Podcasts about Visionaries

Kelly plops down on the couch with Michael Alcee, a clinical psychologist and Mental Health Educator at Manhattan School of Music, to talk about his book, “Therapeutic Improvisation: How to Stop Winging It and Own It as a Therapist.” “Improvisation, like good poetry, works on the turn, the pivot that moves something away from seeming chaos and […]

#trucknhustle #podcast #trucknhustlepodcast "Visionaries across the #LogisticsTech and end-to-end #supplychain ecosystem, from globally recognized retailers and logistics players to #startups, #investors & #technology pioneers, are all taking the stage at Manifest!! The Truck N Hustle community saves $200 off the price to attend. Learn more and register at https://tinyurl.com/yf6e5238 We want to know Your Thoughts on this episode!! Don't forget to Leave Comments on the video and Like and Subscribe as well!! __________ GET EARLY BIRD TICKETS FOR FREIGHT FEST 2023!!: http://FreightFest.com FOR MERCH: http://www.trucknhustle.store FOR EXCLUSIVE CONTENT & MORE VISIT: https://www.trucknhustle.com/ __________ SPECIAL THANKS TO OUR SPONSORS!!: OTR SOLUTIONS https://otrsolutions.com/trucknhustle/ CALL (470)900-3338 GTT COMMERCIAL TIRES https://www.gttcommercial.tires/ CALL 1(800)991-6251 __________ MENTIONED ON TRUCK N' HUSTLE PODCAST: DAT POWER - The Industry's Most Advanced Load Board http://www.dat.com/power/0001922618 DAT TRUCKERS EDGE http://www.truckersedge.com/0001922618 DAT EXPRESS http://www.dat.com/express/0001922618 __________ THIS PODCAST WAS PRODUCED, RECORDED, SHOT & EDITED by Kweku KingNabi for Truck N' Hustle Media HERE IS WHAT WE USE: Blackmagic Design Pocket Cinema Camera 6K Pro: https://amzn.to/3BwRUYm Rode RODECaster Pro Podcast Production Studio: https://amzn.to/3Bw3cvW Electro-Voice RE320 DYNAMIC MICROPHONE: https://amzn.to/3BuhmxD Sigma 18-35mm F1.8 Art DC HSM Lens for Canon, Black: https://amzn.to/3FMqvUE Godox SL-60W CRI 95+ LED Video Light SL60W White 5600K Version: https://amzn.to/3HqXRtE __________ JOIN THE HUSTLE FAM ON SOCIAL MEDIA: Instagram: http://instagram.com/trucknhustle/ TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@trucknhustle Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/trucknhustle Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/tnhmedia/ Discord: https://discord.gg/g8kzDNu7 Twitter: https://twitter.com/TruckNHustle Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/Trucknhustle Listen to the TRUCK N' HUSTLE PODCAST: iTunes: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/truck-n-hustle-1-trucking-podcast Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/55GP6pfA0RlmtEgNH70d5K _________ NOTE: This description contains affiliate links that allow you to find the items mentioned in this video and support the channel at no cost to you. While this channel may earn minimal sums when the viewer uses the links, the viewer is in NO WAY obligated to use these links. Thank you for your support!

Today on Toy Power, it's time to look forward to 2023 and what lies beyond. But before that, just cause (most of us) were on holidays doesn't mean the toy companies are! NECA do their traditional reveals while Boss Fight revive an 80s legend. Mattel do DEEP into the well for their new figure while Todd gives us the most maximum Batman there is. Also featuring Shaq, Tom Sellick, Sarah Jessica Parker and six-packs. And Ben answers the question on everyone's lips: What does Thirty-Thirty look like?Support the show: http://patreon.com/toypowerpodcastSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

From My Mama's Kitchen to Yours Publisher/author Johnny Tan shares memories and future collaboration ideas about My Mama's Kitchen with WEBE publishers Teresa Velardi and Kat Kanavos. What memories do you have about Your Mama's Kitchen? The kitchen is the heart of the home. Let's share a trip down Memory Lane and into a future writing opportunity together on Dreaming Healing. Guest Bios: Johnny Tan- Publisher, Social Entrepreneur, Keynote Speaker, Life Coach, Talk Show Host and Founder & CEO of From My Mama's Kitchen®, an educational platform advocating "Personal Success Begins at Home, The Power of Unconditional Love, and Living and Performing in Our Genius Zone" to build a better world. He is also the Publisher of "Inspirations for Better Living," a digital magazine, and owner of the WordsHavePower.store. As a  multi-award-winning and bestselling author, he was awarded the prestigious 2020-2021 Top 100 Visionaries in Education by the Global Forum for Education and Learning (GFEL) and is an Executive Contributor to Global BRAINZ Magazine. Johnny experienced a Spiritual Awakening while writing his first book, From My Mama's Kitchen - "food for the soul, recipes for living," honoring his 9 moms. The book is about the power of unconditional motherly love, a practical, and timeless principles he learned from his 9 moms, who were his teachers, coaches, and counselors. JohnnyTan.com FromMyMamasKitchen.com FromMyMamasKitchenTalkRadio.com Teresa Velardi- Whether you're writing a children's book or sharing lessons from your life's journey, Teresa Velardi can help you bring your heart's message to the pages of your book. Faith in God, gratitude, and giving are Teresa's heart. It's in this spirit that she empowers others to live their most authentic life. Her daily writing practice keeps her focused on her purpose as life unfolds in this ever-changing world. Blessed with numerous gifts and talents, Teresa's abilities as a writer, editor, publisher, and coach are the vital ingredients she brings to those who choose to share their message with the world through her publishing platform. https://www.webebookspublishing.com/ Video Version: https://youtu.be/eiZ2DajaVjI Call in and Chat with Kat during Live Show with Video Stream: Call 646-558-8656 ID: 8836953587 press #.  To Ask a Question press *9 to raise your hand Have a Question for the Show? Go to Facebook– Dreams that Can Save Your Life Facebook Professional–Kathleen O'Keefe-Kanavos http://kathleenokeefekanavos.com/

E77: 4 Life Strategies for Creative VisionariesFeeling tapped out after the holidays? Struggle to find creative inspiration? In this episode of The Loveish Podcast, Dr. Seida Hood, Vision Architect & Licensed Therapist offers 4 simple life strategies you can implement TODAY to help you become the most creative, amazing, lifechanging version of yourself!Episode Transcript: Catch the latest episode transcript!Resources:Journaling WorkshopActivate Your Influence!The Confident Bae App

Kelly introduces us to Scott Witthoft, who is the Co-Director of the Environments Collaborative at the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design (the d.school) at Stanford University. His new book is called “This is A Prototype: The Curious Craft of Exploring New Ideas.” “Prototyping is a slow art of figuring out by fumbling around; it takes practice to create […]

Understanding your astrological chart and human design plays a huge part in your conscious business practices because once you get clarity on what you're meant to do, you can better understand how this intertwines with the bigger picture of the people and the earth you serve. That is where the magic is. This week, episode 24 of Cosmic RX Radio is about conscious business strategy for visionaries!In this episode of Cosmic RX Radio, Madi Murphy's guest Eva Gajzer shares how Office of Oneness blends mystical magic and traditional business practices to encourage their clients to dream bigger and become powerful disruptors in their industry. 

In today's episode, I discuss using talent acquisition to build your visionary team. There is an old saying that "nobody does anything alone." It could not be more accurate regarding entrepreneurship, and growing your business. I also discuss the different mindset, and strategy changes needed as you develop your team of visionaries and scale your business. Also in this episode: The business building and team building processes are inextricably linked As you progress through building your business, you will bring in different levels of leadership for various reasons Where there is a will, there is always a way It's challenging to create freedom as an entrepreneur until you get to the point where you have a team that is visionaries Sign up for Legacy Leaders Stay Connected With Kelly:  Follow Kelly on Instagram | LinkedIn | Facebook | Website  Grab one of Kelly's bestselling books: Unstoppable: 9 Principles for Unlimited Success in Business and Life Conviction Marketing Bigger than You: The Entrepreneur's Guide to Building an Unstoppable Team The Live Launch Method

There are many cosmovisions, many ways of looking at life and the nature of reality. Some may hold more true than others, some may hold more true for some and less for others. But being able to see the world in different ways is vital.Science is always changing. What was seen as ‘The Science' 500 years ago is very different from 400 years ago and very different from today. The Science of 300 years ago is very different from The Science 200 years ago and today. And The Science of today will be very different from The Science of tomorrow and the future.The idea that one group or class of people should control the narrative is, always has been, and always will be a very dangerous mentality. It has been used throughout time to create power structures that divide people and keep certain groups lower than others. It is used for power and control. It has led to class systems, systems of oppression, othering of peoples, and creating a class of people that can rule over and control others. This is happening today and it is important to stand on principle and morality and choose what is life-giving and not give into fear and divisiveness that uses power in harmful ways. Freedom and liberty are vitally important. Questioning life is an essential part of life. It's what allows us to evolve and grow and to learn. Seeing things from different sides is a sign of wisdom. Having hypotheses and putting them to the test is the very nature of science and of life. Science is not separate from life. This is the true scientific method, and it requires courage and also entails failing. Through this method we refine life and slowly move towards truth. Accepting things without questioning or suppressing voices is anti-science, it lays within the realm of dogma and religious fervor. And it's why almost all of the breakthroughs of science come from visionaries, those who had courage to question reality and accepted dogma and through great vision, work, and often mockery, make change for the better. Visionaries are few and far between, in life and in science. Those who simply follow what is said will, by definition, never be a visionary, and therefore, never lead to change and evolution. Many traditions around the world speak of a similar phenomenon. In Vedic thought it is referred to as Maya, the veil that we see life through. In Christian symbology it is the apocalypse, from the Greek meaning to ‘lift the veil and see the world as it actually is'. It is not the end of days but the end of seeing the world through our illusion, death which leads to rebirth. In many South American shamanic traditions they speak of maricación, that we become lost in the dizziness of life. And in North American native cultures they speak of wetiko, the mind-virus that does not allow us to see clearly. All of these point to this idea that there is something clouding our vision, in a literal and more metaphorical sense. And that the process of living a good life is to begin to question this and begin to find truth, cutting through this veil with knowledge, the experiential gnosis-knowledge, perhaps better translated as wisdom, that can be found through a deep desire to question the nature of reality and of ourselves.As someone who has questioned life vigorously, has been through the medical system, lived from a deep place of personal experience, Will's voice is relevant and powerful. We need not agree with everything someone says, but to suppress a voice is to suppress life itself, and this never is in service of the ‘greater good,' for it is divisive, other than life-giving, and goes against principle, morality, and respect for life in all of its forms. I also have a lot of respect for Will that he took a stand to question things and to speak what he saw as true. So much of what I have seen throughout the pandemic, a fear response, censoring of voices, self-censoring, came from this place of fear. [to continue reading, visit: https://bit.ly/YT-UW ] I saw many people that in private conversations would say one thing and in public conversation would stay quiet or say something else. This comes from fear. It comes from a place other than courage. And ultimately it is not life-giving. So for Will to speak up, in the face of pressure from many sides, is a testament to his will and courage and strength.My Youtube channel now has a warning, for questioning a narrative and offering another point of view. And with a couple more of these, the channel will be permanently deleted and another voice taken down. This was essentially the practice of book burning or witch burning, suppressing dissenting voices that would challenge the heterodoxy and threaten their power and authority. I find myself in an interesting position. As a child who came from split parents, someone who lived near a city but spent much of childhood playing in the woods, one who grew up in a “Western” world but traveled with my father to indigenous peoples all over the world, born in the East and raised in the West, raised in the North and lives in the South, from someone who is fascinated by things and knowledge but also by nature and its simplicity and beauty and laws, I find myself often justifying the “Western” system to people who criticize it and defending “indigenous” cosmovisions to those who think they know better than it. I find myself walking a line of bridge keeping, finding the thread-line that connects all things. It is, I believe, in our mariación that we see things as separate and forget the beauty of all things. That separation is based on and feeds on fear, and I have known it well. And I may dare say that I have a sense of that oneness, not just from an intellectual perspective, although that too, but from an experiential place as well. This is what calls us home, and awaits all of us as we begin to have the courage, whether by choice or by destiny, at the culmination of our lives.I hope more of us have the courage to find principles within ourselves, to strive for truth, and then to stand on that principle when the wind blows and the foundation is threatened. I think we will find, when the principle is true, that its roots go deep and no amount of fear, pressure, or coercion can shake it from its core. I just finished next week's episode with Joan Wilcox, who spent a lot of time with and wrote a wonderful book about the Qero, an Andean group of people who carry a lot of wisdom. I leave you with a few quotes form the book that stood out:“As is true in most indigenous sacred traditions, an initiate of the Andean path acquires knowledge and wisdom through personal experience. If a teaching is not grounded in personal experience, it does not hold much value for an Andean paqo [wise person/healer], so apprentices are encouraged to place greater trust in their own experiences than in the words of their teachers.”“Call the apus [mountain spirits] and Pachamama to you and declare your new intentions by saying, ‘I am what I speak, not what I have spoken.'”“Juan's use of the word “power” raises an important point for Westerners—for all Westerners, not just those of us living in mystical relationship with the universe. Juan says, “In the Western tradition we are afraid of the word ‘power.' We think that power is dangerous, that it is not good. But no! Power is only power. It is the difference between being able to do something and not being able to do it. If you want you can do good things. If you want you can do bad things, because for that you also need power. But if you want to do good things in your life and in the lives of those around you, you must have power. You need power. “But power is only power,” he stresses. “You must decide how to use it not based on your ability to use it, but based on your moral rule. Sometimes you will not do something not because you do not have the power to do it but because you follow a moral rule that tells you not to do it. On the other hand, there are people who are prevented from acting not because of their moral rule but because they do not have the power to do it. They have no choice. Understand? The thing is to have the power to do everything! Then the next thing is to have the personal morals to know how to use or not use your power. But do not be mistaken—we are looking for power when we try to establish a connection with the living energy.” “To view the show notes for the show and Will's bio, visit episode 58. And note that to re-upload to YouTube I had to deleted what I imagine is the content that violated YouTube's policy. So to watch the full, unedited version, you must go to my Rumble or Odysee channels. The audio version remains, for now, unaffected. If you enjoy the show, it would be a big help if you could share it with your own audiences via social media or word of mouth. And please Subscribe or Follow and if you can go on Apple Podcasts and leave a starred-rating and a short review. That would be super helpful with the algorithms and getting this show out to more people. Thank you in advance!For more information about me and my upcoming plant medicine retreats with my colleague Merav Artzi, visit my site at: https://www.NicotianaRustica.orgTo book an integration call with me, visit: https://jasongrechanik.setmore.comSupport this podcast on Patreon:https://www.patreon.com/UniverseWithinDonate directly with PayPal:https://www.paypal.me/jasongrechanikMusic courtesy of: Nuno Moreno (end song). Visit: https://m.soundcloud.com/groove_a_zen_sound and https://nahira-ziwa.bandcamp.com/ And Stefan Kasapovski's Santero Project (intro song). Visit: https://spoti.fi/3y5Rd4Hhttps://www.facebook.com/UniverseWithinPodcasthttps://www.instagram.com/UniverseWithinPodcast

Kelly talks to Dr. Richard Winters, a practicing emergency physician at the Mayo Clinic and the medical director of Professional Leadership Development for the Mayo Clinic Care Network, about his new book, “You're the Leader, Now What? Leadership Lessons from Mayo Clinic.” “As decision making robots, we have a sentient flaw: we tend to overplay our expertise, and […]

Parker J. Palmer is a writer, teacher, and activist. Founder and Senior Partner Emeritus of the Center for Courage & Renewal, he has written ten books, including the bestselling Let Your Life Speak, The Courage to Teach, A Hidden Wholeness, Healing the Heart of Democracy, and On the Brink of Everything: Grace, Gravity and Getting Old. He holds a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of California, Berkeley, and thirteen honorary doctorates. In 1998, The Leadership Project, a national survey of ten thousand educators, named Palmer as one of the thirty “most influential senior leaders” in higher education and one of the ten key “agenda-setters” of the past decade. Since 2002, the Accrediting Commission for Graduate Medical Education has given annual Parker J. Palmer “Courage to Teach” and “Courage to Lead” Awards to directors of exemplary medical residency programs around the U.S. In 2010, Palmer received the William Rainey Harper Award, whose previous recipients include Margaret Mead, Elie Wiesel, and Paolo Freire. In 2011, the Utne Reader named him one of 25 Visionaries on its annual list of “People Who are Changing the World.” To learn more about Parker and his latest project, The Growing Edge, please visit newcomerpalmer.comIn this part one episode we explore: Some of Parker's personal story including challenges and adversities he has faced and how these have shaped his lifeWhat wholeness is and the courage it takes live an undivided lifeParker's insights about writing, speaking, and connecting with an audienceLessons Parker has learned about finding courage and working with fearThe power of reframing situations and circumstances one facesHow to listen deeplyFinding one's vocation in lifeHow to create conditions that foster courage in others And more!For Joshua's upcoming events and classes please visit joshuasteinfeldt.com Please rate the show on iTunes and let us know what you think!For show notes and more visit www.joshuasteinfeldt.com/podcastThanks for listening!Support the show

Visionaries is back! 2022 capped off as one of the biggest year's ever for gaming entertainment, but for esports, the year was less than kind. What will happen in 2023? Award-winning investigative journalist Jacob Wolf and producer Prem Thottumkara sit down to dole out their big predictions for 2023. After allegedly stealing millions of dollars in customer funds, will 30-year-old notorious crypto count Sam Bankman-Fried actually see prison time? Will FaZe Clan, amid financial uncertainty, make it until the end of the year without additional financing? All this and more in Visionaries 2023 prediction episode. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Get it Girl Vision Podcast. I am so glad to be back so shout out to all the Visionaries who faithfully listen to the get it girl vision show. this is Episode 1 of season 5 : What happen to Char mini ep so enjoy and look out for more episodes bi- weekly. GET INTO IT!!!!

Today, Eric Rozenberg is excited to share with you, the listeners, ten books that impressed and impacted him. He sincerely hopes that you will read and enjoy them and that they will inspire you as much as they did him!  Bio: Eric Rozenberg has helped thousands of entrepreneurs grow and manage their businesses better. His purpose is to inspire people with integrity and honesty, help them take action, get results, and develop their businesses and their lives. For two decades in his previous life, Eric consulted with Fortune 500 companies and produced award-winning sales meetings, incentive trips, product launches, and conferences in more than 50 countries across diverse industries. He believes organizations must create meetings and events that are not only breathtakingly memorable but also will bring corporate strategies to life and amplify team motivation/performance.  Eric is an acquisition entrepreneur, speaker, podcaster, and two-time Amazon bestselling author. His podcast, "The Business of Meetings", is the first podcast in the Meetings & Events Industry dedicated to business owners. Every Tuesday, listeners learn something new they can apply in their businesses and/or get inspired by amazing guests. His first book, Meeting at C-Level, is the first book on the Why of a meeting. It has been endorsed by 20 of the most influential leaders from the corporate and association worlds and helps professionals to position themselves as strategic partners. His second book, Before It's Too Late, A Love Letter to my Daughters and America, is a story of grit, perseverance, and courage. It describes why and how he and his wife brought their daughters to America and why it is the greatest country on Earth. Eric is a current member of the Entrepreneurs Organization (EO) and of The Strategic Forum. He also serves on the Board of Trustees of the Demoucelle Parkinson Foundation in Belgium and was the first European to serve as Chairman of the International Board of Meetings Professional International (MPI), the largest professional association in the Meetings and Events Industry. Eric's ten recommended books: The Joy of Success, by Susan Ford Collins The Business Model Generation, by Alexander Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur The Hawke Method, by Eric Huberman Trust Me, I'm Lying, by Ryan Holiday Who Not How, by Dan Sullivan and Dr. Benjamin Hardy The Alter Ego Effect, by Todd Herman Building a StoryBrand, by Donald Miller The Psychology of Money, by Morgan Housel One Last Talk, by Philip McKernan Before It's Too Late, by Eric Rozenberg The Joy of Success, by Susan Ford Collins Susan is a Co-founder of the Strategic Forum in Miami. She has been coaching people throughout her career. The Joy of Success: Ten Essential Skills for Getting the Success You Want was the first of the several books she has written. While writing the book, she looked into what made people successful and realized there are ten essential skills every successful person applies, regardless of their culture or country.  Eric found the ten skills she mentioned exciting and easy to apply. He particularly likes her idea of creating a Success File. The Business Model Generation: A Handbook for Visionaries, Game Changers, and Challengers by Alexander Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur (Designed by Alan Smith) Eric often refers to this book in his workshops or when people talk to him about their businesses because it is an interesting story. Alexander Osterwalder was writing a dissertation on business models, and that became his business. The idea behind it is to have different blocks to consider for any kind of business. You can download a tool called Business Model Canvas, where everything is mapped into one box to brainstorm a business model for a business of any size. It will eliminate the need to do market research for at least six months. The Hawke Method, by Erik Huberman Erik Huberman leads one of the fastest-growing digital agencies in America. He positioned the term “fractional CMO”. The book, The Hawke Method, is centered around the principles of awareness, nurturing, and building trust. The author gives concrete examples to illustrate ways to implement those principles. Eric recommends this book for anyone from beginners in the marketing field to seasoned entrepreneurs. Trust Me, I'm Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator, by Ryan Holiday Ryan Holiday has written several books, including Stillness Is the Key and Perennial Seller. Trust Me, I'm Lying is a frightening book, but it is also enlightening. In the book, the author explains that incorrect information does get corrected after an article has been published. He also discusses what he did with a well-known retail chain regarding using social media to launch a product.  Who Not How by Dan Sullivan and Dr. Benjamin Hardy Dan Sullivan is a master coaching guru. Who not How is a principle that entrepreneurs and business owners who think they are irreplaceable and nobody can do things as well as they do, can apply to encourage them to move in the opposite direction. The Alter Ego Effect: The Power of Secret Identities to Transform Your Life, by Todd Herman   Todd Herman is a fascinating person who coaches athletes and individuals. He wrote The Alter Ego Effect to explain that athletes reach a point where they have to go above and beyond what they would usually do, and the person they become when they put their engine in overdrive is known as their alter ego. In the book, the author explains how to create an alter ego and how to leverage its power to overcome challenges and achieve way more than you would usually achieve in your life. Building a StoryBrand: Clarify Your Message So Customers Will Listen, by Donald Miller This book is a must-read for anyone considering starting a new business or who may be re-inventing an existing business. The book explains the entire methodology and journey of using seven steps to create a StoryBrand to help them define the StoryBrand for their companies.  The Psychology of Money: Timeless Lessons on Wealth Greed and Happiness, by Morgan Housel This is a fascinating book about money. It contains impactful stories and themes to help readers reflect on their values and relationship with money. One Last Talk: Why Your Truth Matters and How to Speak It, by Philip McKernan One Last Talk is an invitation for readers to find their truth and speak it out loud to at least one person. The book gives a framework to help readers do it. It is called One Last Talk to challenge and inspire readers to focus their minds and open their hearts by making them face their metaphorical death. It is an inspiring and fascinating read! Before It's Too Late: A Love Letter To My Daughters and America, by Eric Rozenberg Eric is very proud of his book! It is a legacy project. It is the story of why Eric and his family left Europe, the rise of antisemitism, the rise of Islamism, and the cowardliness of leaders. The book goes into the current situation that prompted them to leave for America and the similarities and differences they see in America. The book has many links and references to help readers fact-check and learn more about what Eric has written.   Eric hopes you will enjoy reading these books!  Resource: Business Model Canvas Books Mentioned Meeting at C-Level, by Eric Rozenberg Before It's TooLate, A Love Letter to my Daughters and America, by Eric Rozenberg The Joy of Success, by Susan Ford Collins The Business Model Generation, by Alexander Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur The Hawke Method, by Eric Huberman Trust Me, I'm Lying, by Ryan Holiday Who Not How, by Dan Sullivan and Dr. Benjamin Hardy The Alter Ego Effect, by Todd Herman Building a StoryBrand, by Donald Miller The Psychology of Money, by Morgan Housel One Last Talk, by Philip McKernan Connect with Eric On LinkedIn On Facebook On Instagram On Website

Kelly welcomes neuroscientist Paul Zak back to the podcast to talk about his new book “Immersion: The Science of the Extraordinary and the Source of Happiness.” “Attention opens the door to action, but the neurologic signature of emotional resonance causes people to act.”  “My studies show that marketers have fifteen seconds to capture attention.”  “Emotions are […]

How to flow with the intuition of your soul with Mark Borax  This is an excerpt from our full-length episode: Soul level astrology, uncovering the layers of the soul and unbinding time with Mark Borax   Listen here: https://theafterlight.podbean.com/e/soul-level-astrology-uncovering-the-layers-of-the-soul-and-unbinding-time-with-mark-borax/?token=eec65d39ff3b2c97ec1a3db16650a972 ----more---- This episode has been sponsored by The Afterlight Institute. Ignite the light, magic and miracles within.  The Afterlight Institute is a community of teachers and students seeking to expand their spiritual gifts and inner wisdom on the road to illuminating their forgotten selves. They offer products, resources and experiences aimed at empowering and encouraging the soul within to grow in light and love. If you are a spiritual teacher or practitioner that has been building your skills and knowledge for years and you are ready to share this wisdom with the world, The Afterlight Institute would like you to apply to become a course creator.    Apply here:  https://bit.ly/37SbfEg Follow the Afterlight Institute Website: https://theafterlightinstitute.com Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theafterlightinstitute Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/theafterlightinstitute TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@theafterlighpodcast YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCeJICw-Lu0ORxYWJGT7QTLw Meet Mark Since the late 1970s, Mark has been collecting adventures and spiritual wisdom as a poet, writer, world traveler, and finally, as an astrologer.  In 1987, he created Soul Level Astrology to free the core nature of human beings and he's since done thousands of private sessions for people around the world. In 2008, Mark and his wife founded the College of Visionaries and Wizards, an online school that teaches students to read astrology charts in the deepest, most soulful way.  Mark is a dynamic and provocative author, counselor, teacher, public speaker, musician and songwriter, whose humorous, compassionate and startling insights inspire others to awaken their soul force.  His third book, The Ruby Heart of the Dragon, which contains a radical revision of the 12 sun signs, is set to be released in 2023. https://markborax.com/ Meet your host, Lauren Grace Lauren is the host of The Afterlight Podcast Co-Founder of The Afterlight Institute Owner/Operator of Lauren Grace Inspirations "I started The Afterlight Podcast after a significant change in my life and felt ready to get back on my spiritual journey. This podcast focuses on creating a safe space where listeners can feel motivated and inspired to look at the world from new and different perspectives. This podcast aims to remind you, my dear listener, that you are never alone and that help and support are only a thought away."   I am an Evidential Medium and Seer. I work with professionals to help them make empowered decisions to help them get to where they want to go by connecting intuitively and clairvoyantly with their Spirit Guides and Angels and their passed-over loved ones. I am a channel of the light and work with Spirit Guides, Angels, the Higher-self, and passed-over loves ones to provide you with support, clarity and encouragement. Using Oracle cards, mediumship and clairvoyance, my readings will leave you feeling comforted and empowered. I have various reading options available, ranging from 30-minute readings to 60-minute readings to group sessions. I also work with professionals to help them clarify business and life purposes. I also work as a workshop facilitator and business and life mentor. Register for a reading here: https://laurengraceinspirations.com/soul-deep-session/   I also support small to medium-sized business owners and service providers. Over the years (20+), I have worked in radio, online, events, management, marketing, sales, and more, and I can provide guidance and training around these topics.   Find more information here: https://laurengraceinspirations.com/support-for-business/   Additionally, you can find out more about Lauren here. Website: https://laurengraceinspirations.com Portfolio: https://laurengraceinspirations.com/portfolio/ Email: Lauren@LaurenGraceInspirations.com    To be a guest on The Afterlight Podcast The Afterlight is a Spiritual podcast on Divination, Angels, Mediumship, Magick and more.  Contact The Afterlight To be a guest, apply here: https://theafterlightinstitute.com/apply-to-be-our-guest/ Email: Welcometotheafterlight@gmail.com Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/WelcometoTheAfterlight Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/the.afterlight/

There are a lot of titles in the industry, and we understand that it can feel overwhelming to know which title and role you need to fill for your business. In today's episode, Emily Reagan explains how she landed on 'Marketing Assistant' as her title as she initially struggled to define how she assisted Visionaries. We compare the difference between Marketing Rainmakers and Unicorn Assistants and explore the point in your business where you would consider bringing on a Rainmaker to support the Assistant and relieve them of the duties that the Rainmaker should be fulfilling.Emily shares a typical day for a digital marketing assistant on behalf of an organization. I clarify what a Rainmaker does to help you understand the differences between these two team members. Then, we outline a Frankenstein role and how to avoid creating a role like this in your business by setting your team members up for success and getting the most out of them.If you need help determining what level of support you need in your business, listen to this interview as we help you identify which team member you need so that you can understand who you might need to hire to help support your marketing growth.Learn more about my guest:Emily Reagan is a jill-of-all-trades when it comes to digital marketing and techie skills. She's worked as a behind-the-scenes digital marketing implementer working with many creatives and furniture painters: Jennifer Allwood, Tracey Bellion, Miss Mustard Seed, Wendy Batten, and more, to grow their online businesses. She's the founder of the Unicorn Digital Marketing Assistant School, where she teaches women the digital marketing skills to get hired online as an in-demand, highly sought-after unicorn digital marketing assistant.Emily's Links:Hire a Unicorn Digital Marketing Assistant: hireaunicorn.comFree Digital Marketing Training Series: https://emily-reagan.mykajabi.com/trainingWebsite: https://emilyreaganpr.com/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/emilyreaganpr/Connect with Veronica on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/vromney/If you're ready to transition from full-time Marketer to full-time Founder of your own business apply for the Rainmaker Residency™: https://rainmakerresidency.com/How I Turn Your Team Member Into A Revenue Generating Rainmaker For Your Company, Take a look at my Fortune 5 Framework™ Syllabus for FREE! https://rainmakerresidency.com/optin-rrsSkip the formal recruiting process and learn how to source Rainmaker applicants that are already connected to you: https://rainmakerresidency.com/rainmaker-hiring-kitDelving deep into the tough topics we often face as scaling business owners that AREN'T talked about often, sign up to The Rainmaker Report: https://rainmakerresidency.com/rainmaker-reportIf you found value in today's episode, I would appreciate it if you could leave a rating and review.

This relationship is an integral part of the organization's success. This episode is Part 2 of a 2-part conversation with Mark C. Winters, co-author of Rocket Fuel and the foremost expert and Visionary/Integrator relationship. If you haven't listened to part 1 of this episode, go do that now. In part 1 of this 2-part conversation, Mark and I focused on the dynamics between a Visionary and an Integrator. What wasn't shared in that episode is that great Integrators are RARE. Mark and his team at Rocket Fuel University™ discovered there are 4 Visionaries for every 1 Integrator. This means really good Integrators are hard to find…and even harder to keep. If you want to learn where to look for your integrator, and more importantly, the principles for keeping them happy and effective, watch this video. Episode Highlights: -Where to find great Integrators both inside and outside your organization -The necessary 3 part process for successfully onboarding an integrator so they quickly earn team respect and don't burn out -5 Rules to follow to ensure a long-term relationship thrives between the Visionary and the Integrator -The way to maintain equality in the relationship even when it's not equal ownership -The difference between Visionaries and “Idea People” and how the latter is not actually very beneficial to a company -What happens when either the Visionary or the Integrator outgrows the role? How do you responsibly exit the relationship Watch the episode on PCA Overdrive PCA Overdrive is free for members. Not a member? Try our 7-day free trial. Download the app on the Apple Store or Google Play. Become a PCA member

The problem-solving prowess of the IT leaders we meet has inspired and motivated us all year. The guests we've featured in 2022 have shared their strategies for cutting costs to their businesses through technology and effective leadership. They've shown us new tools, software, and philosophies that make the world a better place. From healthcare and education to business and sustainability, their innovation continues to carve a clear path for future success. These are just a few of our favorite segments from the 100+ interviews we held this past year.  Tune in to learn:How low-code innovation is empowering Pacific Clinics to increase efficiency (02:20)How Tableau saved the Seattle Seahawks time and money with their tech (07:31)Effective scaling for technology teams (27:49)Creating sustainable power with new tech (31:57)Mentions:How Legends of Low-Code Brought Magical Solutions to Pacific ClinicsWatch: Legends of Low-Code on Salesforce PlusChampioning the Prospective Customer With David Heinemeier HanssonMining the Golden Age of Data with Tableau's CEO Monetize Your KnowledgeAlbert's Kajabi Course on InvestingInnovating at the Cutting Edge of Ad TechnologyMaking Reproductive Healthcare Accessible with SimpleHealthHow Deel Makes Empowering an International Workforce EasierRemoving Latency Byte by Byte with Zayo Group  Respect All Your Clients' Dreams Equally How to Be a Fearless Engineer Visualizing Code Is the Key Harnessing the Consistent Power of the Sea Through Tech IT Visionaries is brought to you by Salesforce. With Salesforce's low-code app dev tools, you can be more efficient, more productive and save money by reducing development time by up to 90%. Get Salesforce's Low-Code Playbook and increase time to value for your team and your customers. Download the free playbook today.Mission.org is a media studio producing content for world-class clients. Learn more at mission.org.

Kelly connects with Ross Dawson, a world-leading futurist, entrepreneur, and keynote speaker to talk about his new book, “Thriving on Overload: The 5 Powers for Success in a World of Exponential Information.” “Information is only meaningful in context.”  “Do you think you're good at multitasking? If so, you're wrong.”  “Problems are the spark for invention.”

For the past eight years, Shenomenal Woman Regina Weatherspoon-Bell served as Deputy Director for the First District San Bernardino County Supervisor. During the past twelve years she's guided her non-profit, Dreamers, Visionaries & Leaders (DVL) Project to become a well-known established brand providing cultural enrichment programs and scholarships throughout the High Desert. She serves on several Boards including Providence Health Care Regional Board and High Desert Community Foundation. She remains an advisor to the CEO of Lil Mogul Holdings owned by notable actress, director, and producer, Kim Fields.https://www.dvlproject.com/We're happy you're here! Like the pod? Follow us on all socials at @amplifywithanika and @yourbrandamplified Leave a review on Apple Podcasts Visit our website Connect with us at hello@yourbrandamplified.co

Closing your month and year strong. How we end the month is how we begin the next. In this episode I  go over the importance of going for it and 7 benefits of being ALL in!!!!Timestamps:4:25 - Stop waiting til next year9:16 - Working with a winner's mindset12:06 - Visionaries are constant creators15:41 - Discipline is the bridge to where you want to be--Links & resources:To follow more info about the podcast@levelup.debbienealCheck out my personal instagram account@debbie_nealThis Podcast is brought to you by Upstarter Podcast Network

In this episode #258 We are starting a new journey with our new name of The Small Business Answer Man.  I am excited to share this journey with you because for the last 30 plus years I have had the pleasure of starting, running and operating about 13 different businesses. We plan to interview experts to help you find solutions in what I term “The Business Owner 6 P Formula of running your business:  1. People (Human capital), 2. Productivity (Execution), 3. Promotion (Marketing), 4. Processes (Operations), 5. Pricing (Sales), 6. Profit (Financials).  Our experts will help you solve these business challenges. My top 5 book recommendations for 2022: #5 Rocket Fuel by Gino Wickman & Mark C Winters – In this book they talk about Visionaries and Integrators and why you need both on your team #4 View From the Top by Aaron Walker – Aaron shares his life lessons and how we can learn to see what we want in life by looking at the big picture. #3 Tax Free Wealth by Tom Wheelwright – This is a great book to create wealth and legally find ways not to pay too much in taxes. #2 The Sale by Alex Demczak & Jon Gordon – A great fable to help teach us an invaluable lesson about what matters most in life and work and how to achieve it.  They share 4 lessons about integrity in order to create lasting success. #1 Holy Moments by Matthew Kelly – Holy Moments is profoundly simple, astonishingly practical, and once you discover it, your life will finally make sense. My top 5 books of all time: #5 The Entrepreneur Roller Coaster by Darren Hardy #4 Atomic Habits by James Clear #3 Intentional Living by John Maxwell #2 Think & Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill #1 Cultivate Positive Culture: 10 Actions to Faithful Living by Gary Wilbers (Now, you didn't see that coming did you.  I couldn't forget a book I authored.) The top 5 ways you can make 2023 your best year yet! #5  READ:  As the saying goes, readers are leaders and leaders are readers. #4  EXERCISE:  Get your heart rate up at least 4x per week.  It will not only give you energy, it will provide you with creativity on what you want to accomplish. #3  LISTEN TO PODCASTS:  What a great way to learn by gaining knowledge on your drive, while exercising, during your downtime.  Especially to this podcast! #2  CONNECT to the relationships that matter the most to you.  I plan to create my list for who I want to have lunch with. It could be in person or how about a virtual lunch via zoom. #1  MORNING ROUTINE: Why not take time to start your day on your terms.  During this time you could read, spend time Spiritually, meditate or journal.  It has been said this is the one time you can spend time on yourself.  Remember if we don't take care of ourselves, we can't take care of others. Gratitude: Gratitude is the experience of counting one's blessings. It is the feeling that embodies the word “Thank You”. It is the unexpected reward of a kind deed that is magically produced by your brain. A 2003 study by Emmons and McCullough found that keeping a daily gratitude journal leads to not just an increased sense of well-being but also better sleep, willingness to accept change and also help and lower symptoms of physical pain. As it turns out, gratitude could be the ultimate magic pill for happiness. Here's the bottom line: Write a journal every morning and every night it's the closest thing to help you find happiness and peace in life.   Either get a journal and start to process or if you need help here is my recommendation I shared with my clients this year.  It's called “The Five Minute Journal.” You can check it out at fiveminutejournal.com Links  Learn more about Gary's Mastermind group at goascend.biz/mastermind/  

TECHSHOW 2023 is right around the corner! Sharon Nelson and Jim Calloway chat with co-chairs Jeannine Lambert and Gyi Tsakalakis about the offerings at the upcoming conference. This year, the conference will be an entirely in-person event, so don't miss the return of Taste of TECHSHOW, crowd favorite Start-Up Alley, the new Visionaries of Legal Tech panel discussion, and much more. Find out more and register (and snag the early bird discount before January 18th!) at: techshow.com. Jeannine Lambert is the executive director of Centers & Programming at Northern Kentucky University Chase College of Law. Gyi Tsakalakis is a former lawyer and the founder of AttorneySync, an online legal marketing agency, to help lawyers be where their clients are looking.

TECHSHOW 2023 is right around the corner! Sharon Nelson and Jim Calloway chat with co-chairs Jeannine Lambert and Gyi Tsakalakis about the offerings at the upcoming conference. This year, the conference will be an entirely in-person event, so don't miss the return of Taste of TECHSHOW, crowd favorite Start-Up Alley, the new Visionaries of Legal Tech panel discussion, and much more. Find out more and register (and snag the early bird discount before January 18th!) at: techshow.com. Jeannine Lambert is the executive director of Centers & Programming at Northern Kentucky University Chase College of Law. Gyi Tsakalakis is a former lawyer and the founder of AttorneySync, an online legal marketing agency, to help lawyers be where their clients are looking.

This relationship is an integral part of the organization's success. The Visionary/Integrator relationship is one I hear a lot of business owners wrestling with. Here is why - A lot of you likely fall on the visionary end of the spectrum. You have a head full of ideas and a heart full of passion. You took the entrepreneurial leap and gave birth to what would become the business you own and lead today. You saw opportunities where others didn't and you have a natural ability to see what you COULD build. But here's the thing. Visionaries can wreck companies. It's possible to have too much vision and too many ideas. A Visionary can easily rip their team in a million directions or load them down with an unreasonable number of projects. Visionaries are also typically pretty terrible with holding accountability. And your business pays for that. The answer is to find an integrator. But Just because you find an integrator, doesn't mean your business will thrive. The Visionary/Integrator relationship is like a marriage. And just like a marriage needs frameworks, habits, and methods of communication that will set it up for a shot at long-term success, so does the relationship between a visionary and an integrator. Click the links below to hear from Mark Winters, the co-author of Rocket Fuel: The One Essential Combination That Will Get You More of What You Want from Your Business. Mark shares the frameworks you'll need to set up to successfully navigate the waters of one of the business's most powerful relationships. Episode Highlights: - The visionary/integrator dynamic and why it can lead to friction or harmony depending on the relationship - The character traits of the visionary and the integrator and why you typically won't be both - Why does not everyone wants to be the visionary, and why the integrator role is so important - The benefits to a business that has both roles as opposed to a business that only has one or the other leading the team - The amount of Visionary 'Juice' that a business needs and why a business will die when they have too much vision - 4 ‘Readiness Signs' a visionary be aware of that will tell them it's time to go and find an integrator Watch the episode on PCA Overdrive PCA Overdrive is free for members. Not a member? Try our 7-day free trial. Download the app on the Apple Store or Google Play. Become a PCA member

This was one of my favorite episodes ever.Bethany McLean was the first reporter to question Enron's earnings, and she has written some of the best finance books out there. We discuss:* The astounding similarities between Enron & FTX,* How visionaries are just frauds who succeed (and which category describes Elon Musk),* What caused 2008, and whether we are headed for a new crisis,* Why there's too many venture capitalists and not enough short sellers,* And why history keeps repeating itself.McLean is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair (see her articles here) and the author of The Smartest Guys in the Room, All the Devils Are Here, Saudi America, and Shaky Ground.Watch on YouTube. Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or your favorite podcast platform.Follow McLean on Twitter. Follow me on Twitter for updates on future episodes. If you enjoyed this episode, please share. Helps out a ton.Timestamps(0:04:37) - Is Fraud Over? (0:11:22) - Shortage of Shortsellers(0:19:03) - Elon Musk - Fraud or Visionary?(0:23:00) - Intelligence, Fake Deals, & Culture(0:33:40) - Rewarding Leaders for Long Term Thinking(0:37:00) - FTX Mafia?(0:40:17) - Is Finance Too Big?(0:44:09) - 2008 Collapse, Fannie & Freddie(0:49:25) - The Big Picture(1:00:12) - Frackers Vindicated?(1:03:40) - Rating Agencies(1:07:05) - Lawyers Getting Rich Off Fraud(1:15:09) - Are Some People Fundamentally Deceptive?(1:19:25) - Advice for Big Picture ThinkersTranscriptThis transcript was autogenerated and thus may contain errors.Dwarkesh Patel: the rapid implosion of a company worth tens of billions of dollars. Insider dealing and romantic entanglements between sister companies, a politically generous c e o, who is well connected in Washington, the use of a company's own stock as its collateral, the attempt, the short-lived attempt to get bought out by a previous competitor, and the fraudulent abuse of mark to market account.[00:01:00] We are not talking about ftx, we are talking about Enron, which my guest today, Bethany McClean, uh, first broke the story of and has written an amazing and detailed book about, uh, called The Smartest Guys in the Room. And she has also written, uh, a book about the housing crisis. All the devils are here, a book about Fannie and Freddy Shaky Ground, and a book about fracking Saudi America, all of which we'll get into.She's, in my opinion, the best finance nonfiction writer out there, and I'm really, really excited to have this conversation now. So, Bethany, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. Bethany McLean: Thank you so much for the, for the probably Undeserved Conference, for having me on the show. Dwarkesh Patel: My first question, what are the odds that Sbf read the smartest guys in the room and just followed it as a playbook, given the similarities there?Bethany McLean: You, you know, I, I love that idea. I have to, I have to admit, I guess I love that idea. I don't know. That would make me responsible for what, for what happened, . So maybe I don't love that idea. L let me take that back . [00:02:00] Anyway, but I, I, I actually think that, that, that even if he had read the book, it would never have occurred to him that, that there was a similarity because self-delusion is such a, Strong component of all of these stories of business gone wrong.It's very rare that you have one of the characters at the heart of this who actually understands what they're doing and understands that they're moving over into the dark side and thinks about the potential repercussions of this and chooses this path. Anyway, that's usually not the way these stories go.So it's entirely possible that Sbf studied Enron, knew all about it, and never envisioned that there were any similarities between that and what he was doing. Dwarkesh Patel: Oh, that's a fascinating, um, which I guess raises the question of what are we doing when we're documenting and trying to learn from books like yours?If somebody who is a, about to commit the same exact kind of thing can read that book and not realize that he's doing the same exact thing, is there something that just [00:03:00] prevents us from learning the lessons of history that we, we can never just, uh, get the analogy right, and we're just guided by our own delusions.Bethany McLean: Wasn't there a great quote that history rhymes, but it doesn't repeat. I'm Yeah. Relying on who it is who said that, but I think that's, that's absolutely true. Oh, I think it's important for all of us, those of us who are not gonna find ourselves at the center of, uh, giant fraud or, so, I hope, I think my time for that has passed.Maybe not you, but, um, I think it's important for all of us to understand what went wrong. And I, I do think these, I do think just there, there's a great value and greater understanding of the world without necessarily a practical payoff for it. So I think when something goes wrong on a massive societal level, it's really important to try to, to try to explain it.Human beings have needed narrative since the dawn of time, and we need narrative all, all, all the more now we need, we need to make sense of the world. So I like to believe. Process of making, trying to make sense of the world. , um, [00:04:00] has a value in, in and of itself. Maybe there is small, some small deterrence aspect to it in that I often think that if people understand more the process by which things go go wrong, that it isn't deliberate, that it's not bad people setting out to do bad things.It's human beings, um, at first convincing themselves even that they're doing the right thing and then ending up in a situation that they, they never meant to be in. And maybe on the margin that does, maybe on the margin that does, that does help because maybe it has deterred some people who, who would've started down that path, but for the fact that they now see that that's the, that's the usual path.Dwarkesh Patel: Yeah. Yeah. That actually raises the next question I wanted to ask you. Bern Hobart, uh, he's a finance writer as well. He wrote a blog post, um, about, uh, I mean this was before FTX obviously, and he was talking about Enron and he said in the end, it actually looks like we fixed the precise problem. Enron represented.Nobody I know solely looks at gap [00:05:00] financials. Everybody ultimately models based on free cash flow, we're much more averse to companies that set up a deliberate conflict of interest between management and shareholders. And I guess there's a way in which you can read that and say, oh, it doesn't FTX prove I'm wrong.But, you know, there's another way you can look at it is that FTX deliberately set up outside the us. So there's a story to be told that actually we learned the lessons of Enron and, you know, uh, so remains obviously worked. Uh, that's why, you know, they were in The Bahamas and we haven't seen the scale fraud of that scale in, you know, the continental United States.Um, do, do you think that the FTX saga and I guess the absence of other frauds of that scale in America shows that. The regulations and this changed business and investment practices in the aftermath of Enron have actually. Bethany McLean: Well, I think they've probably worked in narrowly, written in, in the way in which the writer you quoted articulated, I think it would be very hard for the cfo, F O of a publicly traded company to set up other private [00:06:00] equity firms that he ran, that did all their business with his company.Because everybody would say That's Enron and it would be completely. On the nose. And so, and Sarbanes Oxley in the sense of, in the sense of helping to reign in corporate fraud of the sort that was practiced by Enron, which was this abuse of very specific accounting rules. Um, I think I, I, I think that worked.But you know, you say there hasn't been fraud on a scale like Enron up until perhaps f ftx, but you're forgetting the global financial crisis. Yeah. And then the end, the line between what happened at Enron. and, and what happened in the global financial crisis. It's not a matter of black and white. It's not a matter of, one thing was clear cut fraud and one thing great.We love these practices. Isn't this fantastic? This is the way we want business to operate. They're both somewhere in the murky middle. You know, a lot of what happened at Enron wasn't actually outright fraud. I've coined this phrase, legal fraud to describe, um, to describe what it is that, that, that, that happened at Enron.And a lot of what [00:07:00] happened in the global financial crisis was legal, hence the lack of prosecutions. But it's also not behavior that that leads to a healthy market or mm-hmm. , for that matter, a a a a healthy society. And so there's a reason that you had Sarbanes Oxley and what was it, eight short, short years later you had Dodd-Frank and so Riri broadly.I'm not sure Sarbanes actually did that much good. And what I mean by that is when President George Bush signed it into law in the Rose Garden, he gave this speech about how investors were now protected and everything was great and your, your ordinary investors could take comfort that the laws were meant to protect them from wrongdoing.And you compare that to the speech that President Barack Obama gave eight years later when he signed Don Frank into law in the Rose Garden. And it's remarkably similar that now ordinary investors can count on the rules and regulations keeping themself from people who are prey on their financial wellbeing.[00:08:00] And I don't think it was, it's, it's true in either case because our markets, particularly modern markets move and evolve so quickly that the thing that's coming out of left field to get you is never gonna be the thing you are protecting against. Mm. . Dwarkesh Patel: , but given the fact that Enron, as you say, was committing legal fraud, is it possible that the government, um, when they prosecuted skilling and Fastow and lay, they in fact, We're not, uh, they, they prosecuted them to a greater extent than the law as written at the time would have warranted.In other words, were, uh, was there something legally invalid in the, in this, in the quantity of sentence that they got? Is it possible? Bethany McLean: So that's a really, it, it's, it's a, I I get what you're asking. I think it's a really tricky question because I think in absolute terms, um, Enron needed to be prosecuted and needed to be prosecuted aggressively.And while I say it was legal fraud, that is for the most part, there was actually real fraud around, around, uh, but it's on the margin. It doesn't [00:09:00] entire, it doesn't explain the entirety of Enron's collapse. Much of what they did was using and abusing the accounting rules in order to create an appearance of economic reality.Nothing to do with actual, with actual reality. But then there was actual fraud in the sense that Andy Fasta was stealing money from these partnerships to benefit himself. And they were, if you believe, the core tenant of the prosecution, which was their, this agreement called Global Galactic that was signed by, that was between Andy fau and Jeff Skilling, where Jeff agreed that Andy's partnerships would never lose money.Then that invalidated all of the, all of the accounting, and that's the chief reason that that. That skilling was, was, was convicted, um, was that the jury believed the existence of this, of this, of this agreement that in, um, one set of insider stock sales, which, which we can talk about, which was also a really key moment relative to the, so in absolute terms, I don't know, it's, it's hard for me to, to say there was [00:10:00] such, Enron was such a, to a degree that is still surprising to me, such a, a watershed moment in our, in our country, far beyond business itself.it, it, it caused so much insecurity that about our retirements, our retirement assets safe. Can you trust the company where you work? That I think the government did, did have to prosecute aggressively, but relative to the financial crisis where a lot of people made off with a lot of money and never had to give any of it back, does it seem fair that, that, that Jeff Skilling went to jail for over a decade and no one involved in a major way in the financial crisis paid any price whatsoever?People didn't even really have to give up that much of the money they made then. Then it seems a little bit unfair. Yes, so I think it's, it's an absolute versus a relative Dwarkesh Patel: question. Yeah. Yeah. By the way, who do you think made more money? Um, the investment banks, uh, like, uh, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, um, from doing, [00:11:00] providing their services to Enron as the stock was going up, or Jim Chanos from shorting the stock?In absolute terms, who made more money? Bethany McLean: Oh, I think the investment banks for sure. I mean, they made, they made so much money in investment banking fees from, from, from Enron. But, you know, it's a good question. . , it's a good question actually, because I think Jim made a lot of money too, so, Dwarkesh Patel: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I, I, you've spoken about, I guess the usefulness and the shortage of short sellers des a sort of, uh, corrective on irrational exuberance.And I'm curious why you think that shortage exists in the first place. Like, if you believe in the efficient market hypothesis, you should think that, you know, if some company has terrible financials and implausible numbers, then people would be lining up to short it. And then you would never have a phenomenon like Enron.And so it's, it's, you know, it's so odd that you can. , you know, reporters who are basically ahead of the market in terms of predicting what's gonna happen. Uh, well, uh, how do you square that with like the efficient [00:12:00] market hypothesis? Well, do you Bethany McLean: believe in the efficient market hypothesis, ? Dwarkesh Patel: I, I, I'd like to, but I'm like trying to , trying to wrap my head around Enron.Bethany McLean: I, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm not sure how you. Can, unless you, unless you adopt Warren Buffett's point of view, and I'm gonna mangle the quote because, uh, but, but it's that the market in the short term is a voting machine in the long term. It's a weighing machine, right? Mm-hmm. , or is it the other way around? . Anyway, but the idea is that the market may be very efficient for a long, very inefficient, for a long period of time.But, but it does actually, rationality does actually work in, in, in the end. And I think I might believe that, but isn't it John Maynard Cas who said the market can remain irrational for a lot longer than you can remain solvent. And so I think that's true too. I think believing that the market is efficient and rational in the short term is just obviously wrongUm, but back to your question about short sellers, which is, which is interesting, you know, I think part of it is that there is still this, um, there certainly was a couple of [00:13:00] decades ago, and I think it still exists, this idea that. Owning stocks is Mom, American, and apple pie in shorting stocks somehow is bad and evil and rooting, rooting against America.And I remember going back to the Enron days, someone, people criticizing me, even other people in the press saying, but you took a tip from a short seller. They're biased. And I. , I would say. But, but, but wait, the analysts who have buy ratings on stocks and the portfolio managers who own those stocks, they're biased too.They want the stocks to go up. Everybody's biased. So the trick as a journalist is getting information from all sides and figuring out who you think is right and what makes sense. But it's not avoiding anybody with any bias. But it was really interesting that people saw the bias on the part of short sellers and did not see it on the part of, of, of Longs.And I think there is that preconception that exists broadly, that somehow you are doing something wrong and you're somehow rooting for a company's failure. And that this is, I don't know, anti-American if you, if, if you [00:14:00] short a stock. And so I think that's part of why there's, there's, there's a shortage of shortage of, of, of short sellers.Um, I think also, I mean, we've had. Incredible, unprecedented bull market for the last four decades as a result of falling interest rates, and especially in the decade before the pandemic hit, it was very, very difficult to make money shorting anything because everything went to the moon. Didn't matter if its numbers were good, if it was eventually unmasked to be somewhat fraudulent, , it stocks just went to the moon anyway.The riskier the better. And so it is only diehard short sellers that have managed to stick it out . Yeah, and I think, I think lastly, Jim Chano said this to me once, and I, I think it's true that he could find, dozens of people who were skilled enough to come, smart enough to come work for him.There's no shortage of that. People who are technically skilled and really smart, but being able to be contrarian for a long period of time, especially when the market is going against you, is a different sort [00:15:00] of person. It that it requires a completely different mindset to have everybody in the world saying, you're wrong to be losing money because the stock is continuing to go up and to be able to hold fast to your conviction.And I think that's another, uh, part of the explanation for why there are fewer short sellers. Dwarkesh Patel: Yeah, and that raised an interesting question about. Uh, venture capital, for example, where, or private markets in general? Um, at least in the public markets, there's shorting maybe in shortage, but it, it is a possible mechanism, whereas, uh, I'm a programmer.So, you know, if, if like a one guy thinks the company's worth a hundred million dollars and everybody else thinks it's not, you know, the company will still be, uh, the price will still be said by the, you know, the person who's a believer. Um, does that increase the risk of some sort of bubble in venture capital and in technology?Um, and I guess in private markets generally, if they're, they're not public, is that something you worry about that they're, they will be incredible bubbles built up if there's a lot of money that's floating around in these Bethany McLean: circles. . Well, I think we're seeing that now, [00:16:00] right? And I don't think it's a coincidence that FTX and Theranos were not publicly traded companies, right?Mm-hmm. . Um, there's a certain sort of, uh, black box quality to these companies because people aren't charting them and aren't, aren't, and aren't, you know, whispering to journalists about that. That there's something wrong here and there aren't publicly available financials for people to dig through and look, look, and look at the numbers.So now I don't think that's a coincidence. And I do think this gigantic move into private assets has been, um, probably not great for the, for the, for the, for the. for the, for the safety of the system. And you'd say, well, it's just institutional investors who can afford to lose money who are losing money.But it's really not because institutional investors are just pension fund money. Mm-hmm. and in some cases now mutual fund money. So that distinction that the people who are investing in this stuff can afford to lose it is not really true. Um, so I don't, I don't like that rationalization. I think we're gonna see how that plays out.There was [00:17:00] just a really good piece in the Economist about private equity marks on their portfolio companies and how they are still looked to be much higher than what you would think they should be given the carnage in the market. And so all of what, what actually things are really worth in private markets, both for venture capital firms and for private equity firms, Is absent another, another bubble starting, starting in the markets.I think we're gonna see how that plays out over, over the next year. And it might be a wake up call for, for a lot of people. Um, you know, all that, all that said, it's an interesting thing because investors have been very complicit in this, right? In the sense that a lot of investors are absolutely delighted to have prep, to have their, their private, um, their private investments marked at a high level.They don't have to go to the committee overseeing the investments and say, look, I lost 20% of your money the way they might, um, if, if the numbers were public. And so that the ability of these of private investors to smooth as they call it, the, the, the returns is, is it's [00:18:00] been, it's been part of the appeal.It hasn't been a negative, it's been a positive. And so I would say that investors who wanted this moving are. Art might be getting what they deserve except for the pointing made earlier that it isn't, it isn't their money. It's, it's the money of, of teachers and firefighters and individual investors a around the country, and that's, that's problematic.Dwarkesh Patel: Yeah. Yeah. Being in the world of technology and being around people in it has. made me, somewhat shocked when I read about these numbers from the past. For example, when I'm reading your books and they're detailing things that happened in the nineties or the two thousands, and then you realize that the salary that Hank Paulson made a c e o of Goldman, or that skilling made as, you know, um, c e o of Enron, you know, I, it's like I have friends who are my age, like 22 year olds who are raising seed rounds, , that are as big as like these people's salaries.And so it just feels like the, these books were, you have $50 billion frauds or, you know, hundreds of billions of dollars of collapse and the individuals there, um, it just feels like they, it's missing a few zeros, uh, [00:19:00] because of the delusion of the private markets. But, um, but speaking of short sellers and speaking of private equity, um, I think it'd be interesting to talk about sbf.So, you know, your 2018 Vanity Fair article I thought was really interesting about, you know, sbf factory in Buffalo H How, how do you think back on Tesla and sbf now, given the fact that. The stock did continue to rise afterwards, and the factory, I believe, was completed and it's, I hired the 1500 or so people that had promised New York State, uh, is sbf just a fraud?Who can pull it off? And so he's a visionary. How, how do you think about sbf in the aftermath? Bethany McLean: So I don't think that's right about Buffalo and I have to look, but I don't think they ended up, I mean, the Solar City business that Tesla has pretty much collapsed. I don't think people haven't gotten their roofs.There was just a piece about how they're canceling some of their roof installations. So sbf has repeatedly made grand visions about that business that haven't played out. And I will check this for you post the podcast, but I don't think [00:20:00] if there is employment at that factory in, in Buffalo, it's not because they're churn out solar, solar, solar products that are, that are, that are doing.What was originally promised. So I guess I, I think about that story in a, in a couple of ways. It definitely, um, it was not meant to be a piece about Tesla. It was meant to be a piece that shown a little bit of light on how sbf operates and his willingness to flout the rules and his reliance on government subsidies, despite the fact that he, um, presents himself as this libertarian free, free, free market free marketeer, and his willingness to lie to, to, to, on some level enrich himself, which also runs counter to the Elon sbf narrative that he doesn't care about making money for, for himself.Because the main reason for Teslas to by Solar City was that Solar City had the main reason, was it Tes, that was, that Solar City had, that, that sbf and his, and his and his relatives had extended the these loans to Solar City that were gonna go. [00:21:00] There were gonna be lo all the money was gonna be lost at Solar City when bankrupt.And by having Tesla buy it, sbf was able to bail himself out, um, as, as as well. And I also think a good reason for the, for the, for, and it brings us to the present time, but a reason for the acquisition was that sbf knows that this image of himself as the invincible and vulnerable who can always raise money and whose companies always work out in the end, was really important.And if Solar City had gone bankrupt, it would've cast a big question mark over over sbf, over over the sbf narrative. And so I think he literally couldn't afford to let Solar City go bankrupt. Um, all of that said, I have, I have been, and was I, I was quite skeptical of Tesla and I thought about it in, in, in, in.And I always believed that the product was great. I just, mm-hmm. wasn't sure about the company's money making potential. And I think that, that, it's something I started thinking about, um, background, the Solar City time, maybe earlier, but this line, something I've talked about [00:22:00] before. But this line between a visionary and a fraudster.You know, you think that they're on two opposite ends of the spectrum, but in reality they're where the ends of the circle meet. Characteristics of one. One has that many of the characteristics of the other. And sometimes I think the only thing that really separates the two is that the fraudster is able to keep getting mo raising money in order to get through the really difficult time where he or she isn't telling the truth.And then they, that person goes down in history as a visionary. Um, but because no one ever looks back to the moment in time when they were lying, the fraudster gets caught in the middle. Um, so Enron's Lo lost access to to the capital markets lost AC access to funding as the market collapsed after the.com boom.And people began to wonder whether skilling was telling the truth about Enron's broadband business. And then there were all the disclosures about Andy fasa partnerships if Enron had been able to continue raising money, Business of Enron's called Enron Broadband might well have been Netflix. It was Netflix ahead of its time.So Enron just got caught in the middle and all [00:23:00] the fraud, all the fraud got exposed . Um, but that's not because Jeff Skilling wasn't a visionary who had really grand plans for, for, for, for the future. So I think sbf falls somewhere in that spectrum of, of, of fraudster and visionary. And what's gonna be really interesting why I said that this, we bring it to the present time about what happens to the mu narrative.If something fails is what happens. Yeah. Is as the world watch watches Twitter implode, um, what does that mean then for the Elon sbf narrative overall? Dwarkesh Patel: Yeah. Yeah. Um, going back to the Smartest Guys is the Room, the title obviously suggests something about. The, I guess in general, the ability and the likelihood of very smart people committing fraud or things of that sort.Um, but you know, Begar Jones has this book called Hi Mind, where he talks about how the smarter people are more likely to cooperate in prisoners dilemma type situations. They have longer time preference. And one of the things you've written about is the problem in corporate America is people having shorter, [00:24:00] um, uh, you know, doing two too big time discounting.So, uh, given that trend we see in general of greater Cooperativeness, um, and other kinds of traits of more intelligent people, do you think the reason we often find people like S B F and skilling running big frauds just by being very intelligent, is it just that on, on average smarter people, maybe less likely to commit fraud, but when they do commit fraud, they do it at such garat scales and they're able to do it at such gar scales that it just brings down entire empires?How, how, how do you think about the relationship between intelligence and fraud? . Bethany McLean: That's interesting. Um, I'm not sure I know a coherent answer to that. Um, smartest guys in the room as a title was a little bit tongue in cheek. It wasn't meant to say, these guys actually are the smartest guys in the room. It was, it, it was a little bit, it was a little bit ironic, but that doesn't take away from the really good question that you asked, which is what, what, what is that relationship?I, I mean, I think if you look at the history of corporate fraud, you are not going to find unintelligent people having [00:25:00] been the masterminds behind this. You're gonna find really, really, really smart, even brilliant people having, having, having been, been behind it, maybe some at part of that is this linkage between the visionary and the fraud star that so many of these, of these corporate frauds are people who have qualities of the visionary and to.The qualities of, of a visionary, you have to have a pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty high intelligence. Um, and I do think so many of these stories are, are about then self delusion. So I don't think smart people are any less likely to suffer from self delusion than dumb people. And they're probably more likely to, because you can rationalize, you know, the smart person's ability to rationalize just about anything they wanna rational rationalize is pretty profound.Whereas perhaps someone who doesn't have quite the same, the same brain power isn't gonna be able to create a narrative under which their actions are blameless and they're doing the right thing. So I think sometimes, so maybe there is some sort of relationship [00:26:00] there that somebody more qualified than I am would have to study between smart people's ability to, to, to rationalize just about anything as a way of, as part of the path to self delusion and part of the path by which these things happen.Yeah, that's completely, that's completely , that's Bethany theory. There's absolutely nothing to back that . I'm just Dwarkesh Patel: well clear. Let's do some more speculation. So, um, one of the things, uh, John Ray talked about in his testimony, um, was it two days ago where he said that, you know, FTX had done $5 billion of investments and deals in the last year, and most of those investments were worth a fraction of the value that FTX paid for them.And we see this also in, obviously in Enron, right? With, uh, broadband and with, um, ul, or is that how pronounce it, but basically their international department. Yeah. Um, what is this, uh, this obsession with deal making for its own sake? Is that to appease investors and make them think a lot's going on, is that because of [00:27:00] the hubris of the founder, of just wanting to set up a big empire as fast as possible, even if you're getting a bad sticker price?What, why do we see this pattern of just, you know, excessive deal making for its own sake? Bethany McLean: That's an interesting question too. I'm not sure that that's, um, limited to companies that go splat dramatically. There's a lot of, a lot of deal making in, in corporate America has that same frenzied quality. Um, I haven't seen an updated study on, on this in a, in a long time, but, you know, I began my career working as an analyst in an m and a department at at at Goldman Sachs.And. Definitely deals are done for the sake of doing deals. And I once joked that synergies are kind of like UFOs. A lot of people claim to have seen them, but there's no proof that they actually exist. , and again, I haven't seen an updated study on, on, on this, but there was one years back that showed that most m and a transactions don't result in increased value for shareholders.And most synergies, most promised synergies never materialize. [00:28:00] Just getting bigger for the sake of getting bigger and doing deals for the short term value of showing Wall Street a projection. That earnings are gonna be so much higher even after the cost of the debt that you've taken on. And that they're these great synergies that are gonna come about from, from combining businesses.So I don't know that either the frenzy deal doing or deal doing deals gone wrong is, um, solely limited to people who are committing fraud. , I think it's kinda across the spectrum. , . Dwarkesh Patel: Um, um, well one, one thing I find interesting about your books is how you detail that. And correct me if this is the wrong way to read them, but that, uh, incentives are not the only thing that matter.You know, there there's this perception that, you know, we've set up bad incentives for these actors and that's why they did bad things. But also, um, the power of one individual to shape a co co company's culture and the power of that culture to enable bad behavior, whether scaling at Enron or with Clarkson Right at Moody's.Yeah. Um, is that a good, good way of reading your books or how, how do you think [00:29:00] about the relative importance of culture and incentive? Bethany McLean: I think that's really fair. But incentives are part of culture, right? If, if you've set up a culture where, where how you're valued is what you get paid, I think it's a little, it's a little difficult to separate those two things out because, because the, the incentives do help make the culture, but for sure culture is incredibly, um, incredibly compelling.I've often thought and said that if I had, when I was leaving my short lived career in investment banking, if I had, if I had gotten in some of the head hunters I was talking to, if one of them had said, there's this great, really energetic, interesting energy company down in Houston, , why don't interview there?If I had gone there, would I have been a whistleblower or would I have been a believer? And I'd like to believe I would've been a whistleblower, but I think it's equally likely that I would've been a believer. Culture is so strong. It creates this. What's maybe a miasma that you can't see outside?I remember a guy I talked to who's a trader at Enron, really smart guy, and he [00:30:00] was like, after the, after the bankruptcy, he said, of course, if we're all getting paid based on creating reported earnings and there's all this cash going out the door in order to do these deals that are creating reported earnings, and that's the culture of the entire firm, of course it's not gonna work economically.He said, I never thought about it. . It just didn't, it didn't, it didn't occur to me. And I think the more compelling the CEO o the more likely you are to have that kind of mass delusion. I mean, there's a reason cult exist, right? . We, we are as human beings, remarkably susceptible to.Visionary leaders. It's just, it's the way the human brain is wired. We, we wanna believe, and especially if somebody has the ability to put a vision forward, like Jeff Gilling did at Enron, like Elizabeth Holmes did it Theranos like SPF F did, where you feel like you are in the service of something greater by helping this, vision, , actualize then, then you're, particularly susceptible.And I think that is the place where [00:31:00] incentives don't quite explain things. That is, there is this very human desire to matter, to do something important. Mm-hmm to be doing something that's gonna change the world. And when somebody can tap into that desire in people that feeling that what you're doing isn't just work in a paycheck and the incentives you have, but I mean, I guess it is part of the incentive, but that you're part of some greater good.That's incredibly powerful. Yeah. Dwarkesh Patel: It's what we all speaking of. We all wanna matter. . Yeah. Speaking of peoples psychology, uh, crime and punishment, underrated or overrated as a way to analyze the psychology of people like scaling and S B F or maybe SBF specifically because of the utilitarian nature of SB F'S crime?Um, Bethany McLean: I think it's, I think it's underrated, overrated. I'm not sure anybody. , I'm not sure anybody has ever proven that jail sentences for white collar criminals do anything to deter subsequent white collar crime. Mm-hmm. , and I think one part of this is the self delusion that I've, that I talked about. Nobody thinks, [00:32:00] oh, I'm doing the same thing as Jeff Skilling did at Enron, and if I, and if I do this, then I too might end up in jail.Therefore, I don't wanna do this. I just don't think that's the way the, the, the, the, the thought process works. I think Elizabeth Holmes at Theranos, probably for the most part, convinced herself that this was going to work, and that if you just push forward and push hard enough and keep telling people what they wanna hear and keep being able to raise money, it's gonna work.You know, if. . If, if you pause to think, well, what if it doesn't work and I've lied and I go to jail, then, then you'd stop right, right then and there. So I think that, I think that, that I'm, I'm not, I'm not sure it's much of a deterrent. I remember, and partly I'm, I'm biased because I remember a piece, my co-author Peter Alkin, and I wrote out right after Jess Gilling and Kenley were, were convicted and can lay, we're we're convicted.And we wrote a piece for Fortune in which we said that the entire world has changed. Now that corporate executives are, um, are, are put on high alert that behavior in the gray area will no longer be tolerated and that it will be aggressively prosecuted. And this was spring of [00:33:00] 2006 and the events that caused the global financial crisis were pretty well underway.It didn't. Do much to prevent the global financial crisis. Mm-hmm. , Enron's, Enron's jail time, didn't do anything to present, prevent, Elizabeth Holmes doesn't seem to have done anything to change what Sbf was doing. So I just, I, I just, I'm, I'm, I'm not sure, I'm sure a psychologist or somebody who specializes in studying white color crime could probably make a argument that refutes everything I said and that shows that has had a deterring effect.But I just, I just don't think that people who get themselves into this situation, con, con, consciously think, this is what I'm doing. Dwarkesh Patel: Yeah. Yeah. Um, speaking of other incentives, stock options, uh, you've spoken about how that creates short-term incentives for the executives who are making decisions. If you wanted to set up an instrument that aligned an executive or a leader's compensation with the long-term performance of a company, what would that look like?W would you have the options of less than 10 years instead of a [00:34:00] year? H how would you design it? How do you usually design a compensation scheme to award long-term thinking? Bethany McLean: If I could do that, I should ru rule the world . I think that very sweet. I think that is one of the really tough, um, problems confronting boards or anybody who is determining anybody who's determining stock options and that almost anybody who's determining compensation and that most compensation schemes seem to have really terrible unintended consequences.They look really good on paper. And then as they're implemented, it turns out that there was a way in which they accomplished exactly the opposite of, uh, thing the people who designing them wanted, wanted them to accomplish. I mean, if you think back to the advent of stock options, what could sound better?Right. Giving management a share of the company such that if, if, if shareholders did well, that they'd do well, nobody envisioned the ways in which stock options could be repriced. The ways in which meeting earnings targets could lead to gaming the ways in which the incentive of stock-based [00:35:00] compensation could lead to people trying to get anything they could in order to get the stock price higher and cash out when they're, as soon as their stock options vested.So, and even there was, there was, the whole valiant saga was fascinating on this front because the people who designed Mike Pearson's compensation package as ceo e o Valiant, they were convinced that this was absolutely the way to do it. And he got bigger and bigger, um, stock option incentives for hitting certain, for having the stock achieve certain levels.But of course, that creates this incredible bias to just get the stock to go up no matter, no matter what else you do. Um, it does seem to me that vesting over the long term is. is, is a much better way to go about things. But then do you create incentives for people to play games in order to get the stock lower at, at various points where there's about to be a stock optional board so they have a better chance of having directions be, be worth, be worth something over the long term.And do you, particularly on Wall Street there is this, or in firms where this sort of stuff matters the most? There [00:36:00] is this, there was this clearing out of dead wood that happened where people got paid and they got outta the way and made way for younger people. And I don't know, it was a harsh culture, but maybe it made sense on some level.And now at least I've been told with much longer vesting periods, you have people who don't wanna let go. And so you have more of a problem with people who should have retired, stick sticking around instead of in, in, instead of clearing out. And then it also becomes a question, How much money is, is enough.So if somebody is getting millions of dollars in short-term compensation and then they have a whole bunch more money tied up in long-term compensation, do the long-term numbers matter? At what point do they, do they, do they really matter? I mean, if you gave me $5 million today, I'm not so sure I'd really care if I were getting another $5 million in 10 years.Right. ? Yeah. So, so I think all of that is, is it, it's, I'm not, I'm not sure there's a perfect compensation system. All things considered though, I think longer term is, is probably better, [00:37:00] but. Dwarkesh Patel: Yeah, I didn't think about that downside of the long investing period. That's so interesting there. I guess there is no free lunch.Uh, so with Enron, um, it, it was clear that there was a lot of talent at the firm and that you had these companies and these trading firms launch at the aftermath by people who left Enron, kinder Morgan and John Arnold's, um, uh, Sintas, uh, that were wildly profitable and did well. Do you think we'll see the same thing with FTX, that while Sbf himself and maybe the, his close cadre were frauds, there actually was a lot of great trading and engineering talent there that are gonna start these very successful firms in the aftermath.Bethany McLean: That's, that's interesting. And just, just for the sake of clarification, kinder Morgan was actually started years before Enron's collapsed, when Rich Kinder, who was vying with Jeffs skilling in a sense, to become Chief Operating Officer. Um, Ken Lay, picked Jeffs skilling and Kinder left. Mm-hmm. and took a few assets and went to create Kinder, kinder Morgan.But your overall point, I'm just clarifying your overall point holds, there were a lot of people who [00:38:00] left Enron and went on to do, to have pretty, pretty remarkable careers. I think the answer with ftx, I bet there will be some for sure. But whether they will be in the crypto space, I guess depends on your views on the long-term viability of, of, of the crypto space.And I have never , it's funny is crypto exploded over the last couple of years. I was, I've been working on this book about the pandemic and it's been busy and difficult enough that I have not lifted my head to, to think about much else. And I always thought, I don't get it. I don't understand , I mean, I understand the whole argument about the blockchain being valuable for lots of transactions and I, I get that, but I never understood crypto itself and I thought, well, I just need to, as soon as this book is done, I just need to put a month into understanding this because it's obviously an important, important enough part of our world that I need to figure it out.So now I think, oh, Okay, maybe I didn't understand it for a reason and maybe, um, maybe there isn't anything to understand and I've just saved myself a whole life of crime because it's all gone. And you have [00:39:00] people like Larry Fink at BlackRock saying, whole industry is gonna implode. It's done. And certainly with the news today, this morning of finances auditor basically saying We're out.Um, I, I don't, I don't know how much of it was, how much of it was, is, was a Ponzi scheme. You might know better than I do. And so I don't know what's left after this whole thing implodes. It's a little bit like, there is an analogy here that when Enron imploded, yes, a lot of people went on to start other successful businesses, but the whole energy trading business is practiced by kind of under capitalized, um, um, energy firms went away and that never came back.Yeah. And so I, I, I don't, I don't know, I'm, it'll be, I, I don't know. What do you. The Dwarkesh Patel: time to be worried will be when Bethany McLean writes an article titled Is Bitcoin Overvalued for the Audience. My Moments on That ? Yeah, for the audience that, that was, I believe the first skeptical article about Enron's, um, stock price.Yeah. Uh, and it was titled [00:40:00] Is Enron Overvalued. In aftermath understated, , title. But , Bethany McLean: , I joked that that story should have won, won, won awards for the NICU title and business journalism history. , given that the company was bankrupt six months later was overpricedDwarkesh Patel: Um, uh, well, let me ask a bigger question about finance in general. So finance is 9% of gdp, I believe. How much of that is the productive use and thinking and allocation of the, uh, the capital towards their most productive ends? And how much of that is just zero sum or negative sum games? Um, if, if you had to break that down, like, is 9% too high, do you think, or is it just.I think it's Bethany McLean: too high. I have no idea how to think about breaking it down to what the proper level should be. But I think there are other ways to think about how you can see that in past decades it hasn't been at the right level when you've had all sorts of smart kids. Um, Leaving, leaving business school and leaving college and heading into [00:41:00] finance and hedge funds and private equity is their career of choice.I think that's a sign that that finance is too big when it's sucking up too much of, of, of the talent of the country. Um, and when the rewards for doing it are so disproportionate relative to the rewards of of, of doing other things. Um, the counter to that is that there've also been a lot of rewards for starting businesses.And that's probably, I think, how you want it to be in a, in a product. In a productive economy. So I think the number is, is too high. I don't know how to think about what it should be other than what a, actually, a former Goldman Sachs partner said this to me when I was working on all the devils are here, and she said that finance is supposed to be like the, the substrata of our world.It's supposed to be the thing that enables other things to happen. It's not supposed to be the world itself. So the, the role of a financial system is to enable businesses to get started, to provide capital. That's what it's supposed to be. It's the lubricant that enables business, but it's not supposed to be the thing itself.Right. And it's become the thing itself. [00:42:00] You've, you've, you've, you've, you've got a problem. Um, um, and I think the other, Dwarkesh Patel: there's your article about crypto , that paragraph right there. . Bethany McLean: There you go. That's, that's a good, um, and I think, I think the other way, you, you, you can see, and perhaps this is way too simplistic, but the other way I've thought about it is that how can it be if you can run a hedge fund and make billions of dollars from, and have five people, 10 people, whatever it is, versus starting a company that employs people mm-hmm.and changes a neighborhood and provides jobs and, you know, provides a product that, that, that, that, that improves people's lives. It, it is a shame that too much of the talent and such a huge share of the financial rewards are going to the former rather than the latter. And that just can't mean good things for the future.Dwarkesh Patel: Yeah. Yeah. And I, you know, when people criticize technology, for example, for the idea that, you know, these people who would've been, I don't know, otherwise teachers or something, they're, you know, making half a million dollars at Google. [00:43:00] Um, and I think like when I was in India, people were using Google Maps to get through the streets in Mumbai, which is, which is unimaginable to me before going there that, you know, you would be able to do that with, um, a service built out of Silicon Valley.And so, Yeah, I think that actually is a good allocation of capital and talent. I, I'm not, I'm not sure about finance. Um, yeah, Bethany McLean: I think I, I, I agree with you. I think there are other problems with Google and with the, the social media giants, but, but they are real businesses that employ people, that make products that have had, uh, huge.Um, impact on on, on people's, on people's lives. So in, in that sense, it's very different than a private equity firm, for instance, and especially private equity, even more so than hedge funds draws my ire. Mm-hmm. , because I think one of the reasons they, that it, they've been able to make part of the financialization of our economy has been due to super, super low interest rates and low interest rates that have enabled so many people to make so much money in finance are not, they're just a gift.It wasn't because these people were uniquely smart, they just [00:44:00] found themselves in a great moment in time. And the fact that they now think they're really smart because money makes me crazy. Dwarkesh Patel: Um, are Fanny and Freddy America special purpose entities? Are they our Alameda? It's just the way we hide our debt and uh, that's interesting.Yeah. Bethany McLean: Well, I guess we, you know what? I don't know anymore because, so I last wrote about them when was it in 2016 and I don't know now. No, you're right. Their, their debt is still off, off, off balance sheet. So Yeah, in a lot of ways they, they were. . I would argue though that the old Fanny and Freddy were structured more honestly than, than the new Fanny and Freddy, that it really is conservatorship that have made them, um, that have made them America's off balance sheet entities, because at least when they were their own independent entities.Yes, there was this odd thing known as the implicit guarantee, which is when you think about, back to your point about efficient markets, how can you possibly believe there's an as such a thing as an efficient market when their [00:45:00] Fanny and Freddy had an implicit guarantee, meaning it wasn't real. There was no place where it was written down that the US government would bail Fanny and Freddie out in a crisis, and everybody denied that it existed and yet it did exist.Yeah. Dwarkesh Patel: No, but we, I feel like that confirms the official market hypothesis, right? The, the market correctly, they thought that mortgages backed by Fannie and Freddy would have governments. Uh, okay, okay. You might be father Bethany McLean: and they did . You might be right. I, I, I think what I was getting at you, you might be right.I think what I was getting at is that it is such a screwed up concept. I mean, how can you possibly, when I first, when people were first explaining this to me, when I first read about Fanny and Freddie, I was like, no, no, wait. This is American capitalism . This is, no, wait. What? I don't, I don't understand . Um, um, so yeah, but I, I, I, I think that Fanny and Freddie, at least with shareholders that were forced to bear some level of, of the risks were actually a more honest way of going about this whole screwed up American way of financing mortgages than, than the current setup is.Dwarkesh Patel: What [00:46:00] is the future of these firms? Or are they just gonna say in conservatorship forever? Or is there any developments there? Well, what's gonna happen to them? Bethany McLean: The lawsuit, the latest lawsuit that could have answered that in some ways ended in a mistrial. Um, I don't think, I don't, I don't think unfortunately anybody in government sees any currency in, and I mean, currency in the broad sense, not in the literal sense of money in, in taking this on.And unfortunately, what someone once said to me about it, I think remains true and it's really depressing, but is that various lawmakers get interested in Fannie and Freddy. They engage with it only to figure out it's really, really goddamn complicated. Mm-hmm. and that, and that any kind of solution is gonna involve angering people on one side of the aisle or another and potentially angering their constituent constituents.And they slowly back away, um, from doing anything that could, that, that could affect change. So I think we have a really unhealthy situation. I don't think it's great for these two [00:47:00] entities to be in conservatorship, but at this point, I'm not sure it's gonna change. Dwarkesh Patel: Yep. Speaking of debt and mortgages, um, so total household debt in the United States has been, uh, climbing recently after it's, it's like slightly d decline after 2008, but I think in quarter three alone it increased 350 billion and now it's at 16.5 trillion.Uh, the total US household debt, should we worried about this? Are, are, are we gonna see another sort of collapse because of this? Or what, what should we think about this? Bethany McLean: I don't know. I don't know how to think about that because it's too tied up in other things that no one knows. Are we going to have a recession?How severe is the recession going to be? What is the max unemployment rate that we're gonna hit if we do, if we do have a recession? And all of those things dictate how to, how to think about that number. I. Think consumer debt is embedded in the bowels of the financial system in the same way mortgages were.And in the end, the, the, the [00:48:00] problem with the financial crisis of 2008, it wasn't the losses on the mortgages themselves. It was the way in which they were embedded in the plumbing of the financial system. Mm-hmm. and ways that nobody understood. And then the resulting loss of confidence from the fact that nobody had understood that slash lies had been told about, about that.And that's what caused, that's what caused everything to, to collapse. Consumer debt is a little more visible and seeable and I, I don't think that it has that same, um, that same opaque quality to it that, that mortgage backed securities did. I could be, I could be wrong. I haven't, I haven't, I haven't dug into it enough, enough to understand enough to understand that.But you can see the delinquencies starting to climb. Um, I mean, I guess you could on, on, on mortgages as well, but there was this, there was this profound belief with mortgages that since home prices would never decline, there would never be losses on these instruments because you could always sell the underlying property for more than you had [00:49:00] paid for it, and therefore everything would be fine.And that's what led to a lot of the bad practices in the industry is that lenders didn't think they had to care if they were screwing the home buyer because they always thought they could take the home back and, and, and, and, and make more money on it. And consumer debt is, is unsecured. And so it's, it's, it's different.I think people think about it differently, but I'd have. I'd have to, I'd have to do some more homework to understand where consumer debt sits in the overall architecture of the financial industry. Dwarkesh Patel: I, I, I'm really glad you brought up this theme about what does the overall big picture look like? I feel like this is the theme of all your books that people will be, So obsessed with their subsection of their job or, or that ar area that they won't notice that, um, broader trends like the ones you're talking about.And in Enron it's like, why, why, why do we have all these special purpose entities? What is the total debt load of Enron? Um, or with the, you know, mortgage back securities a similar kind of thing, right? What, what, uh, maybe they weren't correlated in the past, [00:50:00] but what's that? Do we really think that there's really no correlation, um, uh, between, uh, delinquencies across the country?Um, so that, that kind of big picture, think. Whose job is that today? Is it journalists? Is it short sellers? Is it people writing on ck? Who's doing that? Is it anybody's job? Is, is it just like, uh, an important role with nobody assigned to it? Bethany McLean: I think it's the latter. I think it's an important role with nobody, with nobody assigned to it, and there there is a limit.I mean, , I hate to say this, it is not, uh, um, it is not an accident that many of my books have been written. That's probably not fair. It's not true of my book un fracking, but that some of my books have been written after the calamity happened. So they weren't so much foretelling the calamity as they were unpacking the calamity after it happened, which is a different role.And as I said at the start of our conversation, I think an important one to explain to people why this big, bad thing took, took place. But it's not prediction, I don't know, as people that were very good at, at prediction, um, they tried [00:51:00] to set up, what was it called? In the wake of the global financial crisis, they established this thing called fsoc, and now I'm forgetting what the acronym stands for.Financial Security Oversight Committee. And it's supposed to be this, this body that does think about these big picture. That thinks about the ways, the ways an exam, for example, in which mortgage backed securities were, um, were, were, were, were, were, were, were repopulating through the entire financial system and ways that would be cause a loss to be much more than a loss.That it wouldn't just be the loss of money and that security, it would echo and magnify. And so that there are people who are supposed to be thinking about it. But I think, I think it's, it's, it's really hard to see that and. In increasingly complex world, it's even, it's even harder than it was before, because the reverberations from things are really hard to map out in, in, in advance, and especially when some part of those reverberations are a loss of confidence, then all bets [00:52:00] are off because when confidence cracks, lots of things fall apart.But how do you possibly analyze in any quantitative way the the risk that that confidence will collapse? Mm-hmm. . So I think it's, I think, I think, I think it's difficult. That said, and of course I am talking my own book here, I don't think that the lack of the, the increased financial problems of journalism really help matters in that respect, because in an ideal world, you want a lot of people out there writing and thinking about various pieces of this, and then maybe somebody can come along and see the.Pieces and say, oh my God, there's this big picture thing here that we all need to be thinking about. But there's, there's a kind of serendipity in the ability to do that one, that one that the chances, I guess the best way to say that is the chances of that serendipity are dramatically increased by having a lot of people out there doing homework, um, on the various pieces of the puzzle.And so I think in a world, particularly where local news has been decimated mm-hmm. , um, the [00:53:00] chances of that sort of serendipity are, are definitely lower. And people may think, oh, it doesn't matter. We still got national news. We've got the Washington Post, we've got the Wall Street Journal, we've got the New York Times.Um, I would love to have somebody do a piece of analysis and go back through the New York Times stories and see how many were sparked by lp, a piece in the local paper that maybe you wouldn't even notice from reading the New York Times piece, because it'd be in like the sixth paragraph that, oh yeah, credit should go to this person at this local paper who started writing about this.But if you no longer have the person at the local paper who started writing about this, You know, it's, it's, it's, it's less likely that the big national piece gets written. And I think that's a part of the implosion of local news, that people, a part of the cost of the implosion of local news that people don't really understand the idea that the national press functions at, at the same level, um, without local news is just not true.Dwarkesh Patel: Yeah. And, but even if you have the local news, and I, that's a really important point, but even if you have that local news, there still has to be somebody whose job it is to synthesize it all together. And [00:54:00] I'm curious, what is the training that requires? So you, I mean, your training is, you know, math and English major and then working at working in investment banking.Um, is that the, uh, I mean, obviously the anecdotal experience then equals one, seems that that's great training for synthesizing all these pieces together. But what is the right sort of education for somebody who is thinking about the big picture? Bethany McLean: I, I don't, I don't know.And there may be, there may be, there are probably multiple answers to that question, right? There's probably no one, one right answer for me. In, in the end. My, my math major has proven to be pivotal. Even though , my mother dug up these, um, my, my parents were moving and so my mother was going through all her stuff and she dug up these, some my math work from, from college.Literally, if it weren't for the fact that I recognized my own handwriting, I would not recognize these pages on pages of math formula and proofs. And they're like, get gibberish to me now. So , but I, but I still think that math has, so I do not wanna exaggerate my mathematical ability at this stage of [00:55:00] the game.It's basically no. But I do think that doing math proofs any kind of formal, any kind of training and logic is really, really important because the more you've been formally trained in logic, the more you realize when there are piece is missing and when something isn't quite, isn't quite adding on, it just forces you to think in, in a way that is, that in a way that connects the dots.Um, because you know, if you're moving from A to B and B doesn't follow a, you, you understand that B doesn't follow a And I think that that, that, that kind of training is, is really, really important. It's what's given. , whatever kind of backbone I have as a journalist is not because I like to create controversy and like to make people mad.I actually don't. It's just because something doesn't make sense to me. And so maybe it doesn't make sense to me because I'm not getting it, or it doesn't make sense to me because B doesn't actually follow, follow away, and you're just being told that it does. And so I think that, I think that training is, is really, really important.Um, I also have, have often thought [00:56:00] that another part of training is realizing that basic rule that you learned in kindergarten, which is, um, you know, believe your imagination or you know, your imagine follow your imagination. Because the truth is anything can happen. And I think if you look at business history over the last couple of decades, it will be the improbable becoming probable.Truth over and over and over again. I mean, the idea that Enron could implode one of the biggest, supposedly most successful companies in corporate America could be bankrupt within six months. The, from its year, from its stock price high. The idea that the biggest, most successful, um, financial institutions on wall, on Wall Street could all be crumbling into bankruptcy without the aid of the US government.The idea that a young woman with no college degree and no real experience in engineering could create, uh, uh, um, could create a machine that was going to revolutionize blood testing and land on the cover of every business magazine, and that this [00:57:00] whole thing could turn out to be pretty much a fraud. The entire idea of ftx, I mean, over and over again, these things have happened.Forget Bernie Madoff if you had told people a year ago that FTX was gonna implode six months ago, three months ago, people would've been like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. And so I think just that, that, that, that knowledge that the improbable happens over and over again is also a really fundamental, fundamentally important.Dwarkesh Patel: If we're con continuing on the theme of ftx, I, I interviewed him about four or five months ago.Wow. And this is one of these interviews that I'm really, I'm, I don't know if embarrass is the right word, but I knew things then that I could have like asked, poked harder about. But it's also the kind of thing where you look back in retrospect and you're. If it had turned out well, it's, it's not obvious what the red flags are.Um, while you're in the moment, there's things you can look back at the story of Facebook and how, you know, Marcus Zuckerberg acted in the early days of Facebook and you could say, if the thing fell apart, that this is why, or, you know, this is a red flag. So [00:58:00] I have a hard time thinking about how I should have done that interview.B

Kelly sits down with science writer Jessica Nordell to talk about her new book “The End of Bias: A Beginning: The Science and Practice of Overcoming Unconscious Bias.” “Laws create a floor; people determine the ceiling. In the space between floor and ceiling, the interpersonal moments matter.”  “Having biased associations didn't mean you were a […]

Episode 125: Visionaries Live A Powerful Life Based On Clear Inner Wisdom Show Description: You need to cultivate inner wisdom if you want to live the life you envision for yourself. Here are nine ways to become a wiser person.Top Takeaways: [2:53] Techniques To Develop Wisdom1. [3:27] Are you spending time with wise people?2. [4:36] Are you using your time wisely?3. [5:44] Read widely and purposefully.4. [6:40] Reflect uninterruptedly.5. [8:15] Challenge yourself.6. [9:29] Contemplate before deciding.7. [10:25] Focus on each day as it comes.8. [11:09] Wisdom is knowing your greatest teacher is failure.9. [11:59] It's wise to detach from the outcome.[12:40] Wisely Moving Forward Episode Links:Ø  https://terrikozlowski.mastermind.com/masterminds/25609 Ø  Proactive thinkingØ  TruthØ  Trusted tribeØ  Connection Ø  Your purposeØ  ChallengingØ  Diligently Ø  Consciously think Ø  Be fully presentØ  Your responsibilityØ  Before respondingØ  Raven Transcending FearØ  Appreciating Ø  Attached to the resultØ  Adapted Ø  Listen more Ø  Growth mindset. Ø  Clearer to see Ø  Get in touch with meØ  Available on Amazon Support the show

In our final episode for 2022, Malcolm Hobbs and his extreme Transformers knowledge is back as we tackle the second of our famous Intraspectives. Legitimacy of the word aside, this one is all about those Robots in Disguise as we pick G1, Beast Wars, The Bayverse and Masterpiece as our toylines of focus. What do these toylines mean to us? Can we seperate the movie(s) from the toys themselves? In a juggernaut brand spanning many years, which lines hit or missed us? There's a couple of surprising scores throughout, the odd in-context swear word and even a GoBot or two... Strap in for this extended episode as you (and us!) learn more about the might Autobots and Decepticons than you ever thought possible. Support the show: http://patreon.com/toypowerpodcastSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.