSearchable Podcast Transcript Gun Lawyer — Episode Transcript Page – 1 – of 14 Gun Lawyer — Episode 276 Transcript SUMMARY KEYWORDS New Jersey felony law, accidental discharge, Second Amendment, gun rights, reckless conduct, felony dingus, legal consequences, gun ownership, national reciprocity, pro-gun advocacy, government involvement, legal defense, gun laws, gun ownership statistics, gun control. SPEAKERS Evan Nappen, Teddy Nappen Evan Nappen 00:17 I’m Evan Nappen. Teddy Nappen 00:19 And I’m Teddy Nappen. Evan Nappen 00:20 And welcome to Gun Lawyer. New Jersey now officially has the felony Dingus law. That’s right, folks. It has to do with the criminalization of accidents. That’s it. They’ve been criminalized in New Jersey. Now let me explain why it’s the Dingus law. The reason I call it the Dingus law is that a number of years ago I was in Missouri. It was at the James Farm, Jesse and Frank James Farm. It was a great museum there. It’s a pretty cool place to visit if you’re into western history. You know, Jesse James and such is way up there of one of the fun topics to learn about. As a matter of fact, their famous bank robbery is still the record haul for any bank robbery in the U.S., ever. It was done by James and his gang. In terms of the amount of money stolen, in terms of the value of that money today, versus then, it is the record amount ever stolen. Evan Nappen 01:41 But the thing that’s interesting to me about what happened when I was at that museum is I’m looking at all kinds of things about historical facts about Jesse James and his life and all. I’m reading some things, and it talked about “Dingus” at certain times. You know, talking about things that were going on between him and his men. And I’m like, Dingus, who’s Dingus? So, I asked one of the museum folks there, hey, who is this Dingus that they’re talking about? He goes, oh, that’s Jesse James. What do you mean Jesse James is Dingus? Who called him, you know, Dingus and lived, right? He’s like, no, no, no, no, no. His men did. His men did. What? Why? Well, you see, Jesse was apparently playing around with his gun, practicing spinning or screwing around with it, or who knows what, and he accidentally shot two of his fingers off. It was in front of his men. He shot his fingers off, two of them, and Jesse James would never use profanity. He may have been a stone cold killer, but he would not ever use profanity. So, when he shot his two fingers off, he said, Dingus! Now, I don’t know about you, but if I shot my fingers off, I’d say something a lot more than Dingus. But I guess his men fell off their horses Page – 2 – of 14 laughing, you know, and they nicknamed him Dingus. And I guess if you were one of his men, you could bust his balls and call him Dingus and get away with it. Evan Nappen 03:36 But we call accidental discharges in my office “Dingus” cases in honor of Jesse James, of course. So, any accidental discharge is a Dingus case. Now, I once had a guy that shot himself in the hand with a Glock. And so that, of course, was a Dingus case. This was a number of years ago, and they tried to take away his firearms and his ability to be licensed under that. It wasn’t criminalized, but they did try to disenfranchise him of his gun rights. We fought it hard, and we were able to win and save his gun rights and his gun. About a year later, he shot himself in the hand again with a Sig. So, do you know what he was? He was a Double Dingus. That’s right. Evan Nappen 04:40 Anyway, this new Dingus law, and look, accidents can happen. You can drive your car and have an accident. Accidents happen. But this Dingus law that New Jersey has passed is a felony Dingus law. It now turns accidents into a New Jersey felony. A felony level offense. It’s very important that you understand this, because now it is actually law in New Jersey, and you have to know your rights. You have to stand on your rights. Or you not only risk losing your Second Amendment rights, but you also risk becoming a felon, going to State Prison, and having your life essentially destroyed over this. Because becoming a convicted felon can dramatically affect your career, and your ability to earn a living. Your existence becomes one of a second class citizen, and not just in terms of gun rights. Evan Nappen 05:52 So, I want to do a deep dive here into the felony Dingus law that New Jersey has now made law. And I want to make it clear so that you, my dear listeners, know what to do to protect yourself and hear it straight from me as to what you must do and how you must act. Because it will be difficult for some of you to do what I’m saying. It strikes to a certain degree against what might be your first reaction, but you have to do this. Otherwise the consequences can be dire. So, this new law that New Jersey passed, and it is officially law. It takes accidents and makes them felonies, accidents with firearms, into felony level offenses. And we’re going to take a look at how exactly that gets done. How the Legislature, in passing this law, has done it in such a bizarre way, or sneaky way, devious way, that the impact and reality of it is how I’m going to explain it. Evan Nappen 07:13 So, the law reads, and you can read the bill that passed. It was A4976 and was approved by Murphy as one of his parting gifts on January 20 of this year. (https://pub.njleg.state.nj.us/Bills/2024/A5000/4976_R2.PDF) It says, (1.a.) For the purposes of this act, “Recklessly” shall have the same meaning as set forth in N.J.S. 2C:2-2. Now, 2-2 is where the culpability standards for New Jersey law are laid out. Culpability is the establishment of the level of what has to be demonstrated in order to prove whether you’re culpable for the commission of that offense. These fall under the general requirements of culpability, and normally, culpability has to be proven. It’s a level of proof. Often we think of culpability as needing to show purpose fully. You do something purposefully. We do something knowingly, knowingly. But recklessly and negligently can also be culpability levels in criminal law, and New Jersey is now making “Reckless” as part of this law. Page – 3 – of 14 Evan Nappen 08:56 But reckless isn’t necessarily how you might generically think of it. It’s defined in this culpability statute as follows. So, this is where “Reckless” gets defined that they’re incorporating into the new law. (N.J.S. 2C:2-2.(3)) “Recklessly. A person acts recklessly with respect to a material element of an offense when he consciously disregards a substantial and unjustifiable risk that the material element exists or will result from his conduct. The risk must be of such a nature and degree that, considering the nature and purpose of the actor’s conduct and the circumstances known to him, its disregard involves a gross deviation from the standard of conduct that a reasonable person would observe in the actor’s situation. ‘Recklessness,’ or ‘with recklessness’, or equivalent terms have the same meaning.” Evan Nappen 10:05 Now, if you’re having trouble wrapping your head around what I just said, we’re going to get back to it. But I wanted to give you that, initially, as we go through the bill, and I’m going to show you how it translates into reality under the felony Dingus law. So, New Jersey now says “reckless” is defined as what I just told you, and then they define structure. “‘Structure’ means any building, room, ship, vessel, car, vehicle, or airplane, and also means any place adapted for overnight accommodation of persons or for carrying of business therein.” So, any business establishment, any means of transport, and any room, building or ship is a structure, okay? Now the law says a person commits, oh, a disorderly person’s offense. Oh, well, that’s not a felony, Evan. That’s a disorderly person. It’s New Jersey’s version of misdemeanor. Yeah, I know that, but let’s keep reading. Evan Nappen 11:21 Okay, folks. “A person commits a disorderly persons offense by recklessly discharging a firearm . . .” Well, you might think, why I’d never be reckless. I’d never be reckless. “. . . by recklessly discharging a firearm using live ammunition rounds . . .” So, I guess you can recklessly discharge a blank gun, but whatever. “. . . recklessly discharging a firearm using live ammunition rounds unlawfully or without a lawful purpose, except that a second conviction for such an offense constitutes a crime of the fourth degree, and a third or subsequent conviction for such an offense constitutes crime of the third degree.” So, what happens is this. It ups the degree if you have repeat offenses. Evan Nappen 12:12 So, you say, well, look, man, if I have one problem, at least it’s just a misdemeanor, and it’s not a felony. I don’t become a felony Dingus problem in my life. Well, yeah, because here’s the next part. It says, a person who commits a violation of what I just said, subsection b., technically of this section, shall be charged with a crime of one degree higher than what ordinarily would be charged for such offense, where the violation occurs within 100 yards of an occupied structure. Whoa, whoa. Wait a minute. Wait a minute. So, in other words, if you have an accidental discharge, and that AD was done without lawful purpose, well, if it’s an accidental discharge, what was your lawful purpose for having an accident? Of course, there wasn’t one. It’s baked into the cake. There’s no accident done lost with a lawful purpose. Of course not. So, every accident now, unless you can show there was a lawful purpose to your accident, okay? Every accident done, every accidental discharge without a lawful purpose, within 100 yards of any building, room, ship, vessel, car, vehicle, airplane, place of overnight accommodation or where business is conducted, within 100 yards of any of those occupied places, that Page – 4 – of 14 makes it a felony level offense. A felony level offense. So, now you have your accidental discharge. It’s done without a lawful purpose. Now the law says you have to recklessly discharge a firearm without a lawful purpose. Remember, I told you what reckless was under the law. Evan Nappen 14:24 Now, think about this. Let’s go back to that reckless. A person acts reckless with respect to a material element of the offense when he consciously disregards a substantial and unjustifiable risk that a material element will result from his conduct. Oh, conscientious disregarding a risk that you could, what? Have an accidental discharge. Meaning a discharge without a lawful purpose. And the risk must be of such a nature and degree that considering the nature and purpose of the actor’s conduct and circumstances known to him. Oh, did you know you had a gun? Yeah. Did you know that when you pull the trigger of a gun, it goes bang? Yeah. Did you happen to have ammunition? Yeah. Did you check to make sure the gun was empty? Oh, well, what’s this disregard involves a gross deviation from the standard of conduct that a reasonable person would observe in the actor’s situation. Aha. Gross deviation from standard of conduct that a reasonable person would observe. A reasonable person checks to make sure their gun is unloaded. Were you unreasonable in having that accidental discharge because you failed to ensure that your gun wasn’t loaded? Evan Nappen 16:18 Well, let me tell you who’s going to answer that question. Ultimately, my friends, 12 people who aren’t smart enough to avoid jury duty. That’s who’s going to answer it. Twelve persons who most likely don’t know a whole hell of a lot about guns. And even if they do, they’re not going to like the fact that you didn’t ensure that your gun was unloaded. So, this means that if you have an accidental discharge, a Dingus within 100 yards of any of those, “occupied structures”, which basically is virtually everywhere, you’re now looking at a felony charge, which will make you a convicted felon. It will cost you your gun rights throughout the entire United States, because you’d be a convicted felon. You will face criminal prosecution in New Jersey and loss of your guns and your gun license. Evan Nappen 17:32 So, what does this mean, folks? It means, if you ever have an accidental discharge, SHUT THE F UP!!! That’s right. You do not call the police if you had an accidental issue. You don’t incriminate yourself. You don’t talk about it to anyone. They have criminalized this. You have a Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. They did not put any immunity in this law for reporting an accidental discharge. You not only have no obligation to report it, you have a specific Constitutional right now against doing it. Saying you have a right not to do it, because you have a right against self-incrimination. And they’ve made it what is a virtual, almost per se, strict liability, virtually, virtually, offense. At least, how in reality, it’s going to play out. If you have an accidental discharge within 100 yards of that structure and you didn’t have a lawful purpose, did you? Was it reasonable that you deviated from the standard of not ensuring that your gun was unloaded? You can see this felony Dingus problem here, and it now applies throughout New Jersey. Page – 5 – of 14 Teddy Nappen 19:15 One concern, though, Dad, is that. Does the law address, you know, malfunction? Because we’ve had plenty of stories, you know, from the both of the SIG 320 and / or various other pistols that do have, like, mechanical failures. Is that addressed in the law? Evan Nappen 19:34 It’s not addressed in the law. And, you know, maybe if it was an actual SIG problem that can be proven, that it was mechanical, that that would be a defense at law here. You know that would be something where they’re not going to hold the recklessness standard to your conscious disregard of known risk. However, New Jersey has brought a suit against SIG itself for the problem with those guns. I wouldn’t put it past the Government trying to argue that you should have known the risk because you possess a SIG that’s known to have these problems, and we’re suing them over it. And how did you not know that your gun might have this problem? I mean, who knows how extreme they’ll go? I think it is conceivably a good defense, but they’re still going to fight that. I assure you. Evan Nappen 20:37 But short of an actual mechanical defect in a gun, short of that, this law is a huge threat. It is essentially the equivalent of making, if we made every fender bender with a driver, a felony in New Jersey. You would then have a situation where you wouldn’t want to report any car accident. Because upon reporting it, you would immediately have a right against self-incrimination, and you’d be putting yourself in jeopardy of a felony. Well, this is what New Jersey has done with the felony Dingus law to New Jerseyans, and you need to know that. You’re going to have to stand firm on your rights. If you have an AD, the first thing you do is call your lawyer who understands criminal law and understands the gun laws, so that you can be advised on this. It’s critical. The risk here is great, and it will jeopardize your freedom, your livelihood, and your gun rights. You can get at least a year and a half as a maximum, if they go to just the fourth degree level with this offense. So, you’re looking at felony Dingus here. Teddy Nappen 22:13 There’s a bit of irony. When you think about this law, I imagine just go from their perspective. Just the twisted mindset of the gun rights suppressor. In this idea, they’re trying to cut down on accidental discharges, but they’re going to go hidden because of that exact issue. It kind of goes. I remember being explained once in boxing. They did a rule change where they banned rapid punching. You know, we could do, like quick jabs, but in doing so, they required you to punch with an extended arm. They’re like, oh, we’re gonna cut down on the injuries. But it did the opposite. Because people were getting punched with an extended arm, it would cause more concussions. So, it’s just that level of almost self-fulfilling prophecy. It’s not doing anything. It causes the very harm that it meant to prevent. Evan Nappen 22:59 It will. It will. Because now when you have this instead. Let’s say, if you have an accidental discharge, instead of investigating, seeing if it hits somebody or something, or where, when or what it did, you’re going to jeopardize yourself criminally. Now you have to stand on your rights. You’re going to have to just take the Fifth immediately and stand on your rights. Call your attorney. It’s completely criminalized, criminalized. And because of that, your criminal due process rights kick in. And we might, you know, Page – 6 – of 14 normally if they were smart, they would have had an immunity for reporting it. But they don’t. They don’t. There’s no immunity here. If you report it, you’re putting yourself in jeopardy, and you’re giving up your Fifth and Sixth amendment rights by so doing. It is a stupid law. It is not just a Dingus felony, a Dingus law. It is a law passed by Dinguses and signed by Dinguses. It is literally the felony Dingus law, and so aptly named. Evan Nappen 24:10 Hey, on a different subject. Real quick, I just want to mention a landmark little factoid that I think you’ll find pretty cool. The U.S. has broken the firearm ownership number of 500 million. There are over 500 million privately owned firearms in the United States. Boy, that is fantastic. (https://www.thetruthaboutguns.com/us-civilian-gun-ownership-500-million/) Teddy Nappen 24:49 We need to get those numbers up. Evan Nappen 24:52 Yeah, right. We need to get those numbers up. According to the National Shooting Sports Foundation, civilian gun ownership in the U.S. has surpassed the 500 million mark, reaching an estimated 506 million firearms, and the more guns means the more impossibility of banning and seizing them. There is strength in numbers. This figure is based on Federal Manufacturing and import data compiled from 1990 through 2023 using ATF records. And the estimate accounts for firearms manufactured domestically and sold, as well as firearms imported for the commercial market. It also said that there’s continued growth with the ARs in America. Since 1990, 32 million AR-type rifles have entered circulation. 32 million ARs. Talk about being in common use. 32 million. Kind of says it all. Anyway, so we’re way up there. And it says, looking specifically, by the way, at 2023, they said a total of 13,574,653 firearms were made available to the U.S. market when imports were included. So, that was that one year, 2023, over 13 million. Handguns accounted for the majority, with 8,176,000 units, followed by 3,899,000 rifles and 1,498,000 shotguns. So, this is great news. We are definitely the land of firearms, and the Second Amendment is strong in numbers. We’ve broken the 500 million mark for U.S. gun ownership. Evan Nappen 27:23 One other quick note here that I find. A little tidbit here, and this is from militarynyi.com. Mossburg has received a new contract from the Pentagon for about $11.6 million. (https://militarnyi.com/en/news/usa-orders-mossberg-590a1-shotguns-with-custom-barrels-for-drone-interception/) It provides that they’re going to supply Mossberg 590A1 pump shotguns, which are great guns, by the way. I’m going to tell you about 590A1s in a minute. But what’s really cool about this one is that this particular shotgun is designed to combat drones. It’s made to shoot down drones. It has a 17-inch barrel with a specific configuration that’s designed for convenient placement in submarine racks. And it’s also made so that it can use special tungsten shot ammunition, tungsten shot ammo, to shoot down UAVs. And this is literally what the Government said. So, they’ve taken the 590A1s and the load, the shotgun load, is a two ounce number nine bird shot, a tungsten load. And it says it puts a large number of small tungsten pellets, creating a dense cloud ideal for hitting small targets. So, if you thought skeet shooting and trap Page – 7 – of 14 shooting was fun, how about tungsten drone shooting with Mossberg 590A1s. There you go, guys. Now we’re talking about a whole new sport. Teddy Nappen 29:28 Do you remember Amazon delivering those packages with drones? Yeah, well, trap shooting with prizes. Evan Nappen 29:37 Well, there you go. Trap shooting with prizes. But you know something about the 590A1, I gotta tell you. That’s really a great shotgun. And look, I have no financial interest in them. I just love that gun. That gun has a special thing about it when it comes to New Jersey. It is a pump shotgun, military spec shotgun. The 598 one is different from the 590 the a one has a thicker barrel, stronger receiver. It is a really tough shotgun, and it’s a pump shotgun. And because it’s a pump, it’s not semi auto. So, you can have a 590A1 in New Jersey. It can have a nine shot magazine in it. It can have a folding stock. It can have a pistol grip. It can have a bayonet lug, and they do have a bayonet lug. It can have all the whistles and bells on it and not be an assault firearm because it’s a pump shotgun. Only a semi-automatic shotgun falls under New Jersey’s assault firearm law. So, if you really want to have one of the best New Jersey legal combat shotgun with any of the fun features, then the 590A1 is unbeatable for New Jersey. And plus, when you rack that slide, any bad guy hearing that usually registers it in his pants, when you hear that racking going on. So, you should consider having one in your home defense. The 590A1, it’s a great gun. I don’t know if those tungsten loads will be available to the public or not, but this is fun stuff that I wanted to bring to your attention. Evan Nappen 31:32 Hey, let me tell you about our good friends at WeShoot. WeShoot is our gun range that Teddy and I shoot at, and we love it there. They are a fantastic range right in Lakewood, New Jersey, and they have some good specials going on. They have a Sig Sauer P365 Flux, which is the evolution of the micro-compact carry gun, now paired with the FLUX defense chassis for enhanced stability, capacity and speed in a PDW-style platform. They have a Smith & Wesson M&P 9 M2.0 Compact, which is their carry size powerhouse with a flat face trigger, aggressive grip texture, built to perform under pressure with everyday reliability. And they have a Mossberg Gold Reserve Super Sport, a competition-ready over / under, an over and under, 12 gauge with eye-catching scroll engraving, polished blue finish, and a premium walnut stock built for the clay sports game. So, these are just a few of the hot guns being highlighted by WeShoot. You should definitely check them out. Go to weshootusa.com. Evan Nappen 32:52 You can also check out Juliana. She’s fully locked in and in love with her MAC 5, showing off, the versatile fun a modern sporting rifle platform can be. So, go to WeShoot's website – weshootusa.com. You can check out Juliana there with the MAC 5. You can also see the other great photographs that WeShoot prides themselves on. When you go to the range there, you will be very impressed. They have fantastic training, and you can get your certificate there to get your carry. You can also get all kinds of training for both beginners and experienced shooters, as well. They have top people on their staff. It is a great resource that you should take advantage of. Go to weshootusa.com and learn the best kept secret in New Jersey the WeShoot range, a fantastic place. Page – 8 – of 14 Evan Nappen 33:57 Let me also tell you about our good friends at the Association of New Jersey Rifle & Pistol Clubs. They are the stalwart defenders of our gun rights in New Jersey. New Jersey is one tough environment, as you know, and without a great group like the Association, we’d be even worse off. Can you imagine even worse? So we’re there. We’re there with the association. You need to be with us. I’m a member. You need to be a member. It is critical. They’re the ones in Trenton with a full-time paid lobbyist keeping track of the shenanigans going on there. And we’re able to make a difference. Believe it or not. We are. Plus we have the battles ongoing in the courts, and, man, I am excited for them. We have some appellate stuff going on now, an we’re going to be getting some great results. I feel it. I know it. We’ll be reporting about that and telling you all about it here on Gun Lawyer. Evan Nappen 35:00 It’s a slow climb, because the wheels turn slow. But folks, it is. It is something where I know we’re going to be successful, and the Association is there for you, fighting for your rights. Go to anjrpc.org and join today. Make sure you’re part of the solution. Join your official NRA state affiliate, the Association. You’ll get the email alerts to the legislative alerts and court results, and you’ll be on top of things. You’ll get a beautiful newsletter. The best in the state, so you’ll know what’s going on here in New Jersey, and you’ll have the resources of the Association behind you. So, go to anjrpc.org and join today. Evan Nappen 35:58 And while you’re at it, make sure you get a copy of my book, New Jersey Gun Law. It’s the Bible of New Jersey gun law. It’s over 500 pages in a question and answer format. It explains everything you need to know so you can avoid becoming a GOFU in New Jersey. And man, do you need that because New Jersey is crazy. And to not be destroyed by the state’s gun laws, and instead be able to exercise safely and legally your rights. You need my book, New Jersey Gun Law. Go to EvanNappen.com and get your copy today. When you do get your book, right down there on the front cover, make sure you scan the QR code, and you can immediately join for free, my private subscriber base. You’ll be able to access immediately the updates, which I’ll have a new update coming out very shortly here, updating the new laws, doing a comprehensive 2026 Update. You get all that for free. So, your book stays current. Go to EvanNappen.com and get your copy today. Teddy, what do you have for us today? Teddy Nappen 37:15 Well, as we know, Press Checks are always free. And look, everyone has been seeing it on the Left, where they’re all of a sudden now everyone seems to have become an expert on the Second Amendment. As you, which, every time I hear that, I think the words Second Amendment TM – trademark, because it’s their version of the Second Amendment. They never actually go into too many details. But I will say, and this is very funny. From MSN, from this writer, Adam Lynch, “‘Never seen a surge like this:’ Panicked liberals are stocking up on guns..” (https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/never-seen-a-surge-like-this-panicked-liberals-are-stocking-up-on-guns/ar-AA1QuJEL) Huh! The 500 million mark is coming into play. But I love this. If you ever want to laugh, read an MSN article, because it’s just so, not just the propaganda, but the sourcing and how it works. It’s, okay. It goes. “NPR reports liberals and members of the LGBTQ community are buying guns to protect themselves as both the White House and national discourse grows increasingly hostile.” I love how Page – 9 – of 14 they cite their sources, NPR. Like NPR is a reputable source, but yeah. And I love this, a random unnamed Maryland Doctor. It just says Maryland Doctor. I’m not saying. Evan Nappen 38:40 Oh, is he related to the Maryland man? Teddy Nappen 38:43 I guess. I know. Maybe he’s from Venezuela or El Salvador. “I’m not saying that’s what’s going to happen. What I’m saying is none of this is out of the question.” In regards to, like, Trump is going to start kicking in doors on like just. And I love this. “Charles, who is black, says he bought his handgun after Trump administration did things that scared him . . .” Okay. Evan Nappen 39:15 Well, I’ll tell you what. Every gun owner is someone with a vested interest in the Second Amendment. So, good. Yeah, good. Teddy Nappen 39:24 And they decided to do interviews. They say 30 sources, unnamed, mind you. Where they’re saying NPR reports, the face of gun ownership is changing. Once perceived as the white, rural and Republican, gun clubs or trainers, Second Amendment advocates and academic researchers now say that liberals, people of color, and LGBTQ members have been buying guns and training with them since Trump’s re-election. First of all, I like how they separate people of color and Republicans when the mass. Evan Nappen 39:54 The Second Amendment is for everybody. Teddy Nappen 39:56 Yeah! Evan Nappen 39:56 It’s for everybody. Teddy Nappen 39:57 Yeah. And also they need to remember that Hispanics overwhelmingly voted for Trump and are leaning conservative. Blacks overwhelmingly, comparatively, Trump had the most vote of black Americans since dating back to Nixon. So, whenever they try to separate out and try to paint the Republican Party as racist. I always remind them of that. It’s just such stupidity on their part. But going into that, I did love this. So, Thomas Boyer, the spokesman for the San Francisco Chapter the Pink Pistols, said, “Armed gays don’t get bashed.” Evan Nappen 40:37 Right! They don’t. Page – 10 – of 14 Teddy Nappen 40:39 I know. Didn’t you actually like, did they bring you on once, the Pink Pistols? Evan Nappen 40:43 They made me an honorary life member of the Pink Pistols, believe it or not, which is fine, great. The Second Amendment is for everyone. And you know, it doesn’t matter whether someone is liberal or conservative or what their sexual preference or race is. It is all our right. All of us have this right, and we always want to be consistent. Whether or not politically I agree with anything on the Left, it doesn’t matter. In the same way that I support their right to free speech, even though I disagree with them. Rights are rights. And the point here is we can have common ground, and we’re seeing common ground. We’re actually seeing it. Because as more of the Left wants guns, that’s great. Join with us, and let’s pass laws that enhance the Second Amendment. As a matter of fact, think of it this way, folks. The anti-Second Amendment, the Second Amendment oppressors, they don’t want the Left to exercise gun rights any more than they want the right to exercise gun rights because they are anti-gun rights. We are pro-gun rights. We want all people. And every time anybody becomes a gun owner, they now get a vested interest in our Second Amendment rights. So, this creates that common ground, and that can include national reciprocity. It can include Pretti’s Law that we’ve talked about, right? It means this is an opportunity. So, don’t let the Left’s political views cloud our commitment to universal Second Amendment rights. Teddy Nappen 42:56 So, going off of that, one of the things the article cited to was a group known as, I never heard of these guys, the Liberal Gun Club. It was from this firearm instructor, David Phillips. They have 30 chapters in other, in other states. And they said their membership has grown from 2,700 in November to 4,500. So, going off of that, I actually wanted to look these guys up to understand, like, what is a Liberal Gun Club? (https://theliberalgunclub.com/) Like it just, you just, you’re going off of that. I hear those two words, and it just doesn’t sound right. And so. Evan Nappen 43:32 But, it is right. It is right. Evan Nappen 43:35 But I know why you would think it wouldn’t be. Teddy Nappen 43:35 I know. Evan Nappen 43:37 Bingo. Teddy Nappen 43:37 Yeah, exactly. And I went to their website, and this is what was funny. The common ground managers, where they go into, we are, they go into. They include and oppose the assault weapon ban as well as restriction of magazine capacity. Page – 11 – of 14 Teddy Nappen 43:37 And this view is directly related to our preference of an enforcement approach rather than regulation. Then, and what’s even funnier, the one thing that I found, the little nugget in their entire list, they are for national reciprocity. Evan Nappen 44:11 The other factor is, and I dug deeper into them, they actually spoke out against Bloomberg and the Moms Demand Action. Evan Nappen 44:11 Okay. So, look at this liberal gun group here, the Liberal Gun Club. Liberal gun group is against the assault firearm ban, against the magazine ban and pro-national reciprocity. Guess what? We’re all on the same page. This is our common ground. This is a common ground that we need to further develop. We need the pro-Second Amendment side to happily join in the same issues that we mutually support. Look, there are things we have differences about, without a doubt, okay? Most of the liberal agenda I am not, not, on board with at all, but that’s okay. Because the issue that I care most about, the issue that is my entire life’s calling and yours as well, Teddy, is the Second Amendment. And if this group is supporting what I support, then we can be together on those issues. We need to be together on those issues and not try to exclude or judge or separate anybody away because we don’t agree with the rest of their politics. I don’t care about the rest of their politics. That’s fine for us to have our differences, but this is where we’re together. And what you just said, there is great. We need more of that. Because that’s how we can finally get the rest of the Left to lay off our rights and to pass something like National Reciprocity, to quit trying to screw with us at every turn, to disenfranchise us from our gun rights. We can unite here. Evan Nappen 46:09 Even better. Teddy Nappen 46:12 Which they go into with the head president of the yet all actions they say you need to take is to donate to them. And what can they do with their donations, or, quote, unquote, saving lives and quote unquote, ending gun violence, or so they say. However, they spend, the national group spends most of their time advocacy related to gun violence focused exclusively on passing stricter gun control laws, which have already been disproven. So, they even agree that gun control fails. They actually agree it does not solve any of the issues that they actually are worried about. And they cited to a book, and this reminded me of one you brought to me once, it was “Restricting Handguns” by Don Kates. Evan Nappen 47:07 Yes! Teddy Nappen 47:08 Where it was the liberal. It was the liberal skeptics guide where, you know, liberals. Page – 12 – of 14 Evan Nappen 47:14 The Liberal skeptics speak out. Okay. Don Kates was one of my mentors when I first became a lawyer. And prior to becoming a lawyer, I was a member of the very first firearm law firm in America. It was Bennison, Kates and Hardy, and I was in the New York City law office of Bennison and Kates. I knew Don Kates and Mark Bennison, and Dave Hardy. Don Kates was out in California, and he was criminology professor. Don Kates was great guy, and he wanted to do this very thing we’re talking about here. Of cross trestling, of uniting, of making liberals see that the Second Amendment is critical for them as well as us. And so, his book “Restricting Handguns – The Liberal Skeptics Speak Out” was all about folks who you would normally think would be anti- Second Amendment and were not. (https://openlibrary.org/books/OL4408746M/Restricting_handguns) Evan Nappen 48:26 Interestingly, Mark Benson, who was the other partner, was a former president of Amnesty International. But Mark was solidly pro-Second Amendment. I mean, Kates taught criminal justice and law in California. Okay? We’re talking about folks you might normally think of on the Left, but were actually hard-core Second Amendment great pro-gun fighters. I’ll tell you. Don Kates was the first guy that I ever met that carried a firearm, regardless. He said, Second Amendment, and that’s it. And I always was impressed how much he believed in the Second Amendment. He was fantastic. And it was great experience working for that firm and being part of the very first firearm law firm in America. Of course, now firearm law is an identified area of practice, but then people had never heard of such a thing. So, Don Kates, with this book, really had a lot of impact, and to this day, it’s still being utilized and cited because the Liberal Gun Club that you talk about is the same idea. And Kate was really ahead of his time in identifying this very thing. We need to join with the other side when they are with us on our issue. Teddy Nappen 50:14 And what was really, really funny is he meant, and there was a similar book where he references a book called “Beyond Control” by Jacob Sullum. He talks about the racist roots of gun control and drug control. (https://www.beyondcontrolbook.net/) Evan Nappen 50:27 There you go. Teddy Nappen 50:28 And it’s that, it’s that inner weaving of the policies to actually put that in perspective, because everyone on the Left, like they typically, are in lockstep on this. But if we can turn this, just like with the trans issue, if we can turn this into a 90/10 issue, we could get national reciprocity. The vast majority like this. Imagine The Trace and Bloomberg having to, I just saw this, just on my feed, where they’re trying to say, don’t go out and buy firearms. Don’t, don’t kid. Telling their liberal followers, don’t go out and buy firearms, even though they’re all calling for the Second Amendment on it. It’s that level. They have so pushed. Page – 13 – of 14 Evan Nappen 51:12 They are so scared to death that, yeah, this very thing that we’re talking about here is actually happening and taking place. And we on the pro-gun side need to put out our hand of friendship to the other side when they’re with us on our issue. Because those that oppose us, the oppressors, are scared to death of it, and with good reason. This can make us win. It can get our rights back. This is the way to do it, folks. I honestly believe and have fought for this. And throughout my legal career, we’ve seen how the liberal causes so-called, whether you know, traditionally where they claim were pro-civil rights, yet they go after a single black mom. Shaneen Allen, who had a carry permit from Pennsylvania and happened to be in the Democratic People’s Republic of New Jersey, gets put through the shredder. It’s the institutionalized racism that our good friend John Petrolino has talked about and shown in the permitting system. These are the things that are out there that the Left, historically, would have been concerned with, but somehow they block it out with guns. No, no. Join. Join together. This can get our movement over the top. Evan Nappen 52:44 The other thing they can do. This will be the Midas touch. Once they see the National Reciprocity and start carrying, all of a sudden, all the things that they were supporting, Red Flag, Universal Background Check, both things are going to predominantly deny them their rights. Because I think there’s a statistic showing, I think, it’s 67 or 68% of liberals or Democrats have mental health issues which screws them out of their rights. So, this is the key to getting them to see that this is the path to victory of how to get the Second Amendment back. Then we can remove all these insane regulations. Evan Nappen 53:22 Incrementally, get to where we need to be. Well, Teddy, I appreciate it. A great, great topic. And I want to tell you about this week’s GOFU, which is, of course, the Gun Owner Fuck Up, where actual clients, actual cases, where we see the problem, and you get to learn the lesson for free. And this week’s GOFU is pretty simple. Don’t involve the police in your life unless you absolutely have to. And what I mean is this. There are mechanisms in law that are there that people have no idea how it suddenly affects your gun rights. And that includes the so- called wellness check, even domestic violence, all these things where they’re played up as extremely important. And I’m not saying they aren’t. But it makes it so that individuals that invoke any of these laws and involve the Government in your life, next thing you know, guns are being seized. Individuals are losing their rights, and they’re having to fight to get them back. Evan Nappen 54:36 Often it’s the very person that invokes the law itself. Yeah, we see this. We get cases where the person called the police to scare their partner or to just get more attention to it. But they don’t realize that gets the entire system to come down on them, taking guns and ruining lives. They have no clue of the impact once the Government gets in your life. Forget it. It’s going to be a fight. It’s the old, I think, Ronald Reagan said, you know, “We’re here from the Government. We’re here to help.” Yeah, that’s the joke, and it’s true. This is what happens. You get a wellness check done, and boom, guns are taken. You’re now fighting for your rights. We get these all the time. Look, I understand. If someone has serious problems and they need help, maybe you’ve got to do it. If you’re being abused, okay. But, you know, if it’s not something that the Government has to get involved in, do not involve the Government. Page – 14 – of 14 Evan Nappen 55:22 Over and over and over again, we get, I get the calls. I call them “the calls of regret”. The phone calls of regret. They’re GOFUs. And yet, for me to even say this, I’ll get criticized. How dare you say that? How about stopping me? We need to know call. I see the reality of it in the practice. I get the phone call of regret when you involve the Government. So, the GOFU is that be very, very careful. Very, very selective, if you ever want to put the Government in your life or a loved one’s life. Because the ramifications, particularly in the Democratic People’s Republic of New Jersey, can be very significant and can dramatically impact yours and your loved ones lives. Evan Nappen 56:47 This is Evan Nappen and Teddy Nappen reminding you that gun laws don’t protect honest citizens from criminals. They protect criminals from honest citizens. 56:57 Gun Lawyer is a CounterThink Media production. The music used in this broadcast was managed by Cosmo Music, New York, New York. Reach us by emailing Evan@gun.lawyer. The information and opinions in this broadcast do not constitute legal advice. Consult a licensed attorney in your state. Downloadable PDF TranscriptGun Lawyer S5 E276_Transcript About The HostEvan Nappen, Esq.Known as “America's Gun Lawyer,” Evan Nappen is above all a tireless defender of justice. Author of eight bestselling books and countless articles on firearms, knives, and weapons history and the law, a certified Firearms Instructor, and avid weapons collector and historian with a vast collection that spans almost five decades — it's no wonder he's become the trusted, go-to expert for local, industry and national media outlets. Regularly called on by radio, television and online news media for his commentary and expertise on breaking news Evan has appeared countless shows including Fox News – Judge Jeanine, CNN – Lou Dobbs, Court TV, Real Talk on WOR, It's Your Call with Lyn Doyle, Tom Gresham's Gun Talk, and Cam & Company/NRA News. As a creative arts consultant, he also lends his weapons law and historical expertise to an elite, discerning cadre of movie and television producers and directors, and novelists. He also provides expert testimony and consultations for defense attorneys across America. Email Evan Your Comments and Questions  talkback@gun.lawyer Join Evan's InnerCircleHere's your chance to join an elite group of the Savviest gun and knife owners in America.  Membership is totally FREE and Strictly CONFIDENTIAL.  Just enter your email to start receiving insider news, tips, and other valuable membership benefits.   Email (required) *First Name *Select list(s) to subscribe toInnerCircle Membership Yes, I would like to receive emails from Gun Lawyer Podcast. (You can unsubscribe anytime)Constant Contact Use. Please leave this field blank.var ajaxurl = "https://gun.lawyer/wp-admin/admin-ajax.php";

Novelists Maggie O'Farrell, Stacey Halls, and Ruta Sepetys on turning research into living scenes, building non-linear structure that still feels clear, and writing voice and dialogue that make the past feel immediate. Timestamps:00:01:30 Maggie O'Farrell00:26:14 Stacey Halls00:49:33 Ruta Sepetys You'll learn:The importance of "reading like a writer" to reverse-engineer time, tense, and technique from books you love.How to structure a non-chronological narrative using flowcharts and “breadcrumb trails” so readers never feel lost.Where to look for small, specific historical details that unlock character, scene, and momentum.A practical way to treat research as idea-generation, not “homework you must finish” before you start drafting.A simple plotting method (index cards + one-sentence scenes) that helps you see the whole book at a glance.Why a first draft is allowed to be rough, and how that mindset can help you write faster and finish.How “writing toward a feeling” can guide structure when you can't see the whole plot in advance.Ways to keep going through the long middle by focusing on the work itself, not external noise.How to use collaboration and expert readers to pressure-test cultural and historical authenticity. Resources & Links:Join our LWS community!Maggie's full episode and notesStacey's full episode and notesRuta's full episode and notes About the authors:Maggie O'Farrell is the bestselling author of Hamnet and The Marriage Portrait, noted for lyrical prose and inventive structure; her craft insights span sentence-level cadence, non-linear timelines, and historically grounded voice.Note: Our episode with Maggie was done in collaboration with Arvon, the UK's leading creative writing charity. Arvon believes everyone can benefit from the transformative power of creative writing. It hosts residential, online and community-based writing courses and events, embracing over 6,000 people each year, tutored by some of the most respected writers in the UK today. Find out more at arvon.orgStacey Halls is the UK author of The Familiars, The Foundling, and Mrs England, known for vivid period settings, propulsive plotting, and character-driven suspense; she outlines with index cards and drafts quickly before deep revision.Ruta Sepetys is a Lithuanian-American novelist (Between Shades of Gray, Salt to the Sea) whose work uncovers suppressed histories with YA-accessible clarity; she emphasizes collaboration, ethical research, and a clear “why” for every project. For show notes, transcripts and to attend our live podcasts visit: podcast.londonwriterssalon.com.For free writing sessions, join free Writers' Hours: writershour.com.*FOLLOW LONDON WRITERS' SALONTwitter: twitter.com/​​WritersSalonInstagram: instagram.com/londonwriterssalonFacebook: facebook.com/LondonWritersSalonIf you're enjoying this show, please rate and review this show!

In this episode, we get into Ben's favorite Hong film of all time, Yourself and Yours. If On The Beach At Night Alone is Hong's first reflection on the scandalized reception to the reveal of his relationship with Kim Min-hee, Ben shares the theory that Yourself and Yours is secretly the one about its beginning. In our discussion, we try to pin down Minjung's slippery personas, pick apart the film's dream sequences, define the qualities of Hong's surrealist and yet mundane approach, and ask, what does it take to be a Hong film that believes in love?Links:Yourself and Yours segmentationInexplicable doppelganger listHong Sang-soo Notarized: Yourself and YoursBreak a leg at our FREE patreon, discord server, and our socials @ www.deepcutpod.com Timestamps:00:00 Intro02:00 Film Intro04:05 General reactions09:12 AFA Post screening discussion 11:45 Film context15:20 Structure / segmentation20:28 Doppelgangers and dreams26:06 Perception of Mnjung31:09 The ending33:47 Context in Hong's career36:25 Ben's favorite scene40:15 Parallel characters and Hong-isms46:00 Reflection on discussion53:45 Outro

These principles create strong, mobile, pain-free bodies that last for life.No more wasted reps. No more crap workouts. No more broken body parts.▶️ Rad and I created a free deep-dive coaching videoWatch it now and discover exactly how we design UMS workouts for our clients.

Sun, Feb 8 7:32 PM → 7:32 PM Structure fire with entrapment tones for Blacksburg Fire and Longshop Fire Radio Systems: - New River Valley Emergency Communications

BONUS: Conflict Is the Yellow Brick Road to Success — How Embracing Conflict Transforms Teams and Leaders In this bonus episode, we explore why fear, conflict, and courage sit at the heart of true agility with Dan Tocchini, a leadership catalyst who has spent over four decades helping teams at organizations like ESPN, Disney, and Homeboy Industries break through the human barriers to high performance. Dan shares powerful stories and practical wisdom on how leaders can embrace conflict as a generative force, build trust through vulnerability, and restructure their teams for genuine agility. The Power of Vulnerability in Leadership "I'd rather have it on an honest basis, where she knows what I'm thinking, what I'm aiming at, and we're shoulder to shoulder, not head to head."   Dan's career-defining moment came when he told a CFO at ESPN — while he was competing against McKinsey for the same contract — that she was the problem behind her department's 75% turnover rate. Rather than sugarcoating or deflecting, Dan chose vulnerability and honesty, even at the risk of losing the contract. This radical transparency became his superpower. The CFO hired him, and within six months, turnover dropped to 15%. Dan stayed with ESPN for eight years. The lesson for Scrum Masters and leaders: you can only truly connect with someone if you're willing to be honest, even when it might cost you. Listening for Openings, Not Outcomes "Most people listen for outcomes. I listen for openings."   Dan draws a critical distinction between chasing outcomes and discovering openings. When faced with an angry car buyer who felt ripped off, Dan didn't try to close the sale. Instead, he leaned into the conflict, acknowledged the customer's perspective, and opened all the books. The result? A sale with 17% margin — above the dealership average — because the customer chose the price himself. For leaders, this means detaching from your desired outcome and focusing on understanding the opening in front of you. That shift builds trust and often produces better results than pushing for what you want. Why Team Drama Is a Distraction Strategy "Whenever there's drama, it's because people don't want you to see something."   Drama in teams happens because people are siloed, and they silo because they don't trust each other. They share only the information that serves their position without jeopardizing their role. The drama itself is a distraction — like a child throwing a tantrum so you'll forget what they did wrong. Dan's approach: ask three questions. What are they committed to causing? How much of that are they producing? And what's the story between the two? The problem is never the problem — the problem is how you think about the problem. Restructuring for Agility: A Restaurant Case Study "Your way of being needs to be bigger than the structure."   Dan illustrates agile restructuring through a top-25 restaurant in Boise where the general manager flows seamlessly between roles — bussing tables, coordinating with the kitchen, and leading the team — without ever pulling rank. The secret? He grounds his team before every shift with genuine connection, shared meals, and open dialogue. When he gives direction, people move — not from fear, but from respect. Structure alone won't solve problems; it only organizes them so you can see them better. Leaders must be committed to what the structure is designed to accomplish, altering it in motion when needed. Conflict as a Generative Force "What you're not willing to face will eventually defeat you."   Dan's core philosophy centers on embracing conflict rather than avoiding it. When people face conflict, they either seek comfort by avoiding it or realize what's at stake and find a way through. The Stoic principle "the obstacle is the way" applies: to find the path, you must hug the cactus and pull the problem close. In relationships — whether marriage, team, or client — breakdowns should deepen intimacy and trust. Dan reports that 90% of the time, authentically facing into mistakes with clients deepens relationships and keeps contracts alive. What Keeps Dan Going After Four Decades "People love to accomplish things they didn't think they could do. To me, that's exciting."   After more than 40 years in this work, Dan remains energized by working with people to accomplish challenges they initially thought impossible. He describes his work as akin to family — that same depth of connection and shared purpose. His one-liner: "We turn leadership into leadership." It sparks curiosity and opens conversations about what real leadership transformation looks like. About Dan Tocchini   Dan Tocchini has spent 35+ years working with leadership teams across the spectrum — from ESPN to nonprofits like Defy Ventures — helping them evolve from functional to fully alive. His work focuses on the human systems that make agile succeed… or silently kill it.   You can find out more about Dan and his leadership training programs at TakeNewGround.com.

In this episode, I share an observation that quietly changed the way I think about motivation, consistency, and momentum: Motivation is not what carries you forward — structure is. We're often told that if we want to stay consistent, we need to feel motivated. Inspired. Energized. Ready. But motivation is emotional. And emotions fluctuate. We can care deeply and still feel exhausted. We can be disciplined and still feel stuck. We can believe in what we're building and still find ourselves starting over. This episode invites you to pause and ask a deeper question: Am I relying on motivation — or am I supported by structure? Because motivation creates spikes. Structure creates steadiness. And steadiness is what builds momentum when life gets heavy.

In this episode of the Reading Teacher's Lounge, hosts Mary and Shannon welcome expert Sara Lee to discuss best practices for teaching grammar and syntax. They dive into how understanding sentence structure, grammatical functions, and modifiers can elevate both reading comprehension and writing skills for students of all ages. Sara emphasizes the importance of embedding grammar instruction within reading and writing activities, and provides practical strategies for making grammar engaging and relevant. Specific strategies, such as focusing on sentence nuclei, harnessing descriptive modifiers, and being mindful of students' language acquisition backgrounds, are discussed. Additionally, Sara emphasizes the importance of providing meaningful practice opportunities and underscores the value of understanding grammar as the structure of language. The episode is rich with actionable insights and resources to help teachers better support their students.00:00 Welcome to the Reading Teacher Lounge00:40 Shannon's Green Chef Experience01:38 Introducing Our Special Guest: Sara Lee02:31 Diving into Grammar and Syntax05:33 Understanding Grammatical Functions07:55 Challenges and Resources for Teaching Grammar10:04 Practical Applications and Student Engagement12:41 The Importance of Sentence Structure25:05 Using AI to Enhance Grammar Lessons32:23 Supporting Multi-Language Learners35:22 Challenges in Teaching Writing36:38 Tips for Enhancing Writing Skills39:34 Using Sentence Nucleus for Creativity41:28 Grammar in Reading and Writing Instruction44:30 Engaging Students in Grammar48:41 Resources for Teaching Grammar01:02:02 Making Grammar Fun and Approachable01:03:18 Conclusion and Final ThoughtsRECOMMENDED RESOURCES RELEVANT TO THE EPISODE:The Literacy DoctorSentence Composing (Don Killgallon)Grammar for Middle School: A Sentence Composing Approach by Don and Jenny Killgallon *Amazon affiliate linkThe Death of Practice (Sara's blog post)GrammarismLinguistics GirlWord HippoVideo from Dr. Bowers and Marie Foley (Nested Combinatorial Structure)Timothy Shanahan's blog post:   Comprehension Instruction that Really Helps-Teaching CohesionEvan Moor Daily Paragraph Editing book *Amazon affiliate linkSupport the show Get Literacy Support through our Patreon Bonus Episodes access through your podcast app Bonus episodes access through Patreon Buy us a coffee Get a FREE Green Chef box using our link

A coming crypto apocalypse approaches as the total crypto market cap collapses from $4.3 trillion to $2.3 trillion in just four months. The final piece of legislation needed to meld the crypto world with mainstream finance is at risk of getting derailed.~This episode is sponsored by BTCC~BTCC 10% Deposit Bonus! ➜ https://bit.ly/PBNBTCC00:00 Intro00:10 Sponsor: BTCC00:40 Peak Fear01:15 Congress feeling the pressure: “crypto hell”03:00 Senator Boozeman says “months”03:30 Not Hell... "Ragnarok!"05:30 Tether goes all-in on gold06:00 Hyperliquid Defies Market07:30 Bloomberg girl loses faith?08:40 Tom Lee crashes Michael Saylor keynote to FUD Bitcoin10:30 Tom Lee asks “why no bitcoin adoption?”11:20 World liberty selling Bitcoin to pay loans11:30 FatThumb12:50 Mainstream Media bitcoin price predictions14:10 China making it easier for U.S. to win15:00 Trump hasn't said anything about Crypto yet15:40 Dems gloating16:00 WLFI ad no one wants to hear now17:00 $1Trillion added17:40 Eric Balchunas: ETF boomers stepped up19:50 Trends20:20 Charles Hoskinson: Endure the Red22:50 Bottom in?23:30 Horsley signal24:20 XRP recovery24:30 Outro#Crypto #bitcoin #Ethereum~Crypto Hell!

“The mission for me is simple — more businesses need to be DEBT-FREE.”With that one sentence, Stormy Banks, the Queen of Grants and founder of the Pink Print Firm, shifts the entire conversation about wealth, access, and entrepreneurship.Stormy has helped small businesses secure "over $21 MILLION in grants" — not loans, not credit, not investors… but "real money you NEVER have to pay back".In this episode of "Inside the Vault with Ash Cash", she breaks down:

How to design meetings with purpose so they actually move work forward.Meetings are a necessary part of work. But for many people, they're also a major source of frustration. According to Rebecca Hinds, meetings don't have to feel like a drain—better meetings start when we stop treating them as a default and start designing them with intention.Hinds is the author of Your Best Meeting Ever: Seven Principles for Designing Meetings That Get Things Done, and a future-of-work expert who founded the Work Innovation Lab at Asana and the Work AI Institute at Glean. She argues that the problem isn't meetings themselves, but the sheer number of poorly designed ones, and by being more thoughtful about what actually deserves synchronous time, teams can redesign how they communicate in the workplace “Meetings are the most important product in our entire organization, and yet they're also the least optimized,” she says. “The first step is recognizing we need to be much more intentional about how we're designing meetings.”In this episode of Think Fast, Talk Smart, Hinds and host Matt Abrahams discuss why meetings so often go wrong—and what it takes to make them work. Whether you're leading a team, trying to protect focus time, or simply hoping to spend less of your week in calendar invites, Hinds offers practical frameworks for designing meetings with purpose so they become a tool people actually value.To listen to the extended Deep Thinks version of this episode, please visit FasterSmarter.io/premium.Episode Reference Links:Rebecca HindsRebecca's Book: Your Best Meeting EverEp.124 Making Meetings Meaningful Pt. 1: How to Structure and Organize More Effective Gatherings Ep.125 Making Meetings Meaningful Pt. 2: Key Ingredients for Effective Meetings Connect:Premium Signup >>>> Think Fast Talk Smart PremiumEmail Questions & Feedback >>> hello@fastersmarter.ioEpisode Transcripts >>> Think Fast Talk Smart WebsiteNewsletter Signup + English Language Learning >>> FasterSmarter.ioThink Fast Talk Smart >>> LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTubeMatt Abrahams >>> LinkedInChapters:(00:00) - Introduction (01:42) - Why Meetings Feel Broken (02:57) - The Default-To-Meeting Problem (03:50) - Treat Meetings Like A Product (05:10) - Meeting Doomsday Reset (06:40) - The 4-DCEO Test (08:43) - Designing Better Meetings (10:05) - Creating a Meeting Agenda (12:58) - Context And Meeting Fatigue (14:06) - Memo-First Meetings (16:11) - The Final Three Questions (21:02) - Conclusion ********Thank you to our sponsors.  These partnerships support the ongoing production of the podcast, allowing us to bring it to you at no cost.This episode is sponsored by Strawberry.me. Get 50% off your first coaching session today at Strawberry.me/tftsJoin our Think Fast Talk Smart Learning Community and become the communicator you want to be.

Starting a law firm doesn't automatically make you a business owner—designing one does. In episode #600 of the Lawyerist Podcast, Stephanie Everett and Zack Glaser kick off a four-part series on how to design a law firm intentionally, rather than defaulting into a business you didn't mean to build.  They unpack the biggest myths lawyers believe when starting a firm, why being a good lawyer isn't enough to create a sustainable business, and how relying on personal heroics instead of structure quietly traps firm owners over time. Stephanie breaks down the three constraints that cause most firms to struggle, the three distinct paths law firms can take, and the key questions lawyers should ask early to align their business model with the life and career they actually want.  Listen to our other episodes on Law Firm Strategy & Business Design.  #583 – From Survival to Strategy: Scaling Your Law Firm Finances, with Bernadette Harris Apple | Spotify | LTN  #575 – From Overwhelmed Lawyer to Strategic Law Firm Owner, with Chad Fox Apple | Spotify | LTN  #570 – Uncover Your Firm's Journey with the New Small Firm Scorecard™, with Stephanie Everett Apple | Spotify | LTN  #568 – How to Build a Law Firm You Can Sell, with Victoria L. Collier Apple | Spotify | LTN    Have thoughts about today's episode? Join the conversation on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, and X!    If today's podcast resonates with you and you haven't read The Small Firm Roadmap Revisited yet, get the first chapter right now for free! Looking for help beyond the book? See if our coaching community is right for you.    Access more resources from Lawyerist at lawyerist.com.    Chapters / Timestamps:   00:00 – Introduction  01:15 – Why This Isn't About “Starting” a Law Firm  03:45 – The Biggest Myth Lawyers Believe About Firm Ownership  06:50 – Heroics vs. Structure  10:30 – The Three Constraints That Trap Law Firm Owners  12:45 – Every Firm Is Choosing a Business Model (Whether You Realize It or Not)  14:30 – The Three Paths Law Firms Take  18:55 – When Your Goals and Design Don't Match  20:55 – How Clients Actually Buy Legal Services  23:30 – What Breaks If Demand Doubles  25:00 – Clarity Beats Certainty  29:15 – What to Do in the First 30 Days  33:40 – Where to Go Next 

Join host Kyle Forrest and Bob Sutton and Rebecca Hinds, authors from the AI Transformation 100, as they discuss how organizations can integrate AI to amplify culture, reshape work, and instill structure, trust, and human judgement.    

MY NEWSLETTER - https://nikolas-newsletter-241a64.beehiiv.com/subscribeJoin me, Nik (https://x.com/CoFoundersNik), as I interview Jon Matzner (https://x.com/MatznerJon). In this episode, we dive into the "Matzner Mind" and Jon's unique approach to satirizing business influencers and gurus without being malicious. We discuss why building a massive following is often a trap, and why niche communities defined by influence and affluence are far more valuable than broad attention.The conversation heats up when we get into a serious debate about the SBA (Small Business Administration). Jon challenges me on whether SBA loans are just a "subsidy for boomers" and an inappropriate use of government force, while I argue they are a vital tool for economic mobility for entrepreneurs like myself. We wrap up by discussing why you should document your journey as a "fellow traveler" rather than trying to be an expert while building your business.Questions This Episode Answers:Why is having influence and affluence in a niche audience more valuable than millions of views?Is the SBA a necessary tool for entrepreneurs or an unethical use of taxpayer dollars?How can you critique business gurus and influencers effectively without being a "hater"?Why is distribution considered the only defensible moat in the age of AI?Why should founders create content about their struggles instead of just sharing "how-to" advice?Enjoy the conversation!__________________________Love it or hate it, I'd love your feedback.Please fill out this brief survey with your opinion or email me at nik@cofounders.com with your thoughts.__________________________MY NEWSLETTER: https://nikolas-newsletter-241a64.beehiiv.com/subscribeSpotify: https://tinyurl.com/5avyu98yApple: https://tinyurl.com/bdxbr284YouTube: https://tinyurl.com/nikonomicsYT__________________________This week we covered:00:00 The Importance of Pointy Opinions03:04 Influencers and Satire in Business06:02 Building a Brand Through Authenticity09:00 The Value of Distribution and Attention11:49 Influence and Affluence in Community Building14:46 The Role of Authority in Marketing18:11 The Podcast as an Intimate Medium21:03 Debating the SBA Loan Program24:29 Understanding the SBA: A Boomer Subsidy or Entrepreneurial Support?26:21 The Role of the SBA in Economic Mobility28:47 National Defense and Economic Supremacy: A Dual Perspective30:45 The Impact of Government on Monopolies and Economic Mobility32:34 Causation vs. Correlation in Economic Growth34:56 Healthcare Costs and Government Intervention36:49 The SBA's Structure and Its Implications39:14 The Debate on Government Involvement in Business Loans42:35 Prioritizing Government Reforms: Where Should Focus Lie?46:30 The Importance of Personal Journey in Entrepreneurship

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Being [at Work] offers a daily dose of leadership focused on helping you, the leader. During challenging times we need all of the encouragement we can get. Sometimes there's simply no playbook and we just need to do the best we can. Sometimes the best we can is being reminded of the gifts and insight you already have within. Be sure to subscribe and get your daily dose.   About Andrea Butcher Andrea Butcher is a visionary business leader, executive coach, and keynote speaker—she empowers leaders to gain clarity through the chaos by being MORE of who they already are. Her experiences—serving as CEO, leading at an executive level, and working in and leading global teams—make her uniquely qualified to support leadership and business success. She hosts the popular leadership podcast, Being [at Work] with a global audience of over 600,000 listeners and is the author of The Power in the Pivot (Red Thread Publishing 2022) and HR Kit for Dummies (Wiley 2023).   Connect with Andrea https://www.abundantempowerment.com/ LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/leaderdevelopmentcoach/   Abundant Empowerment Upcoming Events https://www.abundantempowerment.com/events      

Geoffrey Roberts concludes that Stalin admired American industrialism and constitutional structure while editing Soviet history, defining him as a fanatical Bolshevik intellectual driven by Marxist dogma.1896 TSAR NICHOLAS