Podcasts about XYZ

Ženy XYZ #53: Feministický podcast, ve kterém Silvie Lauder, Markéta Plíhalová a Clara Zanga řeší důležitá aktuální témataJe mikrofeminismus jen trendem ze sociálních sítí, nebo může být efektivním doplňkem "velkého" aktivismu a tlaku na systémové změny? Jak může vypadat? Je pro každého? A jak s ním začít? O tom debatovaly redaktorky Respektu Silvie Lauder, Markéta Plíhalová a Clara Zanga pod širým nebem na Černé louce v Ostravě na akci Léto v centru.

Persuasion starts with being concise and clear. If the audience cannot follow the speaker quickly, they will not be persuaded, no matter how clever the message may be. In this Age of Distraction, speakers are competing with mobile phones, email, LinkedIn, Slack, Teams, WhatsApp, and every other digital escape route. Leaders, executives, salespeople, trainers, consultants, and presenters in Japan, Australia, the United States, Europe, and across Asia-Pacific need structure, evidence, timing, and strong openings and closes. Persuasion is not a lucky accident. It is designed. Why must persuasive speakers be concise and clear first? Persuasive speakers must be concise and clear because audiences will not accept a message they cannot follow.Rambling kills attention, and confusion kills trust. Many speakers want to be more persuasive, but persuasion is impossible when the audience is lost. In business presentations, sales pitches, investor briefings, training sessions, and leadership town halls, listeners decide quickly whether the speaker is worth their attention. If the speaker rambles, they reach for their phones. If the message is mystifying, they escape into digital safety. Conciseness and clarity create the foundation for influence. Do now: Before trying to persuade, ask whether your audience can explain your main point in one sentence. How should speakers open a persuasive presentation? A persuasive presentation needs a strong opening that wakes the audience up and tells them why they should listen now. The opening is the dynamite, the nitro, and the fuse. The first moments of a talk must break through complacency, sloth, and slumber. A weak opening wastes the audience's best attention. A strong opening may use a provocative statement, a sharp question, a surprising statistic, a customer story, or a vivid problem. In Japan, where business presentations can sometimes begin slowly and formally, a crisp opening helps both local and international audiences understand the value immediately. Do now: Design the opening separately. Do not drift into the talk and hope the audience comes with you. Why should presentations be organised in five-minute blocks? Five-minute blocks help speakers keep the audience attached to the message by regularly changing the rhythm.Every few minutes, the audience needs a fresh reason to stay engaged. A persuasive talk should not run as one long stream of explanation. Around every five minutes, the speaker should switch it up with a story, a strong slide, a quotation, a question, a demonstration, or an example. This prevents the presentation from becoming predictable. In executive briefings, sales presentations, board updates, and training programs, five-minute blocks create momentum and make the message easier to remember. Do now: Map your next presentation into five-minute sections, each with a clear purpose and engagement device. How does evidence make a speaker more persuasive? Evidence makes a speaker more persuasive because it proves the claim and reduces audience doubt. Strong opinions need credible support. When speakers make provocative claims, they must bolt on proof. Data, statistics, survey results, testimonials, case studies, customer feedback, and benchmark comparisons all increase credibility. In B2B sales, leadership communication, consulting, and training, unsupported assertions sound like opinion. Supported assertions sound like business logic. The speaker's job is to make it easy for the audience to believe the point without working too hard. Do now: For every major claim, add one proof point: data, example, testimonial, or result. What structure makes a persuasive talk easy to follow? A persuasive talk becomes easier to follow when the speaker chooses a clear structure and stays with it. Logical flow prevents the audience from getting lost. The structure may be thematic, chronological, micro to macro, problem-solution-result, past-present-future, or challenge-action-outcome. The exact model matters less than the discipline of choosing one. Speakers get into trouble when they let the muse take them on a scenic journey without direction. Audiences are lazy escape artists. If they have to work too hard to follow the thread, they leave mentally. Do now: Choose one organising structure before building slides or writing the script. Why are bridges important in persuasive presentations? Bridges are important because they guide the audience from one section to the next without making them work.They stitch the whole presentation together. Useful bridges sound simple: "We have covered XYZ, now let me explore ABC." "In a moment, let's look at how the economy may affect our projections." "There are three key things we must be vigilant for; the first is…" These verbal signposts help listeners understand where they are and where the speaker is taking them. In cross-cultural presentations, especially when English is a second language for some audience members, bridges reduce confusion and increase trust. Do now: Write transition lines between sections before rehearsing the full talk. How does rehearsal improve persuasion? Rehearsal improves persuasion by forcing the speaker to tighten language, control timing, and remove excess. The stopwatch is the speaker's weapon of choice. Unrehearsed speakers often discover too late that they are running out of time. Then they "whip through" the final slides and cheat the audience out of important information. Rehearsal with a stopwatch exposes rambling, weak sentences, unnecessary detail, and poor pacing. It helps the speaker sharpen the prose, focus on the essentials, and give the strongest points the time they deserve. Do now: Rehearse with a stopwatch and cut anything that does not support the main persuasive point. How should speakers close a persuasive presentation? A persuasive presentation needs two closes: one before Q&A and one at the very end. Both should reinforce the main message and leave the audience with a memorable conclusion. The pre-Q&A close protects the core message before the discussion begins. The final close after Q&A puts the bow on the whole enterprise. These closes are opportunities to hammer the main conclusion, underscore the punch line, and make the key idea stick. A weak close lets the message fade. A strong close leaves a thought pounding in the audience's ears long after they leave. Do now: Write both closes in advance. Never improvise the final impression. Final summary Persuasion is built on concise language, clear structure, credible evidence, and disciplined rehearsal. Speakers who ramble or confuse the audience lose the chance to influence them. A persuasive talk needs a strong opening, five-minute content blocks, logical flow, verbal bridges, proof for major claims, stopwatch rehearsal, and two strong closes. In the Age of Distraction, audiences will not work hard to follow the speaker. The speaker must make the journey easy. Quick actions for speakers Plot the talk in five-minute brackets. Create bridges that lead the audience into each next section. Use a stopwatch to tighten the delivery. Support major claims with evidence. Spend proper time designing the opening and both closes. Author bio Dr. Greg Story, Ph.D. in Japanese Decision-Making, is President of Dale Carnegie Tokyo Training and Adjunct Professor at Griffith University. He is a two-time winner of the Dale Carnegie "One Carnegie Award" and recipient of the Griffith University Business School Outstanding Alumnus Award. As a Dale Carnegie Master Trainer, Greg is certified to deliver globally across all leadership, communication, sales, and presentation programs, including Leadership Training for Results. He has written several books, including three best-sellers — Japan Business Mastery, Japan Sales Mastery, and Japan Presentations Mastery — along with Japan Leadership Mastery and How to Stop Wasting Money on Training. His works have been translated into Japanese, including Za Eigyō（ザ営業）, Purezen no Tatsujin（プレゼンの達人）, Torēningu de Okane o Muda ni Suru no wa Yamemashō（トレーニングでお金を無駄にするのはやめましょう）, and Gendaiban "Hito o Ugokasu" Rīdā（現代版「人を動かす」リーダー）. Greg also publishes daily business insights on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter, and hosts six weekly podcasts. On YouTube, he produces The Cutting Edge Japan Business Show, Japan Business Mastery, and Japan's Top Business Interviews, which are widely followed by executives seeking success strategies in Japan.

Ženy XYZ #52: Feministický podcast, ve kterém Silvie Lauder, Markéta Plíhalová a Clara Zanga řeší důležitá aktuální témata Jednomu aspektu probíhajícího mistrovství světa ve fotbale se nevěnuje příliš pozornosti: roste během něj výskyt domácího násilí. Jak víme z výzkumů, není za tím jen frustrace z prohry klubu nebo národního týmu. Incidentů přibývá, i když mančaft zvítězí. Ve Velké Británii i letos probíhá osvětová kampaň, která na problém upozorňuje a nabízí pomoc. Jakou roli hraje alkohol? A co by mohlo negativní dopady sportovních klání zmírnit? V nejnovějším vydání podcastu Ženy XYZ o tom diskutovaly redaktorky Markéta Plíhalová a Silvie Lauder.  

https://youtu.be/uePyn0u75sY Staff Sheehan, CEO of Project Omega, is driven by a mission to strengthen America’s energy independence and national security by rebuilding the nation’s nuclear fuel cycle and scaling a culture-first business rooted in exceptional leadership and execution. With a career spanning energy, sustainable fuels, hydrogen, and chemical physics, Staff is leading the development of technologies that transform spent nuclear fuel into long-lasting power sources while helping usher in a new era of reliable, abundant nuclear energy. We explore Staff Sheehan’s Scaling Framework — Build the Best C-Suite, Due Diligence Your Investors, Build Things, and Execute, Execute, Execute. Staff explains why exceptional leadership is the foundation of every successful company, why founders should carefully vet their investors, and why hardware startups must prioritize building real products over ambitious concepts. He also discusses how AI-driven energy demand is fueling a nuclear renaissance, why restoring the U.S. nuclear fuel cycle is essential to energy independence, and what it takes to scale both advanced nuclear technologies and a high-growth company. — Scale a Culture-First Business with Staff Sheehan  Hi, everyone. Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint Podcast. My guest today is Staff Sheehan, the CEO of Project Omega, an advanced nuclear recycling company with a mission to rebuild America’s nuclear fuel cycle end-to-end and unlock a new era of energy abundance for the United States. Wow. What a mission. Welcome to the show, Staff.  Thanks so much for having me, Steve. Great to be here.  Wow. You really are not playing small. Rebuilding America’s nuclear fuel cycle and unlocking a new era of energy abundance. Tell me about your personal “Why.” How are you manifesting it through the business? Well, I’ve been working in the energy industry, or adjacent to the energy industry, for a long time. This is the fourth business that I’ve started. Prior to this, I was in sustainable fuels. Prior to that, I was in metals and hydrogen. Before that, I did a Ph.D. in chemical physics. And before that, I was in software, but it was in something that was energy-intensive. So I've always been focused on how we can improve the energy industry in the United States. More recently, especially, that has become more and more intertwined with national security.Share on X  So I would say that for the last 10 years, I’ve spent a lot of time focused not just on energy, but also on national security. Right at the intersection of energy and national security is the nuclear industry. Over the last year, especially since four executive orders on nuclear power were signed, I’ve been focused on the nuclear industry. This has really been the resurgence of nuclear power in the United States over the last year or so. Yeah, it’s super fascinating. So, I mean, stupid question: why is this important?  Well, now I think we’re learning—and we’re having an acute learning experience, especially in the United States—that energy is a key bottleneck. And I think the thing that woke us up to that, in a lot of ways, is AI and the need for compute. But it’s not been only AI. We’ve been exporting manufacturing. We’ve been exporting a lot of things from the United States that rely on electricity or rely on energy in one way or another. Our exporting of that has caught up to us, and we now have to reshore a lot of things that maybe in the ’80s and the ’90s we decided to export out to China, for example. Now that we’ve realized that was not the greatest idea, we now are realizing that we need the energy to power it.  And so energy has become a key talking point, and the infrastructure behind energy has become a key talking point, especially in the United States. People’s electricity prices have gone up, so it’s not just industry and not just the folks who are building AI and data centers. It’s really everybody who’s now feeling the pain of our energy crunch. It’s crunched a little bit now, and I think people see that also because of what’s going on in the Middle East and the high price of gas. But the crunch is continuing because we know we have a high energy demand for all of the AI build-out that we’ve been doing for the last handful of years. Yeah, that is so interesting. And I remember in the 1990s, there was this phenomenon that actually the energy demand was falling, at least in Europe, where I come from, and there was overcapacity, and there was approval of overbuilding capacity. And the discussion was, “Okay, why do we need this? How do we slow this down?” And now the opposite thing is happening, which is pretty fascinating.  There’s a big question as to how idle assets are used, right? Because a lot of people don’t understand how electrical grids work. Everywhere in the world, energy is pretty much generated as you use it. So the energy that we’re using to talk on this podcast is being generated, depending on where you are located in the United States. From my location, it’s probably being generated by a natural gas power plant because it’s 2:10 in the afternoon, and this is around the time when a lot of natural gas peaker plants start to get going.  Depending on where you’re calling in from, those electrons are being generated live as we’re speaking. There’s not much storage on the grid. We do have some storage on the grid. California uses pumped hydro. They’re building battery infrastructure in places like Texas, but they’re not quite there yet. Grids don’t operate by just making the energy and then using it later. No. Grids operate by putting energy into the grid as demand is increasing. So the energy that you use is being generated live. You have to think about it that way.  Historically, back in the ’80s and the ’90s, there were not a lot of sinks for that live energy that was being generated, and people were also really bad at predicting demand. Another thing that happened in the ’80s and the ’90s, as I said right before, is that we were outsourcing a lot of our manufacturing to China. So China was building energy capacity because they saw all this manufacturing demand coming in. Their cost of labor was cheaper than what you guys had in Europe and what we had in the United States.  Robotics was not a thing, so everything was pretty manual. And the energy wasn’t needed here. It was needed, but Europe and the US were outsourcing, so we didn’t have the need for the energy here because we were sending all the jobs over to the Far East. They needed the energy there, so they built a bunch of coal-fired power plants. They built a lot of energy capacity while those conversations were happening in Europe. And now I think we’ve realized that it was a mistake to outsource so many things—and, in a sense, outsource your energy generation as well.  We need to find ways of either storing energy or converting that energy and using it productively. So rather than storing it, you could convert it into chemical products. You could convert it into a variety of different things. I think we've learned a lot since the '80s and the '90s, and I think that ties into the original learning experience: don't outsource everything. You need to learn how to be self-sufficient.Share on X Yeah. Yeah, don’t outsource your key competencies and your key resources. And energy is clearly one of those. Just a quick side question: How much energy is being wasted because it’s not able to be stored?  It depends on where you are. A lot of energy gets wasted in places where you have high hydroelectric utilization. But the cost to produce it is very cheap because hydro is indirect solar. The water evaporates, comes down, and it’s very dependent on the landscape where you can deploy hydroelectric power. In other places where you have power plants that follow load, like natural gas, for example, then you’re probably not wasting quite as many electrons as you are in places where you could potentially overproduce.  But I think we’re generally pretty efficient. We don’t waste too much, and a lot of that is because of the way grids work, where we predict how much electricity is needed, and we ramp production up and down as required.  Okay. Let’s talk about frameworks that you may have in your business. This podcast is about frameworks—the processes that are maybe unique to your business or that you discovered as you were building your business. Anything come to mind that can be explained in three to five steps, or as approaches or perspectives?  Yeah, I mean, I guess the learnings that I've had over all of my businesses. I think the first learning is: hire the right people.Share on X As a CEO, you have to spend an inordinate amount of your time on hiring, recruiting, and finding the right people. It’s super important to make sure that you have the best team. So that was my number one job when I started Project Omega: to hire the best possible team that I could hire.  And that was really, like, I told my investors that your first KPI is: build the best C-suite that you can. And I think I did that. I have a really incredible team of folks at Project Omega who are subject area experts in the parts of the business that they lead, and so I’m really happy with how I did it in this business. I’ve had stumbling blocks in prior businesses, and that’s how you learn. You call them learning experiences for a reason. My biggest stumbling block in my prior company was investors.  I didn’t do proper due diligence on investors. There’s ongoing litigation that I’m a part of that has to do with investors where you may not know where their money comes from. I think the number two thing is: make sure that you do a lot of diligence on who’s backing you. Typically, investors do diligence on founders, but founders don’t do quite as much diligence on the investors. And we need to flip that narrative. It’s especially true in national security. In national security, you have to be very sensitive to foreign actors. And this, again, was the issue that I ran into in my last business.  You can’t accept money from people who have significant backing from groups that are adversarial to the United States. A lot of those groups are U.S.-based funds. They’re not foreign funds, but they just get their money from foreign sources, and you have to be very careful about that when you’re in the national security world. It may not be as important if you’re making, like, a consumer app.  But if you’re doing things in energy and you’re doing things in national security, those are places where those people could seriously cause problems for your business down the line. And it comes out years after they invest in you. It’s not like they invest in you and then middle around two days later. All of these groups, including adversaries to the United States, are playing the long game. It’s not a next-week thing. It’s a several-years-from-now thing.  Interesting. Interesting. Okay. So that’s good advice. So build the best C-suite you can, and make sure you do your due diligence on your investors. What’s the next important lesson that you learned about building a business?  Focus on execution. Execution is the challenge. I think there are a lot of businesses out there that exist on paper, and when you’re a hardware company, that’s not the way to do things. I think there are a lot of on-paper businesses that, for better or for worse, have been very successful. Some of them have had IPOs and SPACs and things like that. There are businesses that exist on paper—at least in the nuclear industry, the energy industry, and the fuels industry—that have gone very far for on-paper businesses. But I think a very large portion of those—and I haven’t done all the statistics, but I’m sure Claude or Grok or GPT could—a lot of those businesses don’t do very well because they don’t have any actual experience building things in the real world.  So I think it's extremely important to execute, to get steel in the ground, and to focus on actually building things when you're in the hardware space.Share on X Now, of course, in software, that’s a little bit different. So it depends on whether you’re running a hardware or software business. In software, you may be able to keep going for a lot longer without a product or without having things in market because you’re building something that you know is going to have a huge splash when it comes out. But that’s not necessarily the way hardware businesses are able to be put together.  So give me an example of a business that’s on paper and not in the real world. Give me a hypothetical example.  A hypothetical example would be a business that has put together a number of contracts and a number of marketing materials about what they’re going to do, but they’ve never actually gone out and done it. Whether that’s at a small scale, like the lab scale, or at a larger scale, the point is they haven’t actually built it. My business—we’re very public about this. There are photographs and things like that of our lab out there. My business is at the lab scale. We’re working on going up to the pilot scale right now.  So that’s grams and kilograms of material. We’re not recycling metric tons of nuclear material. No business is doing that in the Western world except the one in France. So no business is doing that in the United States currently. But we’re public about where we are and what scale we’re at. A lot of businesses out there say they’re going to go out and operate XYZ widget, let’s say, and get a lot of traction around that before they’ve actually operated any sort of widget. And I think hardware is different than software.  Some venture markets have learned that, and some are probably going to learn that. But it’s been my experience over the last 12 years of running hardware businesses. My prior two businesses—Catalytic Innovations and Air Company—were both hardware businesses. And before I went to college and graduate school, I was in the software world, so I’ve kind of seen it from both sides.  Yeah. That’s interesting. So I saw your LinkedIn post about these underwater unmanned vehicles—UUVs, I think you call them. Is this like an underwater drone? Yeah. So, a UUV is an unmanned underwater vehicle. If you're trying to do something underwater, like do reconnaissance or try to find out what's going on under there with your adversaryShare on X or even a neutral party using a UUV is a way to do that without putting service members in harm’s way and a way to do that in a low-cost environment. So that’s one of the major applications for UUVs. But one of the big challenges for them is: how do you power them? You could use fuel to power them, but then they could run out of fuel, and then you have a stranded asset.  You could use electricity to power them with a battery, but the battery also runs out, and once it’s gone, it’s gone. It’s very hard to recover these. You’re not going to go down to the bottom of the sea to recover your UUV. The other option is to use—and we already do this, right, with our manned underwater vehicles, or our nuclear submarines in the United States—we already use nuclear power to power those submarines. And so that’s been the way that we've historically been able to operate underwater for long periods of time, and that's the way that I think we're probably going to go for these unmanned vehicles as well.Share on X  And that’s what my business focuses on. So we not only do this for UUVs but for space applications as well as terrestrial applications by building power sources. Those power sources are made using material that we recycle from spent nuclear fuel. Those power sources are called radiovoltaics, and you could imagine them as like an AA battery that lasts 30 years. And that’s really, I would say, the next step for operational energy. So we’re focused on using those as replacements for batteries in these small applications. You could think of it as a much broader application in the future—not just operational energy for the military, but beyond that. We actually use these sorts of materials in our everyday lives.  You’re sitting in a room, I’m sitting in a room, and I’m looking up at the smoke detector in my room. You’re sitting in a room with a smoke detector in it as well, and that smoke detector has a little piece of americium-241. Americium-241 is an isotope recovered from nuclear waste. We don’t recover it in the United States because we haven’t recycled nuclear waste in probably a little north of 50 years. But you can get these isotopes from places like France, where they recycle nuclear waste today. So all of us are sitting in a room with a radioisotope-powered device. Americium-241 specifically powers the detector in your smoke detector. Americium spits out alpha particles.  Those alpha particles are little helium nuclei. They hit a detector continuously, and that generates a current. Now, if smoke goes up into your smoke detector, those alpha particles hit the smoke instead of hitting the detector, and you won’t get that same current generation in your smoke detector. So that’s how we detect smoke, and right now, nuclear waste is sitting in all of our houses, keeping us safe. But that’s not really a mainstream part of the narrative yet.  Yeah. And what about the radiation? Is it not dangerous?  No. So for americium, there are different types of radiation. Well, not all radiation is created equal. There’s alpha radiation, which is what americium-241 emits predominantly, and those are little helium nuclei. Those can’t go through a piece of paper. Alpha radiation stops very easily. Like, your skin will very easily stop alpha radiation. Beta radiation, which is different from alpha radiation, is an electron that is flung out of a nucleus. So beta radiation is also stopped relatively easily.  Like, if you ingest it, then it could cause problems, but again, your skin can stop it. Gamma radiation is the one that we’re concerned about from a health perspective. Now, gamma radiation can be used for medical treatments and is very effective when it’s used in medical treatments, like to treat cancer, but gamma radiation is generally pretty bad because it goes straight through you. Gamma rays are little photons, and they’re very high-energy photons, so they can fly through you and they can cause damage to your DNA.  A lot of the, I would say, like, negative effects of any nuclear incident are really caused by gamma radiation more than anything else. Like Chernobyl, which is the famous one, had cesium-137 polluting a lot of the countryside around Chernobyl, and cesium-137 is a very strong gamma emitter. So gamma is what we try to avoid. At Project Omega, we don’t use gamma emitters for our power sources, and so all of our power sources use the safer types of radiation. That’s fascinating. So, Staff, I’d like to switch gears here a little bit and go back to business. So what drives growth in a business like yours—or specifically, your business?  A lot of things drive growth. Our business right now works together with a lot of groups in national security.Share on X We’re driven by the growth of the United States, and we’re driven by the growth of our economy. But beyond that, the demand for nuclear electricity has been very high, and that’s driven a lot of growth for us as well. How do you generate enough electricity to power data centers and power compute? That’s a huge problem in the world right now.  A lot of people who initially invested in AI are pivoting to invest in energy, actually, because they’re realizing the bottleneck for AI is not the chips. It’s the energy that’s needed to power the chips. As people are building these new assets that require all this energy, they’re quickly realizing that nuclear is one of the best ways to fulfill all of these energy requirements. As the nuclear industry grows, we’re seeing the need to reshore and bring the nuclear fuel cycle back to the United States.  We stopped doing commercial enrichment, for example, a long time ago, and there are a lot of great companies working on commercial enrichment. We stopped doing recycling and reprocessing back in the 1970s, and we’re bringing that back. We’re one of the groups working on bringing recycling and reprocessing back to the United States in a more responsible way than we did back then because technology is undoubtedly and unarguably better today than it was in the 1960s and 1970s.  That’s fascinating. So you’re helping all these old economies, which are obviously in a new skin, recover here—manufacturing and energy. So what’s one thing that you’re trying to figure out in your business right now?  So one of the challenges that everybody in the nuclear industry faces right now is scale. There’s a whole new group of reactors called small modular reactors, and another colloquial term for those is advanced reactors. Figuring out how to scale those is one of the challenges. So we’re working right now on scale. We're focused very heavily on scaling up our process so that we're able to build these true infrastructure projects that will ensure that the United States has a domestic nuclear fuel cycle going into the future. So that's really the main focus…Share on X  Being able to not only scale our technology but also execute at the current scale that we operate. On the execution side, we work together with two really great national labs: Idaho National Laboratory and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. Execution in the nuclear industry is historically challenging, and working together with the government and the national labs is a big value-add because those national labs have the institutional memory, and they have the experience of working with radioactive materials and nuclear materials that we’re able to piggyback off of. They also have a lot of infrastructure that we’re able to work with.  Yeah. And when you say scale, is it about scaling energy generation, energy transmission, or the manufacturing of equipment that utilizes the recovered nuclear fuel? Or is it also about scaling the organization in terms of managing the organization? All of the above. All of the above. This time last year, we were pretty much one person. Or, this time last year, we were still a concept, and we started the business in July last year. So this time last year, we were pretty much one person, and now we’re close to 20. We’ve already scaled by a lot in just the last year. But we probably need to scale by another order of magnitude by the time we get to next year. So a big part of it is managing the growth of a high-growth and rapidly moving organization.  But a big piece of it is also scaling energy in the United States—scaling transmission, scaling generation, and scaling the production of nuclear fuel. Right now, we get a lot of our nuclear fuel from overseas. Twenty percent of the United States electrical grid is nuclear. So today, we use a lot of nuclear electrons to power, as I mentioned, based on our locations, we’re probably not using too many nuclear electrons right now. Or, Steve, I don’t know where you’re calling in from.  I’m in Virginia, the capital of data centers.  I take it back. You’re actually probably using nuclear electrons as we speak. So we need to scale that generation, but we also need to scale the fuel for those reactors. The nuclear electrons that you’re using to talk with me right now are most likely coming from Russian uranium that we buy from Russia.  I think your home country and many folks in Europe have learned that relying on Russia for your energy resources is not the greatest idea. We still, to this day, rely on Russia for a lot of our commercial uranium for our commercial reactors, and that’s something that we need to change. So scaling our nuclear fuel cycle in the United States is a key aspect of what we’re doing.  So what’s really fascinating is we were on vacation in Moab, Utah, just a few weeks ago, and we noticed that there was a lot of mining of nuclear materials there. Is this something that happened in the past and essentially the industry wound down in the U.S., or is there still mining of nuclear materials here?  So there’s very little actual mining of uranium in the United States. I think something like 99% of our uranium comes from foreign sources. So there’s not a lot of uranium mining. The management of nuclear resources in the United States… There is a good amount of nuclear work that’s being done in Utah, but there are a handful of states that actually do the majority of the nuclear-material legwork. Utah is one of them, I think. Idaho is the birthplace of nuclear energy, and so Idaho is doing a lot of work on the nuclear fuel cycle and nuclear materials management.  Idaho is where all of the spent fuel from our naval fleet goes at the end of the life of aircraft carriers and submarines. That’s public knowledge. You can look it up. There’s a lot of work that’s been done to make sure all of that material is managed completely safely and very effectively. So Idaho is the birthplace of nuclear energy, and it’s also where a lot of work on the nuclear fuel cycle is happening. That’s actually the other state where we operate at Project Omega. So Idaho is, I would say, one of the leaders in the nuclear renaissance that’s happening right now.  Okay. So that’s a really good point. So you’re in Idaho. Where else are you in the United States, and what would you like our listeners to do when they hear about you? Who are the people that you would like to get in touch with you?  Well, I’m calling in from Newport, Rhode Island, right now. So Newport, Rhode Island, is our headquarters. We have a laboratory that we operate that’s down the street from here. So we have some operations in Rhode Island, and that’s our headquarters. We also have operations in Idaho, and that’s where we’re building some of our infrastructure. We have a small contingent in the DC area as well. We have other facilities as well, but we keep those confidential. Publicly, we’re headquartered in Rhode Island, and we do a lot of work in Idaho and in the DC area. That’s fascinating. So if people get interested in what you’re doing and would like to get in touch with you or learn more about Project Omega, where should they go, and where can they learn more? They would go to projectomega.com. info@projectomega.com is our main inbox. We do a pretty good job of staying up to date with it. That’s also what we use for careers and hiring. As I mentioned, hiring is one of my top jobs. So we’re always interested in finding the best candidates out there who want to revolutionize the nuclear fuel cycle in the United States. That’s fantastic. So if you’re interested in the nuclear industry, recycling nuclear fuel, and driving the UUVs of the next generation, then definitely check out the Project Omega website and reach out to Staff. And if you enjoyed this conversation, make sure you follow us and subscribe on YouTube. Stay tuned, because every week there’s an exciting entrepreneur coming on the show. Staff, thanks for coming and sharing your wisdom and unique knowledge. And thanks for listening.  Awesome. Thank you so much for having me, Steve. This was great. Important Links: Staff's LinkedIn Staff's Website Staff's email: info@projectomega.com

Ženy XYZ #51: Feministický podcast, ve kterém Silvie Lauder, Markéta Plíhalová a Clara Zanga řeší důležitá aktuální témata V červenci 2025 vyšel první díl mezigeneračního feministického podcastu Respektu s názvem Ženy XYZ. Za rok existence si vybudoval takové posluchačské zázemí, až mu to vyneslo sedmé místo v hlasování veřejnosti ve kategorii společenských podcastů ankety Podcast roku. Clara Zanga, Silvie Lauder a Markéta Plíhalová oslavují rok “vysílání” dílem, kde odpovídají na otázky posluchačstva. Jaké jsou jejich oblíbené akty mikrofeminismu? Jak reagují na to, když je někdo nepřátelsky naladěný k feministickým myšlenkám? A nadávají někdy v soukromí? 

pWotD Episode 3346: .xyz Welcome to popular Wiki of the Day, spotlighting Wikipedia's most visited pages, giving you a peek into what the world is curious about today.With 355,402 views on Tuesday, 30 June 2026 our article of the day is .xyz..xyz is a top-level domain name that was proposed in ICANN's new generic top-level domain (gTLD) Program for consisting of the last three letters of the Latin-script alphabet. XYZ.com and CentralNic are the registries for the domain, which was created by entrepreneur Daniel Negari. It became available to the general public on June 2, 2014, thereafter becoming widely used by tech startups, creators, and Web3 projects.This recording reflects the Wikipedia text as of 04:01 UTC on Wednesday, 1 July 2026.For the full current version of the article, see .xyz on Wikipedia.This podcast uses content from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.Visit our archives at wikioftheday.com and subscribe to stay updated on new episodes.Follow us on Mastodon at @wikioftheday@masto.ai.Also check out Curmudgeon's Corner, a current events podcast.Until next time, I'm neural Justin.

Dr. Deb Muth 00:03What if bloating, back pain, and low energy aren’t separate problems, but clues from the same root cause? What if your posture and the way your fascia moves are changing how your digestion works and how you feel every day? Today, we’re unpacking why symptoms like bloating, fatigue, and persistent pain often come from deeper, whole body issues, and how a multimodal, root cause approach speeds real recovery. You guys can, put our advertisement in here for Venari before we do the intro.Welcome back to Let’s Talk Wellness Now, the show where we uncover the root causes of chronic illness, explore cutting-edge regenerative and integrative care, and empower you with practical tools to heal.I’m Dr. Deb, your medical detective, and today we’re talking about whole body recovery, how movement, fascia, gut health, and personalized medicine come together to restore function, energy, and confidence in your body. If you or someone you love struggles with bloating, pain that won’t quit. Slow recovery after surgery or postpartum, or chronic low energy, this episode is for you.So get comfortable, grab a warm drink, And let’s get into it.So today, I’m joined by Dr. Shalini Bhat, founder of the Movement Boutique in Toronto. She is a chiropractor and double-certified functional medicine practitioner who builds care around root causes, lady after my own heart. And rather than just treating the symptoms, as we all know, and you guys have heard me talk about before, that is how we get to the other side of things. So, what I love about your work is you blend the clinical expertise and that lived experience, and just before we started recording, we were talking about the difference of fascia.and chiropractic, and even when you’re looking at bringing in acupuncture and Pilates and functional medicine, having all those modalities together is so amazing. So, before we dive into all of this stuff. Tell us a little bit about your own story. Shalinibhat 02:49Yeah, well, my own story is that I grew up very steeped in Western medicine. My father’s a surgeon, and I had, you know, access to all the allopathic care that was out there, but I kind of had all that, what I call, gray area symptoms. That doesn’t make it into, you know, an allopathic answer, so to speak. And so, having access to all of… you know, the best… this specialist and that specialist didn’t really give my IBS you know, some type of help, and it didn’t really give my chronic back pain some type of help. And I kept, like, tearing my meniscus. I was a dancer, and I just kept, like, thinking, I’m doing all the same things as all these other girls in my class. Why am I the one who keeps tearing my meniscus? Like, what is up with… they… like, we all have the exact same tissues. Why is my tissue resilience so low? that this keeps happening to me. And I seem to be the only one in, you know. from dancing from 3 till I was… when I was 3 till when I was 18, and experiencing this, and I’m looking at everybody, like, what’s the deal? And I sort of felt different, but I couldn’t really pinpoint what was going on, and probably similar to your story. all the things that were coming at me were just labels and diagnoses, and like, you know, same with my meniscus, they were like, the first time, they were like, alright, we do surgery. I was like, okay, sounds good, like, went and did the surgery. The second time it, tore, I was like, that obviously didn’t, do it, because they took out 30% the first time, and then, you know, some of the 70%, you know, tore. And I said, there has to be… there has to be some reason why my My tissue resilience is low, and why that shear force is going through on my left knee every single time, like that same mechanical strain is happening, and fast forward to today, I realized that fascia is this fabric that runs all over the body in huge swaths, and in very large, sort of movement patterns, which we’ll get into, but basically, the way that I was, like, standing, the way that I was… my tissue resilience was less, that’s what was setting the stage for me to re-tear that meniscus, but nobody was asking those questions. My IBS, like the stealth infections I had, the leaky gut I had, all of those things creating excessive inflammation just in my body in general was decreasing my tissue resilience and making me re-injure that same area. So instead of, oh, I’ll just keep getting it, you know, shaved down or taken out, like, why was that same mechanistic injury and strain happening? on that knee, and I started asking different questions, which led me to, instead of going to medical school, say, oh, wait, chiropractors can actually, like, you know.Actually move the body, understand what’s going on, spend the time with patients to properly diagnose, and then actually use our hands, because I’ve always been a very tactile person. Being a dancer, you know you’re always using your body, I understand my body, so when I started my kinesiology degree. I… kinesiology was a no-brainer. I’m like, I have a body, I want to use it, I want to learn… you know, when I’m learning about the muscles and the hands and the… like, I have that, so it’s… I’ve always been a touch kind of person, and that makes sense to me, learning about the body. And, that’s why I ended up studying in such, let’s say, asking alternative questions, so to speak, and that’s why even when I finished my kinesiology degree, and even when I finished my chiropractic training, I still went to school to learn acupuncture training, because I still had more questions, and thenI… and concurrently, I was teaching Pilates as well, and Pilates always resonated with me because I thought, yeah, if you have this really strong powerhouse and this really strong core, that always helped my back. And it always helped my knee. And so, translating kind of all four of these modalities, the chiropractic, the fascial release, the acupuncture, and the Pilates, became sort of my… my own little method that I created on how to help people. I probably… a lot of people listening to this, think of chiropractic as, like, you go somewhere and you get crack, crack, crack top to bottom. That actually is not how I’ve ever practiced, either, because even when I was chronically inflamed with all these issues, even an adjustment would send me into more inflammation, and I would be, in… having aches and pains, so that was not even… I needed it so much gentler, and that’s why I started working with fascia and thinking, like, what else is here? And, like, if someone’s so inflamed, maybe an adjustment is too aggressive for, somebody in the moment. And there’s a time and a place for everything, don’t get me wrong, but that wasn’t my personal, you know, go-to, so to speak, and so that’s why I started working more gently around fascia, and that’s why I used acupuncture needles, and pilates training, and rehabilitation, and looking at people’s movement patterns, and seeing, okay, where are things going off here, and what’s the actual… I hate the word root cause, but that’s where we all come from, it’s just gotten so crazy. But really, truly, if you have back pain, why are we just looking at the back.Like, if your entire pelvis is off, if your entire, like, body is leaning to one side, and you’re putting way more weight on one foot than another, like, why are we… why are we just treating the back? Why are we just adjusting the back? Why are we just, you know, putting ice on the back, or put… or putting painkillers, or rubbing things on the back? We gotta look at the entire body as one whole system when it comes to injury, and that’s my very long backstory to tell you how I… sort of amassed these different things that I do, And in my training. Sorry, I forgot one piece in there, and that’s… with my gut thing and my IBS, I went back to school and did functional medicine training to figure out what that was about, because, and even when my uncle mentioned it, I think, oh gosh, early 2000s, he said, leaky gut, and I thought, well, people probably think these days, like, wait, there’s holes in my stomach? You know, like, what isAnd at that time, you know, way back in the day, the first test was, like, that, flakulose mannitol, like, that really. Dr. Deb Mut 08:53Boom. Shalinibhat 08:53You can get tests. Yeah. Now, obviously, we’ve come a long way. So yeah, that’s how I ended up with all these five random modalities that are sort of enmeshed into one, and that’s what we do in my practice. My clinical practice is literally all of those modalities, and we really meet people where they are. So we invite anyone to come to us with, whether they have an MSK issue, and that’s the primary thing they want to work on, we can do it by starting Pilates. We can do it by starting fascial training. We can do it by starting acupuncture. We can do it by running labs and seeing where you are functionally if you want to lower that inflammation, or those stealth infections, or whatever it is that you have going on. So we invite anyone to come in and sort of pick their service menu, because I feel we… we should help everyone, but not everyone feels… like, not everyone’s like, wow, I want to run a school test with you first. They may have the capacity to be like, okay, I’ll try a workout, or I’ll try a Pilates class, you know? And then once they’re in our space, they’re like, oh wait, what else do you offer here? This is really different than where I’ve been. So that’s sort of what my practice is all about. Dr. Deb Muth 09:58I love that. I love that blending of all of the different things, and I think, you know, some of the best practitioners are those who’ve been through things, and it doesn’t have to be that way, but we kind of explore all the different things that could be causing our issues, which allows us to have a little bit bigger reach, across modalities, because there’s never the one thing that fixes everything. It’s kind of like in the conventional medicine world, we’re looking for the one pill that fixes everything, and there just isn’t that. And so, when you’re looking at blending all of these things, eventually you will find the right thing for each person, because it could be very different. You know, what works for me might not work for you, or it might be a different combination, and I think looking at each person as an individual is really important these days. Shalinibhat 10:44Totally, yeah, and I can’t… like, I just have to emphasize what you said again, because everyone is looking for it to be… you have patients like this, I have patients like this who come and they’re like, I’m just looking for that one guru, that one person who’s gonna finally tell me what it is that I have. Finally, I’m looking for that one answer, I’m looking for that one supplement, and like, if I can just reiterate exactly what you said, like. there will be 10 different kind of things that could be bothering you, and 10 different kind of solutions that will be the best for any given person, and if we just change our mindset around that, like, just say, oh, there won’t be one exact thing, and one exact solution, and I should be bucketing myself into 10 different things, and like, just… even just the sheer change of mindset and expectation, I think would help like, everybody, including practitioners, right? Because people will come to us and say, what is the one thing? What is the one, like, what is the one supplement, right? Dr. Deb Muth 11:38Yeah. Shalinibhat 11:39it’s too much pressure, right? Dr. Deb Muth 11:41It is, yeah. Shalinibhat 11:42Yeah. Dr. Deb Muth 11:44Yeah. Yeah, when they come and say, you’re my last hope, and you’re like, oh boy. I hope not, but that’s how we get sometimes. We’re looking for that person with that final answer, and and there is… there’s not just one answer, and I think that’s the important takeaway. So, let’s dive into, fascia. It’s a word that a lot of people might have heard, but don’t really understand what that is. Tell us about fascia and how it fits into the influence of movement and pain, and how can we change that for people? Shalinibhat 12:19Yeah, I love this question, because even one of my own patients who I manually treated for, you know, 14, 13 years, she said to me, Charlie, you know what’s becoming so hot? There’s the word fascia. I’m hearing it all of a sudden. I was like, what? So, yes, even people receiving fascial care, sometimes don’t even put two and two together. Fascia is basically when you cut open a chain chicken breast. When you cut open a steak, there’s that sort of film that’s on, you know, the chicken, or there’s that kind of film around a steak, and those white kind of areas, that we sort of cut off. That is fascia, and if you picture it in a chicken breast, it’s really that… it’s really that thin layer that comes off of that chicken. And what’s really cool about fascia is it’s highly resilient when it’s stretched, so if you actually were to picture stretching that chicken, you know, piece, if you actually, like, you know, hit it with your finger, it would be pretty tensile.But if you kind of let it go and be, relaxed, it’s very flexible. So you could actually take your finger and almost put your finger through that piece of that film, and it would almost make it all the way. So fascia is very flexible, but it’s also extremely resilient. And that is… those two qualities of that fabric are what will give us more tissue resilience.The other thing that we need… sorry, I should also back up. Fascia, by the way, is just a fabric that encases everything in your body. So, it’s a support structure, it holds our organs up in the places where they’re meant to be, otherwise gravity would pull them all down into our pelvis. It surrounds every, you know, blood vessel and nerve and, lymph, area, and then let alone all your muscles and your bones. So, even when we’re talking about something like bone health and bone strength, you know, often people are talking just about this calcium conversation when we’re talking about bone, for example, and fascia is encasing that bone, right? So I just talked about the resilience of that type of, what’s on a chicken breast. I’ll actually change analogies here just to… for people to understand a little more. If you take women’s nylons, of those thin nylons, same thing, right? If you pull them really tight, and you were just holding them in your hand, and someone were to flick it, it’s very strong, right? But again, if you held it single layer and kind of put your finger through, it’s very flexible. So, in… as we age.If that tissue’s getting really tight and dehydrated and, you know, it’s not flexible as bone moves, right? That fabric is what’s holding that bone and creating that sort of shock absorption if we’re doing anything. It’s that women’s nylon that’s kind of shock absorbing that bone when it’s coming down you know, jumping, landing, whatever, running, whatever it is that we’re doing. So that’s why one of the big things of, you know, strength training or keeping your body moving as you age is because it continues to make that fabric that’s actually around the bone. So yes, we talk about things in such isolation. Oh, we need bone health, we need bone strength. Okay, that’s great, but what’s actually intertwined right around that bone, creatingthat integrity is fascia. And one of the ways to keep it, again, flexible and tensile and strong, which are the two qualities we wanted it, is to keep it very hydrated. And there’s, you know, another kind of way to think about hydrated and not hydrated fascia. If you think of beef jerky, but you think of steak, you can… a raw steak, sorry guys, if anyone’s vegan. The beef jerky spirit, you can tear it super easily. Right? But you can’t take a piece of raw steak and tear it with your bare hands, right? You can’t. It’s so strong. So the same thing goes for that type of hydration. You want to keep that tissue really hydrated, and that’s why in a lot of scenarios with chronic aches or pains.The tissue is really dehydrated, and so that’s why, when someone goes for a massage, or they go for fascial release, or they have direct stimulation to that tissue, that’s actually breaking those adhesions and kind of, almost like a sponge, it’s compressing and releasing, which is actually bringing more moisture into that gel-like matrix that is fascia which allows those fibers to move again, so again, we’re bringing that flexibility and that tensile strength back, which gives you more of that raw steak texture versus that beef jerky, right? That beef jerky’s so vulnerable. You go to do a workout on beef jerky, you’re ripping your muscle. I’m so sore, I can’t get up and, you know, people who are so unusually sore the next day, for example, versus those people who have nice, hydrated fascia that they… that they’re great, they’re working on a raw steak texture, they’re not going to rip something or have that feeling of being so vulnerable. So that’s basically, yeah, to answer your question about where fascia fits into, everything. And again, just to reiterate fascia it actually… when you look at… I don’t know if you know any of the work of Tom Myers, that’s who I studied way back in the day, like.In the early 2000s he, you know, wrote this book called Anatomy Trains, and what it, illustrates is how long the connections of fascia are. So, the exact same sheath might start from our forehead and our scalp and go all the way down the back of the skull, all the way down the spine, through the pelvis, down the back, down the hamstrings, down the calves, right into the plantar fascia. So, I… I say plantar fascia because that’s the one area I think people have heard the word fascia before. So, although they’ve heard plantar fasciitis probably more. Dr. Deb Muth 18:06But no. Shalinibhat 18:07you know, it’s from the plantar fascia. And the plantar fascia is a continuous sheath of fascia all the way up to our head. So, you know, at any point along that entire chain, there might be a dysfunction. So you might be having… you might be experiencing plantar fasciitis, but you’re… that… you could address that person’s fascia anywhere along that entire line. To be able to truly again, within quotation marks, root cause, address that plantar fasciitis, because someone might have plantar fasciitis, it hurts when they step out of bed in the morning, they have that exact classical pain, they’ve been to the GP, GP says, yep, you got plantar fasciitis, they go, okay, and now they’re, you know. no better off, they might give them, like, a few things to do, but really, if they actually address that entire channel of fascia, they would give themselves more space, and consequently decrease a lot of that inflammation in that one area that’s, again, getting… just like my knee injury at the beginning, why is that one area taking so much brunt? there’s an issue along the chain. And I’m giving you one train, but there are many different trains that work in long sheets throughout the whole body. And another way I, like, sort of. I like analogies because I’m a visual person. Again, back to that dance mindset. I think another way people can really get on board with, like, fascia being in long sheaths is picturing a woman in a one-piece bathing suit. If you pull up the shoulder straps of that one-piece bathing suit, can you give her a wedgie? Like, she can pick that wedgie all day long. Dr. Deb Muth 19:42Right. Shalinibhat 19:43actually the shoulder straps that you need to release to get rid of it completely. So that’s kind of, like, the easiest example I can give to someone to relate, like, because they might have that wedgie-type experience or symptom, and they go to their doctor, I’m having a wedgie, I’m having a wedgie, and they’re like. Dr. Deb Muth 19:58No. Shalinibhat 19:59let’s pick it, let’s glue the bathing suit down, let’s do this, let’s do that. Really, someone’s up here franking those shoulder straps way up. You’re never going to get rid of that wedgie unless you actually see where it’s getting, pulled. And really. rings true for the gut as well, which is what I’ve learned. And… like I mentioned, fascia’s encasing our entire organ and organ systems as well, so if people are, you know, messed up and torqued in their spiral line, for example, and if they also are having tightness in different areas of their, you know, whatever, stomach, small intestine, large, like, anywhere along the actual gut, that that does make a big difference for bowel habits, gas, you know, trapped gas, IPS, all that kind of stuff as well. So the musculoskeletal component. And this fascial tangling, for example, also does make a big difference with IBS and stomach aches and all that kind of stuff as well. Dr. Deb Muth 21:02Yeah, and I think, too, one of the biggest things that we disregard, or maybe just don’t think of when it comes to GI issues, is the psoas muscle. Like, when people are constipated, and you start pushing around on that psoas muscle, they’re not gonna like you very much. But even for, like, that low back, that pelvic pain, if we start adjusting that and start doing movements, or yoga, or just massage of that psoas muscle and do a release on the psoas muscle. it can make a huge difference in somebody’s lower back pain. Do you want to speak a little bit to that? Shalinibhat 21:39Yeah, I mean, so there’s… yes, and, I mean, the psoas also right there, fascially, is, on the same train as the diaphragm. So, right under there, how that rib cage is sitting. And how the diaphragm tightness related to exactly what you’re saying, let’s say the top of the psoas fascia, for example, that’s going to change our breathing mechanics, which is also going to change the pressure, you know, kind of pressing down through the gut and everything which we need. It’s also going to change how we’re breathing. So, you know, you and I know taking lower, slower belly breaths and full breaths Better than shallow, breathing up through the neck, which people can relate to by, you know, people always are like, oh, are you sure breathwork’s gonna help? I’m like, if I gave you a paper bag right now and told you to hyperventilate for a scene of a movie like you were an actor, would you actually induce a panic attack on yourself? Potentially. even go the other way, that yes, maybe, you know, sitting down and proper breathing could actually, yes, bring you into this relaxed state, which we, of course, know that, but sometimes people are like, breathing, whatever, that can’t make a difference, right? And you’re like, oh, let’s do the hyperventilation one, let’s give you the bag and start just going, right? See how you feel. Dr. Deb Muth 22:54Yeah, exactly. Shalinibhat 22:56that breathwork and changing someone’s breathing mechanics, and I mean this in a gross, sense of actually, because I’ve done a ton of hands-on work for the last 16 years, when you actually release… a lot of people have tight diaphragms, they don’t even realize, and when you actually get in there and can release that fascia. Not only are a lot of those peoplethose tight, psoaszy people that you just mentioned. But it can dramatically, change how the gut is moving and how they’re feeling in that area as well, right? Again, that pressure change, moving gas, all of that. And then. Going down, how the psoas goes from right under the rib cage to the front of the hip, and I know this is a podcast, so I’m trying to speak it out for people who don’t… who can’t, visualize it, but it comes off the front wall of the lower spine, and then goes all the way down to the hips. And when this muscle can feel tight, to your point, this could feel like appendicitis on one side, you know? At some point, this can be very uncomfortable. I had a patient, actually, very similar story recently. had, like, almost a psoas spasm with a torque through her spine, and diaphragm tight, that’s exactly what I was telling you about. Went to the hospital, thought she had appendicitis, had every, like, ran every single test, was in agony, came to see me, we did all this fascial release of all that exact area. She was like, my pain’s gone. And, like, that’s not something they would ever evaluate there. Dr. Deb Muth 24:21No, they don’t even think about it. Shalinibhat 24:24No, it wouldn’t even cross their mind. So, Yes, there are definitely postural consequences. to not only people who are having tummy aches, gut issues, stomach pain, but it will affect breathing mechanics, and to your point, releasing… I find releasing anywhere in that mid-area, so diaphragm, top of the psoas, like, getting in the obliques, like, anywhere that people can start to relieve in that area is fantastic, and if people need, like, a kind of at-home way to do that, you can take… you can, like, roll up a washcloth and even just put it under where your ribs kind of connect at the front, and just lie on it and let your rib cage kind of fall over it. If you have, we have a little cork ball here, that’s a thing you can sort of put in that area, like, kind of just, under the rib cage. And on either side of the midline is sort of where you would start. If anything felt completely uncomfortable, anyone listening, absolutely adjust it, and start with something less. But that can be such a big, tool, just opening up the front wall of that deeper fascia, for sure. Dr. Deb Muth 25:36That’s awesome. How do you use Pilates? Pilates is well known for so many things, right? But when you’re using Pilates, how do you use it to retrain the movement patterns to reduce pain long-term? Shalinibhat 25:50Okay, so that’s such a good question. So I did training in Pilates 20 years ago. so I would say it’s Pilates-informed, but it’s certainly not directly Joseph Pilates work that I, use by any means, if people are picturing his sequence or anything like that. But that basically informed my… understanding of the core, and I was teaching for 20 years, you know, like, just watching movement patterns, movement patterns, and what I noticed, which is so fascinating, the number of, men, actually, who have diastasis, who, you know, they maybe reach midlife and just Like, suddenly got that belly fat or something, and, like, they’re… they have a diastasis, and, like, they maybe play hockey, or they’re playing, you know, they’re weekend warrioring, kind of, their workouts, and suddenly get really bad back pain, and they have the tightest hips because they’re not really doing any type of cross-training, but they’re… They’re working… they’re doing so much hockey. And they have this back pain, and they’re like, I have no idea what’s going on. And again, they go to the… practitioner that myopically is like, it’s back pain, let’s do an image, oh, it’s a disc bulge here, and like, okay, you know, let’s do these XYZ. And I’m like, dude, these people… this is a diastasis, like, you have literally separated your. Dr. Deb Muth 27:06Nope. Shalinibhat 27:06You are not using your deep core at all. It’s completely, un, what’s the word? It’s unconnected. Like, they actually training as if they had a baby. So it’s really… it’s a population that I think is, like, not, because sometimes when we’re in school, you and me both, we learn these very textbook things that we know when a woman’s had a baby to evaluate her abdomen, you know, to look for diastasis. Dr. Deb Muth 27:33Right. Shalinibhat 27:33Or retraining, that’s a time in a woman’s life during school that we were very much, you know, that’s a… that’s where diastasis, that’s where you hear that word, right? Listening, sorry, diastasis is when your abdominal wall separates in the front from a quick or fast, abdominal expansion, which is why we think of it with, Prenatal, postpartum-type, situations. But we’re… we’re completely omitting this, this… you know, just evaluating people in general. I just saw, a young lady yesterday in her 20s, and she does Pilates every single day. Every single day she does Pilates, and she’s like, I can’t feel my obliques. And I was like, come in here, come in here, let me check this out. And her superficial, her, rectus abdominis, which is her most superficial abdominal layer, it was compensating For her obliques. And that shouldn’t be the case when you’re 20, and I had to undo a whole bunch of different kind of fascial torques that were happening, because When somebody… like, if you picture… if you picture blocks standing on each other and they’re not, sort of, perfectly aligned. then they’re gonna topple, right? And I’m just saying that for the people listening, like, that’s when I say fascial torque, it means that the structure isn’t, isn’t optimal in how it’s going to fire, and how the muscles are going to signal to contract. And so what I had to do, I had to say, wow, it’s actually so cool how your superficial rectus abdominis has compensated for your obliques in this way, and it was, like, really fascinating to watch it, actually, and how she would get around doing it. But we had to completely undo those torques, and then she was able to use her obliques afterwards. So I think there’s a huge miss in abdominal evaluation when it comes to chronic low back pain, or back pain, or, yeah, when you’re talking about, like, where does Pilates fit in, I think Pilates is great when you have somebody who’s really good at teaching it, and I use, principles from it to evaluate people’s core. I mean, so hard to say, because I’ve been doing it for so long now, where I’ve pulled the tools from, but yes, it’s definitely Pilates-informed of how I get their core firing back again, and I would be… you would be absolutely shocked, at the number of people who do work out tons, or do Pilates tons, or… and I own a Pilates studio, okay? I’m very openly admitting that, a ton of people are doing these things that are quote-unquote good for their course. Sit-ups, going to the gym, doing this.Thing, and they actually aren’t three-dimensionally training that area due to, again, these huge, long fascial chains that are just… they’re just not trained how they should be, and what I mean by that is we are so sedentary as a population, this, like, in 2026, like, we’ve never, ever, ever been more sedentary in our whole. like, lives, and we… these fascial chains, we are meant to be up and out, and, like, walking tons, and hanging off trees, and picking things up, and, like, we’re meant to be doing huge movements, and we don’t. We sit in chairs, and then we stand up, and we’re like, I’m gonna go to the gym, and we get on a bike, and we do this much range of motion, and then we do some bicep curls, and do this tiny bit of range of motion. We don’t do huge ranges of notion. things that we should be doing with… to keep that, again, those long swaths of fascia really healthy. And so that’s what ends up happening, because when we do those huge ranges of motions in all those different ranges of motion, like, we have many that we can access.And when we miss a lot of those, those huge swaths don’t get trained, and that’s why the core ends up so weak. And to your point about the psoas earlier, the psoas gets, you know, tight in the wrong ways, and we get weak as a result. But yeah, if I could just say back to… Pilates is not synonymous with a good core, and I think every single person listening should have a good, proper core evaluation, and that’s actually one of the things I’m working on, is for people to be able to self-evaluate properly their core, and their breathing mechanics on how to undo this for themselves, because I’ve done it now with so many people, and it’s been so changing, and it seems so easy to me, it’s almost like it’s like my side gig, because I do, like, oh, I’ll run your labs, and your gut health, and this, but this… it makes… You know, it makes such a huge difference that people… we should all be, you know, educated in looking at this. Dr. Deb Muth 32:14Yeah, so since we’re talking about core, let’s kind of talk about gut health. That seems to be something that you’ve dealt with before. So when we’re talking about people who have bloating and brain fog and low energy, which is half the population, if not more these days, right? What are you seeing as the most common underlying patterns from a physical standpoint, if not a, you know, an infectious standpoint as well? Shalinibhat 32:42I mean, from physicality alone, I would say, again, this… prescriptive, chronic, like, diagnosis of sedentation. Like, I… I can’t… I cannot say enough, like, if you go to work from 9 to 5, and then you go on your spin bike for half an hour in the day, and then sit and watch Netflix, I know… like, and I mean this from the nicest place, I know the person’s intention is correct, like, I know that they really are, like, yep, tick mark, did my workout today. I love that for you. Also, like, that is not an active person. Like, that’s not. Like, you know, 10,000 steps or, like, aiming to be mobile, like, moving as much as humanly possible in a day, like, really, that’s the goal. How much can you possibly move in a day? Because that is where a huge piece… bloating, brain fog, and low energy, let’s just cut to the chase. Hydration and lack of circulation, that’s just, like.Basically, here we go. So that’s… that’s one and two, right? So let’s just talk about move as much as humanly possible, because A, you’re going to move that gas, so trapped gas is going to move, you’re going to actually help digestion and peristalsis, you’re going to help your blood sugar. Then, when we’re talking about brain fog, you need, you know, circular… and again, you and I know there could be many issues, but let’s… let’s stay very high level, because you asked physicality. Moving tons is going to help that, too. Oxygenating those tissues, right? Again, breathing, right? So those breathing mechanics we talked about, our breathing mechanics are going to be better when we’re standing up than if we’re just sitting… like, collapsed, right? So, again, moving more is the ultimate prescription that I would give for every single thing that you just mentioned, energy included, because almost like, you know when you nap in the afternoon and you wake up, you feel less energy? That’s sort of where I think of, like, you know, non-moving, right? And you gotta… yes, there’s gonna be a point to everyone listening who’s like, I can’t even move that much, my weather sucks, or like, whatever.Just walk around your office, like, you know, make a… you’ve got to put the timer. Unfortunately, in the world we live in, we have to use timers, right? Because we’re just going to be, you know, not able to do that. The second thing I would say is even just in that sense of physicality is meet, which I’m sure you know about non-exercise activity time, right? Which is just standing more. So, even just setting your your phone timer for every 20 minutes, because every 20 minutes is when you know, your body’s going to… or every 15-20 minutes, A, it’s when your fascia just goes, oh, okay, you’re kind of not moving, so I’m just gonna, like, I’m just gonna sort of relax here, and that’s where it loses resilience. So that’s something called tissue creep. So that’s why, if you sat all day long, you were kind of semi-stretching it and, like, in a seated position, and that’s why when you then are at home showering, you go to reach for your razor, and you’re like. My god, I just, like, put my back out. It wasn’t that you went to go pick up a razor, it was that all day. Dr. Deb Muth 35:41long. Shalinibhat 35:41That tissue was semi-stretched in this one, you know, sedentary range of motion, for example, and that’s something called tissue creep. And when we have tissue creep, we are so prone to injury in that. So when you stand up every 15-20 minutes, you bring that recoil back to that fascia. So, like I said, we have that flexibility to it, and we have that tensile strength to it, and actually just standing up and sitting back down. will bring both of those qualities back to it, because it will hydrate it. So that’s another thing that, I think people could incorporate more in their day, is that non-exercise activity time called MEAT. That would be my answer for your physicality questions. Dr. Deb Muth 36:19I love that. I remember when I learned about the atomic habits, and I was reading that book, and one of the things that he had talked about was moving more, right? And how do we create these habits? And one of the things that he did was, every time he went to the bathroom, he would do 3 wall push-ups, 3 squats. And so, as you got up every day, you know, multiple times you get up to go, by the end of the day, you had a complete workout in, and you didn’t really even have to overexert yourself, you were just moving your body more, and I think we think of workout as, I have to go to the gym, I have to spend a half hour, 45 minutes there, I have to sweat, it has to be all at one time, and it really doesn’t have to be that way. It can be these small movements throughout the whole day, and by the end of the day, you’ve had your whole workout in. And for those people who are listening to us going, I don’t have time for a workout. I just gave you the time for the workout. Shalinibhat 37:15Yeah, exactly. And just one thing to add to that, only because you said squats and push-ups, I love that, but squats and push-ups are in the exact same range of motion as, cycling and running. So I think that… I think we actually spend too much time in that plane of motion, so if everyone thinks of sitting, standing, cycling, running, squatting, push-ups, they’re all in the same range of motion. We actually all need way more Twisting, like, huge twisting ranges of motion. Dr. Deb Muth 37:43And… Shalinibhat 37:44Need side bending. So if we can include, you know, jumping jacks, that’d be the side bending kind of thing, or side stretching, kind of think on that plane of motion, and big, huge twisting motions, those are two categories of planes of motion that we’re missing, so I would, like, just if someone thinks of, like, what do I do all day? Oh yeah, I do bicep curls, and I do push-ups, and I do squats, and I do lunges, and I… cycling, you are literally working on a range of motion, and, you know, again, back to that, how do we create fashion resilience? Dr. Deb Muth 38:18One Shalinibhat 38:19I’m twisting and side bending as well, those types of movements in our day, big time. Dr. Deb Muth 38:24I love that. That is… that is so great. I love that. So, when we put all of this together, you’re… you’re doing some acupuncture, you’re doing some chiropractic, some Pilates, some fascial release, and… and obviously functional medicine together, too. What does a coordinated, week-to-week look like for somebody who’s taking on all of these modalities to fix their chronic pain, or just to make their body move better? Shalinibhat 38:52Kind of what I said at the top of the call, meet yourself where you’re at, and look for results in what moves the needle for you. So let’s say you did go to a Pilates class, and you’re like, wait, I’m, like, actually feeling so much more energized in my, you know, from the twisting I did in this class, my digestion’s feeling a little bit better. Awesome, double down, go again.If you went for a treatment, and you were like, you know what? That fascial release made my back finally feel open, and I’m feeling great, and that’s made my mood lighter, and my sleep got better, amazing, go again. If you went to acupuncture and, you know, you felt that the needles, like, gave you this sense of calm and a nervous system reset, and that helped your digestion and your sleep, awesome, go back to it. Whatever, like, you can get those huge bucket you know, wins in any type of modality you’re going to… to start, you just gotta start it and notice whether there was a shift for you. If you went to a practitioner and you were like, then that’s not the person for you, and that’s not… and I should say the person, maybe, because maybe that modality is for you, but it was just the person. But do more stuff that makes you feel good. So, and I say that because I’ve had patients that are like, oh, I went to this person for 10 years, yeah, I felt okay, it was fine, they told me to come back. I don’t know, they told me to do this. Like, seek results, because, like, I’m a results-oriented person. When you come to see me.like, if I haven’t changed… if I haven’t made a huge difference in one session with you, like, please don’t come back. Like, you know, be like, that didn’t work for me, right? Dr. Deb Muth 40:26Number 7. Shalinibhat 40:26Reason it was complicated, and I explained to you why… like, if someone’s in major acute pain, and you can explain, this isn’t going to be the one-shot thing right now. Right. You know, and there are, like, listen to your practitioner like that, but you want to find a personal fit, first of all. It’s really important when we’re talking about these types of modalities, whether it’s acupuncture or hands-on care, fascial release, Pilates, you need to find someone who’s the right fit for you, because it has to be motivating and exciting, and you want to be able to want to go back. So, if you’re like, I don’t know, my friend kind of, like, goes, and like, they said I should go back next week. If that’s your energy going into it, you’re not going to get the best, most out of it, right? So just do whatever it is that, you know, I’m somebody… if I hear of someone through the grapevine with… through three people, that’s my thing. If three people say, so-and-so’s awesome, I’ll go try them. And then how I built my practice, I kept trying all these people that people would refer, and I would take the best bits of what they did through treatment and stuff, and I’d be like, okay, and I slowly started incorporating that into what I do as a clinician. And I would say the same for… not that you guys would be amassing it to do it as a clinician, but same thing when you go to seek any type of care, number one, make sure you have some type of a positive feeling when you’re coming out. Number two, don’t be… like, go back again. All of these things are meant to be compounded, so, you know, whether you decide to yourself, I’m going to do acupuncture once a month, then I’m gonna do fascial release twice a month, then I’m gonna do Pilates twice a month, and then I’m gonna make sure I get my walks in every single day, and I’m, you know, doing my breathwork and my relaxation techniques, and I’m just gonna prioritize my nutrition, drink my water, and go to sleep on time. Like, hello, you’ve already. Dr. Deb Muth 42:05I’m gonna leave our… Shalinibhat 42:07you’ve already done, you know, you’re gonna be better for it. So, put into your schedule whatever fits, and don’t make it overwhelming, because if something’s overwhelming, you’re also not going to do it, and then it’s not going to work either. Dr. Deb Muth 42:18Absolutely. This is a great conversation, I love this. I have one last question for you, and I ask this question of all of my guests. If you could change one thing in healthcare today, what would it be? Shalinibhat 42:31Oh my god. That’s such a good question. I… does it have to be realistic? Dr. Deb Muth 42:41It does not. Shalinibhat 42:43I would put someone with expertise like myself, and I’m not saying this, like, oh, I’m so good, like, just somebody with outer knowledge of the body and inner knowledge of the body from a gray area functional perspective in acute care. And what I mean by that is for example, that patient I gave earlier that went to the hospital with acute abdominal… within quotation marks, acute abdominal pain, seeking, like, is this appendicitis? If that person sought somebody who… or… That person sat and waited in the, you know. at ER for so long because they’re not bleeding from the head, you know what I mean? Right. And then you put a functional person in there, not only are they going to say, hey, you want to know what this is? That makes that patient feel great, because they feel heard, they feel seen, they now have an answer for what’s going on, and… they didn’t have to clog up the system. I think there’s a lot of functional, from an MSK perspective, people in the ER, and I think there’s a lot of functional you know, things that you and I would see in our practice in the ER. And I wish people were more equipped with the type of tools you and I might have that we take Granted, because if you or I have a symptom… I remember one day, actually, I had this… such an acute neck pain all of a sudden, and I knew exactly what it was, and I knew exactly what to do to, like, how… like, how to move, and how to lie, and what at that moment, and I said to myself, I said to my husband, I said, if I was a layperson right now, I would think death was on my door, I would make you run me to the ER right now in an ambulance, like, I would call an ambulance because of how I felt, but because I actually knew what it was, A, you have that locus of control. You’re like, oh, okay, I’ve seen this before, I’ve treated this before, I know how to deal with it. Okay, it’s gonna be 48 hours, here’s how it’s gonna start, like, here’s the position I need need to be in, blah blah blah.But if you don’t know that, that’s highly alarming. And so, the second… You didn’t ask me for two things, but I’m giving you two things anyways. That’s okay. The thing would be making sure that in schools, all of the children, all of the teenagers are extremely equipped with their own understanding of the body and understanding of tools available to them Should non-emergent things be happening to them that they could empoweringly address themselves. Dr. Deb Muth 45:12I love that, that’s great. I think you’re right, like, we’ve taken so much of how the body functions away from the general population of knowledge and made it so complicated that people can’t help themselves, and they’re so fearful of Any little thing that happens in the body. And I guess rightfully so, you know, there’s a lot of terrible things that can happen, and everybody’s afraid of the worst thing possibly happening, but I think if we could give power back to people so they understood their bodies. That would make all the difference in the world between them being a nervous wreck about something and waiting to see the doctor versus, I can treat this myself, and it’ll be better, and it’s okay. Because I think we’re… we’ve lost a lot of that magic of, folk medicine, so to speak, or the things we pass down from family generations, but we were able to treat a lot of things back then and make people not afraid of it, and we need to go back to learning that. Shalinibhat 46:10We do, and I think the other, like, one thing that I noticed with my son, even, like, all, like, immediate… like, if he even shows a sign of anything, I’m like, oh, immediately putting him on, like, homeopathic this or whatever, and that’s when to use those things, right? Is, like, at that. Dr. Deb Muth 46:26Right. Shalinibhat 46:26So, like, if we could teach people that, like, you know, the signs of when you’re feeling off, like, and really tune into that, so, like, how do I feel today? Like, what’s norm… what’s my normal, and what’s not, so that they can always catch things really. Dr. Deb Muth 46:41early. Shalinibhat 46:42When you catch things really early, all the amazing things that we have, you know, access to can make such a big difference. It’s when it goes on and on and on and on and on so long that you’re suddenly like, oh my gosh, now what’s wrong with me? And that’s the other thing, is like.That if, again, we could shift the mindset of when something happens to someone, they’re like, the hospital will fix me, the doctor will fix me, something’s wrong with me, you know? Dr. Deb Muth 47:03And then… Shalinibhat 47:04Like, oh, my neck is feeling like this because I XYZ, and now… and you know what? It just needs this. Instead of that, I’m going to take this body that’s kind of not mine and take it to the ER, you know, to fix it. Dr. Deb Muth 47:16written. Shalinibhat 47:17You know, and so that’s, like, yeah, that’s a piece that’s missing, too, that I wish we had. Dr. Deb Muth 47:22Awesome. This has been such a great conversation. Thanks for joining me. Is there any last comments or things you want to share with our audience today? Shalinibhat 47:31Yeah, I mean, you guys can come find me. I actually, write a newsletter myself, not through AI, and so if you liked learning these little nuggets from me, here on this podcast, I just talk like this, and this is what my newsletter sounds like, is like you’re chatting with me. So you can head over to my Instagram or my website and join, my newsletter list, and yeah, otherwise you can join me on my social channels, which I’m sure you’re gonna link here. And, yeah, it was really nice to meet you, and thank you for all the work that you do, because I know it’s hard doing the work that we do, and, you know, trying to hold the line for the people that really do need us, so I always, you know, just want to say thank you for that, too, and thank you for having me today. Dr. Deb Muth 48:16Oh, thank you, it’s been a great pleasure. Shalinibhat 48:18Yeah! Dr. Deb Muth 48:21Oh, goose this. Thank you for joining me today on Let’s Talk Wellness Now. If this episode gave you clarity about why your symptoms might be connected, or how, and how they’re integrated in root care cause. and you feel like this could help, share it with someone who needs to hear this. To learn more about Dr. Bhat and the Movement Boutique, you can look them up online or on social, and check out their links below. Until next time, I’m Dr. Deb. Remember that your recovery is a process, not a race. Be well, and I’ll see you next time.The post Episode 271 – The Tissue Saving Your Body (Or Making You Stiff): The Fascia Explanation first appeared on Let's Talk Wellness Now.

The ASX 200 rose 59 points today to close at 8823 (0.7%), with the banks solid. CBA rose 1.0% and NAB gained 1.0%, with the Big Bank Basket up to $271.94 (0.8%). Other financials also had a good session, with NWL rising 3.1% and ZIP enjoying a strong day, up 8.7%, along with XYZ, up 4.9%. Industrials were also firm, with the retail sector performing well. JBH rose 2.2% and ALL also pushed higher. Plenty of Ex Dividends today in REITs and utilities.Technology finally appears to be finding its feet, with WTC up 7.2%, XRO gaining 4.5%, and the old-school platforms REA, CAR, and SEK all rising around 4% or more. Utilities were weaker, with ORG down 1.0%, while APA traded ex-dividend and also drifted lower. Healthcare stocks were better across the board, with CSL up 0.5%, RMD gaining 2.0% and TLX rising 5.5%.Resources painted a mixed picture, with BHP up 1.4%, RIO up 0.3%, and FMG the best of the iron ore majors, up 2.4%. Gold miners were mixed as bullion drifted lower, with NST down 2.3% while GMD gained 1.9%. Lithium stocks were once again under early pressure but recovered to see PLS finish up 0.8%. In the oil and gas sector, WDS edged slightly higher, while some of the uranium stocks also posted modest gains.In corporate news, NEU had a stunning day following progress on European approval for Daybue. RMS rallied 2.3% after agreeing to sell its Edna May gold mine for $300m, while KAR rose 9.1% after restoring production at the SPS-92 well and announcing a new on-market share buyback.There was nothing of note on the economic front today.Nikkei 225 down 0.4%, South Korea up 1.1%, HK up 2% and Shanghai up 0.4%.US futures firm DJ up 191, Nasdaq up 215. European futures slightly higher.Marcus Today – Daily Market Insights Marcus Today provides clear, practical commentary for self-directed investors – covering markets, portfolios, education, and decision-making without the noise. If you'd like to go further: Start a free 14-day trial of Marcus Today http://bit.ly/mt-trial-podcast Join Marcus Today Use code MTPODCAST for 10% off http://bit.ly/mt-join-podcast-offer MT20 – Managed ETF Portfolio A professionally managed portfolio run by Marcus Padley and the team, using ASX-listed ETFs with active market timing. http://bit.ly/mt20-podcast Principles – How We Think About Investing A short video series on timing, behaviour, and decision-making. No stock tips. http://bit.ly/mt-principles-podcast — Disclaimer This podcast is general information only and does not consider your personal circumstances. It is not personal financial advice. 

A daily low dose of aspirin could significantly reduce the risk of bowel cancer in people with Lynch syndrome, an inherited condition that increases the likelihood of developing certain cancers.   In this episode, we explore the findings from the landmark CaPP3 trial, hear from a participant living with Lynch syndrome, and discuss how genomics could help shift healthcare from treatment to prevention.  Our host, Sharon Jones is joined by:  Dr Katie Snape, Principal Clinician for Population Health at Genomics England  Professor Sir John Burn, Professor of Clinical Genetics at Newcastle University  Drew Hyde, participant in the Cancer Prevention Programme (CaPP3)  Links:  Listen to: How can genomics help us understand cancer?  "I think knowing is always a good thing. And obviously, I wish I'd known earlier, and then, I could have taken more measures earlier on. So I think knowledge is definitely a good thing. And it would be great if more people could be tested or could find out if they were carriers at an early age, I think."  You can download the transcript or read it below. [00:00:00] Sharon: Welcome to Behind the Genes. In today's episode, we'll explore the research which shows how a low dose of aspirin can halve the risk of bowel cancer in people with Lynch syndrome. We'll hear about the real-life impact of living with the condition, and look at how genomics can help shape a more preventative approach to care in the future. [00:00:20] I'm Sharon Jones, and to help us unpack all of that, I'm joined by our guests, Dr. Katie Snape, principal clinician for population health at Genomics England; Sir John Burn, professor of clinical genetics at Newcastle University; and Drew Hyde, a participant in the Cancer Prevention Programme, which is also known as the CaPP3 trial. [00:00:42] So to start with the basics, Katie, can you walk us through what cancer is in simple terms? [00:00:50] Katie: Sure, Sharon. So, our body is made up of cells. Those are the building blocks that, that make us as humans and other creatures and plants. And our cells need to keep dividing throughout our lifetime as our bodies are growing and working normally. [00:01:06] And so we need to have processes in place in our body where our cells can divide, but then also stop dividing when we don't need them to carry on dividing. What happens in a cancer cell is basically that cell becomes abnormal, and it doesn't follow the normal checks and balances and rules of cell division. [00:01:23] So it starts to divide and grow uncontrollably, and it can start to invade other tissues and obviously, that can cause serious consequences. [00:01:33] Sharon: We'll hear a lot more from Dr. Katie Snape in this episode. But before we move on, I just wanted to flag that there was an episode of our Genomics 101 explainer series with Katie dedicated to helping us get to grips with how genomics can help us understand and diagnose cancer. [00:01:47] Do go and check that out. We'll put a link to that in the episode description. [00:01:54] So the World Health Organization estimates between 30 to 50% of all cancers are preventable. So, Katie, when we talk about cancer being preventable, what does that actually mean? And what's an example of cancer prevention that people might already know? [00:02:11] Katie: Yeah. So some cancers are due to chance or just mistakes happening as our cells copy. [00:02:19] Other cancers are because there has been damage to the genetic information within the cell that can be caused by certain things that can cause damage to DNA. So for example, a sort of obvious answer would be skin cancer. Skin cancers can be caused by sunlight, the, the UV light in the sun, and particularly if we burn our skin or, or get sun damage to our skin, increases the chance of us developing a skin cancer. [00:02:44] So you can think of lots of other examples such as cigarette smoking and lung cancer, and so we know that there are a number of different risk factors that increase the chance of our cells developing damage and becoming abnormal cells and growing uncontrollably. So when we talk about prevention, we might think, well, could we reduce some of those risk factors and therefore reduce the chance of those cells getting damaged and becoming cancer cells? [00:03:10] So I gave the example of skin cancer. We might put sun cream on if we're going out in the midday sun, for example. That reduces the damage of the UV light onto our skin cells. Or we might help people to go into a smoking prevention programme or, you know, other risk factors, such as we know that being very overweight can increase the chance of cancer. [00:03:31] We might help people get into more exercise regimes or improve people's diets. So those are the sorts of things that we might do sort of for environmental risk factors. But we also know, particularly in this context, that sometimes people are born, they carry genetic changes within their cells that they're born with, that are inherited, that run through families, and those can also increase the chance of some cancers developing. [00:03:56] And for those people at higher genetic risk, then we might look to other ways that we might reduce that risk. We can't change the genetic changes in their cells, but we might be able to put things in place to reduce the risk for those individuals, and that might be medication, it might be surgery, or there could be other things that we might be able to offer. [00:04:15] Sharon: Yeah, and with that in mind, is there anything more, you know, that you can share about some of those risk factors that someone is more likely to develop cancer? [00:04:25] Katie: Yeah. So actually, the, the biggest risk factor for developing cancer is age. The older we get, the more times our cells have divided, the more chance there is of a copying mistake that, that, that can cause that cell to become abnormal and start growing uncontrollably. [00:04:41] And that's why cancer becomes more common the older we get. We obviously can't change our aging process. Then, as I've said, sometimes we're born with certain specific inherited factors that increase the risk. That might be one big high-risk genetic factor, such as having a cancer gene that's important for, for that process of cell division that isn't working properly. [00:05:04] Or it could be that we have multiple lower genetic risk factors that can kind of add up together to increase the risk. And those often interplay with some of those environmental factors that we've talked about, like smoking, for example, or weight, or alcohol or other things like that. So most cancers are due to aging, and then there's a sort of interplay of genetic factors, but environmental factors as well. [00:05:30] Sharon: That's really interesting to understand. And the focus of this podcast is sort of looking at kind of Lynch syndrome and what findings have come out around aspirin and having a low dose of aspirin. So I want to kind of explore what Lynch syndrome is and, and then bring in Drew to talk about his experience of having Lynch syndrome and how he got involved in the trials themselves. [00:05:49] So from what I understand, Lynch syndrome is a genetic condition that can make some people more likely to have the chances of developing into bowel cancer. And Drew, this is your opportunity to sort of talk about what that's been like living with Lynch syndrome. And, you know, I'd like to understand more about your story and how it came about that you discovered that you had Lynch syndrome, and to share with our listeners your journey. [00:06:13] Drew: Yep. So in my case, I discovered I had the colon cancer before I discovered I was a Lynch syndrome carrier Basically, at the age of 50, I noticed some change in my health. You know, I was becoming a little bit more tired. My bowel movements had changed or whatever. So, I went to the GP and the GP basically said, "Well, you're probably too young for cancer, so let's look at other alternatives." [00:06:37] And I had blood tests and I had low iron, so I was on iron tablets for three months and whatever. Then eventually I went back and finally the GP said, "Well, let's try a colonoscopy." And the colonoscopy revealed that I did actually have colon cancer. And then very quickly I had surgery and, uh, then following that, I kind of asked the question, "Well, why me?" [00:06:59] You know, I'm only 50, 51. Yeah. You know, why me? [00:07:02] Drew: And basically, I was told, "Well, it's probably genetics." And then I was referred to, you know, St George's and Katie and I had the test and discovered that I was actually a Lynch syndrome carrier, and that's why, you know, I'd got the colon cancer at the age of 50, so. [00:07:17] Sharon: I mean, that's quite a journey. I mean, how did you feel when you're already on one pathway and then having to kind of find out more, you know, what was your experiences? What was the impact on your life? How did you, how did you feel? [00:07:27] Drew: I think I was lucky in that I had a very good surgeon. I had surgery very quickly, so that was the first hurdle. [00:07:32] Then I had to go on to chemotherapy, and the chemotherapy obviously is far worse than any surgery or anything else that comes before or after. But having got through that, then I went through the St George's onto the Lynch syndrome system. So, the most important thing then really was to basically identify what that meant for me, but also because it was an inherited characteristic, what it meant for my family. [00:07:57] One thing that was interesting, and I say, you know, the, the GP was saying, "Well, you're too young to have cancer," is that there wasn't any history of cancer in my family, you know, looking at older relatives. So, you know, to be fair to the GP, that wasn't an obvious marker. So basically, yeah, it was let's, you know, find out what it means now going forward. [00:08:21] Sharon: So, can you just take us back to when you were diagnosed with Lynch syndrome? What sort of guidance were you given at the time about managing your cancer risk? [00:08:30] Drew: Well, following the surgery, I was given various statistics which were fairly grim on what your percentage survival rate were in three years, five years, 10 years based on the surgery, whatever. [00:08:39] And that was kind of a bit harrowing. But, you know, assuming I'd get through five years, I felt it was, my chances were quite good. As for myself living with, living with Lynch syndrome, that, you know, I was aware that having had the colon cancer, I then had increased risk of other cancers. So since then, I've been on a screening programme, and I have colonoscopies or gastroscopies every year or two years. [00:09:04] So that's been very good. So, I believe now that if any other cancers were to appear, I would probably know very early on because they would be detected through a screening process before they got to a point where they would be, you know, maybe too difficult to resolve, so. So that's-- I think the screening programme, has been very, very good. [00:09:23] The main issue for me was what it meant for my family, being a genetic thing. So very quickly, my children, who were teenagers at the time, were both tested, and they went through some counselling with Katie beforehand, you know, about what it would mean for them to get a positive or negative result. [00:09:42] Unfortunately, my daughter was tested as negative, but my son was tested as positive, so he's now on the same cancer screening programme, and has colonoscopies every two years. So yeah. The mystery really, though, is where I inherited it from because my father died when I was very young. My mother was in a care home at the time, and I wanted to get her tested. [00:10:07] And at the time, her GP wouldn't test her on the basis that she was unable to give consent. But fortunately, I had power of attorney, and we could persuade him to do the test. But she tested negative. So I'm assuming I inherited it from my father's side. But most of my grandparents on that side of the family lived into their nineties without any apparent cancers. [00:10:32] So it's still a bit of a mystery how I inherited it, but what was important for me was to know which side of the family I'd inherited it from because obviously with cousins and whatever on different sides of the family, I wanted to be able to tell them what the situation was. My brother also tested negative, which was a positive. [00:10:54] So at the moment, it's just my son and I that have the defective gene. [00:10:59] Sharon: I'm sorry to hear that about your son, but does it- [00:11:01] Drew: Well, well, I mean, he, you know, he has to go through a colonoscopy every couple of years, which, you know, obviously is not a pleasant experience. But at least he knows that, you know, the first sign of any problem, the medics will be aware of it, and he'll be able to react. [00:11:16] Sharon: Has it changed your outlook on life, having this window in possibly knowing stuff or not knowing stuff? How has that affected you and, and your son as well? [00:11:25] Drew: I think knowing is always a good thing. And obviously, I wish I'd known earlier, and then, I could have taken more measures earlier on. So, I think knowledge is definitely a good thing. And it would be great if more people could be tested or could find out if they were carriers at an early age, I think. [00:11:42] Sharon: Yeah. That is really important. And moving into about the trial more broadly, scientists have known that there's been a link between cancer and aspirin for some time, with fewer cancers observed in people who take aspirin. So coming to you, John, could you share a bit more about the history of inherited cancer research and how the focus of Lynch Syndrome came about? [00:12:02] Because this isn't new, is it? [00:12:06] John: No, absolutely, Sharon. And in fact, this story, my story in this space begins 40 years ago when I was one of the geneticists who set out to try and find the genes that we've just been talking about. At that time, the group of patients who were the most obvious to begin with were young people with a condition called familial adenomatous polyposis, or FAP for short. [00:12:26] And they'd get thousands of polyps in their bowel, and the only way to treat that was to actually remove the whole bowel when they reached adulthood, which is a fairly extreme intervention. And I was running, I was setting up a registry. We were trying to find the gene at that time, and we'd just found it, in fact, but we also were trying to find all the families. [00:12:44] And I'd taken over responsibility for all the genetic services in the north of England, in the North East and Cumbria. And we'd, I'd started identifying families with FAP, and we went to visit one of those families, and this was the kind of light bulb moment for me because I walked into the room and mum had had her colon removed, and her son, Jonathan, had just had his first colonoscopy at the age of 12, and it was clear. [00:13:07] And I was about to give them the good news, but as I walked in, I noticed that he had little bumps on his forehead called osteomas, little bony bumps. His mother had them just the same, and it was one of the features of this condition. So I knew he had the gene even though he hadn't yet got the polyps. [00:13:21] Sharon: Wow. [00:13:22] John: And it made me think, wouldn't it be nice if we could do something to prevent these things happening rather than just waiting for an operation? And as it happened at the time, I was leading the English end of a big study, which you'll probably be aware of, which we're, we're, we were doing the vitamin study on women with spina bifida babies, and we were just about to identify folic acid as a way of preventing spina bifida in pregnant women. [00:13:45] So I had these two thoughts in my head. Maybe we could set up a trial like this folic acid trial, and then one of my friends in Edinburgh said, 'Have you seen this paper from Melbourne?' Gabriel Kuhn had just done a big study looking at people with colon cancer. It seemed that people who took a lot of aspirin didn't seem to get as much bowel cancer in Melbourne as those who didn't. So that was the design set up. [00:14:08] We were applying to Europe for a concerted action, so we had to think of an acronym that began with CA. So I, I came up with Concerted Action Polyp Prevention. But then in 1993, just as we started that trial, we were involved in finding the first of the genes for Lynch syndrome. We had a big family in Northumberland where there were lots of people like Drew's family, and there were three generations of cancer in the family. [00:14:31] So CaPP2 was immediately born in my head. In 1999, we had our first recruit, and we recruited until 2005. We found, in total, 1,000 people in 16 countries to join in, and we gave them two aspirins a day or two dummy tablets. Two aspirins is quite a big dose, but back in my day when I was a junior doctor, we used to give many more tablets of aspirin to people with arthritis. [00:14:57] So two tablets wasn't such a big deal. Nowadays, it's seen as a very high dose. And it worked. Basically, to cut to the chase, when we looked in 2010, the people who were getting the aspirin were getting less bowel cancers. In fact, it was a 50% reduction. So the people who took two aspirins had half as many bowel cancers and fewer cancers of other types as well. [00:15:19] We realised, although, at this point, immediately we saw that it was working, we knew we'd need to do another trial to see whether a smaller dose of aspirin would be just as effective. So CaPP3 began, and the great news is that what we'll be reporting in the journals in the next few days when it gets published, is that the people who were taking  CaPP3 aspirin in any dose were tracking exactly the same as the 600-milligram group in CaPP2. [00:15:46] So we're pretty sure that it works. We're pretty sure that the small dose is just as good. And the great news was that we had fewer side effects in that group. And so in fact, no one had to go to hospital for a transfusion or anything, you know, like that. Whereas in the 600-milligram group, we had a few people who needed treatment because, as you know, and everyone knows, if you take aspirin, there's a higher chance of having an ulcer that causes a bleed. [00:16:10] And that was always the anxiety. But people like Drew were courageous enough to take the chance because they knew we needed to know the answer to this. And of course, when you compare it to the risk of getting cancer, taking an aspirin is a relatively small risk. [00:16:26] Sharon: So, what were your kind of considerations when you were designing the trial, having that knowledge? [00:16:32] John: Well, the first thing is it has to be fully informed consent, which means that you have to explain to people what that risk is. The important thing about aspirin is that doctors have a much worse opinion of it than it deserves because if you work in a hospital, you'll often see people coming in who've had a bleed. [00:16:48] It's not always caused by the aspirin. The thing is, if you're coming with a bleed and you're on aspirin, everyone blames the aspirin. Right. About half of them would've happened anyway. In fact, the, the irritation of the stomach is much more of a problem in older people So in fact, the average age of the people in CaPP2 and CaPP3 was about 45, 46 when they started. [00:17:08] Drew was a little bit older, but, but people in that sort of middle age group are much, much less likely to get into trouble than people in their 70s and 80s. And it's people also who've had a history of ulcers that have a bigger problem. We also knew that if you had a stomach infection called H. Pylori, which is itself a risk factor for cancer, and about one in six people carry that bug, and we knew that if we fixed that with antibiotics, that would significantly reduce the risk of bleeding as well. [00:17:37] So it was a manageable risk. It was something we could share with people. They knew they were taking a bit of a chance. But actually a good way of putting it in terms of the risk, for people in middle age, the risk of a low dose of aspirin is about the same as the risk of having a colonoscopy, which is very small, but it isn't completely without risk. [00:17:56] Sharon: Yeah, and Drew, kind of like hearing this sort of incredible, like, backstory about how we've got to these trials and where we are today What was your experience like as a kind of participant of this trial? [00:18:08] Drew: I understood I was going to be on 100, 300, or 600, but wouldn't know for at least three years, or was it five years? I can't remember. [00:18:15] And then sometime later in the post we got these packs, and it was ... I remember at the time thinking it was like a rather dull advent calendar - ... in that you'd have the days of the week- ... with the little, with the little windows, and you'd, you'd pop the tablets out three times a day and take them. [00:18:31] So I did that. I think, you know, I, I don't think I ever missed a day or whatever. Initially, I thought I must be on a really low dose, because I didn't actually notice any side effects. You know, I remember saying to my wife, I said, "Oh, I think I must be on the lowest dose, because I don't see any side effects." [00:18:46] It was a surprise years later when I was told actually I'd been taking 600, so. [00:18:51] Sharon: Wow. [00:18:52] Drew: It was quite an easy experience really. [00:18:54] John: We had a lot of problems. We had to pack the aspirin in six-month packs, because it was very expensive to pack this stuff up. It cost... We got the aspirin free from the Bayer company, but it cost us more than a million pounds to actually put it in, in the packs to satisfy the regulations. [00:19:10] Uh, and a lot of people complained that the packs were a bit big and awkward, but that was just, you know, a constraint. But it was not that big a deal once people got into it. But we did get a lot of complaints about the size of the packets, which we couldn't do anything about that. [00:19:24] Drew: They came regularly through the post, and, you know, so every three months or whatever I got another supply, and I just carried on taking them. [00:19:30] Yeah, so. [00:19:31] Sharon: What was going through your mind when you were kind of waiting for this potential outcome, Drew? Because you, like you say, it was, you know, it was a long time taking part. What was... Especially as you were opening your, you know, your package a day, knowing exactly what you were going to get. [00:19:44] Drew: Well, I, I kind of knew it would be a long-term thing. [00:19:47] I think I was committed for five years initially. But I carried on taking the aspirin for another probably five years after that. So yeah, I was just sort of happy to take the aspirin and then sort of wait to see what the results would be. As I say, that I didn't really notice any side effects, so I wasn't really worried that it was having any detrimental effect on me. [00:20:09] So I was curious to see what the, what the results would be. [00:20:12] Sharon: Yeah. John, the trial has provided like the evidence that, you know, low-dose aspirin can prevent bowel cancer. But are there any challenges that still exist with translating this research into clinic and ultimately patient care? [00:20:26] John: Well, yes, and I'm going to hand back to Katie, who's actually leading the charge on, on getting it into practice as well. [00:20:32] But just to say that I, I'm actually now literally on my other computer finalising my bid to go back to Cancer Research UK because we want to go for three more years. Wow. We said that we would follow people for 10 years after they'd finished their ... or after they'd started, so, you know, for at least 10 years. [00:20:50] So the last person to join didn't finish until 2024, so we won't get to that person. It's Robin and one of my patients. We won't get to Robin's 10-year anniversary until 2029. Oh, yeah. By which time, obviously, Drew will be even further on. But that will give us at least 10 years of follow-up because we know that there is this delayed effect, and that was seen right back at the beginning when people looked, for example, the nurses study in America, where they followed 86,000 nurses and just asked them if they took aspirin. [00:21:18] And nothing happened for 10 years, but those who were taking aspirin for more than 10 years saw a benefit. So in the general population, it probably takes that long to kick in. And so we need to keep going for just a while longer. It's not as expensive now because we're not giving people aspirin anymore. [00:21:33] Sharon: Yeah. [00:21:34] John: But one of the reasons we g- we made Drew's dose blind was because we wanted to know what the side effects would be when you didn't know how much you were getting There's a danger if you're getting a higher dose, you're more likely to complain. And actually, it did work out that the people on the lowest dose had the fewest side effects, even slight side effects. [00:21:51] The only thing we can't escape from is if you're taking aspirin, you get bruising more easily because it blocks the platelets, which are the little tiny blood cells which plug up little holes in your blood vessels when they leak. The good news is we now know that platelets turn out to be right, a major factor in triggering cancer. [00:22:09] And so the aspirin, by blocking the platelets, is actually reducing the risk of cancer, but also reducing the risk of cancer spreading in the body. So this is new research, and we've got another big research project in collaboration with a team in Cambridge who are, uh, pursuing this. Also, the other exciting news is that my other partner, Ruth Langley, is running a big trial of people with cancer, and those who are given aspirin as part of their treatment have less likelihood of getting spreading cancer later on. [00:22:39] So the aspirin is clearly doing something good at many levels in the system. Surprisingly, and we think it might be partly, partly because we used to have a lot of salicylate in our diet, which is what aspirin's made from. And we think that maybe we're putting back something that the body actually was used to having. [00:22:57] Yeah. But modern diets don't contain any, any salicylate because of the way we prepare our food. So it may well be that a little bit of aspirin's a good thing for everybody, but obviously, that's a choice that each person will have to make. [00:23:09] Sharon: Yeah. I mean, it's a real powerhouse of a, of a drug essentially, which you're finding out more about its benefits as, uh, as research goes on. [00:23:18] So Katie, can you just give us a bit of a broad overview of Genomics England's new adults program, which is kind of looking at this sort of area of work and, and what, how can it benefit people? [00:23:29] Katie: Yeah. Thank you, Sharon. So, the adults programme at Genomics England is being funded by government, and the government wrote about it in the 10-year NHS Health Plan, the Life Science Sector Plan to run a large-scale genomics population study. [00:23:44] So looking at how we can obtain genetic information from people in the population and look at more proactive and preventative healthcare, and can we generate evidence on where, how, and why the NHS should start applying genomics into kind of more population health measures. So, there's sort of two sides to this. [00:24:05] So the first is thinking about pharmacogenomics, which is basically about how genetic factors influence how we respond to drugs. So lots of people have had experiences of having side effects from drugs, we've just been talking about that with aspirin, or for drugs not working so well for them. And we know that there are certain drugs that genetic factors can influence whether you should take the drug at all, or if you do, what dose you should take, whether it's going to work for you or not, whether you might be more likely to get side effects or adverse reactions. [00:24:34] So part of the programme's looking at that. And then the other half of the programme will be looking at sort of is, are the genetic factors relevant for sort of serious and high-risk conditions in the adult population? So we could take bowel cancer as an example of that, a common condition, breast cancer, you know, common cancers or cardiovascular disease. [00:24:58] We know there are certain genetic factors for some people that have significantly increased their chance of developing those serious adult onset conditions. Can we find those people in the population and then put measures in place to prevent that? So, you know, even just thinking about Drew's story, he didn't have a family history of cancer. [00:25:16] The first time that he knew he had Lynch syndrome, he'd already developed bowel cancer. And we know that many people that have Lynch syndrome or other high-risk cancer genes are unaware of their status in the population, and so, um, the idea of this program is to really look at, well, if we were to, to look for some of these very high-risk genes in the general population, could we then put measures in place to reduce the chance of them developing the serious condition as a consequence? [00:25:44] So instead of Drew presenting with his bowel cancer, we'd actually already picked it up, despite the fact he doesn't have a family history, and we'd offered him, let's say, aspirin if we'd known the information at the time, and we could maybe have prevented him from developing bowel cancer. [00:25:58] So it's really exploring looking at that a little bit more. [00:26:02] Where can we get genetic information in the population? Where might there be a really well-evidenced, like all the work John's done over 40 years, is really well-evidenced now. Yeah. Yeah. Where are there these opportunities for us to turn the dial on some of these common adult onset conditions? [00:26:20] Sharon: What other challenges do you think with getting this out there do you see? [00:26:25] Katie: Uh, I think there's, there's lots of challenges. I think it's a really com- ... complex programme of work. The first thing is that the risks might be different for people in a population than have a family history. So where I've worked for, for years, and John as well in, in clinical genetics, we've seen the highest risk people, the people with lots and lots of cancer in their family because they're the people that are presented to healthcare services. So we've worked out the risks based on that population. It will be really different when we move to the population setting. We'll find fewer people, and the risks might be lower because there might be other factors that are giving them a lower risk. But that's not to say the risk is zero. [00:27:05] It's probably still raised. So then what we need to do is we need to consider, okay, well, what can we do to intervene, taking into account this change of context from people that we found through clinical services to people that we see in the population. And aspirin is a great example of this. [00:27:22] So, you know, if we find that someone has a Lynch syndrome gene, then taking aspirin, unless there's a really good reason for them not to take aspirin, is almost certainly going to be low cost to the NHS and really significantly reduce the chance of them developing bowel cancer with a low risk profile. So where are those opportunities? [00:27:41] And that isn't clear cut, and that's why we need a large scale research programme that can try to help the NHS answer some of those questions, so it can decide how best to spend its money in, in the people that are most likely to benefit from it with the least amount of risk or harm to them. [00:27:58] Sharon: That makes sense. And, and so, you know, going to you, Drew, what are your kind of thoughts on some of the challenges that Katie's highlighted? And is there anything else that you think needs to be improved in better supporting people living with inherited risk of cancer in the future? [00:28:14] Drew: In the brief sort of 10, 15 years or whatever since I've been s- suffering, awareness has increased greatly. [00:28:21] I mean, for example, my GP now knows about Lynch syndrome, whereas I don't think she did when I was first diagnosed, and I think there is a little bit more awareness out there, but I still think it's a lot less than there would be for, say, for breast cancer. So for example, when a high-profile personality reveals they've got breast cancer, you often get information about inherited risks. [00:28:44] You don't seem to get that with colon cancer. You know, when it's announced that so-and-so has died or is whatever, you don't get that same, you know, it, it might be a genetic thing. I mean, when I was first told people that I had bowel cancer, the response I got usually was, "Oh, poor diet, was it?" [00:29:04] And I always felt a bit upset, that, you know, actually my diet was fairly healthy. And that was the assumption that people had. So I think anything that gets the message out there that there is a risk, an inherited risk, I'm not sure what the statistics are now, Katie, is it one in 400 people might be a Lynch syndrome carrier or something like that? [00:29:24] You know, it's relatively high for something that is, if you know in advance you're at risk, you can do something about it. But like me, you know, I waited until it was too late, because I didn't know, and then had to have the surgery, so anything that promotes the message that there is a risk. I know some people don't want to know about their genetic makeup. Obviously, that's a choice. But I think to give people, as many people as possible, the choice must be a good thing. [00:29:54] Sharon: Yeah, absolutely. And I think one thing I've noticed through this thread is the sort of theme of funding and what gets funding and the amount of time it takes to, to kind of get that funding. [00:30:05] Is there anything you wanted to add around the kind of funding model, around why some things get funded, you know, uh, more prominent, like Drew's point, obviously, talks about if someone high profile kind of comes forward and says XYZ, that gets the spotlight shone on it, and there might be research going that direction compared to s- to, to other cancers. [00:30:23] John: So maybe I could speak at that. So partly because of my experience, I've now been made chairman of the grant committee at Cancer Research UK for prevention and population research. And there is a real drive to push more resource into prevention for the obvious reasons. [00:30:39] Katie: Yeah. [00:30:39] John: And also, it's got to be remembered, it's very difficult for the drug companies to fund this because it takes such a long time that the drug's- Mm [00:30:46] out of its patent before they actually get to use it. So, it's very difficult from a business point of view to fund research into prevention. But they are keen to help us, uh, but we really need sort of central government and the charities to focus on prevention if it's going to make a difference. [00:31:02] And just on Drew's point on diet, I mean, diet is still important even if you have Lynch syndrome. In our CaPP2 trial, the people who were overweight were more than double the risk of cancer. So it's not like an either/or. If you've got a higher genetic risk and you have a bad diet, then that's, you know, is going to contribute. [00:31:21] But the other exciting thing is, of course, we now have medical ways of treating obesity in, in people. So, one of the interesting areas is whether we should be, in the same way as we are for other high-risk populations with overweight, we should be giving overweight people with Lynch syndrome, help to lose weight because that will also reduce their risk. [00:31:41] It's also worth just dropping in at the last moment here is that this is also a good news story in terms of treatment and further prevention. We now have a new class of drugs called immune checkpoint inhibitors, which specifically target the types of cancer that Drew had and are much more effective in curing them And also, we've just been given funding to do a project called LynchVax, which I'll be helping with, but it's led by David Church in Oxford. [00:32:05] And this is developing a vaccine against cancers in people with Lynch syndrome. The great news is it'll probably work alongside aspirin because we know the aspirin is enhancing the immune response. So the two together may make this a curable condition. [00:32:18] Sharon: That's actually incredible. I mean, that, it gives so much hope for people. [00:32:23] And I just wanted to find out if you had any more kind of reflections as we close, because we're going to come to the end of our podcast today. If there's anything more that you wanted to share, anything that has been missed, or anything that you want our listeners to know, and I think I'm gonna come to you, Drew, first, because you're the person who's had to sort of live through this and, and go through this journey along the way. [00:32:41] Drew: I think just basically, if you're not sure, get tested. Obviously, there are financial constraints. I'm sure that running a DNA test is quite an expensive business. But I think if you've got any history of bowel cancer in the family, you've got any concerns about your health, speak to a GP and see if you can get tested as quickly as possible. [00:33:00] And then, to get a better message out there that there are risks of inherited colon and other similar cancers, so. [00:33:11] Sharon: Yeah, so it's getting that, messaging out, um, for people to understand more and make those informed choices. And Katie? [00:33:18] Katie: I mean, I would say that the power of, of our, you know, NHS and our academia and, and our healthcare system has been collaboration. [00:33:26] Sharon: Yeah. [00:33:27] Katie: There's so many moving parts. There's commissioners, there's funding, there's the evidence, there's research, there's healthcare implementation. The UK's a really amazing place to work in genomic medicine, and I think that's partly because of the amazing collaborations that we have, and the way that we can translate research into healthcare as John's team have done with this amazing study. [00:33:48] So let's all keep working together, please. [00:33:52] Sharon: Absolutely. And John, it feels like this is your lifetime's work. [00:33:58] John: Well, I've become aspirin man, it wasn't intended. But Katie's done fantastic work in her role as chair of the Cancer Genetics Group in the UK, so we've now implemented a, [00:34:06] we're the first in the world to really make this an absolute directive to the GPs and all, to all doctors to say, "People with Lynch syndrome need to be offered aspirin." And so that's a great step forward. But we also need to get it into the British National Formulary, and I'm working with their team so that the GPs are empowered to do this. [00:34:24] It's actually part of their care package. But I would just say we've still got a long way to go. We've now got a national list of all the people with Lynch syndrome, like Drew, to make sure we offer them all a colonoscopy, but there are only 14,000 people after several years of really pushing. [00:34:40] Sharon: Right. [00:34:40] John: We think in the national population in all ages, it's about 1 in 300. That's a lot of people. That means there's about 150,000 people like Drew in the country, and we've only found 10% of them. So we can't just rely on family history for all the reasons Drew explained. You know, I mean, Drew's dad probably died of Lynch syndrome, but we don't know because we've lost that record. [00:35:02] So now we're checking every bowel cancer to see if it might be caused by Lynch, and that programme is now kicking in, and we're picking up a lot more gene carriers as a result of that. But there's still a long way to go to get co- get people aware of Lynch syndrome, to think of it when someone presents with a cancer, not just of the bowel, but in the womb, in the kidney, in other parts of the body. [00:35:23] It's not just the bowel, but that's the most important group. [00:35:26] Sharon: Yeah. [00:35:26] John: So there's still a long way to go. [00:35:28] Sharon: Where you've come to now is still an incredible achievement, even though we've still got a long way to go, and I don't think we should ever lose sight of that. So we're going to wrap it up there. Thank you to our guests, Katie Snape, Professor Sir John Burn, and Drew Hyde, for joining me today as we discuss cancer prevention. [00:35:48] If you'd like to hear more like this, please subscribe to Behind the Genes on your favourite podcast app, and thank you for listening. I've been your host, Sharon Jones, and Behind the Genes is produced by Deanna Barac, Florence Cornish, Sophie McLachlan, and Dave Howard at Bespoken Media.  

Ženy XYZ #50: Feministický podcast, ve kterém Silvie Lauder, Markéta Plíhalová a Clara Zanga řeší důležitá aktuální témata Západní média v posledních týdnech informují, že více íránských žen než dřív se objevuje na veřejnosti bez hidžábu. Íránky jezdící na skútru s rozpuštěnými vlasy se staly symbolem pokračující „občanské neposlušnosti“, i když lednové masové protesty s desítkami tisíc obětí už utichly. Jak začal íránský režim využívat emancipaci žen ke své propagandě? A proč je česká debata o ženách na Blízkém východě zploštělá a nahrává krajně pravicovým stranám? Ve feministickém podcastu Ženy XYZ o tom diskutovaly redaktorky Markéta Plíhalová, Clara Zanga a Silvie Lauder. 

Ženy XYZ #49: Feministický podcast, ve kterém Silvie Lauder, Markéta Plíhalová a Clara Zanga řeší důležitá aktuální témata Vzhled hraje v populární hudbě zásadní roli desítky let. V poslední době si ale stále více lidí všímá, že ženské popové hvězdy nezřídka vystupují v kostýmu, který připomíná spodní prádlo. Kde leží hranice mezi svobodnou volbou umělkyně a sebeobjektifikací, který negativně ovlivňuje celý hudební průmysl? A čelí tlaku na vzhled i mužští popoví zpěváci? Ve feministickém podcastu Ženy XYZ o tom debatovaly Markéta Plíhalová, Silvie Lauder a Clara Zanga. 

What do you do when you receive an incurable diagnosiscombined with childhood trauma? That was the experience of author and founder of She Found Joy Podcast and Retreat, Lauren Gaskill. Listen in as we talk about her story and how Jesus showed up and healed her along the way.Listen in for:How the foundation of the Word is essential forgifts of the Holy SpiritThe power of right relationships for wisdom andcounselWhat Jesus can do with our heart hurtsWhy forgiveness is a BIG part of healingHow to have encounters with God Favorite quotes:“We want our healing journey to be like…  ‘just do XYZ and you'll be fine'… but so many times it is layer by layer because it's complex and we are spirit, soul and body.” – Tiffany Jo Baker“There are people whose faith is born through building a history with God.” – Lauren Gaskill“When you make yourself available, the Lord is not going tonot reveal Himself to you.” – Lauren GaskillFavorite Scriptures:“Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down fromthe Father of the heavenly lights, who does not change like shifting shadows.” – James 1:17“You will seek me and find me when you seek me with allyour heart.” – Jeremiah 29:13 To learn more about Lauren Gaskill her book and all the things she has going on, visit her on Instagram/Facebook and at https://www.laurengaskillinspires.com/ *Want timely words, resources, and episodes delivered rightto your inbox to help you fuel and fulfill your faith journey? Simply subscribe today to never miss an episode at https://www.tiffanyjobaker.com/subscribe (don'tworry, you won't get spam or excessive emails)*If you're looking for perfectly polished people or podcast,this isn't for you.. We're real people, with real good information, and a really great God. Don't miss the next Tiffany Jo Baker Podcast episode as wecontinue to help you GET FREE, LIVE FULL & THANK GOD! You can watch on YouTube and https://www.tiffanyjobaker.com/tiffany-jo-baker-podcast or listen in on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast player. Ratings and reviews are like high-fives and “go-girl's” on podcasts. Helping you refresh and refocus so you can do all the thingsyou are called and created to do, my 31 Day Devotional “Soul-Care for Go-Getters” is available on Amazon and my website shop here. ( https://www.tiffanyjobaker.com/go-getters-devo ) As a 3x Surrogate, Speaker, Soul-Care and Success Coach andHoly Spirit-led Strategist, I uplift the soul and success of women like you who are walking out your WHY, so you can birth your God-given dreams at home, online, and in the real world. Find me, @TiffanyJoBaker, on Instagram, Facebookand https://www.tiffanyjobaker.com. I would love to connect with you there!

On this week's episode of Valley of Depth, we sit down with Ross Fubini, Managing Partner at XYZ Venture Capital, for a conversation about what it actually means to be early in a market nobody believed in. Ross wrote the first check into Anduril in 2016, alongside Founders Fund, before defense tech was a category, before the term sheet wars, and before the word "primes" became a punchline on X. He did it because he'd spent years inside the Palantir network and understood something others couldn't see from the outside: that the company was an unparalleled crucible for entrepreneurial talent, churning out founders who knew how to sell technology to the hardest customer in the world. XYZ has since backed 40+ Palantir alumni across 130+ companies, and the firm now sits at over $1.5B under management. We cover: Why Ross knew Anduril would win from day one and why he still underestimated how big it would get The Palantir thesis: what he saw in that network in 2017 that everyone else missed How the defense tech landscape has gone from "nobody will return your calls" to drunk pirates chasing cash Where the market is overcrowded and where there's significant whitespace How to invest in the SpaceX ecosystem without getting eaten by it What good board work actually looks like when a company is in trouble His case for why the best venture insight is almost always about a market shifting not just a great team • Chapters • 00:00 – Episode Trailer 00:46 – From engineer to investor 04:49 – What Ross saw in Palantir before anyone else was talking about them 06:43 – The founding story and pitch of XYZ 09:42 – How Ross's engineering background informs his investing 14:01 – The market moving around technology 16:14 – What Ross thought would be the outcome of his Anduril investment 17:40 – The truth in the assumption of the US government being a reliable customer in defense tech 23:54 – Anduril vs. other defense tech firms 26:48 – Sectors that Ross is hesitant on 28:35 – Capabilities on Ross's radar 30:02 – SpaceX IPO 33:26 – Investing in an industry with a dominant player 36:19 – How much is Ross focusing on space vs. everything else? 38:42 – Hardest moment Ross has had with a founder 42:10 – How the VC community has evolved since Ross's time at Netscape 44:41 – What does Ross do for fun?   • Show notes • XYZ's' website — https://www.xyz.vc/ Ross's' socials — https://x.com/fubini Mo's socials — https://x.com/itsmoislam Payload's socials — https://x.com/payloadspace / https://www.linkedin.com/company/payloadspace Ignition's socials — https://x.com/ignitionnuclear / https://www.linkedin.com/company/ignition-nuclear/ Tectonic's socials — https://x.com/tectonicdefense / https://www.linkedin.com/company/tectonicdefense/ Valley of Depth archive — Listen: https://pod.payloadspace.com/   • About us • Valley of Depth is a podcast about the technologies that matter — and the people building them. Brought to you by Arkaea Media, the team behind Payload (space), Ignition (nuclear energy), Decoding Bio (biotech) and Tectonic (defense tech), this show goes beyond headlines and hype. We talk to founders, investors, government officials, and military leaders shaping the future of national security and deep tech. From breakthrough science to strategic policy, we dive into the high-stakes decisions behind the world's hardest technologies. Payload: www.payloadspace.com Tectonic: www.tectonicdefense.com Ignition: www.ignition-news.com Decoding Bio: www.decodingbio.com

Ženy XYZ #48: Feministický podcast, ve kterém Silvie Lauder, Markéta Plíhalová a Clara Zanga řeší důležitá aktuální témata.Říká se, že vlasy jsou korunou (nejen) ženské krásy. Podle délky a úpravy kadeří se ale hodnotí také příslušnost k tomu či onomu pohlaví, politický světonázor, profesionalita, nebo dokonce inteligence. A to přesto, že od slavného výroku kronikáře Kosmy, že dlouhé vlasy znamenají u žen “krátký rozum”, uplynulo více než 800 let. Co se stane, když ale žena přijde o vlasy následkem nemoci, třeba alopecie? A jsou vlasy hodnoceny stejně u mužů? Ve 48. díle podcastu Ženy XYZ o tom debatují redaktorky Respektu Markéta Plíhalová, Clara Zanga a Silvie Lauder.

School teaches you how to land a job, but no one teaches you how to leave one. In this episode, Lesley Logan reunites with longtime friend, novelist, and PhD candidate Clare Solly to talk through what most career advice skips: how to actually walk out the door. They cover how to know when it's time to go, how to figure out if you can afford to leave, how to rehearse the resignation conversation, and what to do when you're the one being let go. Whether you're eyeing the exit or recovering from a layoff, this conversation gives you the words and the plan to move forward without losing yourself. If you have any questions about this episode or want to get some of the resources we mentioned, head over to LesleyLogan.co/podcast https://lesleylogan.co/podcast/. If you have any comments or questions about the Be It pod shoot us a message at beit@lesleylogan.co mailto:beit@lesleylogan.co. And as always, if you're enjoying the show please share it with someone who you think would enjoy it as well. It is your continued support that will help us continue to help others. Thank you so much! Never miss another show by subscribing at LesleyLogan.co/subscribe https://lesleylogan.co/podcast/#follow-subscribe-free.In this episode you will learn about:What jealousy of your friends' jobs reveals about you.How to know if you can afford to leave your job.What to expect when you tell them you're quitting.Why staying graceful matters even when you're fired.The exit plan you can write before you ever need it.Episode References/Links:Clare Solly's Website – https://www.claresolly.comClare Solly on Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/actinglikeclareClare Solly's Novels on Amazon – https://beitpod.com/novelsbyclareClare Solly's Novels on B&N – https://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/clare%20sollySubmit your wins or questions - https://beitpod.com/questionsGuest Bio:Clare Solly is a modern day Renaissance woman living in New York City. She is an actress, writer, national pageant queen, and by day she is an executive assistant. She has published three books: The Time Turner, Christmas and Cleats and Save The Last Piece. Clare runs two theatre companies in NYC: The Bechdel Group and Company of Fools Theatre where she loves to foster and challenge new writers. She also is an avid bookstagrammer who grew her followers to almost 11K in 5 months time.If you enjoyed this episode, make sure and give us a five star rating and leave us a review on iTunes, Podcast Addict, Podchaser or Castbox. https://lovethepodcast.com/BITYSIDEALS! DEALS! DEALS! DEALS! https://onlinepilatesclasses.com/memberships/perks/#equipmentCheck out all our Preferred Vendors & Special Deals from Clair Sparrow, Sensate, Lyfefuel BeeKeeper's Naturals, Sauna Space, HigherDose, AG1 and ToeSox https://onlinepilatesclasses.com/memberships/perks/#equipmentBe in the know with all the workshops at OPC https://workshops.onlinepilatesclasses.com/lp-workshop-waitlistBe It Till You See It Podcast Survey https://pod.lesleylogan.co/be-it-podcasts-surveyBe a part of Lesley's Pilates Mentorship https://lesleylogan.co/elevate/FREE Ditching Busy Webinar https://ditchingbusy.com/Resources:Watch the Be It Till You See It podcast on YouTube! https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCq08HES7xLMvVa3Fy5DR8-gLesley Logan website https://lesleylogan.co/Be It Till You See It Podcast https://lesleylogan.co/podcast/Online Pilates Classes by Lesley Logan https://onlinepilatesclasses.com/Online Pilates Classes by Lesley Logan on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCjogqXLnfyhS5VlU4rdzlnQProfitable Pilates https://profitablepilates.com/about/Follow Us on Social Media:Instagram https://www.instagram.com/lesley.logan/The Be It Till You See It Podcast YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCq08HES7xLMvVa3Fy5DR8-gFacebook https://www.facebook.com/llogan.pilatesLinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/lesley-logan/The OPC YouTube Channel https://www.youtube.com/@OnlinePilatesClasses Episode Transcript:Clare Solly 0:00  So we learn how to do a job in school, and then we learn how to sort of kind of interview for a job, but nobody ever tells you how to leave a job, like how to quit, how to prepare for leaving a job, yeah, how to like deal with being in between jobs, like no one trained you for that.Lesley Logan 0:18  Welcome to the Be It Till You See It podcast, where we talk about taking messy action, knowing that perfect is boring. I'm Lesley Logan, Pilates instructor and fitness business coach. I've trained 1000s of people around the world, and the number one thing I see stopping people from achieving anything is self-doubt. My friends, action brings clarity, and it's the antidote to fear. Each week, my guests will bring bold, executable, intrinsic, and targeted steps that you can use to put yourself first and be it till you see it. It's a practice, not a perfect. Let's get started. Lesley Logan 1:01  All right, Be It babe, get ready to totally listen to two friends talking about a topic that we had a lot of fun talking about without you. We're like, we should turn on a recording device and some microphones and lighting and share this with you, because I keep getting great guests who talk about leaving the thing you don't love and doing the thing you love, and it's like, okay, but how? And some people have given some nice things, but I've always just felt like, as a person who's very action-oriented, who's very much like, "Tell me the first next step, because if I can get the first next step, then I can get the second next step." I wanted to have an episode for you like that. And so we have Clare Solly back on the pod. You've heard her on recaps, if you have been listening to this pod for a long time, you've even heard her on episodes if you've really been with us since starting episode 19, and now you can hear us talk about exit strategies and how to exit things. So here is Clare Solly. Lesley Logan 1:47  Hey, Be It babe. Welcome back to the Be It Till You See It podcast. I am so excited because I have Clare Solly back, and we just wrapped two recap episodes. You've been on the pod, we've had two interviews with you on the pod, correct?Clare Solly 2:00  I think two interviews, and I've done several recaps.Lesley Logan 2:03  Month of recaps for me.Clare Solly 2:06  Yeah.Lesley Logan 2:07  It was so fun. I was like, what are people gonna say? You know what? They loved it, the listeners stayed the same.Clare Solly 2:11  You know what? I will sit and chat with you forever and ever and ever, because we've been friends for a million years. But it was also really fun to do Brad recaps.Lesley Logan 2:19  Oh, just to talk about Brad. I listened to him because I was like, I wonder what they're talking about. But you know what's really nice? I often think about, like, what if I need someone to stand in for me, you know, like with OPC we have enough recordings that we could just replay them and people would be like, send us our favorite ones and we'll just replay those. But for the pod, if it's not me, Brad could do some interviews, but you can always step in, which is great. It's so wonderful.Clare Solly 2:45  Redheads, so it works.Lesley Logan 2:46  It really does. It really does. We're both, we're both redheads. So Claire's here, and we were like chit chatting, while you know, she was on the shake plate, I was on the red light. We're talking about, like, I've had a lot of guests on the podcast talk about, like, exiting, like it's okay to leave things, and I have found that the answers to a lot of my guests, when I'm like, okay, but how do you leave, have been kind of not helpful, yeah, like, I love my guests, and I, and I get it, like, especially if you just ended something, you might not be able to describe how you did that, and also sometimes the ends of things are embarrassing, like, yeah, you know, like, whether you wanted to end them or they were ended for you, or I will say, like, some of the.. we're talking more about exiting jobs, but I will say, like, exiting relationship, I sucked at the only time I have ever broken up with someone? I did the worst job doing it, absolute worst, the absolute worst job, like just terrible job, terrible job at it. And it's because, like, I never broken up with anybody. I kind of also didn't date enough to, yeah, to get broken up, and I feel like one of my breakups was more of a ghost team.Clare Solly 4:00  Yeah, I kind of had that too. I kind of had that,Lesley Logan 4:02  So like, to like sit down and like tell someone, and like I guess you'll never have a good answer for why you're ending something, really. So like I just didn't have a good answer, and I just kept going, okay, so I'm gonna go.Clare Solly 4:14  Yeah.Lesley Logan 4:16  So anyways, I so I think like I think exiting things is a muscle. I think like learning how to exit things, itClare Solly 4:21  absolutely is. We learn how to do a job in school, and then we learn how to sort of kind of interview for a job, but nobody ever tells you how to leave a job, like how to quit, how to prepare for leaving a job. Yeah, how to like deal with being in between jobs, like no one trained you for that.Lesley Logan 4:39  Well, and there's like some sort of, sometimes there's shame, there's embarrassment, there's all these things. First, before we get into this, I did a terrible job.Clare Solly 4:46  You heard it first on this episode, everybody.Lesley Logan 4:48  You know what, guys, I'm also.. I'll just be really honest with my B. A pod listeners, so I've been.. I've been diagnosed with the ADHD that you all knew I had before I had it. So today is the first day on medication, and I am just. Seeing how I'm doing, and so clearly it's doing something. It's not helping me, it's not helping me be more organized. She looks great. I'm supposed to say, Claire Solly, will you tell everyone who you are and what do you rock at?Clare Solly 5:14  My name is Clare Solly. I rock at pretty much anything I try, and if I don't, I rock at trying to figure out how not to be too terribly disappointed. I am a quadruple six tuple hyphenate. I am an actress, singer in New York City, have a day job that I really find a lot of crazy fun in. I'm also a novelist, for those of you that have listened to podcasts with me on it before. New news in my life: I've actually gone back to school, and I'm working on getting a PhD in creative writing. Lesley Logan 5:46  I can't wait to call you Dr. Clare Solly.Clare Solly 5:48  Oh my god, can I tell you, I read this meme the other day, that once I have my doctorate, I'm so excited to order something and have it come in and be like, look, this is what the doctor ordered. It's such a dad joke that I will totally use in my life. I have three self-published novels, you can find them on Amazon and Barnes and Noble. They're women's fiction. I run with theater companies in New York City and do all kinds of things, so I'm all over the place and making magic happen.Lesley Logan 6:22  So we met at a job.Clare Solly 6:24  We met at a job. I actually hired you at a job, pretty much.Lesley Logan 6:27  I remember thinking you were standing on an elevated step when I brought my application in, but no, you're just a giant.Clare Solly 6:34  Yeah, because I was behind a counter and I came around. I remember you looking me up and down and going, oh, that's you.Lesley Logan 6:42  I thought she was on an elevated platform, but she was just wearing heels.Clare Solly 6:48  Yep.Lesley Logan 6:49  And so we got to work together, we opened a business together, we had a shoe company together for two years. Fun fact about me, I used to design shoes. I should keep that as part of my two truths and a lie. Clare Solly 7:09  Shoe designer right here. And we spent long nights and long days sitting together and laughing our asses off and drinking.Lesley Logan 7:17  Oh my god, yeah, that was crazy. And probably because we're high on glue, we used deck varnish to make these shoes you guys have no idea.Clare Solly 7:27  By the way, if anybody out there has a pair of Snip and Tuck shoes. Lesley Logan 7:31  Snip and Tuck's Opinionated Shoes. Clare Solly 7:33  Oh that's right. Snip and Tuck's Opinionated Shoes. If somebody has a pair of those still in existence, please write into the pod. I need pictures of them.Lesley Logan 7:43  I'm gonna pull them. I think I kept a shoe from each of the ones that I had. Yeah because I'm not wearing them so I was like I'm not going to keep both. I'll find it in the closet for you. My sister still has a pair.Clare Solly 7:54  Oh my gosh, I didn't keep mine because I've moved too many times.Lesley Logan 8:01  Same. That's why I think I have a shoe from each pair. But anyways, we were talking about this because I interviewed a woman and she talked about the pros and cons, like how much it costs you to stay in the thing you're in. So Clare, how many jobs, you've counted your jobs, I haven't counted mine, so how many jobs have you had? Clare Solly 8:18  Well, actually counting Snip and Tuck, if we count self-employment, I've had 34, I've worked for 34 different companies or people, because I've worked for private families. Lesley Logan 8:29  Oh my god, I worked at a coffee shop, I worked at a doctor's office, then I worked where we worked together, and then I worked for a high-end fitness company. Clare Solly 8:38  Did you work for that? Remember we had that friend that we worked with, that and had a separate job, and did you ever go work for her at all? No? Okay.Lesley Logan 8:45  Then I worked for myself, and it was Snip and Tuck's. And that's all I've had. Clare Solly 8:55  Have you worked, you've worked for two gyms or just one?Lesley Logan 8:57  Just the just the one gym, just by, but here's the thing, in the job we worked together, I did every job, every job, and then.Clare Solly 9:06  We can count that as 20, if you want.Lesley Logan 9:07  Yeah, yeah, so that, well, that's like four, four, five classes.Clare Solly 9:10  Becaus you had five different positions in that.Lesley Logan 9:12  Yeah, cashier, sales, key holder, assistant manager, manager, and then I was hoping to be like an area manager, but then you know, life, and then at the fitness company I was an instructor and a manager and a teacher trainer, and then a regional manager, and as a group fitness instructor. So we're at like 20 jobs, yeah, yeah, we'll go there. So anyways, I feel more like an elder millennial now that I'm at 20, but like some of them I can most I can say, like I left the coffee shop job in a fine way, I left the doctor's office job at a fine way, but I'm not sure. Clare Solly 9:42  The coffee shop, they wouldn't let you go home for breaks in college, and they were always asking you to pick up shifts. You were beloved at that coffee shop.Lesley Logan 9:52  Yeah, I know. And I actually, when my in-laws got us an espresso machine, Brad was reading the directions like, I know what I'm doing.Clare Solly 10:00  Yesterday, when you were like, 'Do you know how to work a coffee machine? I was like, 'Nope, but you do.'Lesley Logan 10:04  I know. So, but I can say, like, you know, those jobs ended because I moved, and so it was like, "Of course, they know I was." Yeah, the other jobs were... I felt like I owed them more when I was leaving, versus, like, "Oh, this is just a job." You know what I mean? But I feel like, because I give my all, I kind of felt like I owe... maybe I should give them a month's notice, maybe I should give two months' notice. So let's talk about, you know, what should you be thinking about if you're exiting on your own terms?Clare Solly 10:36  I think you need to think about the value of yourself, what it is, like, what your skills are, right? This is also kind of helping you gear your mind towards rebuilding your resume and refocusing, like, what you want to do. Also, this is sort of tangential, but just stick with me for a second. When you find yourself jealous of your friends, especially with things that they do in their job, or specifically how their life revolves around their job, look at what that jealousy actually is, right? So you run your own business. I have another friend who runs her own business. I'm not afraid to say this, I'm jealous of both of you. And why is that? Because I like the freedom, the freedom, air quotes, I like the perceived freedom that I think that you have. I like the ability. Lesley Logan 11:21  I laugh because we're sitting here recording this podcast because I have a schedule and I have deadlines, and we can do this today, but it's a perceived freedom. Yes, you choose your boss. Clare Solly 11:30  Well, and that you get to travel, which that one is true, that you get to travel and you get paid for it for the most part. What else? I like... well, we'll just stick with those. Those three things are enough. Okay, so then I need to take that back and say, oh, that jealousy... oh, I actually would like a job where I travel, where I have a perceived freedom, a.k.a. I don't need to be lashed to a desk from eight to five, Monday through Friday. I want to do some things where maybe I'm out in the world doing things, and I work at a desk a couple of days a week, right? So look at yourself and not only what you value, but what skills do you have, do I have—we'll just use me—that can get me to where I want to be, right? So I can't magically leave my desk job and then go travel the world and make money, but I have to go figure out things like you did back when you were at the company we both worked at.Lesley Logan 12:24  Yeah.Clare Solly 12:24  And you went and you were taking classes, and then those classes turned into trainings, and then you went and educated yourself while you were making the money to do so. I mean, listen, if you want to be a babe and you want to like just quit your job tomorrow and run off into the sunset and go make magic happen, as whatever you want to do, live your best life.Lesley Logan 12:47  I do think that, depending on where you are in your life, there's different opportunities to blow things up versus not.Clare Solly 12:53  Oh, yeah, and in my 40s, I give very few (inaudible).Lesley Logan 12:56  Yeah, yeah. And I will say, like, I kind of blew up my life as far as personal life goes. I've never, I'm not someone who's ever blown up my life when it comes to the money I make, because I wasn't raised with a lot, and so for me, I want to be, when it comes to exiting things, I've always made sure I had a runway. So when I was,I actually, the job that we had together, I actually thought I would just be there like two days a week, because I thought I could do that. I thought, I'll do the two days a week, and that means I can keep my customers and keep my clients, my commission, my extra money. And then I'll have this business. And what happened is they were going to fire another salesperson so I could be the two-day-a-week, they were going to fire the other two-day-a-weeker, and I was like, oh, and it made me go, but she really needs this job. I need this job too, but also I have enough clients, and the company that I was teaching at part-time on top of my private Pilates business was going to, I knew they were going to offer me a management job, so if push came to shove, I knew I could just accept that job and reclaim that money in some way. So I actually decided to fully quit there versus do a little slowly stop working for them, because I just didn't want someone to lose their job, especially in early 2010. That just felt like that's a hard thing for her to go and replace. But when I left the fitness company, what I did is I figured out how much, I love your description of, like, what are you jealous of? It's also like, what are you finding you're resenting, like when people email and you're just like, you have instant irritation. And so for me, I felt even though they didn't think, and my friends who still work for them, they don't feel like it's a beck and call. It felt like to me it was a beck and call, clearly my ADHD signs, but really a beck and call to me. And so what I decided was, I sat down, it's like, okay, if I want to give up this job, how many Pilates clients would I need to have to replace this salary? And that salary included health benefits, that included my 401k, all these different things that I really think about. But then when you do the math, it really helped me go, okay, so I need to get this many clients coming twice a week. But what's the reality with how many hours I have to do that with? And so I had to go, okay, at the point that I get five clients who come two times a week, I can quit the salaried part of the job, and so I was able to go. I'm no longer going to manage, but I still taught there, was still a teacher trainer. And then it took me one year from that to let go of all of it. So I will say, like, if you do have the control, give if you need a runway, because money is a thing that you don't have extras of, an abundance of, to go remake yourself. It's really figuring out, like, the skills you'll need to have, the money you need to have, and knowing the numbers. I think that really puts you in a power position. I actually felt really confident letting go of that.Clare Solly 15:52  Yeah, and to, you know, add kind of to the money conversation, make sure you have a little bit more runway than you actually think that you'll need. Staying in a job that you hate for one more month is not going to be terrible compared to the two months you might be out of work and are panicking because you're like, where's the money going to come from?Lesley Logan 16:11  Yeah, I couldn't agree more. We had somebody who wanted to start her own business, and she... but her current job was just really, really stressful, really exhausting, and so Brad and I were like, "Hey, let's be honest, how much are you making here? Okay." So I looked up, I'm like, "If you worked at Starbucks 20 hours a week, you can make 80% of what you're making at this job." Yeah, so could you live off 80% of what you're making, right? Could you... I don't know your numbers, I don't know what that is. Maybe you need to, for the next three months, you just actually try to live off 80% and you bank up some money, right? And then you go find a job where you clock in and out, right? You just clock in and out—like no one who works at Starbucks is thinking about mochas when they leave, like they're not, right? Like, maybe a manager is, but I'm not saying that, I'm saying, like a barista, like just going in. So find a job that is actually not stressful, or where you get to leave the job when you're there, and then you can build your thing. If you can't do what I was able to do, which is like slowly leave away, is there a way that you can live off a little less money and do a different job that you could just leave it there? But I.Clare Solly 17:21  Now that's really smart.Lesley Logan 17:22  I think that it's always better if you can do it on your own timing. But yes, I agree, you need a little bit more money than you think, and you might want to start thinking, like, how can I make myself live on less money so I can be banking it, so I could have that runway, that two months' savings you have for rent and things like that.Clare Solly 17:38  Yeah, I like the strategy of having like a standby job. Let's talk about quitting.Lesley Logan 17:44  Yes.Clare Solly 17:44  That's like, how do you quit, right?Lesley Logan 17:46  Because, okay, wait, we made the plans, but now we have to tell them we're quitting. Clare Solly 17:52  Which is is terrifying, terrifying.Lesley Logan 17:54  Thank you for saying that. I thought I was the only person who's just like, oh my god, I know something that they don't know.Clare Solly 17:58  No, the best thing you can do is like almost get together with a friend and rehearse.Lesley Logan 18:04  Okay. Okay.Clare Solly 18:05  So we've made our plan like whatever it is, you know, you make sure that you've got enough money, that you've got sort of a runway, you make sure that if you have the friends or the family that are able to support you emotionally, mentally, whatever, you might just make sure that's part of your setup of moving forward. And then I, it's funny, I want to go in and quit always. I do these steps, I have found, because I've also done the thing where I'm like, "I'm moving," and pretended that I had a fake reason to leave a job. I've done that, and that doesn't feel good. The best thing to do is to go in, figure out kind of a script for yourself, and also be prepared to have them have different reactions. Like, they could ask you to stay and give you more money, so if you obviously hate the job, but money was your reason for leaving, maybe you might want to consider that, so be prepared for that as a conversation. Be prepared for them to just not care whatsoever. And then people also don't like any kind of leaving separation, whatever; they kind of can lash out at you, which is why it feels terrifying, because you're like, oh my god, they're going to hate me forever. You're leaving the job; they might hate you for a month or two, but they won't care.Lesley Logan 19:25  Also like, if they're going to hate you forever, do you really want to work there?Clare Solly 19:29  Exactly.Lesley Logan 19:30  I mean, that is terrifying. Like, I don't want anyone to feel unsafe, but I really think, like, really ask yourself, if someone's going to hate you forever, do you really want to work for someone just because they'll like you? I do like the idea of playing... like Brad did that with me. I was leaving when I was leaving the fitness job, because I was in management and all these things. He was like, "Well, what if they ask you that they're going to pay you more?" And I had to really think about that, but I also knew I'll just take every promotion someone gives me. So, to be honest, I was literally quitting so they wouldn't offer me another promotion.Clare Solly 20:00  Yeah, I mean, and that's hard, because it's like ultimately you're like, oh, well, things seem to be getting better, so maybe this is... which is why you should be prepared for it, because if you really don't like the actual job you're in, or the company that you're in, there's nothing wrong with that. You have just outgrown that space.Lesley Logan 20:19  Well, that's the thing, like leaving a job is like leaving any relationship, and I think, especially as women, we're not taught that. Like, you can leave friends behind. I think fondly of the friendships I had in elementary, high school, college, you know, even the friendships I had at different jobs, but I don't think that the version of me today could be friends with the version of them... you know, maybe we could be friends today, but we outgrew each other at some point. And maybe we could have reconnected, and I'm not saying that we never will, we might, we might run into each other, but I do think that people think we have to keep all of these people all the time, and so you've outgrown the position. Now, if you are someone who's like, oh my gosh, they're going to give me more money for staying, and you're like, "I could handle this for six more months," and you don't have another thing, then there's nothing wrong with staying and banking up more money, like that's fine too. But I do think that rehearsing that, so you know... and so Brad was like, "If they offer you more money, what are you doing?" I said, "I still need to go. I can't keep going the way this is going, and I already have a good thing lined up, and I'm going to bet on myself." Also, I kind of figured they would just hire me back if I needed to.Clare Solly 21:25  Some jobs can, some jobs can, but yeah, definitely. Like, you should wrap your mindset, and I'm not saying... I'm a chronic overthinker, so I'm not promoting overthinking quitting, but at the same time, make sure you are ready for the different options to be thrown at you.Lesley Logan 21:42  So maybe they might be like, "Okay, great, bye," and you might be like, oh. And the other thing is, depending on the state you live in, you might not get to finish the time.Clare Solly 21:50  Yeah.Lesley Logan 21:50  That you have. so I just want to say, be strategic about that, because I worked for a company where if someone put their notice in, the soonest.Clare Solly 22:00  You get walked out the door.Lesley Logan 22:01  Yes, as soon as we could legally give you the paycheck that we could owe you, we would let you go, yeah. And that's not because we didn't like you; it's actually because the transition process was a lot better, and the liability, all these different things. Like, I remember when we worked at the store, if someone gave us their two weeksClare Solly 22:16  Yeah. Lesley Logan 22:16  For the most part.Clare Solly 22:17  It's awkward too.Lesley Logan 22:18  For the most part, they were pretty much like, okay, we can have a paycheck to them by tomorrow. What's the schedule? Okay. And we literally, they would come in for that day, and I'd go, "Thank you so much for the day you just had. Here's your final pay, it includes today, you know?" They would FedEx it to the store so I could give it to them, and IClare Solly 22:36  Forgot about that, actually.Lesley Logan 22:37  Yeah, and we would live short-handed, because, honestly, it wasn't even personal to them. Putting the business owner hat on, they could steal, there's different things they could do, they could try to spend the next two weeks seeing their customers' information. So there's all these different things about protecting, and that back then, like, we remember, we had the customers' phone numbers and credit cards book, yeah. So there's a lot of information to protect at the fitness place. We wanted to transition the clients as quickly as possible, so we would do that. So I would just say, be mindful of where you're at, because it might be that it might end sooner than you were ready. Yeah, when I tried to exit a rental situation, the contract meant that I didn't have to give them any notice, but they also could just kick me out at any time. We were friends, so I thought they would honor that we're friends, and I wanted... I could see that they were turning away other renters, and I was their number one renter. So I was like, "Hey, these are my friends, I want to let them know, you guys, in four months I'm going to open up my own space, just so I can film whenever I want to. It's not personal." They seemed really, really fine about it, and then three months later they weren't fine.Clare Solly 23:42  Yeah.Lesley Logan 23:43  I don't know what changed. I know what changed now, but at the time I didn't know it changed, and so they literally kicked me out. And I had a month before my equipment was going to show up, and I had the studio, I didn't have a trash can. I had to text all my clients like, "Come to this space, we're moving in early." And then I called all my Pilates friends, and I borrowed equipment from them, and I made it work for a month. So I was, I mean, I'm pretty good to move on my resource, I'm so resourceful, Aquarian with ADHD, like, when the shoe drops, I am so much better than when everything is good. But you just don't know, so you just need to take... I would write down, what would I do if this happened? What would I do? What's the worst-case scenario? And also, here's the thing, the worst-case scenario rarely happens, but even if it did, have a backup plan for that. I think it's helpful.Clare Solly 24:30  Yeah, and like, I'm also kind of, if you have a personal space at the place that you work and you keep personal things there, you might slowly start to take them home, you know, not everything all at once, so it doesn't, you know.Lesley Logan 24:43  Yeah.Clare Solly 24:44  Flags to anybody.Lesley Logan 24:45  I haven't had an office job, so thanks, Claire.Clare Solly 24:47  I'm absolutely not saying do not take anything against company policy, don't do that. And in fact, make sure that anything you might have... because I mean, I work from home like two days a week now in my current job, but you might start bringing back things that might be company property, and just start leaving them at your desk instead. So just start the severing a little bit early if you know it's going to happen.Lesley Logan 25:15  I think so. I think so. Okay, so we talked about if it's on your own terms, we talked about like planning, and we talked about leaving. I guess we didn't really say, like, how do you say I'm quitting? What do you say?Clare Solly 25:28  It's different every time.Lesley Logan 25:31  Do you give a story ahead, or do you just start with I'm quitting?Clare Solly 25:34  Honestly, I think the best is short and sweet. Like, they don't... you don't owe them anything, they don't really owe you anything. I mean, yes, you've invested your time and your intellectual powers to them for however long, but you don't owe them anything. And I really think, too, like telling them where you're going, unless they're asking you, that's your business, you don't have to tell them. Even if they ask you directly, straight out, where you're going, you kind of don't have to tell them.Lesley Logan 26:02  Depending on who it is, I might not. I might say, like, I'm just, I will say, like, when I was leaving the fitness jobs, the management job, I said, "You know what, after we get married, the management responsibilities are not going to be something I'm capable of doing in the best way." And I used my marriage, but it was just like telling them I'm going to go teach somewhere could have meant that they would have fired me from all of my teaching gigs.Clare Solly 26:30  Yeah.Lesley Logan 26:30  You know, so, and by the way, I was legally allowed. I lived in the state of California, there's no non-competes, like I could do whatever I wanted, but you just... I didn't trust the person I worked with to not be vindictive, so I just was like, I'm just going to use my marriage.Clare Solly 26:42  You have to do what's best for you. But honestly, the best policy is just saying, you know, walk in, "I'm so sorry, I found XYZ. I found another job, I'm getting married, I'm moving," whatever it is. Keep it short. "I would like to put in my two weeks for you, if you'll accept that." You can say something bullshitty like, "I've enjoyed working here," or something that is sort of true, "I've learned a lot working here." You don't have to tell them why you're leaving, like, "Hey, you're a bullshit boss." Like, you don't have to tell people that. No, if you want to burn the bridge, you take those matches, baby, and you burn, but it's best to get in, get out, I think.Clare Solly 27:20  I think so, and also, as much as you want to tell if somebody is worth... like, "Oh my god, this person's the most abusive person," unless they want the criticism, they're not going to listen to you. Yeah, you know, so I just think that some lessons they have to learn on their own. But I also just think that I was raised by people and grandparents who worked for their companies forever, all the decades, retired, started the job and retired with the job. And so I was raised with these people like, you do the best, you do better than they're asking, right? And the reality is that in today's world, that is actually very different. They just stop paying you for what they were paying you, and you're just doing more, and not all bosses are aware that you're actually giving above and beyond. You have a family member who just retired, and they had to hire three people to replace him, but were they paying him three people's jobs worth? No, they were just working him to the ground. And so I think we do need to say... like, I'm not saying that all companies are evil, but a company will replace you. The thing that I learned early on when I ran that jewelry store is everybody's replaceable, even your best salesperson. And that's terrible, and that's awful, and I will remember all the personalities, but the truth is that a lot of us are being replaced by AI.Clare Solly 28:42  Or not even that we're being replaced by, people you and I are of the age where companies are reskilling and they're replacing people with newer skills, whether fresh out of college or fresh out of a program, right, rather than somebody who's been there with a longer tenure. Lesley Logan 29:00  Yeah.Clare Solly 29:00  And it's not necessarily the age thing; it's like what you know and what you're able to do. Lesley Logan 29:04  Well, and also, even for those who are going to start your own thing, when you become a business owner, you start to realize, like, "What can I pay for this role?" So you might... we have lost some people on the team. We're actually, I'm really proud of us, we're really good at weeding people out in the interview process. We keep our team members for a long time, but we've been around for a long time. Like, this business I've been running, I've been running it by myself starting in 2016 full-time, right? Yeah. And then my first hires were in 2016. Brad came on full-time, and we started hiring more. We had about six people in 2020, now we're more like over 20, but we lost three people due to life situations at the same time. One went on maternity leave forever, one was moving and needed to be paid more for the same job. And it's like, but the role is this pay, like, that's the budget, and that's the role.Clare Solly 29:54  You can tell them that too. You can say, "Hey, I got this job in another company and it pays more." Yeah, I'm welcome, you know.Lesley Logan 30:00  And we will take all of them back in a heartbeat, but also as a business owner, sometimes I can love someone so much, and I have to let them grow somewhere else because where my budget is for that role that they're doing isn't what they are wanting or feel they deserve, right? And that's not personal, and that's the hard thing.Clare Solly 30:22  Yeah, yeah. And also, like, if you're leaving a job because you got more money, you don't have to open that door for them. You just say, "I'm getting more money." Again, just the facts, minimal details, and just the facts.Lesley Logan 30:37  I'm having a life change, those are changes in my life, whatever, my life needs, whatever, you don't owe them more information than they actually need. You just, you really, really don't.Clare Solly 30:47  It's literally like, "Hey Lesley, I loved working on the Be It Pod. I'm so sorry, I've got a job that is willing to pay me more to do podcasts, and I'm excited about it." Lesley Logan 30:57  Yeah. And it would suck so much. And, you know, we can talk another time of how our team always prepares for anybody to be sick for any amount of time because we have to keep going. Like, you know, and I want to honor people's mental health days and things like that, so we have like a lot of redundancy so we can make sure that we can be there for people, but also so people can go and someone can take their place. And it would suck, and I think of them so fondly, and all that stuff.Lesley Logan 31:21  Okay, what if your exit is not your own, like you're fired or the company closed? Like, what happens if the exit happened to you? Clare Solly 31:30  Oh, definitely, definitely. Lesley Logan 31:31  Everything happens for you, but let's be real, like, it happened to you. Clare Solly 31:35  Definitely throw as many things as you can, break as many things on your way out, you know, stab tires. No, don't do any of that. Be as graceful as possible, right? I think one of the best, it hurts, right? It is an ego thing, and it is an ego stab in your heart, and you just have to go. just keep a brave face while you're in front of colleagues, etc., and be as polite as possible because it is a small world. I do not care who you are. I do not care what job you're in. Somebody knows somebody who knows somebody's sister, who knows who's married to somebody who knows you in the next company you go to. It is a small world.Lesley Logan 32:18  Yes.Clare Solly 32:18  Or it'll get back to you in some weird way, 20 years in the future. We are in a social media-heavy world where everybody knows everything. And I'm not saying you have to be happy about it. I am just saying don't go crazy, just try to hold everything in. And you might,in the back of your mind now, because I generally kind of knew when either I was unhappy or my company was unhappy with me, and I knew, because I've been fired, I'm going to say I've been fired four times. You know, once was like a redundancy, once was because the manager hated me, and I can't remember the other two times, but I've been fired a decent amount, and it hurts every time. And no matter how prepared for it you are, you're never prepared for it. So just kind of pick up on the clues in the background, and just don't sit there every day going, "Oh, I'm going to get fired," but maybe start, you know, hit the rewind button, listen to the beginning of this podcast, this episode, and kind of prepare, and then be as graceful as possible. Get your things together as quickly as possible. Don't talk to anyone that still works for the company. Lesley Logan 33:28  Yeah I agree. Clare Solly 33:29  Even if you have a BFF that works for the company, like, especially don't put anything in writing, don't blast anybody, because a lot of times if you are being let go, they're giving you some sort of package, hopefully.Lesley Logan 33:42  Yeah, I would hope so. And I think, even if they don't, even if they're terrible, even for the worst, I just want to reiterate, like, you might end up somewhere, even two jobs from now, where there's someone else who worked there. It just happens, and you don't want your worst day to be the thing that people remember about you when they see you next time, or when someone does ask. Like, sometimes people do call your references in your past jobs, sometimes they call your past jobs, and you don't want the tone of voice to change. So I think... but that's why you go to these new rage stations, and then you break things.Clare Solly 34:27  Definitely go to a rage station.Lesley Logan 34:28  So, okay, so don't burn the bridges, that's good. Go to a rage place, yay! But, like.Clare Solly 34:34  Have a safe friend to talk to, like, that doesn't work at your company.Lesley Logan 34:39  This is good advice for everything. Have someone to talk to about everybody who doesn't know the people involved.Clare Solly 34:45  You know, and maybe that's somebody you pay, maybe that's a therapist, maybe that's a safe space. I would sort of stay away from telling your mom or your dad, or close family, because family always has opinions on these kind of things.Lesley Logan 34:58  Until you're ready. I do think that there are certain things... you kind of have to get your wits about you before you tell the people. It depends on how your relationship is with them, but if they're opinionated, and you often feel like you're constantly letting them know, "I'm not a child anymore." You know, it's the same as a breakup. I don't tell people until I'm like, you have to heal from things before you talk about it sometimes.Clare Solly 35:18  So you're human, and we all try things, and we fail things, and failures are hard, and you don't need somebody poking at your failures or asking you. Like, my least favorite thing is when a relationship ends, people are like, "And when are you going to date?"Lesley Logan 35:35  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's like, "I just got fired. Okay, so is your resume together?" But I will say a tip: maybe have a little thing in your calendar, like every six months, that you just update your resume. Clare Solly 35:47  Yeah. I get mine updated, so (inaudible).Lesley Logan 35:50  Yeah, so it's ready to go, because you just never know these days. You never, you never know, like, people think that the companies will be around forever, and they're not. So I think that that's a really, I think also I just want to highlight what you're saying, it's like, I think you need to grieve a little bit.Clare Solly 36:02  Yeah.Lesley Logan 36:03  Because maybe you had ideas about what that job could be or what it was going to let you do. I do think a little grieving process is important.Clare Solly 36:11  Well, and no matter if you are let go, if you are given severance, or if you are choosing to leave a job, I highly recommend making sure you give yourself space. Make sure you take a week off between jobs, take a couple of weeks, make sure you can, or try your best to afford that. But before you start running again in any capacity, you have to decompress. We take vacations for ourselves from the jobs that we're currently in; we need to do that as well when we are doing anything involved with work.Lesley Logan 36:48  I love this idea, so it's like, call the unemployment office first thing, yeah, call your therapist, and then take a beat, just a beat.Clare Solly 36:57  Take a beat,Lesley Logan 36:58  Yeah, maybe, so hopefully, usually they fire you on a Friday, so hopefully you can take the weekend, like use some credit card points, get a hotel.Clare Solly 37:05  Yeah.Lesley Logan 37:06  You know.Clare Solly 37:06  I mean, I've rage-updated my resume before, and it never works that well, and I have to redo it all.Lesley Logan 37:11  Okay, so don't, so you're saying go grieve first, then resume later.Clare Solly 37:15  Yeah, yeah. I mean, still check in with the unemployment office, and still check in with like your therapist, and I would check in with your bank account and make sure that you're good there.Lesley Logan 37:24  Yeah, yeah, I agree. I think that, you know... but I do think you're allowed to be upset, you're allowed to be sad, you're allowed to be frustrated, you're allowed to be like, "The reason this happened is because of them."Clare Solly 37:35  Yeah.Lesley Logan 37:35  But also, depending on where you live in the states—I don't know how it works in the rest of the world—but I'm of the management style that you kind of are quitting on me before I fire you. I'm giving you talks, and those talks... at least in California, I had to give you written notices, and these are the dates you've improved these things by, so if you're around number two or three, they're probably not happy with you. So you can plan for that, but if you can't, it is out of your control, and it happens sooner than you thought. I do think grief and taking a pause is really nice.Clare Solly 38:12  Yeah, and I think, too, to some extent, when you were saying that, it just kind of came to my head, like, maybe just when you're in a thoughtful moment, and you can handle that thought, just write yourself just like a little exit plan in your notes app in your phone or something like that. So that... we have an emergency strategy if your house is on fire, right? You know where the exits are. Maybe you just give yourself that when you're in a good space. You know, what are my steps that I need to take? Who are my emergency contacts? Where am I in the level-set of money and my trajectory, and all that?Lesley Logan 38:49  I also think, even if it was your dream job, I would sit down and journal. I would write down all the things that you hated about it, and all the things you loved about it, right? This is something we do all the time. Like, when people are like, "I need to get a scheduling tool," I'm like, "Write down all the things you want it to do, like, what are your dream things?" Same as if you're going to date someone where they have to have these qualities. I would say take a moment to think about what is the stuff that you loved about that job, and then what are the things that you fucking hated, even as a dream job. There are always things that are irritating, like working for anybody is irritating, so it has irritating moments. So I would write that down, because that way, when you are updating your resume, you're updating it with the ideas of the qualities you want to enhance and highlight, and you're looking for the jobs that have the keywords that are in the love section, and you are a little bit more aware of the things where you're like, "I don't do well in these spaces." Yeah, if you're not a team player, then a job that is like, "You're going to be working on this team, and it's integral that you work with the team," you can go, "Oh, I need a more solo job." It's okay.Clare Solly 39:47  Yeah. And then also, instead of trying to... because the instinct is to pick at yourself and go, "What did I do wrong? What was wrong with me?" Right? We do that in any kind of relationship, whether it is a work relationship or a personal relationship. We focus it back on ourselves, and sometimes it's not you. I mean, sometimes it is, but sometimes it's just not what you're capable of, or not the skills that you have, or not the education you have. So when you start taking yourself apart, turn it back positively. And maybe instead of sitting there... we all get to mourn, right? We all get to mourn, we all get to hurt. But instead of sitting there and picking apart yourself and panicking about not having a job, go on YouTube and look up some skill videos. Yeah, go to university websites and take a look at courses.Lesley Logan 40:46  Universities give courses for free.Clare Solly 40:47  Yeah, and if you find yourself sort of like rage-scrolling through LinkedIn or something like that, looking at your colleagues or looking at people that have similar jobs to you, look at their resumes and go, "What are the skills they have? What can I add to my resume that makes me more excitable as a hire? What am I missing?" and just kind of re-level set yourself.Lesley Logan 41:07  Yeah.Clare Solly 41:08  Instead of going internal, look to the external and see how you can grow, and be it till you see it.Lesley Logan 41:15  I love that. Oh my god, we could talk forever on this topic because I feel like there's just so much to say, but I do feel like that's some great, helpful stuff because being it till you see it often isn't staying where you are, it's acting like the person you want to be when you're there, and that can mean building an exit strategy, or it could mean letting go of the place that you're at. So I love this, Clare. We're going to take a brief break, and then we're going to find out where people can find you, follow you, connect with you, and get your Be It Action Items. Lesley Logan 41:44  Okay, Clare, where do you hang out these days?Clare Solly 41:48  I am still on the Instagram as a bookstagrammer. You can find me at @YouWontBeSolly on the Instagram and the TikTok, although I'm slow to post these days. You can find me and my books at www.claresolly.com Clare with no I, and there will be more news in a couple of years once I get that PhD rolling and going.Lesley Logan 42:08  I know. I'll have to have you back on for that. "How did you 'be it till you see it' to call yourself a doctor?"Clare Solly 42:13  I know, I'm so excited I'm here. Schedule me now for that. Set your alarms. And I would say for this topic, my Be It Action Items.Lesley Logan 42:21  Bold, executable, intrinsic or targeted steps people can take to be it until they see it. I mean, I know you know the thing, but I gotta say it, you know, for the new listeners.Clare Solly 42:29  I love it. New listeners.Lesley Logan 42:30  New listeners, this is the section where they tell us your action items.Clare Solly 42:35  I mean, I think take a look at yourself, where you are, look at where you can improve, and create an exit strategy if you are ready to leave, just so you have it. In a sane moment, you're ready to go when you have that crazy moment later.Lesley Logan 42:53  Yeah, yeah, I think it's important. Why not, while you don't need to do it, think about what to do, because it is really hard to do it when you, unless you're like me, and you're clear-headed when the shoe drops.Clare Solly 43:09  Yeah.Lesley Logan 43:10  And some people are, but I think a lot of people need a little more time to wrap their heads around it, and that's okay.Clare Solly 43:15  We think about retirement, we think about when our job is ending towards the end of our life, we think about again when you're in a fire situation, when you're in an earthquake situation, like, we practice those things. And even though it feels a little bit like dun dun dun to think about the ending of your job, if you prepare for it now, you'll be ready for it when it happens. If it happens, maybe it won't, maybe you'll be forever in your job and happy.Lesley Logan 43:41  Yeah, well, I hope so. Okay, thanks so much, Clare, for being you and bringing up this topic. I think this is so fun. You guys, make sure you tell us which parts of this you loved, and I know it's more conversational if you're used to listening to this, but I think that that's also even more fun. So I'm kind of into that as well. And share this with a friend who needs to hear it, share with a friend who's like constantly complaining about their job—like, you don't have to be their coach for them. Guess what, you could just go, "Wow, you should listen to the Be It Till You See It podcast, yeah, with Lesley and Clare on this topic." And until next time, Be It Till You See It. Lesley Logan 44:11  That's all I got for this episode of the Be It Till You See It Podcast. One thing that would help both myself and future listeners is for you to rate the show and leave a review and follow or subscribe for free wherever you listen to your podcast. Also, make sure to introduce yourself over at the Be It Pod on Instagram. I would love to know more about you. Share this episode with whoever you think needs to hear it. Help us and others Be It Till You See It. Have an awesome day. Be It Till You See It is a production of The Bloom Podcast Network. If you want to leave us a message or a question that we might read on another episode, you can text us at +1-310-905-5534 or send a DM on Instagram @BeItPod.Brad Crowell 44:53  It's written, filmed, and recorded by your host, Lesley Logan, and me, Brad Crowell.Lesley Logan 44:58  It is transcribed, produced and edited by the epic team at Disenyo.co.Brad Crowell 45:03  Our theme music is by Ali at Apex Production Music and our branding by designer and artist, Gianfranco Cioffi.Lesley Logan 45:10  Special thanks to Melissa Solomon for creating our visuals.Brad Crowell 45:13  Also to Angelina Herico for adding all of our content to our website. And finally to Meridith Root for keeping us all on point and on time.Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Ženy XYZ #47: Feministický podcast, ve kterém Silvie Lauder, Markéta Plíhalová a Clara Zanga řeší důležitá aktuální témata.Premiér Andrej Babiš oznámil zásadní změny ve struktuře lidskoprávních odborů. Od července je plánuje přesunout u Úřadu vlády pod jednotlivá ministerstva. Týká se to také odboru rovnosti žen a mužů, který měl původně zamířit pod ministerstvo práce vedené konzervativním zástupcem hnutí ANO Alešem Juchelkou. Nakonec to vypadá na přesun pod ministerstvo spravedlnosti. Odborníky a odbornice, kteří sedí v Radě vlády pro rovnost žen a mužů to ale příliš neuklidnilo a dál trvají na svých rezignacích. Proč k přesunům dochází? Jaký dopad mohou mít na genderové i jiné lidskoprávní otázky? Bude výsledkem skutečně větší efektivita, jak premiér slibuje? Ve feministickém podcastu Ženy XYZ o tom diskutovaly redaktorky Silvie Lauder, Markéta Plíhalová a Clara Zanga.

The new AIEWF website is live! CFPs close in 2 days and we will run our first New Engineer Orientation this weekend, get your tickets booked ASAP as they -will- sell out. Take the AI Engineering Survey and get >$2k in credits and free AIE WF tickets!One of the central tensions in the agents industry is that even while there are major decacorn agent labs like Sierra, Decagon, Notion and Cursor being built up, it is also true that it has never been easier to DIY agents, with a plethora of agent frameworks like LangGraph and Pydantic and Flue, and managed agents from Anthropic and Gemini and Amazon. There has been a wave of companies building their own background agents from Shopify to Stripe to Paradigm to Razorpay, and even Cognition's friends Ramp have built their own coding agent with other friend Modal.You'd think Cognition might feel a bit threatened, but they're not - even after all this, they were way oversubscribed for the $1B Series D they just announced:Walden Yan, coiner of context engineering and Chief Product Officer/Cofounder of Cognition, invited OpenInspect's Cole Murray to talk about why the Devin is in the Details.Full conversation live on the pod today: In retrospect, async agents were the most AGI pilled bet you could make in 2024 - the models weren't good enough yet to vibecode, and people didn't trust AI enough to let it rip, nobody (including early Cognition) was sure about the form factors. Now it is obvious:* The first wave of AI coding tools made the developer faster but remain heavily in the loop. Copilor and Cursor's tab autocomplete are prime examples However, the workflow was still heavily centered around and bottlenecked by the developer's local workflow: a developer in an IDE, watching the model, accepting or rejecting changes, and pushing code one interaction at a time.* The second wave was local agents: Claude Code, Windsurf, Cursor's agents pane: first one and increasingly many terminals all running concurrently.* The current Age of Async Agents points to a different future focused more on agent orchestration which drives end-to-end development.According to previous guest Steve Yegge, there are finer-grained 8 levels to agent adoption, but we have collapsed it into three.As Cursor's Michael Truell put it in The third era of AI software development:Cursor is no longer primarily about writing code. It is about helping developers build the factory that creates their software. This factory is made up of fleets of agents that they interact with as teammates: providing initial direction, equipping them with the tools to work independently, and reviewing their work.The agent should not sit solely inside the developer's flow. It should be setup to work in the background so that you can give it a task, a repo, a machine, a shell, a browser, tests, memory, and review loops to go do the work somewhere else.In less than a year, the sentiment has shifted from avoiding multi-agent systems:to suggesting approaches that actually work:From coining “context engineering” to building the infrastructure behind Devin's 7x PR growth and jump from 16% to 80% of commits across Cognition repos, Walden Yan has had a front-row seat to the background-agent shift. In this episode, Cognition co-founder and CPO Walden Yan joins swyx alongside Cole Murray, creator of OpenInspect, to unpack why everyone is building their own Devin, what changed after the December 2025 model inflection, and why “spec to pull request” is now becoming a real production workflow.We go deep on the architecture of background agents: harness-in-the-box vs out-of-the-box, why Devin separates the “brain” from the machine, why repo setup is still one of the hardest problems, why Docker is not always enough, and how full VMs, snapshots, scoped secrets, GitHub bots, Slack integrations, and video-based testing all fit together. Walden and Cole also dig into memory, MCP limitations, multi-agent orchestration, AI code review, SRE auto-triage, PMs shipping code from Slack, Windsurf 2.0, hybrid frontier/sub-frontier systems, and the real failure mode of uncontrolled vibe coding: your codebase regressing to your worst engineer.And as agents eat software… and software eats the world… you can draw the conclusion on what is next:We discuss:* Why the engineering world is waking up to background agents and cloud agents* The December 2025 model inflection that made spec-to-PR workflows practical* Devin's 7x merged PR growth and rise from 16% to 80% of commits* Why Cole built OpenInspect as an open-source background-agent system* The economics of $20/seat agent products and why monetization is tricky* What Cognition actually sells beyond Devin: infra, onboarding, integrations, and adoption* Harness in the box vs out of the box, and why architecture matters* Why Devin separates the brain from the machine for security and permissions* Repo setup, scoped secrets, Docker Compose, and agent-ready dev environments* Why full VMs matter when agents need to run real applications and test them* Android, macOS, Windows, nested virtualization, and machine-specific agent work* Why testing is much harder than “computer use”* Screenshots, video verification, and the “I know it works” merge moment* GitHub UX, Devin Review, AI reviewers, and agents responding to PR comments* Why MCP alone is not enough for first-class Slack and enterprise integrations* Memory, Knowledge, skills, Claude.md, and why retrieval is still unsolved* Devin's auto-generated memories and the challenge of memory pruning* Always-on agents as permanent PMs for issues, tickets, and product areas* Sub-agents, meta-Devin management, and what multi-agent systems actually add* Why pure auto-merge vibe coding breaks down after about two weeks* AI code smells, lint rules, reward hacking, and Semgrep for agent-written code* GitAI, inline context, and preserving the “why” behind code changes* Local testing, mock servers, older codebases, and preparing companies for agents* Windsurf 2.0 and the handoff between local foreground agents and cloud background agents* SRE auto-triage, support workflows, and agents as first responders* PMs, marketing, and non-engineers creating pull requests from Slack* AI agent budgets, $1k-$5k per engineer spend, and hybrid frontier/sub-frontier systems* The rise of autonomous coding factories and who Cognition is hiringWalden Yan* X: https://x.com/walden_yan* LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/waldenyan/Cole Murray* X: https://x.com/_colemurray* LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/colemurray/* OpenInspect / Background Agents: https://github.com/ColeMurray/background-agentsTimestamps00:00:00 Introduction00:00:43 Why Everyone Is Building Their Own Devin00:01:57 Devin's 2025 Ramp: 7x PR Growth and 80% of Commits00:03:49 OpenInspect and the Rise of Open-Source Background Agents00:07:59 What Cognition Actually Sells Beyond Devin00:09:56 Background Agent Architecture: Harness In vs Out of the Box00:12:08 Separating the Brain from the Machine00:14:07 Repo Setup, Secrets, Docker, and Full VMs00:19:13 Why Testing Is Harder Than Computer Use00:22:40 Video Verification and the “I Know It Works” Merge Moment00:23:19 GitHub UX, Devin Review, and AI Code Review00:25:42 MCP, Slack, and Enterprise Agent Integrations00:28:59 Memory, Knowledge, and Always-On Agents00:36:16 Sub-Agents, Multi-Agent Orchestration, and Meta-Devin00:43:55 Vibe Coding, Auto-Merge, and Codebase Decay00:48:38 Agent Infra, VPCs, Cloud Providers, and Fast VM Restore00:52:25 AI Code Smells, Reward Hacking, and Code Review Systems00:56:10 Making Codebases Agent-Ready00:58:30 Windsurf 2.0 and the Local-to-Cloud Agent Handoff01:01:15 SRE Auto-Triage, PMs Shipping Code, and Agent Use Cases01:04:32 Agent Budgets, Hybrid Models, and Autonomous Coding Factories01:06:51 Hiring at Cognition and OpenInspect Consulting01:07:45 OutroTranscriptIntroduction: Walden Yan, Cole Murray, and Context EngineeringSwyx [00:00:00]: All right, we're in the studio with Walden Yan, co-founder of Cognition, CPO.Walden [00:00:08]: Happy to be here.Swyx [00:00:09]: Which is a cool title. And coiner of context engineering.Walden [00:00:15]: Although I think there are many people who'd used the terms in various ways beforehand, but I did find that people, both internally and externally, enjoyed the upgrade from prompt engineering or model wrapping into maybe a more thoughtful way to build agents.Swyx [00:00:33]: For those who haven't caught up on that, I have on screen the Don't Build Multi-Agents post, which you should go read on and we might refer to, and Cole Murray, who created OpenInspect.Cole [00:00:43]: Great to be here.Swyx [00:00:43]: So let's talk about it. Everyone is building their own Devins. What's going on?The December Shift: From Handholding Models to Autonomous PRsCole [00:00:51]: So I think the engineering world is waking up to this idea of background agents, cloud agents, whatever you'd like to call it. And I think we saw a shift around the December timeframe of 2025, where the models Opus 4.5 and GPT 5.2, they reached a capability where we moved away from handholding the model and being able to actually more or less autonomously drive the model. And what I mean by that is that we could pretty much go from a specification to a completed pull request, assuming the spec was good enough, with very little friction. And that paradigm alone, I think, changed a lot of how we interact with agents, and opened this world where background agents became more practical.Swyx [00:01:41]: I think for Cole, everyone experienced this in December, but I feel like there was just this increasing ramp, right? There was this moment which was, I think, Sonnet 3.7, where, You guys rewrote Devin in one night or something. So describe 2025 or how it felt from your side.Walden [00:02:01]: In retrospect, we always thought it was ramping up, but then even now, over the last three, four months from today, it's been ramping up even faster. So it's almost funny to be talking about how, big of a leap Sonnet 3.7 was, and honestly, a lot of it was stripping out parts of Devin that were no longer needed with that jump in of intelligence. But I also just think that a lot of the recent leaps, especially, you look at, models like Opus and the latest GPT models, they are reaching levels of autonomy where people are actually finding that they actually can just be hands-off. And people who were once debating, “Oh, do I need to be in the weeds with my model in the IDE? Can I just completely move it off into the cloud?” That's a more serious conversation, and we've seen that in all of our growth charts. Internally there's this funny graph where our usage has, of PRs, our merged PRs, has grown 7X since I forget what it was called.Swyx [00:02:57]: I think Dev, maybe tweeted that. Yes.Walden [00:03:01]: it grew like 7X over, the last, I think it was, two months, three months, something like that. And then you see our engineering headcount growth. It's, gone up by, 10% or something.Swyx [00:03:11]: We were, we were afraid To release this. So this is Devin commit percentages on all Devin repos, was 16% in January and now 80% in March.Walden [00:03:25]: It's a big shift right now. And so it makes sense that a lot of people are now thinking about, buying Devin, but also maybe, trying to build their own and there's Lots of I have a lot of fun building Devin, so I can see why other people would want to build their own cloud agents as well. Matt, well, maybe it's good to hear, what initially inspired you to try to build OpenInspect?OpenInspect: Ramp, Cloud Agents, and Open SourceCole [00:03:49]: OpenInspect came about, through primarily my clients observing how they were using tools like Claude, OpenAI's Codex at the time, and seeing some of the friction that they were having with it. Primarily the Claude was being used through Slack, and a big issue they ran into was that the sessions that were launched were specific to whoever called it via Slack. And so if a PM was the one who invoked the session and they would then go to pass context to engineering can't see the session. And that in itself was a deal breaker because the PM, “Hey, engineering, can you jump in?” But there's nothing to jump in on unless they're copy-pasting out or the single response that came back. And so seeing some of these problems, I had built a similar architecture internally, just to experiment with, test out different ideas as this trend of moving off of localhost was starting to become, And as Ramp released their blog post, I had a lot of the pieces for this already in place, and just thought it would be funny to, see what Claude could do just purely from the blog post. And on my X account, there's actually a thread of where I live tweeted, going through thisCole [00:05:14]: comparing GPT and Claude as both of them are going through it.Swyx [00:05:17]: On the announcement thing or something else?Cole [00:05:19]: right after it got released. We can put it in the show notes. Yeah, it was helpful that I had already knew how to verify the system. I knew what I was looking for. I think Ramp did a great job of really illustrating, the technical aspects of how to build something. It was much more than just like, “Hey, we built a great system.” It was, “And here's how you can build it too.” And so, I resonated a lot with that, just with the problems that I was already seeing, and I thought that, looking around, I didn't really see anything in the open source community that, met this type of system. I think there's a lot that run, in localhost like Superset, Conductor, and many others.But nothing that was actually running in the cloud. And so, I built it, and I thought it was interesting to just open source it and allow anyone to then have a foundation that they can mix and match on top of.The Business of Background Agents: Open Source vs. DevinSwyx [00:06:16]: So literally after Devin was launched was, there was OpenDevin Which became All Hands. I don't know if you tried that orWalden [00:06:22]: I was going to say, one of the things that interested me a lot with OpenInspect was, you didn't try to go make it then something you monetize. There are a lot of, I think, these open source projects would then go and really try to, raise VSwyx [00:06:36]: That's why no OpenDevin. Yeah.Walden [00:06:38]: yeah, and how did you think about that? I thought that was very interesting.Cole [00:06:44]: I thought, and just what I had seen across my clients, was that having a background agent system is going to become a critical infrastructure within their company. And so because of that, I think that I wanted to open source it so that they could fork it and put in whatever customization they wanted. To that question though, I get asked all, “Oh, are you going to raise? Are you going to turn this into a service?”Walden [00:07:08]: I'm sure you've gotten offers.Cole [00:07:09]: but primarily I don't want to do that for a few reasons. One, I think that I don't want to compete for, $20 a seat. I think that is just a really difficult business. I think it's very easy to copy the main pieces of it. Again, I built this fairly quickly. And I think because you are not owning, I guess, the entire stack, it's hard to monetize. You have money being made at the sandbox layer with Daytona, E2b, many other players. You have money being made at the model layer. And you sit in this weird in-between gray area where what are you actually selling? You're selling, I guess, the infrastructure. You're selling, the integrations maybe.Swyx [00:07:55]: let's ask the guy. What are you What are you selling?Walden [00:07:59]: Well, yeah, there's multiple layers to this in practice, and actually it's funny you mentioned the infrastructure, ‘cause when we got started building Devin as well, we had to go figure out how to make the infrastructure as well because,Swyx [00:08:10]: You had to build this two years before everyone else,?Swyx [00:08:15]: Including, the model sideWalden [00:08:17]: It was not, it was not very polished at the start, when we just built it off of raw VMs from cloud providers like EC2, the boot up time was so slow, I think, And especially then, turning off the machines, saving them, and then to be able to bring them back up again when the, when you want Devin to wake up again later. It would just be out cold for like 10 minutes because that's just how long these systems took. They were not built for this repeated down and up usage. And so we actually had to go do all of that. And as a result now, one thing we offer when we go and sell Devin to people is, you don't have to worry about all the compute side of things. We'll make it work. We'll make it work in your cloud if you want it to. But aside from the product, and I want to go into the agents and the tuning of the intelligence part later, but I think a big part of what we do at Cognition as well is to just make sure that your company learns and uses and adopts these coding agents. ‘Cause I think for especially the largest enterprises in the world, you find that there is a lot of people who want to move over to using AI for their day-to-day workloads. But because of the way projects are planned, because, not everyone is literate in using AI in these ways, having a team of engineers who can actually go in and onboard you, set up all the integrations you need, the automations you need to really get to that level of, leverage with AI, is super helpful. And so We do that. We show thought partners to the customers that we work with as well.Swyx [00:09:56]: So let's talk about, architectural stuff. I think that's always, that is something that was the topic of conversation between the two of you. Is this, the mental model that you want to start with or something else? I'll just leave the floor open to you guys.Agent Architecture: Harness in the Box vs. Out of the BoxCole [00:10:11]: I think, maybe we can start here as just a general what are the pieces of a background agent system. And then maybe we can go into some of the nuances of, Decisions that you can make.Swyx [00:10:22]: But I guess I also Like, what, maybe what Walden is saying is the agent is like in this open code box, I guess. Right? This is infra, and then there's, that's the agent. And you had this discussion about whether you put the agent in here or in Out externally. Can you tease that out?Cole [00:10:39]: In a background agent systems, you have a decision to make of where the agent is actually going to run. This is typically described as the harness in the box or out of the box. With running the agent in the box, you're making some trade-offs by doing that. The negative trade-off you're making is primarily security. Because the agent is running in that box, unless you otherwise design it, all of your secrets need to go into that box as well. And given the nature of AI, it can be unpredictable, and you could very easily end up accidentally exfilling your secrets, or other unintended behavior. Now, the out of the box is the idea that we are going to have the actual agent running not directly in the sandbox, and we will have, quote-unquote, the brain of the agent running in some type of worker, control plane. That sandbox then is going to serve as the hands where the brain is basically operating and making tool calls into that environment to manipulate it. I guess other trade-off that you're making between the two systems is that, in my opinion, running it out of the box is much more complex because, you have state that has to be managed, whereas if you're running it in the box, all of the state of that agent is actually in the box, and yes, it's you could persist it elsewhere, but it's all localized and you have less concerns to worry about.Walden [00:12:08]: I think a lot of that, what you mentioned, is why we actually from the start built Devin to what we called separate the brain from the machine. The other thing that this allows you to do is reuse any existing infrastructure you have for dev boxes Perhaps. And so you don't have to worry as much about making a new type of dev box that has all the dependencies the brain needs, as you mentioned, the secrets the brain needs as well. One thing that we've seen some customers run into is, you have a GitHub app and you want Devin, your agent, whatever, be able to interact with GitHub through this application, but then you have different users with different actual permissions. If they are all interacting through the same GitHub app and there's no actual, separation between the system that decides, what it does and the actual secrets on the machine, then you run into an issue where, okay, it's hard to do the separation. But in practice, with Devin, it's much easier because we just say whatever you put on the machine, that is, the scope of basically what the user is free to do, what the agent is free to do. So only put the most scoped secrets on that machine, and then the brain is fully not accessible from the machine. So you don't have to worry about messing with the, any of the most secure parts of the brain if the user is free to do whatever they want with the machine.Swyx [00:13:31]: I was going to just bring, I have this, chart from OpenAI, where I don't know if this is, in the box, out of the box. That is something that they do use to describe it. And then also recently Anthropic did, managed agentsSwyx [00:13:44]: Which is, this is their thing. I don't know. It's all, it's all variations of the same pattern, right?Cole [00:13:49]: So this would be out of the box.Swyx [00:13:51]: Which, is preferable for them because it's less work?Cole [00:13:56]: I would say it's more work.Swyx [00:13:58]: It's more work?Cole [00:13:58]: But it, in my opinion, it is the better architecture of the two. It's just, you're taking on a bit of complexity by doing that.Repo Setup, Docker, and VM-Based Development EnvironmentsWalden [00:14:07]: One thing I've not seen a lot of other players do well is how do you manage what's actually on the box? And this can be complex for many reasons. Let's say you have a big repository that's changing and updating a lot with changing dependencies. How do you make sure that the working environment of the agent actually stays up to date, has all the credentials it needs to, let's say, run the app and test it, and all the things you want your autonomousSwyx [00:14:34]: So a repo setup.Walden [00:14:35]: Exactly. So in, internally At Cognition, we call this repo setup.Cole [00:14:39]: The hardest part ofWalden [00:14:40]: It's been a perennial problem since the start of the company, of how do we help people get this set up? Because not everyone just has, working cloud environments working out of the box. And do you find this to be a common problem withSwyx [00:14:53]: How do you solve it?Walden [00:14:53]: Your clients?Cole [00:14:54]: This is a very common problem, and through my consulting, this is a lot of what I help teams do. A lot of teams don't really have great developer environment setups, if any. A lot of the times it's, “Go talk to Bob and get the secrets,” and that obviously doesn't work when the agent needs to actually set this up. And so a lot of that, most teams are using Docker Compose or some type of microservices. And so for theSwyx [00:15:19]: Even in prod?Cole [00:15:20]: Not in prod. With the OpenInspect, you are using this primarily to interact, and make code changes. There is other use cases, but you can hook, whether through CLI, MCPs, other tools, you can then hook that into your production systems primarily for, SRE type use cases. But you are not, necessarily, trying to test your prod internal microservice through the system.Walden [00:15:48]: And you mentioned Docker Compose. I think one direction we saw some of our friends take early on was, using Docker containers as the level of abstraction for their models. There's lots of reasons, I think, why Docker containers are not great. One thing is, Docker container's not really a true security boundary, for one. But the other is, if you are running real applications, a lot of times those applications use Docker, and then you have to think about Docker in Docker, which is, really weird. And so I think part of, the really hard challenge of getting VMs to work, why did we do that? Well, it was because we realized that you actually needed, full VMs to be able to do these types of things. And especially nowadays where there's actually value in running the application and clicking around and sending you screen recordings of these things. The value just, keeps adding on top of that. But it is a decision I see people run into when they try to build their own systems, is, “Oh, do we, in addition to this, do we put the agent in the machine or out of the machine? Do we use Docker? Do we use something else?” What do you recommend people nowadays?Cole [00:16:57]: I think Docker is a good solution for maybe not running the agent, but running your infrastructure, because that is more or less the same setup your engineers are probably already using. If they're not, then I don't know what they're using. But they're probably already using Docker Compose.Swyx [00:17:14]: I've always had a small candle for web containers. I don't know if you guys have tried them before.Swyx [00:17:19]: To me, they were, supposed to be like Docker Light.Cole [00:17:22]: Is it?Swyx [00:17:22]: I don't know.Cole [00:17:22]: No, I haven't tried it. But yeah, I think any environment that you've set up that is a good experience for your developer naturally lends itself to being easy to set up for the agent. And once you figure out that local developer story, you've more or less solved the agent in a sandbox, environment setup. OpenInspect does have hooks as well, where you can, run a setup SH script that will pre-install everything. You can then pre-snapshot that build so it starts instantly, and then there is a second hook to actually then, restore the state of the sandbox when it comes back. And so you can already have all of those microservices running and basically get the same experience that you would on your machine within the sandbox.Testing Agents: Computer Use, Screenshots, and Real App WorkflowsWalden [00:18:08]: Another thing that we've been thinking a lot about is like Different VM service offerings. Have you had customers where they needed like macOS specific VMs or like Windows specificWalden [00:18:20]: VMs?Walden [00:18:22]: There are like many technologies in the world that only work on specific types of machines, right? If you're building a.NET application that has to run on Windows or like, maybe more commonly if you want to build iOS or macOS Does that workSwyx [00:18:32]: Does Commission supportSwyx [00:18:33]: Choices like that?Walden [00:18:35]: The fundamental architecture we do, because we do the separation, it does support, but the actual work in progress is happening right now on these. Another thing that we've actually recently added support now for, it's in beta, is doing Android development. To do that, we needed to support, I think, nested virtualization within our machines because the VM itself is like a, is a virtualized Firecracker instance, and then you had to then run another Android emulator inside. And there's like weird performance issues that like, it, which is why it's like still in beta. We have to think through these problems, but it unlocks a lot for anyone who wants to do Android development.Swyx [00:19:13]: I was trying to find like a reference video for the testing thing. I couldn't find it, but I think you worked on the testing, capability. Why call it testing and not like computer use or I don't know, it's, what's the general Category of problem?Walden [00:19:26]: I think that when people think about the ability of an AI to run your app and test it, I think they actually over-index on the computer use part of it because computer use in my mind is the literal, okay, you want what button you want to click. Can you emit the right coordinates to go click that button? I think testing is actually a really interesting likeWalden [00:19:48]: Problem-solving, challenge for these AIs because if you wanted to do arbitrary testing, imagine you make a change that spans the frontend and the backend, maybe, even some other like even more deeply nested service. To actually test that change, we have to reason through what-- how do you first run these applications to orchestrate with each other with the right version of the code? Then, okay, how do I trigger the feature or how do I make the thing actually happen? And this can get arbitrarily hard, maybe you have to be an admin. Maybe a certain thing has to be feature flagged on. Maybe, you have to like run two sessions and then send us a very specific word into one of them to trigger a specific behavior. And figuring out how do you do that requires a lot of code base context, requires, a lot of orchestration that we've specifically done. And in some cases, we found that you actually, no one frontier model can actually do this full end-to-end task itself.Walden [00:20:42]: We've seen cases where we actually had to orchestrate different frontier models together to solve this problem together. That is where we spend most of our time when we think about this testing problem, not so much the computer use part. Computer use for what it's worth has gotten a lot better with recent models and it's made that part of the job certainly easier.Swyx [00:20:58]: Especially with like even 4.7, that they released yesterday, apparently like way better in terms of the vision stuff, which is going to be encompassing computer use.Walden [00:21:08]: Having evals for all these as well is something that like takes a while to build up. And having the evals be right is tricky as well. Do you ever see like, clients who are building their own agents have to start standing up evals to make sure things don't regress?Swyx [00:21:25]: Not so much evals in the traditional sense, but specific to the testing part that has just gone in. I just added support for screenshots And in theory you can also do video. I need to put in a plugin to do that. But they do show up natively, and it was a very heavily requested feature, especially after Cursor's recording came out. I think that was very enlightening for everyone of like, “Oh, this is a very good feature to actually have.”, I think with Devin you guys have had this for a while.Swyx [00:21:57]: Oh, yeah. See how screenshots work. Yeah, I don't know if there's anything, super and not obvious. It's like once what feature to build, you can just prompt it and it Will mostly work.Walden [00:22:09]: I think to Walden's point, though, the computer use is a subset of the larger testing problem, and I think that's very specific to the code base that you're working and it's not something that, out of the box that you could just solve it. The-- you do need the code base context to actually know how to test it. And I think in the case of a background agent system, you fortunately do have that code base locally that what is changing and could then inspect it and use that to drive the model.Swyx [00:22:40]: For those who haven't seen it before, this is an example of how it works. You, after the PR is done, you click testing approved, and then it sends you back a video. What I really like is that it labels, It's very small here, but it actually labels what it's testing. And then it-- and then you actually see the cursor and everything. So I don't know, yeah, the engineering in this, just Whatever you want to show. ‘cause this is like, this is one of those like, oh, few of the AGI moments, right? ‘cause Once I look at this, I actually don't I wish I can just merge inside Of Slack instead of going to GitHub ‘cause I don't need to see the code. I know it works.Walden [00:23:19]: Maybe a new feature in Cursor. Yeah, the annotations at the bottom was also a big difference for me when I, when I added those.Swyx [00:23:27]: It's just like, what am I looking at? What are you trying to demonstrate?Walden [00:23:30]: Exactly. There's a surprisingly long tail of small details that ends up making a big difference for this end metric of like how fast do you actually merge the code in. One experience that we spent a lot of time tuning early on was what is the right experience on GitHub for these tools. Because I think, most tools out there when you build the agent, you'll think about, oh, it'll create the PR for you. We try to take that a step further and say, “Oh, what if we actually made sure you could interact Devin, with direct Devin directly on GitHub?” And so we made sure that you can comment on GitHub, and Devin would actually receive those comments and address them back. But there's actually quite a bit of tuning you have to do here because you can imagine that actually like-We recently have Devin Review, for example. Devin Review will post comments on his own PR And then Devin has to then goGitHub Workflows: Devin Review, Comments, and PR AutomationSwyx [00:24:23]: He answers his own comments, which is Really loopy. So like, yeah, I like that it just updates here that it's, that I have commented But usually it's just me saying like, “Hey, merged, fix any merge conflicts.”Walden [00:24:37]: The, so when Devin fixes his own comments, you might be scared that, oh, maybe I'll infinite loop. But we've put a lot of work into making sure it doesn't, both by making sure that the comments are high signal, but also that the agent is thoughtful about what comments it immediately goes and tries to fix, and what comments it's like, “Wait a second, I think you're wrong.” Actually, that's one of my favorite moments is when Devin tells me that I'm wrong, when I try to get it to do something different. But tuning that behavior, actually makes a big difference in terms of how useful the actual GitHub experience is.Cole [00:25:06]: I think to touch on that as well, I think having the AI reviewer integrated into the system is a critical part of this background system. OpenInspect does have that. It has a GitHub code reviewer that you can control the prompt. It does do comments as well. It doesn't do them automatically yet. The capability is there, but it's not fully used.Swyx [00:25:27]: So you have to ask for it?Cole [00:25:28]: you do, yeah. You can tag it on GitHub, and then whatever you named your, GitHub bot, it will then follow up on it. It will then, if you have merge conflicts or whatever you have asked it to resolve, it will then resolve it, but it doesn't do it automatically yet.Integrations: Slack, MCP, and First-Party Agent InterfacesWalden [00:25:42]: Well, I'm curious, what is, the most common thing that people end up requesting, that they still need on top of OpenInspect when you help them go implement it?Cole [00:25:52]: I think a lot of it comes down to actually integrating it into the company. It's one thing to have the background agent system set up, but if it isn't actually integrated into your larger ecosystem, it isn't that useful. It is useful to be able to kick off sessions, but what we really want to be able to do is hook it into all of our other systems, whether that is the production database with read-only credentials, the logs, a Confluence or internal knowledge-based system. I think that is where I see the huge leap for companies, and that can be a challenge for companies as well who are maybe not familiar with exactly how to approach it, especially if they're in environments that have more compliance type things where, access control can be pretty big and how do you deliberately think about these problems, I find to be, one of the problems that comes with a system like this.Walden [00:26:46]: The thing we found is So, MCPs, obviously it has been like this, really big explosion of, oh, you can go, integrate it with all these different things. But to actually get the integration right and the and get the right experience, oftentimes we found that we had to go build our own ad hoc things. I think Slack is a great example of this. You could give your agent a Slack MCP and okay, it can post messages back to you on Slack. But we actually use Devin like a coworker in Slack, and that's how it's been built from the ground up. But to do that, you actually need to, support webhooks that come back, right? And then Devin has to respond in a natural way and then hopefully don't spam your threads too much and annoy the people in your company. So you got to tune that experience just right. Especially when there's a lot of back and forths, we find that we actually have to go beyond the simple MCP integrations in these places.Swyx [00:27:39]: I just pulled up the MCP marketplace. I know this is a Fair amount of work. Is the answer to eventually take first party control of all the top MCPs? Is that theWalden [00:27:48]: I would love a world where you could have something that's more expressive than MCP. That, goes both ways, not just a set of tools, but a proper system that interacts back and lets it Have the right experience with all these interfaces.Swyx [00:28:03]: So there actually is sampling in the MCP spec, but nobody Uses it, right?Walden [00:28:07]: And so I think that's the other part is, actually we found that when the MCP spec starts to get too complicated, it starts to lose its original promise of Being like a simple one-step connect. Now then we have to go figure out how to support all these different variations of things and It starts to look a lot like just building the first party integrations in a lot of these cases now.Cole [00:28:29]: I think it matters, too, how critical it is to your company, right? If this is something that nearly every session is going through, it probably makes sense to own it so that you can make optimizations on top of it Versus just whatever is off the shelf.Swyx [00:28:43]: Awesome. Other than MCPs, what else, sorry, well, I don't know if that's Narrowing in too much on, integrations. But what else? What other elements of building OpenInspect or Devin that you guys really sink on?Memory and Knowledge: What Agents Should RememberCole [00:28:59]: I think, a problem that comes up very frequently is this idea of memories or knowledge base.Swyx [00:29:05]: Oh, boy. How do you solve it?Cole [00:29:08]: so not solved yet, is the short answer.Cole [00:29:11]: it's something, there's a open issue for it, someone asking about it.Swyx [00:29:16]: There's, I, D Wiki hasn't indexed anything about memory yet.Cole [00:29:20]: how I'm seeing it solved across my clients is primarily through skills. I find that skills can be a good gap within that or updating Claude MD, but I think memory as a whole is a pretty unsolved problem, and it is why I've been hesitant to add it. I think there is parts of memory and that can be addressed, but I think as a whole it's a very difficult retrieval problem.Swyx [00:29:44]: Oh my God. RAMP didn't write anything about memory? I see zero search results.Walden [00:29:50]: No. Memory can be quite tricky to get right because it's the retrieval, but also the generation of the memories that can be really tricky. You don't want it to just like Remember very specific details.Swyx [00:29:59]: Walk us through the Devin memory journey because I know there's been a journey.Walden [00:30:03]: the first version of memory that like stuck around for a while was A system we have called Knowledge. And the idea was we wanted it to pick up things over time and not need the user to be proactive about teaching Devin things. So, okay, any time you remind Devin, “Wait, no, that's not quite the way you're supposed to use Git”Like, we actually want Devin to say, “Hey, do you want me to actually just remember this for the future?” And for you to just basically quickly approve or reject and for it to build up over time. ‘Cause I find that, 95%, I think, or some crazy stat like that of the memories that Devin has are all through these auto-generated things. Very few people actually just want to sit down and write big docs on Here's how you're supposed to work with the technology, et cetera. The generation and the retrieval has been something that we've been trying to tune a lot over the years. Generation, you don't want it to remember something like, if you asked one time to like, “Oh, please open as a draft PR,” you don't want to be like, “Oh, everyone forever now should get their PRs as draft PRs.” But you do want some, conveyor. Maybe you want to say like, “Oh, Cole generally likes, things to be created as draft PRs.” Same with retrieval, if you have thousands of these memories, how do you actually make sure they're retrieved at the right time? And that can be quite tricky to do right without exploding the context with a bunch of useful yeah, useless information. Surprising amount of just, eval work to just make sure that, memory is, remains a reliable system as new models come and go.Cole [00:31:31]: Do you have anything that you could share on, memory pruning? And like the temporal aspect of memory?Swyx [00:31:36]: Deleting and forgetting?Walden [00:31:39]: The, today, the, So the things they could do is it could edit memories. And so if your memory used to say like, “Oh, Cole likes to open everything as like a draft PR,” then you can imagine, “No, don't do that.” And then it'll say, “Oh, do you want me to update the memory to be Cole now want everything as, open PRs?” I think that at the same time we don't know if this is going to be the final version of the system. Whatever we have here will probably, translate into the new system that we'll be coming up with. But I think one big difference between two years ago and today is these agents are really good at using anything that resembles a file system natively. And so part of us are, is thinking, “Oh, should we rebuild memories to feel more like a file system that we let the agent navigate on its own?” That's been an interesting exploration. Also similar ideas in the scale space.Swyx [00:32:35]: I am pulling up OpenClaude's memory thing right now. So memory, OpenClaude has like this like daily memory journal thing, right? And you can I mean, that is a file system you can grep through and is a source of truth. I don't know if it's the best. It's probably super noisy, but at least, if you lose something you can discover it or you can apply some, forgetting algorithm to, more ancient memories that don't get recalled again or something. I don't know.Walden [00:33:01]: One thing we've been trying to do to push the boundaries of how you use agents at your company is letting an agent basically have a very similar file, a memory.md or something, and just like be your permanent PM for a specific set of issues maybe. So we have like some Slack channels internally, maybe a Slack channel dedicated to, a specific product like DeepWiki maybe. And you can imagine that, or you want a Devin that never stops, it's just always awake, but it has this like memory dock that it can just maintain for itself about, okay, what are like the number one priorities of what we have to fix and prioritize? Who is responsible for some upcoming work? Maybe they'll even Devin will even tag you on some recurring basis. And so it's been an interesting move to see, okay, how can we actually use Devin for more than just engineering? Can we actually upstream above the engineering process and maybe it's just Devin creating tickets, which then maybe some humans do, but then maybe other Devins do.Swyx [00:34:00]: One of my more fun automations is go research competitors and just suggest stuff to me on a weekly basis. That's the automation. I can't find it right now, but basically it just like, “Look at competitors and suggest things.” “And here are three things that you've suggested that I don't want any more of,” and you just stick that in the prompts. But like I wish actually So for like when I, for example, when I reject a PR, I wish that it updated memory so that I can then just not have to go up, go back and update the scheduled, sync, but anyway, feature request.Walden [00:34:31]: what? We might change it soon. I guess OpenInspect, in the time you've been around, has there been anything you tried to implement but then you had to like undo and like do a different way?OpenInspect Architecture: Webhooks, Control Planes, and Agent StateCole [00:34:41]: Nothing yet, but something that is on my mind. The initial way that I built it was that each of the integrations lives as its own package. And so you have The Slack bot, which is what's handling the webhooks, and then is basically interacting with the control plane. As I'm seeing the system starting to be more integrated, specifically with the GitHub bot integration, I'm considering bringing that all into the central control plane because especially now I want to start, And a request that I'm getting is the ability to monitor, the actual, pull requests being merged, as well as just tracking ofSwyx [00:35:19]: What do I have open?Cole [00:35:21]: What do I have open? How many of these are getting merged? How many comments are showing up? To just understand the health of the system. And so in the case of a GitHub app, you only have one webhook. And so then it's a question of do I put that webhook in that GitHub bot package? That's weird. It doesn't really make sense to live there because that package is more for like the code reviewer. Or do I like centralize it? So that's something that's on my mind of, making that decision. I think the other one we touched on earlier is the harness in the box versus out of the box. I think long term the architecture will eventually come back out of the box. Some of the newer tools that I've added are calling back into the control plane so that you don't have the secrets in the sandbox. And so I think long term I probably will pull the actual, agent out of the box, but I think for now it's fine.Subagents and Multi-Agent Systems: When Parallelism Helps or HurtsSwyx [00:36:16]: Just, a quick question on pulling the agent out of the box. I'm One thing I'm very bullish on this year is agents calling other agents or spawning sub-agents or Whatever you want to call it. Does that make it harder or easier? I can't tell. Because if the harness is in the box, you can just spin up more boxes. If the harness is outside the box, then you're, it's less easy because you are, you have a unicorn pet of a, of a harness that's, living outside the box.Cole [00:36:45]: In theory it would be the same way, right? Whether, one agent has launched many, sub-sessions within it, OpenInspect, for example, can launch sub-sessions and actually create other environments and then monitor them. In the case where it is out of the box, that would basically just be an additional session that's running. And so that session is also running outside of the box. It's running in your worker plane, wherever you're running this. And then you really just have to think about how does your top level agent then interact with it. I do think it can be more complex, just ‘cause again, you have now a more difficult architecture. But I think if you figured it out once, it's probably fine.Swyx [00:37:26]: Well, then I'm just, throwing it open to you in terms of, I call this like meta Devin management. Which is like the, Devin's calling Devins or Devin scheduling Devins or querying trajectories or anything like that. What have you built or unshipped, anything?Cole [00:37:46]: I think one of the surprising things we've seen is that a lot of the ways that, these, separate agents work with each other, and you want them to, parallelize their work, has still mostly followed the same manager sub-agents regime. And a lot of people I think are excited about this world where you have swarms of agents that, talk with each other all over the place. We've actually given Devin an MCP so they can just go arbitrarily message other Devins And create new Devins, et cetera. But I guess, it somehow creates, a really chaotic world in that sense. And so we've still found that most practical use on a day-to-day basis has been one single Devin.Cole [00:38:33]: Figuring out how to segregate the work and get, have other Devins work on it in, a relatively isolated sense, each with their own boxes Not sharing machines, so there's, a very little room for conflict is the regime that you have to create today.Swyx [00:38:50]: I'll call out, the experiments from Cursor, right? This is Wilson Lin's work on Single agent to multi-agent, and you're obviously famously on the side of don't build multi-agent. But they went through the whole thing, only to arrive at, this Which is exactly what Devin has, I think.Cole [00:39:08]: I think there will be a revision to that post at some point AboutSwyx [00:39:12]: Tell us about itCole [00:39:12]: I think multi-agents were very much not at all possible a year ago. You do see more multi-agent experiments today, but you can argue, are they really multi-agents, or are they just just, tool calls,? There are people who, will create sub-agents to go look for XYZ file, XYZ implementation. Has really nice context management benefits because all of the tool calls and tokens that it spends then get collapsed back to just the answer for the main agent. There's a lot of benefits to doing this. We basically have Devin do this with Deep Bookie, make a call out to Deep Bookie, give you back the results, but that feels like a tool call,? It's not like these, two collaborators actually talking back with each, back and forth with each other. But I think the thing that gives me the most bullishness that multi-agents might actually be possible is actually what I said earlier about Devin will actually sometimes tell me I'm wrong and push back, and I think that demonstrates a level of maturity and communication today that makes a multi-agent world possible. One, can two agents who have seen different information come back to each other and actually figure out who is right, what is the correct implementation? They're not just, yes men. Claude, I guess is like, used to just say, what is it? “You're right,” or,Swyx [00:40:25]: “You're absolutely right.”Cole [00:40:26]: “You're absolutely right.” Yeah.Swyx [00:40:28]: The Have you seen, did you seeCole [00:40:29]: The age is overSwyx [00:40:30]: The Codex app troll in Topic? This is the Codex app. Inside of Settings, there's a little, there's a little Easter egg, right? So if you go to, the Themes or Appearance, right? There's all these, color codes, and the top is absolutely, and it's the Topic's colors. Which is such a troll. Anyway.Model Behavior: Pushback, Adversarial Prompts, and Agent SkepticismCole [00:40:53]: I love that Easter egg. Did you discover that yourself?Swyx [00:40:54]: No, it was, someone was, tweeting about it And I was like, I was like, “Is this true?” Because, sometimes people just tweet stuff to, get a rise out of you. But yeah, there you go, in Topic colors.Cole [00:41:06]: Yeah. So yeah, we're out of this regime where, it just says you're absolutely right, and they can have real conversations and real back and forths.Swyx [00:41:13]: You can prompt it as well to be more adversarial or whatever. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, that, I mean, to me, that is more intelligence, right? That is not just something that's, a dumb tool, it's actually pushing back on you I think. Yeah.Cole [00:41:24]: when you mentioned, of course, the blog posts. There was one blog they had where they fed a swarm of agents together and built a browser.Swyx [00:41:34]: That was I think that was the one.Cole [00:41:36]: You can have, likeSwyx [00:41:37]: I think it's the same oneCole [00:41:37]: Creation of it. We found a surprising success of, don't do a swarm or anything, just have one Devin, it does its own context management. Just let it keep running for a while and give it some crazy tasks. I think we asked it to, rebuild, a Windows OS system. And it managed to do it just like, going on for long enough. It'sSwyx [00:41:55]: Was this Andrew's thing?Cole [00:41:58]: there were lots of demos that we ended up not posting, ‘cause at some point we'd just be posting way too much a bunch of, Demos. But I love that because it shows that I think the multi-agent thing still has, a bit of exciting sexiness to it, which is maybe still beyond still, the actual delta it adds to the capabilities of these systems. But it's absolutely the future. I think we're heading in that direction and we can see the progress being made there already.Swyx [00:42:25]: If I were to, make one super minor pushback because I don't feel that confident about it yetCole [00:42:33]: Go for itSwyx [00:42:33]: But I've had Ryan Lopopolo from OpenAI on the pod And he's a super slop cannon, right? Oh my God, that's my coding agent being done. I downloaded this, Peon Ping. I don't know if you guys have heard this. It takes like-, sound packs from popular games like, Command and Conquer and Warcraft, and then it plays it whenever it's done. And so it's like, “Work,” or whatever, “At your command,” or something. Anyway, what I got from the Cursor code base and from Ryan's thing was that there's a slop cannon approach where you try to loosen the single agent's, bottleneck, and I feel like that is, probably an, a very important thing to try to figure out. I don't think anyone's, really solved it. Because then you just have more reviewer slop on top of the agent slop To try to wrangle it all. Ryan will probably very strongly object that I say that he hasn't solved it, but he thinks he's He thinks he's completely solved it. But I think it's still I think it's, very important, ‘cause, that is a bottleneck, right? I feel Devin is slow sometimes Because I'm like, well, yeah, this is very readable and very sensible, but also it is slower than it could be if I just, I want a button to just say, “Just ramp this up 1,000 next parallel, in parallel and just, see what happens,”? And I don't know if that's, feasible at some point in the future.Code Review, Entropy, and AI SlopWalden [00:43:55]: I And we've also run experiments internally where we've basically tried to build entire products, true products that we knew we would eventually ship, but for now, let's try to see if we can do it just by purely, vibe coding on top of each other, auto merge, no code review at all. And then there's this benchmark of how many weeks can you go onto this for Before you say, “We have the trashiest code base.”Walden [00:44:18]: “Let's actually rewrite it from scratch.”Swyx [00:44:19]: Start a new factory, yeah. What'd you find?Walden [00:44:21]: I think we found that the state-of-the-art in December was you can probably, run this for about two weeks. By the end of those two weeks, you'd find that, hey, you want to, change the color of a button. Well, it turns out this button is implemented in, 10 different places, and they, have All these different variations, and oh, you forgot one of them, and actually it's a slightly different color in one spot. And you're like, “Okay, this is too much to work with. Let's actually try to do code review at the same time.” And make sure that we're on top of our software, actually cleaning it up a bit And making sure it's done in a scalable way.Cole [00:44:54]: I think building on that, the idea of, you don't have to look at code, I think is generally a bad idea. And the meme that I have for thatWalden [00:45:03]: What timeline, all right, is Do you think that statement will be true on?Cole [00:45:06]: I think probably for a while it'll be true that you should continue to look at your code. A problem that I see a lot of teams run into that I work with who are embracing AI native, AI first coding, is The meme that I have is that your code base regresses to your worst engineer, because that engineer who is, very gung-ho about AI and is not auditing their code, their pattern starts cementing into the code, and now the AI is referencing their patterns. And so now their if/else block that, is 20 if/elses back and forth, the AI is seeing that as the pattern of how things are done and starts to then exponentially grow this slop. And I find to your point, a pretty good approach to that is having scheduled cleanup, whether by humans or through systems, that are looking for duplication. They then address that. You'll end up with like 12 helpers for how to format a date. And you need to address that, because otherwise it will continue to sprawl.Swyx [00:46:09]: Within balance, I think it's fine to have some duplication, and then sometimes To have garbage collection, right? Yeah. The What I've been, talking about with a lot of engineering leaders is that you want to be very strict about the boundaries between modules, and it's your job as an architect, as a CTO, whatever, to say like, “Okay, here's the hard contract between you guys and you guys. Whatever you do inside this black box is your business. You do whatever. But between these guys, let's be, really damn clear, and any movement must be signed off by a human or me,” or. Then, and like that's that. I don't know if you have any other modifications or advice.Walden [00:46:44]: Well, I guess generally on the topic of, where humans can be useful, I found that ‘cause, some of these, really deep infra problems, sometimes just having a human that just has, really deep expertise can make a big difference. I've actually seen this come into play when actually building agents. So we've had a few friends now, try building their own coding agents, and I think one same problem that I recurringly heard a lot of them run into was this problem of like, “Oh, Grep is really slow on our agents' machines.” And so a lot of them, I assume because they're using AI and they themselves don't have, super deep infra background knowledge, say, “Okay, we're going to go build our own custom Grep index. It's going to be really fast,” and use that as a way around this problem. When we ran into this problem About like, maybe like a year and a half ago when we were, in the early days of building Devin, we obviously didn't have AI then. We just asked our, how to, how to do this. You can just swap out a new Grep index, so.Infrastructure Details: Grep, File Systems, and SandboxesSwyx [00:47:45]: What do you mean you hand-coded Devin? What?Walden [00:47:48]: It's like, can you believe we hand-wrote this code? And we had, our infra people who are really amazing, they were looking into it and they're like, “Oh, what? We realized that actually the root cause of this problem is actually super simple, but like fine-grain detail,” which is that a lot of these virtual machines actually underlying them don't use real file systems. They use these, network file systems where things are actually cached over the network actually in S3. So when you're Grepping, you're actually making network calls Every time you're doing these things, and that's why Grep is extremely slow on these machines. And so again, goes back to, what is all of the crazy infra work that we had to do to actually get these machines working. If you try to do this yourself, there are tons of small details like this, and so we had to eventually go swap out that network file system. ButSwyx [00:48:35]: I think there's a write-up about it, right? Silas did one about the virtual file system.Walden [00:48:38]: Oh, that was a whole other thing. TheSwyx [00:48:39]: Oh, that's a different thingWalden [00:48:40]: The BlockDev file storage formatSwyx [00:48:42]: I'll bring it upWalden [00:48:42]: Which is, a file system format that we built so that the VMs could be spun up and down very quickly. Basically, the intuition behind this is-Imagine you have, a terabyte of disk, and your agent only, wrote, a hundred lines of code on top of that disk. How long does it, say, take to, save and re-bring up that disk? And most systems, because you're not optimizing for this case, it's just, on the order of a terabyte of work because you have to Save all of that and bring it back up. In our system, we try to build a file system that incrementally builds on top of each other. So every time you save and bring the machine back up, you're only doing work that is proportional to effectively the diff in the file system. And so this, shaves off a lot of time in the boot-up process of Devin. I think we This is actually now outdated. We have a newer system inside of Devin. But yeah, there's a lot of tiny details you have to get right here to actually get the day-to-day experience of Devin to be good.Swyx [00:49:39]: It's, not technically agents, but it is agent infra, and when you sell an agent as a company, you sell agent plus agent infra.Walden [00:49:46]: At least the way we do it be And the other The nice thing about having the agent infra being done together is, you We get to deploy Devin in whatever environment we want now. We don't need to wait for some underlying infra provider to also go and support VPC or on-prem or FedGovCloud, for instance. So we can actually go and figure out, okay, since we own the infrastructure, how can we get that set up for you?Cloud Providers: Modal, Daytona, and Enterprise SandboxesSwyx [00:50:12]: Whereas you're Cloudflare dependent.Cole [00:50:15]: so Cloudflare runs the control plane. The sandboxes, Modal is supported. A contributor just added Daytona. E2B is on the roadmap, and I think there's an abstraction in place that if any contributor wants to add a new provider, they can add that in.Walden [00:50:32]: Well, what are, How are the customers you work with Do they generally try to then go set up a contract with another one of these third-party providers? Do they try to do the VMs in-house?Cole [00:50:44]: most of them I see using Modal. I think Modal has a greatWalden [00:50:48]: Shout out Modal.Swyx [00:50:48]: Shout out Modal.Cole [00:50:50]: I think Modal has a great offering. It captures all of the sandbox pieces you need, snapshots being a pretty big piece of that, and given that they also offer GPUs, I think it's a pretty nice offering as a whole.Swyx [00:51:04]: no debate there.Walden [00:51:07]: Modal is great, especially, I think their container offering is, the most natural, and so especially if you are willing to, forego, the full VM requirements Modal is, a really vast place you can spin something up on.Swyx [00:51:20]: Is there a point So Modal's very Python, and I feel like most workload, has really shifted to JavaScript. I don't know if you guys Get the same feeling. So, okay, when I started Landspace and IE and all these things, I was like 50/50 Python and JS, right? That's roughly. I think that's wrong now. I think JS has won. I don't know if you guys Like, I Maybe I'm overstating it, and maybe for cognition, there's, C# and Java and what have you. But for, new greenfield apps, do you feel that Do you get that sense? Does it matter?Cole [00:51:52]: I think that most of the libraries that I see in this space are Python native first, especially in theCole [00:51:58]: Observability space. That said, I think that there is a pretty big appeal of having your entire system in one language. Especially when you have both your frontend and backend communicating, you can have one central type Which is very nice.Swyx [00:52:11]: That's my case against Modal, which is Then you have to run JS. You can run JS inside Modal. It's just, one extra step That, isn't native to the runtime. I don't know ifWalden [00:52:22]: I don't knowSwyx [00:52:23]: Reviews. Do you have numbers? I don't know.Walden [00:52:25]: the one thing I don't like about Python is whenever AI, whenever it writes Python, it always does, the weirdest patterns, andSwyx [00:52:32]: Oh, because it's, mixing two and three or what?Walden [00:52:34]: I think it's something mixing two and three, yeah. The I don't know if you see this. It always tries to do, has attribute on objects as likeCole [00:52:41]: Oh, my God.Walden [00:52:41]: But it's like But that you shouldn't be doing that. It should error if there wasSwyx [00:52:45]: Because it's training on library code?Cole [00:52:47]: I think it's more of, likeCole [00:52:48]: From what I've seen, it's more of, a reward hacking mechanism where it doesn't want to basicallyWalden [00:52:54]: It'll never error.Cole [00:52:54]: It doesn't want the code to fail. And so it Even when it knows it has the attribute, it'll call getattr on a, and for a lot of my clients who have moved towards more autonomous coding, we've put that in as a lint rule That if you do getattr, your pull request is going to fail.Slop Signatures: Comments, Backwards Compatibility, and TypesSwyx [00:53:12]: Ooh, this is a fun topic. Can you tell me more about this? What else is a sign of AI coding that you have to put guards in?Walden [00:53:21]: So we were talking just before this about Opus 4.7. One of the things this new model likes to do is it writes lots of comments. Not like, it'll, comment every line, but it'll write, paragraph, PRDs, on top of every function. But I will say, to its credit, these aren't slop, descriptions like they were before. “Oh, here's what this function does.” It's like, “Oh, here's actually the r

A Special Industry Update with Jason Diamond and Mindy Diamond A replay of part one of a two-part series, Jason and Mindy Diamond unpack the real advisor transition playbook—from due diligence and culture fit to portability, enterprise value, and the evolving landscape of advisor choice. In Summary Why do advisors really consider changing firms or models—and what separates thoughtful due diligence from reactive decision-making? In a replay of the first of this special two-part Industry Update, Jason and Mindy Diamond unpack what actually drives advisor transitions, the misconceptions that derail decision-making, and the questions sophisticated teams should be asking long before they're ready to act. The conversation also explores how the industry landscape has evolved around independence, portability, enterprise value, and advisor optionality—drawing context from Diamond's role in the landmark OpenArc breakaway from Merrill and much more. The Storyline Most advisors assume transitions are primarily driven by recruiting economics. Jason Diamond and Mindy Diamond suggest that recruiting economics may get the headlines, but advisor transitions are usually driven by a far more layered set of considerations. What tends to happen instead is more gradual: a growing disconnect between how advisors want to serve clients and the constraints of the environment around them. Sometimes it's bureaucracy. Sometimes it's limitations around growth, marketing, technology, or flexibility. Sometimes it's simply the realization that the industry landscape has evolved while their assumptions about it have not. This conversation examines what actually happens between the moment curiosity begins and the moment a move becomes real. Rather than treating transitions as transactional events, Jason and Mindy frame due diligence as a strategic process of self-assessment—clarifying what matters, identifying trade-offs, evaluating long-term optionality, and pressure-testing assumptions before making consequential decisions. The discussion also offers a rare look inside the mechanics of advisor movement itself: how teams evaluate culture, how portability is assessed, why some advisors choose ownership over upfront monetization, and what sophisticated client communication really looks like during a transition. The backdrop throughout the episode is Diamond's role in facilitating the historic OpenArc breakaway from Merrill—a move that challenged longstanding assumptions about scale, independence, and what even the industry's largest teams are now willing to reconsider. Topics Covered Advisor transition due diligence Wirehouse limitations and advisor frustration Independence versus traditional firm models Enterprise value and long-term ownership Advisor portability and client transition strategy Boutique and regional firm recruiting trends Culture evaluation during due diligence Reverse due diligence and evaluating firm stability Transition economics and recruiting deals The OpenArc Merrill breakaway story Advisor optionality and industry evolution How technology and AI are changing transitions   > Download a transcript of this episode… Listen and Learn Highlights for Advisors Why do advisors actually decide to leave firms? (06:20) Mindy explains why most transitions are driven less by economics and more—by mounting limitations around growth, flexibility, client service, and long-term alignment. What is the biggest mistake advisors make when beginning due diligence? (18:12) The conversation explores why many advisors evaluate firms before gaining clarity around what they truly want to improve—often creating confusion instead of insight. How should advisors evaluate culture beyond a firm's sales pitch? (32:41) Jason and Mindy discuss the importance of speaking directly with advisors who have already made similar moves—and how to pressure-test what firms promise. When should transition economics matter most? (47:03) The episode breaks down the difference between short-term monetization and long-term enterprise value creation—and why many elite teams are increasingly prioritizing ownership and optionality. Why are more advisors reconsidering independence? (56:48) Using the OpenArc transition as context, the discussion explores how today's independent landscape has evolved far beyond the traditional “build it yourself” model. How long does a real due diligence process take? (1:06:10) Jason and Mindy explain why thoughtful transitions often unfold over many months—and why some advisors remain in exploratory conversations for years before acting. How should advisors think about portability and client communication? (1:16:20) The conversation details how sophisticated teams assess portability risk—and why the client-facing rationale for a move matters more than recruiting economics. Have advisor transitions become easier over time? (1:24:12) Mindy explains how technology, legal infrastructure, and industry specialization have improved the process—while emphasizing that transitions still require risk tolerance, effort, and patience. Key Takeaways Most advisors do not move primarily because of recruiting deals. The larger driver is usually a growing disconnect between what they want to build and what their current environment allows. Due diligence tends to fail when advisors begin by evaluating firms before clarifying what they actually want for their business, clients, and long-term future. The industry landscape has evolved dramatically over the last decade, particularly around independent and supported-independent models, creating far more customization and optionality than many advisors realize. Transition economics matter — but sophisticated advisors increasingly view upfront monetization as only one component of a much larger enterprise value equation. The ability to articulate a compelling client-facing value proposition is one of the strongest tests of whether a transition opportunity is truly viable. Conversations with advisors who have already made similar moves remain one of the most valuable forms of real-world due diligence. Even the industry's largest teams are reassessing assumptions around independence, ownership, control, and scalability. Quotable Moments “The biggest mistake advisors make is beginning due diligence before they've gotten clear about what they actually want.” “A recruiting deal can't be the first thing you consider. But it would be foolish not to consider it at all.” “The landscape looks entirely different than it did five or ten years ago. If you haven't gotten educated, you're doing yourself a disservice.” “The real question is not whether you can move. It's whether you can clearly explain to clients why the move makes their experience better.” FAQs Why do advisors typically begin exploring a move? In many cases, the process begins gradually. Advisors may still feel successful and reasonably satisfied, but start questioning whether their current environment fully supports how they want to grow, serve clients, or build long term. Often, curiosity precedes dissatisfaction. Is advisor movement mostly driven by recruiting deals? Not usually. While economics are an important consideration, the episode explains that most sophisticated advisors weigh a much broader set of factors, including flexibility, culture, client experience, growth limitations, ownership opportunities, and long-term enterprise value. How long does a typical due diligence process take? There is no universal timeline. Some advisors move relatively quickly once they decide change is necessary, while others spend months – or even years – getting educated and evaluating options before acting. For many teams, a thoughtful due diligence process unfolds over roughly six months. What is the biggest mistake advisors make during due diligence? The episode suggests the biggest mistake is evaluating firms before gaining clarity around personal and business priorities. Without understanding what they actually want to improve, advisors often become overwhelmed by options, recruiting pitches, and conflicting information. How can advisors really assess a firm's culture? One of the most valuable approaches is speaking directly with advisors who have already made similar moves. Jason and Mindy discuss why real-world perspective – particularly from advisors with comparable client bases or business structures – is often far more revealing than formal presentations or recruiting materials. How should advisors think about independence versus traditional firms? The conversation frames the decision less as “right versus wrong” and more as a question of alignment. Some advisors prioritize ownership, control, and long-term enterprise value. Others value infrastructure, brand recognition, or operational support. The industry landscape has evolved enough that advisors now have far more flexibility to design around the trade-offs that matter most to them. In many cases, the process begins gradually. Advisors may still feel successful and reasonably satisfied, but start questioning whether their current environment fully supports how they want to grow, serve clients, or build long term. Often, curiosity precedes dissatisfaction. Not usually. While economics are an important consideration, the episode explains that most sophisticated advisors weigh a much broader set of factors, including flexibility, culture, client experience, growth limitations, ownership opportunities, and long-term enterprise value. There is no universal timeline. Some advisors move relatively quickly once they decide change is necessary, while others spend months – or even years – getting educated and evaluating options before acting. For many teams, a thoughtful due diligence process unfolds over roughly six months. The episode suggests the biggest mistake is evaluating firms before gaining clarity around personal and business priorities. Without understanding what they actually want to improve, advisors often become overwhelmed by options, recruiting pitches, and conflicting information. One of the most valuable approaches is speaking directly with advisors who have already made similar moves. Jason and Mindy discuss why real-world perspective – particularly from advisors with comparable client bases or business structures – is often far more revealing than formal presentations or recruiting materials. The conversation frames the decision less as “right versus wrong” and more as a question of alignment. Some advisors prioritize ownership, control, and long-term enterprise value. Others value infrastructure, brand recognition, or operational support. The industry landscape has evolved enough that advisors now have far more flexibility to design around the trade-offs that matter most to them. Related Resources The Advisor Transition Playbook: The Latest on Due Diligence, the Move, and Everything In Between – Part 2Jason and Mindy Diamond revisit the transition playbook, this time focused on how advisor priorities are shifting. From AI and enterprise value to stability and flexibility, they unpack what's changing in due diligence and what it means for advisors evaluating their next move.  The $129B Blockbuster Move: Shirl Penney on Why This Transition Marks a New Era for the IndustryThe $129B OpenArc breakaway marks a watershed moment for wealth management. In this Rapid Reaction episode, Louis Diamond and Shirl Penney unpack what it means for the RIA model, advisors, and the future of industry competition. The Missing Narrative of the $129B Merrill Breakaway StoryThe largest (and quite possibly most significant) advisor breakaway in industry history made news this week. Yet instead of leading with the scale or significance of the move, headlines centered on Merrill's lawsuit alleging corporate raiding. NOTE: The views and opinions expressed by the guests on this podcast are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of Diamond Consultants. Neither Diamond Consultants nor the guests on this podcast are compensated in any way for their participation. View the transcript of this episode… The Advisor Transition Playbook: Inside Baseball on Due Diligence, the Move, and Everything In Between A Special Industry Update with Jason Diamond and Mindy Diamond. Jason Diamond: Welcome to a replay of one of the most popular episodes from our podcast series for financial advisors, The Advisor Transition Playbook: Inside Baseball on Due Diligence, the Move, and Everything In Between. It's Part 1 of a 2-Part Industry Update with Mindy Diamond. I’m Jason Diamond and this is the Diamond Podcast for Financial Advisors. Mindy Diamond: At Diamond Consultants, we help elite advisors identify the right environment for their businesses to thrive, whether that’s at a wirehouse, boutique, or independent firm. With nearly three decades of experience, we’ve guided thousands of advisors and represented more than a quarter of a trillion dollars in assets transitioned. And each year, one in four advisors managing a billion dollars or more, who change firms, are our clients. Our process is education driven and based on building relationships, starting as your strategic partner well before you’re even thinking of a move. To schedule a confidential conversation, call us at (908) 879-1002. Wondering why advisors change firms, and where they’re headed? Are transition deals going up or down? Those very questions and more inspired us to create our annual Advisor Transition Report. It’s the award-winning data-driven resource designed for advisors that connects the dots between the motivations around movement and the firm’s appetite for top talent. Arm yourself with the knowledge you need to make smart decisions. Download your copy at diamond-consultants.com/transitionreport. Jason Diamond: Everything about a transition can seem incredibly overwhelming. From understanding the whys of a move, then conducting due diligence, and onto aligning the right models and selecting the best firms, it might seem like a fairly linear process. And for some, it can be. But for others, the layers of minutia can be daunting. Essentially, it comes down to the adage, “You don’t know what you don’t know.” So the goal of this episode is to share some inside baseball in how to get from here to there. I asked Mindy Diamond to join me to help draw from decades of experience in helping advisors through their transitions. We’ve dived into the misconceptions, the common traps, the aware of a big check and much more. Essentially, it’s a download of what you need to know when considering a move. There’s a lot to discuss, so let’s get to it. Mindy, so excited to have you join me for this topic. Mindy Diamond: Yeah, I’m really happy to be here. And I’m just thinking to myself, “Yikes, decades of experience,” you’ve said, and yes it is, decades of experience. Jason Diamond: It most certainly is, 30 years in the business. So the seeding for this topic was, “You’ve been in this business now for 30 years, how many hundreds of thousands of conversations with advisors is that?” Some who moved, plenty who certainly did not. But ultimately, what we thought would be useful because it’s a question we get most commonly from advisors that we speak with is, “Tell me what I don’t know. What are the questions I should be asking?” So I’m going to just pepper you with some of the most common questions we get, and I would love to share the benefit of your wisdom and experience with our audience. That sound good? Mindy Diamond: It sounds great. I just want to say that we are recording this two days after one of the largest deals probably in the history of the industry broke that I am gratified to say we facilitated the OpenArc team who left Merrill with 129 billion in assets under management, broke a couple days ago to go independent. I’m hoping we have the opportunity to talk about some of their best practices and things we discovered along the way because I think it’s relevant. And a deal like this gets a lot of attention, people always want to know what they do and what went wrong. Jason Diamond: It’s a good point. I’m glad you bring it up. First of all, it’s so timely, but I think you can almost use it as a case study a little bit to answer some of these questions. So let’s dive in with that. I want to start with the big picture, “Why?” Because that’s the number one thing I think people want to know is, “Why do advisors move?” And I think there’s an assumption that 95% of transitions happen because of a big check or because of economics. I’m certain you’re going to touch on that to some extent, but give me your sense of what are the main triggers of advisor movement. Mindy Diamond: Yeah. Look, are there some advisors that move because they need to recapitalize or they want the money? Sure. But the absolute vast majority are moving because they come to a place where one of two things is true, and oftentimes both. One, the pain of staying is great enough. Meaning there’s enough frustrations or limitations that they’ve gotten to a point where despite efforts to the contrary to make it better, despite gutting it out and saying, “On par, it’s good enough,” they come to a point where there’s limitations in how they can serve their clients, how they can grow the business, and that’s just untenable for them. Hopefully, simultaneously, they are equally excited and have identified an opportunity that they believe is needle-moving enough, it’s worth the hassle, the disruption, the everything to make this move. I’ve never done a move where it doesn’t fall into one of those two or, hopefully, both of those categories. Jason Diamond: Let’s go a little deeper there. You mentioned limitations. Give me an example either using this recent deal or even just any recent advisors that you’ve worked with about, “What are some limitations that people experience at,” let’s say, “the wirehouses that potentially would be a catalyst for a move?” Mindy Diamond: Generally speaking, the biggest limitations have to do with how they’re able to grow their business and serve their clients. So anything to do with excess bureaucracy, anything to do with an incongruence, if you will, between the advisors or the team’s goals for how they want to serve clients or grow the business and what the firm is allowing them to do. Using this enormous deal as an example, you’ve got a team that was doing extraordinarily well. Oh, my god. They were the biggest team at Merrill, so talk about having a batphone to the top and the attention of senior leadership. If anyone was going to be able to break through the red tape or get things done, or eschew the limitations, it was them. And for a long time, they did. But they were sort of increasingly unhappy, let’s say, over a decade. Despite their size, every year, they became a little bit more frustrated. And after probably six or seven years of saying, “We’re just too big to move,” they came to a point of saying, “We can’t ignore this anymore. We’ve got a tiger by its tail. We have this extraordinary business that is growing exponentially. We’ve got clients that are complaining to us. And more importantly, we’ve got team members that are feeling stifled.” And that’s where it comes from, where there’s problems you just can’t ignore even if you want to. Jason Diamond: It almost feels like one of those things where advisors know they’re limited, they can just feel it. But if you’re fighting against the firm, and instead of with it. I’ll give you one other one that comes to mind as we’re talking here, that seems to come up a lot in advisor conversations, which is freedom of marketing. And that might seem like a fairly minor limitation, but I can’t tell you how many times, certainly myself, I’m sure you too, get call from an advisor who is heated. They’re angry because they were trying to send some timely market commentary and the firm took two weeks to approve it. Does that fall under the same category of limitations, in your mind? Mindy Diamond: Oh, without a doubt. And it’s funny you say that because in this world of social media where the news is consumed or can be consumed within seconds of an event happening, there’s nothing more frustrating for an advisor than wanting to write a newsletter to update their clients with scale as opposed to having to make one phone call at a time and not being able to do so. It absolutely puts them on a back foot. And then, I think it’s the lack of freedom to differentiate themselves. Most advisors that work for big firms have a firm website that is templated, the same sort of structure of the website and the picture of the team and the same basic wordings, and that’s hard to deal with. Jason Diamond: Well, you bring up an interesting point, which is sometimes… For example, advisors might say or wirehouse advisors might say, “Oh, the marketing is good enough.” But a lot of times, and we’ve had advisors on this podcast who talk about exactly this, they don’t realize how limited the sandbox they were playing in is or was until after a transition. And that’s when their eyes open and they realize, “Oh, my god. I was basically playing with one arm tied behind my back.” We’ve heard advisors use that metaphor. Let me ask you this then, and this is a tough question, what do you think advisors get wrong? What is the number one misconception that advisors have prior to approaching due diligence and thinking about a move? And maybe it’s something as simple as like, “Eh, it’s the same everywhere,” but tell me what you think you hear most commonly. Mindy Diamond: There’s certainly those myths, the assumptions or presumptions that it’s the same everywhere or there’s nothing that’s going to change anyway, for sure. But I think the biggest and most fundamental thing they get wrong is a lack of clarity around, “What it is they’re trying to accomplish, and why?” I’d like to say that I think one of the things, the thing, we do better than most, I’m not going to say everyone else but better than most, and something we’re really good at, is helping advisors to answer the really tough questions, the smartest questions, to get a sense of what it is they’re looking to accomplish, what it is they want to improve and why, “What does success look like?” Because if you don’t do that, then a lot of folks do it backwards. They get a phone call from a manager at Morgan Stanley or from somebody at Schwab or somebody at Dynasty, or whatever it may be, and they say, “I’ll take a lunch, why not?” And of course, the job of the manager from Morgan or the sales rep from Dynasty, or whatever it is, is to tell you all the good things about independence or about Morgan Stanley. But if I, as the advisor, am not really clear about what it is I’m looking to accomplish and why, it’s going to all sound good and I’m going to wind up more overwhelmed than when I started. And that is probably the number one thing that we see advisors getting wrong. It makes the due diligence process, if you choose to enter it, exceedingly inefficient. Jason Diamond: I totally agree. So I’m an advisor, I want to start due diligence in earnest. I know in my head, things are suboptimal. I’m not going to go so far as to say,” I definitively want to move.” But I’m a wirehouse advisor and I’m thinking for the first time in my career, “I’ve built a nice business, but it’s time for me to start getting educated.” So what do I do? Do I just say, “Hey, John at Morgan Stanley, what’s your recruiting deal look like these days?” Tell me, for an advisor who’s never thought about this before, what are the ABCs of this process look like? Mindy Diamond: Yeah. It’s definitely not, the first step, calling Morgan Stanley, even if you’re pretty sure Morgan Stanley is where you want to go. I’d suggest that’s probably one of the last steps, and I’ll tell you why. The first thing is to give yourself permission to say, “Even if I’m not 100% certain that a move is in my future or that I know I’m unhappy enough to go through the hassle and disruption of making a move,” to give yourself permission to get educated. The world, the industry landscape, the ecosystem, the everything looks entirely different than it did five and 10 years ago. And if it’s been five or 10 years, or even three to five years, since you last got educated, asked the questions, looked under the hood to get a sense of, “Is there or could there be something that’s better than where I am?”, you’re doing yourself and your team a disservice. Yeah, it takes time and it’s annoying and it’s overwhelming, and it’s all of it, but that’s honestly why people like us have a job. We don’t approach this that we think people should only come to us when they’re sure they’re going to make a move. In fact, it’s the opposite. We love the calls we get when somebody says, “I’m really happy here. I’ve been here 40 years. I’ve been here 30 years, it’s really good enough, it’s working well for me.” “But all of a sudden, I’m beginning to be curious. Or all of a sudden, I feel X, Y and Z. Tell me what I don’t know.” Those are the best calls. Those are the smartest calls. That’s the best thing an advisor can do. Jason Diamond: Yeah, I agree with that. Are there things you think an advisor needs to ask for during the diligence… I guess what I’m getting at is, do you trust the process that if you go through this process with, let’s say, three to five strategically picked firms… So you work within a recruiter or, a shameless plug, however you approach this, and you end up with your short list of contenders. Do you trust that, by going through the due diligence process, these firms are going to give you the building blocks that you need to do proper due diligence? Or are there things you, as an advisor, need to ask for? I’ll give you one example that comes to mind, which is… There’s obviously been some firms that have had financial troubles recently. So do you think an advisor, for example, needs to ask for financial statements from a firm they’re potentially considering due diligence on? I’m curious what your thoughts are. Mindy Diamond: Yeah. Particularly, if you’re looking at sort of in this new world order, if we think about the landscape as a continuum and the newer boutique multifamily offices on the right side, absolutely. Conducting what we call reverse due diligence and getting to see the financials of the firms you’re considering, to make sure that they’re sound and solid and that the equity valuation is exactly as advertised, of course, yes, that’s true. So the answer is, in part, you trust the process. You trust that if you’ve asked the right questions, if you’ve gotten clarity around what’s important to you, and as a result, you’ve crafted the right questions, and therefore, the manager or the representative from the firm or options you’re considering has put together the right due diligence plan, you can trust that at least 90% of what needs to be gotten right has gotten right. But there are always things around the margins that aren’t addressed. One is you can’t just outsource the due diligence process. You need to be paying attention. And much like people who trust their doctor and presume the doctor just always has it right, you need to be your own advocate. I would say, the same thing here. That as the process unfolds, there will be additional questions, additional sort of gaps and holes, and you shouldn’t stop until you’ve gotten all of your questions answered. That’s really the best advice I can give. Jason Diamond: You are talking to John from XYZ firm and Jim from ABC firm, and they’re going to tell you what’s great about their firms. So how do you know that you’re not just buying a false bill of goods, it’s just a glossy kind of sales pitch? I’ll give you my answer first. Part of it is, I think, you test drive the systems. I think another step I suggest a lot is calls with advisors on the platform. So an advisor who left UBS to go to Morgan Stanley, probably the best possible person to ask about Morgan Stanley. Any other additional thoughts on that one? Mindy Diamond: You took the words right out of my mouth. Absolutely, that is the number one way to do it, is that you ask for an opportunity, and you can do it in a name-blind way without identifying yourself, to talk with advisors that have made the move that are two things, that either came from the firm you’re coming from, so you get a similar perspective, but it’s equally important to talk to advisors that have similar business mix. It doesn’t matter what firm they came from, even if it’s not the same as yours, but, “How does someone that services international clients, how are they better able to serve those international clients at this new firm or new model than they were where you are?” We’re talking about it as if it’s wirehouse-to-wirehouse. But very often in today’s world order, especially looking at this giant move from this week, it’s about wirehouse to some version of independence. So there’s so much more due diligence, so many more questions that are required. It is even more important in that world to really get an understanding of what it’s like from the perspective of somebody that’s walking in those shoes. I will tell you, Jason, and you know this, that literally the number one reason I started this podcast more than a decade ago, and why we continue to do the podcast and the feedback we get, is because the feedback from advisors that have joined a platform already is the very best feedback, the best way, in a discreet confidential manner, to hear the truth from somebody who doesn’t have a horse in the race who’s just sharing their perspective with you. And that’s the feedback we continue to get. In a couple of weeks, I’m interviewing, as an example, Neil Rubinstein. Neil’s an advisor in Texas that came from Merrill that we moved to Rockefeller. A perfect example. So many advisors that are considering a move if they’ve got high net worth clients are going to look at Rockefeller. Well, what better way to understand what Rockefeller is about than to hear it from an advisor that’s walked in the shoes, not only of a Merrill advisor, but services high net worth clients and then have information or perspective similar to Neil. What do you think about that? Do you agree with that? Jason Diamond: 1000%. First of all, the podcast, I will say, a little bit of a sales pitch, has one thing going for it that a call with an advisor doesn’t, which is complete discretion and confidentiality. I will say, I think we’ve done a good job of doing facilitating name-blind calls between advisors. We continue to harp on this point even though it sounds somewhat minor, because it really is the very… You can talk to people like me and people like the recruiters from the firms until you’re blue in the face. But the right way, the best possible way to learn the, “Is this guy selling me? How does the technology compare to Merrill? How does the day-to-day compare? What’s it like working for this manager?”, all those types of questions, I think are best answered by another advisor. So completely agree with you. Mindy Diamond: Yeah, and I’ll take it one step further. Somewhere in the process, you take advantage of the opportunity to either listen to a podcast and hear somebody’s perspective of what the move was like, and how it’s bettered their life and where the pitfalls are, and/or you take the opportunity to talk with other advisors that have made the move, so you can ask your own specific questions. But after you’ve had the opportunity to do that, then it’s really important, and this is the part that why you can’t entirely outsource or let the due diligence process just go on autopilot, to take some of that perspective and the manager that you’re interviewing with, hold his or her feet to the fire. What do I mean by that? So I talked to an advisor that talked about the fact that the number one concern about Rockefeller, I’m making this up, is that they’re going to be the next Merrill, or that they just added a fee that now is going to have to be passed on to clients. While this advisor said it doesn’t bother them and they had a lot of good reason of why it’s not an issue, I’d love for you to tell me why it could be an issue. What are some of the things you’ve gotten wrong? When someone doesn’t join Rockefeller, why is it? I’m making that up- Jason Diamond: Yeah, smart. Same thing. Even let go, this advisor mentioned that technology is a step back from the firm I’m coming from. And I’m not asking you to argue with me, but perhaps the manager might be able to say something like, “We’re investing substantially in the platform, and we have these rollouts coming in the next several months that are going to close that gap.” So I completely agree. That’s a really smart- Mindy Diamond: And a follow-up question to that example, Jason, which is a great one, is, “How can I trust, how can I get a sense of security, if I join here in the next couple of months that in fact that investment is going to be made? And how that investment in technology will actually impact thing?” So again, it’s constantly being your own advocate, constantly paying attention, and constantly questions beget more questions. Jason Diamond: I agree we. Haven’t talked at all about the dollars and cents of this, and I think we need to because it’s important. Right? You can have the best platform on the planet, but the reality is a move comes with risk, a move comes with hassle, and there is a market for advisors’ books of businesses. That’s one of, I think, the major kind of paradigm shifts we’ve seen in the last, call it, decade is advisors know their books are assets, their book is a business, and that business is worth something substantial. At any firm, even at their current firm via retire and place deals, the book is worth something substantial. So if you had to put a percentage to it, I’m an advisor making a decision, 100% waiting, how much percent waiting do I put on the economics and how much waiting do I put on culture, platform, everything else? Mindy Diamond: The answer is, absolutely, it’s an inside job, personal, and it depends upon the advisor. There are some advisors, they’re wrong, but they will put all the weight on personal economics. They’re making a big mistake, if that’s the case. And most advisors will put much more weight on getting it right, meaning, “What’s life going to be like afterwards? And will I have a better ability to serve clients and grow the business?” But here’s what I would say, they’re both equally important. So no advisor who’s got a decent enough runway ahead of him or her and who’s looking to really grow the business and who cares about their clients can’t be unconcerned about the culture of where they’re going and what life is going to be like and what are the limitations, all of the questions we’ve been talking about. But an advisor who’s built a great business would be a fool not to consider their own personal economics. It just can’t be the first thing they consider. And in the book I wrote, Should I Stay or Should I Go?, I wrote that 100 times that it’s all about, “Lead with what’s important to the business and important to clients, do the right thing, but you can’t ignore personal financial gain.” Let’s talk about this move of OpenArc, this $129-billion Merrill team. You can only imagine the number of zeros at the end of a check that this team was offered by every major firm on the street. And in the span of a decade, they got those offers. Independence, making this enormous leap, was not the first thing they looked at, was not necessarily their first choice. But as they began, in their case, to really consider how limited they felt on the things they wanted to be able to do for clients… By the way, I don’t want to steal anybody’s thunder because we’re going to be launching a podcast specifically talking about this deal and this move, so I’ll save that for… Louis Diamond, our partner, and Shirl Penney, the CEO and founder of Dynasty, are going to be talking about it and they’ll cover all of that. But I just want to give the example that as this team began to realize, certainly in the last five years, how much things had changed at Merrill and how incongruent they felt between their goals, the goals for the business, the goals for serving clients, and what the firm was asking of them since Bank of America came to town, it became impossible to just say, “Holy cow, we can get a check with a lot of zeros at the end of it.” They couldn’t not see the benefits of everything else, the benefits that creating their own independent entity could bring them. Jason Diamond: I agree with that. I will play devil’s advocate a little bit here and say, “I think what you’re really talking about is the trade-off.” They’re not martyrs, they’re not altruistic and said, “We don’t want your hundreds of millions of dollars.” I think what you’re talking about is the trade-off between near-term upfront recruiting deals, which is the primary means by which the wirehouses, the regionals, the boutique firms recruit. Right? The traditional forgivable loan structure is all about a short term de-risking of the move, a monetization event in the near term where they’re paying you some percentage of revenue, 350%, 400% of revenue, tied to a forgivable loan. But that’s your bite of the apple in that example. With the example of a move to independence, you’ll lose, in some cases, all of that upfront monetization. So this example you’re talking about is a good example where they got no upfront transition dollars because they launched an RIA. But, and this is a very important caveat, they know they are building equity and ownership in something that is going to, at the current rate, be worth a preposterous multiple if and when they decide to sell it. So I assume that has to be part of this conversation around independence is, it’s not that you don’t care about monetizing the business, it’s that you plan to monetize the business in a different and probably more significant way. Fair? Mindy Diamond: Beyond fair. 1000%, that’s absolutely correct. Again, not only making it about this example, but it’s a good example. So again, the possibility of getting a check with a lot of zeros on it, and by the way, also tapping into an already established well-familiar, well-run infrastructure. Think about how much easier the move would’ve been, to jump from Merrill Lynch to Morgan Stanley, and not probably was their first choice, if they were going to go the traditional route. Think about how much easier the due diligence process… how much less heavy the lift would’ve been in terms of due diligence, but certainly from a short-term upfront perspective. And that’s really the key, is that not everyone has the appetite to bet on the long term. To me, that’s the beauty of the industry landscape as it’s evolved and the waterfall of possibilities today. If you’re a great team, and there are so many great teams, you’re growing, you’ve got a multi-generational bench of advisors, you’ve got a succession plan, you’ve got sticky clients, you don’t have 5,000 clients but you have 100 or 200 relationships, you’ve got a great business that you’ve got options for it, there’s no right or wrong. It’s, “What do I want to be when I grow up?”, and, “How do I want to live my business life?” And if you query 10 of those great teams, five of them will wind up moving to the traditional space. That doesn’t make it wrong, it’s just, “That’s what’s right for them.” But the other five will have entrepreneurial drive, will value the long term, and willing to forego the short-term upside in order to bet on themselves for the long term. And holy cow, again, we’ll save that for the episode that Shirl and Louis do to talk about what those multiples could look like, but I don’t think there’s enough zeros on the calculator to begin to think about what that business… OpenArc’s business will be worth even as little as five years from now. Jason Diamond: I agree with that. I think the one point I would probably make in defense of people who go the traditional firm route… Actually, two points. Number one, I don’t think it’s only about, “I am not willing to bet on myself, and I don’t want to delay the monetization event.” I think for some people, the idea of being independent and putting the toner in the copy machine and the little K-cups, that’s just not appealing. I like going into a branch and they have everything, my desk is all set up. So that’s one caveat I’d make that some people just prefer the traditional firm world. The other caveat I’d make is there are advisors who, rightly or wrongly, believe in the brand name of the firm mattering. So there are some advisors who say, “Look, I am a good advisor, but my ability to land and grow business is tied very closely to XYZ firm/brand, Morgan Stanley.” I think, a lot of times, we find that’s not always the case as much as advisors believe. But I’m just trying to think of a couple scenarios where there are advisors who genuinely prefer or need or want the stability, big brand, resources of the biggest firms on the planet. Mindy Diamond: I totally agree. Actually, thank you for bringing those two caveats up because, I’d say, there’s a third caveat. Someone can’t go independent, they don’t have a next gen. They don’t have someone that could do the heavy lifting, if they’re not capable of doing it on their own, to build an independent firm. They don’t have entrepreneurial spirit. They’re three years from retirement, and they don’t have the kind of time that it takes to really build the value of an independent practice. And we have great respect for those people. But again, the cool thing about the industry landscape is that as it’s evolved, there’s something for everyone. It doesn’t necessarily mean that the only choice is stay put or go to UBS. Jason Diamond: Agree. In fact, there’s probably even versions of independence. For example, if you don’t have a successor, well, there are versions of independence that might work where there’s a monetization event on the backend where somebody can buy and inherit your book. So that is probably the coolest or most interesting thing, the most exciting thing anyway, about the industry landscape in the last, really call it, five years anyway, probably even a little sooner than that is, especially in the independent side of things, there are options that check just about every box. You as the advisor choose what elements… And this gets back to your begin with the end in mind. Choose what elements of the business you like, and want to maintain control over. Choose what elements of the business you don’t, and there is probably a solution out there that works to check those boxes. Mindy Diamond: And then, that goes back to what we were saying. Even if you are 90% satisfied and 99% certain you would never make a move, if you haven’t gotten educated, in some capacity, whether it be listening to a podcast, reading articles, talking to a recruiter, talking to other firms, talking to friends and colleagues at other firms, or some combination of all of the above, in the last five years, I think you’re doing yourself a disservice. And again, not because in any way we’re trying to sell you on making a move, but because we believe knowledge is power and it looks different than it did. So make sure that you’re challenging your own assumptions, and that you’re really crystal-clear that what you believe or what you believe five years ago is still true today. Jason Diamond: This is a little bit of a gear shift, but I think there’s a tie in here. If you are an advisor now, or a point in their career, they’re wise to at least get educated, pick their heads up, understand what’s out there. But then, there’s the question of, “When is due diligence done?” But I’m going to frame this through a different lens here, which is, “Now, I’m an advisor, I’ve done due diligence, I’ve talked to maybe three to five strategic firms.” Is there typically an aha moment when an advisor says, “Oh, my god. It’s RBC, and I need to go that way and I know I need to move”? Or is it more process driven than that? What are your thoughts? Because I think a lot of advisors struggle with that. And I often find myself telling advisors, “Trust the process here and you’ll know when… You don’t have to know right away in the first inning of due diligence which firm or which model you’re meeting, or even if you’re going to make a move.” But curious what your thoughts are on this one. Mindy Diamond: Yeah. In fact, we hope you don’t. We hope that you don’t go into this process with preconceived notions, we hope that you don’t make a decision after one meeting, because we do think that there’s value in the process. And people get to that aha moment at different times. You and I are working with a team, right now, that is 22 meetings in. And that’s not to say every process takes 22 meetings, but the team is sort of taking it slowly. They started out looking at five or six firms. They’ve narrowed it down now to three. The goal is to get to two or one, then to get to a home office visit to the one that’s their first choice. They’re absolutely getting closer. And I’m probably exaggerating at 22 meetings, but I’m making a point, that even at this point in the game, which is probably a good, would you say, five months into the due diligence process, I don’t know that they’ve had an aha moment. They have an aha moment that they know they don’t want another wirehouse. They don’t want to be independent because the senior member of the team is exactly that person we just described, that he doesn’t have the kind of time in the business in order to make independence worthwhile- Jason Diamond: Or drive. They just don’t want independence. Mindy Diamond: Right, and the next generation doesn’t really want it. So at this point of the game, the aha moment is think we want a regional firm or a boutique firm. But it’s not an aha moment yet that it’s going to be this firm, and that’s I think a good point. A lot of times, the aha moment is the model, first, and then the firm. Jason Diamond: Sometimes, deal can be the type like, “Okay. I know I love the regional firms, but one is offering a deal that’s 100% better,” and that’s often when we actually will counsel advisors, “It’s okay to consider the deal.” The deal is a factor, as you said earlier. Mindy Diamond: If I can, that’s actually a great point. That’s the perfect example of where, “Always consider the deal, just don’t make it your primary or first consideration.” Jason Diamond: Right. Mindy Diamond: So if you’ve done all the right due diligence and two firms or two opportunities stack up next to each other perfectly, they both will allow you to move the needle significantly enough. If they both will allow you to do better for clients and grow faster, and do everything else that’s important to you, then it’s absolutely time to make deal the tiebreaker. Jason Diamond: So you threw out five months and talking about 22 meetings, let’s table that. An advisor calls you, Mindy, this morning and says, “Not unhappy, but I’m getting that itch.” Give me the average time it takes them from that first call this morning to the moment they resigned from their firm, and then give me the quickest they could do it if they needed to. Mindy Diamond: Yeah. Let me start out by saying that those calls we get from advisors come in two different categories. One is, “Yeah, getting the itch. The straw that broke the camel’s back happened yesterday when X happened.” But the other call, the one we mentioned earlier, which is, “I am 90% happy. I am growing exponentially. I get time to coach my kids’ soccer game. I have great quality of life. I have a great team. I’ve been here 30 or 40 years, and life is good. I’m watching more of my colleagues go or I’m feeling more pain,” fill in the blank for whatever that is. “Even though I’m 90% happy and I’m 100% convinced I don’t want to move, that moving is a hassle, I can’t not see the handwriting on the wall and I at least need to get educated.” So let’s assume that we get one of those calls. The reason I am calling out the difference between the two is because the time it takes to do the due diligence is usually different. If someone is already at the point where they know that they’re unhappy and likely to move, the due diligence process usually runs quicker. The due diligence process for somebody that’s mostly happy and just beginning to get curious, sort of the latter example, might take a little longer. Jason Diamond: Give me some real parameters to it. Mindy Diamond: Well, I’d love to hear what you think. What’s swirling in my head, it’s all over the map, but I’m going to say typically six months. Jason Diamond: Six months was the number I was about to throw out as well. And I think the quickest you want to do this is three months. Anything beyond that starts to be basically a fire drill. We’ve done deals quicker than that obviously, an advisor’s going to or has been terminated. But I think six months in earnest is a good, healthy timeline. Especially, by the way, because a lot of firms are busy, we’re hearing this from a lot of the firm side of things these days. Depending upon what firm you’re moving to, you need to make sure that the firm can handle you. You want to get their A team upon your breakaway and your transition, no matter what firm that is. Mindy Diamond: Do you think, Jason, that it’s six months from, “Gee, I’m a little curious. I want to start to look. I want to begin to do due diligence. What does that look like?”, to, “My butt is in a new seat”? Jason Diamond: No. Because I think in the example where you’re just like, “Eh, I’m a little unhappy,” those early innings conversations typically play out slowly because the guy who’s 90% happy is in no rush to say, “Set me up with a bunch of firms, and let’s talk about it.” In those instances, it could take a year and a half because I think what happens really there is then there’s a catalyst event that takes them from your category two to category one. Right? They went from a little unhappy, just curious, to the straw that broke the camel’s back. And that’s when then they shift into the more… or they say the firm has… A good example, UBS, upset a lot of advisors with the compensation plan. They recently walked back a lot of those changes. I’m certain there will be some advisors who say, “This is a nod to attrition. I’ve seen from management what I need to see, and I’m going to stay put.” Equally, probably plenty of advisors who say, “It’s too little too late.” Mindy Diamond: Let me say something, and again, not to make this episode at all about this team in Atlanta, but that was a ten-year conversation for us. Literally, 10 years ago, maybe even 12 years ago, but let’s say 10, one of the senior partners on the team had called to say, “Curious, really happy, doing incredibly well. Zero chance we are moving in the next year or two or five.” But look, what don’t we know? And every year, we would then have a conversation about what the landscape looked like. But I’m going to say it was six years ago when the conversation shifted from, “Really happy, convinced we’re staying,” to, “starting to think we might leave at some point,” but another six years until this really happened. Now, that’s a good example because they were going independent. The transition itself probably took a year, year and a half. Jason Diamond: And the size and complexity of the team, by the way, probably amplifies that as well. Mindy Diamond: Well, there are outliers on either side, and that’s the point I wanted to make. Correct. Jason Diamond: Very fair. I’m glad you bring that up because there’s no cookie-cutter answer. It totally depends on the makeup of the business, where you’re going, how you’re going, when you’re going. I think we have time for two more questions, and I want to make sure we get to this because we’ve talked about this through the lens of the advisor and the advisor’s team. We haven’t talked much about the client experience, and that is clearly self-portability, in general, is something that gives advisors anxiety rightfully so. I think if you could tell a lot of advisors with 100% certainty that their book would move, I think many more would be interested in moving. I think concerns about portability, a lot of times, would keep advisors in seats. I guess what I’m getting at is because that initial client conversation is so important, is there anything you coach advisors to think about or to say to clients or potential clients as they consider a change, a transition? Mindy Diamond: Well, you have to be mindful certainly of your own employment agreement and legal considerations of pre-soliciting- Jason Diamond: Important point. Mindy Diamond: No way are any of us advocating for pre-solicitation. But you do have to have a pretty good sense in your mind without asking the client specifically, who is likely to come and who not. And the determination, the sort of hypothesis or the supposition, of who will come and who will not has everything to do with where you’re going and the value proposition, “Will I be able to make a compelling enough point? Will I have compelling enough reasons where it’s not about me, the advisor, it’s about you, the clients, about how I will better be able to service them? And if I’m able to say to a client, ‘If I make a move or I’m making this move and I’m now going to be able to do X, Y, and Z for you,’ I’m much more confident that they will be able to come?” In the case of this OpenArc deal, the Atlanta team, they did a lot of retirement plan business, so they had to be really concerned about how they were going to position this move and the new brand separating from Merrill brand, how they were going to convince their Fortune 500 clients that this was the right move. So it always has to start with what’s best for clients and how will I pitch it, if you will. Jason Diamond: I love how you answered that because it’s like two different answers to me. Part one is handicapping the portability, and that’s pre-transition during the due diligence process. Honestly, if you’re an advisor, you could do that now, right? If I were to make a move, “Here’s my client who I know with 100% certainty would follow me. Here’s the maybes, here’s the no,” you come up with a weighted average portability metric. I totally agree with you on that. And then the second piece of it is you have to be constantly thinking this option might sound the best to you, but remember, and I agree, not pre-solicit, but post-transition, you’re going to have to sell it to your clients. So you need to be thinking about every conversation you have with every firm through that lens. Do you agree with that? Meaning I’m going to move my business from UBS to Morgan Stanley. You get paid a big check, but can you articulate the clients- Mindy Diamond: Yeah, 1000%. It’s such a good point because, and we’re going to give you some inside baseball here, the number one question that any advisor who is in traffic with any firm or any model needs to ask is, put words in my mouth, “If we were fast forwarding to the day I made a move and joined your firm or joined your model, help me to understand what would the pitch to my clients sound like.” And then, you need to sort of absorb that pitch from the perspective of your clients. Put yourself in the shoes of your oldest clients, of your youngest clients, of your most important clients, of your middle-of-the-road clients, of your middle net worth clients, of the institutional clients, fill in the blank, “Does that value proposition fit?” That is one of the best ways to assess whether a firm or an opportunity is better enough or good enough for you. Jason Diamond: It’s such a good answer, and I love the inside baseball look there. Also, by the way, it has this side benefit of you’re forcing the managers or the recruiters to articulate almost like a succinct value prop on their firm. Right? Tell me, hypothetically, what would I say to clients about, and you’re just picking on Morgan, “Why is Morgan Stanley better than my current firm?” And that answer ought to be compelling. In closing, I want to wrap this up with a question around the difficulty of a move. You’ve been in this business now 30 years, I think it’s almost exactly 30 years. Has it gotten easier logistically to transition? And do you see that trend continuing, let’s say, because of partially things like AI, DocuSign and the like? What are your thoughts on the nuts and bolts of transitioning? Mindy Diamond: There’s no question it’s gotten easier. There’s no question that, from a legal perspective, the advent of broker protocol certainly makes it less scary or less risky to make a move. But there are plenty of moves that are made as a non-protocol move, and that’s not always the case. And the ecosystem, I should say, has gotten better to support the advisor in transition. Legal counsel, all they do all day long is facilitate these moves. Third-party consultancies, people like us that have been at it 30 years and have seen it all, and all the mistakes have already been made, we know how to do it. But with that said, moving is a hassle. No matter how much better the support system has gotten, no matter how many times a manager or a firm has transitioned advisors, it is a hassle to move. It is disruptive. It is a lot. And again, this statement is not going to win me a place in the headhunter hall of fame, but you should absolutely not consider a move unless you have the appetite for some risk, for some breakage, meaning some loss of clients, and you’re willing to shrink to grow, and you’ve got an appetite for some hassle factor to work perhaps harder for a short period of time than you have in a while. If you don’t have that, then no matter how unhappy you are, you really need to seriously consider whether moving is the best way to solve your problems. Jason Diamond: Yeah. It’s a really great way to tie a bow on this episode. It was a lot of fun. I’m excited. I think that would be 2037 based on your 12-year timeline. So the next $129-billion team, we’ll have to schedule that episode out for 10 or 12 years from now. But Mindy, thank you so much for sharing your years of wisdom and expertise with us. This was a fantastic episode. I had a lot of fun. Mindy Diamond: Yeah, I loved it too. Thank you, my pleasure. Jason Diamond: Thank you for joining us. We'll be back with a new episode next week, so be sure to listen in. Mindy Diamond: As a financial advisor, you hold yourself to the highest standards of integrity, honesty, and credibility. You are successful because you take your professional responsibility seriously and are dedicated to your clients. But are you living your best business life? Are your goals aligned with your firms, or could a better option exist? Should I Stay or Should I Go? is a book written with you in mind. It’s a self-guided journey that walks you through the key steps that we take with our advisor clients. This strategic thought process and road map to professional self-discovery is designed to help you ask the right questions and think critically and objectively, whether you’re considering change or not. Learn how to get your copy at diamond-consultants.com/thebook.     The Advisor Transition Playbook: Inside Baseball on Due Diligence, the Move, and Everything In Between A Special Industry Update with Jason Diamond and Mindy Diamond. Jason Diamond: Welcome to a replay of one of the most popular episodes from our podcast series for financial advisors, The Advisor Transition Playbook: Inside Baseball on Due Diligence, the Move, and Everything In Between. It's Part 1 of a 2-Part Industry Update with Mindy Diamond. I’m Jason Diamond and this is the Diamond Podcast for Financial Advisors. Mindy Diamond: At Diamond Consultants, we help elite advisors identify the right environment for their businesses to thrive, whether that’s at a wirehouse, boutique, or independent firm. With nearly three decades of experience, we’ve guided thousands of advisors and represented more than a quarter of a trillion dollars in assets transitioned. And each year, one in four advisors managing a billion dollars or more, who change firms, are our clients. Our process is education driven and based on building relationships, starting as your strategic partner well before you’re even thinking of a move. To schedule a confidential conversation, call us at (908) 879-1002. Wondering why advisors change firms, and where they’re headed? Are transition deals going up or down? Those very questions and more inspired us to create our annual Advisor Transition Report. It’s the award-winning data-driven resource designed for advisors that connects the dots between the motivations around movement and the firm’s appetite for top talent. Arm yourself with the knowledge you need to make smart decisions. Download your copy at diamond-consultants.com/transitionreport. Jason Diamond: Everything about a transition can seem incredibly overwhelming. From understanding the whys of a move, then conducting due diligence, and onto aligning the right models and selecting the best firms, it might seem like a fairly linear process. And for some, it can be. But for others, the layers of minutia can be daunting. Essentially, it comes down to the adage, “You don’t know what you don’t know.” So the goal of this episode is to share some inside baseball in how to get from here to there. I asked Mindy Diamond to join me to help draw from decades of experience in helping advisors through their transitions. We’ve dived into the misconceptions, the common

One of the biggest misconceptions most people have is we think other people actually care about us.    And nothing can be further from the truth.    People only care about what they care about.    When it comes to sales, it's important to remember, most popelpe are not going to jump at the first offer you make.    And I see so many people run the typical line of "Hey buy my shit."   "If you like this, then you'll really like this....it's only XYZ-dollars."    The truth is, you have to be a bit smoother when you're approaching people.    It requires you actually caring enough to take the time to find out what they like.    What they think.    What they enjoy doing.    Why they do what they do.     So how do you build rapport long enough to have a conversation and gain someone's trust, especailly if they're a perfect stranger?    I'm glad you asked.    I'm going to cover how to be a socail recon master in this episode and how to leverage it to make more connections.    Build relationships.    Make more offers.    And close more sales.    About the ReWire Podcast   The ReWire Podcast with Ryan Stewman – Dive into powerful insights as Ryan Stewman, the HardCore Closer, breaks down mental barriers and shares actionable steps to rewire your thoughts. Each episode is a fast-paced journey designed to reshape your mindset, align your actions, and guide you toward becoming the best version of yourself. Join in for a daily dose of real talk that empowers you to embrace change and unlock your full potential.    Learn how you can become a member of a powerful community consistently rewiring itself for success at https://www.jointheapex.com/   Rise Above 

Ženy XYZ #46: Feministický podcast, ve kterém Silvie Lauder, Markéta Plíhalová a Clara Zanga řeší důležitá aktuální témata. Ostře řezaná čelist, uhrančivé oči a co nejnižší procento tuku. Jako vedlejší důsledky poruchy příjmu potravy, neplodnost nebo rozlámané kosti v obličeji. To je ve zkratce looksmaxxing, kdysi okrajový fenomén manosféry, dnes poměrně rozšířené mužské hnutí, které věří, že životní úspěch a štěstí jsou úzce svázány se vzhledem. Jak tento trend mužům a chlapcům ubližuje? Co má společného s eugenikou a kde se vzalo přesvědčení, že ženy na mužích zajímá pouze atraktivní vzhled? O tom debatovaly redaktorky Markéta Plíhalová, Clara Zanga a Silvie Lauder.

XYZ

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(26:13) Forza Horizon 6(28:10) Prześladowania Bonkola i SouShibo(35:52) Sony wraca do ekskluzywności(44:10) LEGO Batman: Dziedzictwo Mrocznego Rycerza - pierwsze wrażeniaMeetUp65: Brama do Chinhttps://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScoyXpoMxfGYcUVF1h3C2uFq4sJMhfiNciNhdAAF76Piiw1kg/viewform#DRIVE Rallyhttps://store.steampowered.com/app/2494780/DRIVE_Rally/BFS
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https://store.steampowered.com/app/3509950/Gun_in_a_Well/XYZ - DEMO OUT NOW TRAILERhttps://youtu.be/MiHty-eH_CY?si=VQm66Wu-s0gsSGO6Gun in a Well — Gameplay Trailerhttps://youtu.be/jBQx5Q4IGss?si=Sw-SI3TymjnSzjTY#DRIVE Rally | Gameplay Trailerhttps://youtu.be/bFQKXF8DFl4?si=0wggSQat3IaRlP13Foxy Dumplings - Official Announcement Teaser Trailerhttps://youtu.be/IvYqoikhSbI?si=Iy3j5Uaw4oFHC3p-To już pewne: PlayStation rakiem wycofuje się z PC. W nowe gry ekskluzywne Sony zagramy wyłącznie na PS5 i PS6https://www.gry-online.pl/newsroom/to-juz-pewne-playstation-rakiem-wycofuje-sie-z-pc-w-nowe-gry-eksk/zc30e13#google_vignetteLEGO® Batman™: Legacy of the Dark Knight – Official Launch Trailerhttps://youtu.be/DfJaUpW_P00?si=geABiI4m0ll9GBvXGrupa Rock i Borys na FB - https://www.facebook.com/groups/805231679816756/Podcast Remigiusz "Pojęcia Nie Mam" Maciaszekhttps://tinyurl.com/yfx4s5zzShorty Rock i Boryshttps://www.facebook.com/rockiboryshttps://www.tiktok.com/@borysniespielakSerwer Discord podcastu Rock i Borys!https://discord.com/invite/AMUHt4JEvdSłuchaj nas na Lectonie: https://lectonapp.com/p/rckbrsSłuchaj nas na Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2WxzUqjSłuchaj nas na iTunes: https://apple.co/2Jz7MPSProgram LIVE w niedzielę od osiemnastej - https://jarock.pl/live/rockRock i Borys to program o grach, technologii i życiu

Ženy XYZ #45: Feministický podcast, ve kterém Silvie Lauder, Markéta Plíhalová a Clara Zanga řeší důležitá aktuální témata. ožná jste se také ve škole učili, že před patriarchátem existoval bájný matriarchát, jehož dokladem jsou nálezy sošek, takzvaných venuší. Dnes už víme, že to tak nebylo, to ale neznamená, že neexistovala řada rovnostářských společností, v jejichž centru byly ženy. Některá společenství takto fungují dodnes. Čím se od nich můžeme inspirovat? A skončily by všechny války, kdyby světu vládly ženy? Na živém natáčení podcastu Ženy XYZ ve Zlíně si o tom povídaly redaktorky Respektu Silvie Lauder, Markéta Plíhalová a Clara Zanga.

Send us Fan MailMost managers think strong leadership means holding regular one-on-one meetings. But if those conversations are nothing more than project updates and task reviews, your team is not being led. They are being supervised.In this episode of The Mid-Career GPS Podcast, leadership and career coach, keynote speaker, and host John Neral breaks down the three leadership skills that separate transactional managers from impactful leaders. If you are a mid-career professional trying to become a stronger leader, get promoted, improve team performance, or create more influence at work, this episode gives you practical leadership strategies you can use immediately.We start by rethinking the purpose of one-on-one meetings. Instead of treating them like weekly status reports, I share a simple framework centered around clarity, ownership, and growth so your conversations become more intentional, developmental, and productive.Then we tackle one of the biggest leadership mistakes I see: avoiding direct feedback. Too many managers soften difficult conversations to avoid discomfort, only to create confusion, frustration, and poor performance later. I explain why the “be nice” instinct often backfires and how employees end up blindsided during performance reviews because no one addressed the issue earlier.You will also learn a practical XYZ feedback framework you can immediately apply with your team: “When you did X, it impacted Y, and going forward, I need you to do Z.”Finally, we explore one of the most overlooked leadership responsibilities: advocacy. Strong leaders do more than manage performance. They represent their people when those employees are not in the room. I share how advocating for your team by naming wins, connecting contributions to business outcomes, and creating visibility can lead to stronger engagement, stretch opportunities, promotions, and career growth.If you want to improve your leadership presence, become a more trusted manager, and position yourself for greater career advancement, this episode will challenge how you think about leadership and show you how to SHOW UP more intentionally.Support the showIf this episode resonated with you and you want more support in how you SHOW UP for your career and life, I want to invite you to join the SHOW UP Leadership Lab. This is my group membership program where you'll get the clarity and support you need to SHOW UP more impactfully and effectively in your life and career. Visit https://johnneral.com/showup to join. Please leave a rating and review on Apple Podcasts here.Connect with John on LinkedIn here.Get John's New Mid-Career Journal on Amazon here.  Follow John on Instagram @johnneralcoaching. Subscribe to John's YouTube Channel here.  

According to Highspot’s Go-To-Market Gap Report, 98% of leaders say their GTM strategy is active, but only 10% see it driving results. The reason for that? Strategy abounds. Real meaningful execution, not so much. So how do you overcome the go-to-market performance gap and bridge that growing rift between strategy and execution? Riley Rogers: Hi, and welcome to the Win/Win Podcast. I’m your host, Riley Rogers. Join us as we dive into changing trends in the workplace and how to navigate them successfully. Here to discuss this topic is Jacob Keith, senior revenue enablement specialist at HealthJoy. Thank you so much for joining us today, Jacob. I’m super excited to dive into your experience. So could you kick us off just by sharing a little bit about yourself, your background, and the role you’re in currently? Jacob Keeth: Yeah, absolutely. Also, Riley, thanks so much for having me on. I’m really grateful and excited that we get the chance to chat about something so consequential and oddly kind of fun. So I’m just looking forward to it. My name’s Jacob. Professionally speaking, I’ve been working in enablement for just shy of five years and worked in sales for a year prior to that doing SDR prospecting work. I’ve done all types of enablement, everything from onboarding-focused work to focusing on BDRs and prospecting. Now at my current company, HealthJoy, it’s been so much fun. We’re operating in primarily a channel sales method, so we’re working through individuals who then sell our product, which has been a really fun and complicated task from the enablement perspective. We’ll dive all into that today. RR: Awesome. So exciting that you’re in a role that’s challenging you and building on all of those skills that you were learning and picking up along the way. Before we jump in, I’d love if you could set the stage for those of us not familiar with HealthJoy—who you are, what you do, who you serve, and then maybe a little bit of that sales motion that you touched on. JK: HealthJoy is a benefits operating system, and really what we do is help make sure that companies’ benefits strategies and plans actually work as designed. What do I mean by that? Well, I’m sure, Riley, as you’ve experienced too, companies typically have a pretty fragmented benefits plan, right? There’s the medical plan, the dental plan, maybe individual solutions. Usually these companies all have different logins, different ways to access them, and there’s not necessarily a concrete place where you can go to get all that information inside of one environment. Also, the reality is, if I’m debating whether I need to go to the ER right now, I can tell you the last place I’m gonna go is logging into my company’s intranet to figure out which ER is best applicable to me and which one is likely gonna work with my insurance. We make healthcare decisions through the path of least resistance, and frankly, they’re usually made in situations where we don’t have the luxury of time. This is really where HealthJoy can come in. With HealthJoy, companies can unite that benefits ecosystem into one seamless platform. We use an AI assistant called Joy AI, as well as human concierges, to give our end members or employees personalized guidance and proactive support. That’s really where HealthJoy finds itself: being that benefits operating system that puts everything together and helps you, Riley, make the right decision at the right time. So that’s the big-picture view of what the company is and what we do. Now, how do we actually do it? The way HealthJoy operates is we work through what you’d call a benefits consultant. Your HR team at your business is probably working with an external benefits agency, consultant, or broker to help curate and strategize that benefits plan to maximize its effectiveness and cost for the business. We work through them, build really meaningful relationships with brokers all across the United States, and then from there, when there’s strategic alignment and the broker believes in us and our message, they’ll introduce us to clients where they think we can help that company advance its mission because they align with the kinds of things we’re offering. So that’s what we’d call a channel sales methodology. We’re working with people who then sell in tandem with us. From an enablement perspective, you’re not only trying to enable your selling team, but you’re also asking: how can I best train these folks to then go and enable the hundreds of brokers they’re all working with individually around the country? RR: I think your marketing and comms team is really gonna be thrilled because that was a great pitch. It almost seems like you have to, as an enabler, play a game of telephone. You have one message to share with folks internally that you then need them to get out the right way externally. It sounds like it’s quite the challenge, especially given that, like you shared, HealthJoy is in kind of a unique position at the intersection of tech and all of the wonderful complexity that comes with healthcare. So how does that industry challenge shape the way your go-to-market teams need to operate, and what kind of challenges does that create for you on the enablement side? JK: Yeah, that complexity gives me a lot of job security. So it is a real challenge. One thing HealthJoy has gotten really good at over the last year is defining who our ideal customer is. Is it the end-user employer? Is it the member who would experience it? Is it the broker we’re targeting? And it really is the broker. Those are the folks we’re working with, building meaningful relationships with, and who can open up so much opportunity for us as a business. When a broker believes in us, it pays huge dividends in both effectiveness and outcomes. At that intersection of tech and healthcare, another interesting element that often shows up in enablement is onboarding. You look at who we hire as our sales reps—we’re looking for people who typically have a strong background in healthcare and great existing relationships with brokers around the United States. Then they’re coming into an environment where maybe they weren’t in a tech environment at all. So how do we equip these individuals to feel really confident in a remote sales environment that’s very tech-forward? HealthJoy as a company is also heavily leaning into AI internally and externally. So convincing our sellers that the direction we’re taking as a company is one they can understand, intuit, and promote into the market is a real challenge. It’s multi-step. An adage I try to live by as an enabler—and this is really a hallmark of adult education—is the question: what’s in it for me? If it’s not relevant for that seller, they’re not going to retain it, even if they want to. Even if their boss is pleading with them, “You have to know this. This has to make sense for you.” If there’s not an immediate connection to why this matters for me and my paycheck at the end of the day, it’s not going to stick. That’s not selfishness. That’s just the reality of how adults learn and prioritize what’s important. So for us, we have to make sure the messages we’re positioning—whether they’re for the seller to use, for the seller to communicate to their broker, or for the end member—have a really clear through line. The rep needs to know what’s in it for them and who that message is for throughout. It can be complicated. It can be a real challenge to make sure we’re nailing that every single time. I get a negative shiver down my spine every time I hear a message about what HealthJoy is that doesn’t align with the message we’re putting out into the market. Because I know for every one rep who says that, there’s probably a dozen brokers who hear it too. And we’re working with brokers over the course of years. So if that broker got a demo of HealthJoy three years ago and thinks, “I know it. I’m good to move forward,” how do we keep our existing brokers who love us educated on what’s happening across the market and how we’re evolving as a company? RR: It’s kind of fascinating. I feel like sometimes you talk to folks and the challenge of bringing in sellers is getting them up to speed on the complex side of the industry. If I’m chatting with fintech customers, it’s understanding the financial environment. Or with health tech customers, it’s learning how to speak about healthcare. But you have the reverse challenge. You’re bringing in sales reps who maybe were in the field or in more traditional spaces, and now you need to get them up to speed on all of the innovation that comes with a tech company. So it’s a very unique challenge, and it sounds like it’s one you’re well-equipped to tackle. You described yourself as someone who really excels at turning ideas into repeatable, measurable processes. I’d love if you could tell us, from your perspective, how you’re connecting strategy to execution, because as that stat we opened with tells us, things tend to get lost in translation. JK: For me, when it comes to turning things into repeatable and measurable processes—especially as an enablement team of one—my thought is this: pick really carefully and be ready to pivot. Especially in a startup environment, odds are if you’re an enablement team of one, you’re in a company that’s still developing. There isn’t a strong adherence to “the way things have always been,” or a large team and lots of infrastructure supporting the organization. It’s you. You are the brand of enablement. Who you represent and how you show up is what enablement is perceived as by your organization every single time. So with that, be really careful about what you choose to make repeatable. I get so many asks every month: “Hey, I’d love to make a process on this,” or “Can we update XYZ?” But I have to be mindful of the opportunity cost of saying yes to developing more things, because all of those things have downstream maintenance and upkeep. It’s more to manage, which steals time I wasn’t intending to give six months from now. So when it comes to measurable processes, we basically say: let’s take the idea and find a couple key metrics. As a team of one, pick one or two that really matter to your executives, then ask yourself: is this worth keeping track of? Is this worth my bandwidth over the next year or two? There’s another line our CEO says frequently: “80% today is better than 100% two weeks from now.” Now, that doesn’t mean deliver lackluster work. But especially as an enablement person, I’m a perfectionist. I want things to look and feel really good. I want them to be intuitive and usable. But sometimes the pace of the organization demands that we move faster. If I can embody the reality that 80% today is better than 100% later, I can deliver work that really matters, drives impact, and still allows me to pivot and adapt quickly. Because the more perfect we make something, the more maintenance it often requires. That’s a profound hidden cost for enablement organizations: what does it cost to maintain the standards you’re presenting? That’s a lesson I’ve had to learn the hard way. I’ve done it well and really poorly at different points in my career. And I think it can really make or break your own love of enablement—whether it’s something you can continue to grow in, or whether you end up stuck inside the castle you built yourself. RR: I think you just gave us a framework of two very practical questions you can ask yourself as you’re looking at a request from your sales team or something coming cross-functionally: Is it going to be valuable for me to invest in this? And what does timely execution look like? How can I get something out that is useful and delivers business value, even if it doesn’t meet every single standard I have? That’s really helpful for anybody who’s trying to ruthlessly prioritize, which I know is hard. JK: Because it’s all important, right? Everyone has great ideas, but if 30 things fall in your lap to manage and maintain, congrats—you just built yourself three jobs, none of which have much capacity to strategically grow in the future. It becomes about project and program maintenance, which is valuable and important, but as a team of one or a lean enablement team, it’s a non-starter. It can’t be part of the equation that often. And when it is, it’s gotta be really important to make it worthwhile. RR: 100%. I wonder if we can ground this thinking in an example. Recently, HealthJoy launched a new go-to-market message. So, when you’re talking about scaling ideas and execution—in this case, a new message and a new market perception—what do you find are the key ingredients to success in making that strategy become reality? JK: Yeah, absolutely. For 2026, our message is: “HealthJoy is the benefits operating system that makes your benefits strategy work as designed.” I think the way we get this to stick in the market with these very disparate audiences is the same story internally as well. We have to make sure everyone’s on the same page. A couple of things stand out for me from an adult education and enablement perspective. First, when you’re talking about large company-wide initiatives, you have to define the problem incredibly clearly. Why is what we’re doing right now not working? Again, getting at that adult education mentality of “what’s in it for me?” The reality is: what’s happening now isn’t working for you. If it’s not a compelling and inspiring vision, people won’t care. They’ll stick with what they’re doing today because the status quo is always easier than change. I need to understand that changing my behavior and changing how I’m presenting messaging in the market means every demo and sales pitch now has to adjust because of this. That’s no small lift. So be really clear about what’s not working now, where we’re going in the future, why it’s better, and why sellers should care. Second: repetition. I’m a really big fan of multimodal learning for reps. That means delivering content through stand-and-present sessions, team trainings, one-on-one conversations, learning management systems, videos—I've even recorded podcasts. You have to hit learners in different ways from where they are. One thing I can never let myself forget is that I cannot assume people are paying attention the first time. They’re distracted with XYZ—you fill in the blank. We owe double the responsibility to be repetitive with our content if we actually want it to stick. Saying, “Well, I trained on it once. I sent the deliverable. I gave the email recap. That should be enough,” isn’t enough. In enablement, we should be asking not whether we think we did enough, but whether it actually worked. And where we can, let’s let reps weigh in on the decisions. Obviously, a single seller probably isn’t going to reshape your whole go-to-market message. But in our case, we had reps test this out in their markets first and give us feedback on what was resonating. Reps felt like they were part of the process from day one because they were brought into those conversations to help steer the organization. When we do these things together, it creates a deep sense of confidence and a steady vision. RR: Yeah, and it sounds like these are all layers of that foundational piece of “what’s in it for you?” How can we message that, and then how can I make sure that everywhere you’re working and telling our story, you have what you need to tell it the right way? I love that it all ladders up to that primary objective. JK: Because it’s fundamentally behavior change, right? How do we actually drive real behavior change instead of just checking boxes that say, “Well, this should’ve changed the behavior”? And in a remote environment, working with sellers who may be coming from non-tech backgrounds, this has to be done with excellence or it’s going to fail. RR: Mm-hmm. And when we’re talking about behavior change, can you share where a tool like Highspot fits into the picture and how you’re using it to bring new programs, processes, and this messaging shift to life? JK: The way I’ve positioned Highspot in the organization—and I think it’s gotten a lot of traction—is that it’s a beautiful place that reps can trust. That’s kind of my tagline for it. Primarily, we use Highspot to organize our internal sales policies, external sales collateral, Digital Rooms, and a couple of AutoDocs. How our reps mostly understand the platform is this: it’s the centralized database where they can trust they’re getting the most up-to-date content. They can send it out through the platform, track it, and see how it’s performing with customers. When I was interviewing for this role, I talked with a couple other enablement leaders, and one thing someone said really stuck with me: “Beautiful things get used.” Highspot, when you put in a little work, can look so pleasing and inviting. It’s just a great UI. When I came into the organization, there were three different versions of content in Highspot. It wasn’t well maintained for a variety of reasons. But I knew that to maximize the effectiveness of the platform, we had to clean it up and create a compelling vision for why reps should use this instead of their own private Google Drive with five downloaded resources. How could I give them a compelling vision that centralization is better? We started by making it really appealing, really beautiful, and simple to navigate. So when we talk about driving behavior change, you need tools in a remote environment that categorize what great looks like, make it really clear, create centralized expectations, and stop reps from running off like lone cowboys and cowgirls across the country. We need a central standard for what great looks like and what good content is. Highspot serves that role well because reps trust it. It’s cleaned up, it’s beautiful, and it’s enjoyable to use. And then on top of that, they get the tracking, benefits, and analytics on the backend. RR: If you look at the data, it shows that what you’re doing is working and that these philosophies are really resonating with your teams because you’ve driven 93% recurring usage of the platform. Pretty much everybody is coming back time and time again. When you’ve made something people want to come back to and find real value in, that’s fantastic. JK: It was honestly one of my proudest moments in my first few months here. When I joined HealthJoy a little over a year ago, Highspot was one of the first projects I took on as an enabler. I thought, “I want to revamp this experience.” At that point, the main concern I was hearing—because I met with every rep individually—was: “I don’t know what content is up to date. It takes me forever to find what I’m looking for.” In my brain, because my previous company used Highspot, I immediately thought: ding, ding, ding. There’s an easy solution to this. We have it. We just need to make this the default behavior. So I did a couple things. One, I pitched and presented it. I met with reps one-on-one to understand their problems, then met with some of them again to say, “Hey, here’s the solution. This is kind of your idea because you said this was an issue.” They had buy-in. Then, I built a treasure hunt, which was basically a 30-question quiz where reps had to navigate through Highspot, find resources, create pages, and complete tasks. Naturally, reps didn’t love the idea of homework. Who would? But about two months into my role, we had an onsite in Chicago. At a team dinner, one of the managers said in front of everyone: “Jacob, we’ve been talking and we’ve all agreed—we’re gonna do your treasure hunt.” That was a key turning point for us. If you want Highspot—or any tool—to work, reps need to have buy-in. And especially on enablement teams of one or two, you’re the brand. If they’re not bought into you, they’re not going to buy into what you’re implementing. RR: On that topic of making life easier, you mentioned a few use cases where Highspot comes into play with both optimization and time savings, especially with Digital Rooms and AutoDocs. With these capabilities fueling external sharing and customization to brokers’ processes, what workflow improvements have you seen, and how has that reduced complexity for the sales team? JK: I’ll give one example. Alongside a formal price quote, we send out a proposal form. It’s the more beautiful, easy-to-read version of the formal quote. It gives the compelling narrative for why someone should use the platform and what’s included in their package. Previously, the process was basically a Google Drive template where reps manually adjusted text boxes. I would hear stories of reps spending two to three hours realigning boxes into a single vertical line. And they’re like, “This is so dumb.” I understood the frustration, but proposals still have to look excellent. There’s no excuse. So that was the first AutoDoc we took on. In some cases, building a proposal was taking reps two to three hours. On average, probably about an hour if everything went well. We streamlined that process dramatically. Every prospect got a proposal, but the process went from 45–60 minutes down to at most 15 minutes, and on average about five. It took me a lot of hours upfront to build, but the payoff was immediate. I think within the first year, something like 70 proposals had already been sent through that auto doc. When I calculated the time savings, I was thrilled. And I could’ve built that AutoDoc six months earlier, but because we didn’t yet have the platform engagement and trust, nobody would’ve trusted what came next. We had to solve the foundational issues first: engagement and trust. Once reps believed this was better than the alternatives, then we could deliver the “chef’s kiss” features. But we had to get them in the door first. Otherwise, we were dead on arrival. RR: I really like that framing of building the foundation first and spending time building trust. Now that you have adoption and users are bought in—sending proposals, sharing content, tracking engagement—what impact would you say this work has had on the business overall? JK: I think it was the first case under my stewardship of enablement at HealthJoy where I could say: “I hear you. This project was done in response to your needs. Trust me with the solution, and you’re going to see the positive outcome because of it.” It showed a really clear way that, as a solo enabler, I could offer real value and build a strong partnership with the sales team. Because I’m not their boss. I’m their peer who’s here to think strategically alongside them and help them win revenue more easily. I also think the Highspot rollout set us on a trajectory where we could repeat that process. The change in go-to-market messaging came on the heels of Highspot. Even though they weren’t the same project, that organizational muscle had already been exercised successfully. RR: You’re in a fast-moving startup environment, and now you have that central source of truth so that as things change, you can help your reps change with them. As we’re wrapping up, if there’s one crystallizing theme for enablement teams operating with limited capacity or as a team of one, what advice would you give on prioritization and focusing efforts to drive the most impact? JK: I’m learning this lesson a lot right now. As an enablement team of one—or even two—have really great partnerships and open conversations across the business: with your CEO, your C-suite, sales leaders, marketing, and product. You really do serve as connective tissue. One thing I can struggle with is getting so stuck in training, training, training that I forget to ask: what’s the highest-impact thing I can spend my time on to drive business outcomes? That may be training, but it may also mean joining tiger teams across the business, helping investigate new products or strategies, and bringing an enablement perspective into implementation planning. So keep an ear to the ground. Stay responsive to business needs. Be open to pivoting quickly. Don’t pigeonhole yourself into saying, “In enablement, I do onboarding and training, and that’s it.” Enablement is dynamic by design, and that’s why I love it so much. I’ve joked that any six-month snapshot of my enablement career would probably look like a completely different job description. That’s just the name of the game. So embrace change. Look for where the cheese is moving, and don’t get mad that your cheese got moved. Also, champion your successes. Especially in a small enablement team, people want to know what’s happening. But in a remote environment, if you’re not shouting from the rooftops about the cool things you’re doing, they won’t get seen. That’s just reality. So especially for newer enablement pros, don’t be afraid to champion your work because it’s super cool. And finally, going full circle to what we talked about at the beginning: only scale the things that aren’t going to steal your time. Scale the things you’re willing to continue investing in. That’s what keeps you dynamic, strategic, and able to adapt to new opportunities while still helping champion your reps across the organization. RR: I think it’s really powerful that every piece of advice you just shared ties directly back to examples from your own work. Even that last point—“scale what doesn’t steal your time”—showed up in your proposal example. Yes, it took time upfront, but it saved time down the line and was the right place to invest. Thank you for such practical and applicable advice for anyone trying to prioritize, manage competing asks, and figure out where to focus their efforts.Really wonderful insights throughout this conversation. We’re so grateful you took the time to share them with us. JK: Thanks so much, Riley. This has been a ton of fun. RR: To our audience, thank you for listening to this episode of the Win Win podcast. Be sure to tune in next time for more insights on how you can maximize go-to-market success with Highspot.

Welcome to the Nothing Shocking Podcast episode 332 with our guest Pat Fontaine of XYZ.  We discuss the bands touring and one off shows, 1989 debut album, 1991 Hungry, and  more!    For more information: https://www.facebook.com/xyzband/ https://www.instagram.com/xyztheband/   Please like our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/nothingshockingpodcast/  Follow us on X at  https://twitter.com/hashtag/noshockpod.   Libsyn website: https://nothingshocking.libsyn.com For more info on the Hong Kong Sleepover: https://thehongkongsleepover.bandcamp.com Help support the podcast and record stores by shopping local at   Big Stricks Vinyl Records and Sports Cards - https://www.facebook.com/p/Big-Stricks-LLC-61560351678007/

Special discounts up for AIE Melbourne (LS discount) and AIE World's Fair (group discounts up to 25% - CFPs still open for Autoresearch and Vertical AI) Cya there!Abridge did not start as an “GPT wrapper”. It was founded in 2018, years before the Cambrian explosion of AI application layer companies. OpenAI launched ChatGPT publicly on November 30, 2022 and by then, Abridge had already spent years doing the unglamorous work of building trust for one of the highest context, most important workflows in healthcare: the conversation between a patient and a clinician.Abridge's original wedge was clinical documentation. Listen to the visit, generate the note, reduce the clerical burden, and let clinicians spend more time with patients instead of the EHR. By focusing on how doctors actually document, how health systems actually buy, how EHR integration actually works, how clinicians verify outputs, and how missing context during a visit turns into downstream friction across billing, prior authorization, quality, and follow-up, the adoption of LLMs became a force multiplier on a workflow already optimized for sensitive context gathering.The company has scaled fast: Abridge says it is projected to support 80M+ patient-clinician conversations this year across 250 large and complex U.S. health systems, with support for 28+ languages and 50+ specialties. It raised $300M at a $5.3B valuation in June 2025, after a $250M round earlier that year.Today, Janie Lee and Chaitanya “Chai” Asawa of Abridge join us for another crossover pod with Redpoint's Jacob Effron (who is on the board of Abridge) to dive into how Abridge is building the clinical intelligence layer for healthcare starting with ambient documentation, then expanding into clinical decision support, prior authorization, payer/provider/pharma workflows, and eventually real-time agents that act before, during, and after the patient conversation. We go inside the product, data, infra, evals, workflow, privacy, and org design choices behind bringing AI into one of the highest-stakes enterprise environments from 100M+ medical conversations and specialty-specific evals to real-time alerts, EHR integration, de-identification, clinician-scientist teams, and why healthcare may solve some of the hardest AI problems first.We discuss:* Why Abridge started with clinical documentation, “pajama time,” and saving clinicians 10–20 hours a week* The transition from ambient scribe to clinical intelligence layer: save time, save money, and save lives* Why conversations between patients and clinicians may be the most important workflow in healthcare (patient visit summary feature)* Chai's “healthcare-coded Glean” framing: context is king, but healthcare raises the stakes on safety, evals, and rollout* Why Abridge wants AI to feel like “air conditioning”: always in the background, but only interrupting when it truly matters* The prior authorization example: turning a denied MRI weeks later into real-time guidance while the patient is still in the room* Why payer policies, EHR data, medical literature, and hospital-specific guidelines make the problem hard, and also create the moat* How Abridge thinks about ambient form factors: mobile, desktop, in-room devices, nursing workflows, multimodality, and future AR* The multi-sided healthcare customer: CMIOs, CFOs, CIOs, clinicians, patients, payers, and pharma* The hardest AI problem at Abridge: high-quality, low-latency, low-cost real-time support in a high-stakes clinical setting* When Abridge uses frontier models vs proprietary models, and why its unique data from medical conversations matters* Why “every agent is a coding agent underneath,” and how the EHR can be thought of as a filesystem for healthcare agents* How Abridge approaches personalization across individual doctors, specialties, and health systems* Why “AI slop” is AI without context, and how edits, memories, and clinician preferences create a data flywheel* Abridge's eval stack: LFDs, LLM judges, in-house clinicians, third-party evaluators, specialty-specific evals, and progressive rollout* HIPAA, PHI, de-identification, one-way anonymization, customer contracts, and learning from healthcare data safely* What changes when you operate at 100M+ conversations: reliability, cost, post-training, model routing, and infrastructure optimization* Why the same clinical conversation can serve doctors, patients, payers, pharma, and future clinical-trial workflows* How Abridge works with EHRs, and why deep interoperability is table stakes for clinician adoption* Why healthcare AI has regulatory tailwinds, why 80/20 does not work here, and why high-stakes domains may drive AI forward* Why Abridge embeds “clinician scientists” into product and eval teams* What Chai learned from Glean about search, quality, and durable AI infrastructure* Why the future of AI infra may look like context layers, event-driven systems, Kafka, Temporal, sockets, CRDTs, and tools built for humans* Why Janie changed her mind on “PRDs are dead,” and why crisp written clarity matters more in complex AI products* How Abridge uses Claude Code, Cursor, and coding agents internallyAbridge:* Website: https://www.abridge.com/* X: https://x.com/AbridgeHQJanie Lee:* LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/janiejleeChaitanya “Chai” Asawa:* LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/casawaTimestamps00:00:00 Introduction and what Abridge does00:02:05 From ambient documentation to clinical intelligence00:04:04 Clinical decision support and context as king00:06:57 Alert fatigue, proactive intelligence, and prior authorization00:12:36 Ambient AI form factors and healthcare customers00:16:59 The hardest AI problems in healthcare00:18:26 Frontier models, proprietary data, and model strategy00:21:07 The EHR as a filesystem for agents00:24:03 Personalization, memory, and clinician preferences00:30:40 Evals, LLM judges, and progressive rollout00:36:47 HIPAA, de-identification, and privacy00:39:21 100M conversations and operating at scale00:44:10 EHR integration and the clinical intelligence layer00:46:39 Healthcare regulation, latency, and high-stakes AI00:50:11 Clinician scientists and long-tail quality00:53:04 Lessons from Glean and durable AI infrastructure00:57:03 The future of agentic healthcare workflows00:57:34 PRDs, product clarity, and building serious AI products01:03:11 AI coding tools at Abridge01:04:06 OutroTranscriptIntroduction: Abridge, Clinical Intelligence, and the Latent Space x Unsupervised Learning CrossoverSwyx [00:00:00]: Okay. This is a special crossover Latent Space Unsupervised Learning pod.Jacob [00:00:07]: Very excited to do this.Jacob [00:00:08]: At this point, we get together once a year.Swyx [00:00:10]: Once a yearJacob [00:00:11]: And this is a fun occasion to get to do it on.Swyx [00:00:13]: I really wanted to talk to Abridge but I felt very underqualified because healthcare is not something we cover very intensely. It just so happens that Redpoint's our big investors and supporters of Abridge.Jacob [00:00:27]: Anytime you want to have a portfolio company on your podcastJacob [00:00:29]: Please, by all means.Swyx [00:00:31]: So we'll introduce our guests. Chai and Janie, welcome to the pod.Janie [00:00:34]: Thanks for having us.Chai [00:00:35]: Thank you.Janie [00:00:35]: We're excited to be here.Chai [00:00:36]: Thank you.Swyx [00:00:36]: So for listeners, what do you guys do, just to situate you guys in the company?Janie [00:00:42]: Abridge is a clinical intelligence layer for health systems. We really started with documentation and building for clinicians and as we think about reducing the burden that clinicians have, they're spending 10 to 20 hours a week on documentation. There's a massive doctor shortage in the country. We also think that conversations between patients and clinicians are probably the most important workflow in healthcare. It's where care is given and received but if you think about the 20% of our GDP that goes towards healthcare, almost everything is a derivative of that conversation, whether it's the claim, the payment, the actual diagnosis given, the treatment. And we've started with a conversation to reduce the burden for doctors on documentation but we're really excited about the path ahead as we become this broader clinical intelligence layer.Chai [00:01:34]: I'm Chai. I work on clinical decision support at Abridge.Swyx [00:01:37]: Yes.Chai [00:01:37]: And so as Janie said, we're uniquely situated where we started off with the clinical note. What I'm really excited about and where we're expanding towards is what are all the things you can do before the conversation, during the conversation and after the conversation if you did have access to all the context about patients, payer guidelines, medical literature and put that together and to serve, how healthcare could look fundamentally different.Swyx [00:02:01]: And that's the context engine that you guys have?Chai [00:02:04]: Yes.Swyx [00:02:04]: Is that what it's called? Okay.Swyx [00:02:05]: So historically, as I understand it, the company started in 2018. A lot of people would be familiar with the AI voice notes form factor that doctors would be “Well, do you consent to being recorded?” It replaces handwriting and what have you. But it sounds like more recently there's been a big transition in the company. Tell me about the broader transition.From Documentation to Clinical Intelligence: Save Time, Save Money, Save LivesJanie [00:02:26]: So from a transition perspective, we really think about our journey as The first act was: how do we help save time? And that's where a lot of that original product was.Swyx [00:02:37]: By the way, one of those interesting statsSwyx [00:02:39]: On your landing page was, doctors spend time after hours.Janie [00:02:43]: They call it pajama time.Swyx [00:02:44]: Why is that pajama time?Janie [00:02:46]: Doctors after work in their pajamasSwyx [00:02:48]: In their pajamas. OhJanie [00:02:49]: At home are just writing and catching up on their notes every day.Janie [00:02:53]: Some of our favorite customer love stories, we have a Slack channel called Love Stories. We have clinicians telling us, “Abridge has helped us, from retiring early or we're now finally able toJanie [00:03:06]: go home and eat dinner with our kids for the first time.”Chai [00:03:08]: Save the marriage in some cases.Swyx [00:03:10]: One of the quotes was “We're not divorcing anymore.”Swyx [00:03:12]: I'm asking, “Why?”Swyx [00:03:14]: Because they're working too much.Janie [00:03:16]: But, in terms of where we're going and where we're expanding, we really think about our second and third acts around how do we help health systems save and make more money. Health systems are operating with record-low operating margins. It's getting harder and harder to serve patients and they have regulatory, some tailwinds but also a lot of headwinds coming their way and AI is ripe for helping on the saving and make-more-money piece. And then ultimately, how do we help save lives? The fact that our software and our product is open millions of times a week before, during and after a patient walks in the room, gives us massive opportunity with products like clinical decision support, which Chai is building but so many others to improve patient outcomes and probably one of the most important workflows and problems to be going after right now.From Glean to Healthcare: Context Is KingJacob [00:04:04]: One thing that's interesting, Chai, is you came over to Abridge from Glean and clinical decision support, which for our listeners is, in the context of a visit, helping a doctor figure out the right type of care. It's really a search problem in many ways, going through lots of different data sources. Very analogous to your previous role as one of the earliest engineers over at Glean. I'm sure a lot of our listeners are curious what's similar about the problems that you're going after now and what feels different, now that you're in healthcare.Chai [00:04:33]: Very similar. Taking a step back, with every wave, there's a lot of very similar patterns that happen across different products. A lot of social networking products look the same. A lot of credit-based products look the same. And we're seeing that very similar in the agent era with many companies, of course, in Redpoint's portfolio and so forth. And the key insight between both companies is that you have amazing models but context is king. Context is what puts them to work. So I see it in a lot of ways, a lot of similarities in this is a healthcare-coded version of Glean but the differences are really interesting. A couple things that come to mind. First and foremost, the rigor of the setting we're in. The downside risk is extremely high here in healthcare. It can be fatal in some cases. You prescribe something that the patient is allergic to for example. Whereas at Glean, it's “Oh, you got the question wrong.” It wasn't the end of the world in most cases. And so what does that mean? That shapes our evaluation strategy, both offline evaluation, progressive rollout and there's a lot more we could go into there. Second thing that comes to mind is, vertical versus horizontal. In both cases, there's a large variance but when Glean is, it's a much more horizontal company, there's a variance of personas, companies that you're working with. We also have a variance of personas, different types of specialties, different hospital systems. But the variance is a little more narrow. So from a product perspective, you're able to focus far more, especially when you have a maturing technology and you're building new products that never existed before. It lets you go after them much more easily and especially in healthcare where so many problems were solved with labor and process, that it's extremely ripe for AI to keep helping augment and enable. And the final thing that's really interesting, Abridge specifically compared to many other companies in the AI area, is the modality we started with where we're ambient and we're always listening in the background. And many more AI products will go that way but it's how we started. And that's the greatest form of AI we can create, AI that's seamless. You're not looking at your screen. It's always there. It's always helping you out and being proactive. The Jarvis vision that, every hackathon I went to over the past decade, there was always a Jarvis competitor. But Abridge very much started from the opportunity and continues to go that way.Ambient AI and Alert Fatigue: When Should the Product Interrupt?Jacob [00:06:57]: One thing that is super interesting then from a product perspective is you have this always-on seamless in the background and then you have to decide when you break the wall almost and say, “Hey, clinician, you might not have thought about X,” or whatever it is that you want to do. And in healthcare traditionally there's been this idea of alert fatigue and a million pop-ups and then a doctor just ignores all of them. It's probably a pattern that a lot of builders are thinking through now. How do you think about the right way to intervene or to pop up in a doctor visit?Janie [00:07:26]: It's such a good question. Alerts are notorious in healthcare specifically. Over 90% of alerts are ignored. The first and most important thing is context is everything, as Chai alluded to and I also think about how do we go from being reactive alerting to really proactive intelligence at the point at which it matters most. One thing we like to say is we want our product to feel like air conditioning. It should be in the background just making things better and if there is something that has great clinical risk and we're acutely aware that intervening now and not later is incredibly important, we should decide to act. But if you think about proactive versus reactive, instead of alerting a clinician during a visit when they're with their patient having a pretty serious and sensitive conversation, how do we prep a clinician before they walk into the room with that patient? And so historically, clinicians might have to manually go through charts with a patient that they've had over the course of months or years and they'll try to suss out what are the things they should be doing. You can imagine a world with Abridge. We'll summarize all of the most recent context for you, tell you based on the reason for a visit the patient is coming in for the types of things you should be discussing. And so you're going into that conversation prepped rather than walking in cold to that patient visit and then having this product interrupt you five or 10 times throughout the visit. And there might be times where it's really important to interrupt. We have a product called Prior Authorization and so this is when you may go into a doctor's office with knee pain. They'll prescribe you an MRI and so many of us have had this experience before, where in four weeks you'll get a call saying, “Hey, Sean, that MRI that you were prescribed wasn't approved and why don't you come back in? We'll figure it out.” In a world with Abridge, we might choose to quietly but still alert a doctor in that visit. And alert is probably not even the word we would want to use. Before a patient leaves, we would want to tell the doctor, “Hey, Doctor, before Sean leaves, you should ask him, has he had physical therapy and has his pain lasted for more than six weeks? Because the Aetna plan that he's on in California requires six things. We've already confirmed four of them have been met ‘cause we have all the context. But these two last criteria, if you can address with Sean before he leaves the room, we could guarantee that your MRI is approved before you leave.” And so when you think about clinical usefulness, impact to the patient, there are instances in which if we can catch a doctor while the patient is still in the room, as we think about save time, save money, save lives, we get to check all of those boxes. But when doctors have 15 minutes between visits, we have to be really thoughtful about when it matters.Prior Authorization: Reducing Latency in CareChai [00:10:23]: There's this interesting product opportunity AI has is reducing latency in the world. For example, prior authorization is an example of where care gets delayed and so great AI can reduce that. And the problem with alerts before partially is a technical problem: the quality of your alerts really matters. They're going to get ignored if you get alerts that... Similarly in engineering, where they're noisy alerts that you can't act on. But if you can make really high-quality alerts with both the context, as Janie said, and really high-quality models, then you can create a whole other game.Janie [00:10:53]: And I really like that experience because it starts to tease apart, what makes this so hard and unique. One, to make that prior authorization example possible, think about all the data that you need to have. You need to integrate with the electronic health record to know all of the patient context. Do we have access to your previous labs, previous imaging? And then to match you and to know that you're on Aetna, we have to collect all of the different payer policies and they vary by state. Some of these payer policies live on websites. Some of them live in unstructured 50-page PDF files.Jacob [00:11:31]: I thought this episode wasJacob [00:11:31]: To make sure we didn't scare people from healthcare.Janie [00:11:34]: But when you think about the things that make it hard, it also gives you the moat.Janie [00:11:39]: And then the second is the AI and the model quality we need to be able to hang our hat on. And so the bar, similarly when I worked at Opendoor, I worked on pricing models. Every outlier wiped out the margins of 30 and so similarly here in healthcare, the bar for accuracy is so high. And then I'd say the last is workflow is everything. If insurance companies deploy AI, it typically happens too late and this is when you have the notorious comical examples of AI just fighting each other when it's too late. But if we can pull forward the use of both the AI but also the ability to solve problems when the patient's in the room, you can start to collapse what typically takes weeks or months after your visit, ideally down to minutes or real-time. And it's where healthcare is both very difficult but also extremely rewarding if you can crack it.Product Form Factors: Mobile, Desktop, In-Room Devices, and ARSwyx [00:12:36]: Just to get some baseline on the form factors, because I've seen some videos on your website and stuff. You guys talk a lot about ambient AI. Is it primarily on the phone? Is there any other form factor that people get Abridge in? Is there an Abridge room setup where it's always on? I don't know.Jacob [00:12:55]: An Abridge podcast studio.Janie [00:12:58]: Primary form factor is mobile and desktop. UsuallyJanie [00:13:00]: Clinicians are walking in and out of rooms with mobile but at the end of the day, when they're closing out their notes or wanting to prep for the day ahead, they might use desktop. We have been having a lot of really interesting partnership conversations with a lot of these in-room device companies as you think about the power of multimodality and even more data, as you think about all of what is not captured today. It is fascinating to think about, especially even as we go into building and scaling our nursing product. It's one where nurses constantly, as they're walking in to check in on a patient for two minutes or maybe even 30 seconds,Janie [00:13:43]: Starting an Abridge experience is probably going to take longer than the visit. And so what can we do with in-room devices that are always on starts to raise really interesting and fun product questions.Swyx [00:13:54]: I was thinking, the way in tech companies we have all these Google MeetSwyx [00:13:58]: And other things, we might as well set up entire rooms with just Abridge tech.Chai [00:14:02]: Very much. AR glasses and related form factors are also relevant: how do we bring the information to the clinician in real-time without a screen, while still letting them focus on the patient?Swyx [00:14:18]: Do you think they want that? I'm skeptical of AR, but I'm curious what you've tried.Chai [00:14:26]: Admittedly, it's not a near-term product roadmapChai [00:14:29]: By any means. I'm being far-fetched.Jacob [00:14:31]: There's some sick AR stuff for surgeries.Swyx [00:14:33]: Really?Jacob [00:14:33]: When people are trying to visualize, you're about to make an incision but you want to see, what the cut might look or what the body might look like inside and they can layer in imaging.Swyx [00:14:43]: That's cool.Chai [00:14:45]: At some point in the future.Janie [00:14:46]: But there are a lot of our largest customers and at the largest health systems integrating already and so even as we think about building into it, unlocks a lot of product capabilities.Swyx [00:14:57]: And just to establish the terminology. Sorry, and I know I'm asking basic questions somewhat for myself but also for the audience who might beHealth Systems, Buyers, Clinicians, Patients, and PayersSwyx [00:15:05]: Less integrated. When you say health systems, it's like the Johns Hopkins, the Kaiser Permanentes.Janie [00:15:09]: Mayos, the Kaisers of the world.Swyx [00:15:10]: These are your customers, right? And the outcome that you deliver for them is happier doctors, reduced cost of processing, reduced mistakes. It's weird in a sense that I feel like there's also, a secondary customer, the customer of the customer and I don't know if you — do you think about it that way?Janie [00:15:28]: The other interesting and complex part of building product is we have our buyers, who are the chief medical information officersJanie [00:15:39]: The chief financial officers, the CIOs of these large health systems. Our users today are clinicians but if you think about who downstream is impacted, it's patients. And so as we build, with every product in mind, we think about who we're building for, who the secondary user is and what does that mean either in terms of experience, security compliance, ROI that we have to make tangible. And so like you said, time savings is one of them. But for CFOs, they care a lot more than just time savings. We have to show for every dollar you put into Abridge, because you have more compliant documentation or because you have fewer queries coming from your billing team, we save or add real dollars to your bottom line or top line, are things that we're constantly thinking about because of the dynamic across all three sets of users.Chai [00:16:32]: There's a whole other axis too with the payers and pharmaChai [00:16:35]: as well. Connecting all these three big stakeholders in healthcare isSwyx [00:16:39]: Do the payers ever see your data? Sorry, the payers meaning the insurers, right?Chai [00:16:44]: Yes.Swyx [00:16:44]: They also see Abridge data?Chai [00:16:47]: NoSwyx [00:16:47]: Like the direct integration to you guysChai [00:16:48]: They wouldn't see the raw Abridge data but when you're working together on something like prior authorization, whatever information they need, we'd communicate to them.Jacob [00:16:59]: That's cool. I would love to dig into the AI side. You still have a lot of problems on the AI side. And so maybe to start at the highest level, what's one of the hardest problems you have to solve in AI at Abridge today?The Hardest AI Problems: Quality, Latency, and CostChai [00:17:11]: To make things simple, let's take, building off the prior auth example. So one thing Janie talked about is okay, this data is all over the place and there's this combinatorial explosion of procedures, payer policies and even sometimes different health systems. There can be some cross-product of all of these different considerations you have to take into account. But what's really hard about this problem is doing it real-time in the conversation. So, in any AI product, usually the three KPIs you care about are quality, latency and cost. Now, what we're saying is we want you to do this real-time in the conversation, guiding the clinician. How do we do it in a way that does not break the bank? But we're using — But we also need very intelligent models because you're working with this cross-product of data and this, all this context layer as well. So you need high intelligence and high-quality because you don't want the alert fatigue but you also need to be fast and cost-effective. And so that's where a lot of clever engineering goes. It's okay, without getting into all the details here, can you model these policies in some intermediate representation or other things that you can do that can make this problem tractable? And of course, the Pareto frontier is always changing but we are also trying to do this now.Model Strategy: Third-Party Models, Proprietary Data, and Medical ConversationsJacob [00:18:26]: What implications has that had for what you take off-the-shelf and say, “ what? We don't need to be world-class at X. We'll just take this from the model providers or from some infrastructure player,” and what you're “No, this is where we spend most of our time focused on”?Chai [00:18:38]: This is, the fun challenge in AI?Jacob [00:18:42]: It changes every three months? SoChai [00:18:42]: Of course, with the shifting landscape, we try to be extremely thoughtful on predicting the trends of where third-party models are going and where we can uniquely go. And, sometimes when you talk about AI models, we're the models are just going to get infinitely better. But I don't think... It may be in the grandness of time you could say that but, within every month, every quarter, there's specific ways they're getting better. They're training on a lot more, coding data to be better coding agents, for example. And soChai [00:19:14]: We have to think about where are the things that won't — unique data that we're uniquely training on or to step back a little, where is a proprietary model bringing advantage to us is if it can give higher quality or lower cost and latency for similar quality, very similar to many other companies. And when we can do that is when we have proprietary data. So, for example, we have on the order of eighty million or hundreds of millions now getting close to of medical conversations.Jacob [00:19:44]: It's insane.Chai [00:19:45]: This is a unique data set. And this data set, it's very interesting because this data set is effectively a large part of the trace between the patient and the provider. That's where the quote-unquote debugging happens in healthcare. We have these traces at scale, as in as, our CEOs even called it, an exhaust that comes out of our product. And so when you have these traces, that's how you can train better agents on certain use cases, whether it's your transcription diarization use cases or so on or like note generation models and we can do that much cheaper and faster. But we're always also working with these third-party model providers. We closely collaborate with them and that's how we predict where the trends are going. The thing that I think about a lot is that, I know that the model providers are going to train much more on agentic workflows and so forth, so that's great, so that you have a better agentic harness. But the other thing that's interesting is that the model providers, because a large class of the consumer model providers is healthcare queries, that they might, optimize to train a lot of healthcare data to encode the knowledge in its weights. And this is just a great thing for us as well, where the off-the-shelf models can keep bett-getting better at general healthcare information, such that what our strategy is, we have a constellation of models, we can use something for this, that and, we only care about, at the end of the day, the best product experience.EHR as File System: Agentic Workflows and Real-Time InterfacesJacob [00:21:07]: And, you have, overall capabilities improving. I'm curious, as these models get better, is there something you look at and you're “, three months ago, we really couldn't do that but God, the the latest models really allow us to do it”?Chai [00:21:19]: So here's something interesting that I've, been toying with. So all models are... This wasn't super obvious a year ago but now it's become clear and clear that almost every agent is a coding agent underneath the hood? So you give it whatever file system, it can write its own code and so forth. So when you think about within healthcare and the use case that we have, you can think of the EHR effectively like a file system. It's just — it's a storage of all this information. It's a lot of information there that cannot fit into the context window, at least of today's models and you want to use that context effectively for all these product use cases we're talking about. And so if you have better agents that can, manipulate data, read that data, treat it as a file system as we see they're going and we know model companies are investing this way, then that very directly benefits us.Swyx [00:22:09]: Yeah. Okay, cool. Again, just establishing basic things. But we're going back to the model stuff. I'm really interested in double-clicking more on the real-time, element, which is pretty important for both of you. Is it — Is real-time just batches of every one minute, every five minutes? Is that how we do it? Or is there some more native, genuinely real-time in the sense that OpenAI has a real-time API or Gemini has a real-time API?Chai [00:22:35]: Yeah. Yeah. So today it is more on the on the batch basis but there's interestingChai [00:22:41]: Prototypes that we have that we're still not fully, full time, voice in text out or in that sense. But, can you trigger your models, your agents or agentic workflows, depending on the right times in the conversation?Chai [00:22:58]: And so you can imagine, different techniques to bring this latency down and, you want to bring the feedback loop down as much as you can. And so a lot of clever engineering there without fully... Maybe one day we'll do full voice in and text out, train a model to do something like that.Swyx [00:23:15]: You do — People don't want voice in voice out?Chai [00:23:18]: Now we aren't creating experiences that are, during the conversation, inter — It's almost likeSwyx [00:23:25]: Might be too disruptiveChai [00:23:26]: Too disruptive until, who knows, maybe eventually you could have full voice agents once we — the quality and we improve the comfort of the technology. But right now gra — that change is much more gradual and it's more text focus, text out.Janie [00:23:42]: And so much of currently what our product is trying to do is allow a clinician to focus on their patient and maybe at some point but right now patients, clinicians don't want a third voice, at least in a literal voice in that room. And so how do we be there with all the contacts and information ready at hand when there's the right moment?Personalization: Individual Doctors, Specialties, and Health SystemsJacob [00:24:03]: Jenny, one thing I'm curious about is how you think about, personalization in the product. I imagine, every doctor is a special snowflake in their own way, has their own way they like to do things. There are probably a bunch of different approaches you could take to doing that, both within the model layer itself but then also just with clever prompting or engineering. How do youJacob [00:24:20]: Deliver on that?Janie [00:24:21]: It's such a good question. Personalization is massive for us. We think about personalization at three levels. The first is at the individual, the second is at the specialty level and then the third is at the health system or the organization level. To your point, there are a lot of individual preferences. You-When a note is produced, it almost is a reflection that is so deeply personal of a doctor's work and how they give care. And so do they have preferences on things like style? They might want bullets versus paragraphs, really concise versus comprehensive. They also might have phrases that they really like to use or the templates that they want every note to be structured. And, we see it in our feedback all the time. We want two spaces in between sentences or I refuse to use this tool. And so that's something that we've had to build in. And the tricky part is how do you make sure that stylistic preferences don't interrupt accuracy and quality and that's something that we've really had to refine and hone over time. Second is at the specialty level. A cardiologist note or workflow is going to look very different from a dermatologist workflow.Jacob [00:25:32]: I assume cardiology notes are the highest stakes for you guys, given your CEO is a cardiologist.Jacob [00:25:36]: It's “Oh my God, make sure we get this one.”Janie [00:25:37]: Shiv, our CEO, is still a practicing cardiologist. He rounds once a month. And so, first call when we want just quick and easy user feedback too.Janie [00:25:46]: But, specialties require a lot of personalization, both in terms of what does the product look and so we make sure that as new users onboard, we catch that and the product proportionally reflects that. But also on the back end, evals at the specialty level, they are hard-earned to calibrate and get. What does a really great dermatology note look like? What makes it complete? What makes it compliant and billable is very different than a primary care doctor. And so it's not just about what does the product experience look but on the back end tuning and really deepening our understanding for the specialists. What does great output look like? And that's, a problem that we need to calibrate internally, externally, online, offline but, takes lots of cycles but is necessary in a high-stakes environment. And then at the health system level, for products like clinical decision support, you have health systems who've spent years or decades refining their best practices and they want to know, “Hey, we love your clinical decision support product but how do we embed our own hospital guidelines into them to inform clinicians before, during or after a visit what brest — best practices should look like?” And as you think about, deepening moats as well, when health systems, trust us with that data, allow us to productize it and directly into the clinical workflow, makes us a really great partner to health systems who want to build something that truly meets their needs, their practicing guidelines.AI Slop, Memory, and Product Data FlywheelsChai [00:27:23]: And I want to add onto that. The for the clinical documentation problem, it's very similar to AI writing that doesn't feel like your own and then we call that slop. But the way I describe one framing of slop is like AI without context. But we have all that context and both the clinicians, can have it and can guide it. And so part of the other interesting exhaust for us is, memory is, one of these new systems recordsChai [00:27:49]: Almost.Janie [00:27:50]: And we also have all the edits people make on our product and when you think about a data flywheel and how we get better over time becomes really powerful as a mechanism to just going deeper in personalization.Jacob [00:28:04]: It's interesting. I love this idea of working with systems on the guidelines they built up over a long time. I feel like so many of the best AI app companies today are... The question is: How do you take the expertise that a law firm or a bank has built up over many years and then add that as context and also a special sauce over, a an AI tool? And so seems like y'all are really doing that very effectively.Janie [00:28:24]: We're now starting to have our customers ask, “What are other customers doing?”Janie [00:28:28]: “And how are they doing it?”Janie [00:28:30]: And as we think about having visibility across such a large set of care being delivered right now, a really interesting place we could also partner.Swyx [00:28:40]: I'm just curious. I — This may be a nothing question but, how different are health system guidelines from each other? Don't they all converge to the same thing? And if not, where do they differ?Chai [00:28:52]: At a really high level, they're going to talk about very similar things but the difference is probably in some more of the details. “Oh, you should refer to specialists only when XYZ conditions are met,” or so forth and maybe different organizations have different practices and guidelines around that. But high level, talking about similar things but the details are what, of course, that shapes the context and the decisions you make.Swyx [00:29:15]: And this all goes into the context engine and it might affect the notes but maybe not.Chai [00:29:21]: The — For these local pathways, we're definitely thinking about it a little more for our clinical decision support product.Chai [00:29:26]: So yeah.Swyx [00:29:27]: Which is your stuff, yeah.Swyx [00:29:28]: And then the memory which you raised, let's just tell us more about that. What have you tried in memory? What's the structure of the memory? What works? What doesn't work?Chai [00:29:38]: There's, of course, many different ways you could do memory, where it's okay, can you bake it into the model weights or can you do it in some external store? For us, what's interesting is, of course, when you think the models are rapidly changing, whether it's in-house or third-party, baking into the model weights, sometimes you worry that it could be a little throwaway. And so, how do you... You need to find a way that you decompose the problem, the preferences from the underlying models and so forth. The thing we're right now most both that's easiest to start with and we're excited about is having, a separate store for memory, where you have, for example, a memory sub-agent that's, working in the background, figuring out what are the important parts of the clinician's actions that we want to remember for the long term. And then you can also imagine, other things where in the — you have background jobs that are running that are collating these, memories similar to Sleep, of course and what other pattern, patterns products do as well. Learning over all these action, all the action data we have, again, note edits, the conversations they did and the actual transcripts.Evals: LFD, LLM Judges, and Clinical SafetyJacob [00:30:40]: What about evals? How in the world do you... It is such a complex product surface area. We would love to hear you riff on that and also how has that evolved? I'm sure you've gotten better at it, so any learnings along the way.Janie [00:30:50]: From an evals perspective, we, from day one when we build any new product or feature, we think about, what does good look like? And there are table stakes things like clinical safety but then you start to get deeper into what does good quality look like. And when you go into something like our core product, there's stuff like style and completeness and there's things like does this note become something that can be billable, which is very high stakes for a health system. We have a number of ways in which we get confidence for this. We have, internal in-house clinicians who do what we call an LFD process to give us our very first pass at is this or isn't this a good enough output, look at the effing data.Jacob [00:31:41]: LFD?Chai [00:31:42]: That's why I was smiling. I was “Is Janie going to mention what it stands for?”Jacob [00:31:46]: I was not... There's like a million acronyms.Jacob [00:31:48]: How am I supposed to know that I don't? So “Oh yeah, of course, an LFD.”Swyx [00:31:51]: I've never heard of LFDs.Chai [00:31:53]: It's a bridge for sure.Janie [00:31:55]: I got through three days and then I had to ask someone.Janie [00:31:58]: I thought it was just me that didn't knowJanie [00:32:01]: It's our internal process.Swyx [00:32:02]: But look at the data as a meme in ML, ‘cause you tend to not look at it. You just want to look at number go up.Chai [00:32:06]: Exactly.Swyx [00:32:07]: But yes.Janie [00:32:08]: But so, we make sure we look at the data and then as we think about all of the components of good output, we, one, create LLM judges across all of these and we make sure with annotated data and either internal or external evaluators, we feel like these judges are calibrated. And then depending on the stakes, we also work with in-house and third-party evaluators across all of these before we ship any big change. And the goal is, in terms of evolution, how do you go from this process taking months, down to weeks, down to days? Some of it is, a true science and ML problem. A lot of it's also just, hard operational work. Have you planned ahead in terms of what you need? Have you really optimized the capacity that you need across all of the different specialties you need? Have you gotten a really good sense of which third parties are great to work with for what use cases? This takes a lot of domain, expertise and, lots of mistakes and errors in figuring that out. And so as much of it is an ML problem, so much of it has also been operational gains that are hugely important, where domain-specific expertise is everything.Specialty-Level Evaluation and Progressive RolloutsJacob [00:33:23]: But it's funny, ‘cause I feel like people talk about healthcare like it's one giant market and the reality isJacob [00:33:26]: It's, dozens and dozens of sub-markets. And so it feels like in your evals you have to build that up across the board, probably.Swyx [00:33:34]: And is specialization the primary cardinality at... That's the word that comes to mind.Janie [00:33:40]: Sometimes, depending on the product or the use case. And so if we're making a note improvement or feature for a particular specialty, definitely but we have products that are for nurses. We have products that, are really aimed at making the document or the output a lot more billable. And so we'll want to work with coding teams and not necessary clinicians. And so likeJacob [00:34:05]: Coding meaning healthcare coding.Janie [00:34:06]: Yes. Yes.Jacob [00:34:07]: NotChai [00:34:07]: Yes. I see you.Swyx [00:34:07]: Other kinds.Janie [00:34:09]: But is this output proportional to the work that was delivered? Is there sufficient documentation to justify the amount that a health system may end up charging? And so, specialty sometimes but also domain, very different across all of the different products that we're working for. And building out that network is, not easy and is where a lot of our operational investments have gone into.Chai [00:34:35]: And I view a lot of analogies to self-driving cars here, where, part of it is we really want progressive rollout of features to test in the real world is this useful? Is this going to work? One big difference compared to past lives is before I'd build a product, maybe I'd alpha it and then I'd like GA it the next week, ‘cause I'm “Go, move fast, ship,” and whatnot. But the mentality is like you... I want to make contact with the reality as quick as possible but I want a progressive rollout. Because as much as I get as large of an offline eval set, I want the distribution of that to match real-life distribution. And over time, by rolling out early, similar to Waymo has a tagline, “The world's most experienced driver,” another thing that can, at least linearly increase for us is, both the size of our evaluation offline and online, that and it all feeds back.Janie [00:35:25]: Something that's been earned over time, speaking of evolution, is just the trust we've gotten with customers. Historically, a lot of these health systems, when they bring on new vendors, their release cycles are quarters, sometimes twice a year. We've gotten our customers onto monthly release cycles, which is pretty fast for health systems but what is more exciting over the last, call it, few quarters, has been, a subset of our customers have said, “We want to innovate with you. We trust you,” and we have a pretty, decent chunk of our customers who say, “We'll develop with you outside of these monthly release cycles. We have a higher tolerance. We know that the stakes are very high but we want to be the first ones using these products, giving you feedback.” And so for a pretty substantial set of our customers, we've been able to convince them to be able to ship, in this gradual way before GA. Something we talk about a lot internally is, trust is earned in drops, earned in buckets and so we still can't do what I used to do when I worked at Loom. We had 30 million users. I'd just be, rolling out experiments left and. The bar is still quite high for iterative rollout but because of the trust we've earned, we're able to learn at pretty high volume very quickly.Privacy, HIPAA, and De-IdentificationSwyx [00:36:45]: Your scale is still pretty huge.Swyx [00:36:47]: One thing I want to... We were going to go into scale? In a sec. One thing I wanted to call up, follow up on evals, which, again, just coming from a generalist engineer point of view, just thinking through what would people be scared of in doing this, the privacy and HIPAAJacob [00:37:00]: Elements of this. I have zero experience in that. What do you have to do? What is surprisingly not that bad?Chai [00:37:06]: So one thing that's really important here from a compliance perspective is very much that any of the data we use needs to be de-identified, any real-world data we use as a basis of online eval sets we're learning from. And so you have to — And there's, very clear, government guidelines, what counts as PHI. And so we've even have built models that can take, for example, a clinical transcript and remove all the key PHI indicators and so you have a scrubbed/de-identified version. And then once you... And so one thing that's important is first you've got to get confidence in that model in the first place? And prove that out. Because, now you have, multiple probabilistic systems on top of each other.Chai [00:37:46]: But once you have that, then you can train on it use it for evaluation and so forth, provided one of the cool things also that you can do from a business side is the right data contracting as well with your partners.Jacob [00:37:57]: Is the anonymization one way? Once it's done, you cannot undo it? Or is there someoneChai [00:38:01]: YesJacob [00:38:02]: Who holds the master key that can... Yeah, okay. So it's one way.Chai [00:38:05]: It's one way. Yeah.Jacob [00:38:06]: That's how it works. I just wanted to... Because, there's a lot of this, learning from feedback and everything that, you would want to debug more but you can't because you just physically don't allow yourself to.Janie [00:38:17]: Some of it's also written in our customer contracts in terms of who can or can't access PHI data, how long do we retain it,Jacob [00:38:27]: Very goodJanie [00:38:27]: Before it gets de-identified. And so we have a pretty high bar for who can access that PHI data, just to make sure that we always respect our customer data and privacy. But that's something that we partner with our customers on too, to make sure that as we want full, as close to precision as possible in that qualityJanie [00:38:48]: We can still use it.Jacob [00:38:50]: But it'll be fascinating to see how that space evolves? Because you think about, I used to work at a company that, did a lot of healthcare data in the cancer space and if you asked, the average cancer patient, “Hey, do you want people, do you want other patients to be able to learn-”Chai [00:39:03]: Take it.Jacob [00:39:03]: “... Learn from your experience?”Chai [00:39:04]: Take it all.Jacob [00:39:05]: They're “Please.”Jacob [00:39:06]: “I'd love, nothing more than for other people to be able to learn fromJacob [00:39:10]: The experience that I had.” And so in the past it was a lot harder to do that learning. But with this technology, that might really be practical and so it'll be fascinating to see how that continues to evolve.Chai [00:39:21]: There's so much in our data set of 100 million conversations.Chai [00:39:26]: You can imagine things like insights that you can give to the clinician. How could you, oh, how could you have reacted to this? In coaching or insights around, which treatments are effective or, like... Because you have this, again, this data source that was never captured before but that's, where, intuition or experience is created from, going back to this idea that the conversation is the agent of truth.Operating at Scale: Reliability, Cost, and Token EfficiencyJacob [00:39:46]: Back to the 100 million conversations, I feel like you have this insane scale that maybe only a few other AI app companies have and everyone else dreams of. So not everyone has had to confront this yet but maybe just talk about some of the challenges of operating at that scale and what, our listeners have to look forward to if they ever get to this level of scale.Chai [00:40:05]: At large and larger in scale, so of course there's a general, infrastructure reliability. When you... In any given startup, you're building the plane while it's flying. So there's some notion of that. But what gets interesting on the AI and ML side for sure is this, as you get at more and more scale, so one, you have the data to first and foremost do this. But, you start thinking about costs or infrastructure in a whole different way at scale versus, a prototype.Chai [00:40:34]: You can use the most expensive model, you can burn as many tokens as you want but when you're doing 100 million conversationsJacob [00:40:41]: Token max on leaderboards are less upsetting than that context.Chai [00:40:45]: . When you're doing that and so that comes for we have the data and we also have the team that's able to post-train based on this and you can optimize for efficiency, especially in areas where you believe that maybe a lot of the quality headroom is less so and you don't expect the other off-the-shelf models to go that way, such that you want to do, efficiency maximization, in terms of compute and tokens.Jacob [00:41:08]: I feel like you guys live in the future in some way where most use cases today are really just in use case discovery mode, where it's “God, I really hope I can find something that can get to scale,” and so you're always going to use the most powerful model. And then the few things that do get to this level of scale, you start to do those optimizations.Chai [00:41:22]: It's a natural trajectory where it's like zero-to-one, we're not talking about any of these optimizations.Chai [00:41:26]: But when maybe we're in the one-to-100 or so forth, then we're in optimization mode and, what works out really well is you've got all this data from zero-to-one that lets you do this.What Comes Next: The Conversation as the Shared Healthcare PlatformJacob [00:41:36]: That's fascinating. I feel like one thing that's so interesting about the Abridge footprint is that you're in the doctor-patient visit in real-time. I always like to say, there's like probably 50 years' worth of product you could build on top of that. What gets each of you, I don't know, what are you most excited about building, either in the short term or medium term or even, long down the line?Janie [00:41:53]: Something that I get really excited about is that the same conversation can serve so many stakeholders. If you think about the conversation, a doctor needs to know what is the documentation, how do I make sure that this fully represent the care I gave? A patient needs to know, “What the heck just happened? This was really overwhelming. What are my next steps?” A payer needs to know, was this the proper and appropriate care given? A pharma company might want to know why isn't this drug being properly used or is there a good candidate for this clinical trial that I'm about to run? And where I get excited is that our product and our platform and our infrastructure can be the same product across all of those things and start to what's today, separate, very expensive, complex systems that serve each one of these stakeholders in very different ways, start to collapse all of that into a singular platform that enables not just more efficiency across the board but also better outcomes for everyone. And, all of us experience healthcare in probably very painful ways and knowing that there is a world in which we can simplify a lot is really exciting to me and it all starts with the conversation.Chai [00:43:15]: It's interesting. Of it very similar to going back to the KPIs that any AI product cares about. How do you increase quality of care? How do you reduce latency to care? And how do you reduce costs? Which is a huge, in healthcareJacob [00:43:28]: They call it the triple aim in healthcare.Chai [00:43:30]: But very similar to building AI products and the thing that really excites me is when we talk about that latency piece, we talked about one example earlier of prior authorization, can you reduce the latency to care? But you can imagine so much more. Oh, as soon as the lab value gets updated, do you have like a background agent that, kicks off and uses all the context to be “Oh, hey, the patient should do this next,” for example. And of flagging that to the clinician who's always in the loop but reducing that latency, to care. And then you can imagine this is much further down the road but it's like even connecting that to the direct patient and the consumer. And so how can you, how can you build a bridge to all of these things?EHR Partnerships and the Clinical Intelligence LayerJacob [00:44:10]: Very cool. The connections piece is just an ever-growing thing. And one of the key partners is the EHR and I wonder what that relationship is like. Will they, look at this as, something that is valuable enough that they want to own someday?Janie [00:44:29]: Our partnerships with the EHR is, we know that we have to be extremely close partners with all the EHRs who we partner with. Being able to not only pull and push all of the data into the right places is, not only table stakes, if we can't do that, health systems don't want to use us. The second and the reality of today is clinicians spend a lot of their days in the EHR. So much of what allowed us to win in the largest health systems was pretty direct and, very close partnerships with some of the largest electronic health records that allowed us to pull and push data with APIs that weren't ready out of the box. And clinicians want to save clicks. Anytime we introduce a new product that, adds two clicks for them in their day, they're “We're not going to use it.”Janie [00:45:21]: They have 15-minute back-to-back appointments with their patients. They're spending, hours during pajama time doing documentation. Every second and every minute counts and so we really think about being deeply integrated into the EHR as also table stakes to getting real usage and adoption. And anything that we build or introduce, we really talk about earn the right internally a lot, which is we have to provide so much value or save so much time that people will use us. But those are the two things that are close to us, is we know that the product won't be used unless it is deeply interoperable.Chai [00:46:01]: And strategically, to your point, it's like what does EHR want to own versus us? EHRs are really focused on the clinical workflows and so forth but some of the things that we're talking about here, I do these traditionally are outside of the domain where it's oh, connecting pairs and providers together with provider policies or the clinical trial matching, as Janie brought up. And so these are, entirely — we position ourselves as building this entirely new intelligence, clinical intelligence layer across, again, providers, pharma and, payers.Chai [00:46:33]: And so that's a it's a whole different ballgame that we try to playChai [00:46:36]: In combination with them.Jacob [00:46:37]: But it's like a different layer of scope.Healthcare AI Regulation, Technical Depth, and What Changed Their MindsJacob [00:46:39]: I'm curious, you are both relatively newcomers to healthcare. People have these, there's lots of futuristic healthcare AI takes of “Oh, everything will look different.”, now that you've been in healthcare for a bit, you live at the edge of AI, what have you, changed your mind on around this, as you think about what healthcare looks like in ten, 20 years? Any updates to your mental model from the time being close to the problems?Chai [00:47:02]: One thing that IChai [00:47:04]: Was hesitant about before and it's a common thing when I'm trying to recruit engineers that people ask me around, is definitely oh, healthcare, heavily regulated space. And it is, rightfully so. You want to keep, the patients at the end of the day safe. But one of the interesting things that, is a that surprised me how much it is coming to the company is there's a lot of really favorable regulatory tailwinds as well. Where you think about, government really wants interoperability between all these systems that we talked about and so agents can access this information. The government just in January, the FDA released updated guidance on clinical decision support, what I work on in such a way that they used to have guidance from like 2022 that required you to have, mention all these options and do all these other things but it's a very forward and forward-looking way. And so for me, what's been really cool to work on is this, there's this very special moment both in AI in general, we all know that but there's a special moment also regulatory in healthcare as well.Janie [00:48:05]: One thing I would call out is for the very reasons things are higher stakes or, potentially considered more difficult in healthcare, it's where some of the hardest AI problems will get solved first, just because the bar is so high. When I first joined, I was “Oh, this is where we'll be on the tail end of where, all of the AI innovation will be able to be applied.” But when you think about, zero error evals or multi-step workflows that have really low tolerance, a lot of the innovation will happen here just because we have to or else we can't ship.Jacob [00:48:42]: ‘Cause like in other domains, you'd much rather just solve the 80%-is-good-enough problems firstJanie [00:48:46]: 80/20 doesn't work hereChai [00:48:48]: And building off that, traditionally, there was a bit of stigma that, oh, healthcare companies are not that interesting from a technical perspective or I've seen that or faced that myself. But these are really hard and fun problems from a pure technical perspective beyond just the impact. How do you bring the latency of this thing down and make it really high-quality?Reducing Latency: Clinical Workflows, Agents, and Implementation RealityJacob [00:49:07]: How do you bring the latency of things down?Chai [00:49:10]: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So okay, let's answer the latency question. And maybe hopefully not too redundant with some of the things I've said earlier but some part of it is with any latency, you have to like what is, what is really your bottleneck. In a lot of workflows, it's sometimes it's the model itself. And so that's where like our data flywheel, our post-training team and so forth come in so that can you make the models far more efficient. So that's one aspect of latency. But there's whole other aspects of latency where it's okay, on top of that, if you use a constellation of different models, can you use — can you first use like a — it's like thinking fast and slow. Can you use a cheap, fast model that triages and hands it off to a larger model where you get more intelligence and so forth and so all theseChai [00:49:56]: Clever tricks to make it work.Chai [00:49:58]: And by the way, we are totally — we also realize that the parameter frontier is changing and so these tricks will — may not get us to where we want to be in five years but we need to if we want to build a useful product right now.Jacob [00:50:11]: Should we go to the quick-fire or you want to ask more about Abridge? We can stuff everything that's not Abridge into the quick-fireSwyx [00:50:16]: I don't mind. I was — I feel like Janie was on the topic of more long tail stuff, which isSwyx [00:50:21]: Not the eighty/twenty thing and that really matters. And I'll —, if you have any tips or cool stories or just general approaches that have worked for you that's interesting to dig into.Janie [00:50:32]: One of them is even just how we staff our teams looks different than a traditional software engineering team, I'd say.Swyx [00:50:40]: Let's go.Clinician Scientists, Edge Cases, and Evals at ScaleJanie [00:50:41]: We have a bunch of folks with different roles who are clinicians and so we have this role called the clinician scientist and I heard one of our leaders refer to them as mutants recently. But they are people who've had clinical backgrounds, so MDs typically, who are also deeply technical, somewhere, on the spectrum of like a full stack engineer all the way to like extremely scrappy prompter. But having each of these people embedded within our teams instantly raises the bar for everything that we build because not only are they determining, is this product clinically useful but they're deeply embedded in our whole evals process. And so when we talk about LFDs, when we talk about what is our actual evaluation criteria, you don't want Chai or me creating what those are because we don't have clinical background. But is probably unique to Abridge but has been game changing. And when you think about where the puck is going, you have people build with clinical backgrounds who are technical and where AI tools are going, they just becomeJanie [00:51:53]: More and more, critical and like the killers of the team. And so that's one. And then the second is just the scale at which we do evals to catch that long tail up front before anything ever gets into production is something that we've pretty much like really started to fine-tune, both from a scale but when do we know we need to get several hundred versus several thousand offline responses, what helps us make that quick decision and make this less of an art and as much of a science as possible. But that's also been something we've had to tune over time.Swyx [00:52:27]: And you have partners who opted in to give you those evals.Janie [00:52:31]: So we work either internally or with third-party for offline evals and then we have customers who also agree to give us, whether it's like thumbs up, thumbs down to like choose this or that, a lot of data to get us to what is as close to fully confident as possible.Swyx [00:52:51]: The term that comes to mind isSwyx [00:52:53]: Like active learning on things where you're weak. I feel like it's a lost artSwyx [00:52:58]: Is a lot of the polish that comes into doing something like this.Janie [00:53:02]: Really.Chai [00:53:03]: Hundred percent.Lessons from Glean: Technical Foundations and AI App InfrastructureJacob [00:53:04]: Maybe, on a totally unrelated note, Chai, you had a very, storied run at Glean b

Ženy XYZ #44: Feministický podcast, ve kterém Silvie Lauder, Markéta Plíhalová a Clara Zanga řeší důležitá aktuální témata. Blíží se finále nejprestižnější české soutěže krásy Miss Czech Republic, a tak se vynořují články v bulvárních médiích, které vyzdvihují “zadečky a vnady” účastnic. Jsou soutěže krásy v dnešním světě stále ještě relevantní, nebo je to přežitek? Mohou mít i pozitivní rozměr? A jakou roli hrály v upevňování ideálu krásy, rozvoji konzumerismu či kosmetického průmyslu? Ve feministickém podcastu Ženy XYZ o tom diskutovaly redaktorky Silvie Lauder, Markéta Plíhalová a Clara Zanga. 

Ženy XYZ #43: Sestavit si rozpočet, nastudovat místo a kulturu, sebrat pas a vyrazit. Tzv. passport bros pojímají hledání partnerky jako obchodní projekt, v němž vyhodnocují náklady a přínosy. Američanům či Evropanům v této rovnici dlouho vycházejí jako ideální ženy z Thajska nebo Vietnamu. Na transakci založené vztahy ale nejsou doménou pouze západních mužů: mladší partnery si v Africe hledají také bohaté Evropanky, po nevěstách v jiných zemích se rozhlížejí také muži z Číny nebo Indie. O tom, jestli je pro passport broes stále zajímavé i Česko a kde jsou kořeny tohoto fenoménou debatují redaktorky Respektu Markéta Plíhalová, Clara Zanga a Silvie Lauder. 

Neste episódio comentamos sobre os desafios e as soluções técnicas para a aferição de idade na internet, um tema que ganhou forte destaque com as novas regras do ECA Digital. Você irá descobrir como funcionam os protocolos de conhecimento zero, também conhecidos como Zero-Knowledge Protocol ou ZKP, e de que forma eles permitem comprovar a maioridade de um usuário sem expor dados pessoais sensíveis. Você entenderá a diferença entre ferramentas invasivas, como a biometria facial, e métodos técnicos que respeitam a privacidade e a proteção de dados, utilizando criptografia aplicada e padrões internacionais de segurança da informação. Além disso, você vai aprender sobre os impactos práticos da regulamentação da ANPD no controle de acesso a conteúdos restritos e como evitar o rastreamento excessivo por grandes empresas de tecnologia. O debate também aborda táticas de engenharia social, destacando uma série educativa sobre phishing baseada na psicologia da fraude, que é um conhecimento essencial para evitar golpes online e vazamento de dados. Ao longo da discussão, você verá que é possível equilibrar a proteção no ambiente digital com a garantia da intimidade, sem adotar modelos de vigilância em massa durante a autenticação de sistemas. Para não perder nenhuma discussão sobre tecnologia, direito e sociedade, assine o podcast na sua plataforma de áudio favorita e siga nossos perfis no YouTube, Mastodon, Blue Sky, Instagram e TikTok. Aproveite para avaliar o programa e compartilhar o conteúdo com outras pessoas interessadas no assunto. Você também pode apoiar o projeto acessando a plataforma de financiamento coletivo indicada no áudio ou enviando suas dúvidas e sugestões diretamente para o nosso e-mail oficial. Esta descrição foi realizada a partir do áudio do podcast com o uso de IA, com revisão humana  Visite nossa campanha de financiamento coletivo e nos apoie!  Conheça o Blog da BrownPipe Consultoria e se inscreva no nosso mailing ShowNotes The Psychology of Fraud, Persuasion and Scam Techniques LEI Nº 15.211, DE 17 DE SETEMBRO DE 2025 – Dispõe sobre a proteção de crianças e adolescentes em ambientes digitais (Estatuto Digital da Criança e do Adolescente) DECRETO Nº 12.880, DE 18 DE MARÇO DE 2026 – Regulamenta a Lei nº 15.211, de 17 de setembro de 2025, que dispõe sobre a proteção de crianças e adolescentes em ambientes digitais, e institui a Política Nacional de Promoção e Proteção dos Direitos da Criança e do Adolescente no Ambiente Digital. Mecanismos confiáveis de aferição de idade – ORIENTAÇÕES PRELIMINARES Radar tecnológico – Mecanismos de aferição de idade

Ženy XYZ #42: Feministický podcast, ve kterém Silvie Lauder, Markéta Plíhalová a Clara Zanga řeší důležitá aktuální témata.Během honů na čarodějnice byly odsouzeny a popraveny desítky tisíc nevinných lidí, z 80 procent žen. Mnoha zeměmi se šířil strach a kolektivní psychóza. Vykonstruované procesy ovšem nepřinesl temný středověk, jak si často myslíme, naplno propukly až po nástupu novověku, přičemž k jejich rozšíření přispěly některé moderní vynálezy, například knihtisk. Autorka knihy Kaliban a čarodějnice, italská a v USA žijící vědkyně Silvia Federici pak posedlost ženami, které údajně obcují s ďáblem, klade do souvislosti s koncem feudalismu a nástupem kapitalismu. O tom, kdo a proč se stal terčem procesů a jak s nimi souvisí nová vlna takzvaného witchy feminismu diskutovaly redaktorky Respektu Clara Zanga, Markéta Plíhalová a Silvie Lauder. 

Zeitgeist #17 s Dominikou Perlínovou a Tomášem Lindnerem o klesající porodnosti, přičinách, receptech na změnu i o dopadech demografické změny.Není to tak dávno, co svět vážně řešil dnes již z části vyvrácené obavy z "populační bomby", jak překotné rozrůstání lidstva označili američtí biologové Paul Ehrlich a Anne Ehrlich ve stejnojmenné populární knize z roku 1968. Dnes na Zemi žije přes 8,3 miliard lidí a jejich počet nadále poroste. Zároveň ovšem v příštích padesáti letech pravděpodobně dosáhne svého maxima. Přibývá totiž zemí, kde se rychle propadá porodnost navzdory snahám států tento trend zvrátit. Několik let v řadě klesá také v Česku, kde se loni podle demografů narodilo nejméně dětí za 240 let. Z jakých důvodů mají rodiče v mnoha zemích světa méně dětí než dřív? Co to znamená ve vybraných státech? Jaké recepty se nabízejí podle evropských demografů ve snaze zýšit počet dětí? A jaké velké změny čekat s ohledem na demografické rozdíly mezi zeměmi? Nejen o tom debatují v podcastu Zeitgeist Dominika Perlínová a Tomáš Lindner. Moderuje Štěpán Sedláček. Doporučujeme k tématu také články:Mít děti musí být zase cool. Politický tlak nikoho rodit nedonutíhttps://www.respekt.cz/zahranici/mit-deti-musi-byt-zase-cool-politicky-tlak-nikoho-rodit-nedonutiJán Markoš: Neexistuje příliš dobrých důvodů pro to mít dětihttps://www.respekt.cz/komentare/neexistuje-prilis-dobrych-duvodu-pro-to-mit-detiNech si zmrazit vajíčka a počkej na toho pravého (podcast Ženy XYZ)https://www.respekt.cz/podcasty/nech-si-zmrazit-vajicka-a-pockej-na-toho-pravehoOpravdová zábava začíná, když mají děti nad rodiči početní přesiluhttps://www.respekt.cz/tydenik/2024/21/opravdova-zabava-zacina-kdyz-maji-deti-nad-rodici-pocetni-presilu

אחרי שהבנו עד כמה הביקורת שורפת את הקשר, הגיע הזמן לפתרונות. בחלק השלישי בסדרה, הרב צבי וילור צידון פורס ארגז כלים מעשי שכל זוג חייב בבית, המבוסס על מחקרי תקשורת זוגית מובילים.בפרק זה נדון ב:חוקי הברזל לטיימינג: למה הערה ליד הילדים או בארוחת שבת היא גזר דין מוות לשיחה.התנהגות מול אישיות: איך להפריד בין המעשה לאדם שמולכם (ולמה ניתוחי אופי לא עובדים).נוסחת ה-XYZ: המדריך המדויק לניסוח תלונה בונה שלא מעוררת מגננה.אומנות התיקון (Repair Attempts): למה היכולת לעשות "פרסה" ולקחת אחריות על חלק קטן מהאשמה היא סוד הקסם של הזוגות המצליחים בעולם.האזנה חובה לכל מי שרוצה להחליף את זירת הקרב הביתית בשולחן עבודה משותף. (הסדרה תמשיך בחלק 4 בפרק הבא!) #פודקאסטזוגיות #ייעוץזוגי #הרבצביוילורצידון #שלוםבית #גוןגוטמן #תקשורתמקרבת #התפתחותאישית #נישואין #זוגיותומשפחה לקריאה המאמר השלם על ביקורת זוגיתhttps://heb.centernyc.com/love1/הרשמו לזריקת חסידות בערוצים השוניםלומדים יהדות וחסידות ברשת, הרשמו לערוץ היוטיוב, פייסבוק,  ווצאפ ,פודקאסטים ועודhttps://heb.centernyc.com/zrikat

We're back with another On the Journey episode! We had a rich conversation with Living Joyfully Network member Lucia Silva. Lucia was previously on the podcast in episode 251, Unschooling as a Lifestyle. She is an unschooling mom of two and she came back to share some updates about her unschooling journey. We talked about trusting our children’s learning journeys, Lucia’s inner growth and mindset shifts, as well as her experience in the Living Joyfully Network and how the community has supported her over the years. It was a really beautiful discussion and we hope you find it helpful! THINGS WE MENTION IN THIS EPISODE We invite you to join us in The Living Joyfully Network, a wonderful online community for parents to connect and engage in candid discussions about living and learning through the lens of unschooling. Come and be part of the conversation! Sign up to our mailing list on Substack to receive our email newsletters as well as new articles about learning, parenting, and so much more! Watch the video of our conversation on YouTube. EU251: Unschooling as a Lifestyle with Lucia Silva Follow @pamlaricchia on Instagram and Facebook. Check out our website, livingjoyfully.ca for more information about navigating relationships and exploring unschooling. So much of what we talk about on this podcast and in the Living Joyfully Network isn't actually about unschooling. It's about life. On The Living Joyfully Podcast, Anna Brown and Pam Laricchia talk about life, relationships, and parenting. You can check out the archive here, or find it in your your favorite podcast player. EPISODE TRANSCRIPT ERIKA: Hello, everyone. I’m Erika Ellis from Living Joyfully, and I’m joined by my co-hosts, Anna Brown and Pam Laricchia, as well as our guest today, Lucia Silva. Hello to you all! PAM, ANNA, AND LUCIA: Hello! ERIKA: Before we begin our conversation with Lucia, I wanted to invite you to join us in the Living Joyfully Network, which has really been life changing for me in so many ways. On the Network, we have such great discussions about so many topics. Our community has such a wide variety of experiences, and everyone’s really interested in learning and growing and being intentional with their families. It’s really unlike any other online community I’ve found. Being part of the Network offers powerful support, especially during those moments when fears pop up or if you’re new to unschooling and just need a place where people understand what you’re going through. If you’d like to learn more about the Network and check it out for yourself, you can visit livingjoyfully.ca and click on Network at the top of the page. And we’ll also leave a link for that in the show notes. We would love to meet you. So I’m very excited that we get to talk to Lucia today. I met Lucia on the Living Joyfully Network and have just loved getting to know her over the years. And she was also on the podcast back in episode 251 and shared her journey to unschooling in that episode. I encourage everyone to check that out as well. And we’re excited to dive in for an update five and a half years later, which is wild. So Lucia, we would love to hear what everyone is interested in right now. LUCIA: Five and a half years later sounds like, in the scope of kid time, it’s so long. It’s so long. And then thinking, how long have you been unschooling? Five and a half years still seems really new. So, it’s interesting to think about those elastic times. And it was fun to see how some things are just so similar. I’m sure you guys see that with your kids. But, wow, I can connect where they’re into the exact same thing. So there’s four of us. It’s me and my husband, Micah, and my two kids. They’re older now. To respect their privacy, I’m not going to be using their names. And I’ll just refer to them with neutral pronouns. They said I could talk about them in general. My oldest child is still really into ballet. And that’s their primary passion. And that has remained strong, grown, changed a little bit. It’s not what they want to do professionally, but it is just a primary part of their lives. They’re also still really into reading and drawing and making. They have a great friend group. And they do lots of fun stuff. I just dropped them off at the botanical gardens to hang out with friends this morning. And let’s see, there was one other thing I wanted to mention. I lost my train of thought. My younger child, back when I originally did the podcast, they were really into building and constructing items out of stuff. And I had not really forgotten, even though we still have a lot of that preserved in the garage. But they’re really into building tabletop games, mostly card games. They’re constantly inventing new games. We’ve brought a lot of them to the table, done a lot of design. We’ve taken them to little fairs and sold lots of them. And we have game tournaments. They’re kind of based around the Wings of Fire lore, because that’s what their friends were into when they started it. It’s turned into this thing where they have this whole group of friends that are waiting for the next booster pack to come out. But it’s kind of amazing to see connections, from that fascination with construction, like moving pieces, how they fit together. And now it’s, Mom, I have a new game. And it’s this whole fully formed game mechanics and point values. Now it’s branching out to some things that aren’t just trading card games. They’re thinking about what would be a good family game? But mostly card games. So they’re really into that. They’ve gotten really into fencing and chess, which I think are both similar sort of mental games. And they love talking with Micah about probability problems and stuff like that. They’re also really into philosophy and philosophical debate, or debating anything. So that’s that. And I think when we last spoke, Micah, my husband, was a professor at UGA, and he’s now moved into tech. And along that whole journey, so much of what we’ve gone through in our unschooling journey, I’m putting that in air quotes, because it just sort of becomes your entire sort of life philosophy, unschooling. But that has really been so meaningful for him on his journey of just learning the way his mind works, what his interests are, stuff like that. So he’s still in the research, data field, has gotten really into improv and musical improv with a little group here, and plays music all the time. And I am, I think, still doing a lot of the same things. I like to sew, and I’m reading, and I love following little rabbit trails and researching anything and dabbling about here and there. ANNA: So fun. All the things, but how they all weave together, right? You can just picture the household and the weaving together of all the things. ERIKA: I love connecting it back to the old conversation and seeing how that tracks, because we always talk about that, looking back and seeing how those threads connect together. And it just also makes me think, oh my gosh, kids are all so different, the things that they love and are interested in. You can’t predict it. And it's just so interesting. PAM: Yeah, I loved hearing the piece of looking back and now seeing how that is weaving into the things they’re interested in right now, because they can seem very different. Yet, when you look back, you can see the thread that underlies the various things together over time. And that is so interesting, just as a piece of knowledge, just a little bit more understanding about who they are, right? I think that is super cool. Did you want to say something? LUCIA: Oh, just as you were saying that I realized that along the way, I feel like that’s given me, it’s a really important reflection to have when they get interested in something that maybe I’m unsure about, like video games, for example, and thinking, what is happening with all this time? And it’s so easy to see what’s underneath for them. How does this work? How do the team dynamics work? How do I analyze these moves? It doesn’t mean that if you’re not doing that, it’s not important, but there’s always something going on underneath an interest unless they’re not being attended to, right? But if it’s intentional, just like we’re intentional. And seeing that there is that through line and that intention under it. Oh, and then sorry, one other thing about my oldest kiddo, who’s really into working with kids these days. They’re interning at a Waldorf school and they’ve been babysitting a lot too, which is a job, and they assist in the little kids’ classes at our co-op. There’s something underneath it that’s more like a passion rather than just like, oh, I go babysitting. Looking at the intention they bring to that and how respectful they are of the children, their privacy, what they’re going through and what reverence they have for that job. I mean, there’s all kinds of ways to have a job, but also to look at that as we are spending a lot of time doing that because I’m seeing that it is something that is really important to them to do rather than, oh, they’re working or they’re working without getting paid. PAM: All the different stories we can tell ourselves, right? But when we take that moment to actually dive a little bit deeper, so often we can see those threads. We can see the intentionality rather than the surface story that just, oh, I’m taking them to their job. They’re doing this thing. I don’t quite know why they’re not getting paid. Whatever lenses that kind of automatically bubble up, if we take a minute to just dig a little bit deeper and see what else comes up alongside it, it is really exciting. And it helps, as I think back, just helps with the mechanics too. Like I don’t mind driving them to X, Y, Z because I know the impact and what they’re getting out of it. I’m not just a chauffeur or something like that. If I take that as the superficial story of what’s happening, but no, I’m fundamentally supporting their pursuit of something that they are intentionally interested in. Who knows where it will go? We’ve talked a lot about how you really can’t predict it because we can guess but it’s really only looking back where we can see those threads and the connections and go, oh my gosh, I am so glad that I supported and helped with that along the way. ANNA: I just want to say I feel like this is a core piece of unschooling for me, this valuing the experience and the exploration and facilitating that. But it’s hard because it doesn’t necessarily have a product at the end, or it doesn’t necessarily even have a photo op or whatever the thing might be that grounds it in our culture. But gosh, it’s such a big part of it. And when you can take this time to look back, you do see those threads and you do see that growth. And again, it may be that they end up doing something with children, but maybe they’re just building a wealth of information and connection and relationship pieces that’ll be used in some other way. So yeah, just love that. ERIKA: It’s trusting, trusting that they know, right? They know the thing that’s interesting now, and that’s going to lead to something. And I feel like it can be hard because we are always seeing through our own lenses. That’s the part that can be challenging about that for me. I think, but it doesn’t make sense. Or why would you want to spend your time doing that? Or little judgmental feelings can come up just based on what it would be for me, like that interest doesn’t make sense to me. I think if we can drop that part, drop the judgment and just trust that they know themselves and this is going to lead to whatever it needs to lead to for them. I really love them. LUCIA: And it is so hard for people, they really want to attach it to something. Are they going to be a professional dancer? Are they going to go into child development? I’m like, I don’t know. Are you going to become a historian because you learned about the battle of the bulge. I get it. I think they want to know that everything’s okay. I understand it, but it’s important, or it’s been important for me to make my little energetic bubble and go like, yeah, is that cool? No, they don’t want to be a professional dancer because of XYZ or whatever. Then their face falls, oh, but they dance for 12 hours a week. Yes, that’s pretty awesome. That’s still great. It’s very, it’s just interesting when you get so steeped in this, to have to pull yourself out and see through those eyes, right? Remembering, that’s where they are. And I get it. And I’m going to figure out how to talk to you about this in a way that doesn’t make you so worried. PAM: Yes, I would want them to not be worried. Although I have no control over that. I got those questions so many times, especially as your kids get older, right? People start, well, then what are they going to be? Et cetera. And I got to a point where I just loved answering those with, “I don’t know, maybe.” They look at you like, don’t you know your child? LUCIA: Don’t you care? Well, especially as they get older, right? When they’re seven, that’s fine for everybody. When they’re 15 going on 16 and everybody’s talking about college and what are you going to do? And they look at you like, do you not care? Are you going to abandon them? And they’re starting to feel that, not pressure to do, but pressure to answer. Luckily we don’t get that from our family. So, I’d like to care a little bit less, but we’ll encounter adults who are like, what are you going to major in? Oh, are you going to this? Are you going to that? What do I say? It’s like, well, here are the options. We can prepare a little, you can just be out there with it. ERIKA: It depends on how humorous you want to be. You have lots of options. PAM: Oh my goodness. So I wanted to pull back something that you mentioned a little bit earlier and we’ll tie it in with the first interview we did. Episode 251. I do recommend everyone go back there and check out because you talked a lot about your journey to unschooling there. The theme and the title of the episode was unschooling as a lifestyle. And like you said earlier, it just becomes the way you live. So I was curious as you look back, how has your journey evolved so far? Because we know it will continue. And what things have helped you along the way? LUCIA: Well, I did read the transcript of that episode again. I had a vague idea. And it was so interesting to me to see both how I was at the beginning and how I was already like two feet in, here’s what we’re doing. And a lot of the sort of philosophy for lack of a better word, or like the ideas now are just, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. And I know then that my yes was a different kind of yes. It just had a different feel and I was really eager and trying hard. And now a lot of those things just feel like, Oh wow. I can’t believe I was worried about that. That was my primary focus. I totally remember feeling that way. And I was thinking of Pam’s unschooling journey. Also, that was the first book that I read. That’s what it’s called, right? The Unschooling Journey. PAM: Yes. LUCIA: And thinking about the Network as this constant companion and knowing that the unschooling journey is based around this idea of the hero’s journey as the journey into and through unschooling. And I’m thinking about how many times we do that journey in this spiral, right? This big sort of macro journey of we won’t do that and we won’t do this and let go of that. And we’re okay with this and then you go the next layer in and in and in, and now we’re sort of on this really micro journey where sort of everything spins around more quickly. I enter an unfamiliar situation or way of thinking, or how do I feel about this that my kid wants to do? How do I feel about this and do a little whole circle of a journey with that. And I realized that for me, and I think for a lot of us who are part of the Network, that it’s a mix of a companion, a champion, an oracle, like all of the things that those mystical mythical heroes come upon that reveal some little truth, here’s a little encouragement, here’s your magic potion to keep you going. But, for me, symbolically, there is no way, I guess I won’t say there’s no way I could have done it without the Network. But I know that my life is just totally different because of it. I know that every relationship I have is totally different because of it. I know that our family is totally different because of it. And it’s funny, because I never get to talk about the Network. I think all the people outside my life know that I’m part of this unschooling network. They know it's this online thing, and I have to go to a Zoom all the time. People will ask, why do you have all these Zoom meetings? Do you have a job? I’m like, no, no, I have, it’s a very important meeting I have to go to. Because there are all these layers to it. When we started, I approached it the same way I approached listening to the podcast as like, I was in mentorship mode. And I still am in a different way. I remember, every week, as soon as the talk came out, I would listen to it. And then Micah and I would sit together on the couch at night, and I’d either play certain parts, we’d listen to the whole thing. We were steeping in this lecture series, and then we’d talk about it. And I’d make notes and have these things I wanted to keep top of mind that week. And I could feel that transformation of ideas come loose in me and be like, okay, these are ideas I want to steep in. But then, I think I was maybe a little hesitant sometimes to post in the network, but I realized so quickly how much I learned from reading other people sharing it, everybody commenting and realizing this is unlike any other place that I’ve been. And in the same way that unschooling is unlike any other place that I’ve been. If you think of this as the ultimate community for that based on intentionality, and not based on this set of rules and ideals. Which is so funny that a lot of the homeschooling and unschooling communities online turn into exactly that. Because I think people look for advice. And there’s always one person who wants to be the expert. And that person ends up being the quote, unquote, expert and having the rules and you’re either in or you’re outside of that. And what I love seeing, even now, when somebody new comes into the Network, I learned so much from reading their new posts and the new things they’re wondering about. And I learned so much from people who are dealing with things that could seem totally irrelevant to me and my family. You learn so quickly how to read into the core of that relevance, how to offer support from your own experience to receive support from that shared experience. And the ability to share those things and be in a space that is really without judgment, which is so weird. Especially when you’re dealing with something that feels like a high principle, or just high intentionality. Most of those spaces, and I’ve been in a lot that have to do with unschooling, but also that have to do with health or lots of other things, and it can feel like there’s this sort of untouchable expert at the center, or this untouchable idea, and we’re all sort of at the feet of that. And feeling like we have this communal place, or real community, but also there’s this strong architecture that makes it so that anybody who walks into that space knows, gets the vibe. You can read the room really quickly, what’s going to be allowed here and not allowed here. There’s just not any bad behavior. So it feels really safe in those ways. But now it just lives in my head, all three of your voices live in my head, other people’s voices live in my head, phrases that people have said that I’ve written on a Post-it and stuck on my wall. So that sometimes throughout my day, like, I’ll be like, oh, okay, I’m feeling uncertain about this. I got to post in the Network. But I can write the whole post and all the answers before I even do it. I realized that’s why I’m maybe posting less, and I think I should just do this anyway, because it was so helpful for me then. And I love knowing that there are people in there who have been in there since I was there, whose kids are much older, and who aren’t visibly active so much. But just the other day, I posted something that was kind of a tender post. And immediately someone who had been in the group since I joined, who I wasn’t even sure was part of the group anymore, because I didn’t see them, but I thought about them as we’ve had some dialogue, and they just messaged me the loveliest message. Just knowing that there are people for whom this is so important. And just looking at the calls, I get so emotional sometimes when someone is sharing something. And everybody’s giving space, holding space, giving feedback, whatever it is. And I see these 16 tiles of faces. And I think these are parents all around the world, who are dedicating their Saturday morning or afternoon or whatever it is, to talking about their families and their self development as caring people who are stewards of other people in the world. And that just blows me away. I think that in and of itself is so powerful. ANNA: I feel like you captured it in a way that I don’t know that I could, because I think it’s really hard to explain to people. Because we do have those calls every week, we’ve been having them since we started in 2020. And I think of all of those weeks that we’ve had calls. And that’s the piece too, that this web of people all over the world, bringing such intention and there isn’t one path. And you know that we don’t ever talk about there’s one right way or one way to be. But gosh, have I learned so much from just seeing other people navigating all the different pieces in their life. And again, it may be a relationship issue, and maybe I’m not having that problem in my relationship, but just steeping in that intentionality and growth mindset is so powerful for me individually, and then just the collective of it is incredible. But yeah, I just am so grateful for you being there. And you really have seen it from the beginning and how it’s grown and what it looks like. I just really appreciated that and got very emotional, because it is, it’s so powerful. LUCIA: Yeah, and the growth mindset part of it. I think maybe you get lucky to meet a few people along the way in your real life who are invested in that. And I feel so lucky to have that in my partner, Micah, that’s where we are too, that is so important and central. And some people do have that with friends, but to be in a community of people where that’s their focus. And I think it’s maybe the kind of community that some other people may find in a totally different way in, like a church or something. I always wanted that type of community without any of the one right way, or the dogma piece. Even with the most wonderful ones, there’s a book we’re going to go back to, or there’s a principle we’re going to go back to. Well, our principles are there’s no one right way. Everybody’s different. These expansive ideas. Some people are nervous to come on the calls. At first, I know that I was, sometimes I'm even nervous now. But it’s hard to describe what it feels like once you’re there. It doesn’t feel like how I imagined, how can you create a warm, kind of magical community online on Zoom? I don’t know how it happened. But I think it’s just exactly that. You guys are the stewards of people coming together in this container with this intentionality, and everybody sort of rises to that occasion. And to do that kind of work in my life constantly is absolutely transformational. It’s changed every relationship I have. Really. ERIKA: It speeds up the process for me. I feel like being around people who are constantly kind of reminding me of things that I need to work through or things I want to process. It helps me grow faster. I don’t know if that’s the right word. But that’s what it feels like. I don’t know if I would have gotten to these places. You know? PAM: That’s the word that keeps coming up for me. This whole conversation is intentional, right? It’s like with that intentionality, and just showing up with that openness and curiosity. Okay, we’re going to go open and curious. Showing up with that piece, instead of the dogma, the direction, the measuring against, am I doing it right? Those are the pieces that we work hard to dispel, really, right? Which on one hand feels really good, there’s no rules to follow. And then on the other hand, it’s like, oh, what do I replace that with? What do I do if I don’t have a rule to orient myself towards? But that’s where the openness, the curiosity, and the intentionality come in. It’s the intentionality piece, like you mentioned, Erika, that helps with the moving forward versus feeling stuck. And I understand your hesitation about using the word fast to describe it, but maybe faster. It's the reminder to visit those things. And also the compassion when we don’t have the capacity in the moment, and the space, as you mentioned, just the space, right? Just the open space that’s there for whatever is going on. But I think that brings me back to the book, The Unschooling Journey, because number one, I love that you talked about the commonality of the different roles and people, mentors, and monsters. We talked about that a little while ago in the network, things that seem like maybe they’re getting in your way, but really, maybe they’re bringing messages. And that side is super interesting. And to see when we’re spiraling or using that journey, how we can go more quickly, because we have more experience, and we have more language to help ourselves walk through those pieces, to remember, oh, yeah, this is my intention. This is why I want to do this. And oh, yeah, this is new. Why is this bubbling up now? We’re always talking about that. It’s not that we don’t have challenges in life, we can just notice them a little bit more quickly, and move through them a little bit more quickly, because we gained these tools on what to do, instead of following the one path, right? ANNA: That’s what I was going to say. We talk about that a lot. It’s not like this makes it the panacea, that nothing ever happens. It’s not all rainbow and sunshines. But wow, do I catch myself faster. I reorient faster. I get back to connection faster. I just slow things down to be able to be present with whatever’s happening faster than if I didn’t have that. So I think that’s the piece, because it keeps happening, keeps happening, all these decades later. And there’s such a gift to it. And like you’re saying, I think it is faster, but there’s no end point. And I also appreciated you saying, Lucia, that it’s not always comfortable for people. I think some people come to an environment like the Network, and it isn’t comfortable because the one answer idea feels easier. Like, if you just give me the one answer, I’ll do it. That’s how we were trained in school. Tell me what I’m supposed to do, and I’ll do it. I’ll exceed the expectation. This is a little scarier in some ways, I think. But if you can just get past that fear piece of it, and kind of steep in that container of acceptance and curiosity, it’s so empowering. It just opens up so many possibilities. And I think it really speaks to people when they can get past that piece of, but wait, I don’t want to do it wrong. PAM: I was just going to say, that reminds me of, Pam, don’t lose it. When you mentioned it, Lucia, too, like when questions or challenges and things come up that don’t directly relate to things that are going on in our life, but it is still so useful to think through because it’s the foundational processes, right? It’s the tools that we’re using. How do we apply the tools in this situation and in that situation? And that is just so much more deeply useful because then that’s understanding the tools and how you apply it in different places. It just gives us so much more experience on the breadth of how I might take this tool and apply it to all sorts of different things. I think of when we first come to unschooling and you encounter a challenge and you go and you ask, and you get an answer and you’re like, oh great, that worked great. And then another challenge comes up a few months later. It’s like, oh my gosh, I don’t know what to do. I need to go ask and you ask and you get it, et cetera. If you’re not taking that intentional step to foundationally understand what’s the connection between why these different answers are working for me. I just find for me, I always need to go back and ask somebody because I haven’t learned the foundational stuff, gone underneath all that, where I can now think through something and help myself through it, et cetera. I don’t know if that makes sense. ANNA: Okay, wait, just really quickly. I think this is making me, sorry, this is making me think about why it makes it faster is because, and maybe it’s personality driven too, but I’m experiencing to some extent all of the issues. We have a member that’s gone through like house flooding and having to move and all the things she's navigating. Oh my gosh, I’m thinking of your thing with the fire extinguisher, Lucia. I haven’t gone through those things physically and yet I was able to sit with it, hold the container, process it myself, think about what that would mean. So I think that’s what makes it faster because we only have so many experiences in our life but I don’t need all of those personally to learn more. There’s something interesting about that. ERIKA: Yeah, I learned a lot about fire extinguishers from you, Lucia. I also, I wanted to pull back that other bit that I love that you said about intentional communities are often rule-based. I think that’s so interesting to think about. Maybe other people that we meet that are very focused on growth and intention, they are trying to do things the right way though. And so our intention is totally different because it’s an intention about figuring out how people are different and being open and curious, An intention to be curious about things, which just, it feels very different. LUCIA: Yeah, I mean, I wish it existed. I wish there was a beautiful room I could go to and be next to people and eat cookies and coffee afterwards. It’s like totally that part of it, but I realized it would be great if the world would be different. You reminded me when you were talking about going through all of these things, even if they’re not your experience. I realized that a lot of what I used to do and still kind of do it out of habit, a fear-based habit, when I would hear about someone had this emergency and they were misdiagnosed and it turned out I would catalog, okay, if they have a rash on their palms, they check for Kawasaki disease. I was cataloging these, okay, if my kid’s not talking by this age, I have to demand whatever it was, some fear-based, okay, I’m going to arm myself with this practical knowledge that will fend off any bad eventuality. And as we were talking, I realized that’s what we get, this real sort of other meta prevention, which is like we’re not going to prevent anything bad or practical happening, but what we have, we’re going to go through the same thing with it. If I’m feeling really strong about that, my priority is connection with the people involved, choosing out of love, being open and curious, all of the things that foundationally can feel like safety when so many things feel scary. Whether it’s that your kid’s playing video games or that they have an illness or that there’s a challenge. That there’s a different kind of safety, whereas I have always ascribed safety to rules and following best practices and figuring out the best way. So, this is something I’m still working on, but I like the concept. ANNA: Me too. I do think, because I think our brain can be, you and I are very similar in that, and well, all four of us really, knowing the four of us as I do. I think we all want to, we have that brain that’s cataloging and thinking all the things. But for me, that deep breath into, there’s plenty of time, staying in this moment, being open and curious really is the thing that provides me the most peace and safety, because I think it was so stressful for me when I thought I was preparing for every eventuality, especially in my first pregnancy, and then everything went to hell in a hand basket. It’s like, but wait, I did everything the “right way”, and that got me stuck, right? But I don’t get stuck there anymore, because I know things are going to happen, but what I know is that I can be present, I can have these connections, I can have these relationships, and that we’re going to figure it out. That feels more like real safety to me than what I was kind of chasing when I was younger with trying to do everything perfectly. PAM: I love that. ANNA: Okay, so I want to go to our next question, because I think it’s interesting. Something you’ve talked about on the network and reflected upon on calls is just observations about your kids and their relationship to themselves, and how you’ve seen them evolve as they’ve grown in this environment that you’ve created. How they move through the world, and so are there any little bits that you feel comfortable sharing just about your experience of that. LUCIA: Yeah, I mean, it has been so interesting. This is an area where I can so directly see. Where I’m just practically learning from them, just by observing how someone else can be in the world, and being someone who is shaped totally differently by an experience of looking outside and adhering to outside standards to determine how I feel, when I need rest, what kind of food I’m eating. To see the opposite of that, of people who have such a strong basis in that type of self-knowledge, intuition, self-reflection, and all bolstered by, I don’t want to say extreme, but just actual autonomy of being. And I don’t want to say I've given them autonomy, they’re not being prevented from being autonomous beings who have agency over so many areas of their lives, as much as possible. I believe that’s part of how they’ve developed this. Just watching how to do it. There’s no question, if they need to rest, they’re going to rest at this time, and if they they’re going to eat this kind of food, they’re going to eat this kind of food, and just this really strong conviction of anybody who gets in the way of that. And they’re not rude people, but it’s about people who press back on that, are you really going to eat that? You’ve been in bed all day, etc. They have no tolerance for that type of external judgment, and they have sensitive humor about it. They function pretty well in the world, but things that I’m so uncomfortable with, I feel like this is the big personal project of my life to try and unravel the ideas of, have I done enough work to deserve rest? What should a person of my age, what am I capable of doing in a day? Really having lost total touch with what I actually need to be resourced, and then living with people who are in total touch with what they need. And so, kind of going back to this idea of what are they going to do with their lives or major in, and also what we’ve been talking about as our process is in being open and curious, and all of these principles. That’s what they’re majoring in, right? You can do anything if you’re open and curious, you have a relationship with yourself that is grounded in trust or intuition. People see this, they will say, they’re so amazing, they’re such a pleasure to talk to, they just know who they are, but where are they going to go to college? You just answered your own question, so it’s fine. But really, it’s just a total flip side of priorities of what starts to happen being steeped in something like this is where those priorities come up and change. My oldest child was diagnosed with severe scoliosis a few years ago. A total S curve, and they deemed it surgical immediately. They would need surgery, and just in that room, they were just, I think they were 13 at the time, anyway, and just asked the surgeon questions, like, oh, what would happen if we wait? Do we need to do this now? The doctors started with when is your ballet break? When are we going to schedule the surgery? And then answered well, you should probably do this before you’re 22 or 23. They were like, okay, so let’s wait. What are the other options? I’m using a little more confrontational tone than they did. But they said those things on their own. And then in the car later was said, they put their hands on my back without even asking. And I had to step back from not taking that as like, Oh, I really messed up. That’s my job. But I come from an era where doctors did all kinds of things without asking. A lot of things, especially for a child, but that they would expect having very little experience with that for a doctor to say, Hey, can I touch your back? They’ve received no education about that. That’s just what they mean, well, they have by living in a world of the person who’s respected, autonomous. So, that’s how they walked through that whole journey and ended up doing really intense physical therapy and loved their physical therapist. And it turned into this whole fascination with the body and how the body works and alignment and, learning that they were hyper mobile and reading books about this. And so they have a whole fascination with physical therapy and physiology now. But ended up being deemed by that same doctor a year later, that their curve was corrected by like 14 degrees. And the doctor said, I would not recommend surgery anymore. They have no pain, a total success story for them. But again, there were all kinds of practical and sort of more emotional parts of how that is supported, right? One is being willing to go out on a limb and run a ledge and be the outsider who’s not going to do the surgery, being willing to do that, right? You have to, again, step outside of this sort of echo chamber, everybody’s going, this is what you do, this is what you do, it’s going to be your fault if you don’t do this. And just taking in all of the information, looking at the person in front of you asking all of the questions, getting all the information and going, Yes, let’s try this. And then being 100% willing to drive them to physical therapy four times a week, for a year, and them being willing to do it. And I’m having the time to do that in the middle of the day. And so many times I was more in it, in a practical sense. I think during that year, we didn't have time for a lot of other things. And they were getting older, we were doing just little, and that faltering that you have along the way. Is it enough? And Micah was like, look how much they’ve learned about themselves, their body, their relationship with their body, their relationship with all kinds of things this year, I realized, yes, wow. And seeing now a couple years later, what a big role that had in their life. For some people, that story is different and also meaningful for them. They have a surgery, they have this long recovery, they have limited mobility, there’s an identity in that. And for my kiddo, they got this experience that fit their personality, which was to be in their body, get really in tune with, I mean, as a dancer, that’s how they relate to themselves. So it just expanded this vision for them of what is happening for them in their body, in their role, what it means, and the kind of relationship they can have with their body. I think that really started to solidify for them, a core piece of the way they walk through the world, which I think could feel like an insignificant little side trail for some people. That was the year I had scoliosis and got the surgery or whatever, which is, again, the right path for some. It is not the right path for every 13 year old to do physical therapy every day on their own and in an office for two hours. But that’s what they wanted to do. And there was a lot of support and scaffolding needed. And then a lot of trust to know when they got to a place where they didn’t need to do as much, and I was still in the like, well, have you done this today? Have you done that? And they were like, no, I can feel it. I can feel my alignment, I can feel I’m doing okay. And I realized that they had integrated this into their whole, that’s the way they are, is that they’re constantly sort of being in that spiraling place of alignment in their body. And I got to see it on an x-ray, which we don’t get to see when we’re talking about emotional things, right? There was this kind of parallel for me to get that level of trust with things that are not as evident or not physical around ways they’re thinking about things they want to explore, and to trust that all of that is just as valid, if not more than filling out the transcript, we would have filled out for a ninth grade year. Which is also challenging to come up against. ANNA: It’s so interesting to think about that journey and how when we look at the threads, that piece of who they are with dance, that was there before. And so I think that’s the piece you trusted for them to be in dance six days a week for years, because it was that important to them. And now you see that they’re taking that experience into all these other pieces and all these other realms. And then their ability to be able to say, to know that I can ask my questions, I deserve for somebody to talk to me and answer my questions. That’s just really powerful at 13 years old, and I know they’re both like that in different realms. That they have that experience. And I think that is one of the big things that we touch on. That’s a big difference that I see is, I feel like we were talking about it in the network not too long ago of just this kind of adults as authority or the enemy that we kind of structure it that way in our culture. And I think it’s so different when we can have that collaborative relationship between adults and children. I think everybody’s better off. I feel like that surgeon learned a lot through that experience. And they still may value surgery, because that’s what they do. And they love it. But they learned something. I think having that collaboration just helps everybody involved, no matter what path is chosen. PAM: I just wanted to bring it back, Lucia, I loved your point about how you could see the results on the x-ray. But it’s just beautiful to recognize that you had that moment, and you could see the intentionality that they were bringing to this whole process, and the choices that they were making, and how that was fitting with who they are as a person through their other choices and activities. But to understand, like you said, for other journeys, and emotional ones, just the different kinds of choices that a person, child or adult, makes in their life, that they are perfectly capable of bringing that same level of intentionality to it. So that even if we don’t quite understand why they’re making those choices, we’re going to trust it the same as the one that we could more visually comprehend because of its particular circumstances. But to recognize that they are just so friggin capable of that, of being in the world and of choosing how intentional or how deep they want to go with a particular interest, or choice or, I’ve had enough of that. I don’t want to go any deeper, I don’t want to push any harder. I want to quit. That whole piece that is still with intention, that is a choice that they are making. That is totally there, like you were saying, that authenticity, whatever word one wants to use. I just think that was such a great point. And to recognize the intentionality that they so often bring to things that we can’t see, often we can’t see the impact, again, looking back is easier as well. But yeah, I love that piece. ERIKA: It’s such a beautiful example of that. And I feel like our kids who have grown up with this kind of autonomy and being more in touch with who they are as a different person than we are, I feel like that helps me remember, there’s not one right way. That’s literally what your child told the doctor’s, there’s not one right way, just telling the surgeon, there are going to be other ways to do this, and we’ll figure it out. And I think it’s such a great reminder when my kids do that, because I think I was so schooled. So, you just get to a point where it feels like, oh, when this happens, you do this. And if this and this, this is the right way to do that. And that’s the right way to do this. There’s just a lot of peeling back all those layers of expectations, or just feeling like, what are people gonna think? All of these different judgmental parts that we have. I remembered recently, I asked my youngest, are you interested in traveling? Because in the past, that’s been something that we’ve talked about a lot and really enjoyed as a family. And it seemed like they really liked it too. And the answer was, not right now. And I was like, that is such a great answer that I would not have been able to give at that age. Because it just kind of leaves space to change. I’m not gonna say I’m not a traveler. But right now, I know I’m not in the season where I would enjoy that. And, I’m just like, wow, it just feels like such a more mature response. Your child at the surgeon is a much more mature response than I would have been able to have at that time. I would have been taken over by the authority feeling. So anyway, I think the kids are amazing. ANNA: Yes. Two other things that came to mind about this whole piece, I’m going to try not to lose them. So one is, this is back to the x-ray and being able to see it, but not always being able to see it, whatever the journey for them is. And I think it’s just important to say out loud that we may never see it, we may never see the actual x-ray, right? Sometimes we can look back and we can see the threads. And we can see how that really led into this developmental piece. But sometimes we’ll never see it because we’re different human beings, we’re never going to be inside of them. And I think that can, again, feel scary, or it can feel kind of exciting, to know there is this person on their own journey, and I trust their journey. But that can be tricky. So that stuck out for me. And then the other piece you said about how people recognize, oh, they’re so self aware and easy to talk to. And then where are they going to school? Or what is their next step? It just reminded me, so you know, I work with a lot of adults and couples and I just wish people could understand that piece that you’re talking about. That’s the reason why they’re coming to seek help in their 40s and 50s. And 30s is because they don’t have it. It’s not because they didn’t go to school, or they didn’t have the career, they did all those things that they were supposed to do. But they can’t figure out, who’s who am I? What is my voice? What matters to me? And so for me, these kids that we see, because I mean, we’ve been at this for almost 30 years now, Pam, these kids that we see growing up in this lifestyle and moving on, that is the piece that they have, even through the bumps, and even through the maybe not figuring it out, or tough times, because it’s hard to become an adult and figure out all the things. It’s not that it’s without bumps. But they do have that core sense of who they are, they do have this sense of, yeah, I can ask people for things, I deserve to have that collaboration. It is just such a different feel. Go ahead, Pam. PAM: Yeah, so what bubble, they know who they are. And tying back to what Erika said, they know they can change. Yes, that they aren’t static. I know who I am. And this is static. And now everything that happens around me, I must measure against that vision of myself, and respond that way. No, that they have a sense of who they are, and a sense of how they can change, that that change isn’t bad, or wrong, or that who I was two years ago is now wrong, because I see things differently. LUCIA: Without that, I feel like I was so oriented, like Erika, I was very well schooled in how I was being observed, how I was being interpreted, how I was being identified, and then identified with those identifications. I’m this, I’m that. And so really feeling this pressure to be that and always falling short of that. And then seeing kids who just have no relationship to that. It’s like it doesn’t exist. It’s so weird. And I can feel it. I felt it. It’s so easy to see with the ballet piece, because you’re going to talk about something where you’re just looking at a mirror all day, right? How do you escape that? And it’s not that they’re not aware of the toxicity around ballet and dance. And that’s why they don’t want to do it professionally. But they are an unbelievably gifted dancer, their musicality and technique, combined with the amount of hard work that they want to put into it is astounding. It’s hard to not go, but you could be that, everybody thinks you’re that. If it were me, that’s all I ever wanted was to actually be that good, right? And to realize, oh, wow, that’s what they don’t have, which is why they love it. Why half the days they wake up and they’re like, I love my life. Instead of just what I remember is just the pain of being inadequate. And everybody’s going to experience that no matter what kind of life you grow up in. But that’s not inadequacy is not the central driving force to overcome. It’s amazing to watch. It’s amazing to be around people who are not oriented to an external reflection of who they are, I guess. That’s what I would like to speed up for myself. ERIKA: Well, this has been so much fun. And thank you so much, Lucia, for joining us. We hope everyone enjoyed the conversation and maybe had an aha moment or picked up some ideas to consider on your own unschooling journey. And if you enjoy conversations like these, I really do think you would love the Living Joyfully Network. It’s such an amazing group of people connecting and having thoughtful conversations about all the different things we encounter in our unschooling lives. So we invite you to check it out and see if it fits with our free month offer. You can find the link in the show notes or you could just go to livingjoyfully.ca and the link is right on the homepage. So thanks for joining us and we’ll see you next time!

"אני רק אומר את האמת!" – האם המשפט הזה הוא התירוץ שלכם להריסת הבית?

A simple but powerful leadership lesson: show up — whether in loss, transition or everyday life. SUMMARY Jessica Whitney '10 reminds us that we often know what to do — the difference is actually doing it. Small acts of showing up can mean everything.   SHARE THIS EPISODE LINKEDIN  |  FACEBOOK   JESSICA'S TOP 10 LEADERSHIP LESSONS Here are 10 leadership lessons from this conversation: 1. Align your life with your values, not your plan Whitney thought she'd do 20 years in the U.S. Air Force, but family and faith became higher priorities than her original career plan. Leadership lesson: Be willing to pivot when reality and your values diverge, even if it means leaving a prestigious path. 2. Redefine success beyond titles and rank She struggled after leaving the Air Force because her identity was tied to “academy grad” and “officer.” Leadership lesson: Anchor your worth in who you are and how you impact people daily, not in your job title. 3. Use mentors to unlock “freedom to choose” A single honest conversation with her mentor gave Whitney “freedom” to imagine different possibilities. Leadership lesson: Seek out mentors who model alternative paths and will tell you the truth about tradeoffs. 4. Make decisions with the best information you have now Whitney references the Gen. George Patton quote about a good plan now vs. a perfect plan later, and emphasizes moving forward one step at a time. Leadership lesson: Don't wait for total certainty. Clarify what you know, what you don't control, then act. 5. Integrity = keeping and honoring your word From her transformational leadership class: Keep your word when you can. When you can't, honor it: Notify early, reset expectations and clean up the impact. Leadership lesson: Integrity isn't perfection; it's proactive ownership. This builds trust and reduces stress for everyone. 6. Name the stories that secretly run you (“what's undefined runs you”) Whitney recognized long-standing internal stories like “I don't belong” from moving often as a Navy brat. Leadership lesson: Identify your limiting narratives (e.g., “I can't disappoint people,” “I don't belong”) so they stop unconsciously driving your behavior. 7. Create a compelling future and work backwards She describes standing in the future you want (for yourself or an organization) and asking, “If we were already there, how did we get here?” Leadership lesson: Lead by designing the future state (culture, behaviors, outcomes), then reverse-engineer today's actions. 8. Show up for people — especially in their storms After her brother-in-law's suicide, the support from church and Air Force community showed her the power of “just showing up.” Leadership lesson: You rarely know what others are carrying. Leadership is often simply being present, unasked, when it matters. 9. Align daily actions with stated values Whitney feels the most stress when her behavior and values (family, faith, health, service) are misaligned. Leadership lesson: Use misalignment (stress, guilt, burnout) as a signal to recalibrate how you spend time, energy and money. 10. Invest in small, consistent habits (1% better) Whitney references “atomic habits” — reading regularly, moving her body, cooking healthy meals and doing “one more rep.” Leadership lesson: Long-term leadership impact comes from small, repeatable behaviors, not dramatic one-time efforts CHAPTERS 00:00:05 – Introduction & Transition Theme Whitney is welcomed to Long Blue Leadership. Host, Lt. Col. (Ret.) Naviere Walkewicz '99, frames the episode around transitioning out of the military, and Whitney shares her background as part of a dual-military couple and early family life. 00:02:02 – Mentorship, Freedom & First Thoughts of Leaving Whitney describes reaching out to her mentor about transitioning to the reserves. That conversation gives her “freedom” to imagine a different life that prioritizes family and values over a 20-year active-duty career. 00:06:39 – Academy Lessons, Courage & Decision-Making Under Uncertainty Col. Walkwicz digs into Whitney's use of the word “freedom.” Whitney connects her decision-making and leap of faith to leadership lessons from the Academy — facing unknowns, focusing on what she can control, and acting without a perfect plan. 00:10:13 – Growing Up Military & Redefining Identity Beyond Rank Whitney shares her deep military heritage as a Navy brat and descendant of generations of service. She explains the identity shock of leaving active duty and having to redefine success beyond titles like “officer” and “academy grad.” 00:13:26 – Values, Overwhelm & Redefining Success in Daily Life Whitney talks about aligning actions with values: quiet time, family, health and rest. She contrasts the nonstop pace of active duty with her new season as a stay-at-home mom and reservist, and how she now defines success. 00:17:19 – Loss, Suicide, Grief & the Power of Community Whitney shares the story of losing her brother-in-law to suicide in January 2020. She reflects on hidden struggles, the “buying bananas in the grocery store” moment of invisible grief, and the profound impact of church and Air Force community support. 00:23:12 – Learning to “Show Up” for Others Col. Walkewicz asks where Whitney learned to show up so intentionally. Whitney recalls community support during her dad's deployments, meals after her first child's birth, and a commander welcoming her back from maternity leave — illustrating the difference between knowing you should show up and actually doing it. 00:26:11 – Serving Beyond the Uniform: Church, Family & Cadet Morale Whitney explains what service looks like now: leading a 120-woman Bible study and serving on the USAFA Class of 2010 Cadet Morale Endowment board, which funds morale events for top cadet squadrons. She highlights meaningful leadership without a visible rank. 00:29:20 – Transformational Leadership & Redefining Integrity Whitney shares lessons from a transformational leadership course she took (and later taught): integrity means both keeping and honoring your word. She gives practical examples (calling when you'll be late, managing deadlines early) and uses a bicycle-wheel analogy to show how broken commitments make everything bumpier. 00:32:07 – “What's Undefined Runs You”: Naming Limiting Stories Whitney introduces the idea that unexamined stories (e.g., “I don't belong,” “I can't disappoint people”) quietly drive behavior. She shares her own “I don't belong” narrative from moving often as a Navy kid and how she consciously claims, “I belong here,” to lead more authentically. 00:36:50 – Creating a Future & Leading from It Whitney explains how leaders can “stand” in a desired future for their organization — one of trust, transparency and camaraderie — and then work backward to identify the actions and changes needed today to get there. 00:38:33 – Advice to Young Jess: Vision, Risk & Trusting the Journey Asked what she'd tell her younger self, Whitney emphasizes clarifying what will matter at age 80, aligning life with that long-term view, being less risk-averse, and trusting God with unexpected pivots and new paths. 00:38:43 – Daily Habits, 1% Better & Long-Term Growth Whitney shares the small daily practices that make her “better”: reading and podcasts, surrounding herself with uplifting people, and health-oriented habits like walking and “one more rep.” She connects this to the concept of atomic habits and incremental growth. 00:40:52 – Closing: Character, Showing Up & Living Your Values Col. Walkewicz closes by summarizing Whitney's key themes: leadership as character and presence, not having all the answers; simply showing up; and honoring integrity even amid uncertainty. She thanks Whitney for her ongoing service and impact. 00:42:05 – Production Note & Recording Date Ted Robertson notes that this Long Blue Leadership conversation was recorded on Wednesday, Nov. 19, 2025.   ABOUT JESSICA BIO Jessica Whitney '10 is a U.S. Air Force veteran, leadership coach and conflict resolution facilitator who helps executives and emerging leaders design purposeful futures and take aligned action. Drawing on more than a decade of military leadership experience navigating communication, conflict and high-stress environments, she supports individuals and teams in overcoming limiting beliefs, clarifying priorities and building systems that foster confident decision-making. Whitney specializes in one-on-one leadership coaching and workplace mediation, guiding productive conversations that transform tension into trust and strengthen organizational culture. She is also a wife, mother of four and advocate for intentional living, dedicating her work to empowering leaders to align their identities and results with their vision for the future. CONNECT WITH JESSICA LINKEDIN  |  SIMPLIFIED MOTHERHOOD CONNECT WITH THE LONG BLUE LINE PODCAST NETWORK TEAM Ted Robertson | Producer and Editor:  Ted.Robertson@USAFA.org Send your feedback or nominate a guest: socialmedia@usafa.org   Ryan Hall | Director:  Ryan.Hall@USAFA.org  Bryan Grossman | Copy Editor:  Bryan.Grossman@USAFA.org Wyatt Hornsby | Executive Producer:  Wyatt.Hornsby@USAFA.org     ALL PAST LBL EPISODES  |  ALL LBLPN PRODUCTIONS AVAILABLE AT USAFA.ORG/LONGBLUELEADERSHIP AND ON ALL MAJOR PODCAST PLATFORMS FULL TRANSCRIPT SPEAKERS: Guest, Jessica Whitney '10  |  Host, Lt. Col. (Ret.) Naviere Walkewicz '99   Col. Naviere Walkewicz 0:04 Welcome to Long Blue Leadership. We're so glad you're here.   Jessica Whitney 0:08 Thanks so much for having me.   Col. Naviere Walkewicz 0:04 You know, one of the things we love to do, and we're going to have some time really exploring a lot of the things that you've encountered in your journey, but we want to jump right into a place that is both relevant to our listeners, which is transitioning out of the military, but you did so in a way that was a little bit different, and maybe not on, like, the timeline of planning. Jessica Whitney 0:28 I'm a 2010 grad, and so is my husband, Tom, and he was a nuclear missile operator, and I was a finance officer on active duty, and we started having kids in 2013 which was just amazing. But being a dual military couple, we had kind of been through a lot of separation and time apart, which is standard for military couples. And so in 2013, I kind of — I just had my first son, and I was back at work, and I was just feeling this torn feeling, because I always thought I would stay in the Air Force the full 20 years. I loved serving. I loved being in the military, and having gone to the Academy — just all the dreams and the hopes that came with that, and being able to lead and serve my airmen. But I was feeling this yearning and desire to kind of do something else, and that's kind of where the seed was planted at that time. And I reached out to one of my mentors, who was actually the coach of the lacrosse team at the Academy when I was there my freshman year. She's actually one of your classmates, I think. She's Anne Marie Hornby. She's from Class of '99, and I just reached out on Facebook, and I was like, “I know, I haven't talked in a while, but I just wanted to check in and ask, you know, like, why did you transition to the Reserve?” Because she was always, you know, she was a teacher at the Academy. Like, she was always high performing. Like, I knew she was an amazing officer. Col. Naviere Walkewicz 2:02 She was high performing as a cadet too, by the way. Jessica Whitney 2:05 I'm sure she was. Just everything she did, I could tell she did it with excellence and love, and I just really respected her opinion. So I reached out and asked her just like, “Hey, can you just tell me, like, why did you decide to separate?” I'm just kind of feeling this tornness, and I'm feeling like maybe my calling might be something else than serving in the military, which, as an 18-year-old, you kind of go to the Academy thinking, “OK, I'm gonna have four years at the Academy, and then I'm gonna serve for five years, or 12 years, or whatever.” Like, you've got your whole life planned out, and then all of a sudden there's this, you know, pivot and decision that you have to make of like, “OK, wait, life is throwing some things at me that I didn't expect.” And I just wanted to know her opinion. And she just said such a sweet thing that resonated with me, that she kind of felt that same call of, “I wanted to spend more time with my kids. I wanted to be able to focus more on my husband and my family.” And while it was scary, she said, I know she knew that motherhood, or like becoming a stay-at-home mom and transitioning to the Reserve wouldn't necessarily feed all of her desires of competition and performing well and using her strengths to the utmost, maybe that she could — she also knew that it aligned with what was important to her and her family. And each family is different, and each career is different. So it really gave me freedom to say, “OK, I know successful women in the military who have families. I know successful women outside of the military who have families.” And you know, we choose to do the stay-at-home mom career, which was different for me, because my mom worked full time when I was growing up. So anyway, it gave me that freedom to kind of like pivot and think, “OK, what could the possibility be to like, create this life of being there for my family?” So fast forward, 2016 I was teaching ROTC at Colorado State University, which was a dream job, by the way, I absolutely love that job. And Tom, my husband, at that point, had already separated from the Air Force and was pursuing his career in professional golf. He was traveling to PGA Latin America in both the fall and spring of 2016, I had to go TDY to field training for seven weeks that summer. And I think we counted up being apart for over 40 weeks that year.   Col. Naviere Walkewicz 4:35 Majority of the year.   Jessica Whitney 4:36 The majority of the year. Yeah, and I did not really see staying in the Air Force, it getting any better, as far as, you know, having more time with my family and my husband. And I just felt disconnected, my heart wasn't in it anymore and serving, and I still had that little, you know, seed that had been planted when I talked to Wibs about, you know, like, “Why did you go into the Reserve?” And I talked to a couple other reservists who just loved the balance of being able to still serve in uniform while also being able to maybe have a civilian career, or just be able to have some more flexibility to spend more time and focus on their families during a season of life. And so in 2016 I'm sitting there my desk, like, “I just want to go home and take a nap. I'm so tired.” I had two kids at this time. I was like, “Oh my gosh, I'm just exhausted.” But I was like, “OK, I think —" you know, my husband and I prayed about it, we were just like, “OK, I think it's time to just take this leap of faith, kind of walk away from what we've known.” So now both of us would be out of the Air Force and pivot to something else, and like, step into that faith decision that for us, that the Lord's going to provide, and that we wanted to build and focus on the things that were really important to us. So showing that if family faith are the most important things, how was I using my time? How was I using my energy? How are we using our money? Did it reflect what was actually important? And so we made that decision, and then I got out in 2017 and separated. And honestly, it was the best decision ever. Now, I struggled a ton with my identity afterwards, because I just didn't realize that I really kind of was wrapped up in this idea, like, “Oh, I'm an Air Force officer, I'm an Academy grad,” and those things are, like, very focused on what you do. And so I had to kind of redefine what success was to me as far as just impacting the people around me. Col. Naviere Walkewicz 6:41 I want to just interject here for a moment, because you said a couple of things that I really want to pull on before we get too far, because I think it really does impact some of our listeners and some of the experiences that they've had. So the first one, when you talked about that transition, and there was a key word you use, and you use the word “freedom,” — “It gave me a freedom to kind of things a little differently” after having a conversation with your mentor, and then, you know, praying about it with your husband. And so I want to just explore that a little bit, because did you feel like that freedom, or just the ability to kind of navigate that did touch on some of the things you really valued that you learned at the Academy, as far as decision making, and kind of, you know, taking this leap of faith and navigating what's not always known. And, you know, I don't want to say it's safe, but maybe it's not the safest path, right? So, like, can you just touch on that a little bit more? Because I think that is something that, you know, people question that, kind of, in that decision-making place. Jessica Whitney 7:41 Yeah, I definitely think that in that decision, when I say, you know, we had this, I had this freedom to make a choice, we could, kind of, I could kind of lean back onto my time at the Academy of we were given so many challenges at the Academy and things that were unknown and things outside of our control, and you just learn to have an approach where you cannot problem-solve everything, but just like you can say, “OK, here's the variables I know that are true, here are the things that are outside of my control,” which just help you make clear decisions, and then just stepping into the fact that any decision, any action, is just taking one step at a time, and you don't have to have the whole future planned out. And in fact, in the military, you rarely do, right? I always kind of joke with my husband with, like, the quotes, but you know, like Gen. Patton, like “A good plan executed now is better than a perfect plan next week,” right? Col. Naviere Walkewicz 8:40 Next week. Thankful I was able to contribute a little. Jessica Whitney 8:43 Good job. Good job. Yes. And so just, but the fact that, like, just make — do what's best with the information you have now, and take action and don't just sit on it. And I think, but, yeah, that gave me that freedom. Because, yeah, it was a big step and leap of faith, because a lot of people think the military is, well, of course, it is a risky job, and especially risky in the sense of our physical harm and a lot of the challenges that we face. But in many ways, it's something we knew, know, and it's something that's very reliable, and it's something that we had, my husband and I had both lived for, you know, 11 years between the Academy and now. So it was a big leap of faith, as far as, you know, transitioning to the unknown, but we were able to kind of lean on just, “Hey, it's OK that we don't know everything. We can trust the skills that we gained at the Academy and trust the skills that we gain just in life to move forward.” And even with my husband, I'm like, “If this golf thing doesn't work out —" which, by the way, he's been a professional golfer for 10-plus years now, so it's worked out. I fully believe that we are capable of learning anything and doing anything if we choose to set our minds to it, and like we're gonna be OK, like, because of what we learned at the Academy and skills that we garnered. Like, we're gonna be OK moving forward. Col. Naviere Walkewicz 10:13 I love that. And you started to talk about having to redefine yourself, and before we get into that, I think it's interesting, because you grew up as a dependent of — your dad served in the Navy, right? So we like to use the term, you know, lovingly, I was an Air Force brat. You're a Navy brat, so your identity going into the Academy was already one of a military dependent, right? So let's talk about this redefining your identity, because I'm sure that it was much more than, you know, just on the surface level, it seems really simple, right, going from this, but I'm still serving, so it's not really that different, but I'm sure it was. Jessica Whitney 10:49 Yeah, it was a big transition. So as you mentioned, I was a Navy brat. My dad served for 30 years, and I come from a proud heritage of military service. My grandfather, before that, served in the Navy, he joined straight from the Philippines, and my great-grandfather actually served in the Philippine army and was in the Bataan Death March. So I've got a lot of history in the military and a lot of pride and service to my country. And my dad was always, you know, a hero to me and someone that I looked up to, as far as he was always, not the only serving in the military, but he would be a leader of, like my brother's Boy Scout troop, right, and volunteer with this, and he'd be active in the Rotary Club. And my mom worked full time and led my Girl Scout troop, and whenever he was gone to Bahrain for 16 months, you know, she held down the fort with three kids. Like, I just looked up to my parents and how hard working they were, and just how they were always serving something bigger than themselves and balancing family and all that. I still don't know how they do it. And we have four kids now. I'm like, how did you guys do all of that? But when I transitioned out of the Reserve, I just remember sitting one time, like, I was doing my quiet time in the morning, and I was reading my Bible. And at least for me, I had to remind myself my value is not in what I do. It's not in awards I get. My value is one, in Christ, and then two, in the actions that I take each and every day. And it's impacting and positively impacting the people that are around you right now. And honestly, it's a struggle every day, even today. I've been a stay-at-home mom for eight years now, and it's something I think we all struggle with — of like, what is our purpose in life? What is the reason — why we do the things we do? And each person really has to, like, struggle with that. So I had to, I think when I was really struggling with my identity, I had to redefine, like, OK, my worth and value is not in the title that I have or the rank that I have or anything like that. It is loving on the people around me really well and serving to the best of my ability with excellence in all we do right where I am, and that's the most important thing. Col. Naviere Walkewicz 13:25 How did you get to that point of defining that? I mean, is it kind of in lockstep with your views of yourself as a leader? Or would you say it's just where you kind of settled into in your moments of quiet and through your prayer of, “This is how I define my impact and my —" you know, what that looks like? Jessica Whitney 13:48 I think a big chunk of it was just continuous practice, in a way, each and every day, reminding myself, one, is what success looks like, because I think that as people who are highly motivated and being leader, you're like, you've got your to do list, you've got your things you want to do. I've got, like, a to do list, like, this long, you know? And yeah, and I would just tell myself, like, “I've got 25 things to do. I only did six of them.” Like, there was no way I was going to do 25 things in the first place, you know. So I think that as a leader in general, you need to be realistic about what you can actually accomplish each and every day, whether you're a stay-at-home mom or you're a leader in the workplace, and actually be able to, like, you know, time block and say, like, “These are the most important things. These are my priorities.” And probably just over, it's probably just over time of like, every morning, like, "OK, the most important things, like, got my quiet time in. I'm spending time with the kids. I went for a walk, I moved my body, and we're eating healthy meals. I remember when I was working full time, I would kind of be jealous of those people who, like, had time to cook a full meal, and, like, spend an hour maybe making dinner and, you know, have quiet time. I always felt when I was on active duty working full time, it was just like, get up early in the morning, go to daycare, drop off, work all day. You know, work out during lunch. Never have a break, and then run home, make dinner really fast, and, like, get the kids in bed, and there was no break, and there was no rest. And so I remember yearning for that when I was on active duty. And so when I first became a stay-at-home mom, and when I first transitioned out of the Air Force. I really had to remind myself, like, OK, what are my values? What is most important here, and are my actions aligned with that? And if they are, then that's success right there. And so I had to remind myself that every day, like I get time to make healthy meals for my family. I have time to go to the gym five days a week if I want to. I have time to put a, you know, like, say yes to things like this. I've got time to go speak at the Veterans Day ceremony at my kids school. Like, I don't have to feel bad about missing appointments for my missing meetings at work for appointments for my kids. I don't have to choose that all the time. Now, serving in the Reserve, you know, I still miss weekends where the kids have tournaments and games and stuff, but that's OK, like it there's, there's a balance in there. I hate the word balance, because I don't think you ever really achieve that. But I think that as leaders, you know, we have to — like, when you're feeling the most stressed, or when I felt the most stressed, it's when my actions and behaviors just haven't lined up with my values and what's most important to me. “So as leaders in your organization, if you know you guys are — your stated values, are, you know, XYZ, but you're over here doing ABC, then there's going to be disconnect in the organization.” So I think at any time, you know, when there's alignment there, then you're going to feel alignment for you as a person, as a leader. Col. Naviere Walkewicz 17:19 I'd like to dig into those values a little bit, because we did talk about how you've experienced deep personal loss, right, in your family, and you know, how have the values, or maybe just your life experiences, helped you navigate that? Because, you know, I think people experience grief on all levels, and if you don't mind sharing your story a little bit, I think it just will allow others to understand how you were able to navigate through that and maybe continue to navigate through that today. Jessica Whitney 17:51 Yeah, thanks for the opportunity to share this part of my story. So my husband's brother, Bob, was a 2008 grad, and unfortunately, we lost him to suicide in January of 2020. It was really just a complete shock when it did happen. It seemed like it came on so quickly. Bob was just always someone that when you walk into a room, he was always smiling. He was the light in the room. He was such a great husband and father. He was super active in his church and his family. And so a couple things that I took away from all of that was just one, we just never know what people are going through, what storms they are, like, they might seem perfect on the outside, and really, they're having struggles with maybe imposter syndrome or just doubt, or they're just having all sorts of issues, right? So you just never know. I remember standing in the grocery store after he passed away, and I'm like, staring at these bananas that I'm supposed to be buying for eight kids because we were like, up with them, you know, after the funeral. And I'm just thinking, like, no one around me knows that this just happened in my life, and I'm just standing here doing this mundane thing of buying bananas. And I think it, just, as a leader makes you realize that people are walking through storms all over around you, and if you're not currently in a storm, most likely you will be. After he passed away too, we were just blown away by the community support that he received, both from his church as well as from the Air Force family, but I know that it takes time to have good community. It takes — you have to invest time. And all of us, we're just so busy, but these relationships, these are the most important things that we can work on and develop the people around us. It kind of showed up for me in my unit, we had an airman who lost a spouse. He had three young kids at home, and his wife passed away. And I was like, we just need to show up for him, like, be at his doorstep. And we're in the Reserve. We don't live close together. We're not all stationed by the base. So, you know, it's like someone needs to go to his house, bring him a card, tell him we love and care for him as our Air Force family. And you know, he even commented afterwards, he was like, “You know what, you guys—” this Air Force family that he only saw one weekend a month. He's like, “You guys are my lifeline.” But I know that, for me, I really knew that we needed to show up, and that's because I knew what it felt like when people showed up at my door, when we needed it, you know? Col. Naviere Walkewicz 20:51 Wow. I mean, I think that's really — I mean, to navigate that. And loss, I think you know, is as a journey, that it's still a life journey, right? And so, and I think the fact that you were able to lean in and you knew and expressed it in a way that you know, showing up for those and then seeing it happen actually in your unit, and being able to translate that. Have you always known, I guess, about showing up? Have you seen that in other leaders in your career or in your life, what showing up looks like? How that really defined you? Because I'm curious if you know that was all just developed in seeing that in that loss journey, or if it was something you've seen over time and then witnessed it? Jessica Whitney 21:37 I guess I would say, if I'm really looking back, especially because I'm a Navy brat, right? We did live in places all over the country, and, yeah, we did have a good support system. Like my friends, my family, had people that would show up. Like when my dad was deployed, they would show up at the house when I was in high school. You know, we had such a tight knit community there, but I am thinking, like the first time I really felt that was with our church community. After our first son was born, people would show up at our house, and I didn't even know them, and they were bringing food to us. I was like, “Oh my gosh, this is so sweet.” But just, like, that power of community, and then even with leaders that I've had in the past, like my first squadron commander that I can remember, she, like, the first day I got back again from maternity leave, she had, like, just brought, like, a little vase of flowers and put it on my desk, and just like a welcome back, but like an acknowledgement too. Of you know, it's hard to come back after, right? You know, your first child, or any child, like after you have a baby, and then you come back to work, but just, you know, welcoming and showing up. And I think that this, I don't know exactly where it stems from, but, yeah, actually taking the time to do it, because a lot of us know we should do it, but do we actually pause long enough to do it? Col. Naviere Walkewicz 23:11 That's a really great — I think that particular nugget, right? We know what we should be doing, but do we actually take the steps to do it? I think, is actually an important lesson right there. And, you know, would you say that throughout your experiences, and I'm really curious, because I think, you know, you talk about being a stay-at-home mom, but I'm sure your schedule is quite — you said you get six out of your 25 things done. Can you talk about how you're serving outside of the uniform? Because I think that that's really important as well. Service doesn't stop just because we take the uniform off. And I mean, it sounds like you're serving in your church and your community. You know, what does service look like to you now, through that leadership lens, maybe when you're not wearing a rank all the time? Jessica Whitney 23:54 I have really looked at the areas of my life that I want to be active in, like, what's important to me? And in the church, I participate in the women's Bible study, and I'm one of the leaders there and kind of help lead. We have 120 women that come every Wednesday and I'm one of the leaders that, you know, kind of facilitates the overall Bible study. And I've just loved stepping into that role and using my leadership skills to encourage people and show up. And then the other board I kind of serve on is the Class of 2010 Endowment for Cadet Morale. And so our class, with our funds that we, you know, had raised throughout the years, decided to set up a morale fund. So the top squadron for each semester actually receives a $5,000 check from our endowment, and they can use it on whatever they want. And I just remember, like those cadets, those high schoolers that are transitioning to be future leaders of the Air Force, they are amazing. I am impressed every time I interact with them. And the Academy is hard, and I just want to offer that little bit of light, you know, to encourage them. Like, “Hey, you're on a good path. Like, just, just continue on. And here's a little bonus, bonus check.” You know, literally, we love that part. But yeah, so I just love to step into service where I can. Col. Naviere Walkewicz 25:23 I'm glad that you shared that, because I do think it's easy for us to downplay our role and impact in the hats that we wear and the ways that we serve, and so I really appreciate you sharing that, because I think that's an important part of our stories you talked about with me before you know, redefining yourself. I want to go back to that because I think it has to do with being authentic and who you are. And so as you've navigated this new season in your life where you're still serving in these multiple hats and raising your family, supporting your husband, you know, where was that seed planted from, being an authentic leader, kind of, you know, being — leading with integrity, you know, maybe saying, “I can't do this, but I can do this.” Can you talk a little bit about that? Jessica Whitney 26:07 Yeah, absolutely. I took an amazing class at the Academy, a leadership class that a friend of mine, again from the lacrosse team, recommended me, and she's like, “Jess, this class — it's called transformational leadership. It's way more than that. I really think you need to take this course.” And she was so right, because there are so many things that I carry over from that, from that course into my leadership, and then just my everyday life. And it was taught by Capt. Kari Granger, who's now Kari Zeller, and she's an Academy grad as well. And when I got to my ROTC detachment in 2016, so eight years later, this gentleman came into the office, and he's like, “Hey, my daughter teaches this leadership course called being a leader and the effective exercise of leadership. I really want to teach it at Colorado State, but I'm looking for someone to partner with, maybe through the detachment. Like, do you think anybody would want to co-lead this class with me?” And his name was Karl Zeller, and I was like, “I think I took this class when I was at the Academy, and it was amazing, and I would love to lead this class with you.” And so not only did I take the class at the Academy, I also taught it two semesters while at Colorado State, we kind of made it an elective class, and we had several cadets and cadre go through the class, which was just an amazing experience. Because I think most of us know that when we have to teach other people something, we learn it even better than when we go through it ourselves. So the kind of the main takeaways I had were one kind of heard the definition of integrity. We all know the Air Force's definition of doing what you know the right thing when no one's watching, when nobody's looking, but she kind of defined it more as both keeping your word and honoring your word. So we all know that keeping your word that's easy, but what is honoring your word mean? And her framework kind of laid out, honoring your word is, as soon as you realize you're not going to keep your word, notifying the person that involves saying when you are going to keep your word and then cleaning up any mess that you made by not doing it. So a quick example would be, you know, you're running late to a doctor's appointment. You get in the car, you realize, “Oh my gosh, I'm going to be seven minutes late to the appointment.” Instead of, like, white knuckling your steering wheel to make it in time, you feel guilty when you get there. You immediately call the office. You tell them, “Hey, I'm going to be late to the appointment. I'm going to get there seven minutes late. And, you know, I realized that this has an impact on you like, you know, let me know if I need to reschedule." Whatever it is, right? Most people are so shocked by this ownership that they are so much more gracious to you in whatever the circumstances are. And on top of that, you're not stressed. You're not, you know, white knuckling. Col. Naviere Walkewicz 29:22 So when it really takes you nine minutes to get there? Yeah,.   Jessica Whitney 29:26 So hopefully overestimate.   Col. Naviere Walkewicz 29:28 Seven minutes and 40… Like, round down. Jessica Whitney 29:29 My husband calls that, like, Jess math. I'm like, yeah, well, it's fine. It's fine. But, like, if you think about in the workplace, right, like, you have an assignment, you have something your boss gave you, it's due Friday. You realize Monday, OK, there's no way I'm going to do this. I can either stress about it, work super late hours and, you know, like cause all this extra stress, and then maybe still not accomplish and get the work done, and then show up to my boss on Friday and say, “OK, sorry, boss, I couldn't get it done.” Or on Monday, you bring up the conversation, you swallow your pride, and you say, “These are my challenges.” You manage expectations, and you're you guys together. Can you know, either reassign, get help or bump the deadline, whatever it is, but now you're no longer living in this like, fear of like, I'm going to be late or whatever, like you're able to perform better. And so they, in the class, they talked about how, with integrity, everything works. And they talk about the idea of like a bicycle wheel, right? There's spokes on a bicycle wheel, and if all the spokes are intact, it's going to run very smoothly, right? That's keeping your word and honoring your word, you're performing really well. Well, when you're not honoring and those folks and you're not keeping your word, or you're not honoring your word, some of those books are missing, so it's just going to be a little bit bumpier. And things are going to get done, but they're not going to get done as well as they would if you were honoring your word. So that's a big takeaway Col. Naviere Walkewicz 30:56 That's a great analogy. Wow. Yeah. Jessica Whitney 30:58 So I apply that, I feel like in everything, because I think a lot of us will get in the way of ourselves, of just like, “Oh, I don't want to tell them and be late, or I don't want to, I don't know, disappoint someone, or I know there's expectations with my husband, but I'm just going to ask forgiveness instead of, you know, for permission,” or whatever it is with whoever. So anyway, with integrity, nothing works. And so I kind of take that away of, like, OK, what's expected of me? OK, I'm going to try to meet that. And that kind of lines up too with just this idea of what's your values, right? So if I say I'm a person that values fitness, do my actions line up with that. That's part of my word. OK, so I've said, I've said, “OK, I'm a fitness person and I want to be healthy.” Well, am I going to the gym? Am I eating healthy? Am I drinking too much? Am I — whatever? Do my actions align with that? No, OK, I'm not in integrity. It's not bad or good. It's just not working as well. Not going to accomplish my goals if I'm not in alignment with the other two things. And I'll just touch on them quickly, and then we can explore more if you want. But the other one is what's undefined runs you, which is basically means — Col. Naviere Walkewicz 32:06 Wait, say that one more time. Jessica Whitney 32:09 What's undefined runs you. So it's this idea of all of us have stories most likely from our childhood that we make up about ourselves. So like, I don't belong. I can't disappoint people. I have to get things done the right time. And we can probably all look back in our past and say, “I remember I got in trouble one time when my grandpa was at the house and I was late getting in, and he said, you know, you're disappointing your mom. You're not listening to her.” And then, all of a sudden, you make this life sentence for yourself of I can't disappoint my mom. I can't disappoint so now you have this filter, this mindset that all of your decisions and actions flow through that says I can't disappoint others. Well, of course, that's going to limit what you can and can't do, because it's filtering out half of, you know, a quarter of action, anything that could any — Col. Naviere Walkewicz 33:03 Risk or grit. Jessica Whitney 33:05 Exactly. And so what the undefined run you means you're never going to be able to completely get rid of these filters and things that you have, but you can name them and define them. So you say, OK, like for me, I was a Navy brat. I moved around a lot, and so I often felt like I didn't belong where I was. Like, I always felt like people already had relationships, all that stuff. So I do, I know that I will walk into a room like a Bible study, and in my mind, think, “Man, like, people just don't really connect with them. Like, maybe they just don't like me.” I'm like, “No, I've been here for five years. I belong here. I am a part of this group.” But it's this, you know, filter that I'm running things through, of I don't belong. I need to name that, remove it, and then be like, OK, I belong here. I am part of this group. Naviere Walkewicz 33:54 So what have you named it? And have you removed it? Jessica Whitney 33:59 I think it's more about just the awareness. So it's like that, we as leaders have to be aware of the things that are getting in our own way of being an effective leader. And so I — this is a big one for me, like the I don't belong. So even recently, I walked into a new group of women and I said, “I belong here. I am a part of this community.” It's like at my son's school, and I can contribute as me. I don't have to hold back, or, you know, be a certain way. I can be myself. I can be my authentic self and lean into this. And it was very freeing, because in the past, I have gone in and just kind of like sat kind of back, and I don't want to be intimidating, or I don't want to take over the conversation, or just whatever it is, I'm not being myself, and I have to tell myself, like, “I belong here. I can be myself if they don't accept me for me, that's OK,” you know. But I can't hold back just because I'm trying to fit in and just because I'm trying to be risk averse, or, you know, conflict averse, or something like that. So, yeah, just be yourself, right? But so what's undefined runs you. So as leaders, we need to identify what's holding us back, what's running our lives, right? And just name it. They have a phrase: “Name it to tame it.” So once you can put a name on it, then that often helps you change your actions, you know? And then the last one is just, I think leaders, you are a leader. If you are impacting something around you, the organization, the people around you, they wouldn't be who they are without your influence. So in that framework, we talked about creating a future as leaders. So you've got a current organization, and maybe there's, you know, like no one likes to hang out, there's gossip, there's toxic leadership, there's bad communication, no transparency. This is a very imaginary organization, of course. But you acknowledge, like, OK, this is what's going on. Let's create a future. What does the future look like that we actually want, with all the actions and things like, OK, we have transparency. We like to hang out. There's, you know, Squadron picnics. We go to PT and we all encourage and work hard. We handle conflict in a healthy way. OK, so if we're standing in that future and looking back, how did we get here? So the course is a lot about, like the whole ends, ways, means that the Air Force talks about, but just how can you stand in the future and look back and say, “How did I get to that spot?” And then that's how, you know, what's the next action you can take in this current spot? Col. Naviere Walkewicz 36:49 Wow. Jess, it's almost like you read my mind, because there's two questions I actually want to ask you, and one of them is about looking back. So why don't we start with that one? First, you know, what is something you would tell yourself, young Jess back then that you could be doing then to help you be a better leader now? And is it actually what you just talked about, or would it be something else you would add? Jessica Whitney 37:11 No, I think it would be just that. Like, no, where do you want to be even, like, let's say, in five years, or what's going to be most important to you in 80 years? Right when you're 80, when you look back on your life like, what's going to really matter? And start aligning your life with that. Now, some of that takes time, but standing in that future of how you want it to feel, how it looks, how you want your organization to feel. Like, start — write it down, put it on a vision board, talk about it with someone. And then I would say to myself, like, and then start working towards it. I think when I was younger, I was, you know, I was comfortable with where I was at. I was afraid to take risk. I was afraid to do things different than what I always thought I would do. And you know, for me, the Lord really worked in it, in my heart of just saying, Just trust me. Just trust me with that next step you have the direction you kind of want to go, and I'm going to take you on a journey that you know you're probably never going to be able to predict, kind of like, what I talked about at the beginning, like I pivoted, like it was completely different than what I want, and just be OK with that. That's the beauty of life is, you know, pivoting with what's in front of you, but just taking that next, that next step. Col. Naviere Walkewicz 38:32 I love that. And then what is something that you do every day, just to be better and better is really you define better, but what is something you're doing every day. Jessica Whitney 38:42 I love the books, like The Power of Habit and Atomic Habits and yeah, they're so good in just this idea of your daily actions are, what are, who you are, really like, how you show up in the world, because you can only control what you're doing today. Can't control what you're doing tomorrow or what you did in the past, and so for me, one, I do love to read. So I'm always reading books, listening to podcasts and all that kind of stuff. So I think, as a leader, just, like, surround yourself with lots of different opinions, read different things and just encourage my brain. Two, I love to surround myself with people that encourage me and a community that's going to help me challenge myself to improve. And then three, like those daily actions of self-improvement, of like, OK, how can I be just like, 1% better than I was yesterday, whether that be choosing to eat a little healthier today or going on a 30-minute walk, or, you know, when you're lifting weights like, Can I do five pounds more on this? Like, one or one more rep, right? Like, one more. But I do love that analogy, and weightlifting like, OK, I didn't realize that, you know, like, I can do one more rep this week than I could last but three months ago, you know, I've made huge improvement from three months ago. But you don't realize until after the fact. So I think, you know, being a high achiever all my life, it's like, you want to see these big, like, changes and, you know, immediately, but oftentimes it's in these, like, small moments of like, “How can I just be better today?” Healthwise, community-wise. Who can I love on today? How can I, you know, for me, like being in alignment with, you know, what I think God has for my life, being in prayer and focusing on the people around me. You know, that seems like a lot of things. That's why I've got 25 things on my list, , Col. Naviere Walkewicz 40:44 But you get a few of them done And that's OK, because you just gotta do one. Jessica Whitney Exactly, you just gotta do one. Col. Naviere Walkewicz 40:51 Well, I can just share how much, you know, you really just like leaned in and shared your love and wisdom with all of us. And I think that's one of the things I really appreciated about this today: how you showed up for us and shared your authentic self, and so I just want to say thank you. You know, as we wrap up today's conversation, Jess, what's really stood out to me is that we talked about leadership is just about as much about character, but it's really also about, like, showing up and who you are. You know, you show us just that strong leaders don't just show up and need to have all the answers. They actually just need to show up, right? And just, you know, live their values, live with integrity. And I love how you said, you know, honor your integrity even when life is uncertain or changing. So, you know, I think your transition out of active duty could have been a moment of doubt and struggle, but you turned it into an opportunity to serve, and your family has continued to thrive. So thank you for all that you're doing in your community, and for all of you who need to hear this journey, for those that have also gone or going through a transition, this is a conversation you certainly don't want to miss. So again, thank you to Jess Whitney, Class of 2010. It's been a pleasure having you on Long Blue Leadership.   Jessica Whitney 42:05 Thanks again. Outro 42:05 This Long Blue Leadership conversation was recorded Wednesday, Nov., 19, 2025. KEYWORDS Leadership, authentic leadership, transformational leadership, values-based leadership, character-driven leadership, servant leadership, integrity, honoring your word, keeping your word, accountability, responsibility, vulnerability in leadership, decision-making under uncertainty, courage, leading through change, creating a future, vision casting, aligning actions with values, purpose-driven leadership, redefining success, identity as a leader, mentoring, mentorship, developing others, showing up for your people, empathy, compassion, community building, resilience, leading through grief, supporting mental health, trust, transparency, culture change, organizational alignment, handling conflict, managing expectations, setting priorities, work-life integration for leaders, modeling behavior, investing in relationships, daily leadership habits, incremental improvement, 1% better mindset, self-awareness, naming limiting beliefs, “what's undefined runs you”, authenticity, influence without rank, service beyond the uniform, leading in family and community, Long Blue Leadership. The Long Blue Line Podcast Network is presented by the U.S. Air Force Academy Association & Foundation  

In this episode, we speak with Lisa Gralnek, Managing Director of iF Design USA and Global Head of Sustainability and Impact at iF Design. We cover the scale and rigor behind the iF Design Award — one of the world's most recognized design competitions since 1953 — and how iF has made sustainability a core, embedded criterion in its judging process. We also discuss the launch of the iF Design Academy, what it means to close the gap between design and business fluency, and the risks of outsourcing critical thinking to AI tools. Plus, we reflect on why design thinking became its own victim, what head-heart-hands means in an age of AI, and what we might be collectively unlearning as machines take on more of the work.TOPICS WE ADDRESS:- Lisa's path from political science and fashion to design leadership- How the iF Design Award jury process works across 93 categories and 9 disciplines- Why sustainability now accounts for 20% of the iF scoring criteria — and what that shift has taught applicants and jurors alike- The circular economy and the "R ladder" of repairability, reusability, and recyclability- iF Design's two free-entry competitions: the iF Design Student Award and the iF Social Impact Prize, both aligned with the UN Sustainable Development Goals- The launch of the iF Design Academy and why designers need more than design education to lead- The upcoming course AI Strategy for Design Leaders (June 2026) — led by Tey Bannerman, former McKinsey partner- Why design thinking became a buzzword without operationalization — and what it would take to bring it back- What the documentary Modernism, Inc.: The Eliot Noyes Design Story says about the long history of design and corporate power- The tension between AI efficiency and the tactile, hands-on learning that makes designers designers- What we might be collectively "unlearning" as AI tools take on more of the creative processRESOURCES MENTIONED:- iF Design: https://ifdesign.com/en/- iF Design Award: https://ifdesign.com/en/if-design-award-and-jury- iF Design Academy: https://ifdesign-academy.com/- iF Design Trend Report (5th annual edition releasing April 28): https://ifdesign.com/en/trend-report- iF Design Student Award: https://ifdesign.com/en/if-design-student-award- iF Social Impact Prize: https://ifdesign.com/en/if-social-impact-prize- Future of XYZ podcast: https://ifdesign.com/en/podcast-future-of-xyz-by-if-design- Lisa Gralnek, "Where Are All the Designers?" (Fast Company): https://www.fastcompany.com/91374558/where-are-all-the-designers- Ellen MacArthur Foundation: https://www.ellenmacarthurfoundation.org/- Modernism, Inc.: The Eliot Noyes Design Story (2023): https://www.imdb.com/title/tt29215800/- UN Sustainable Development Goals: https://sdgs.un.org/goals- AIGA + Yale SOM: Business Perspectives for Creative Leaders: https://www.aiga.org/professional-development/business-perspectives-for-creative-leaders- Subscribe to the AIGA Design Podcast: https://creators.spotify.com/pod/profile/aigadesign/- Questions or feedback? Email us at podcast@aiga.org

What to do, what to do about Marathon? The crew considers radical shock therapy with surprising answers and solutions. Deadlock pushes systems design to its logical extreme in a few shooters that are just starting to play with, but does it actually have an audience? Take bets now.We discuss:● Deadlock's systems-first design philosophy◦ Layered stat architecture across weapon, vitality, and spirit◦ Scaling curves that turn every component into a progression vector◦ The role of the Action and X-Y-Z plane crosshairs● Marathon's core tension: retention without acquisition◦ Strong engagement signals versus weak top-of-funnel growth◦ Why extraction shooters remain a constrained TAM◦ Arc Raiders reframing the genre through accessibility◦ Why tuning economy variables won't solve an acquisition problem● Extraction as a product, not a feature◦ Why the loop requires full-system commitment, not a side mode◦ The importance of PvE readability and social cooperation◦ Session design, server economics, and continuous player insertion

BRADY WELLER discusses the intricacies of QSBS rollovers, including eligibility, timing, and strategic planning for founders and investors. The goal is to help the listener maximize tax benefits and navigate the legal complexities of this powerful tool. https://youtu.be/gvQ0ZskvWVI QSBS, tax exemption, startup founders, rollover, legal structuring, investment strategy, tax planning, startup exit, C corporation, Key Topics QSBS eligibility and benefits Challenges in executing rollovers Legal and tax considerations for founders Timing and risk management in rollovers Strategic structuring for maximum benefit “QSBS ROLLOVERS” Sound Bites “60 days is a very short window for founders.” “Rollover continues your holding period clock.” “Partial rollovers are common for founders.” Chapters 00:00 Understanding QSBS and Its Benefits 03:07 Challenges for Founders in QSBS Compliance 05:54 Advising Founders on QSBS Rollovers 08:57 Structuring New Ventures for QSBS Eligibility 12:00 Navigating QSBS for Tech and Non-Tech Founders 14:54 Investor Considerations in QSBS Transactions 17:46 State-Specific QSBS Regulations and Planning 20:57 Future of QSBS and Strategic Planning Resources Brady Weller on LinkedIn qsbsrollover.com qsbsreference.com Frazer Rice and Michael Arlein discuss the nuts and bolts of 1202 QSBS Features for Founders Guest links LinkedIn Transcript Frazer Rice (00:01.314)Welcome aboard, Brady. Brady Weller (QSBS Rollover) (00:03.043)Hey, Frazer, thanks for having me. Frazer Rice (00:04.738)Well, you are the nice compliment to a piece I just did with Michael Arlene on QSBS. We covered some of the nuts and bolts around 1202. You come at it from a little bit different angle. It’s usually where people, founders especially, have issues sort of complying with things like the three and five year rule. And otherwise really maximizing the capability of the rollover and the tax significance for it. Tell us a little bit about who benefits and what you do here. Brady Weller (QSBS Rollover) (00:35.107)Yeah, QSBS is. by far the biggest tax exemption available to individual taxpayers in the U.S. So it’s been something that hasn’t been up. I should say there’s not a massive advisory network around it. So it’s not something that’s been taken advantage of, I think, to its full scope. Michael, who you had on recently, is a top trust and estate planner for founders of companies around QSBS. The specific problem that QSBS rollover solve is for a shareholder of an early stage company. Most often founders or very early investors, say, maybe series A or earlier shareholders. It’s an incentive to basically hold your stock for a quote unquote long time. In this sense, that means, you know, now under some new rules, basically three to five plus years. It’s a tax exemption available to folks who hold their stock for at least five years. Then they can exclude from federal income tax now up to $15 million of gains when they sell that stock. So you have to be a shareholder in an early stage C corporation, early stage company. Frazer Rice (01:50.616).Those founders before three to five years are trying to figure out how to use this tool. What are the challenges in making sure they don’t blow up the transaction by transferring something poorly. Or having their company grow too large or have too much cash or those types of things? Maybe list out a little bit some of the challenges that are out there that that a founder needs to be aware of. Brady Weller (QSBS Rollover) (02:22.509).Yeah. So we don’t have to constantly caveat. I’ll mainly talk as though we’re speaking about the pre July 5th, 2025 rules for QSPS. Anything, any stock issued after that date, middle of last year. is under a slightly different set of rules. They are more expanded rules, but I’ll speak to this sort of from those old rules. And so the old rules state that you have to hold your stock for at least five years. And if you do, you can exclude a large portion from federal income tax, usually $10 million for founders. But if you don’t hold the stock for five years, your only option is to take the cash from that sale. For example, say you sell stock at year three or year four, and purchase new QSBS eligible stock with that cash within 60 days. So it’s sort of like the 1031 exchange. Folks maybe are more familiar with real estate property exchanges. Its sort of like a 1031 exchange for stock. So you take the cash and you purchase a like kind quote unquote asset with it. Now the challenge with that is 60 days is not a very long time. And when you’re a founder of a company who just went through liquidity. You just got your deal done and the whirlwind that that is. Now you’re dealing maybe in a post liquidity world. You’re maybe running another team at the acquirer or you’re otherwise involved. 60 days is not a long time to be able to find and diligence a new opportunity. . It’s just not feasible. Especially for founders to use that cash to say buy stock in someone else’s company. It just doesn’t make sense. Like risk adjusted, I suppose. Frazer Rice (04:05.579)No, it’s a miracle that your company did great. Now you have to go and find another miracle and make it work within 60 days. It’s crazy. Brady Weller (QSBS Rollover) (04:10.143).That that’s the biggest that’s probably the biggest barrier to executing them. For the longest time there just weren’t a lot of people. They hadn’t come alongside founders to help advise them on structured ways that they could do these rollovers. Yeah, the options are risky. It’s like take your money and invest it in Dave’s startup in San Francisco. He’s going to lose your money. So that may be what you want to do with that money. To keep your risk profile sort of moving. But that’s not tax planning in any way. Right. To make that decision just to save on federal income tax might not be the best way to use your rollover. So we’ve seen it much more for angel investors, something that they might use. People who want to maybe have a lot of deal flow. A lot of investment opportunities in front of them. But they want to keep that risk profile moving. I’d say timing and risk are the two biggest challenges when you’re trying to execute a rollover. Frazer Rice (05:13.805).As a detail on that, you’ve got your company. You’ve got $10 million coming to you. Hopefully tax free, similar to a 1031. You don’t have to go into one company, you could go into a basket of companies. Brady Weller (QSBS Rollover) (05:28.579).Yeah, you could take the cash, say you make $10 million from a sale. You could pay taxes on $3 million of it, assuming you haven’t hit your five year requirement. Then, you could roll over the other seven in various other deals. You could put it all into one new company. What the rollover actually does is it continues your holding period clock from the last stock. So if you held for three years in your original company stock, You sell. You’re able to reinvest those proceeds within 60 days. It continues your holding period. Once you’re beyond a combined five the next liquidity event in the second company. Now you have proper seasoning on your shares, for lack of a better word, and then you can sell them under the QSPS exemption. Frazer Rice (06:17.143)So, this gets to what you do on a day-to-day basis. So a founder comes to you and says, all right, I’ve got this situation I think that’s coming. And I need some advice. You’re sort of letting them know what’s happening here. How do you advise them, in a sense, whether it’s through your company or even as a general matter? Do you have a suite of other founders and companies that are out there? And then… Maybe also similar to a 1031, is there sort of an intermediary function that needs to happen in order for the asset or the cash to go into sort of a, for lack of word, like an escrow account to then be deployed correctly into the eligible next company so that you keep that period going. Brady Weller (QSBS Rollover) (06:50.713)Boom. Brady Weller (QSBS Rollover) (07:05.839)That’s a good question. It’s not as formalized as the, you know, in terms of the 1031 world where there’s sort of a designated intermediary and that’s sort of required step in the process. This is very much the wire goes into your checking account for the sale of company A stock. Frazer Rice (07:11.703)Mm-hmm. Brady Weller (QSBS Rollover) (07:22.281)You send a wire back out to purchase stock in company B. When someone comes to us and is looking for guidance on how to do a rollover, sometimes they’ve talked to tax or trust in state attorneys already, or maybe they’re CPA. And there are maybe 50 folks in the US who have, I’d say, Frazer Rice (07:37.463)Sure. Brady Weller (QSBS Rollover) (07:45.07)I call it advanced QSPS planning knowledge, which is they have the trust planning strategies, rollover knowledge, all of these things that sort of at their disposal that they can speak to, but it’s a very small network. so our firm is actually the only non-CPA non-law firm in the country that deals directly with founders on these. And so we ended up kind of playing quarterback, connecting them with the right attorneys, maybe the right CPA, if they don’t have one to make sure that the team is sort of assembled. You know, because the risk profile of taking your money and investing in someone else’s company typically doesn’t align with most founders’ interests at that time, the service that we provide is helping them to roll that money into a new startup of their own. We think these founder-led rollovers where the founder or the shareholder who sold their original stock can now direct the proceeds into a new entity that they own and control. It’s a really great way to execute this. It gives the shareholder, the founder the optimal amount of flexibility and control over the proceeds over time. So they can handle their own risk profile. Frazer Rice (08:57.921)So for the founder who built their business originally, they sell it and you’re sort of with them along the way to roll it over into another founder led situation. Are there any mechanics that you help with to sort of ensure that that takes place correctly? There’s so many, it seems like so many tiger traps along the way that you can stick your foot in and you did every, your intent was there, but maybe you did something weird or incorrect. Brady Weller (QSBS Rollover) (09:26.617)Yeah. Frazer Rice (09:26.721)Maybe a better way to ask this question is what are the things in that receiving new QSBS rollover do you want to see or a founder should make sure they have in place before they go ahead and pull the trigger? Brady Weller (QSBS Rollover) (09:41.904)We want to make sure it’s a C corporation. First of all, a lot of times when founders start their first companies, they just, you know, incorporate an LLC somewhere and start doing business. A lot of times there’s not even, maybe there’s, you know, two or $3,000 transferred to a checking account, you know, from their personal to their checking. That’s how you start most businesses. But when you’re, when you’re starting a rollover business, we have to see a couple other things. One is we want to make sure it’s a C corp from day one. Frazer Rice (09:58.989)Right. Brady Weller (QSBS Rollover) (10:09.123)You know, it’s okay if it’s a single owner C Corp where the founders, the, you know, only board member, only director. It’s, you know, it’s your entity. That’s fine. but we also want to see a purchase agreement, some kind of stock purchase agreement. So you can’t just transfer money from your chase savings account where the wire landed to the new business account and, know, go on about, about the business. we want to see a stock purchase agreement. And so some of those agreements, and the optimal way to do those for sort of the, the, the long run. Sometimes, we would obviously we have our template docs in ways that we might advise to do it. But very often we refer that out to legal counsel and coordinate there to make sure that just all the purchase agreements and governance docs and those types of things are in a good place. You know, it’s really making sure we have the purchase agreements and that the money gets moved to the corporate bank account, the new business bank account within 60 days. It’s really not a long period of time. And we run into a lot of situations where If someone’s not kind of quarterbacking the process, deadlines get away quickly and then administrative issues with a bank might push you beyond the 60 day window. We’ve seen that a few times and it can obviously cost you a lot of money. Frazer Rice (11:24.468)The, when you get to a point where the next business that this is going into, often the qualifications of being a QSBS eligible business can be a little bit murky. I’m thinking healthcare for instance, where like a hospital or that type of thing would traditionally probably not be a QSBS situation, but a healthcare service provider or a biotech company or something like that is. Brady Weller (QSBS Rollover) (11:46.937)Yeah. Frazer Rice (11:51.029)Do you help founders think about that? in many ways, there’s sort of the which came first, the idea for the company or the company itself. How do you make sure people stay on all fours on that front? Brady Weller (QSBS Rollover) (12:00.56)Yeah. Yeah, I if you build a startup before, know that the ideas in the early stage sometimes are extremely malleable. And when you start testing things in the market, the business very often changes. You know, we majority work with tech founders and that’s not because, you know, QSBS is well suited for tech. I think a lot of people think that to be QSBS, to be a technology company. That’s not true. It’s just that we most often see QSBS. We run into people who are knowledgeable about QSBS in the venture space. So venture backed start up, like traditional startup businesses, has 80 % plus of those companies are tech businesses. And then the other 20 % is manufacturing, biotech, life science, e-commerce, those types of things. But majority of people that we do these transaction with are in tech. And so by virtue of that, their rollover business ends up being, most of the time, ideas that they have are tech adjacent. So that’s a great place to be. I’d say some things to avoid. What we hear often people coming to us wanting to roll over into real estate in some way or another. And there are ways that the business that you start as part of a QSPS roll over can hold real estate assets long term, depending on the business type. But you have to be really careful there not to, in the eyes of the IRS, look like a real estate holding company or have too much of your assets tied up in sort of like passive real estate holdings. And so I’d say that’s the murkiest stuff that we run into. Brady Weller (QSBS Rollover) (13:37.822).Most of the businesses that we are helping founders start and grow as part of a QSPS rollover are B2B or B2C tech. Either web applications or mobile applications, e-commerce stores. We have a few hardware sort of based companies or like very physical product based companies as well. Frazer Rice (13:58.431)For a lot of tech founders, the idea of taking some money off the table is important. And I would think that maybe partial QSPS situations come up. This isn’t an all or nothing thing. You can take some money off the table and then allocate other parts, maybe half off and then the other half you can roll into the next company. Brady Weller (QSBS Rollover) (14:14.137)Yeah. Brady Weller (QSBS Rollover) (14:18.798)I’d say an extremely common situation that we see is maybe a founder. in New York who is raising maybe a Series B, call it a 50 or $60 million Series B. We saw a lot of these size rounds with the AI kind of boom happening and might be an opportunity to take, you know, four to $6 million off the table as secondary at that stage in the company’s growth. so you have this founder who just got $5 million wired to their bank account, maybe their first money. They’ve been renting in a condo or apartment in the city and they’re still very much like in high growth stage with company so they don’t have a lot of bandwidth to run a new business. And so they’ll really try and de-risk themselves. That is, maybe pay taxes on a million, a million and a half, give themselves a cushion right away, maybe buy a condo or you know whatever, stabilize their life just a bit and roll over the other four, three and a half million, you know, and manage a project on the side that way. That’s a really common situation we see. Frazer Rice (15:19.624)For investors who are invested in a lot of different things and maybe you know, they’ve got six or seven companies that are QSBS eligible and they are sort of rolling the dice on that and sort of picking and choosing which one should go into which that type of thing What’s different about it from an investor standpoint than from an operator standpoint? Brady Weller (QSBS Rollover) (15:43.758)Yeah, I think the biggest thing investors have to pay attention to is if you receive a distribution that isn’t QSPS eligible because of holding period, you cannot just take that money and invest it back into a venture fund. and call that a rollover. The money can go into a venture fund, but that capital also has to be called and deployed into, an investment from that fund. Meaning you can’t just invest in the, in the partnership at the partnership level in a venture fund and it’s sit there undeployed and be eligible for QSBS. It actually has to be fully deployed into target, target opportunities within 60 days. So that’s something that I think that we’ve run into a couple of times with, with investors is they think, I’ll just, know, Fund2 is open at, you know, XYZ firm. I’ll just roll the money over there. But it does have to be deployed still within that 60 day window. So that’s something that we hear a lot of. You know, if you’re an investor, I would keep, you know, you don’t always have the perfect deal ready at the right time. But keeping good relationships with the founders that… you’re partnering with, you know, you never know when someone might be able to open up a tranche on the side or sell some secondary to you. if you’re trying to still get access to that deal sort of outside of a normal round. Frazer Rice (17:07.445)So for the companies that are in your orbit, obviously you’re probably checking in saying, hey, you didn’t do anything to blow up your QSBS status. But for the companies that aren’t that way, and let’s say you’re a founder and you’ve got a nice situation where you’re able to take some money off the table and maybe put it into. one of the things that your friends put together or something like that. How do you think about a checklist or what are the questions to ask to make sure that the recipient investor or recipient of the investment is QSBS eligible and will sort of stick to it? Brady Weller (QSBS Rollover) (17:46.48)Yeah, you want to ensure first that the company is small enough. so under the old rules that I mentioned, the company would have to have less than $50 million of gross assets. A really great proxy for that is just how much has that company raised? You know, if you’re trying to invest in a company and they’ve raised $120 million, it’s very likely that they have at some point blown the asset test and they’re not issuing QSPS anymore. It’s very, it’s not always, but it’s very possible. A lot of people confuse that test for valuation. which is a mistake, you could have a billion dollar company in terms of market value, you know, with only 20 or 25 million dollars worth of assets on the balance sheet. It is possible, especially in some of these high multiple high growth tech businesses. And so, yeah, not confusing valuation with gross assets is one thing to pay attention to. the other is ensuring just that the company is a C corp, especially for early stage investors. I’m talking like first money in, maybe before, you know, pre seed or pre seed, would say, ensuring that the right structuring is in place such that, know, you’re getting stock issued directly from a C corporation at that time you’re investing. So I would say that’s something to worry about more if you’re, you know, an angel. who does a lot of sort of direct sourcing of deals and you’re not going through a fund. Most of the time, if someone’s raised capital directly from a venture fund, all the paperwork and things that you’re going to look for as far as QSPS are going to be in place, because most VCs are pretty well acquainted at this point with, hey, let’s make sure this is eligible before we get in here. Frazer Rice (19:27.913)Right. And just to distinguish, an LLC that elects to be taxed as a C Corp versus a C Corp, C Corp, is there any distinction there for our listeners? Brady Weller (QSBS Rollover) (19:39.673)Yes. Generally, we would say as long as the LLC has made that C-Corp election before issuing more at that stage, guess, membership units of stock, as long as they’ve made that C-Corp election prior to issuing the stock, then we feel generally good about it. But yeah, an LLC, it’s an entity structure whose default taxation is as a pass-through, but an LLC can also be taxed as a C-Corp and can issue quote unquote QSBS eligible shares. or units as well, so it is possible. Frazer Rice (20:12.683)I was gonna say, so for the listeners out there, C-Corp doesn’t just mean C-Corp, but the real operative language is that it’s taxed as a C-Corp component, and that should be part of your checklist as you go down the list of companies to potentially roll into. So for those people who aren’t exactly founders, but maybe are investors or otherwise part of businesses that they’ve been included in, et cetera. Those non-venture-backed businesses, what are the opportunities there for QSBS and then the ability to roll it over into other things? Brady Weller (QSBS Rollover) (20:48.708)Yeah, I would say it’s very rare that we see a non-venture-backed business in between the coasts, I’ll say, right? Like not one of these like kind of like call them coastal elite tech businesses. I’m talking about your like legacy family business in, you know, North Carolina. Frazer Rice (20:59.488)I mean… Brady Weller (QSBS Rollover) (21:11.856)Most of the time we’re going to see those as pass-throughs or partnerships, maybe like an S-Corp. You would see that type of structure and those businesses, while they could be amazing businesses, the interest in them isn’t QSPS eligible because it has to be issued from a C-Corporation. Most of the time, the planning opportunity we see with those types of businesses is around the time of maybe a generational transition or other type of transition planning where Maybe the children take over from the parents and they establish a plan. Hey, we’re going to take it over, but we want to plan to sell maybe the next five to seven years. I hear this a lot. And opportunity. If you are in an industry in a sector where stock sales are common in the industry for exiting the businesses, changing, electing to be treated as a C Corp or restructuring to a C Corporation from one of those pass through structures is an opportunity because you could sort of reorganize, reissue stock, now start your QSBS five year time clock. And, you know, hopefully the business keeps doing well and you can have that exit opportunity down the line. And at that point, take advantage of QSBS. Again, the thing you want to pay attention to is that you actually be able to do a stock sale at that time because QSBS requires a sale of stock, not an asset sale. And so that’s a really important distinction. So make sure either that you’re in an industry where that’s common or you’re working with counsel who understands what you’re trying to accomplish before you make those decisions about how you’re setting your entity up at that stage. Frazer Rice (22:41.353)Right. Frazer Rice (22:56.758)I just have a comment for me with the passage of the new law that we sort of alluded to where previously you really didn’t start thinking about this until fully five years. The new law, people can start thinking about it within three. You get 50 % of the benefit of the exclusion at three years. Brady Weller (QSBS Rollover) (23:08.282)Mm-hmm. Frazer Rice (23:15.21)And I’ve run into people where three years suddenly seems like a short amount of time, whereas five years, I think everyone was sort of like, we’ll get there eventually. you know, they’re they’re they’re fighting for their survival anyway. And if that happens to work terrific in this case, I think that the law moving the timeline up a little bit has had an interesting impact on those conversion discussions, because I think people are now starting to say, hey, you know what? I can get to three years. And, you know, with the speed at the and the rate at which things change at this point, it’s much more realistic than I think it might have been going back in time. Brady Weller (QSBS Rollover) (23:50.896)And if you have a stable business where you feel comfortable making projections, say three years out, so to what that business could look like at that time, it’s really becoming more common now to do what you’re calling like choice of entity studies, right? So working with someone who can model out with the difference in taxation, both at the company level and at the point of. Frazer Rice (24:05.482)Mm-hmm. Brady Weller (QSBS Rollover) (24:15.276)selling stock, what the optimal structure may be depending on your time horizon tax it, your expectations for growth or lack thereof. So that’s something that some valuation firms, business advisories, some law firms or CPA tax advisories may be able to do. If you’re in that situation, you’re trying to figure out, hey, what’s the math look like based on my baseline assumptions of what this business will be and can help you sort of make those decisions about how to plan. over the next three to seven years. Frazer Rice (24:47.402)As part of that reorganization too, I’ve talked to a few people who are in, let’s call it personality-based businesses, whether they’re podcasters or influencers or other types of things that are a little bit adjacent to maybe typical software companies. And I’ve brought up the notion that you may be disqualified now, but you may have a future growth opportunity within your business to make it fall more in line with a QSBS-defined business. And so, you if you’ve got the time and the ability and it makes a business sense, it may make sense to start thinking about either sectioning that off or developing that business line for something a little bit later on. Brady Weller (QSBS Rollover) (25:27.95)Yeah, being strategic about where those adjacent businesses, how they’re structured and where they’re built. And I mean, where like in terms of a legal entity level sense, I’m thinking about, for instance, several golf YouTubers, make a lot of golf content online, but now they’re announcing partnerships to, you know, design clothing, you know, have their own clothing line, or maybe they’ve entered a, a joint venture with a golf club maker or maybe an emerging brand and they’re taking equity. Frazer Rice (25:41.983)Mm-hmm. Brady Weller (QSBS Rollover) (25:57.826)Those are really interesting options and I think that you still have the opportunity to leverage your personal brand to grow that business but separating them out so that you know your reliance on your personal brand doesn’t ruin QSBS. That’s actually getting to one of the rules around qualified small business stock which is that the companies can’t be based on the skill or reputation of a single person. And so that’s when we think about Frazer Rice (26:24.938)Mm-hmm. Brady Weller (QSBS Rollover) (26:27.632)Like entertainers, athletes, social media personalities. MrBeast, for instance, couldn’t sell MrBeast, the YouTube channel necessarily, as QSBS eligible interest because of that rule more than likely. And that’s obviously a broad brush, paying attention to where you hold your business interests is important for this if you’re in that space. Frazer Rice (26:53.5)Any state thoughts? I know California QSBS is uncoupled from the federal QSBS and New York threatened it and apparently that got knocked down. New Jersey just coupled with the federal government so that people weren’t scared away from doing that. How does that figure into your analysis? Brady Weller (QSBS Rollover) (27:04.304)you Yeah. Brady Weller (QSBS Rollover) (27:12.784)It’s sort of a battle of the coast. It’s like which coast of the United States is going to be most investor and founder friendly with relation to these things. Yeah, because California hasn’t followed it for a long time. Oregon and Washington state are close behind there. And then we have the sort of somewhat the opposite happening on the East Coast. So as an East Coast guy, I hope it becomes a hub. But yeah, there is some sort of. Frazer Rice (27:19.528)Right. Brady Weller (QSBS Rollover) (27:36.388)you know, state and local tax planning, strategic planning that you might be able to do if you have the foresight and, you know, the right data to determine where you might become a resident or taxpayer prior to an exit. You might talk with a. assault attorney or assault advisor state and local tax is usually tax advisors CPAs or or tax attorneys who can help you think through Hey, does it make a difference whether or not I move from California to Texas? What does that look like for my family? What does that look like for my post-tax exit situation? because where the company is headquartered, as long as it’s in the United States, doesn’t matter for QSPS, just has to be a domestic USC corporation. And so remembering that QSPS is fundamentally an individual taxpayer incentive means that regardless of where the shareholders are located, you’re gonna be beholden to that specific state of where you live and their roles around QSPS. Frazer Rice (28:36.906)Terrific stuff. Brady, we’re winding down here. How do people find you and your company and any sort of parting thoughts? Brady Weller (QSBS Rollover) (28:44.516)Yeah, I’m personally very active on LinkedIn. So you can find me there, Brady Weller and our website, qsbsrollover.com. We also have a sort of an open source QSBS advisory referral site called qsbsreference.com. And so you can find us at either of those places. We’d be happy to help you out and point you in the right direction. Frazer Rice (29:05.13)Brady, thanks for being on. Brady Weller (QSBS Rollover) (29:06.874)Thanks, Frazier, appreciate it. Keywords QSBS, tax exemption, startup founders, rollover, legal structuring, investment strategy, tax planning, startup exit, C corporation, legal advice Titles Mastering QSBS Rollovers: Strategies for Founders and Investors The Ultimate Guide to QSBS Tax Exemptions and Rollovers https://www.amazon.com/Wealth-Actually-Intelligent-Decision-Making-1-ebook/dp/B07FPQJJQT/

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What if the conversations you're avoiding are the very thing holding you and your team back? Too often, we stay silent to keep the peace, avoid discomfort, or protect relationships… but in doing so, we create misalignment, confusion, and missed opportunities. In this episode, we explore how effective communication becomes a powerful lever for trust, performance, and leadership growth. Molly Tschang shares how shifting your mindset and building practical communication skills can transform not only your conversations, but your entire organization. Molly is a leadership advisor, executive coach, and the founder of Say It Skillfully. She's worked with leaders from startups to Fortune 500 companies, helping them navigate high-stakes conversations around feedback, accountability, and team dynamics. Known for her ability to bring humanity back into leadership, Molly equips leaders with the tools to communicate with clarity, compassion, and confidence. In this episode, Molly breaks down how to have the conversations you've been avoiding — and how to do it in a way that builds trust, alignment, and real progress. Communication Starts With You, Not Them One of the biggest misconceptions about communication is that breakdowns are caused by "other people." But Molly challenges this thinking with a powerful shift: communication starts with you. When something isn't landing, it's worth asking, "Was I as clear, intentional, or grounded as I could have been?" Her "Me, You, We" framework reframes communication as both an internal and external process. First, you get clear on your own emotions, intentions, and desired outcome. Then, you step into empathy — understanding the other person's perspective. Finally, you align as a team, creating a shared understanding that drives better decisions and stronger collaboration. This shift moves communication away from reactive, emotionally driven exchanges and toward thoughtful, intentional conversations that actually create results. Accountability Isn't the Problem — Lack of Clarity Is Many leaders struggle with accountability, but Molly reveals that the real issue is often a lack of transparency. When expectations, outcomes, and timelines aren't clearly defined, it becomes nearly impossible to hold people accountable without frustration or friction. Instead of addressing issues after the fact, Molly encourages leaders to set the foundation upfront — clearly defining what success looks like, aligning on expectations, and building in checkpoints along the way. This creates a culture where accountability feels collaborative, not punitive. She also emphasizes the importance of psychological safety. Leaders must actively invite feedback — even when it's uncomfortable — and respond with openness rather than defensiveness. Because the moment people feel unsafe speaking up is the moment communication and performance break down. Enjoy this episode with Molly Tschang… Soundbytes 21:43–22:12 "Someone has the courage to come up to you, the leader, and say, 'You know, Rachel, X-Y-Z.' And then the very next words out of the leader's mouth are, 'Who said that?!' Like, 'Obviously, if the person felt comfortable saying it to you, they would've come to you themself. Now you're yelling at me, who took all the courage.' So, that should be, 'Oh, my gosh, thank you for sharing that. That may not have been easy to do.' Right? That's a signal of safety to the team; not, 'Who said that?!'" 24:05–24:28 "If you're exhausted, haven't eaten well, haven't been exercising, and something stressful hits you, you're going to have less resiliency to handle it, for sure. You're more likely to blow off the handle. I am not happy to admit the number of times I have overacted. I mean, it happens. Right? But the more we can prevent that sort of thing by taking care of ourselves — I really want to encourage that." Quotes "I was silent on the sidelines for years — and communication became the most empowering skill I ever built." "If you want people to understand your value, you have to make your words matter." "We're never really taught how to communicate in a way that's true to ourselves." "Human connection is what opens the door to effective communication." "We all have blind spots — and we need other people to help us see them." Links mentioned in this episode: From Our Guest Website: https://www.sayitskillfully.com/ Connect with Molly Tschang on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mollytschang/ Connect with brandiD Find out how top leaders are increasing their authority, impact, and income online. Listen to our private podcast, The Professional Presence Podcast: https://thebrandid.com/professional-presence-podcast Ready to elevate your digital presence with a powerful brand or website? Contact us here: https://thebrandid.com/contact-form/

Toxic Relationships: Recognizing Narcissism in a Spouse, Parent, or Child with Kris Reece (Episode 288)   *Disclaimer* This episode contains mature content and user discretion is suggested.    Proverbs 27:6 AMP “Faithful are the wounds of a friend [who corrects out of love and concern], But the kisses of an enemy are deceitful [because they serve his hidden agenda].”   *Transcription Below*   Kris Reece is a Christian Author, Toxic Relationship Coach, and Manipulation Tactics Specialist. Kris equips believers to escape the grip of toxic relationships—especially those shaped by guilt, confusion, or spiritual distortion. Her work empowers Christians to set biblical boundaries and walk in emotional and spiritual freedom. Connect with her on Instagram or through her website.    Thank you to our sponsor for today's episode: Midwest Food Bank   Topics and Questions We Cover: In your opinion, can you be a Christian and a narcissist? Will you share a few of the toxic tactics narcissists use for power and control in relationships?  Will you define codependency for us and also reactive abuse and trauma bond?   Other Related Episodes on The Savvy Sauce Podcast: 146 Biblical Response to Emotionally Destructive Relationships with Leslie Vernick 148 Overcoming Evil with Good: Recognizing Spiritual Abuse with Dr. Diane Langberg 263. Domestic Violence and Abuse: Identifying and Healing from Abusive Relationships with Stacey Womack   Connect with The Savvy Sauce on Facebook or Instagram or Our Website   Gospel Scripture: (all NIV) Romans 3:23 “for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God,”   Romans 3:24 “and are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus.”   Romans 3:25 (a) “God presented him as a sacrifice of atonement, through faith in his blood.”    Hebrews 9:22 (b) “without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness.”    Romans 5:8 “But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”    Romans 5:11 “Not only is this so, but we also rejoice in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation.”    John 3:16 “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.”   Romans 10:9 “That if you confess with your mouth, “Jesus is Lord,” and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.”    Luke 15:10 says “In the same way, I tell you, there is rejoicing in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents.”   Romans 8:1 “Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus”   Ephesians 1:13–14 “And you also were included in Christ when you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation. Having believed, you were marked in him with a seal, the promised Holy Spirit, who is a deposit guaranteeing our inheritance until the redemption of those who are God's possession- to the praise of his glory.”   Ephesians 1:15–23 “For this reason, ever since I heard about your faith in the Lord Jesus and your love for all the saints, I have not stopped giving thanks for you, remembering you in my prayers. I keep asking that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the glorious Father, may give you the spirit of wisdom and revelation, so that you may know him better. I pray also that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened in order that you may know the hope to which he has called you, the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints, and his incomparably great power for us who believe. That power is like the working of his mighty strength, which he exerted in Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly realms, far above all rule and authority, power and dominion, and every title that can be given, not only in the present age but also in the one to come. And God placed all things under his feet and appointed him to be head over everything for the church, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills everything in every way.”   Ephesians 2:8–10 “For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith – and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God – not by works, so that no one can boast. For we are God‘s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.“   Ephesians 2:13 “But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far away have been brought near through the blood of Christ.“   Philippians 1:6 “being confident of this, that he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus.”   *Transcription*   Music: (0:00 – 0:10)   Laura Dugger: (0:11 - 1:29) Welcome to The Savvy Sauce, where we have practical chats for intentional living. I'm your host, Laura Dugger, and I'm so glad you're here.   Leman Property Management Company has the apartment you will be able to call home, with over 1,700 apartment units available in Central Illinois. Visit them today at lemanproperties.com or connect with them on Facebook.   My captivating guest for this week is Kris Reece. She has an abundance of resources available online, and she's actually recently had this book published, Breaking the Narcissist's Grip. I cannot recommend this episode enough to you to find out about toxic relationships, whether that's with your parents or your adult children or your spouse. She's going to do a deep dive into narcissism. Help us understand it, help us identify those people in our lives, and most importantly, offer some hope, which is only possible through Jesus Christ. Here's our chat.   Welcome to The Savvy Sauce, Kris.   Kris Reece: (1:31 - 1:34) Thank you so much for having me. I am so blessed to be here.   Laura Dugger: (1:34 - 1:48) Well, I am so grateful to have you, and you are in a unique line of work that is so needed. How did you get into this work of offering Christian advice for toxic relationships?   Kris Reece: (1:50 - 4:16) Well, I'll give you the short version of that story. So, I had been in the fitness industry for a good 20 plus years, and I went back to school for counseling and theology because I really wanted to be able to help people emotionally and mentally as opposed to just physically, right?   So, as I started to counsel people, there were women that were coming to me from all walks of life and all ages. I'm talking 16 years old all the way up to 86 years old. And no matter what their issue was, no matter what they were struggling with, they were coming to me for purpose or just growing in their faith. It all came down to one thing. And Laura, I think this might surprise you just as much as it surprised me. Toxic mothers. I was floored. And this wasn't the kind of thing where now we're just blaming mom for everything. No, this started to get revealed on all of the dysfunctions that were taking place within their relationship with their mother and how it had impacted them in so many areas of their lives. So, I said, “Lord, I need to dive deeper into this.” Now, I had already come out of, unfortunately, several toxic narcissistic relationships, not with my mother. So, that was very foreign to me. So, I started to dive deeper into how those same traits applied. And it was sad and it was very scary. So, I started teaching more on that.   And then they started coming out of the woodwork. But what about my husband? What about my daughter? What about my boss? What about my... And it was just like a flood. And it reached a point where, Laura, I got to confess to you. I took this to the Lord and I said, please don't send me. I don't want to do this. This is toxic. It's like you're just dealing with this toxicity all day long. And once I began to rest in, not just talking about the toxic relationships, but understanding where His heart was in it and the healing that He wants, not only for the toxic people, but those weren't the ones that were coming to me, the ones that were affected and infected by it, is when my heart started to shift. I said, “okay, God, all right, send me.” And here we are. Many, many years later.   Laura Dugger: (4:16 - 4:41) Well, you've done some incredible work. And I am shocked by that answer. Can you clarify too with the toxic mothers? That's not speaking to the mom who's trying her best asking the Lord for help and yet making mistakes. Would you consider them as mothers who are narcissists or does toxic embrace a wider?   Kris Reece: (4:41 - 6:01) Toxic can embrace a much wider spectrum. It could be borderline personality disorder, even a lot of codependent traits. If they're not harnessed properly or surrendered to the Lord, it can be very toxic to our relationship. You know, you're dealing with the guilt and the manipulation. No, we are not in any way talking about a mother who's made some mistakes, hands up, who's surrendering all this to the Lord and really just trying to find her way, you know, regardless of whether it's a newborn, an infant, a teenager or an adult child.   That's not what I'm referring to as a toxic mother. And some of them do struggle because it's so common for, I guess, young adults at this point to just be like, my mom's toxic because your mother had an opinion, because your mother is trying to get a little bit more time with you. Now, all of a sudden she's toxic. So, the label is unfortunate, but no, we're not referring to that type of mother. We're talking about the ones that have been approached lovingly and gently and are still standing firm in their manipulation, their guilt, their no, this is my way or the highway, their distorted view of scripture. I don't care if you're two or 42, you're called to obey me. That's the kind of toxic mother we're talking about.   Laura Dugger: (6:01 - 6:13) That is helpful. And then just to zero in on that term, narcissist, can you just help us understand what characteristics define a narcissist?   Kris Reece: (6:14 - 8:00) Yeah, absolutely. So, at its core, narcissism is less about confidence and it's more about this distorted sense of self. And that distorted sense is what damages relationships. Psychologically, narcissism can actually be marked by three pillars.   Number one is an exaggerated sense of self-importance. They quite honestly believe that the world revolves around them. Two is a deep need for admiration. They crave validation and praise, and we call that supply. So, if you're giving it to them, you're on their good side. You're not, you're on the bad side. And then lastly is their lack of empathy. This is a true hallmark of narcissism. But I know you didn't ask this, but we kind of go down a little bit of a rabbit trail.   Now that narcissists are starting to catch on to what these traits look like, they're doing what we call performative empathy. So, they're looking and they're saying all the right words. One of my, I love to say is they got the words, they ain't got the music. So, you really have to understand what true empathy looks like, but they lack empathy. So, and then what happens is from those traits are going to flow three roots, entitlement, arrogance, and manipulation. They twist everything and it's all about them. And one of the things that we need to understand is that a one-time selfish act doesn't make someone a narcissist. I've said some things that, oh boy, that I need to repent of. It doesn't make somebody a narcissist, but a lifestyle of self-protective empathy, lacking behavior at the expense of others. Yeah. Raise the red flag.   Laura Dugger: (8:01 - 8:22) That's helpful. That even shows us the difference between a little self-absorbed or mistakes made and a narcissist. But then I'm also curious as we're raising children, do these traits show up early in life or when are they usually identifiable?   Kris Reece: (8:23 - 10:25) That's a great question. One that I don't think you're ever going to be able to get a solid answer from anyone on, because narcissistic traits, while they don't just appear out of nowhere, we can say that they're formed in childhood. And we can say that probably almost every child is a bit narcissistic. I mean, we don't get like the terrible mind, mind twos from nowhere. I mean, as children, as human beings, I mean, even scripture tells us we are innately selfish. Our heart is deceptively wicked. So, the point of childhood is for the parents to now pull that out of the child, to grow that out. Right. And a lot of times that doesn't take place. So, what we have to understand is that the roots usually form in childhood, but the fruit shows up later in life.   So, in childhood, you may notice things like entitlement, this extreme sensitivity to criticism, but kids, like we said, are naturally self-focused. So, that's actually going to be part of their normal development. So, kids are self-centered by nature, but narcissism becomes very concerning when someone never grows out of it. So, when we start to see by the teen years, you see that pattern take place and how they handle correction, how they handle empathy and accountability. And if empathy isn't growing, but entitlement is, oh, we've got a pretty big sign. So, now by adulthood, those narcissistic traits, they just become unmistakable.   You see the manipulation, the blame shifting, the lack of accountability, the control, especially when life requires any type of humility. So, immaturity says, I messed up. Narcissism says, you made me do it.   Laura Dugger: (10:25 - 11:04) Oh, that's helpful. And I guess just to put parents at ease, if they are parenting, let's say tweens and teens, I'd love to hear your take on this, but something we learned in grad school was that they said, “don't freak out when your child, even when your teen does this, because a lot of times teenagers could be fitting all of the description in the DSM for multiple things.” And that is part of adolescence and going through puberty and everything. But what I hear you saying is then if that pattern continues into adulthood, especially as you're developing certain things, but lacking empathy, that's one big concern. Is that correct?   Kris Reece: (11:04 - 12:07) That is correct. That is why they don't diagnose teenagers with narcissism, because quite honestly, I would say about 98% of them would be diagnosed. So, no, that's why we don't, because a lot of teenagers are that way. So, yes, don't panic if your teenagers are acting that way. But the other thing that I would also say is don't chalk it up to a phase. It's a great opportunity to speak the truth in love. You may not think they're hearing it. You may not think they're receiving it, but we are responsible as parents for obedience, not outcome. Of course, we want the best outcome for our children possible, but we can't just chalk up those traits as, ah, they're just being teenagers. Ah, it's just a phase. No, as your parent, I need to teach you and train you out of that phase, not force you out of the phase, but I need to train you out of that phase. And then the rest is going to be up to them.   Laura Dugger: (12:07 - 12:22) That's good. Knowing who's part to own. And would you say part of that then is disciplining them and discipling them, training them in the ways that we would think of or anything that you would add for how to help train our children out of these characteristics?   Kris Reece: (12:23 - 13:39) Absolutely. So, we do want to train them in the way they're supposed to go. So, when there is entitlement, we don't chalk it up to a phase. We don't continue to give what they're expecting. So, there needs to be consequences for behavior. And I'm not talking harsh punishment, but there's two sides. So, if there is really bad behavior that needs to stop, then there needs to be a consequence for that. On the flip side, if it's behavior that could kind of be borderline, and I don't mean borderline personality, I just mean borderline in terms of is this bad or is this a phase, then it's a talking too.   Hey, why did you decide to handle your classmate in this way? What do you think could have been a better way? What was the point of your outcome? What were you hoping the outcome would be, I should say? And then starting to really guide them through that, because they're still in their very formative years in terms of processing, in terms of how to cope with things. So, if they're now going to start defaulting to patterns that maybe that was taught or caught, we really want to take that opportunity to train them out of that. And we can do that with gentleness and love. And then, of course, use consequences when necessary.   Laura Dugger: (13:40 - 13:52) That is so well summed up, Kris. I appreciate that. And then what are some types of narcissism that make it especially difficult to recognize at first?   Kris Reece: (13:53 - 16:40) Oh, my favorite one. And I say that with seeping sarcasm. Is the covert narcissist. We would call that one the quiet one. And now if you want to add another layer of complexity, the Christian covert narcissist. This one is going to be the hardest type to detect because they don't look confident. They look wounded. They use self-pity. They use guilt. They use this emotional fragility. But they're using it to control others. And what we have to recognize is covert narcissists, they don't dominate the room. They dominate your emotions. They play the victim. So, you now feel responsible for their feelings, their life, their outcome. That's a scary one.   The other one is what we call the communal or we could refer to them as more of the spiritual narcissist. This is what we would refer to as the helper or the holy one. So, they appear really generous. Big servant's heart, maybe in a serving profession. They're spiritually devoted, but it's all about image. And they're going to use the good deeds. They're going to use the faith, the ministry, or their morality as proof of their superiority. And they may quote the Bible, but they will use shame, silence, and scripture to control others.   And the other one is, this is a little bit more of the obvious one, but we often disguise this in our society. And that's the overt. This is your classic narcissist. This is the one that people recognize. They're loud, they're attention seeking, they're boastful, they're arrogant, and they are just outwardly entitled. But we often, depending on the position that they're in, in business or politics, we're like, oh, they're confident. Oh, they're good leaders. They could be classic overt narcissists. And a lot of times these narcissists really go unrecognized because they always, always start with the charm or the kindness. My favorite is the connection. They establish this connection with you. They're gonna mirror your values, your interests, and yes, even your faith. And a lot of times they appear very wounded or generous, and the whole intention is to now just disarm you. Bottom line is a lot of narcissists, they're gonna wear different masks, but at the core, they're all the same.   Laura Dugger: (16:41 - 18:35) And now a brief message from our sponsor.   With over 1,700 apartment units available throughout Pekin, Peoria, Peoria Heights, Morton, and Washington, and with every price range covered, you will have plenty of options when you rent through Leman Property Management Company. They have townhomes, duplexes, studios, and garden style options located in many areas throughout Pekin. And make sure you check out their newest offering; the McKinley located in Pekin is a new construction addition to their platinum collection. Featuring nine-foot ceilings, large spacious layouts, beautiful finishes such as quartz countertops and garages, you won't want to miss this outstanding new property.   In Peoria, a historic downtown location and apartments adjacent to OSF Medical Center provide excellent choices. Check out their brand-new luxury property in Peoria Heights, overlooking the boutique shops and fine dining on Prospect. And in Morton, they offer a variety of apartment homes with garages, a hot downtown location, and now a brand-new high-end complex near Idlewood Park. If you want to become part of their team, contact them about open office positions. They're also hiring in their maintenance department. So, we invite you to find out why so many people have chosen to make a career with them. Check them out on Facebook today or email their friendly staff at leasing@lemanprops.com. You can also stop by their website at lemanproperties.com. Check them out and find your place to call home today.   Do narcissists recognize or ever admit to being narcissists? Can they ever see that in themselves?   Kris Reece: (18:36 - 20:20) That's a great question. And that's actually two-sided. So, the one where I would say no, they don't see that in themselves. They see themselves truly as entitled, as somebody who's been given the short straw, somebody who is owed something, the victim. They honestly don't see themselves as narcissistic.   Then there's another side where they sort of see it and they actually will use that now to their advantage. See, this makes me somebody who is self-reflective. This is somebody who is, I'm willing to recognize where I've gone wrong. But the problem is, there's no depth there. You'll get generalities like, oh, I know I'm not perfect, but, and then you'll get a litany of justifications or you'll, I know I'm not perfect, but all of your sins are now laid out in detail. So, they will, if they do recognize it, they will use it to their advantage.   Now there is that final subset that does start to recognize and they see, I don't want to be this way. Wow, I've caused a lot of destruction to relationships. I do want to change. And that road is really long, really long. But I'm not, I'm not of the camp that believes that narcissists don't change. They can, if they want to. It takes a lot to recognize it. And I've seen some do.   Laura Dugger: (20:22 - 21:11) I appreciate that hope. You don't always hear that very often with this type of personality. But I think one more piece that has always been so confusing to me when loved ones have shared that they're in a relationship with someone who is a narcissist, whether that's their spouse or their parent is where I've been in friendship with people before. But they, all of their stories, no matter where they live in the world, the narcissist seems to struggle with the same things. They seem to act the same way. They're master manipulators. And I just don't understand how they all have the same playbook. And like you say, they lie even when they don't have to. So, as you've thought about this, are there any reasons why it's so similar across the board?   Kris Reece: (21:14 - 23:27) Yes, because by nature, they are, they're lazy. They don't want to put in an effort. And they're also, what word would I use to describe this? It's almost like they're aliens to empathy. So, if you could imagine an alien coming from, I don't believe in aliens, so please don't hear what I'm not saying, but let's just imagine for a moment, you know, they come on this earth and they're like, oh, I got to adapt myself to these people. I got to fit in. What do I do? So, they're going to start listening. They're going to start mimicking behaviors and they're going to start testing to see what works and what doesn't work. So, for them, now we go back to that whole childhood thing. If they've learned that the only way to get what I want is to lie, the only way to get people to see me as XYZ is to manipulate, that's what they're going to do. And they're going to do it by default.   And that's what people don't understand is that default mechanisms are so powerful that even a master manipulator could turn around and say, “you know, I really, I recognize, yeah, I do manipulate a little bit.” And then when push comes to shove, if they have not done the hard work to begin to dig and really understand where it came from, why it's there and start to develop the patterns to override it, they're going to default to the same way every single time.   And that's why they lie so easily. It's just a default. Now, I'm not saying that as an excuse, but it's a default. And what they also don't realize is that this is not just psychological. This is spiritual. Narcissism is fueled by pride, deception, and control. Is that describing anybody we know? That's the enemy to the core. So, it's not that they're all just studying the same playbook. It is that they're all influenced by the same spirit. And that's what we're struggling with.   Laura Dugger: (23:29 - 24:00) Wow. And that really, there was an aha moment, and I wrote this down, kind of what you're saying. But on page 133, you said, “it's like they're demonically inspired or at the very least, influenced.” And I think that makes so much sense. Even the insidious ways that they are cunning or crafty, that they're influenced by our enemy. That makes a lot more sense. Anything else that you would want to add to that?   Kris Reece: (24:02 - 25:36) Yes. When we look at, I hate to, I don't like to label people. But when we look at how the enemy operates, let's look at how Satan operates. Kill, steal, destroy. Control, pride, deception, manipulation. If he is now influencing these people and they are not putting up any of the barriers, they're continuing to give him a foothold. They are now walking in his purpose. So, if Satan is looking to do this to you, why wouldn't his ambassadors? They are highly influenced by his behaviors, and they don't even realize it. So, yes, we can have compassion. We can take this to prayer because any stronghold can be broken. But that's got to be done by the power of Christ.   So, we pray for their eyes to be open. We pray for them to see the wickedness of their ways and give them a desire to turn from it. But you're not going to change that. It's not going to happen, especially when it is so deeply spiritually rooted. Because a lot of times we get caught in the, well, I'm a good person. Well, I would never behave that way. If I knew I was doing that, I'd want to change. So, we think that our explanation alone is really just going to be the aha moment for the narcissist, right? So, we explain, we re-explain, we over-explain. And then what we don't realize is that now we just got caught in that trap as well. We're now playing that game on their turf and we're not going to win. We have got to hand over this spiritual battle to the Lord.   Laura Dugger: (25:37 - 25:54) Okay, so then that makes me wonder, you said that there is hope. So, how is this treatable? You've kind of let us in on a little bit of it, but also can you just share if you have ever seen someone repent or change their ways?   Kris Reece: (25:56 - 28:30) Yes, more than one. I've seen it on more than one occasion. It is a journey. It does not come from you just over loving them and just giving them passes and excuses and being more like Christ. It's usually from what I refer to as a two-by-four moment.   When God just clunks them over the head, everything is lost, everything is gone, and everything that they held so dearly, meaning everything that was holding them up. So, if you can think about narcissists, they can't function on their own. They don't have their own self-identity. They don't have their own self-discipline. They don't have any other self-regulation. They have no sense of self. So, everything is external. So, when God is looking to change somebody, guess what's going to happen? He's going to start kicking out those crutches one by one, and then they're going to get the two-by-four moment, which is that knock over the head, like that road to Damascus experience that Paul went through. It's like, hello, are we going to wake up here?   And that is when they start to have their awakening, and that is when they begin to pursue, hey, I think change might be possible. This is what happens to me. And then in that environment, if they're able to get met with then the love and the compassion, again, not the enabling, then you'll start to see that change begin to unfold. Narcissism is treatable, but not in the way people often imagine. It's not this surface-level behavioral issue. It's not getting somebody to say, I'm sorry, or getting somebody to validate you. It is a deep identity and a heart issue that is rooted in pride. And I don't know about you, there is not enough experience on the planet. I could never take somebody through that. That has got to be a God moment.   And that's where I want to just caution people sometimes, especially if we struggle with codependency, thinking that we are now responsible for these people, that maybe God planted me in their lives for such a time as this. Stop, stop, stop. Guard your heart. Allow God to heal you of what's driving you now to want to fix this person. And truly, truly, if you really love this person, pray for them, go into warfare for them, but hand them over to the Lord.   Laura Dugger: (28:32 - 28:48) Okay, so then another spiritual question, Kris, in your opinion, can someone be a Christian, a true born-again believer, and a narcissist? Ah, I love and I hate this question.   Kris Reece: (28:52 - 32:44) Hilary, you're going to love and hate my answer. Yes and no. So, in one sense, yes. In the sense that somebody can actually profess faith and faith in Christ but still live in a way that looks absolutely nothing like him. And we see this all throughout scripture. But claiming Christ and following Christ are not the same thing. And that's where I believe that there are times where it's no. You know, just because you had an altar moment where some way, somehow your belly was full, you were well rested, the music was just right, and you came to this place of, okay, I'm going to give my life to Christ at the altar, but you continued in your iniquity for the next 30 years. I really have to seriously question your salvation. But it's not my job to question someone's salvation. But I can question your walk. If I'm not seeing the fruit of that walk, I don't know that I can call you a brother or a sister. If you continue to walk in that route of pride and self-exaltation and manipulation, it's not of God. So, there's a difference between a Christian who's struggling and a Christian who's just refusing to admit any of the error of their ways. One of the questions that we really have to ask is, can a narcissist be saved? And the answer to that is absolutely. Jesus came for the broken, the blind, the hard-hearted, every single last one of them. But that transformation is going to require repentance.   So, yes, I think our hope always needs to be in, Lord, you can save them. If you saved a wretch like me, you could save them. So, now what happens is our prayer needs to now shift. Lord, give them a heart of repentance, a willingness to see themselves truthfully and surrender to your work. That's where our prayer now needs to shift. Not, Lord, get them to stop doing this, get them to stop doing that, get them out of here, move them on. Because if it is God's heart that none should perish, it should be our heart that none should perish. But all should come to repentance. So, that's where our prayer needs to be. So, yes, while there is hope, we're not mini-Jesuses. It's not going to happen. It's not our responsibility. Sometimes our responsibility is actually to step out of the way and allow them to suffer their own consequences, because that is what starts to bring a narcissist to themselves. Not always, but oftentimes. You know what it's reminding me of is the scripture in 1st or 2nd Corinthians, I can't remember, is when Paul commanded the young man who was sleeping with his stepmother to be cast out of the church, get rid of him, to send him out. And here's what he said, “Give him over to Satan for the destruction of his flesh.” So, it wasn't like, get rid of him. He's a piece of dirt. We don't want anything to do with him anymore. It's like, okay, if that's the lifestyle he wants to live, then let him live it. And let Satan have his way. So, his flesh is now destroyed. Not him as a person, but his flesh is destroyed. And that's really what narcissists are. They're very fleshly people. I want what I want when I want it, and I'm going to do whatever I can to get it. So, we really want to change our prayer to the Lord, lead them to repentance.   Laura Dugger: (32:49 - 34:01) Updated website, thesavvysauce.com, so that you can have access to all the additional freebies we are offering, including all of our previous articles and all of our previous episodes, which now include transcriptions. You will be equipped to have your own practical chats for intentional living when you read all the recommended questions in the articles or gain insight from expert guests and past episodes as you read through the transcriptions. Because many people have shared with us that they want to take notes on previous episodes, or maybe their spouse prefers to read our conversations rather than listen to them or watch them now that we're offering video rather than just audio. So, we heard all of that, and we now have provided transcripts for all our episodes. Just visit thesavvysauce.com. All of this is conveniently located under the tab show notes on our website. Happy reading.   Will you also share a few of the toxic tactics that narcissists typically use for power and control in relationships?   Kris Reece: (34:02 - 36:33) Yes, actually one of their favorite ones is gaslighting. And I think it's just a word that is so overused and abused, but it is so accurate because it's not just lying, it is denying, it is distorting, and it is rewriting reality with the intention to make you doubt yourself, your memory, your feelings, or even your sanity. Tell me that's not wicked. I don't know what it is. It's manipulation at its finest. And the same with love bombing, which is another one of their tactics. At the start, or not even just at the start, maybe when they recognize that you've had enough, like that's it, I'm putting my foot down, I'm setting boundaries, sometimes they'll come in with that love bombing. And what they do is they start to overwhelm you with the affection and the attention and the promises and the chores and all those things that you've been just fighting for all those years. What they're looking to do is to recreate or recreate that emotional dependency, because it's not about love to them, it's about bait. So, in their mind, they're not going, oh no, I'm losing this relationship. Let me get my act together. It's, oh no, I'm losing control. Let me get him or her back into my clutches. So, those are two of the very common ones.   Another one is projection. You want to know what a narcissist is doing? Listen to what they're accusing you of. That will tell you clearly what they've got going on. Lying, selfishness, anger, cheating, hiding, whatever it is, they want to put you on the defensive instead of facing their truth. So, what it does is it puts the spotlight on you and keeps it off them. So, those are some of the most common tactics that they're going to use. And it's on a spectrum. They will do it to different degrees. They'll do it in different ways to different relationships. But they're always going to do what has worked in the past. So, again, once your eyes start to open, now it becomes more difficult. And now their tactics start to change just a little bit. Remember, they're the alien. They're here. They've now got to figure this out. They're like, oh, this isn't working anymore. So, they're going to try to figure out what does work. And that's where you need to be very careful. Know them by their fruit. Fruit takes time to develop.   Laura Dugger: (36:35 - 36:45) Okay. Even that term gaslighting, I think it can be hard to understand. Can you give an example of what that would look like in a relationship?   Kris Reece: (36:46 - 37:50) Yeah, absolutely. So, you can go to, let's say, your spouse and you tell them, you know, when you said this to me, it really hurt my feelings. An obvious form of gaslighting could be, I never said that. You're misunderstanding me. Now, a lot of times people become savvy enough to have proof. No, no, no. You did say that. See, it's right here. Well, that's not what I meant. And you should know that. If you were a good Christian, you would know that that's not what I meant. You know that I get a little confused. You know that I mix up my words.   And what they're doing is they're trying to distort your feelings instead of just owning. Wow. I didn't intend to make you feel that way, but I could see that it left an impact on you. They will skirt around all of that. They will make you question yourself. They will even deny, they will flat out deny that they said or did anything.   Laura Dugger: (37:52 - 38:26) And I see where this gets so confusing for the person in relationship with them, because there's extra layers that you talk about and even extra tactics, like pathological lying that are added in there too. Yep. But they will flat out deny it. Yeah. Well, there's also a few more terms that I'd love for you to explain, just because they may come up throughout our conversation this week and next week. So, will you define codependency for us and also reactive abuse and trauma bond?   Kris Reece: (38:27 - 43:41) Oh, absolutely. These are all very powerful and they are issues that can leave. I hate to use the word victim because we may be victimized, but if you're in Christ, you are not a victim. You have a hope and a future. God can meet you and do exceedingly abundantly above what you could ask, hope or think. But codependency, reactive abuse and trauma bonds are all very real and they often travel together. But they're different pieces of the same trap.   So, when we look at codependency, this is where your sense of worth or peace now depends on someone else's mood or approval. It's like saying, if you're okay, I'm okay. If you're not okay, I'm not okay. So, I need you to be okay. Okay. And you start to manage other people's emotions instead of your own. And that's when we start to confuse enabling with loving because at the core of it, we want to feel okay and they're not okay. So, we have to get them okay. And that's where that caring now turns into control.   So, now we get into reactive abuse. This is often very misunderstood because this happens a lot in churches. So, I want you to picture this. You have a married couple. Let's just say he is for the, just for the sake of our conversation. There are, there are a lot of female narcissists out there, but let's just say the male is the narcissist and he is gaslighting and he is abusive at home, but it's borderline. It's like, you know, he's a little insulting. He's a bit harsh. He's not loving. He's not nurturing. But boy, when he's at church, oh, he's everybody's pal. He's serving all the time. So, now when they go to counseling, they're sitting in front of the pastor, and she's got years and years and years of this abuse that has taken place. And she's now reacting to it. She's elevated. She's yelling, she's screaming, she's crying. And guess what happens? He's sitting there cool as a cucumber. I really don't understand. I mean, I know I've not been perfect and that's where the reactive abuse is taking place because she's now reacting to all of those years of manipulation and provocation and now questioning her own sanity because she knows what's going on. So, she's got that, what we refer to as cognitive dissonance going on.   She's like, well, wait a minute, he's done this, saying this, this isn't making sense. I know I'm not losing it, but I feel like I'm losing it. And that's what's taking place. So, she just explodes because she has no idea what's going on. Her sanity is in question right now. So, to that pastor, guess who looks like the problem? She does. So, if you would just react a little bit more gently when he brings something to you, you may not have this problem. And if she's a Christian, she's going to go back and recognize the error of her ways, which that is a problem. You know, we are responsible for how we react, but she's owning now all of it. So, now let's take a step back.   What is reactive abuse? It happens when you finally explode after those long periods of manipulation and provocation. The abuser then points to your reaction as the proof that you are the problem. And that keeps the guilt train going.   The trauma bond is what happens with trauma bonds is they form when your brain gets hooked on the cycles of fear and relief. And we also go back to that cognitive dissonance. We're like, oh, wait a minute. Okay, he's this way one minute and he's this way another minute. So, is he good? Is he bad? I don't, I don't, instead of the brain being able to say, he's both, you've got both of this going on and we need to deal with this. We're trying to put either a bad blanket on it or a good blanket on it. So, we get hooked in these cycles in the relationship. And what we're chasing is that constant good time. Maybe we had a great time at the gala and he was so wonderful. He was even kind to me after we got in the car, and those small moments of kindness start to release the dopamine, and they convince you to stay even though the big picture is you're being hurt long term.   It's like the frog in the boiling pot. They don't even realize it. But the good news, codependency, reactive abuse, and trauma bonds, once you recognize these patterns, you can begin to renew your mind, break the cycle and allow the Holy Spirit to retrain your heart towards peace instead of that counterfeit connection.   Laura Dugger: (43:43 - 44:06) Wow. That is so well summed up. And if somebody is recognizing that they're in that cycle or if they're identifying they're in a relationship with a narcissist, do you have a practical first step as we're starting to wind down our time together today? Anything that they could do before they tune in next week?   Kris Reece: (44:07 - 45:13) Absolutely. So, the first thing you're going to want to do is to release these feelings of shame and bringing this before God. Your time right now with the Lord can be precious and incredibly restorative. My hope would be that we take our focus off of them. Yes, I get it. We're starting to identify. We're recognizing. And all that can be very enlightening. But be careful not to fall into the enemy's trap of now overanalyzing, over fixing, over controlling.   Take this before the Lord and say, “God, what are you trying to do in me?” Because for whatever reason, He's allowed this relationship. For whatever reason, He's not allowing you out of it. There's a lot of work that He's going to want to begin to do in you. And this is not to say this is your responsibility, but I promise you at the end of this road, if you walk this with Him, there will be a life that is beyond your imagination. Whether it's in the relationship or not, I'm not sure, but it will be beyond your imagination.   Laura Dugger: (45:15 - 45:24) Thank you again for sharing the hope, Kris. And where can we go in between these weeks if we want to continue learning more from you?   Kris Reece: (45:25 - 45:43) Oh, that'd be great. I would love if you'd jump on over to my website. It's krisreece.com. That's Kris with a K, Reece with a C. And you're going to find a wealth of content and resources, some of them free resources. And it's also where you can find my new book. It's called Breaking the Narcissist's Grip. Or you can just jump on Amazon for that as well.   Laura Dugger: (45:44 - 46:01) Wonderful. We'll add links for all of that in the show notes for today's episode. And you're familiar that we're called The Savvy Sauce because savvy is synonymous with practical knowledge.   And so, as my final question for you today, Kris, what is your savvy sauce?   Kris Reece: (46:02 - 47:06) My savvy sauce is going to be very practical. I'm a really practical gal. And this may sound like a cliche, so I want you to kind of stick with me a little bit, but it has changed my life. And that is practicing the pause. In these difficult relationships, whether you were reactive before or not, you are now. And we want to begin to practice that pause because toxic people really want to dictate the emotional temperature of the conversation.   So, before you respond, before you react, before you decide anything, just one pause. And you got to ask yourself this one question. This is what I do. I say, is this led by peace or pressure? And that question has saved me from countless toxic conversations and impulsive decisions. So, before you respond, pause, because peace is always going to tell you the truth faster than pressure ever will.   Laura Dugger: (47:08 - 47:37) Well, so well said. I love that. And you are, I'm just so grateful that you were called to this work and that you did surrender to the Lord. Here I am. Send me with your book and the way that you're communicating today and all of these resources that you put together. I think a lot of people are going to find healing and hope. And that's my prayer as we conclude our time together. But I'm just very grateful for you, Kris. So, thank you for being my guest.   Kris Reece: (47:37 - 47:41) Thank you. Thank you. It's been such a blessing and an honor. I am so appreciative.   Laura Dugger: (47:43 - 51:25) One more thing before you go, have you heard the term gospel before? It simply means good news. And I want to share the best news with you, but it starts with the bad news.   Every single one of us were born sinners, but Christ desires to rescue us from our sin, which is something we cannot do for ourselves. This means there's absolutely no chance we can make it to heaven on our own. So, for you and for me, it means we deserve death, and we can never pay back the sacrifice we owe to be saved.   We need a savior, but God loved us so much. He made a way for his only son to willingly die in our place as the perfect substitute. This gives us hope of life forever in right relationship with him.   That is good news. Jesus lived the perfect life. We could never live and died in our place for our sin.   This was God's plan to make a way to reconcile with us so that God can look at us and see Jesus. We can be covered and justified through the work Jesus finished. If we choose to receive what he has done for us, Romans 10:9 says, “that if you confess with your mouth, Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.”   So, you pray with me now. Heavenly father, thank you for sending Jesus to take our place. I pray someone today right now is touched and chooses to turn their life over to you.   Will you clearly guide them and help them take their next step in faith to declare you as Lord of their life? We trust you to work and change lives now for eternity. In Jesus name we pray.   Amen. If you prayed that prayer, you are declaring him for me. So, me for him, you get the opportunity to live your life for him.   And at this podcast, we're called The Savvy Sauce for a reason. We want to give you practical tools to implement the knowledge you have learned. So, you're ready to get started.   First, tell someone, say it out loud, get a Bible. The first day I made this decision, my parents took me to Barnes and Noble and let me choose my own Bible. I selected the Quest NIV Bible and I love it.   You can start by reading the book of John. Also get connected locally, which just means tell someone who's a part of a church in your community that you made a decision to follow Christ. I'm assuming they will be thrilled to talk with you about further steps such as going to church and getting connected to other believers to encourage you.   We want to celebrate with you too. So, feel free to leave a comment for us here. If you did make a decision to follow Christ, we also have show notes included where you can read scripture that describes this process.   And finally, be encouraged. Luke 15:10 says, “in the same way, I tell you, there is rejoicing in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents.” The heavens are praising with you for your decision today.   And if you've already received this good news, I pray you have someone to share it with. You are loved and I look forward to meeting you here next time.

“I prioritized client work, and my SEO strategy paid the price.”It's probably surprising that an SEO would ignore her own SEO, but here we are. And you know what? There's that saying about cobbler's kids, and I just keep seeing how true that is. You're really skilled in XYZ and you help your clients with that, but then 9 times out of 10, it happens to be a hot mess express on the back end of your own business.The great news is that hope is NOT lost! There's a way to fix it & I'm talking you through that 3-step process in this episode.→ Follow along on the journey on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/brittany_herzberg/→ Get the full show notes here!——

BONUS: Why the Spotify Model Didn't Work (Even at Spotify) Imagine a company that spends a year building an iPad app—and on launch day the product owner says: "Now it'll be interesting to see IF anyone uses it." In this episode, Marcus Hammarberg and Tore Fjaertoft share why organizations keep installing frameworks like software, why it still doesn't work, and what they've learned from places like Spotify about treating your way of working as a product in itself. When Copying Without Adopting Becomes the Norm "It becomes more about following whatever this framework tells you to do, rather than to understand what the problem you're trying to solve is all about."   Marcus and Tore met at a consultancy in Malmö and within 15 minutes realized they shared the same frustrations—despite coming from opposite directions. Marcus comes from the ground up as a software developer and coach, while Tore works top-down with leadership teams on product organization design. Both had worked at Spotify and both had seen organizations copy famous frameworks and models without adopting the underlying mindset. The telltale sign, as Tore describes it, is when people focus on compliance rather than being pragmatic—following the manual without questioning whether the way they're working is actually serving the organization. As Marcus frames it through Cynefin, product development lives in a domain where best practices don't even exist—only emergent practices that you discover by trying things out. Treat Your Process Like a Product "The easiest way for us to explain things has been: take the mindset you use for your product, and then use that same mindset when you're approaching how you set things up and how you work internally."   The core idea Marcus and Tore keep returning to is deceptively simple: see the way you operate as a product in and of itself. Just as a digital product is never finished—you ship it, observe how customers use it, and evolve accordingly—your operating model should follow the same cycle. Tore explains that the "customers" of your process are your employees: they need less friction, more empowerment, and the ability to spend more time on work that actually moves the needle for users. Marcus connects this to the lean concept of True North—a shared direction that everyone understands, so that every experiment and process change moves the organization closer to what matters. He contrasts this with the three Agile transformations he participated in that all had the same misguided tagline: "get more out of our development organization." As Marcus points out, even the AI DORA report shows developers feeling more productive individually—but is individual productivity really the goal? The Factory Floor Story: Empowerment Needs Alignment "Everyone down here knows that anything we do needs to be the best in the world, in every step."   Marcus shares a powerful story from a Swedish lorry factory where workers changed their workstation instructions several times a day—written on a whiteboard with a pen, not locked in a manual. When asked how they got everyone to engage in continuous improvement, the factory managers didn't understand the question. Every worker on the floor knew they were building the most expensive lorry in the world, and they wanted it to stay the best. That shared purpose drove improvement without mandates.  But Marcus is quick to add the counterbalance: empowerment without alignment leads to local optimization. The factory combined local metrics with overarching flow metrics, so everyone could see how their station fit into the whole chain. Marcus and Tore distill this into three interconnected principles: empowerment to enable people to change how they work, alignment to steer toward shared outcomes, and collaboration to prevent teams from optimizing in isolation. From Static Frameworks to Dynamic Ways of Working "We realized that Spotify didn't use the Spotify model. They moved on, because they see the way they work as a continuously evolving approach."   Tore reveals one of the most striking lessons from their Spotify experience: the company that accidentally created "the Spotify model" had already moved beyond it by the time the rest of the world started copying it. The reason? Spotify treated its way of working as something that continuously evolves—not a static blueprint to install and follow. Marcus adds a practical example from Spotify: on your first day, you got access to the company's key metrics. Everyone knew the True North—at the time, increasing monthly active users—and every process change, every experiment, every team decision was oriented toward that outcome. The contrast with organizations that "install" a framework and then wonder why it doesn't work couldn't be sharper. As Marcus puts it: "We tried process X, it didn't work. We tried process Y, the opposite, and that didn't work either. Why doesn't the process work?" The answer is that the "how" must emerge over time, guided by a clear "why." Always Know Why You're Doing What You're Doing "I don't want anyone to work on anything if you don't know why."   Tore shares a policy from a product management colleague at Spotify: every single day, everyone on his team should be able to articulate not just what they're working on, but why—and the "why" could not be "because person XYZ told me to." It had to connect to the company's purpose and users. Marcus takes this even further, recounting how he once stopped productivity at an entire company by telling developers: don't work on anything unless you know why. Nobody could continue. The uncomfortable silence that followed became a powerful catalyst for change. With an 80% failure rate for product experiments being the industry standard, packaging that risk into year-long projects is a recipe for the iPad app scenario they opened with. The alternative is to build the organizational muscle for rapid experimentation—cheap hypotheses, fast feedback, and the humility to let outcomes guide the way forward.   Self-reflection Question: When was the last time you asked your team—or yourself—"why are we doing this?" and got an answer that connected to a real business or user outcome rather than "because the framework says so"?   About Marcus Hammarberg and Tore Fjaertoft Marcus Hammarberg is a product and software coach and consultant who has seen product organizations from the inside and from the trenches. He works at Humane, part of the ADRA consulting collective, and has experience from Spotify, Tradera, and multiple Agile transformations across banks and insurance companies.   Tore Fjaertoft is a product organization advisor who works with leadership teams on how product thinking actually scales in large, complex companies. He works at Above, also part of the ADRA consulting collective, and has experience from Spotify and Volvo Cars.   You can link with Marcus Hammarberg on LinkedIn and Tore Fjaertoft on LinkedIn.

Atlassian announced that it is letting about 10% of its workforce go today. Management said it was because AI is making the company more efficient, but we're wondering if there is more to it than that. Plus, some napkin math on the Strategic Petroleum Reserve release and Dollar General's most recent earnings Tyler Crowe, Matt Frankel, and Jon Quast discuss: - Altassian's Layoffs - The challenges facing SaaS companies in an age of efficiency - Assessing the impact of the SPR release and how it changes our investing approach - Dollar General's earnings and its ongoing turnaround project Companies discussed: TEAM, XYZ, DG, FIVE, WMT, TGT Host: Tyler Crowe Guests: Matt Frankel, Jon Quast Engineer: Dan Boyd Disclosure: Advertisements are sponsored content and provided for informational purposes only. The Motley Fool and its affiliates (collectively, “TMF”) do not endorse, recommend, or verify the accuracy or completeness of the statements made within advertisements. TMF is not involved in the offer, sale, or solicitation of any securities advertised herein and makes no representations regarding the suitability, or risks associated with any investment opportunity presented. Investors should conduct their own due diligence and consult with legal, tax, and financial advisors before making any investment decisions. TMF assumes no responsibility for any losses or damages arising from this advertisement. We're committed to transparency: All personal opinions in advertisements from Fools are their own. The product advertised in this episode was loaned to TMF and was returned after a test period or the product advertised in this episode was purchased by TMF. Advertiser has paid for the sponsorship of this episode. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠megaphone.fm/adchoices⁠⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Let Us Know What You Think of the Show!Date: March 11, 2026Name of Podcast: Backstage Pass RadioS10: E5: Denny Somach - Getting the Led Out!SHOW SUMMARY:What if the biggest band in the world won by saying no? Author and hall of fame broadcaster Denny Somach joins us to unpack how Led Zeppelin rewrote the rules—refusing singles, skipping TV, guarding the studio—and still built a global legend on the strength of live shows, mystery, and relentless craft. Drawing on a vast archive, Denny shares the raw voices behind the myth: label chiefs, engineers, publicists, peers, and the band members themselves.We dive into Atlantic Records' unprecedented deal with Zeppelin and why Jimmy Page and Peter Grant's terms created a fortress around the music. Then we head to Headley Grange for a ground-level look at Physical Graffiti, Cashmere's hypnotic power, and the ambient tricks that made John Bonham's drums feel like thunder in a stairwell. Denny opens the vault on rare memorabilia—global picture sleeves that “weren't supposed to exist”—and the touring strategy that transformed college halls into a nationwide campaign. Along the way, we chase the near-mythic: Sabbath and Zeppelin jamming with tape maybe rolling, the XYZ sessions with Page and members of Yes, and a $500 Billy Joel headliner that foreshadowed Allentown.Beyond Zeppelin, Denny explains why classic rock radio lost its catalog and how his show, Rock and Roll for Grown Ups, brings back the songs we loved but stopped hearing—paired with tight interview clips that reveal the stories behind them. It's a conversation about taste, memory, and preservation: what survives, what gets erased, and how to listen with new ears.If you love rock history told by the people who lived it, you'll feel right at home. Hit play, then tell us your favorite Zeppelin track, the deep cut you miss on radio, and which lost story surprised you most. Subscribe, share with a friend, and leave a review to help others find the show.Sponsor Link:WWW.ECOTRIC.COMWWW.SIGNAD.COMWWW.RUNWAYAUDIO.COMBackstage Pass Radio Social Media Handles:Facebook - @backstagepassradiopodcast @randyhulseymusicInstagram - @Backstagepassradio @randyhulseymusicTwitter - @backstagepassPC @rhulseymusicWebsite - backstagepassradio.com and randyhulsey.comArtist(s) Web Page:https://www.linkedin.com/in/dennysomach/https://rocknroll4grownups.com/Call to actionWe ask our listeners to like, share, and subscribe to the show and the artist's social media pages. This enables us to continue pushing great content to the consumer. Support Backstage Pass Radio - https://www.buzzsprout.com/1628902/support Thank you for being a part of Backstage Pass Radio Your Host,Randy Hulsey Support the showSupport the show

War with Iran: Why all eyes are on the Strait of Hormuz… And why U.S. producers will benefit. Plus, should you buy stocks during a war? … Block's (XYZ) layoff… Private equity… The betting markets… And Tesla's (TSLA) upgrade. In this episode: War with Iran: Why all eyes are on the Strait of Hormuz [1:27] U.S. producers will benefit from the Iran War [5:55] Should you buy stocks during a war? [17:07] Is AI to blame for Block's big layoff? [19:11] Private equity is crashing—is it time to buy? [32:07] The betting markets are going wild over the Iran War [41:20] I hate Bank of America's Tesla upgrade [48:39] Did you like this episode? Get more Wall Street Unplugged FREE each week in your inbox. Sign up here: https://curzio.me/syn_wsu Find Wall Street Unplugged podcast… --Curzio Research App: https://curzio.me/syn_app --iTunes: https://curzio.me/syn_wsu_i --Stitcher: https://curzio.me/syn_wsu_s --Website: https://curzio.me/syn_wsu_cat Follow Frank… X: https://curzio.me/syn_twt Facebook: https://curzio.me/syn_fb LinkedIn: https://curzio.me/syn_li

I'm on a quest to help my audience discovery their SIMPLEST path to earning meaningful income month after month. In this episode I break down the four necessary components of what I call the Simplest Business Funnel. If you are interested in doing LESS But BETTER....this episode is for YOU!   Links mentioned in this episode: Explore my coaching options or sign up for a Discovery Call to discuss working together: https://www.podcastingbusiness.school/   Want to record a podcast episode recommendation outro like you heard with this episode? Step One: Use this Speakpipe link to record your audio (60 seconds or less please!) https://www.speakpipe.com/podcastingbusinessschool Step Two: Use this template: "Hi my name is (YOUR NAME) from (YOUR PODCAST). One of my favorite episodes of Podcasting Business School is episode (XYZ) because (XYZ)..   *********************  

U.S. stocks are falling behind international markets in what could signal an epic shift toward global investing. A 40-year Wall Street veteran is telling clients to "sell everything American" as the decades-long dominance of U.S. equities shows cracks.Today's Stocks & Topics: iShares MSCI Brazil ETF (EWZ), Market Wrap, Power Solutions International, Inc. (PSIX), Union Business Cycle, The Great American Stock Exodus: When U.S. Markets Lose Their Crown, Bonds, Blue Owl Capital Inc. (OWL), iShares MSCI Japan ETF (EWJ), WisdomTree Japan Opportunities Fund (OPPJ), Tariffs and Trades, CrowdStrike Holdings, Inc. (CRWD), Cloudflare, Inc. (NET), SM Energy Company (SM), Block, Inc. (XYZ).Our Sponsors:* Check out Anthropic: https://claude.ai/invest* Check out Pebl: https://hipebl.ai* Check out Quince: https://quince.com/INVESTAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

A practice won't truly thrive until its team members are aligned and attached to your company's purpose. Tiff and Kristy go into what it takes to gain collective buy-in from those who keep your practice humming, including being reminded of fundamental desires, embracing vulnerability, understanding motivators, and a ton more. Episode resources: Subscribe to The Dental A-Team podcast Schedule a Practice Assessment Leave us a review Transcript: The Dental A Team (00:00) Hello, Dental A Team listeners. I'm so excited for you to be here today. You know, I'm   always excited. I love podcasting. I have loved doing this over the course of all of the years that Kiera and I have been putting these out. They are so much fun. It is so cool to reach you guys and it is amazing to get the time in with our consultants. And I'm bringing her live to you, well not live, I guess. It's live for me. It's recorded for you. But I'm bringing her all this month for you because...   We just busted them out in one day, if I'm honest with you, Kristy. Thank you for being here. Thank you for blocking your afternoon for podcasting with me. And I'm excited for this topic. How are you and how excited are you for this topic?   The Dental A Team (00:41) Excited and I'm doing well. It's not 49 degrees in the morning. It's actually 71 here Oh 72 now, so know that's a little chilly to us, but I'm excited the sun's shining and We get our time together. So I'm excited   The Dental A Team (00:49) ⁓   That's fair. I love walks and I was doing morning walks until like mid December and I was like, I can't, I don't know if it's because I'm an Arizona girl or if it's because I have, you know, thyroid stuff and Hashimoto's, but that chill, as soon as it hits my body, I'm done for. You don't want to be around me. You don't want to know me. And so I have not been going outside in the morning nor later in the evening because that Arizona desert does something   different when that sun goes down. So very happy to hear 71. Those are my, I really, think my sweet spot is like 73 to 76. That's my ideal. So if we can find a place that's always 73 to 76, I say we jet. That's where we're going. We just stay there.   So I love this topic today because, I mean, I love every topic we go through, because you tend to really spin it for me and make everything fun. ⁓ But I love the emotional side of life and the buy-in side, and today really talking about how to get teams bought into your big why. And I like that because I love purpose. I like everyone to have a purpose. And I think when a practice owner   knows what they're after, they have their purpose, it allows the team to then see their purpose within that that why within the owner's purpose. And we actually talked about this a little bit. Now that I say that, it's like I've repeated that we talked about this at the Mastermind in September. And it was actually fun. Anyone who was there will hopefully remember maybe recap will remind you. But Kira was talking we were talking about   writing their why's like what are they doing? What's their purpose? And Kiera spoke about hers and it was really really emotional because Kiera and I get emotional   it was fun to see for her how her   purpose and her why came to life when she spoke about it because I think it morphed a little bit as she was saying it but then it was really fun because she was able to see how my purpose   is fulfilled within her purpose in that I think for owners, it's scary to think that your team has a drive or a why or a want, and it can feel like everyone wants to be an entrepreneur. And if they have their own thing, they're gonna leave. And some of them will, that will happen. I've seen, I had a practice.   The Dental A Team (03:34) Hmm.   The Dental A Team (03:39) She was there in September. She'll remember, she'll know exactly what I'm talking about. I had a practice, I went, we did a stellar meeting. ⁓ it was so much fun. So much fun. She has the best practice, she has the best why. She's just an incredible human. Two days later, ⁓ she had a team member quit because she wanted to open up her own business and she wanted to do hair. And the inspiration from talking about why's and talking about what are we doing with our lives.   prompted her to quit and start a hair salon. She just, I was like, I am sorry and not sorry at the same time. So it can happen. And I think that's the fear for a lot of people. But watching Kira open up and then watching Kira get so emotional over how my why and my purpose is fulfilled within what I do, within my position.   The Dental A Team (04:15) Yeah.   The Dental A Team (04:33) it was like something morphed and changed for her and we all got to see it as like this butterfly effect. But I say that because I can't, I can have my own purpose and my own why, we all do. But when you can see how it aligns with the company that you're working with and how you can serve your purpose and your why within the job that you're in, that's really cool. And I think Kristy, for me at least,   personally as a team member, that helps keep me tethered to the job. Because if I don't know what the why is, where we're going, what are we growing for, why are we tracking these numbers, like what's the big deal, and I just wanna help people, I'm gonna move on until I find my place. And the find your place is being in alignment and being attached to the purpose that your company is serving and driving.   And that was a really long-winded way of introducing the topic. But I thought as soon as I said those things, I was like, oh my gosh, the September event. And so I hope all the doctors listening who were at the September event remember, because it was a really magical time for Dental A Team. And for those of you coming to future events, just buckle up, because there's always something really cool attached. But Kristy, passing the mic over to you, what are your thoughts? And really gaining team member buy-in, what do you?   What did I prompt for you in all of those words I just spewed?   The Dental A Team (06:02) Yeah. Yeah, and   all those words.   Tiff,   I know we were talking numbers earlier, so hopefully they were listening to that too, but the numbers are our gauge, but the buy-in has to be emotional. It's gotta be vulnerable and it's gotta go back to why you do what you do. Like, why'd you get into dentistry? And doctors why maybe, I mean, you said it, doctors why may be different than team members, but.   I venture to say almost every one of us that got into dentistry have some sort of passion for caring, you know? And we gotta get back to the root of that. And we even talked about ⁓ finances and getting to the emotional why. It's no different. If you want our teams to be bought in, you've gotta get to your emotional why. And you doctors have to be the North Star in that.   You can have leadership teams, right? But they've got to be very clear on the why. And it doesn't mean that our direction won't change, because it could change. But that intentional, why do you do what you do? Why do you wake up and get out of bed? We have to identify that.   The Dental A Team (07:17) I love that. You're spot on. And something shifts and changes, I think, for a person when they key in on that. And it's not just going with the motions. We can go through the motions in life very easily. And I think you finish high school and you go to undergrad and you go to school and you go to whatever. You go through dental school. You become a dentist. You do the thing and then you buy the practice. And it's like you get there and you're like, why did I do all that?   Right? They forget. They forget why they did the thing. And I listened to a Simon Sinek thing not too long ago. Well, you know, I love listening to him, his speeches. But one thing that he's been able to key in on for purpose is going back to your high school self. Because in high school really is when we decided what we wanted to do and we tagged it to a work.   like to a physical thing, like what is the job we're going to hold? But somewhere in there, our high school self wanted to serve a purpose and we attached the job to that purpose. So if we can kind of think back to our high school self and really think what did we love? What inspired us? What did we like doing? Where did we feel the most fulfilled and satisfied at that age?   that helps figure out what it was that you're intending to do in life. What is that purpose? Because the purpose isn't, this might rock a few of you, the purpose isn't to do the best dentistry in Kentucky and have smiles that last forever. That's not why you're here. You were not put on this earth to.   Do fillings you might be doing fillings, but that's the actionable piece. That's the what? but what's the why and We actually Kristy shared this recently with a client and Really like I feel like this kind of work on your purpose your your emotionally driven purpose is What can? re-inspire dentists   who might feel like they don't know what they're doing anymore. Why am I even here? Why did I become a dentist? Or teams that are like, what are we doing? Why are we pushing? What are we even after? But that emotionally driven why you can see where in your purpose, the what that you're doing, the job that you're doing, might be satisfying and fulfilling that space.   The Dental A Team (10:05) Wow, that was big. And yeah, you're absolutely right. We just went through this exercise and when you start feeling burnt out, it's great time to go back and revisit that why to reignite that fire and remember why you're doing it because you are going to go through the ebb and flow and the hard times to get there. But when you can let that be your burning desire in your gut, the rest of it's going to fall back into place. Yeah.   The Dental A Team (10:33) Yeah, yeah.   Thank you. I love all of this work. It's part of like who I am as a human is to help people figure out the inspiration that makes them love what they do every day. That is what I said in September. is my purpose is to inspire people to love what they do in life. So this stuff lights me up. Like I know I'm in my purpose when I get to talk about this stuff. So that's very easy. But how do you   Once we key in on that, Kristy, how do you suggest or coach doctors in sharing that with the team? Because it is incredibly vulnerable, especially when you figure out that your purpose has nothing to do with dentistry. Dentistry is the engine behind the purpose, a lot of, we talked about this earlier too, a lot of people are afraid to share those kinds of things. They're afraid to share the numbers, they're afraid to...   The Dental A Team (11:13) it is.   The Dental A Team (11:27) It's scary to be vulnerable and it's scary, it can be scary to inspire a team to want their own purposes too, again, because you don't, you're like scared they're gonna leave or go start a hair salon. But what do you, how do you coach them on that and how to be vulnerable?   The Dental A Team (11:46) Yeah. Well, I think it's funny that you said the hair salon, first of all, because that person can be a great referral source back to the practice. So it might not be all bad. That too. Yeah. And with that being said, it is vulnerable. And what's coming to my mind is how many times do   The Dental A Team (11:50) I do too.   That's fair. I was thinking that was the opposite of you. ⁓   The Dental A Team (12:11) And again, doctors, I'm not trying to pick on you, but how many times do they come to us and say, they're just here for a paycheck?   The Dental A Team (12:18) Mm. All the time.   The Dental A Team (12:21) And maybe we shouldn't make that wrong.   The Dental A Team (12:24) Yeah, I say   that. ⁓ my gosh, yes, drop the mic. I say that all the time. We are here for a paycheck. We have to pay our bills.   The Dental A Team (12:28) Yeah.   Yeah, and doctors paying something too, which means I think my soft spot goes back to sometimes doctors are afraid to say they're doing this for a quality of life or a legacy of life that they're going to leave and it is tied to money. And I don't think we need to be shameful of that anymore. I truly don't. And I think we need to give permission because even if I am here for a paycheck, that doesn't mean I'm going to serve differently. Right.   ⁓ It's okay and let that be the motivator because if they're getting that, they may serve even better.   The Dental A Team (13:13) Yeah, yeah, and you made me think of to speak to all the team members who are listening. For me, when I hear that somebody wants to a legacy or a legacy dental practice where their kids, if they decide to be dentists, can come be dentists, like this lifestyle, I want this lifestyle for my family. Well, I'm helping serve that I'm helping provide that. And in turn,   I'm also growing. I'm also reaping benefits of them succeeding. So I would much rather work for a doctor who's driven to keep going and keep growing than someone who's like, we're just here to do the fillings. Like cash your check, because I'm like, are we though? Are we going to be here in a year? Like is this stable? The doctor who's like, yeah, I want to build a legacy and I want to impact this community and my family in   XYZ ways. I'm like, cool, you're bought in. That means this is stable. I can get bought in on that because my family is going to grow as your family grows. And I can see myself here for a long time. And I think that's that team buying and that vulnerability of this is why I'm here because I'm here to serve my family. I'm here to pay my bills. I'm here to make sure Brody goes to college. I'm here to make sure that he has everything that he wants and desires. Ask my   The Dental A Team (14:16) Yeah.   The Dental A Team (14:42) checking account. That is my goal. Brody is happy and it's served by doing things like this. And if I want my goal, if my goal is to leave a legacy and be the entrepreneur who leaves a legacy for my family, that people can pick up that business and they don't have to work for anyone, then that's going to look different. I'm going go open a hair salon. I'm going to go do that thing. But I'm going to do that regardless of you telling me.   The Dental A Team (14:44) you   The Dental A Team (15:10) your purpose and your why, it's gonna happen no matter what. So don't be afraid to share it, just know you're serving, you're providing a space where people can grow. Whether they grow with you forever or they grow to a place where they're like, cool, I can go do that thing that I've always wanted to do, that's incredible. You got somebody to a point where they could go fulfill their life dreams, holy cow.   That's really freaking cool. And hopefully in the meantime, in the middle of that, you guys built some awesome systems that somebody can come in and learn. Because not everything's a guarantee, but the way you said that, Kristy, is just spot on. That vulnerability piece and allowing the team to decide if that's what they're here for or not, instead of leaving in the shadows, never speaking of it, and hoping that they stay anyway.   The Dental A Team (16:05) Yeah. How many times have you, I mean, I haven't worked at a lot of jobs, so I'm pretty loyal to my jobs, but for people that have gone, and I've interviewed people and hired people, so I'm speaking to myself in this too, but how many times have we shared our why in that process?   You know, and it all starts there. And you said something before, the what. The what may be getting to three million this year. And that's all we ever hear instead of the why. If we hear the why, then we can get behind the what. And then I like to say the core values just serve as how we behave to get to the why.   The Dental A Team (16:48) Yes.   Yes, yes, I love that because oftentimes core values are how we like how they want the community to view us. And so, you know, where we have integrity and we do great dental care and we have your dental, ⁓ your dentistry in mind and your dental health and is our is our heart. I'm like, I don't know how to show up to that. I don't know how to I don't know how to exude your dental health is my heart because it's not I don't.   I'm not here, I think dentistry is really cool, but I didn't go to dental school because I don't want to be a dentist. So that's spot on. It's hard to know what we're aiming for and what we're going for if we don't know the why or the what. A lot of times we're not trying the what either. So if we don't know what our goals are, if we don't know what our inspiration is, I tell people all the time, motivation is short lived. I can motivate you for a short amount of time, but if I can inspire you, inspiration lives inside of you.   Motivation comes and goes, it dies. It dies. That's why gym, you know, people who aren't inspired to go to the gym, they're not inspired by the change that the gym can make in their lives, like the steak, right? We talked about the steak and having ⁓ an all-on-four so we can eat a steak. If there's not inspiration tied to the health, the motivation to get up and go to the gym will die. It will fade. Every January, you're gonna be re-motivated to start the gym again. But if there's not inspiration living inside of you,   to be healthier, it will die off. So if I'm not inspired by the work that I'm doing, which if I'm doing new patient intake forms, like give me something to be inspired about. that's, you know, this can get really boring. Insurance verifications, why am I doing this? What difference does it make? Give me some inspiration so that I can attach to that and then give me the path of how I show up and live it every day. Those are your core values. So you need your   your mission vision, your why, what are we, why am I here, your inspiration, and then how do I show up to that?   The Dental A Team (18:55) I agree with you 100%. And I think you said something that we failed to realize. I wish I could remember the name of the book now, but there was one and he treats people that have heart attacks. And he's like, if you think I could motivate people, I should be able to motivate people because they're at best door, right? And I'm gonna try to get them to change eating or this.   The Dental A Team (19:06) Okay.   Yes.   The Dental A Team (19:20) they do for two weeks or two months because they remember what it was like to have a heart attack, but then they go back to the behavior. So even when we're faced with our own mortality, you just, I mean, it proves like we, it lives and dies. Yeah. Yep.   The Dental A Team (19:36) We're complacent.   Yeah, muscle memory sets in and it's easier to stay where you're at even in uncomfortableness. And even if your life is uncomfortable, it's easier to stay here than to make the change because you don't know what's on the other side of change. It's an unknown. You can't quite even imagine it or what you imagine you can't guarantee is going to happen. So it's easier to stay in the uncomfortable because it's what you know. There's no questions. It's gonna stop.   It's uncomfortable. It's easier to stay here and even face your own mortality than to say, okay, I'm gonna do this thing and whatever happens on the other side, I'm okay with, because that's scary.   The Dental A Team (20:17) Yep.   Well, I think the other thing, Tiff, that we failed to really tap into is you recognize it and you do it once. And how many times do we get with our clients and we're like, what is your what? Well, it's written down somewhere or it's in the drawer. Like you've got to revisit it and make it come alive or you just forget. And it's not front and center. And then that's when you get the burnout. And that's when you, you know, we've got to get back to that core and revisit it. So   I challenge you every time you have a team meeting, bring it up, talk about it. How are we living it? What are we doing that's in alignment with that and serving it? Because that's what's gonna inspire you to keep going. And so often, as a leader, that's one of my favorite things. How inspiring are you being in this moment? How inspiring am I being if I'm squatting, you're not doing this, you're not doing that. That's not inspiring change.   We talk about it all the time in hygiene. You say you're not flossing every day. Well, no, I just told you I'm not flossing. That's not inspiring me to floss every day. Right? So again, I just think putting a little spin and making sure you know your buy-in and then also revisit it. Don't put it in a drawer. ⁓ I once learned, and again, I apologize where I don't have the statistic behind me.   The Dental A Team (21:25) Yeah. Yeah.   resource.   The Dental A Team (21:45) They say, or resource, yeah, they say if you state your goal, you're a certain percentage ⁓ to achieve it. Is it James Clear? I don't know. Maybe. Maybe give them credit with credits on it. With that though, if you write it down, you're even exponentially higher. And if you say it, write it down and share it with somebody even more so.   The Dental A Team (21:55) I think so. Yeah. It might be atomic habits.   The Dental A Team (22:14) And then if you revisit it frequently, those are the people that really hit their goals.   The Dental A Team (22:16) Yeah.   And I challenge you to, you, meaning everyone and even myself, to consider goals that we're not willing to share with other people. It's much easier to tell ourselves that we're gonna do something and then not do it than to tell other people that we're gonna do something and then not do it. We will hold ourselves to a higher level of accountability if we vocalize it to people outside of ourselves, because we're okay to lie to ourselves. I'm okay. I'm okay to have.   low personal integrity until I can't take that anymore, until it hurts too much, but I won't do that public facing. So I encourage you guys to evaluate that to us there. Is there an unspoken goal that maybe if we just said it out loud and wrote it down and had some accountability partners around us, would we actually do it? Just like I said, I was gonna do a pull-up and let me tell you how many times Erin asks me if I've practiced for it.   The Dental A Team (22:51) Yeah.   Yeah.   The Dental A Team (23:14) You know?   The Dental A Team (23:14) I love it. You know, Tiff, I had a client one time that ⁓ she wrote, she was in a pretty tough spot financially and she wrote a check to herself, pulled it out a few years later and I mean, granted, visited through the way, did some of the things we talked about, but pulled it back out and it was like, holy cow, that she thought that was so undoable.   The Dental A Team (23:27) Mm, I love that.   The Dental A Team (23:42) and then it was surpassed. So challenge, I challenge our listeners.   The Dental A Team (23:44) ⁓ Yeah.   Yeah, I like it. Thank you. This was a fun. These are my favorite. You know that these are my favorite topics and I love having someone who's of the same mindset and I guess path of leadership. We listen to so much stuff and so many people and read so many books. So I love bouncing this stuff with you, Kristy. Thank you. And I think if we summed it up, I would say the biggest the action item from today is to sit down.   and get in touch with your purpose. And no, I know, Kristy, we've talked to a few clients, but specifically a client we worked with together that we had to stress that it's not perfect. It may not be perfect. It may take you months to really dial it in, but just start. You have to start somewhere. And oftentimes we hold ourselves back because we think we're not ready for perfect yet. It's not done. I don't have it like...   formulated yet. It's not my brain hasn't finished. Well, your brain's not going to finish if you don't get it on paper. Once you get it on paper, it's out of your brain and your brain can then process other things and other things come to light. So that would be my challenge. and Kristy, thank you again for today, for the whole day. Thank you. And thank you for just all of the, all of the light that you shed on this topic in general. think we can.   We can see lot of brilliance in that. So thank you for being here today, Kristy.   The Dental A Team (25:15) Yeah, thank you for ⁓ having the conversation with me.   The Dental A Team (25:19) Yeah, it's my favorite. I'll do this all day long. One care is like, what do you love? This is what I love. So how do we do that? But anyways, you guys, know, Hello@TheDentalATeam.com. If you are looking for advice, you're looking for guidance. If you're a client, obviously reach out to your consultant. We all dabble in this stuff. We all do the leadership. We all have those paths. And if you're not yet a consultant or someone who's going to be a listener forever, that's   cool too, just know we're here, reach out. We love this stuff, we are passionate about serving the dental community in the best ways possible and reaching as many people as we possibly can. That's why we started the podcast years and years ago. So reach out to us, Hello@TheDentalATeam.com Drop us a review below, let us know what you loved about today and honestly, Kristy and I would love to hear from you guys. Again, Hello@TheDentalATeam.com, tell them, send this to Tiff and Kristy. We would love to hear from you guys on what is your why?   What is your purpose? What's your inspiration? And how are you gonna use it? I, truth be told, would love to see those emails. I know, Kristy, you would too. awesome. All right, guys, go do the things. Go be inspirational and check back with us. Let us know how your teams do. Thanks so much.