36 Burst results for "Supervisor"
Capstone Conversation
Jared Asch Talks With Chris Whitmore of the Richmond Promise
"I am joined by Christopher Whitmore of Richmond Promise. And Chris, first, tell us a little bit about your background and how you came to Richmond Promise. And then tell us, what is the Richmond Promise? Absolutely. First off, thank you for inviting me on the podcast. Really great to be here and have this conversation. So I was raised here in the city of Richmond. I still live in Richmond, and growing up here in our community, like so many other young people, I wanted to enter into a career pathway and build an adult life in which I could support the Richmond community and try to make this city, this community, the kind of place that I always envisioned it to be, which is a place where everyone can thrive. Everyone can feel welcome here in Richmond, feel like they have opportunities from the city, from the community to be who they want to be, to contribute to this space and to make this city better for everyone. And so with that really broad, general goal in mind, I decided at a very young age, elementary school age, that I wanted to be a public official when I grew up. I wanted to work specifically in the mayor's office of the city of Richmond when I grew up. And my godmother, Erma Anderson, was mayor when I was in elementary school. She was the first African -American woman elected mayor of the city of Richmond. I grew up with folks like John Gioia, who's our county supervisor and has been our representative for several years on the Contra Costa County Board of Supervisors and several other folks who really inspired me to want to build out a career in public service. And so with that in mind, I went off to college. I went out of state to Webster University in St. Louis, Missouri. I studied political science with an emphasis in public law. After graduating from Webster in 2014, I moved to Washington, D .C., where I was accepted into a congressional fellowship. And through that fellowship, I worked in the office of then U .S. Senator Bill Nelson's office of Florida. I moved back to Richmond in December 2014 and got my first job, first full time job working for Congressman Mark DeSaulnier, who at the time was the representative, newly elected representative for California's 11th congressional district. I had the privilege of working as an outreach coordinator in his Richmond office, which is actually just down the hall from where my current office is today. A year later, 2016, I got to accomplish that childhood goal of mine of working in the mayor's office. I worked for Mayor Tom Butt, starting off initially as his director of community engagement, later promoted to be his director of policy and strategy. After about two years in that office, I went over to the city and county of San Francisco, where I went to the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission and worked on their policy and government affairs team. And for about a year and a half, I wrote, along with my supervisor, all of the water, power and wastewater legislation for the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. And I'll speed up the story. So about a year and a half later, I came back here to the city of Richmond and served as Tom Butt's chief of staff for exactly two years. And two years ago, October 4th, 2021, I started as Richmond Promise's second executive director. And it's been a great journey over the last two years, and I was really inspired to make the transition from the mayor's office to Richmond Promise. Just thinking back on my experience growing up in Richmond, having a goal to go to college at a young age for the sake and purpose of really accomplishing my career goals. And just being reminded constantly that there are so many other young people in Richmond who have educational and career goals for themselves. And those young people also deserve to have really strong support systems in our community to help them go off and do the things that they want to do. And I came over to Richmond Promise to strengthen that support system for our entire community.
WTOP 24 Hour News
Fresh update on "supervisor" discussed on WTOP 24 Hour News
"State Delegate Elizabeth Guzman of Prince William County has announced that she too be will seeking the democratic nomination for that spot. Guzman's a social worker and public administrator who's seen as champion a of immigrant rights, public education and organized labor. She'll be facing three other democrats from Prince William County who are running for the congressional seat. County Supervisor Margaret Franklin, State Delegate Brianna Sewell and retired Army Colonel Eugene Vindman. Spanberger is not running for reelection to Congress next year after announcing she'll instead be running for governor in 2025. 2023 is set to be the warmest year on record that according to a provisional report from the UN World Meteorological Organization which says global temperatures have risen 1 .4 degrees Celsius above pre -industrial levels. That is approaching the 1 .5 degree limit agreed to by world leaders in Paris in 2015. The report points to impacts including reduced Antarctic sea ice, glaciers in North America and the European Alps experiencing an extreme melt season as well. UN's chief is calling on leaders at a climate conference that's now underway to get the word out about what he calls deep trouble. And at that climate conference in Dubai, 200 countries have agreed to create a fund to help developing nations deal with the impacts of climate change. One of the big fears in the coming decades is what people are calling climate migration, where people basically have to flee where they live because either the seas are rising so fast that it's wiping them off the map literally or places are getting so hot that they're just not fit for humans to live there anymore. And so you could have conflict all over the world, not only because people are moving, but also over resources, things like water. That is CBS News correspondent Ben Tracy. Sports at 25 and 55, powered by Maximus, moving people and technology forward. Welcome back,
The Financial Guys
A highlight from The Economic Impact of Business Owner Outmigration
"It seems like our local GOP leadership, well, I'm not gonna say the conservatives, but the constitutionalists, they don't really care about the community. You never see community initiatives or outreach. And the Democrats and the socialists have that locked down. I mean, as much as there's crime and there's this and that, they're still out in the community kind of giving back. I mean, Mark Poloncarz was just at the Grider Street Community Center a week or so ago, giving out free hot dogs. And unfortunately, that's what people, the voters, the Democrat voters who do outnumber us, that's what they see. It's like instant gratification and they forget everything that's been done. And how do you defeat that? ["Oh, Whoa, Whoa, Whoa, Whoa, Whoa, Whoa, Whoa, Whoa, Whoa"] Hey, welcome back. Mike Lomas, Glenn Wiggle actually taking off, Ron Rheinstein in with me. We've got a special guest on the live line here. We'll talk a little bit about what happened last night. Erie County stuck on stupid again. The pain, the pain. Nationwide though, just not Erie County. Yeah, we're going to talk to an optimist in a little bit who's a workhorse here in Erie County, Nancy Ortecelli. But I got to be honest, I texted her this morning. I'm like, I feel like drinking. And it's like seven o 'clock in the morning. Can we take a personal day? Can we take a personal day? You're just so beat up. I mean, it's just, you know, it's like, you have to ask yourself, how could these people be this dumb? Well, how could you be this dumb? And it's not even rhetorical. Everything you've touched has turned to shit and you continue to vote for the same exact shit. It's just unreal. Because here's, this is just from a sleepless knife yesterday into today. People that left the cities, they're just like, I got to get away from the crime. I got to get away from the poverty, all the above. And their shitty voting has metastasized like a cancer in the suburbs. And it just keeps going and going and going. Well, they don't show up. That's what's so frustrating. Well, there's also that. I mean, you look at the numbers and it's like, how in the world do you not show up? I'm actually going through my phone yesterday. I'm saying, don't forget to vote. Don't forget to vote. Who's on the ballot? That's what I've got to think about. Like, how could you be that freaking stupid? I know. But the other, I mean, even if you look at an area where I grew up in Chictawaga and yes, the demographic has changed substantially since I left in 1998, but for the fact of the matter of the third world that has been imported, the taxes, the last county executive or not, the supervisor, she hammered two increases on the property assessments. It's back to back. Highest taxes in the country. And on top of that, the last one, because she's, again, the politicians, how they're just full of shit. Oh, that's our bad. You know, we're not even, well, maybe up for a second. Oh, we're not going to do another reassessment for two years and then literally the next year, here comes the next increase and all our bad, but we won't do it again. However, you got to pay. Yeah, sorry about that. And that's, and you look at the votes that were cast for supervisor. And I mean, again, how close it was and it'll go to recount. That's it? That's the amount of people that voted? Yeah, well, the GFP didn't do anything with absentee ballots there. So it'll go the other way. Before I forget, download our app, search Financial Guys Media in your app store and be sure to click notifications so you don't miss our weekly media drops. So don't forget about our app. Let me introduce Nancy Oreticelli. I was able to grab her. I know she's extremely busy. Nancy, what is your title today? Besides a miss of everything. I don't know, like, what is your exact title? You're everywhere, you know, constitution coalition, all this stuff. What is your, do you have a title? I mean, Antifa has called me a lot of things. So I know I work for an assemblyman, for assemblyman David DiPietro. I am on the executive board of the Erie County conservatives. I do, I'm the president of the constitutional coalition of New York state. So yeah, I do a lot of things. So that's who I am. I just, I believe in freedom and liberty and no matter what it looks like, I'm not a person who gives up and talking to a couple of people this morning, they're like, why do you sound so happy? I was like, well, I'm used to this. This is how it is here in Erie County. It's nothing new. It's not like - I know, you'd think all of us between the political environment here and then the bills and sabers, we'd be used to disappointment, right? We're like, let's roll out of that. Like, all right, I get it. Let me ask you, let's start out with the county executive race. I mean, what happened there? You know, you can't, first of all, he's literally, the cops are showing up because he's restraining a woman. We had people die in a storm because of his mismanagement. We had a record amount of businesses closed because of the way he handled COVID, right? I mean, you can't ask. And then he drops off all these illegal immigrants. They, 13 out of 50 of them get arrested and brought it up on charges. They destroy a hotel. I mean, it's like, okay, maybe you're not happy with Chrissy, but boy, you have to be some kind of a mental midget to say that's a good - And crimes on the rise. And crimes on the rise, record number. We don't want to enforce laws. Here's your appearance ticket. Yeah, number two in the entire country for Carstola. Number one is our neighbor Rochester. Number two, so what the heck happened? So people are misinformed. And it's like you just said, when you called and texted people and they said, who's on the ballot? Nobody cares anymore because it seems like our local GOP leadership are, well, I'm not gonna say the conservatives, but the constitutionalists, they don't really care about the community. You never see community initiatives or outreach. And the Democrats and the socialists have that locked down. I mean, as much as there's crime and there's this and that, they're still out in the community kind of giving back. I mean, polling cars was just at the Grider Street Community Center a week or so ago, giving out free hot dogs. And unfortunately, that's what people, the voters, the Democrat voters who do outnumber us, that's what they see. It's like instant gratification and they forget everything that's been done. And how do you defeat that? And I think the GOP needs to get out in the community more. I mean, they've had their get out the vote rallies that of consisted maybe 20 to 25 committee members. It wasn't the community. Do you know what I'm saying? And they don't - No, I get it. I was gonna say, but how - Nothing beats a good sailing hot dog. Yeah, here's your meat cylinder, go vote for four years and more tyranny. It's true, it's true. Well, that's, you're right. But the thing is, is, but then you take it a step further. You go fill up your car, holy shit, part of my life. That's even higher than it was a month ago. You go to the grocery store and our household, we do okay. But every time, between my wife, myself, and our two kids, and here's four bags, that was 300 bucks. Daughter, oldest daughter and my wife were down in Tennessee last week. My daughter was looking at the possibility of University of Tennessee. And she says to me, she said, "'Dad, do you know gas is a dollar a gallon cheaper there?' So I went through this whole thing about, you know, it's taxes. She's like, you're kidding me, just taxes. I said, yep, yep, that's the difference, difference between one state and the other. And every time somebody puts gas in their tank, it's an extra 30, 40 bucks here, as opposed to down there. So - So that's you and that's me, but that's not the urban voters. The urban voters are in poverty because of Democrat policies. But yeah, it's still vote that way. But they still vote that way because they'll come and give you free stuff a few times a year. They'll give you hot dogs. They'll give you backpacks. They'll give you this and that. A lot of them maybe don't have vehicles to fill up. Do you know what I'm saying? That's a fair point. But it's, you know what? Now that we're talking, Nancy, that also works against us too. I mean, we are top 10 in the country in poverty. Yeah, top three, I think. Per capita. Yeah, the city of Buffalo is, I think, two or three. Here's the, you know, our fair city. To your point, and I think you mentioned this, you know, the GOP will run on reducing the taxes. And Nancy, you said, these people don't pay taxes. That's true. That's not a problem for them, right? Although it is funny when you interview some of them, they actually think they do. They'll say, well, it's not fair. We're paying our fair share. Like, now you don't pay any federal taxes, and you don't pay any state taxes. If you look at it, and this isn't to be negative, but, and again, money's money. And let's just say they make $50 ,000, they're married filing joint. With your standard deduction, you're probably, you have $25 ,000 maybe in taxes total. Yeah, well, most of them. But that's what I'm just saying. And then you're probably getting a real fund. That's right. Most of them are public assistance. That's right. Talk about the women vote. I mean, you know, you look at other places, other parts of the country, and the women have really rallied together to really change things. And it just, you know, last night, I was really hoping that like town of Amherst, town of Cheektowaga, the women would step up and say, okay, we've got a guy who's clearly, you know, he's abused women. He's threatened a process server, a female process server that he's going to shoot her. And then the cops are showing up. I mean, well, I would think the moms would say, and it's amazing to me, I'm watching his speech last night, I'm thinking all these hypocrite Democrats, they're all, oh, believe the women, believe the women, unless it's a Democrat that can shove the left -wing agenda down your throat, then we don't believe them. So here's my take, two points I want to make. You know, talking about the women vote, I had a phone call the other week and somebody, it was actually Stephon, and he said, do you know a strong woman leader in Western New York who could do calls for Chrissy? And I was like, no, do you? I don't know any woman. There is no strong woman. I said, what about Lynn Dixon? They already had her. And I had thought about it. Mike, you probably remember a few years ago, I came to visit you. I wanted to start a women's group, but the coalition took off. And you know, if there's any women out there, women who would like to start a women's group, I'll help. I mean, I can't run it, but I'll help to get strong women elected. But there isn't. And then you have Moms for Liberty here in Erie County, but for some reason, the GOP will not unite with the grassroots organizations. Moms for Liberty have been phenomenal across the nation because the establishment has partnered with them. I don't know why they won't do it here. I don't get it. And if you would just unite, and it's the same issue with the conservatives and the Republicans, it's no secret we are outnumbered by Democrats. And so what happens with the conservatives and the Republicans who should be working together? The Republicans try to take over the legislature seat that was supposed to be conservative. You know, it was supposed to go to Lindsay Larrigo and they fought it with Jim Malcheski. I like Jim Malcheski and Lindsay Larrigo. They're both great people, but the GOP spent so much money on that primary that they had nothing to give to Chrissy to get her name out during this election because nobody knew who Chrissy was. And then they tried to do a party takeover in Evans where they switched a bunch of Democrats to conservatives, the GOP there did, to try to take over that party. And Ralph Larrigo did a lawsuit and the lawsuit is not finished yet, but the GOP candidate lost miserably. So they're focusing on things that should be uniting us, but they're dividing us instead of uniting. Look at West Connecticut and Lancaster. Those towns won amazingly for their town boards because the conservative committees and the Republican committees there are united and they work together. And I don't understand what the whole issue was with the Republicans trying to take out the conservatives this summer. It was baffling to me. So instead of focusing on Mark polling cars, you're gonna try to take a legacy away from a conservative candidate that it was already in the bag for them. You're gonna focus on a fight that was already a constitutionally minded candidate that was in there. It was a given, what a waste of resources and what a waste of time. That's a shame. Yeah, that's a shame. Absolutely. Well, the financial guys are here to help. I'd like to get you on the radio as well. We'll find that, hopefully we can find a strong female. That's what we need. You need the female vote. I mean, last night, the female vote shows up because Mark had been called, accused of holding a woman, I don't know, hostage or whatever. I mean, holding against her will, but they didn't show up. And they're like, God, that's so frustrating. The last thing before I let you go, the frustrating part to me and folks like Ron is we're in the business community, right? And so we're constantly getting involved. We're constantly trying to do our part. And sometimes I feel guilty because I look at somebody like you and I'm like, oh, I feel like a slug. But yeah, like, oh man, I really do. But the business community, I am just at awe this morning that they didn't show up at all. I mean, at all. How many restaurants did Mark destroy during COVID? How many gyms did he destroy? Now, some of these folks were strong enough to make it through, but I'm gonna be honest with you. If I owned a restaurant, I am never forgetting that. Now, I might be a little bit different of an animal because his picture and Gal Bernstein's picture would be on the front door and there would be a message that says, hey, if you're these people and you're walking in, do not bother, right? I mean, that's where I would be. But I get it. Some of these folks say, well, you know, I don't wanna be that aggressive. Okay, could you send Christie a hundred bucks? Could you put a sign out front of the restaurant to say, hey, just saying, I mean, like, not one. Well, that was the fault of the GOP, that they don't know how to fundraise. They really don't. And like I said before, their fundraisers consisted of just their own committee members. The public doesn't want anything to do with the GOP because the GOP has alienated them. Now, Michael Crocker is a good guy. I've met him. I've worked with him. He's really good, but he's got a lot to fix from the previous leadership. And yeah, I wouldn't want that job. I know. I know. You know what? It's funny you said that because I was talking to Glenn about it and Glenn's like, oh, they needed this. The hardest part about that is so many people have left. When you look at, and I'll say for America, I think it's a great thing, right? I mean, Florida is gaining delegates. New York is losing delegates. Florida had a $21 billion surplus. New York is going to go bankrupt at some point. I don't know when, but the math doesn't work, right? You cannot have the, and the 25 % of people that have left, they're all the top taxpayers, right? They're the ones paying the bills. Mike, this all sounds racist. Stop. That's right. Math is racist. But I mean, that's, even if the people that leave and, you know, from clients and friends and family that are in these Southern states, they still care, but they got up and left. Oh yeah. I mean, it's just - Well, they're not voting, right? They're not participating. Even if voting, but like, even if they've sent a check, like you said to Chrissy, but that's just the whole thing. They're gone. They're gone. I know, but you have, for the people, and I guess maybe this is where my deficiency comes with this, is that I'm like occupying common sense, I guess, way too much. But how the hell do people, again, you look at this, this sobering statistics or drive around the area, what the hell is coming here? Nothing. What is leaving here? A lot. A lot. What is beneficial that is derived from low -T polling cars? Let's just go over the last five years, the scandemic. How many people were affected by that? And how many businesses were lost? How many people, again, how many people have been Vax injured? Because, well, I can't go to the Bills game or the Sabres game, but seriously, I'm gonna roll up my sleeve. You were able to see the playoffs wave, but now you got my old car died. Or, again, my employer's forcing me, because this shit bag in City Hall is following crime wave Kathy, or Andrew, I killed your grandmother, Cuomo. Then you take it further. How many people died in nursing homes alone? One of my best friend's sister died in a hospital alone. Why is that, you may ask? Oh, because she tested positive for the Wuhan sniffles. Yes, I know. And these stories are out there. Yeah, I know. And yet there is zero messaging. And this is from Chrissy. This is from the GOP. This is from any Republican candidate that you can absolutely, and again, voting aside, fundraising aside, but if you got that message out there, debt would resonate. You need money to do that. You do, which is fair. And you need lots of it. I said from day one, I said for Chrissy to win, she probably needs a million bucks. And I think that's a fair number. And I think she got a total of about 150 ,000 from the business community. She was well, well, well underfunded. And I don't know, I was down there last night, I don't know if you got a chance to see her speech last night, but you could tell she cared. There was a few conservatives are sending messages, oh, she can't cry. I'm like, bullshit, she can't cry. She can do whatever she wants to do. You have the stones to step up. Then I was able to see her in the hallway before I said, Chrissy, that she's like, oh man, I feel like a failure. I said, Chrissy, I said, there's a million people in this freaking town, a million people. Do you know who was the only one that stepped up against this piece of shit, Mark Poloncarz? You. So don't let anybody ever tell you that you shouldn't do what you wanna do. There are so many armchair quarterbacks that oh, I should have done this, should have done that. I'm like, Chrissy, you're the only one. Guess what? Mike Lomas could have ran. I could have ran. I could have signed up. I didn't. Now - I feel like I told you to.
Capstone Conversation
Capstone's Jared Asch and Jim Wunderman Discuss the East Bay's Biggest Growth Hurdles
"What do you see as the biggest challenge for continued growth in the East Bay? Sounds like transit is one, economic development. But what do you see as some of the challenges ahead and maybe some of the solutions, some that could come from Sacramento or D .C., even? Yeah, look, I think the East Bay grew up kind of fast. Some people feel impacted by local traffic, things like that. There's a lot of newbies in East Bay. They just are. They're used to the place being the way it is and they don't need any more of it. And so they're reluctant. So I think there really needs to be a movement that the elected officials can get behind and get excited about and that their leadership can really drive the growth and the improvements and the new what's to come rather than them being dragged to vote against investments and improvements, because people with a similarly colored T -shirt all get up at the council meeting and scream, no way. And so that's where I think the opportunity is to come together. And let's just agree that a lot of what's in the East Bay was built at a time that was a different time. So now we need to rethink some of these areas. The way we did them just really isn't consistent with what we need now. We need something different. I look at it as I drive about. I see a lot of aging kind of strip mall centers and I see a lot of stores that are out and I have a feeling nobody's coming in and we probably need to repurpose a lot of that and do it thoughtfully. And that could provide a lot of housing. It could provide entertainment. It could provide new lifestyle opportunities. And these places tend to be in the central part of cities. So they're often very well located. I was talking to two different mayors that said one of the biggest problems that they're having with some of those shopping centers you're talking about that are nearly dead is that it was owned by grandpa in the 1960s or something, and now it could be 10 or 30 entities, family members that have a share in it. And so what they have found is they have one anchor store and one or two other stores that come and go, they're still making cash flow on those because property taxes hasn't changed much and things haven't changed. So if you have an anchor that's giving you cash flow, even if each family, if you have 20 or 30 families, is still making two grand a month, but maybe they're also getting losses from the vacancies that is equal to 20 ,000 or 30 ,000 off their W2 taxes. It's a win for those people. And when developers have come in and tried to buy that out, they can't even get 20 percent of the families to come to a meeting because they're just happy with the status quo, where if even if those families developed it themselves, you've got to bring everything up to code. You've got to really invest in it. And there's been this laissez -faire approach and people could probably name half a dozen in Concord, one or two in Pleasant Hill. I'm sure we can go throughout the whole Bay Area and name them. But that's a big problem. I don't know if you have thoughts on that. Well, momentum is is important. And once you start seeing something, when I started, I've been in this job 20 years. So when I came, we were talking about my predecessor was a woman named Sunny McPeak, who was a Contra Costa supervisor and had this job for a bunch of years and then went on to become Arnold Schwarzenegger's secretary for business, transportation and housing at the time. So she was very well -known in planning circles and is very influential, I think, lead in the area. And she was all about transit oriented development. I think she might have invented the term, but there was really not a lot of examples of it around at that time. And it was a lot of resistance to it because you're basically going into a suburban area where it's all single family private homes and say, we're not going to do that over here because there's transit here. So we want to densify that area. So she was able to accomplish that at the Contra Costa Center, Pleasant Hill, Bart Station. Then we had at least one that was under construction. It was happening. And then a couple of others. And then before you knew it, they were popping up like all over the place because there was momentum.
Nonprofits Are Messy: Lessons in Leadership | Fundraising | Board Development | Communications
A highlight from Ep 191: How to Build Amazing Work Relationships (with Michael Bungay Stanier)
"So here's a story I've heard dozens of times. You have this senior staff member who needs to be managed out and everyone knows it. But instead of addressing the problem, you hire someone underneath that person to support the poor performer. It feels like no time at all, and that rock star you hired resigns, a new opportunity they just couldn't pass up. But we know the truth. Gallup tells us that close to 60 % of employees who leave are not leaving because of compensation. The main reason? Managers are simply not investing in meeting staff needs as valued employees and human beings. As author and today's guest, Michael Bungay Stanier, says in his new book, people don't leave organizations. They leave managers. This new book, How to Work with Almost Anyone, will be the foundation, the anchor of our conversation. And its foundational assumption is that work success is intrinsically tied to the relationships we build, cultivate, and nurture, and that most of the time we leave the health and fate of these relationships to chance. How crazy is that, right? That's why Michael wrote this book. He believes it's time to commit to intentionally design and manage the way you work with people to actively build what he calls the BPR, the best possible relationship. Can you imagine if your relationship with your employee or your supervisor was safe, vital, and repairable? You don't have to imagine. Today, Michael will share a very clear and compelling recipe. Greetings and welcome to Nonprofits are Messy. I'm your host, Joan Gary, founder of the Nonprofit Leadership Lab, where we help smaller nonprofits thrive. I'm also a strategic advisor for executive directors and boards of larger nonprofits. I'm a frequent keynote speaker, a blogger, and an author on all things leadership and management. You can learn more at joangarry .com. I think of myself as a woman with a mission, to fuel the leadership of the nonprofit sector. My goal with each episode is to dig deep into an issue I know the nonprofit leaders are grappling with by finding just the right person to offer you advice and insights. Today is no exception. Michael Bunge -Stanyer helps people know they're awesome and that they're doing great. He's best known for The Coaching Habit, the best -selling coaching book of the century, and already recognized as a classic. His new book I referenced, How to Work with Almost Anyone, does what it says on the label. Michael was a Rhodes Scholar. He dabbles in the ukuleles, so do I. He's Australian, I'm not, and lives in Toronto, Canada. I've been there. Learn more about Michael at www .mbs .works. Michael, it's great to have you back on my podcast. What I totally love about your work is that you work to solve workplace problems with clear, compelling, simple, and actionable strategies. Your books are easy to digest, not because they're overly simplistic, hardly, but because you don't mince words, you get to the point, and the points you make really stick. So I am delighted you've written another book so that I had the excuse to have you back. Welcome. Joan, what a very generous and kind introduction. Thank you. You're right, I have a mantra when I'm writing a book, which is, what's the shortest book I can write that's still useful? Because so many books are so long and there are so many words and there's so much fluff, and I'm trying to unweird stuff for people. The coaching habit, I think, unweirds the whole idea of coaching, so everybody can kind of go, oh, if that's coaching, I can give that a shot. And here I'm trying to unweird this idea of how do you actively manage the health of your working relationships? Because it's a bit daunting, it's a bit hard, but I'm trying to give people an easier way into that. So you're kind of north of BlinkList of and south a 300 -page book. That's a lovely way to put it. Yeah, I'm like that. So because I've written a book, I always love to know what compelled you to write about this topic? What was their igniting incident? Sort of what drove you to do it? Because you need a drive to write a book, regardless of how short or long it is. Yeah, it's mostly a miserable experience writing a book, even if you like writing books. And I do quite like writing books. Well, there wasn't an inciting incident so much, Joan, but part of what I realized is my best contribution to the world is to be a writer. Like of all the things that I can do, and I'm a speaker and I can coach and I can facilitate and I can design learning and training, and I can do all of that pretty well. But the thing that is most distinctive in what I do is how I write and how I try and move things from complex to simplicity on the other side of complicated. Which is, by the way, no small feat and definitely a superpower. Oh, thank you. So I actually sit with the question, what's my best idea? What's my best guess for the next book I should write? Because I've got all sorts of ideas. I have ideas all the time. A vast majority of them are not very good ideas, but which are the ones that keep showing up. And this idea of actively managing a working relationship, having a conversation about how we work together before you have a conversation on what are we working on. Well, that seed got planted 30 years ago by a writer called Peter Block, who I'm sure you know of as well. And he calls it social contracting. And I'd been using this tool with my clients, with my board when I had a board, with my team, with my direct reports, but also with my peers. And I kind of fine -tuned how I thought this could work best. And I just realized the power of this tool. And I'm like, you know, if I got one tool that I could teach that I haven't taught yet, it might be this whole idea of a Keystone conversation in service of how do you build the best possible relationship with the most important people with whom you work? So you say that we should all be shooting for this best possible relationship. And I mean, there's a part of me that says, oh, okay, so who doesn't want that, right? Isn't it something comes naturally and builds over time? Well, if you're lucky, it comes naturally. And if you're lucky, it builds over time. But I think the odds are against you. I mean, it's entropy. Stuff gets cracked, stuff gets damaged. And the difference is passively waiting and hoping to see if it all, you know, cross your fingers and hope that it all plays out well versus actively saying, what can I do to make this relationship the best version of this relationship? So, you know, your relationships, your working relationships probably fit on a bell curve. You've got some on one end where you're like, I love working with this person, it's fantastic. They get me, I get them. We, you know, amplify each other's strengths. We kind of navigate the tricky things with grace and ease, brilliant. You've probably got some relationships, hopefully not too many at the other end where you're like, oh my goodness, this person is an energy vampire. They suck my life away. If I write a blog post called The Energy Vampire, I'm totally crediting you. Carry on there, Michael. You have to credit what we do in the shadows, which is a fabulous TV show, which is where I got the idea of Energy Vampire from. But anyway, you know, there are these people who you're like, you just can't crack it. No matter what you do, no matter how good your intentions and perhaps their intentions, it just feels like a kind of sucky relationship. And then most of your relationships are somewhere in the middle. They're decent, they're pretty good. You get along most of the time. But each one of those relationships has a potential. And I reckon whether you're at one end of the bell curve or the other or in the middle, there's a way that you can live more fully up to the potential of that relationship. And it takes actively managing it. It takes you going, how do I be the person who reaches out and says, let's figure out how we work best together for your sake and for my sake and for the mission of our organization's sake. I keep coming back to this word intention. So often, people want me to come to the word mindfulness, but I'm a fidgety skeptic, as Dan Harris calls me. I can see that. I'm watching you on video and I'm like, I'm getting that vibe just hanging out with you. But I'm telling you, what you're proposing here, what you're evangelizing about, is to enter into a relationship with intention. And this is something that I talk a lot about with nonprofit leaders who are constantly racing with everything feeling quite urgent because usually everything is quite urgent. And so intentionality is a little bit, is a scarcer commodity than I think is good for a thriving nonprofit. So I love this notion of being intentional about building the best possible relationship. So you talk about three characteristics of the best possible relationship. Can you tease them out for me briefly? Yeah, yeah. So I think the best possible relationships have three characteristics, just as you say. It's not A plus B plus C. There are three characteristics that exist in tension with each other because all best things, all best systems have three principles that are in tension with each other. So I think a best possible relationship needs to be safe and vital and repairable. So let me unpack each one of those three things for you. Safe is the best place to start. And if you've heard of any one of those three, it's probably about safety within relationships, psychological safety, because Amy Edmondson, the OG on psychological safety has made it really clear what a significant role this plays in team and organizational success. Google with Project Oxygen and Project Aristotle talking about how teams and managers thrive. Psychological safety is a key part of the characteristics that they mention. And safety feels an ability to not be in a place of fear. So being able to say things and not fear the repercussions of it. That's how Amy Edmondson defines it. It could even go a little beyond that. Deloitte recently did a study around something they call coverage. And coverage is this idea of, do you get to show up as yourself or do you have to hide some parts of yourself? And it's a really significant number of people who feel they can't bring their whole selves to work. More so, as soon as you move away from people like me, straight white men, old man, I'm like, I'm more comfortable with bringing my whole self to work, but I've got a whole bunch of structures around me that allow that when you're racialized or gender or whatever it might be. There's all sorts of, as people of color will say, code switching that goes on so you fit in and you don't bring your whole self to work. So safety is about an awareness of that. Yes, yes. And I can say as a very quick aside, as a member of the LGBT community, I know about covering and I know about authenticity and the distinction between, I've seen it and read lots about it, about the difference in job satisfaction and productivity of someone of a marginalized community who is able to be authentic versus people who are not. And I often say that LGBT people kind of model authenticity for others who don't come out about all kinds of things. Right, right, that's exactly right. So let's move on to Vital. Yeah, so Vital, I love that Vital has two meanings. Vital meaning essential, but Vital also meaning enlivening. Sort of makes your heart beat a little faster and you kind of in a good way kind of get sweaty hands and kind of go, this is exciting. So Vital is about a relationship that invites people to be brave, to step to the edge of who they are and what they know, to have adventures, to be courageous, to take some risks. And you can see that safe and Vital actually are in a dance with each other. There's this tension between them. You can have a relationship that is so safe that it is deadening, that there's a kind of like, you can't go to the edges because it's all about safety. You can have a relationship that's so vital, so kind of dangerous, that failure is catastrophic because when it breaks, and it will, there's not that safety to kind of balance it. So in any best possible relationship, we're like, what's the balance between safety and vitality that we need to strike? Interesting, I also think about, as you describe, a vital relationship. It's one that when you are in a meeting with that person that that meeting is fueling rather than depleting. Yeah, exactly. It's like Marcus Buckingham talks about strengths. Strength isn't just what you're good at, it's what enlivens you. It's what gives you vitality and what's giving you energy. Yep, repairable. Yeah, so the third attribute is repairable, which is, it stems from this insight, your best relationships and your worst relationships and the ones in the middle will go off the rails at some stage. And an ability to say, how do we fix this so we get back on track is an extraordinarily powerful role to play in any working relationship. And in my research for this, I read a lot of people who write just about the health of relationships. So people like Esther Perel and Dan Siegel and Terry Reel, all terrific authors, all with not all the same, but kind of different, but kind of aligned points of view. And one of the things that was really clear is how poor we are at repairability. You know, something gets slightly dinged and we kind of go, oh, I'm hurt. I feel a bit broken. I feel like this relationship's deteriorating a little bit. And you just kind of assume that that's the way to go because it's hard to speak up about being hurt. It's hard to be the person who builds a bridge to say, let's see if we can get back on track and get back to health in terms of this relationship. So safe, vital, and repairable are the three attributes that make up a best possible relationship. And yes, they're in a dance with each other, right? If a relationship with a colleague goes off the rails, I need to have some element of safety, but I need to feel some element of safety to be able to say either, wait, hold on, that actually did not work for me. That's right. Or can I please tell you how that made me feel? Not to sound too woo -woo or too therapeutic, like let's just face it, there's a lot of therapeutic techniques in buildings and sustaining and nurturing relationships. And how you do it depends on the conversation you've had with the person you're trying to fix this with. So how you and I might repair a glitch that's happened in our working relationships might happen a different way because we're both fast, we're both slightly skeptical, we're both slightly jittery, as you said earlier on. I'm like, me too. We probably do it in a different way because I don't need so much of the blanket of a therapy language to repair stuff. But we figure that out between us. But with somebody, for instance, on my team, I'm thinking of somebody in particular who has much more of that kind of, I need that kind of language and pattern around therapeutic exchange, I'd repair with her in a very different way. But that's the nature of this. There's not a generic way about you showing up. It is a co -created plan to say, how do we build the best possible relationship together? So you talk about building and designing this best possible relationship through something you call the keystone conversation. And I think by virtue of the title of it, I think I know it's a big conversation and an important conversation, that's keystone. Can it happen at any point in your trajectory of a relationship? Or is it best to happen as someone first comes in the door? Yeah, it's a little bit like that saying, the best time to plant an acorn was 20 years ago, but the second best time to plant an acorn is today. Which is like, you can pull back and say, let's have a conversation about how we're working together anywhere through the arc of a relationship. Now, Joan, I'm gonna say this, just because it's on people's minds as they listen to us talk, at least one person is thinking, isn't this going to be awkward? And I just want to say, yes, it is going to be an awkward conversation. Certainly the first time for you and the first time for that other person, it's like, this doesn't happen very often. And it's a bit unusual to step out of the urgency of everyday work, because there's plenty to do and there's plenty to worry about, and there are plenty of fires to put out, and there are plenty of things to be focused on. To step back and go, let's take a beat and talk about you and me and how we're working together. So I love that, I love that. I will also say, and we'll come back to it in a little bit, we actually put your book to the test yesterday with a brand new employee. I love this. And as part of onboarding, and I talked to the manager and Chris, you indicated no awkwardness at all, but an actual wow, like a receptivity to it where both people benefited from the conversation. So depending on when you, it might, if you get further along, it might be, what are we doing? Like, what are we doing this for? But as part of onboarding, it seems to actually be lovely and organic and welcoming. And give the structure to that. But I'm also going to say, Joan, I that love that's onboarding and a manager to a new team member is the most obvious moment when you would do this very conversation. I'm meeting a new vendor this afternoon. Like, they're going to work with me to kind of help produce SEO stuff and help support the launch of the book. I don't understand it at all. SEO stuff, I like that, yeah. But honestly, I've tried to work with agencies like this before. And for the most part, these have not been great relationships. I haven't understood what's going on. They haven't understood me. And it's kind of deteriorated. I'll be using these same questions or variations on them in the setup with this company to say, when you've worked with clients and they've been really good for you, what happened? What did they do? What did you do? When you've worked with clients and they've kind of sucked a bit, what happened? What did they do? What did you do? And I'm going to answer that as well. When I've worked with an agency and it's been great, what happened? What did they do? What did I do? When it didn't work, what did they do? What did I do? It's anytime you've got a relationship that goes beyond it being a transaction, it might be worth investing in the robustness of that relationship. I totally love that. And in fact, it's funny when I always interview potential coaching clients because I coach CEOs of nonprofits. And I know that I have found someone I want to coach when they ask me, who's your ideal coaching client? How do you know that you've had an impact? It's like, first of all, it actually is a very self -reflecting kind of question. It helps me to focus on what I want out of my working relationships with my coaching clients and it gives them insight into me. And so these are the kinds of questions that are so incredibly helpful. So I want to talk about the Keystone conversation and the elements of it. For those people who may be joining or running on the elliptical or something, I just want to say - We salute you. Joan and I are both in excellent shape, so we don't need to run on the elliptical. And so we are sitting on our asses actually. We embody something so healthy, but for everybody who's exercising as you listen to us, carry on, you're doing great. Carry on, indeed. You have our full support. The Nonprofit Leadership Lab is led by Joan Gary and is the world's best online community for leaders of small nonprofits. Learn how to raise more money, build the board of your dreams, grow a large audience of supporters and so much more. To learn more and request an invitation to become a member, please go to NonprofitLeadershipLab .com slash podcast. That's NonprofitLeadershipLab .com slash podcast. We are chatting about working relationships. We're just talking about relationships. And we're talking to Michael Bungay Stanier and he is best known for a book called The Coaching Habit, which I love. It's a best -selling coaching book of the century, already recognized as a classic. And his new book, which is coming out on June 27th, is called How to Work with Almost Anyone. And that's what we're talking about. Let's get to it. The Keystone Conversation. And maybe you can, because if you go through all five of them, then people won't actually need to read the book. So... Or buy the book. Which I'm okay with. Like, you know, if they're like, I got all I need from this conversation and I can build better relationships, the mission of this book is 10 million better working relationships. And if I can get that through a conversation with you and a million people, improve working relationships because of the Joan Gary influence, then boom, I'm winning. Doesn't matter about book sales so much. But if you want to buy the book, that's fine as well. That's right. We want you to buy the book. But I want you to give people a flavor of some of the kinds of questions that serve as a foundation of the Keystone Conversation. Sure. So I think there are five questions. And I've actually kind of hinted at what two of them are already. So let me just name those and kind of formally tell you what those are. These are questions number three and question four. There's the good date question, which is what can you learn from successful past relationships? Because the key thing you need to know is your past relationships will show you patterns of your future relationships. I know every relationship is different and every person you're working with is different, but the way you show up and the way they show up, there are just recurring patterns that will keep showing up. So you can look back at the best and go, that, what happened there? What did they do? What did they do that contributed to this? Because we've got a natural bias to taking too much credit for the good relationships. It's like, no, it's all me. It's like, it's not all you. What did they do? What can you learn from that? Because telling that to the person you're in conversation with right now, that's going to be so helpful for them. And also explain what you did. So you both get to exchange what best working relationship is. So powerful. But then the bad date question is kind of the flip of that, the dark side of that, which is what can you learn from frustrating past relationships? Because you've had frustrating past relationships, you've contributed to the frustration of that past relationship. It wasn't just that the other person sucked and they were psychopathic and they were terrible and they were bad human beings, although all of those might also be true. But you played a role in that. A relationship is a dynamic between two people. So what was your role? What was your contribution? How do you learn about yourself and how you show up in bad possible relationships, bad working relationships? And just those two questions alone give so much data about what we should strive for and what we should avoid in terms of how we work well together. The third question I wanted to share, number two on the list, was actually the one that your colleague used in terms of setting up that onboarding conversation. Because before you hit record, you told me that story and I loved it. I might tell it again. But no goosebumps up and down my arm. Yeah, it was like amazing. And it was, what are your practices and preferences? So I call this the steady question. We all have patterns, ways of working, ways of using technology, ways of showing up. They the are questions that are often put on what's sometimes called a read me document. They're kind of big on, I think, Silicon Valley and maybe elsewhere as well, which is like, here are a whole bunch of things you need to know about me. And then the old pattern is I've written out this document, I'm going to send it out and everybody should read it and then they'll just understand how to work. They'll just know me. Yeah, they'll just know me. I'm like, you know, nobody's going to read the document or at least read it well. Nobody's going to remember it. That's not how you form a relationship by sending out a manifesto of how to work with me. That's ridiculous. And the content is so useful when you're sharing about your colleague onboarding your new employee. They're like, we started with these conversations, starting with the simplest question, which is what's your name? What's not your name? Yes, I have to actually, yeah. So I do want to talk about this for just a second because I think it was so instructive to me. So I gave Christy a copy of the book last week. I got a, because I have a special friend, I was able to get one ahead of time. I know some people who know some people. And what Christy said, and we have a new staff person and we are a fully remote organization. That's an important thing to know. There are people that work for me that I have never met in person. So we have to work with greater intention to actually know each other. And I believe we do a pretty good job of that. But anyway, so what Christy said was that the questions in this Read Me exercise did seem so simple, but then it just got, it went to all kinds of places. So the first question, what's my name? What's your name? What's not your name? Christy said, it sparked discussion around our backgrounds and our culture and how we grew up. And she went on and what she said is that the introspection required to answer the question helps you get to know yourself as well as the other person. She referred to the good at versus fulfilled exercise. And it completely changes the tone of the manager direct report conversation by sharing answers back and forth. What a great testimony. Thank you, Christy. Yeah, you know. And thank you to Crystal, our brand new employee for saying, hey, let's do this.
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"So technology would be next for me and we're kind of we're moving that way slowly, but for whatever reason, and I know there's plans in the works and there's already changes coming on different departments websites, but we need to build housing and we need to make some changes in our housing. So I would love and I know DCD, our Department of Conservation and Development, basically our planning department are working on making that a better process, streamlining that process. And it already has. It used to be you had to go in person and you had to go through all these different steps. Now, technology has allowed us to put that online. I just want to see that become much more efficient, much more timely. That seems to be one of the big complaints I get is I've submitted my plans and then they're kicked back and then I've sent them back. How do you make that process smoother, easier? There are definitely professionals out there, but for the mom and pops or the small business owner, going through that permitting process, small restaurant, going through the health department, the fire department, DCD and all these different agencies to get a permit to open a small restaurant can be daunting. And take six months to a year. Should it take that long? Not if we're educating people or we're providing them the resources. So I think there's some investment in our technology that we can do as a county to make our interactions with the public much smoother, much more efficient. It's kind of a priority of mine, especially in the planning department. If there were about 12 episodes into this podcast now, and I think that is the one theme that comes up is how to, well, two themes within that, right? One is time to permit a business and get them through the process, which, and what maybe at PG &E on next year and central sanitation is talking about how long it takes them to do this stuff too. But time to open a business, right? We talk about that as number one. And number two is the sort of like the concierge concept of government, right? How do you just walk somebody through the government process? Because even if you have a great website, the process itself is still, whether you're replacing your HVAC or getting a liquor license, well, that's the state, but it's a complicated process for people to figure out. Yeah. We were talking about was we've created navigators. So we're still hiring them up, but in district one and district four, we have navigators for, and they're in our school. So mine is at Oak Grove Middle School, just rolling out. But the idea is being those that are in need of services and support, how do they navigate the system? And that's really, quite often you'll find that it's such an overwhelming and challenging process. They just don't engage, right? So now we have a navigator who can help connect you, not only just to the county services, things like CalFresh or Medigal or health services, whatever it might be, it actually connects you with our nonprofit partners out in the community, legal services, all these different things. So the concierge, right? Instead of having to open the roadmap and try and figure out this roadmap, you've got somebody to help you point you in the right direction. Yeah. And when it comes to the permitting process on some of these, having that navigator might be the way to go. Somebody who's like, yes, I've got your plans in front of me, but I've got 30 plans in front of me. How does, how do I take the time, push all 29 aside so I can take the time to walk you through, not only do you have my processes here in planning, but you've got to get with environmental health, you've got to get with fire. So having that navigator might be the solution to some of those challenges. Well, bringing everybody together across multiple different departments is key and I've helped clients do that kind of work as well. And I actually liked the term navigator that you just used because I was talking to a city councilman, Rick Vicaro of Fairfield recently, and he was talking about on a homeless initiative, they are building out a navigator center for the county. And they're finding that, uh, one of the biggest things is that people are, might be in one city and they don't know that there's resources in a different part of the county that they need. And it's really about making that match and bridging that communications for people who really need it. And we have talked about it on economic development and for schools, but just making it accessible to everybody in different, with different needs, different concepts. Yeah. The bureaucracy we have can be challenging to navigate and to know all the rules. And the last thing you want to do is invest time or money only to have it delayed or prolonged. And I hear that quite often. And so I've invested every, every penny I have in order to start this business up. And I'm just a mom and dad, but I'm now 10 months in to getting my perm ads. I'm out of money. I'm living just the challenges that break and it is understanding the system. It is us clearly communicating the processes. It's also us trying to streamline it as much as possible. Yeah, that makes sense. So let's talk about healthcare. The county health agency was very busy as were other counterparts with COVID. I know you're, we've talked a lot of subjects, so I know you're not an expert on every single one, but talk about where does healthcare. From the county's perspective, go over the next couple of years. What's next? What's their priorities? Anything else you want to add on that subject? Yeah, we've got, they're a short staff. We are trying to hire, there are way too many vacancies. We are one of two counties that run a hospital and a health plan. So we are our own little Kaiser, you might say. We provide the insurance, we're the insurance or the health plan, let alone the care system. And granted, we're partnered with that. John Muir is a part of that, Sutter Delta is a part of that. But what we're facing is we're going to expanding Medi-Cal. So the state is expanding Medi-Cal and now we're going to have to really pick up a significant number of patients who are going to transition from what might have been covered California into our health plan because they're on Medi-Cal. So there's that expansion going on. And that's challenging when you're understaffed and facing that transition. Our team is doing a great job, I will say that. The other part of that is we're doing what we can to expand our behavioral health care system. So especially for our youth. So there is an expansion planned out at Contessa Regional Medical Center in the child psychiatric unit and trying to find a way to take psych emergency services and kind of separate that from adult and youth. And of course, then we just spending money to create a parking structure out there because access has been a challenge out there. Finding parking when you need to be at the hospital has been just extremely difficult. So there's a lot going on with that. And again, like I say, with the expansion of Medi-Cal, that's probably the biggest challenge we're facing right now. We've got great partners. We've got great community clinics. We have so many of our community benefit organizations are out there. They're contracted with us, providing health care. We're in good shape. But again, it's there is a lot of transition going on over the course of the next year to 18 months. That's a big task for Contra Costa Health Department, as well as for everyone in the state. Right. That's a there's a lot of new people coming into those programs to be expanded. Yeah, very much. So you're almost a year in. What do you think is your your biggest accomplishment so far? What do you feel like? I don't want to I don't want to laugh about it, but getting through that first budget cycle. So you come on to the Board of Supervisors in January and within weeks you're going through the budget process. And again, our budget process is different than what you face on a city council. Government aid does really control a lot of what we do as far as the budget process. But you have federal and state dollars that pass through. So fifty three percent of our budget is federal and state money, specific allocation to programming and other things we provide. So you're kind of limited. But then I go from a thirty one million dollar budget in Pleasant Hill to a five point one billion dollar budget at the county. Health service is a big part of that. Right. I didn't have a health services department on city council, but shows our criminal justice system, the sheriff's office, our detention facilities, programming there. And then you have EHSD, our employment and human services department, which handles everything from early childhood education to our seniors to workforce development. It just goes on and on. So you're looking at this huge budget. And I thought initially that was going to be just overwhelmingly daunting. It really wasn't. We put put a lot of energy and effort into it, but it was very smooth, let's say, in balancing and getting a balanced budget. And there was some wiggle room in there. So not only passing a balanced budget, but then finding the money to expand some resources. One thing that I felt very passionate about is Stand Together Contra Costa, which provides legal aid to undocumented individuals in our community. And these are people who are working, they are paying taxes, they are contributing to our society, but they're seeking asylum. And they're not guaranteed any type of legal support when they go into immigration court. And the success rate as an individual going in there was minimal. Your odds of success were 20 percent or less. Now with Stand Together Contra Costa, an influx of people coming across the border seeking asylum, we were able to give them additional staffing, clerical and or attorneys to expand the programming, because unbeknownst to many, we have a new immigration court opening probably in early next year. It was supposed to open this summer, but early next year in Concord. And so we're going to see a higher rate of people being pulled into immigration court. So getting them the funding. And then the other thing is with the social justice objectives of the state, let alone us as a county, our DA's office and our public defender's office is having to review all past cases where someone is incarcerated, especially in any pending cases for any sign of racial bias. So that's a daunting task to go through and review all these cases on both sides, public defender and the DA's office. So we were able to find the money to allocate five new DA's as well as five new public defenders. One, so they could do that work, but two, manage the caseload that will result from the scrutiny of that work. So a lot going on. But again, with a balanced budget and being able to expand those services specifically were really important to me. And I think those are, you know, in the first year significant accomplishments. In talking to my staff today, it's OK, now it's time to let's set the priorities. What do we want to focus on? What are those things that we can go after? And again, like we've talked before many times, economic development, clearly we have the priorities, right? Housing, homelessness, behavioral health, the priorities we all see each and every day. But again, we can improve the quality of life in Country Cross County if we bring economic vitality, right? That only brings money, brings jobs, brings opportunity to everyone. So economic opportunity and how we're going to generate those jobs are really important to me. So how we can work with our airport, how we can work with things like the GoMentum station I see is a great opportunity. The Northern Waterfront project, you know, how we can entice appropriate manufacturing, take advantage of green technology and the expansion that's going on there. There's just so much. So economic diversity is a priority to me, economic innovation. How we can bring jobs and business to Country Cross is one of my top priorities. Awesome. Those are great priorities to have. Anything else that you want to talk about today as a key priority? No, again, it just really is a privilege. And many people have asked, especially in this first year, that it is a lot of work to get up to speed on all the different departments and everything that goes on in the county, engage in the county. We, like I say, Envision Contra Costa, our general plan, was out with our CCTV team last week shooting a couple of videos so that we can share it and generate, hopefully, public engagement on those things. So with all of that, people have asked me, oh, my gosh, is this just overwhelming? And I've told them this is, in all my careers, the best job I've ever had. I love the work I'm doing. I love engaging with the community. Hearing from the community, what their ideas are, what they'd like to see change, what they think we can focus in on. So it's really important to me. And that's why if there are people out there or someone that has questions or concerns, especially when it's over District 4, which is kind of my little realm, granted it's the whole county, but District 4 is who I have the strongest voice for. Feel free to reach out to my office. And I have a great team. I'm very fortunate that I have a great staff and we're all energized to work for our constituents. So feel free to get a hold of me in my office, shoot his emails, whatever you need to do.And we'll put that contact information in the show notes so you know how to reach them. All right. I appreciate you being here and thank you so much for your time. We're joined today by Supervisor Ken Carlson from Contra Costa County on the Capstone Conversation. Thank you for being here with us today. Remember, hit subscribe so you get the weekly notifications and feel free to find me on LinkedIn at Jared Ash, A.S.C.H., or at Capstone Government Affairs. Thank you for your time today. Please hit subscribe today so you get the weekly updates of when we release the next episode. And in October, where this will air, we are giving away a twenty five dollar Amazon gift card to somebody that leaves us a five star review and leave the comments, whether it's on iTunes, Spotify or Amazon. Thank you for doing that for us. I appreciate it. I'd like to thank our sponsors, Capstone Government Affairs and Economic Development, a firm where I serve as managing partner. For more information, check us out at www.capstonegov.com and follow us on LinkedIn by typing in Capstone Government. Thank you for listening to today's show. Check out the show notes and for a full transcript, visit our website, www.capstonegov.com and follow us on LinkedIn by typing in Capstone Government. Or you can find me, your host, Jared Ash.
Capstone Conversation
Capstone's Jared Asch Talks Contra Costa County Innovation With Ken Carlson
"Let's talk about how the county can innovate. You mentioned innovation as part of this plan, and you're definitely somebody who believes in innovation in government. What are some things that you've been and you've seen in the last year that you would like to help Contra Costa become a leader in versus a laggard? We've got a lot going on, you know, and it's been a rough, I don't want to say rough year. It's been a busy year with everything that we've been doing with Measure Act, everything we're doing on the general plan, climate action plan. It's definitely resource intensive, mostly staff. They are day in, day out grinding and gathering the information to put out the work product and the vision. So technology would be next for me and we're kind of we're moving that way slowly, but for whatever reason, and I know there's plans in the works and there's already changes coming on different departments websites, but we need to build housing and we need to make some changes in our housing. So I would love and I know DCD, our Department of Conservation and Development, basically our planning department are working on making that a better process, streamlining that process. And it already has. It used to be you had to go in person and you had to go through all these different steps. Now, technology has allowed us to put that online. I just want to see that become much more efficient, much more timely. That seems to be one of the big complaints I get is I've submitted my plans and then they're kicked back and then I've sent them back. How do you make that process smoother, easier? There are definitely professionals out there, but for the mom and pops or the small business owner, going through that permitting process, small restaurant, going through the health department, the fire department, DCD and all these different agencies to get a permit to open a small restaurant can be daunting. And take six months to a year. Should it take that long? Not if we're educating people or we're providing them the resources. So I think there's some investment in our technology that we can do as a county to make our interactions with the public much smoother, much more efficient. It's kind of a priority of mine, especially in the planning department. were If there about 12 episodes into this podcast now, and I think that is the one theme that comes up is how to, well, two themes within that, right? One is time to permit a business and get them through the process, which, and what maybe at PG &E on next year and central sanitation is talking about how long it takes them to do this stuff too. But time to open a business, right? We talk about that as number one. And number two is the sort of like the concierge concept of government, right? How do you just walk somebody through the government process? Because even if you have a great website, the process itself is still, whether you're replacing your HVAC or getting a liquor license, well, that's the state, but it's a complicated process for people to figure out. Yeah. We were talking about was we've created navigators. So we're still hiring them up, but in district one and district four, we have navigators for, and they're in our school. So mine is at Oak Grove Middle School, just rolling out. But the idea is being those that are in need of services and support, how do they navigate the system? And that's really, quite often you'll find that it's such an overwhelming and challenging process. They just don't engage, right? So now we have a navigator who can help connect you, not only just to the county services, things like CalFresh or Medigal or health services, whatever it might be, it actually connects you with our nonprofit partners out in the community, legal services, all these different things. So the concierge, right? Instead of having to open the roadmap and try and figure out this roadmap, you've got somebody to help you point you in the right direction. Yeah. And when it comes to the permitting process on some of these, having that navigator might be the way to go. Somebody who's like, yes, I've got your plans in front of me, but I've got 30 plans in front of me. How does, how do I take the time, push all 29 aside so I can take the time to walk you through, not only do you have my processes here in planning, but you've got to get with environmental health, you've got to get with fire. So having that navigator might be the solution to some of those challenges.
Capstone Conversation
"supervisor" Discussed on Capstone Conversation
"Some of us are newbies out there. Talk to us. What is the general plan? How does that govern us and what is the goal of the updates? So the general plan is really kind of the framework, the blueprint and the vision of Contra Costa going forward for the next 20 years, it outlines what we want to accomplish. And then it also creates or at least gives us the outline of the programs that we want to enact and the policies and how we're going to achieve those goals. And that's everything from housing, economic development to climate, our climate action plan, a sustainability plan, how we're going to manage the environment, all of these different things. So we just late last week released the public review draft. So this is an opportunity for the public to look at that. And there might be something in there. Transportation might be kind of what you're worried about or you're seeing things that trouble you about our transportation in the communities. So you go in, you look at that transportation and you look at the programs and the policies that we are looking at doing to improve transportation and access to transportation. And it's open for public comment. It'll be open for a couple of months and there'll be community outreach events for the public to come out and take a look at the document and have interaction with county staff. But it's the model of what we're going to do. And then from that, we take and we look at our zoning ordinances and our land use plans and all of that kind of gets updated as well as the general plan. So we're looking at a climate action plan and a general plan update all kind of at the same time. And again, it's the roadmap of where we're going to be in 2040 or where we'd like to be in 2040. It doesn't mean it's set in stone because you can always adapt and adjust as you move forward. You see greater needs or unmet needs. We can adapt to those as well. But it does give us a path. So let's break that down a little bit and talk about sustainability and climate. From your perspective, what are the biggest focus points that the county itself can address and should be working towards? Well, we need to continue. My district, I have Morgan territory here, foot of Mount Diablo, parts of Mount Diablo. So wildfire and wildfire mitigation, the impacts of our climate on those things have to be a priority for us. So how can we adapt and adjust to those? What housing should we do? Should we not do? But these are all in partnership, but none of it is done solely by the county, right? We have to partner with our residents. Everybody has to play a part in a business. So the other one to think about is sea level rise. A lot of what goes on in Contra Costa County is fronted by water. You look at the delta to the bay. And what's along those waterfronts is a lot of our industry, our refineries, our manufacturing, our rail system, and all of these are near the water. And if you look at projections going out to 2050 and sea level rise, there's a potential for those businesses and industry to be impacted as well as our transportation system. So what are we doing? One, to mitigate that and two, what are we doing to prepare and protect ourselves from it? And again, that has to be a partnership with our businesses and our industry and our manufacturing and our transportation plan of how we're going to work together to mitigate the impacts of sea level rise. And it just goes on from there. As far as air quality, what are we going to do about air quality? What are you going to do there? Recycling our waste management system. This year, the county, we were co-sponsors to license and regulate non-franchised waste haulers. What we're finding is somebody decides, I'm going to just do backyard cleanup. I'm going to open a business and I'll go around and solicit trash removal from people's homes. And then we find that landing on the sides of our roads or not being recycled appropriately, it's all ending up in our landfill. So there's things we might want to think about doing even more in waste management, how we can do more to divert things from landing in our landfills and be recycled or repurposed. In some way, I was just at a conference of state energy officials and there was one state that was talking about, it's great that we help people afford more energy efficient and newer appliances. He says, my biggest problem is that we have a pickup problem and they all end up on the side of a road somewhere dumped out on the highway. So he was like, we've got to figure out, we can't do one without the other. So it just talks about how comprehensive some of this is. Yeah. We talk about electrification of vehicles, right? Big push. But what we hadn't thought about was just kind of coming to light is what happens when those batteries need to retire and are we in a position to recycle them? Are they recyclable? And if they're recyclable, how are we going to process that and what are the risks and hazards of doing that? So there's every time we come up with one emerging new technology that does benefit us is what's the unintended or what's the next step we need to take? And so when we talk about electric cars, now we're going to talk about recycling and those types of batteries. OK, let's talk about economic development now. You mentioned it as part of the plan, but I know that's a conversation you and I've had how there's everything from GoMentum Station. There's Buchanan Field that are both in your district, parts of the Northern Waterfront and just at large, right? Getting the cities to recruit new businesses. What is talk about some of the stuff you've done on economic development and some of the stuff that you want to work on? Yeah, it really is. How do you make controversy around a and this is again, it's partnership. There seems like the Diable Valley Tech Initiative. I've been on the periphery with that group since, oh, since its beginnings, because we're missing opportunities. And it's kind of a broad subject because we're all facing this housing crisis and we're looking at having to create new housing. And part of the methodology that came out of how those numbers were assigned to communities was, well, let's put housing near jobs or jobs near housing because then we're taking cars off the road. Really betters the life of everyone. And yet, country county got a significant chunk of housing and it wasn't proportional to their expected job growth. So we've got to kind of take on the responsibility of making this a better business climate and where those opportunities are and where we want to take them. What kind of industries and businesses do we want to bring in? So we've had a green innovation zones, which go momentum, clearly could be a part of in testing autonomous vehicles and other things that go with that. But in economic empowerment zones, innovation zones, can we bring in biotech? Can we bring in, we talked about the airport early on, it's probably a couple of years ago, a lot of these innovations, autonomous flying vehicles were coming out of Silicon Valley. And yeah, with the flight patterns down in Silicon Valley, it wasn't appropriate for them to be up testing in the middle of three major airports, plus a few municipal ones, the airspace was just too crowded. So the next thing you know is we've got a little bit of that going on at Buchanan, but we lost that opportunity. They went up to Pendleton, Oregon. For those living in Silicon Valley, I don't know, that might be a choice to move to Pendleton, Oregon, but if you're a Bay Area person, you might want to stay in your own backyard. And you could have been working out of Buchanan Airfield. So just looking at one, how we can incentivize and or how we can market contrast county to be a strong economic leader is high on my priority list. And it's something that will be in our general plan. Yeah, well, I know you and I have talked in the past about attracting those kind of businesses to work out of Buchanan Field. And that's a great opportunity of high paying jobs of people that a lot of those people already kind of work here or live here, I should say. So now we can create the job opportunities and use that space. And I just I guess somebody was telling me for maybe like 20 years, Buchanan Field was like the like the number one commuted municipal airport in the country. Is that what's got a long history? I don't know. That's an interesting factoid. I'd like to know there's undeveloped portions of the airfield outside of the fence line that's still part of the airport infrastructure that, yeah, that could be developed in technology industries. Yeah, I could say autonomous flying vehicles and the supporting technology that goes around that there's opportunities there. It's a matter of us getting out, marketing our county and showing that this is a viable place to do business. When you look at the 680, 242, Highway 4, all of that is right there for the opportunity to bring in whatever resources are necessary to do manufacturing, to do innovative technologies. It really is a convenient space. We've got deep water ports that bring that opportunity as well. So there's so many things that I think we can do if we have the vision and the plan. And you look at us over the course of our history and across the county, there's been significant opportunities over many decades that, granted, we've transitioned and we're moving away from. But there were reasons why those industries chose to be there. And just like now, yeah, innovation and technology has changed, but the needs of those businesses are still the same. Transportation access to get the resources in and the people to their jobs are there. Yeah, those are great points and sound like exciting opportunities. Let's talk about how the county can innovate. You mentioned innovation as part of this plan, and you're definitely somebody who believes in innovation in government. What are some things that you've been and you've seen in the last year that you would like to help Contra Costa become a leader in versus a laggard? We've got a lot going on, you know, and it's been a rough, I don't want to say rough year. It's been a busy year with everything that we've been doing with Measure Act, everything we're doing on the general plan, climate action plan. It's definitely resource intensive, mostly staff. They are day in, day out grinding and gathering the information to put out the work product and the vision.
Capstone Conversation
"supervisor" Discussed on Capstone Conversation
"Welcome to the East Bay's best podcast, The Capstone Conversation. This is a show that interviews political government and community leaders in Alameda, Contra Costa, and Solano counties. We look at what is going on in your city, how are we developing things economically, and where are we going from here? I'm your host, Jared Ash. Welcome, I'm Jared Ash with The Capstone Conversation. We are talking today to Supervisor Ken Carlson, who represents Contra Costa County in District 4. He has been in office for just shy of one year now, but not a stranger to the county. He has worked in the past as a police officer and has served as the mayor of the city of Pleasant Hill. He is also my supervisor, so I appreciate all the work that he is doing in our community. And we're going to talk about all things Contra Costa County today, so thanks, Supervisor, for joining us. It's a pleasure to be here with you. Any more details you want to share about where you come from and how you got here? Yeah, so just real quick, I'm born and bred right here in Contra Costa County, so I've lived here the majority of my life. I worked in the city of Concord as a police officer for 29 years, went to our local schools, and then got elected to the Pleasant Hill City Council, where I served for 10 years, twice as mayor, and then sought office to be on the Board of Supervisors. And it really is just about serving the community that I've grown up in, I've spent my entire life in, and really excited just to continue the public service career. Great, I appreciate it. So let's dive into some things that are happening in Contra Costa County. One of the big ones is a few years ago, the county has passed Measure X, which is an additional sales tax that the residents accepted to do. What are the benefits that people are getting in Measure X? What is the success? It's interesting, we were just in Family and Human Services Committee meeting, and something that was pointed out is when 2020 voters approved Measure X, the board created a citizen advisory body to kind of look at the county priorities and where the needs were. County departments were set about kind of determining what the needs were within the county as far as in our departments. So a lot of money was allocated over the last three years now. And what's interesting is not everybody has seen the results of that money being expended because it truly actually hasn't. And there's a process to go through. Once the money started coming in, once the procedures of where do we want to prioritize that spending, then it goes into the RFP process that goes into the contract process. So we're just now starting to see some of those dollars actually go to work for us. Money has been allocated to our health care system to improve access to our hospitals. Money has gone out to our community benefit organizations to improve services. We've looked at creating the A3 program, which is the Anytime, Anyone, Anywhere program, to change how we respond to mental health emergencies and crises. So those people that are experiencing it, how they can do it without law enforcement necessarily being involved. Just so many different things are going on, and we're continuing to make those allocations. So Measure X is a huge change for us. It's let us do some innovative things in our delivery models and greater services to our county residents and those who need it most, some of our most marginalized population. Clearly, homelessness is a big focus on where we're spending our Measure X dollars. Housing and affordable housing are a big part of that as well. That's great. And you touched base briefly on the A3 program, but can you dive a little bit more into that for a minute to let people know who aren't familiar with that? Yeah, it really is the Miles Hall Call Center. So we're creating a call center to handle mental health emergencies. So those who are experiencing a mental health crisis can call that line and they don't necessarily have to have a law enforcement response to get their needs. So there are mental health crisis workers who can, one, respond or two, manage those conversations over the phone, referral for resources. So it's really a change in the model delivery used to be, and this comes from almost 30 years in law enforcement. If you called 911 with a mental health crisis, the police are going to respond. And that's not really the best model because there's nothing calming about an officer showing up in a uniform with a gun and a badge that doesn't necessarily calm people down. So having somebody with those professional skills in dealing with mental illness and behavioral issues is much, much more effective, much calmer and puts the client in a safer place. So we're getting we're moving forward on rolling that out or developing the A3 Center in Concord, and that'll kind of be the hub for those delivery of services. That's great. That's helpful. So let's talk about the county general plan. There's an update that you and I were talking about going on. It's been 30, 40 years since the general plan has been updated? OK, so 30, 32 years ago. Tell us what is the half the audience is very astute.
Capstone Conversation
"supervisor" Discussed on Capstone Conversation
"So let's dive into some things that are happening in Contra Costa County. One of the big ones is a few years ago, the county has passed Measure X, which is an additional sales tax that the residents accepted to do. What are the benefits that people are getting in Measure X? What is the success? It's interesting, we were just in Family and Human Services Committee meeting, and something that was pointed out is when 2020 voters approved Measure X, the board created a citizen advisory body to kind of look at the county priorities and where the needs were. County departments were set about kind of determining what the needs were within the county as far as in our departments. So a lot of money was allocated over the last three years now. And what's interesting is not everybody has seen the results of that money being expended because it truly actually hasn't. And there's a process to go through. Once the money started coming in, once the procedures of where do we want to prioritize that spending, then it goes into the RFP process that goes into the contract process. So we're just now starting to see some of those dollars actually go to work for us. Money has been allocated to our health care system to improve access to our hospitals. Money has gone out to our community benefit organizations to improve services. We've looked at creating the A3 program, which is the Anytime, Anyone, Anywhere program, to change how we respond to mental health emergencies and crises. So those people that are experiencing it, how they can do it without law enforcement necessarily being involved. Just so many different things are going on, and we're continuing to make those allocations. So Measure X is a huge change for us. It's let us do some innovative things in our delivery models and greater services to our county residents and those who need it most, some of our most marginalized population. Clearly, homelessness is a big focus on where we're spending our Measure X dollars. Housing and affordable housing are a big part of that as well. That's great. And you touched base briefly on the A3 program, but can you dive a little bit more into that for a minute to let people know who aren't familiar with that? Yeah, it really is the Miles Hall Call Center. So we're creating a call center to handle mental health emergencies. So those who are experiencing a mental health crisis can call that line and they don't necessarily have to have a law enforcement response to get their needs. So there are mental health crisis workers who can, one, respond or two, manage those conversations over the phone, referral for resources. So it's really a change in the model delivery used to be, and this comes from almost 30 years in law enforcement. If you called 911 with a mental health crisis, the police are going to respond. And that's not really the best model because there's nothing calming about an officer showing up in a uniform with a gun and a badge that doesn't necessarily calm people down. So having somebody with those professional skills in dealing with mental illness and behavioral issues is much, much more effective, much calmer and puts the client in a safer place. So we're getting we're moving forward on rolling that out or developing the A3 Center in Concord, and that'll kind of be the hub for those delivery of services.
Capstone Conversation
Unpacking 'Measure X' With Ken Carlson, Contra Costa County Supervisor
"So let's dive into some things that are happening in Contra Costa County. One of the big ones is a few years ago, the county has passed Measure X, which is an additional sales tax that the residents accepted to do. What are the benefits that people are getting in Measure X? What is the success? It's interesting, we were just in Family and Human Services Committee meeting, and something that was pointed out is when 2020 voters approved Measure X, the board created a citizen advisory body to kind of look at the county priorities and where the needs were. County departments were set about kind of determining what the needs were within the county as far as in our departments. So a lot of money was allocated over the last three years now. And what's interesting is not everybody has seen the results of that money being expended because it truly actually hasn't. And there's a process to go through. Once the money started coming in, once the procedures of where do we want to prioritize that spending, then it goes into the RFP process that goes into the contract process. So we're just now starting to see some of those dollars actually go to work for us. Money has been allocated to our health care system to improve access to our hospitals. Money has gone out to our community benefit organizations to improve services. We've looked at creating the A3 program, which is the Anytime, Anyone, Anywhere program, to change how we respond to mental health emergencies and crises. So those people that are experiencing it, how they can do it without law enforcement necessarily being involved. Just so many different things are going on, and we're continuing to make those allocations. So Measure X is a huge change for us. It's let us do some innovative things in our delivery models and greater services to our county residents and those who need it most, some of our most marginalized population. Clearly, homelessness is a big focus on where we're spending our Measure X dollars. Housing and affordable housing are a big part of that as well. That's great. And you touched base briefly on the A3 program, but can you dive a little bit more into that for a minute to let people know who aren't familiar with that? Yeah, it really is the Miles Hall Call Center. So we're creating a call center to handle mental health emergencies. So those who are experiencing a mental health crisis can call that line and they don't necessarily have to have a law enforcement response to get their needs. So there are mental health crisis workers who can, one, respond or two, manage those conversations over the phone, referral for resources. So it's really a change in the model delivery used to be, and this comes from almost 30 years in law enforcement. If you called 911 with a mental health crisis, the police are going to respond. And that's not really the best model because there's nothing calming about an officer showing up in a uniform with a gun and a badge that doesn't necessarily calm people down. So having somebody with those professional skills in dealing with mental illness and behavioral issues is much, much more effective, much calmer and puts the client in a safer place. So we're getting we're moving forward on rolling that out or developing the A3 Center in Concord, and that'll kind of be the hub for those delivery of services.
Tech Path Crypto
A highlight from Claynosaurz INTERVIEW! | Solana's Pixar NFT Roadmap
"All right, today we're going to do a deep dive on a project I think you guys will recognize and it's really kind of focusing in on the NFT space and what the opportunities are. Obviously we've got Breakpoint coming up with Solana, there's going to be a lot of new stuff. This particular project is in alignment with all that, so you guys are going to love it. Stick around for a good one. My name is Paul Baron. Welcome back into Tech Pass. Joining me today is Nick Cabana, who is the co -creative director and founder over at Klanesaurs. And of course, Andrew Palekas, the CEO over at Klanesaurs. Great having you both. Thanks, it's great to be here. Excellent. All right, so let's just jump off. We'll start with Nick. And Nick, let's go into a little bit, for most of our audience, some I would say recognize the Klanesaurs brand, so to speak. But for those who might be new, give us kind of a rundown on the size, the scope of the project, your team, etc. Yeah, so Klanesaurs is really a brand of characters focused on cute, quirky little clay dinosaurs that go off on adventures in a fantasy setting. The team is comprised of a wide range of professional industry animators coming from the feature side and from visual effects. Right now on the core team, we've got around 14 with a slew of other freelancers helping out. But it's a pretty big team to pull off what we're trying to do. And it's our initial Genesis release was 10 ,000 collectibles. Today, we have over 40 ,000 assets there, but primarily 12 ,000 characters that we can kind of leverage for content. And our primary focus is just that, is content that kind of engages the audience, engages the fan base using their own collectibles, which is really fun. And our focus was quality above and beyond everything. So we were bringing our knowledge from the animation industry into the game. I've been an animation supervisor, so I've been in the industry for about 13 years as an animator. And for about six years, I was an animation supervisor. So I've supervised creature work on Game of Thrones, on Paddington 2, Fantastic Beasts, HBO's Dark Material, a whole slew of things. I started my career at Sony Animation. So that's where they've done Spider -Verse and Hotel Transylvania. And eventually made my way to studios like Framestore that's notably recognized for like Gravity and Guardians of the Galaxy. I've worked on things like Jurassic World and I've done some music videos as well. So I've worked with Kay Tranata on award winning music videos. And now I do these cute little dinosaurs. And most of the background is welcome into the Web3 space. Right. It's been incredible. Like we saw a huge opportunity for doing things differently and incubating IP and in this new paradigm where artists can kind of retain ownership of the assets. And the whole team comes from a similar background. So we've got leaders across the board and we've got, you know, animators that have been involved with Minions, Hotel Transylvania, Spider -Verse. We've got people from Dreamworks. It's a healthy bag of artists. Andrew, you know, your background interesting as well. And when you guys look at rolling out, you know, projects like what you're doing now, you're starting to do a lot of value add for dinosaurs. Breakpoint is coming up right now, kind of pointing at over a thousand people coming into on that. Andrew, can you tell us a little bit more about what's going to happen at Breakpoint? What's what's kind of in store? Right. So since Buzz has tweeted that we've actually increased that number, I think we're over 1200 now. So we're expecting a big from our community. We're hosting a whole number of events throughout the week. We've got everyone in our in a sort of hotel buyout situation where the community comes together and all stays together. We're hosting lunches and more casual events throughout the week and in the days after that main event. So we're looking forward to all of it. That main event, we're going to broadcast everything into our Discord so that the community that couldn't make it out will still have the opportunity to engage and see what we're working on from their homes or from wherever they are in the world. So, wow, that's that's going to be kind of like a little bit of a mini Super Bowl week for you guys. I mean, you've got a lot happening there along with the release, the cinematic trailer. Talk to me about what that release really means to the Clan of Swords project, but more importantly, maybe even the community. Where do you guys see that going? It means a lot to us. You know, it's it's definitely a labor of love for for the team. It's a statement piece, for sure, because it for us, it kind of leverages our know how and and it's in the quality of what you'd expect from any sort of feature style work. So even in, let's say, the Web 2 world, it's going to be recognized for for the quality and the storytelling that comes across in that video. For us, it's a little bit of like a primary touch point for for fans. And we wanted it to kind of lend itself to familiarity so that people can understand the brand, can understand the larger story. And once they see that, it's a lot more tangible that this can one day become episodic or movies or games. So it's kind of like the wall of quality. And and then when people kind of get introduced to short form content and stuff like that, they can go back to this brand trailer and understand that the the bigger picture. And for the for the Web 3 fans, what's going to be really special to them, and maybe we'll get into this later, is a lot of the ideas in the cinematic is ideas that were leveraged through them, through the pitches they had, through the feedback they've given us for about a year. There's a level of internal pop culture that will come across in this trailer. There's not as many that go as deep as what you guys have done. Is this a bigger kind of story arc that you guys are trying to create into a variety of different multimedia experiences? What's kind of the goal there? Yeah, absolutely. I think you've hit the nail on the head in that one of the problems that we see with a number of early projects in the NFT space is a is a lack of quality. And I think Nick spoke to that just now that we're trying to bring this Pixar Disney quality into the NFT space. And that's where our team comes from. We think this is imperative for bringing people into the space. Yeah, you know, a lot of other projects, they have interesting art, but it doesn't necessarily resonate with a wider community. And it's very tough for them to grow outside of that Web 3 space, if you will. And we believe that great communities have formed around those projects. And just like ours, we think we have a really great community forming around our project. But in order to make that community larger and to turn this into a brand that resonates with a larger population, the quality has to compete at that at that Disney level or at that level when you're turning on Netflix for someone to say, hey, I want to click on this objectively for no other reason than the fact that it looks really great. In the space, there was a there was always a focus on over the top mystery without really getting into characters so much. You know, we've we've seen that with some of the videos from Yuga or even artifact, where early on, there wasn't much of a it felt like the trailers were engineered for hype without really explaining what it's all about. And we and as storytellers doing this, you know, for for larger companies for over a decade, for most of our team, like our approach was, well, if if this is the first time you see this video, you get it and you understand these characters. It makes you smile and you want to learn more about them. And that was the goal, really. Yeah, well, I think this is the problem right now that unfortunately Web three has a bit of a moniker on it, that there's a lot of cash grabs out there. And to your point, Nick, in many cases, the hype is more important than the actual storyline and kind of what the evolution of what that really is going to that project is really going to be about in the future. So it's good to see, you know, projects like what you guys are doing start to really understand that. Obviously, you guys bring the experience from a Web two, you know, and an entertainment environment that can really kind of translate. I want to jump over into the project itself. We're going to show a couple of things on screen and I want you guys to explain classes and foraging. All right. Or foraging, not foraging and thinking of another game. So let's go into that. Well, and either one of you can kind of jump onto it. Let's jump into to that real quick. Just classes in general. Sure. So the class selection is meant to be the first interactive component for the existing NFT collections.
The Hobo CEO
A highlight from The Hobo CEO podcast episode 5 with Angie Giltner Best-Selling Author, Master Coach & Business Booster
"Hello, and welcome to the Hobo CEO podcast, where we're talking all things business and entrepreneurship, including the highs and lows with a sprinkle of neurodiversity for good measure. I'm your host, Shay Wiesel, neurodivergent serial entrepreneur, personal and business coach, author, researcher, and most importantly, a mother to one beautiful little human being. This podcast is all about sharing the entrepreneurial journey, as well as tips, tricks and advice from my guests to help you become the business owner and entrepreneur you've always imagined you could be. And you definitely can be that person. But before we get started, I'd like to acknowledge the beautiful lands on which I live and work, the lands of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin nation. And I pay my respects to elders past, present, and to all First Nations people that are listening today. So let's get started. Today's guest is just so amazing. And I am so lucky to have met her and to really have the privilege of just learning so much from this wonderful person who is Angie Giltner, I hope I've said your last name wrong, I normally say them wrong. Angie and I met through the Fempire program. And so I'm lucky enough to meet with her every week. She's one of our master coaches. And she's based in America, which is my goal to spread all of the work that I do across the United States since I've met Angie and others from the US. And so I'm so glad to have her on the show. I'm apologizing now if I slip up a few times because it is 5 .30 in the morning here and we have had a rocky week of sick family people. So I haven't had my coffee yet. So if I'm not on point, then you'll just have to laugh your way through this podcast. So welcome to the show, Angie. I'm so pleased you could join me. Oh, Shay, thank you so much. That was such a lovely introduction. And I just admire and respect everything that you're doing. I think you're just such a lovely person. And I'm honored to be a guest on your podcast today. Thank you. And I know we had so much fun on your podcast. And it's great to be able to return the favor and to share these opportunities. Could you tell our listeners a little bit about your work and what led you to being an entrepreneur in the space of courage building? Because it's such an important topic, I think, especially as we've come out of such a traumatic three years. Yes, yes. So thank you very much. So back in 2013, I was actually working for a nonprofit, and I was onboarding someone who I was going to be supervising. And at this point, I had had 18 years of experience with three college degrees. And this particular person who was being onboarded was fresh out of college, and I was there once too. So it's nothing against that. But I found out that the executive director was offering him $3 ,000 a year more than what I was making. And I was like, um, okay, like, I'm not okay with this. So I went to the CEO, and I said, what is going on? Why? Why is he being offered three grand more? I have all this more experience, I have more college degrees, and I'm the supervisor. And he looked me dead square in the face and said, That's all you're worth. Uh huh. So much like many women, I created my business out of adversity, because I was never ever going to have somebody tell me ever again, that's all you're worth. Oh my gosh. And it I'm telling you the way that I felt in that moment, I never want anybody to ever feel like I felt in that moment, because it was awful. It was truly awful. And then whenever he found out I was becoming an entrepreneur, because I started my business in four days, I got I mean, literally four days, that's how driven and motivated I was. And so when he found out I was becoming an entrepreneur, he left me a voicemail message and said that he would gladly accept my resume back whenever I failed. And I kept that voicemail for five years, and I used it as motivation during challenging times or whenever I started to waver or question my decision, because I did start my business in haste. I mean, four days. I don't recommend that, because I had to learn a lot of lessons very quickly and the hard way. And in the long run, I mean, because of the way I did it, it ended up costing me time and money that I could have avoided, but very much lessons learned. And then at the five year mark, I finally just had to delete that email because it was no longer serving me a purpose. And so now, I mean, and obviously it took a lot of courage to do that, right? Like I had to walk away from a very stable career. I was making really good money, but I just was never ever going to let somebody tell me that's all you're worth ever again. And so now I teach female entrepreneurs how to do the same. And I have, as Shay said, I am a master coach. I'm FEMPIRE certified master coach, and I'm proud to say that I'm the catalyst of bringing FEMPIRE to the United States. And I am the only master coach of FEMPIRE in the entire world. And I'm super proud of that fact. And I have the privilege of coaching women literally from all over the world and meeting wonderful coaches just like Shay. And yeah, I just I love what I do so much. I just can't help but smile whenever I think about what I get to do on a regular basis. And if you saw Angie right now, her smile, her whole face lights up when she smiles. It's just you just feel like you're you've come home. It's so gorgeous. And what a horrific story. I'm still shocked that that well, I shouldn't be shocked because the gender pay gap is still huge around the world and, you know, men tell you it doesn't exist anymore. But it's so not true. But it's interesting that you like how your business came out of anger and distress and shock because that's how my business started as well, even though I like I'd struggled a lot throughout my working career because of my dyslexia. But I'd moved to this regional community to work with Aboriginal communities across Victoria. Well, this out of Victoria. And I'd been there for six weeks and something happened, might have been eight weeks. And my then manager, actually, no, sorry, it was longer. But anyway, my then manager terminated me on the spot because of my dyslexia, even though I disclosed it. Because it was within the six month probation period, you can be terminated in Australia. I don't know what it's like in America, but you can be terminated on the spot and there's nothing you can do about it if you haven't made probation. And I remember sitting by the beautiful Murray River up north of Victoria and crying to my mum saying, I can't do this anymore, Mum, I've got to do something different. And that was the turning point for me. But it's so sad that we have to have such a horrific experience to end up transitioning into things that we love. Yes. Oh, yes. And it's so interesting because I would venture to guess that at least 75 percent of the women who I have coached over the last 10 years have started their business out of some type of adversity. And it's quite disheartening. But on the flip side of things, to watch women step into their own power and take control of their lives in monumental ways and earn a living that they would have never been able to earn if they were stuck in corporate somewhere, you know, and because, you know, the earning potential is just unlimited when you're an entrepreneur. And so that to me is just it's so exciting because it really does in a way, because I'm so grateful of the way that people who have, whether it's a unique challenge or are of a minority status or something like that, the way that we are viewed and treated and respected and compensated, like I'm trying so hard to change that in the world and just fighting for so much equality for everybody. I mean, across the board, everybody. There's so many things you just touched on there. It's that I could never, I could never imagine earning what I'm aiming to earn now if I was in a paid job working in a not -for -profit, because that's where I like my most of my career has been in health and not -for -profit. And, you know, you would hit a glass ceiling of 150 to 200 ,000, probably, where in my business planning for the business, I'm way beyond that. And sometimes I think, is this delusional? No. My counsellor said to me, you know, is that delusional or is that attainable? I said, I'm not sure, but you've got to have, you've got to have a mark or a vision of where you want your business to be. And I think that's really exciting because I have it written and I know what my target is. And, you know, until I started Vempire, I would never have thought about going to America. But my vision was being a global leader, an influencer. And I have an international following from different things. But it was through Vempire that I went, well, you know what, now we're talking to people in America. That's because Australia is so slow at supporting dyslexic adults. And there's so many of us that are entrepreneurs. But, yeah, that opportunity to go global has only just really started to resonate. And it's amazing. And it is an exciting lifestyle. Yes. Yes, very much. There's a lot to be said for being able to be in control of each and every day, you know. And so if the kiddos get sick, you just, it's much more easy to shift and make those adjustments than if you are working in the nonprofit world or in corporate. Yeah. And it's just nice to know that we have those flexibilities and we have those freedoms. And now there are still things that need to get done. Right. Like, you know, that's like being up at five thirty in the morning. And I said, the more I make, the more I do in America, the earlier it's going to get. Yes. And I'm the opposite. I'm a night owl. So it's nothing for me to be on at 10 p .m. or 10 or 11 p .m. at night because I prefer the evening over the daytime. And yes. So, you know, yes, my husband is often going to bed without me because I'm in the office working, but doing what I love. So it's it's worth it for me. So how can we go from because this is the topic we're going to talk about is ordinary to extraordinary, which is so exciting. And I know you've been presenting and talking about this at home, at your home, in your home. And how do we not think it's delusional to have financial goals that we want to achieve, especially when we're in startup and we're not we might not be making any money at all or the money might be really sporadic. You know, at the end of last year, I had a really great run and it really convinced me that the path I was on was right. But since then, money has been very, very small. And so how do we go from from that phase of startup and not just the phase of startup, but, you know, feeling like we're really quite ordinary and why are we doing this to becoming as extraordinary as you, Angie? So it really I mean, it does boil down and I'm going to give some real clear strategies before we part ways today. But I want to ask you in the audience some questions and just the reflective questions to really sit in with yourself and ask yourself, do you believe that you can achieve success in any situation? Do you believe that with every fiber of your being, can you stand firm in your confidence and say, absolutely, I know that I can achieve success in any situation? And then why do you believe that we're going to go even the next layer deeper? Why do you believe that you can achieve success in any situation? And if you've said no, you've already you've already thought yourself small and you have already put a limit to your growth. OK, and that's a topic where we can talk about that for days. But we're only going to talk about the positive. We're only going to talk about moving from ordinary to extraordinary. So I want you even if you have to fake it for right now, I just want you to to literally stop what you're doing and think to yourself, I can achieve success in any situation. And I believe that because and what is your because? And it could be because you want it so bad that you can feel it, you can taste it, you can just like almost grab it within your soul. You want it that badly. Or it could be I want to help so many people and it's what gets me up in the morning. And so in order for me to help other people, I have to achieve success in every situation so that I can help the next person and the next person and the next person. And then you have to get rid of all of those messages of people who have ever told you that's all you're worth, you are not good enough, you are not smart enough, you don't have what it takes because that's their opinion. And just because that's their opinion, that doesn't make it true. And I want you to think about it like this. Some people look at a beautiful sunset with bright, vibrant colors and they just relish in the beauty of that bright, vibrant sunset. And someone else will look at that very same sunset and all they will think about is pollution because it's the pollution that causes those bright, vibrant colors in a sunset. So you have a choice of, you know, you can either choose to see the pollution or you can choose to see the beauty. And that is a choice that you and only you alone can make for yourself. There are days that it's easier than others, just depending on what you have going on. Like Shay said, she had a good run of it, you know, towards the end of last year. And now she's not necessarily as happy with the way, you know, things are going. But the next sunset, the next beautiful sunset is coming and you just have to believe it. And I'm not professing that this is easy. And this is where working with a mentor, a coach, a therapist, somebody to help you, an with that powerful mindset can make all the difference between the ordinary and the extraordinary. There are some other things that you can do to really believe that you can achieve success in any situation and that you have to get comfortable being uncomfortable. Now, I know that might sound strange, but you do it all the time and you don't even realize it. And I'm going to prove it to you. So when you exercise, how often do you like the next day or later that day, you're like, I can't even sit down to pee. My muscles hurt so bad, right? You purposefully got yourself uncomfortable to make a positive change in your life, right? Like whenever you, you know, it's your birthday and you're going to indulge on, maybe you're going to eat some things that you normally wouldn't eat. You're going to maybe overindulge with some drinking that you maybe wouldn't do on a regular basis. And you're purposefully going to get yourself uncomfortable, but for a really good reason, because you're celebrating you. You're celebrating the special day that that is for you. And so we do it to ourselves all the time. It's just how we think about it. And so getting comfortable being uncomfortable means learning and growing and stretching and challenging your mindset.
The Maverick Paradox Podcast
A highlight from Military v Civilian leadership - whats the difference?
"In this episode I speak to Jack Smith about the importance of leadership and how it differs between the military and civilian life. During this conversation Jack discusses the importance of recognising individual reactions to stress and burnout and how military leadership skills can be applied in civilian environments. We talk about the importance of humility in leadership and how military leadership training can impact civilian leadership styles with a focus on empathy and decision making in challenging environments. I create clear thinking and decisive leaders who can amplify their influence. Contact me to find out how I can help you or your organisation. And today our guest is Jack Smith. How you doing Jack? I'm very well, thank you for having me, are you well? Yeah apart from a cold so if I sound a bit stuffed up please forgive me. So Jack tell me what type of movies do you like to watch? You know I'm a wide variety of movies I like naturally you know coming from the background that I do I like a good war movie. I like to spend the majority of my time picking pieces apart in war movies and stuff like that it always irritates everybody I watch them with but anything you know good action drama I just don't do horror movies very well. Yeah I understand what you're saying I find that as I as I get older my tastes have changed quite substantially and my ability to sit through stuff so back in my head I'm like is this a good use of my time? It's like committing an hour and a half to three and a half hours in some cases isn't it where you just go I could be doing something else. Well yeah it's more like I might start watching a something like a series or something can get like five episodes in and then I always make the mistake of just seeing how many is in there then notice that there's like five seasons and I'm like no I cannot commit the time to catching up to the to the fifth season so like even though I was enjoying it I'm like no I can't spend that much time. And I know I love a box set you can pick it up and put it down whenever you eat whenever you get your spare time it's that sort of way to escape I think. Oh that's the problem I can't put them down so that's why I just watched them one after the other so that's why I'm like oh no I can't commit 30 hours because that's how long it's going to take. So Jack tell us a bit more about you. Yeah so I'm currently the the logistics lead and inventory lead for an IT solutions company we deal in warehouse and distribution but my background comes from the military where I've spent time in both the regular and reserve space so I've been able to travel around a bit and work with varying different people all different kinds of leaders and really had a sort of experience of the spectrum of what the military has to offer all its qualifications and all of its sort of building and training and all the way through to where I am now where I say I now have the the absolute honor of being able to train our British Army Reserve soldiers so it's been a really exciting time it's really exciting career and I went into logistics with the British Army because it was it was closest to my house at the time it was the closest unit to my house at the time and it was the best decision I could have made because it really set me up for where I am now and where I am now and where I'm going now is really exciting for me and there's there's a lot that I'm learning and there's a lot that I'm benefiting from and it all comes down to essentially the the the start in life that the the the British Army and the MOD as a wider piece has given me really. Okay thank you for that I've had a number of people from all sorts of different countries military on and they all have something unique to say you you mentioned earlier that you know the British Army's helped set you up for how you're leading today can you explore that a little bit more for us? Yeah absolutely so one of the things that I've learned in my time with British Armed Forces and with the Army is that there is no sort of clear differentiation between when you become a leader and when you're not and I think from the get -go in its most simplest forms when you look at the processes and training that you go through you're always encouraged to know the person above you and you know know the person above you's job and what what it is that they need to be able to do in order to you know fulfill a mission to complete a task and so on and so forth so from the get -go that kind of introduction to to leadership is is is presented to you and it's up to you then to take that with both hands and and essentially manage how you go forward you know within two to three years of of British Army service you could you can be promoted especially from the the non -commissioned ranks so the the people that aren't officers when you become a junior NCO or junior non -commissioned officer that is that is your first rung on the ladder and that is you for being recognized as as a leader as a supervisor if you like from from very early on in your career obviously from a commissioned officer perspective you have you know 44 weeks I believe it is at Sandhurst where you are trained throughout that entire year as well as looking at your strategies and and understanding all sorts of things within the military curriculum you are bred then to be a leader from the second you walk out the door so it inherently gives you that that opportunity to start learning and developing your leadership and your leadership style as soon as you begin. Okay so I mean that's a that is quite a substantial course you've got there so what what are you learning though because 44 weeks of leadership training seems like a lot so what specifically are you learning there? So I'm not I didn't commission so I'm I'm part of the non -commissioned part so the the officer training itself is a bit of a mystery to me and I think it's interesting to be that way it's like this sort of dark art that the officers do they sort of go in one week carrying their ironing board under one arm and then leave you know 44 weeks later ready to to command soldiers you know and I think the majority of it it looks at that command part and how leadership and management feeds into the command piece so but the intricacies of the training itself is is a mystery to me and I think it's probably intentionally. That makes that makes a lot of sense so having been in the army out and then training reserves and then doing your day job as well how do you see the differences if there is any between a military leader and say a ceo or a senior leader in a civilian organization? Well this is the big secret there isn't a great deal of difference.
Game of Crimes
A highlight from 120: Part 2: Tim Cardwell is a Top Cop for Drug Interdiction but Nearly Loses His Life
"Let's kind of pull on that dope thread a little bit, because you get onto the, you survive the academy, obviously. So you graduate, you get out, you start working. As you're working, we want to talk about now what leads you into doing drug interdiction. So obviously, when you start off, you're with a field training officer, you go through your training phase, then you get out on your own. What kind of things were you doing initially when you were out on your own? How does North Carolina do it? I mean, you train for a while, then you're out. And standard -like what? Traffic enforcement, work accidents? Yes. Pretty much, is that what you were doing? Change tires, go get gasoline. I warned you, Murph. Don't go there. One of these days, we're going to be driving, there's going to be Murph on the side of the road. You go, hey, can you help me? I go, no. Hey, Steve and I have had many of these constant back and forths on this exact thing. But yeah, so when I graduated the academy, it was 20 weeks, reported to my first duty station and did have a field training officer actually. What was that at? It was in Asheboro, North Carolina, Randolph County, which is on the south side of Greensboro. It was about an hour and 15 minutes from where I grew up, but it was still within the same troop, which was most state agencies have that similar structure where you have a troop and then you have districts within that troop. So that was my first duty station and I had a primary and a secondary training officer and went through, I'm thinking it was at the time, maybe six or eight weeks field training. And my primary field training officer, his name was Wayne Brumley, just a jewel of a man, wonderful training guy. And my secondary, his name was Tony Miller, who later he rose to the rank of major within the organization. He was a young guy who was been on about five or six years when I came on. So I had a good mixture of, you know, youthfulness as well as very veteran experience. And the shift I was on, it was similar type makeup. And so going into the field training officer, you know, having some of that law enforcement background, I had become pretty good at catching impaired drivers at the police department. And so it was a natural... Wait a minute, all the impaired drivers were at the police department? When I worked at the police department, I should say, I apologize. But it was just something I thought, you know, this is where I want to go. And so, and my training officer, he was one of the leading impaired driver troopers in the district and he really focused and was successful with that. He taught me a lot, but, you know, in the beginning, doing the traditional trooper type efforts, that's what my goal was. I really enjoyed it. It's what I wanted to do. And, you know, there's some funny stories in there, but one in particular that my training officer shared at my retirement luncheon and he would share with you today was, this was just kind of an internal trooper agency thing. I don't know if you did this, Morgan, or not, but when you would encounter in the old days, somebody whose license were suspended roadside or whatever, you would take their license there on the spot and you would put it over your driver's side window along the headliner there. Just slide it in there or you'd keep it over your sun visor. And my training officer had tons of those and it was just always something I remember Roger Smith having. So it was one of those little symbolic visuals that I thought, I want that. So I kind of set out on a mission, you know, to see how many licenses I could collect roadside in. So I made a comment to my training officer at the time and he said, you know, there are more trouble than they're worth. You have to keep up with them. And I said, well, that's what I want to do. So he handed me a handful before I got out of training and said, here you go, maybe this will help you feel like a real trooper. And so it was just one of those little symbolic things that I connected with. But in that, you know, his nickname was Brutal Brumley. He was a former military guy, about six foot, six one, thin guy, was very physically fit, marathon runner, still runs today and he's mid to late seventies. developed But he that nickname because of, you know, some roadside encounters, obviously through the courts. And I saw it in action during training. We stopped a gentleman for speeding one day late evening and the gentleman didn't initially want to cooperate. And this was when he had turned it over to me and he was just watching from a distance and, you know, trying to find my way through. This guy wasn't the most cooperative after a couple of requests. So next thing I know, my training officer commences to removing the gentleman from the car and not in how the gentleman wanted to cooperate. And this guy was twice our size. And so I saw firsthand in action, you know, how he earned his nickname. But he was very fair. And anyway, when we got the gentleman under control and took him to jail, he had a long conversation with me about taking control. He said, you cannot let anybody else get the upper hand on you out here. It's because of survivability. So it was a valuable lesson taught at the time. But, you know, I've seen him encounter so many situations where he showed a lot of compassion through accident investigations, as well as roadside stops for different violations. And so he was well -rounded and gave me a good lesson. And but at the time, interdiction was not even in the culture of the Highway Patrol, wasn't even thought about. It was just traditional trooper work. And the county that I went to had eight miles of interstate. But where we worked was non -interstate. And so that leads me into once he cut me loose, passed all my training, I started doing traditional trooper work. And at the time when I joined the patrol, I kind of have to go back here. There we patrol the troopers that have, you know, gotten killed in action. They kind of came in clusters, two and three at a time. And just before I joined patrol, we'd had three members that were killed roadside. And two of those were on interstate highway. And where I grew up, we didn't have interstate highway. So I didn't have any familiarity to it. And so I was like, you know, I don't want nothing to do with that. I just want to be a traditional trooper. But I was very proactive. I was finding a lot of stuff, roadside. And, you know, when I would make an arrest for driving one paired, I took the time to go up and search the car. And if I found anything else, I was making charges. And so I kind of developed the desire to do that. And then in our patrol office one day, my secondary training officer, the gentleman I mentioned to you earlier who had been on last time, he had attended our first interdiction training course, which was taught internally. And I remember him talking about it. And for some reason, it just connected, you know, I connected with it, the stories he was telling, the lessons that they were talking about. And when our agency started the interdiction effort, it was in partnership with DEA. And they had started the experiment on Interstate 95 down in Fayetteville. And the troopers that were working it down there had had a lot of success. They were kind of the first generation interdiction troopers. This is, you know, the mid and late 80s. And so a couple of gentlemen by the name of Chris Dew, who had a first K -9, and Terry Isaacs, who was really the one who was making a lot of seizures at the time, they taught that course. So anyway, he comes back to our district and is talking some about it, and it just captured me. And he had a bulletin that they had given him in that school, and it was an epic bulletin. It was a teletype that would list, you know, seizures from throughout the country of seizures that made the threshold. And so I started reading it. And for whatever reason, it just connected with me. And that's how I began, you know, pursuing the interdiction efforts. Oh, I remember reading those teletypes, too. You know, those were very interesting. You get the law enforcement officers killed summary and then the teletypes. But you mentioned something, too, I want to ask you about. You said that they traditionally didn't work interstate. You know, is that just because of like you're talking about the danger or was it because C is kind of the opposite, a lot of troops where I was at. We had a lot of Tulane, in fact, all of my stuff was Tulane, and you would have killed to be up on the interstate where you thought all the action was. Why did they keep you away from the interstate or why did you stay away from the interstate just because of part of the danger factor or something else? Well, I think it was a combination of reasons. Again, going back to where I said I grew up, non -interstate, a lot of secondary roads. That's just what I was familiar with. And, you know, those folks that had been like Roger Smith and a couple of his workmates, that's where they worked and built their reputation. And so, you know, trying to follow that lead, I think that's why I did that. And my training officer, he worked some interstate, but he wasn't in the interdiction area. He was just, you know, regular trooper enforcement. But that's the way he operated was secondary roads. You know, in that day, you were heavy on looking for impaired drivers. Then, you know, looking for the under the influence drivers, especially on Friday and Saturday nights on evening shift, it was a lot of priority placed on that. And so just trying to fall in line and follow their lead, I think is why I did that. And, you know, but what I quickly learned was what the interstate did bring you was if you were low for the week as far as, you know, number of citations or activity that you had to turn in at the end of the week for the supervisor to see, you know, you could go out there and with high volume traffic, you could quickly pick up on some of your total numbers for the week. And wait a minute, did the North Carolina Highway Patrol have a quota? No, we did not have a quota, but I will say the supervisors did monitor your number of contacts per hour of preventive patrol. That's how it was worded. And you had better be in that district average of what everybody else had. So, you know. I had somebody asked me that one time, do you guys have a quota? Said, no, sir, I can ride as many as I want. How many would you like today? Good response. Yeah, so that, you know, that was kind of my introduction. And then, you know, with my training officer, my secondary training officer introduced me to that. It just kind of took. And so I started going out there and trying it and having little success. Really didn't know what I was doing, but it was just a process of learning from there. And, you know, I was a very proactive trooper. I, you know, did a lot of high production. Got unmarked a car at a young age, young in my career. And anyway, the next time the next class came open internally, my then district first sergeant asked me if I would be interested in going. I said, yeah. And I remember sitting through that class with those troopers teaching it, and it just captivated me. That's, I mean, that's the simplest way. You know, they were given some of their case studies talking about, you know, what their findings were and some of the follow -up results. I thought, that's what I really want to try. And so I came back and started trying to apply. So you started doing this. So what was your first, what was your first big seizure? What's the one that cracked the, because, you know, you have to go, we started it. I was part of a four -person team, four -man team at that time. We started our interdiction unit. And so when you start off, you don't really like say, know what you're doing. You get a few things here and there. We were working 54, which if you remember, the Pipeline Operation report out of Epic, Highway 54 that came up out of Texas and Oklahoma and through Kansas, that was a major pipeline. They were making lots of arrests. So we started working that area. You know, we were stopping everything in sight, you know, trying to look for stuff. But you always kind of start off small. What was that watershed event for you? What was that thing that kind of cracked it open that once you get that first one, it's like, I got this figured out. Well, so this was in 1988. Again, it wasn't the culture of the Highway Patrol. It was just kind of getting started. And so there really wasn't a lot of information to pull from or, you know, a lot of guys saying, hey, let's go out and work this road and look for this. It was just kind of, you know, an individual effort, so to speak. And at that same time, one of the troopers I mentioned early on Interstate 95, Chris Dew, he had had our first canine on the patrol, but it was just a narcotic dog. It was a Beagle. And, you know, some about that during the training, listening to him talk about, you know, the role the canine played that interested me. So when I came back to the district, not long after that, requests came through patrol headquarters or troop headquarters, any troopers interested in having a canine, you know, submit your interest. So I thought about it and I did. And the district commander at that time or the troop commander at that time, who was very much old school, was not on board with this, he was passing it along from patrol headquarters. When I submitted my name, he sent a message back that said, if you want a canine, I think I can find somewhere else in a different place to get you a canine assigned to you, meaning, you know, I'm going to transfer if you really want this canine. And again, you got to understand the internal culture of the organization. So I said, no, sir, no, sir, I'm not interested in one. So anyway, there was another supervisor who had been involved in the early stages of it. He said, I thought you expressed interest in this. I said, I did. But here's what, you know, what I was told. And he said, I'll take care of that. And I was like, oh, no, please don't get me in trouble here. You thinking Lumberton? Here I come. You know what, Trooper Cardwell just told me there for sergeant. And so anyway, you know, next thing you know, I got word that, hey, if you want a dog, we'll assign you one. We're going to send one to the central part of the state and one east part of the state. And you report to this canine school, which was actually in Greensboro at the time. And so we did. And anyway, the school was about 10 days, 11 days. You know, again, patrol hadn't had a program at that time. They were just starting to get into it. And so getting the dog really helped as far as going out roadside, learning what I was doing. And so I had made some phone calls to troopers that I had learned about on this epic Operation Pipeline Bulletin. There was a couple of guys that I kept consistently reading their names. Do you remember a guy named Jeff Faison out of Florida? Yeah, I remember his name. He was kind of the first generation that came along at the time. These other troopers I mentioned that taught us. And then there was some in the area, neighboring states, Mike Ralston and Georgia State Patrol, Benji Hodges, Georgia. And there were some others throughout the country. But I can't remember what it was that caused me to reach out to Mike one day, because I had expressed interest in getting more training. But again, it wasn't the culture. So somehow I made contact with Mike. He worked north of Atlanta on Interstate 75. And where I worked was Interstate 85 and Interstate 40. And I just cold -called him and introduced myself. And anyway, I told him what I was seeking. He said, sure, you're welcome to come down and ride with me if you'd like. I had to take vacation time because I couldn't get approval to go on patrol time. So I went down there and rode with him, spent my own money. And he took care of me really good. He showed me a lot. And then I come back. And we had had another gentleman by the name of Ed Lowry, who had worked on Interstate 95 in Fayetteville in our agency. I had gotten approval to go ride with him. But I had to take vacation time, too. So I went and rode with him. And this was the watershed moment that you're speaking of. While riding with him on 95, he was kind of the hottest guy at that time consistently making cases. And this was when everything was flowing out of South Florida, back when Steve was, you know, he was familiar with all the importation through South Florida. Well, everything those guys were getting was Miami -connected in some way, shape, form, or fashion. And I remember getting in a car with Ed. And he had just come off some days off. And says, he Bo, I don't know if we're going to have any luck. And that's what he called everybody was Bo. I don't know why. That was just the habit of his. But he said, but we're going to go out and try. I'm going to see if I can get you something. Well, the second car that he stopped, it was like that epic bulletin teletype operation pipeline played out before my eyes. The second stop, he gets a four -door, I believe it was a Buick old four -door sedan coming out of Miami, registered out of New Jersey, male -female occupant, and found a compartment built between a rear seat and trunk. And it had like five kilos of Coke. I thought I was just, I was seeing it play out before my eyes. And that just, that was my watershed moment. I was like, this is what I want to do. I had been trying it up to that point with minimal success, but between him and Mike, it really opened my eyes to other things that I really had not been paying attention to, human behavior, the importance of the interview. And anyway, so when I left from there, I was really energetic. And so I come back and started applying it. And having learned to operate my canine, I started looking at things differently as far as my approach and how to talk with people and what to look for roadside interview -wise. And so that first big seizure was a U -Haul that had come out of South Texas, which obviously still is today, but then the major source for our area, it was a U -Haul and it had about 850 pounds of marijuana in it. And once I got that, I was hooked. I mean, I was hooked a hundred percent. Well, let's go back to that seizure of Coke. When you opened it, did you know, I mean, when you saw the bricks, obviously, did you know what it was at that time or did you kind of have to go, okay, wait, you know, I'm just kind of like, whoa, what is this? Oh no, I know what that is. Kind of, yeah. I had never seen a kilo in person. And obviously it had, but I had not. I'd seen many pictures. And so I'm like, well, that's what it really looks like, I guess. So yeah, it was a really good learning experience. Now, so the 850 pounds of weed, that wasn't the case that you and I worked on, was it? No, this was a brother and sister that had come out of San Antonio and they were delivering somewhere in, I think around Richmond, Virginia area. But it's an interesting story on that. We had not had that kind of seizures go through our court system. And when it went for first appearance the next morning, the judge who was listening to the probable cause hearing, he said, he pulled me to the side before the hearing. He said, now, from what I'm told, you can't do this. And I said, well, what do you mean? And he said, you can't just go in and start searching somebody's belongings. And I said, well, I didn't, sir. I said, they gave me permission. And he was like, what? And I said, yes, sir. He said, they gave you permission to search their truck, knowing that they were carrying this? I said, yeah. And he's like, oh, okay. So it was a learning experience for a lot of us through the court process and myself. I love the way the judge was having a preliminary hearing out in the hallway before anybody was even sworn in. Well, again, it's a small community. And anyway, everybody knew everybody. And I'd built a good rapport with this judge. And I just remember that conversation. And once I said that, he said, wow, can't believe somebody would do that. I said, well, he said, where'd you learn to do this? And I told him. And he said, so they tell you to ask people to search the vehicle if you think you're suspicious to want to look for something else? I said, yes, sir. And he said, and they actually do? I said, yes, sir, they do. It's unbelievable. It is. It goes back to your point you were making. If you understand human behavior, if you understand how to talk to them and set the right circumstances, I mean, even to this day, Murph and I were talking about it on our Patreon channel, but at the time, it was the largest seizure of cash in Kansas. But it was only a quarter of a million. I mean, they've gotten much bigger stuff now. And people are going, I mean, they let you search the car. The guy I remember to this day, his name is Brian Lacy. I looked at him. I said, now, do you have anything that would be illegal in the state of Kansas? Guns, drugs, large amounts of cash. He says, no. I said, would you? And one question, one thing I learned to ask was not can I search? Because people always want to say no. I said, would you have any objection if I search for these items? And they would say, no. Well, no meant yes. And he even offered to show me, hey, I got a briefcase here. I opened up the trunk. There's the cash. And in his briefcase, plans for a methamphetamine laboratory. He had a marijuana press. It's like, you dumb son of a bitch. All you had to say was no. And we didn't have a canine at that point. There's not much I could have done. Yeah. It's amazing. I was just thinking, Tim, remember Dave Wilhelm with customs? Yes. Down in Charlotte. And he was murdered in Atlanta. So God rest him. But he called me one day, and I can't remember if it was Asper. I think it might have been Randleman. And he called and he says, hey, Murphy. He said, I got a tip. This trailer out in the country, some Mexicans are in there. Supposed to be sitting on a big stash of weed. He said, I need somebody to speak Spanish. So I met him down there. We took some people with us and walked up to this trailer. I remember that it was a huge lot with these big, tall pine trees. But there were no limbs from like 10 feet, 12 feet high before the limb started. So you had this wide open, we think of as a killing field that you have to go through to get to that front door. But we have no reason to be pulling our weapons out. To go up, like we're going to do a tactical entry. We knock on the door and I get up there and do use my Spanish. And they're like, yeah, come on in. We go inside. I forget how many is 1 ,200 pounds of weed or whatever they'd been using saws to cut it up. But there was an AR -15 sitting behind the front door. I mean, they pulled out and wiped us all out. But it's just amazing. They're sitting on the dope and they're like, sure, come on in. You know, and Tim, I don't know if you remember seeing this video if it was a Texas DPS trooper, but he's on the side of the road and he's talking to this guy in that Texas draw going, now son, you got anything that's illegal? You got, well, and so he's talking and you can see it's the old dash cam. This kid's getting nervous. Now, do you have anything in the car that's illegal? No, he's like, would you mind if I checked your car? And this kid just vapor locks and passes out into the ditch. He goes, well, I'll take that as an admission of guilt.
The Plant Movement Podcast
Miami Dade's New HEAT ORDINANCE: The Fine Print
"So talk to us and tell us what is proposed in this ordinance, aside from what we've spoken about, but what's in that five print that has, you know, most of the people that know about this ordinance upset? One of the things are the fines and the fines and the department that the county is going to start is going to be fine -based. So it's going to be strictly run and paid for by fines. So then that just means the inspector is going to come out. He's going to find something wrong so they can raise money for their department. So this is one of the, you know, one of the really most objectionable parts for us, which is the creation of a new agency or a new office in Miami -Dade County dedicated to the health and welfare. So it's not just heat. Right. And so what we start to see is that this can encourage health and welfare. Yeah. So where's the health and safety? Yeah. It's not just, I can't remember now if it's health and safety or health and welfare, you know, welfare of employees in Miami -Dade County. But in any event, it doesn't exist right now. It would be newly formed and funded 100 % by fines. And it will be fines in the agriculture, horticulture and construction industries only. Only. When there's a bunch of other industries that are outside labor as well. And so what happens is that right now, you know, we'll say, well, you know, is that really that bad? Well, look, first of all, OSHA already does this, right? And OSHA has a set of rules in place that we all follow, that we all know what they are, and they have to give us notice, for example, before they come onto our properties. In this, there is none of that. So what it opens up really, and I think what's most concerning and which should be concerning to everybody listening to this, is that now the county would have the unfettered right to come onto our properties, presumably under heat, but they could be looking for all kinds of other things because this would open the door to an expansion there. It's so unclear, but we don't want that door to open. I mean, we've got OSHA in place. They could start regulating every other aspect of our business. I mean, they could come on, they say they're coming in to look at heat. They could see when you're a tractor driver, someone driving a tractor. They're like, I think I need to start regulating the tractor driving. They need licenses to drive the tractors or this or that. Yeah, it can just open doors. Yes. What are some of the reasons people can get fines based off this new ordinance? Yeah, so the fines are based on the proposed ordinance says you have to have a heat plan in place, which we do already. We need to have that in place for OSHA. Which is just water. Well, water rest and shade, right? You know, under the general welfare clause of OSHA, we have to provide break rooms. And so this would mandate having this and then every having a mandatory 10 minute break every two hours. That's paid for. Having shade enough area, as it's described, so that every person on your work site could stand without touching each other. So it's pretty specific on infrastructure there. It applies to every outdoor environment, including people working under pull bars, for example. Yeah, that do have, you know, cover from the sun. It has a very specific range on the temperature of the water. So when you ask, you know, how are the fines imposed? The fines are imposed because they can come and test your water. And if it's one degree off, fines of ranging from $1 ,000 to $3 ,000 per person. They have a very specific range. It's 35 to 77. Under 35 is basically ice. But so at least 77 degrees. A maximum of 77 degrees. And then one of some other aspects of that is you have to verbally tell the people every two hours and every two hours. You have to verbally tell them. And if you don't, right. To drink water, take a break and drink water. And you could get fined if you don't. If you don't tell them. Don't tell them. So that's physically calling every single individual on staff, letting them know that they have to stop. You actually have to have enough supervision so that you've got a supervisor for 20 employees that would be there to tell them that every physically. So for every 20 employees, you've got to have a supervisor now in place to be able to tell them they need to drink water, which is something that they obviously know to drink water. If I'm not mistaken, you can get a fine for not telling them to drink water. Is that correct? That is correct. If you don't have that reminder in place. And look, and one of the outcomes of all of this that we see is that you're going to be creating a pretty antagonistic environment where it becomes very easy for an employee. Because there is, and gosh, there's just so many problems with this. In the fine print. Yeah, there's no due process. So which means that once the fine is imposed, there's no appeal process. You cannot appeal it. You cannot appeal it. So of course. What are the fines ranging in? Between $1 ,000 and $3 ,000 per person. So if you have 10, to say you have 10 people working in the field, that's let's just say a $2 ,000 fine. So that's going to be 2 ,000 times those 10 employees. So guys listen to this. $20 ,000. So every day you have to tell them every two hours to drink water. If you skip one time because you had a vacation planned or your wife got sick, or now you're in the hospital. Now you have your whole staff that can sue you on top of getting a fine just because you didn't tell them to drink water. And that's how it works. And you were also saying, which that is not fair. In my opinion, you were also saying that if your coworker, talk about the coworker. Everybody's liable on this. So even your coworker working with you, say someone's getting heat exhaustion. If you don't recognize that and report it, then you could actually fall as a potentially liable for that person also. So you can get sued. So it goes all the way to the landowners, all the way down the line from employees to supervisors, owners, landowners, and so
Telecom Reseller
A highlight from A Deep-dive into CallMiners 2023 CX Landscape Report Fostering the Super Agent Era, Podcast
"This is Doug Green, and I'm the publisher of TR Publications, and I'm very glad to have with us today Jeff Galino, who's the CTO and founder of CallMiner. Jeff, thank you for joining us today. Thanks for having me, Doug. Really appreciate it. To give you a little bit of background, like you said, I am the CTO, Chief Technology Officer and founder of CallMiner. CallMiner is a little over 20, almost 22 years old at this point, so I've been doing this for a while. What we do at CallMiner is we have a platform that is for understanding and providing insight and guidance around interactions between an enterprise and its downstream customers, whether that is a bot talking to a human, whether it's a human talking to another human, whether they're chatting, whether there's email involved, direct messaging, or multimodal. They could be talking on video like this, as well as typing, as well as sending information back and forth. And all through that, our software monitors those conversations, can give information to the agent in real time, so that they can be more efficient, but also give them training and guidance in the background, here's how you can become just a better person at your job. In addition to that, it brings in all the feedback that we're hearing in those conversations. So if I'm calling a wireless provider, let's say Mint Mobile, new customer, and so let's say I'm calling Mint Mobile and during that conversation, I say, boy, I really want that new titanium iPhone, I just wish they sold that damn thing in Aquamarine or something like that. Now, the marketing and product folks for Mint and Apple want to know that, but there's really no simple way to capture something as seemingly innocent as that. Let alone, I might say, I can't pay my bill because I'm a vulnerable person, or your product doesn't work for me, or stop calling, anything that you can imagine, we're going to capture everything that's said, and then provide insight on that. So Jeff, you talked about bots, so let's ask the question of the hour, is AI going to replace the contact center agent, is that going to really happen? There's a simple answer where you could go, of course it is, this is the way of automation, and then there's a much more accurate and complex answer, which is, I believe this will go the way of robotics in manufacturing, yes, robotics replaced a lot of people doing manufacturing, but not everybody, because there are just some tasks that you want a human or you need a human on, and we're going to see the same thing with contact centers, what they're going to do is they're going to start moving, in my opinion, they're going to move that bot -like behavior further back in the conversation toward the IVR, they're going to try to keep you contained in a bot environment, but these bots are a heck of a lot smarter, they're interacting, they also know how to raise their own hand, they know how to say, I need help, because they know if they have an answer to a question or not. So we're going to see a lot more sophisticated workflows, I think what this is driving, and we like to talk about it, is the rise of the super agent, the rise of the skill agent, the knowledge worker agent, and kind of almost the death of the mundane, I'm not going to call and change my pen with a human, I'm not going to call, probably, and do most things with a human when I have a problem, when I say, hey, I'm calling, it's the middle of the night, the gas went off, and I know I paid my bill, what the heck, then I want to talk to a human, you better not give me a bot if I'm in an extreme situation, that's the kind of thing that these contact center managers and owners are struggling with, they're like, okay, what level of automation, and quite frankly, according to what we call our CX landscape report, which we just did, it's an astoundingly high number of people are saying, we know we need AI, and I'm talking over 43 % have said we know we need it, but we don't know what, and we're not sure when we can put it in. And so there's still a lot of people out there that are stuck in the hype curve that don't know what it actually means, and so I know there's a lot of people out there looking and saying, hey, instead of trying to automate the agent all the way through, what if we start picking off activity, and so I'll give you my favorite example, when we look at agent assistance with knowledge base, what you can do is you can make sure that the agent, when they're asked a difficult question, you can present knowledge to them, and in fact, it can be very clever knowledge based on how others have answered it that day, because the AI gets to hear all the conversations, and so when it hears positive responses to a particular answer, it starts to prioritize, it starts to actually say, okay, that might be the better answer, and so you could focus it on, let's say, authentication, you could do it all, all the authentication with an AI, you could do all payment stuff with an pure credit card number, and you could say it, and the thing can hear you and recognize it, but we're still keeping the human out of the loop. Then you can start saying, okay, well, what else can we do? How about we look at, here are the 50 things that we ask our agents to do, and the bottom 10 are hard, and they're not requested a lot, so you know what, let's not train anybody on that anymore, let's get them on the phones faster, so you're lowering cost to kind of train and produce, you know, nesting with an AI as opposed to nesting with a supervisor, you can do a lot of really interesting things there, and the idea is that it becomes kind of almost a backstop to the agent, and as the agent gets better, they don't need to pay attention to the AI as much, and the AI then starts to work and say, okay, they know this stuff, so I know I can route to this person because of that, and when they get a question that they don't know, then I can start stacking and lining up training for them and giving them better QA, so this is gonna be a gradual evolution as we slowly, in my opinion, slowly automate a lot, and there will be a lot, like, I think it'll be probably 80, 85 % in maybe five years, and you say, we're gonna lose 85 % of people in contact centers in five years, I don't think it'll be that much, but I think the tasks in the high -end, heavy -spending call centers, yeah, they're gonna start really moving those to automation, however, the agents that remain, those knowledge workers, man, they are gonna be paid well because they really do know what they're doing, they're almost to rise to the level of kind of engineer status in terms of being able to troubleshoot, being able to solve problems, because they're only given the hard problems, they won't be giving any of the mundane stuff, that's what the AI will actually be for, that's how I see it, sorry, that was a very long answer. No, no, no, so what you're saying, I think, is that you actually see AI as benefiting contact center agents in the future, because they will have a very different kind of role, that they might become the sort of super agent that you've been discussing, and to draw on that analogy, manufacturing people used to say that before automation took over the automotive plants, it was almost a dehumanizing process, that repetitive task work, no matter how you tried to mitigate it, was very hard on people, and it's no secret, turnover historically in contact centers has been very high, it's basically the same problem, the repetitive, you know, not very interesting task, you're saying, you know, people will be able, contact center agents will be able to dive into more complex, more informed, will be kind of almost a kind of different job. It will, and don't forget that after the call, that AI can then also, and it's, you know, it's obvious, well, maybe not obvious to everybody, but it's a different AI, but it's an AI that just does QA, and will then say, hey, you just had a really great call, we'd really like you to use more empathy when a person talks about vulnerability, right at that moment, then, as they go through the next two or three calls, if they encounter that same situation, the bot's looking to say, did they respond like we trained them, if not, then maybe I need to enroll them in some training, and start the idea of escalated training as well, so that you, then the supervisor, the coach, can really focus on behavioral activity to improve and not have to say, oh, okay, there's 100 things I wanted you to do, you did 99 really well, let's talk about this one. They have to go through the 100 things, whereas when we're bringing a lot of this automation to bear, they get to focus on the one thing, so you could have your best agent, and they're agent, is really quite important. So here comes the practical question, can we really do this, can we, how can organizations actually integrate AI into their contact center? So they can do it with products like ours, so I can describe a really simple thing, I was using the agent assistant as an idea before, so let me give you kind of a deeper scenario, in the agent assistant, the agent is using the desktop tools they normally do, whether they're remote or they're sitting in a contact center, wherever they are, they tend to have a presentation from a CRM system, ticket system, something like that, where they can interact with the data that the caller is calling about. Now imagine in that same screen, there is a spot where an AI who is listening into the conversation, so let's pretend it's a call, it's using speech recognition in real time, and it's literally writing down everything said by both parties, the customer doesn't know that that AI exists, the agent is there, and they're able to read the output, they're able to see where maybe if the customer says, yeah, I need to do this thing, and whatever that thing is, the AI could just present a button to the agent that I think you need this button, and then the agent goes, yep, that's the button, and presses it. And so it can, little things like that really add up in terms of efficiency, and it makes the agent, to your point earlier, that dehumanizing, redundant process, it's slowly just trying to make it a little easier. I mean, ultimately, when AI showed up, I hoped what we would see is everybody going, this is going to be great, now we don't have to do those mundane jobs, and instead everybody's going, oh no, they're going to take my job, and you're like, yeah, that's the way of the world. So eventually the crap jobs get automated so that we can go and do better, more interesting things. I mean, an area of automation is farming, right? They're still a human, you're still driving the tractor for right now, but think about how complex those machines are and how they compare to 100 years ago when you were out there literally cutting down corn by hand and shucking and pulling, and all of that work. Now it's mostly been automated to the benefit of both the consumer and the user, and ultimately that's what we hope, is that this makes customer service easier, more transparent, and therefore that savings, that lower dollar, we hope gets passed on to the downstream customer. So Jeff, do these thoughts that you've just shared, your vision there of where we're going with all this, does that jive with the comminer's CX landscape report that I think you recently issued? It does, and thank you. Yeah, absolutely. What we see, and it's very much emphasized and supported by the CX landscape report, which is available to anybody, you can just go to our website and download it, it's really quite interesting. We got 700 plus CX leaders, so people that had the main CX title in their organizations to respond to a series of questions, both about contact centers as well as AI's influence in the contact centers. And I think the thing that was interesting to me is that when we asked those people, hey, what are you looking at? Where are you focused in the next six months on your purchases and research? 43 % said Gen AI, an additional 34 % said conversation intelligence. They want to add in generative AI and they want to look at adding bots and then analytics on top of those bots. I mean, that's a lot of their next what's happening. Another fun stat is of those that said, we're definitely going after AI, more than half said, but we don't know what we're looking for. We are so ignorant to this technology that we're starting from ground zero. We're having to educate ourselves first on what the heck it is. And a lot of that's going to come from the vendors. The vendors are going to show up and go, we've got this great technology, here's the ROI, here's the reason you'd use it. And they'll manage that for those organizations. Because honestly, almost every organization that I've spoken to in the last six months has told us, yeah, we're investigating AI, we're investigating Gen AI, those sorts of things. And we'd say, okay, toward what end? Most of them honestly would cross their eyes a little bit and they're like, we're not sure yet. We just know we need to know. And so we're in kind of a great learning mode, which is ironic considering all of this AI has really learned things. It's not programmed things like those of us more, let's say, experienced. We're used to programming systems to do things, prescriptively saying, if, then, then this. Whereas now, we're teaching it so that when it is stuck with information that's never heard of, it can fall back on that training and go, okay, I think this is the right answer. Generative, it can come up with those answers. So did that answer your question? I mean, there's so much information in there that's really fascinating to people. Like for instance, another fun stat is people evaluating AI are overwhelmingly worried about security and data privacy because they keep hearing on the news, this group's being sued and this, and it was built using this copyrighted material. And that is a challenge and all of those CX professionals have a duty to protect their own company and protect their client's data. So a big part of where we spend a lot of our time with AI is not building generative AI. Honestly, not that hard. There's so many good base and foundational models out there. It's not that much to go. It's what kind of bias detection, guardrails, security, data protection that you put in is really, in my opinion, what's going to differentiate people. Then you have to deal with scale. So as they're thinking about this, when you're talking to a company with 100 people in their contact center, don't take this the wrong way. That's not a huge scaling problem. But when you're talking to a BPO that has 150 ,000 people around the world and they want to make sure they're giving singular answers, that's where AI is really going to help a lot of people is it it'll scale up and provide that replacement to mundaneity. And you want that to be consistent and safe. So, you know, Doug, that statistic of 45 percent are concerned about exposing their company to security compliance risks based on Gen AI and that sort of thing. There's something else that they need to think about, which is that hacking and a lot of these breaches that happen through social engineering are happening in contact centers. And AI represents both an opportunity and a risk. The is, opportunity first off, if you can shift a lot of mundane conversation with no rights off to an AI, then that basically becomes unhackable until we figure out a way to hack that. And that leaves that super agent that we've talked about, they can be that line of defense. You know, if you think about what happened with MGM, where they did a social engineering and they skipped their own zero trust process. And you can't emphasize that enough. This wasn't the technology thing. This was just people that get too comfortable. They hear what they expect to hear and then break out of the process. You could put an AI in there whose only job is to listen to those conversations and basically just say, nope, you can't say that and just stop the call or, oh, you're trying to get this person access, but I don't see where you follow the zero trust process. So, no, I'm not going to let you do that until you follow the process. And that might seem like a trivial thing and it'll probably piss a bunch of people off because, you know, you got a machine saying, no, you can't do that. But think about how much effort and angst and just challenges that would have saved somebody like MGM.
Telecom Reseller
A highlight from AI Chat Analysis, an AI-powered sentiment analysis and chat summary function inside GoTo Connects Contact Center is game changing, Podcast
"This is Doug Green, and I'm the publisher of Telecom Reseller, and I'm very pleased to have with us today Damon Covey, who's the Senior Vice President and Head of Product at GoTo. Damon, thank you for joining me today. Absolutely, Doug. Thanks so much for having us. Appreciate this. Well, I'm very excited to be able to do this podcast because maybe our listeners and watchers may not know this, but the over 3 ,000 podcasts that we've provided for the community and recorded over the years, on -site at conferences and also this way and remote, have all been done on the GoTo platform. So it's very exciting for me to do a podcast with the company that's provided that platform. So Damon, thanks very much. It's been a good ride. Love to hear that. Thank you for being a customer and hopefully we'll get 3 ,000 more down. Well, we're going to be talking about a lot of my favorite topics today. We're going to be talking about the benefits of AI technologies and enabling customer success in the UC and in IT industries, things that are close to the heart for many of our readers. We're going to get into that in just a second, but before we do that, Damon, could you tell us more about GoTo? I think a lot of people know you as maybe one thing, but there's a lot there. Yeah, absolutely. Thanks, Doug. So if you think about GoTo, we have been over a bit of a journey over the last 20 years. So some folks might know us in some form or fashion as LogMeIn. We actually were part of Citrix with some parts of our company. So there's a vast portfolio and we used to be called LogMeIn until about a year and a half ago. We renamed the company to GoTo and we simplified our portfolio. And so if you think about GoTo now, it consists of at the top level GoTo, the name of the company. And then really there's two parts to the business, Doug. There is the IT part or our IT solution. So we are very well known for remote support with products like Rescue, products like Resolve, GoToMy PC. Those are all products that are part of our IT solutions division. And then the other part of our product portfolio would be our communications division. So our unified communications, UCAS, GoTo Connect product portfolio. So those are the two main products, core collaboration, webinar training are also part of that communication side of the business. So they are very interconnected also, but that's kind of how to look at our business from the top down, if that makes sense. So let's dive into some recent news about GoTo. You have launched an AI chat analysis and my understanding is it's a powered sentiment analysis and chat summary function. So tell me about that. It sounds like it's a contact center application. It is. And so if you think about kind of the right side of what I just described there, our communications side, we have a very rich history in cloud telephony. We've done some acquisitions in that space in the past and obviously from the GoTo meeting perspective, what you and I are using today from a collaboration perspective. We also have different customer engagement tools, whether it's, we actually have one called customer engagement and the contact center functionality. So what these tools allow you to do is really to focus on how your customers want to communicate with you. So as you know, people increasingly want to communicate over text, over web chat, over other mediums as opposed to phone and even telephony in many cases. And so the particular feature that you were talking about, what it does is let's say that you contacted a healthcare provider as an example. And you wanted to set up an appointment to visit your healthcare provider or an auto dealer, anybody that might be out there and you have an interaction with an agent. There's someone on the back end that's interacting with you. The customer or that interaction, regardless of what your business is, that is literal gold. If you're the business owner or even the solution provider in terms of healthcare, things of that nature, that the person on the other end of that text is gold. That is the reason for you being in business. It's a reason for you being around. And so what this solution allows the end user to do is we will real time show them how is the text or how is the chat actually going? And so you can see, hey, is there a positive sentiment? Is there a negative sentiment? Did something good happen, something bad happen? We can alert supervisors with that so we can start to actually take proactive measures to the help agent, help them get better at what they're doing. And then the other thing is we can wrap that up for them. So one of the most frustrating things about any kind of a contact center agent or someone having to document that interaction, because you don't want to sit and type that you got to get onto the next call and do your work. And so we want to enable this and this will also allow them to actually get a short transcription of what actually happened within that automatically. This one is in a series of many AI functions that we're providing to our customers. But that, in a nutshell, is what that particular feature provides to our customers and why we think it's important in the context of some of that communication to have that. Now, are you leveraging this AI technology and these innovations across your product suite? So we are leveraging these technologies. So if you think about, again, I'll talk about the two sides of GoTo for just a minute. That is, on the communication side, a lot of the things we just talked about in terms of being able to analyze communications, provide that functionality and really, again, see, hey, how are things going with that, optimize the customer journey as they come into your environment from a communications perspective. But think about it from the IT solution perspective as well. Imagine if you're an IT person and one of the most challenging things for an IT person to do is automate the tasks that they need to do and not disrupt the end user. And so AI also unlocks that functionality as well. So if I needed to create, let's say, for example, I want to install the application we're working on right now, let's install GoToConnect, but I don't want to interrupt the end user before maybe you knew how to script that. Maybe there was a job inside the system that would allow you to do it, maybe not. But how would you actually go about doing that? And so now, instead of just having to go through that manually, you can on that, just ask the system to create that for you, it'll create that script for you automatically and then allow you to do that. And then there are other exciting things coming to even get more proactive with that as well. So we can talk more about that, but that gives you an idea of kind of across the portfolio, yes, across our communications side, but then it also extends into the IT solutions as well. So Damon, we're fast approaching the fourth quarter of the year. We're looking into the new year. What's up ahead for GoTo? Yeah. So one of the other exciting things we just introduced, Doug, was is the ability to tie a communications, a phone call or any communications from a customer completely together. So imagine if you were to call me and you get put on hold, transferred, and you get transferred to three or four people because that's your life cycle within our communication system. Traditionally, that's something you have to stitch together yourself. You might lose part of that. And so we've recently introduced the ability to have that seamlessly known from all parts of that. Now, you might ask yourself, why is that important? That enables this AI function we're talking about. So imagine we have the ability now on the fly to actually look at all parts of your journey as it's actually happening and then alert the supervisor and also give suggestions to the agent and unleash and harness some of that AI functionality to further help the supervisor and again, mine that gold that's really in your environment. So those are the things we're really excited about. There's a lot of stuff coming between now and the end of the year. We've got a bit of a rolling thunder campaign and we're also working on that with our IT solution side. So starting to get more predictive about like, hey, you know what, there's a computer problem. Now let's actually let you know beforehand and let's start to predict some of those things. So a lot of predictive things kind of getting ahead of the solution. And the other thing I would say, Doug, that's one of our core tenants is we never want to provide AI for AI sake. This is only to help the customer do their job in the course of what they would normally want to do. So we're really excited about being able to unleash it, but in that way that it matters to them. Your products offer customization? We do. We have a number of different integrations. And so as an example on the communication side of things, if you want to integrate into your CRM, you want to integrate into another system. We've got we've got a number of published APIs that are out there available for customers to do that. And we see customization happen quite often. The administrator can also customize what features get down to the end user. So if you want to have some end users, they're full contact center users and others just use telephony or use the soft foam as part of the system. You can customize what that looks like for the end user as well. So do you guys have a channel program? Is this a channel opportunity? Absolutely. On the telephony side, I would say 70 to 80 percent of our business actually flows through the channel. So it's a very, very strong partner channel opportunity. And we do some direct business on the communication side, usually in the larger enterprises you might imagine. On the IT solution side, we also have a strong partner base. And then we do have a very, very strong large enterprise base. So something like rescue is something that most major PC manufacturers would use to do remote support, as an example. So it's a little bit of both, but absolutely a giant channel opportunity, especially on the communication side of our business. So, Damon, did I hear that right, that the rescue product you mentioned, I think a lot of people have maybe experienced that, but I didn't know that that was a go -to brand. It is. A lot of folks will know that as log me and rescue, or in some cases, actually, Doug, they don't know it as anything because they're actually seeing the interaction. That's why PC manufacturers and global systems integrators, large enterprises love it, is you don't have to own the system or have an agent persisting out there, things of that nature to use it. But yes, that's absolutely one of our premier brands from an IT solutions perspective. So and that's a great solution for, it looks like also an opportunity for enterprises, also maybe an opportunity for the MSP channel community too. 100%. We see tremendous opportunity and we are also tremendously developing and continuing to pour innovation in for MSPs around that IT solutions, specifically on rescue. Well, Damon, you know, this has been really interesting. I hope we get to do this soon again to get a, you know, where we're doing, it sounds like you've got some more products in the pipeline and stuff. So I hope to talk to you again in the upcoming quarter, but for now, where can we learn more about go -to? Yeah, please visit us at www .goto .com. All of our solutions are there. You'll find the IT solutions and our communication solution, communication solutions and all the things we just talked about on this particular podcast, you can find on that site. All right, Damon, we're looking forward to our next one, but for now, thanks very much. Thank you, Doug. Pleasure.
VUX World
A highlight from The uniphore approach to conversational automation with Kim West
"All right. We are live and kicking, I believe. Hello, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls. Should have sorted my windows out before I started this broadcast, but there we go. Hello. My name is Caine Sims, as always. And as always, this is VUX World. I'm delighted for you to join me. Thank you for joining me. And today we are joined by Kim West, who is a director of product marketing at Unifor. A lot of you probably know Unifor. Unifor has been around for a long time, actually, and has been through various guises and is now definitely one of the leaders in the conversational AI space. And so we're going to be picking Kim's brains around some of the successes that Unifor have had, some of the tips and tricks that she might be able to share with businesses that want to try and capitalize on what is now probably the biggest growth industry going. Since last November, conversational AI is looking good. And so, yeah, excited for this conversation with Kim West. And so without further ado, let's bring Kim on, shall we, Kim? Welcome to VUX World. Great to be here, Caine. Thank you for joining me. All the way from Canada. All the way from Canada, Toronto. Nice, nice. Representing. Lots going on in Toronto. Like, it seems to be that, you know, I say this every time someone from Toronto is on, which seems to be fairly frequent enough, but yeah, Toronto is a happening place in the AI space right now. It is. We like to say in Canada that we are part of the sort of creators, the place to be. Yeah, yeah. A lot of exciting companies in Canada as well. Cohea is based in Toronto, I believe, actually. They're doing very well. Yeah. So yeah, there you go. Thank you for joining me. So tell us about yourself then, Kim. How did you get into conversational AI generally? Yeah, no, great question. I always like to say that I am a former agent, actually. So Unifor itself started in the contact center space thinking through how do we actually improve communication. I was an agent 20 years ago, came across these companies that were actually doing cool things in the contact center space, and so found Unifor about two and a half years ago, and loved that they were looking at the full experience. So not only the back end in terms of tools for agents and then not just QM, QA for quality management, but they're looking at analytics in a unique way, and then really looking at the front end. I was like, wait a minute, if we can improve what's happening on the call or in the chat, we have some analytics, how do we then improve that front end self -service experience that a lot of customers are looking for? When we think conversational AI, we think of that front end, but it really blows throughout every part of the interaction a customer has with any brand that they're talking to. Interesting. Definitely get into analytics shortly, because it's definitely a topic well worth exploring and underexplored, actually, in lots of cases, I think. So you were a customer service agent, so you're answering phones at one point 20 years ago, you said? Yes, so I know the pain. I did it for three years, and I understand the sort of strain that happens with that in terms of you have to be efficient, you have to hit certain metrics, you get rated on how you're doing on a daily basis, sometimes weekly, in terms of did you do the opening welcome call, did you do all of the authentication, and then on top of that, did you upsell, cross -sell. So there's a lot that a customer service agent actually has to know and manage in one time, and the idea that for so long they were just doing it on their own is fascinating, and I think it's a great training ground for anybody that then later on wants to go out professionally into any role. I speak to myself like the reason why I have comfort speaking at all times in any medium is partially because of that experience. Yeah, and that's evident because I sprung on you that this was actually going to be a live broadcast about 10 minutes ago, and so adaptivity is also something that you learned there. It's interesting because we had the conversation with Sham Aziz from Selfridges last week on the podcast, and it touched on these exact issues, not issues, but these exact points, which is that having that foundation in customer service, answering calls, speaking to customers, teaches you so much about business in general and gives you a load of foundational skills that you can use for everything else beyond that. And in fact, Sham was saying that he thinks that spending time in customer service should basically be either an apprentice or a mandatory requirement of entering the workplace in general because of how much value there is to be learned there. Completely agree. There's actually a company I know based here in Canada, regardless what level you are, when you join the company, two weeks of the sort of onboarding is that you actually need to either take calls or need to do side -by -side shadowing of the customer success team, so you have a strong understanding of the customer base, their pain points, what the company actually does, regardless if you work in finance or if you work on the tech team. Yeah, exactly. I agree with that. And the other thing we were talking about is how customer service as a job isn't what it was kind of assumed to be before, which is like, so growing up and going to college, going to uni or whatever, at that kind of age between 16 to 20, early 20s, lots of friends had jobs in call centers and stuff like that. And it was always seen as a similar kind of job to working in a corner shop, which I used to do, or working in a bar, which I also used to do. It's almost like that entry level kind of job for lots of people. But the conversation I was having with Sham last week was that actually you've just named a load of stuff that customer service agent needs to do. Multiple systems, you need understanding of technology, you need to understand people, you need to have relatively not just thick skin as in not to take offense when you're being shouted at, but also the skills to be able to navigate that negative conversation into a positive conversation, which is a tremendous social skill to be able to have. And so it's kind of like, yeah, although there is these entry level jobs, customer service shouldn't really be one of them because it is quite a complex area. Especially not anymore. I think what's so fascinating is that now they're actually looking for people. So if I look and I think about our client base, our customers are looking for people who actually have post -secondary education and have some sense of being able to absorb a lot of new information because that adaptability and being able to understand what the company does really appeal to that customer, navigate the different issues that they have, maybe transition them into something else that they weren't even calling about. So yes, you resolve their base issues, but can you now maybe upsell, cross -sell them into something? Can you inform them on something new that's coming in the next six months? You're kind of getting that sort of seed planted. There's a number of things now that I look at it as becoming more and more of this professional training ground more so than just entry level. And you could have tiers now within the contact center of like, yes, come in entry level, great way to sort of just get started. But then there's growth potential even before you get to the next levels of supervisor management. And then it helps you if you want to continue throughout that company. Because most companies, if you think of the ones that have contact centers, are large global brands that we're all familiar with. We've all at one point had to call into a contact center because of some issue. And so those companies have fast departments and other areas that that person could work in as well. Mmm. Olya is shouting Shopify on the chat on LinkedIn. I don't know. That's because is Shopify one of the companies that mandates people spend time in customer services when people begin? I don't know. That'd be interesting. I wouldn't be surprised, actually. I know that they do encourage their employees to actually build their own retail store. So I could imagine they might be something similar like that. Just it's the empathy piece at the end of the day. I think the biggest thing, what I find funny actually with all things AI coming into our space is the emphasis on being human. And it's almost like we had to get the reminder that we shouldn't just be going through the motions for the longest time. When it came to customer service contact center, it was like the necessary evil. Like, let's have this thing. Let's make sure people are getting their answers. But now we're stepping back and rethinking it and saying, wait, how can we be more human if all of the other stuff that was like drudgery and time is being handled by the tech? How do we show up to be empathetic, personal, connect, actually build a relationship? And we know that gives you a lot more in terms of what everybody wants. Long -term customer value and pieces like that. Definitely.
Dear Dyslexic Podcast
A highlight from Episode 59 with Bill Goj on Life as a Dyslexic PhD candidate
"Hello there, and welcome to the Dear Dyslexic podcast series brought to you by Rethink Dyslexia, the podcast where we're breaking barriers and doing things differently. I'm Shaye Wiesel, your host, and I'm so glad you can join us. I'm a fellow neurodivergent, and I'm coming from the lands of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation, where I live and work, and I would like to acknowledge and pay my respects to all the tribes across our beautiful country and to all First Nations people listening today. Our podcast was born in 2017 out of a need to give a voice to the stories and perspectives of adults with dyslexia, and our voice has grown stronger year after year. We're now a globally listened to podcast with guests from all around the world. Join us for insightful conversations about living with dyslexia and other neurodivergences across all walks of life. Our special focus is on adult education, employment, social and emotional wellbeing, and entrepreneurship. We're excited to be bringing you this episode and invite you to like and follow us, or even better, why not leave us a review on your favorite podcast platform? So let's get started. Today, I am speaking to Bill, who is a PhD colleague of mine. And when I say colleague, we met through our PhD support group that we run through the foundation. And Bill is a peer, I should say, rather than a colleague. And I'd like to welcome him onto the show today where we'll be talking about everything to do with research and being dyslexic and trying to do a PhD. So welcome to the show, Bill. Thanks. Good to be here. Thanks for asking me. Thanks for coming along, especially because we've just spent the last half an hour chatting instead of doing our podcast. So, yeah, dyslexics get distracted. Yeah, we do very much, which I think is one of the good things about having our PhD group, because we get to talk about trying to do our PhDs, but also all the all the different facets of life that come with studying and being dyslexic. And you are studying a very interesting topic, one that blows my mind, because I can't do numbers at all. So how did you end up doing your PhD? What led you on this crazy journey of academia? Oh, wow. How do you sum it up? For those listening, I'm a mature aged student, but I'm like 50, over 50. In the summer. Yeah, thanks. And so I had I had decades of life in between. And school was horrible. And I have very few good memories of it. So, but I always loved learning. And I felt I was good at it. And I don't know, as I got older, I did little things through TAFE, because I wanted to do human resources. So I did the TAFE Diploma and I started doing the Advanced Diploma. And I topped the year. And this was like, late 20s. So suddenly, I was sort of in a situation where I wanted something, I applied to get into it. And it's all sort of like surprising how I sort of got into it. Because half of me is thinking, yeah, like, I'm gonna be able to do this. But I did. And yeah, I totally topped the year. suddenly And which opened a door that I didn't really believe was there for me in the past. And then I sort of thought, I can do this. And it wasn't until recently, I suppose, in my recent life, that I got into a situation where I could choose what I wanted to do. So in kind of an odd kind of a way, it's like going back in time. And I was fascinated by, I do a PhD in marine biology. So I was fascinated by animals and, you know, the marine life and stuff like that. And suddenly, when I went to university, I was looking at applying, it quickly became a reality that I could almost or pretty well apply for any degree I wanted. you And, know, from someone who like failed, you know, year 12 and dropped out, dropped out because they were failing it and failed grade two and stuff like this and hated school. This was like, one of those epiphanies of, oh my God, I can do my dreamers. So I turned into a kid again and picked marine biology and at every, I didn't really think I could do a PhD in it. I didn't even know what a PhD was, to be honest, even though my dad's a doctor, I didn't know. So as I went through it, I figured, oh my God, I could do this and I'm really good at it. And then I got into the honours and then the dyslexia thing started hitting a bit. And then I wasn't sure that I could do a PhD, but everyone else thought I could. And so I was like, that's good enough for me. Let's give it a go. And here I am. I've got lots of questions to ask you, but going back in time, you said school was horrible for you. So we're of an elk where diagnosis just did not exist. So were you diagnosed as an adult as well when you were doing university? Yeah, so my dad is a retired doctor, psychiatrist. So there's a bit of understanding in terms of neuro differences. And, you know, my mum was just like, my child is smarter than failing grade two, except by grade two. So I forgot the question, Shay. This is me. This is a very dyslexic me thing of like getting totally sidetracked. I'm so sorry. No, now what was the question? I think the question was around diagnosis. Were you diagnosed like I was because we're older and there wasn't such a thing. I don't think I'll just see a diagnosis back on the room. So I'm so random. I was so random. Anyway, so, so, so, yeah, look, so, so there's something wrong with what the school thought I was like because they just thought I was dumb and stupid and lazy and that type of thing. And I what could do, because I could say or tell them all of my parents, all about animals and my mum would be in the car going, oh, what's this plus this? You know, and there'd be big numbers and stuff and none of the adults could do it. And I just pop and go and say it. And they'd be like, this there's a disconnect there. So so my mum sort of could pick this. There's something different about me. So so they got me tested in a time where I know someone could qualify this. But, you know, I reckon half the people as described to me didn't even realise dyslexia existed. And some of the teachers, like half teachers would be like, no, it doesn't. That's rubbish. But she got me assessed then. But I lost that assessment at university. They asked for an assessment and I'm not even sure they would accept assessment from me since I was like late forties at that stage. And the assessment's 12. So I tried uni the first semester because when I did that course in the past, I told you about I never told anyone I was dyslexic. And I tried it, but after the first semester, it became very clear that you could pretty well wipe off maybe 20 to 30 percent of my grades off of every single subject just before I started it because of my disability. And it became obvious in second semester that to give me a chance to actually do well in it, I needed to say, hey, I've got a disability and to get acknowledged, I needed another testing. So I got tested twice and hey, the assessments align very neatly, which is interesting over 30 years later. That is interesting. I've always wondered if I should get reassessed because at the time I was going through my divorce, so I was in really bad state. So I wonder if there'd be any improvements now or and trying to do my PhD. Surely I've improved somewhat with my writing, but it would be interesting to see. And it's interesting that you say 30 years difference that they still pretty much aligned. Yeah, well, that's that's a really interesting point, because they aligned in terms of the the how the different psychologists, one was done by one. The other one was assessed by two. And the two reports align in the sense that they talk about how, you know, the deficits you have and they sort of value it. And those values were basically the same. What was fascinating about it, I found that in these two reports, this is kind of one of those things. And I'm happy to, you know, share them with you, because I think that I just think that's fascinating is is that I read better, you know, and so I had improved, which is a really it was brilliant. And that was just like, you know, that was like that. That was that was amazing. And, you know, you know, and it sticks in. It's one of those things that I think we're talking about before the podcast out of memory and stuff. It sticks in my head that I was told I'm read like a 15 year old. And I was just like, that is better than I'd ever been assessed or, you know, thought I was ever doesn't mean I comprehend the same way. I can read as fast as 15 year old. I won't recall most of what I read if I read that fast, though, to be to be blunt. But I still when you test that basic thing and time it, I can still regurgitate the words without sort of really soaking it in when I'm reading. And this is complicated. I don't get it myself. But but yeah, so that was interesting is is the progression you make in that and things that they pointed out when I was young, which which I think is is frustrating. And the problem with testing people so young is that they pointed out that they couldn't really tell if I was trying or if I wasn't trying when I was reading. You know, I mean, because by 12, I suppose I had a lot of hang ups, you know, bullying and harassment, reading out loud stuff like this. So they put that we're not sure whether this is a true assessment of certain certain things. And so it's great having that one later, which basically said, no, no, these are these are exactly the same. And they hadn't read my old report because I couldn't find it. So it's interesting to see an independent assessment over 30 years later, just saying, yep, you are this, this, this, this, this. These are your deficits and going, wow. You know, that's they are there's no denying it. It's interesting. There's two two points, hopefully, that don't drop out of my head. As I'm saying, it's starting to drop out of my head is, you know, we can improve, even though we our brains are predisposed to difficulties in reading, that we can improve and the importance of early assessments and interventions so that children have the best opportunity they can to manage their disability and to build skills around it. But also and we're getting way off topic. Sorry. No, no, don't apologize, because it's important. And it's the conversation around assessments, particularly when you go into higher ed and you have to have that assessment. But the like how they couldn't decide whether it really was your dyslexia that was impacting you or whether part of it was this is in my terms of baggage that you brought, because by the time you were 12, you'd gone through all those difficulties. And that's why I had. Yeah. And for me, it was such anxiety to think I was being diagnosed at 27 with this disability and how was my life going to change it? I'd taken all this back. I knew I had all this baggage in. And every time I did the testing, because it was over a few weeks, I'd go and sit in the car and I cry before I went home. Because it's like, oh, my God, there's something wrong with me. And so it's interesting. I wonder, you know, again, the importance of having an assessment when we're younger, like even before we hit preteens, because we're not carrying so much baggage and maybe it is a true reflection or maybe it doesn't matter, because like yours demonstrated, regardless of the age difference, you still those primary challenges were still there. Yeah, yeah. Look, it's I mean, I found a lot of benefit from doing it. I but you know, obviously it's a novel thing. I mean, you can't go back in time. But I mean, now now I think I mean, you'd be better positioned, of course, to tell me me actually what they're doing. But, you know, they're assessing kids a bit better now. And it isn't a part of the part of what happens in school in grade one or two or something that they are they are assessed for reading and writing skills, you know, potentially which would show up us. But it's not a formal assessment. So it's not something you can compare it to. Some some states, I think, are bringing in phonics checking in grade one. Yeah. Which starts to give an early indication that children might be starting to struggle. But I mean, normally dyslexia typically shows up in grade two onwards when we're starting to put sentences together and to read whole words and bigger words. Yeah. So whether grade one, I'm not I mean, yeah, I know that some states are looking at bringing in or they already are. Whether it's too early, I'm not sure. I wouldn't want to comment on phonics. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Look, look, you explain things so much better than regarding this. Oh, well, it's it's an area I don't like to step into very often. But you got I don't want to sidetrack the conversation because it is around how we get into doing our PhDs. But the assessment process is really important. And you had to demonstrate by the time you got into higher ed that you did have dyslexia and disability. And so there's two I guess there's two questions. One is around how do you self advocate once you get through to a PhD level? Because what I've found is that supervisors, there's an there's a misconception that if you're dyslexic, you're never going to get to that level. And I don't know that from that I hated my speech degree and wasn't until I did my masters that I actually started to really love learning and see I could learn. And I just had in my head, I just had to do a PhD. And I don't know whether it was because I wanted to prove to people that I wasn't dumb and that I was succeeding in academia because I'd struggled in my life. It was just in my head I had to do it. I didn't know what I was going to do it in. Originally, it was going to be on Aboriginal communities and that space I love working in. And then finally, it ended up being in dyslexia. But how do you like everyone told you you could do it? So you said I was going to do it. Is that what drove you? Is it to see what's behind the desire to do your PhD, I guess? It's a long window. Yeah, look, look, it's really holistic. And I mean that in, you know, holistic and holistic, you know, both. There's there are a whole lot of things here. I mean, I, I love learning about this stuff. It's like an addiction. it's, It's, it's, it's something which I mean, even without doing study, I'm still, I still do it anyway. You know, I'll still sit there for hours and watch a bug climb up a tree and see how it does and why it does. And, you know, I can't get those out of my head. So, so to me, it was a really natural progression in that sense. The barrier was always dyslexia. I see it as, or dyslexia or something which, which indirectly came from the dyslexia. You know, so having everyone say, so me really wanting to do it because it was just, it's just a continuation of what I do. So it's like, it's like getting the opportunity for someone to pay you to do what you just love doing anyway, even though they make you do certain things like write a lot that you hate. You know, they also make you read like all this research on it, which you love, you know, it's just like you, you, you imagine it and you see what they're doing in your head. Like, yeah, you can really, you can see it and feel it. And you relate it to all those experiences you've had. And it's just, it's just a really, it was just a really sort of like joyful thing for my brain to do in that sense. And it makes the struggle of reading worthwhile. So before I was getting a whole lot of, you know, you know, assistance and, you know, before I was really tapping into the text to speech programs like that, the pain was so worth the benefits. And that's just because it's like an addiction. And that's probably a good way to describe it, because, you know, you know, addiction might not just be the chemicals, it can be the process, the your environment and the whole of other things. And to me, it's just me. And this is the cool thing about sort of like the way I see it as I became a kid again, because these were, this was my escape. One of the escapes I did from the torture of school. It was, you know, and home. And it was, it was, it was really, it was, I only have good, strong, good and wonderful memories from learning about bugs and animals and fish and stuff like that. And and so the PhD basically was somebody just said, hey, look, you know what you you want to do as a dream? You know, you can do that. Here you go. And then which made it when it felt like it was getting taken away from me at some stage because the supports really aren't there at PhD. It made me fight to the death, you know, and I hate using that word. That was really how strongly I felt about it. I wasn't going to give up once, once somebody gave me that carrot. It's that's my carrot, you know, this bunny is angry. And I would like, I want to come back to self -advocacy. But it's interesting you say it's like an addiction, because originally when I wanted to do a PhD, I was like, yeah, that's just something in my head I have to do. But I completely resonate with you when you're it's like you're in your flow and your purpose, like for me. And like even when my mum was dying, I was still writing my papers, still doing my thesis and people say to me, why are you doing it? And you kept saying, take a break. And I said, but that for me, that is where I find my purpose and my passion. And I know the work I'm doing is is going to make change for people. And 100 percent. And I really resonate with that addiction word, because it does feel like it, because you're constant. Like, I just love it. And I keep saying to people, I'm going to do go on and do my prof doc or do another PhD and everyone, because I don't get paid like you. It's all voluntary, six years of voluntary PhD. That's dedication. And but I just love it. And I can't explain it because it's so hard. Writing is so hard. I'm terrible at it. But the concepts and being able to go out and talk to people about what I'm finding in Australian first research, that's the stuff that just drives me to keep going. Yeah. Oh, look, a quick example. We'll get back on track. But this when I was doing what was it? It was it was my undergrad and I was falling behind in stuff. It was my third year, I think I was falling behind and stuff. And I just asked for an extension for my now supervisor. I think it was undergrad or it was undergrad, whether it was honours or not, I'm not sure. Anyway, so my supervisor, my to be supervisor and she said and I was I was volunteering for another scientist. I'm doing all this work, all this work. And she came and goes, What are you doing here? You've asked for an extension, you know, for this work, because you don't have enough time to do it. And here I come in and you're doing volunteering work for somebody else on some other non -related project. Bloody bloody bloody blah. And my response to her was, this is how I relax. Don't take this from me. Don't take this away from me. And and I was so like scared of it being taken from me that she felt it like she's amazing. My supervisor is amazing that she was like, OK, and left me to it. And that's that's it is it's it's it was my she was taking my hobby, you know, and I needed that. I need that to distress. And I needed that to to get my head back in track and to try and so I could get back on the horse and punch it again and sit there for hours trying to write this thing and doing my head in and reading, blah, blah, blah, blah. Anyway, it's funny that our self -care is doing something that is so hard for us. I know, I know. But isn't it great? I mean, haven't we just picked the best careers ever? You know, you know what I mean? It's it's it's a funny life just moves you in funny ways. Well, because I've been meaning to do do a Facebook live in our Facebook group, the other one and our community. And it's about my husband says that I've got an addiction of buying books. And I do every time I go to the post office like, what are you going to the post office for? It's another book, but I really do need it. So chapters out of different things.
The Dan Bongino Show
Hinds County Supervisor David Archie Blames Fraud for Election Loss
"This is a perfect example cue up for me cut tension I thought challenging an election questioning towns questioning machines signatures I thought I'd I thought that was a prison sentence I thought that was an insurrection where we would be not told that you're not allowed to question elections it's tyranny it's the 14th amendment you're fostering a rebellion against the United States hang up by the I thought we were told that yet this story seemingly flew under the radar gave me need this tomorrow on the podcast do I forgot I can't believe I didn't get to this. Here's Hines County, county Mississippi, supervisor David Archie Democrat claiming on the local news channel claiming they were the victims of election frauds. I'm just is this guy in the he's he's not Mike Mike Mike have you heard anything any updates from you no prison no no no prison time can you Jim can you do me a favor can you reach to out the FBI today for an on -the -record comment if there's going to be a wanted poster see because this guy's a Democrat alleging during a primary that another Democrat may have tinkered with the election but notice notice there's no FBI raids or anything like that why because he was a shocker this guy's exercise exercising his constitutional right to free speech reason allowed to challenge an election all he wants but Donald Trump it finds his people that indicted in Georgia for the so weird the exact exact same thing so straight Joseph yes justice here here listen to yourself check this out Hines County Democratic Party person by the name of Jackie Hanks we both we believe and we have evidence that Jackie Amos
The Financial Guys
A highlight from Migrant Placement in Western New York Hotels
"My favorite is when the climate people and the Save the Earth folks leave their protest and they leave it filthy, like the litter's everywhere, right? They showed up, the park was clean, you protested, Save the Earth, you know, stop drilling for oil and then when we left, there's garbage everywhere. Nice work, right? Idiots. Alright, welcome everybody to the Financial Guys Podcast. Glenn Wiggle, Mike Lomas, thanks for downloading and listening. We do certainly appreciate it. We have kind of a brief show for you today. We're going to pound out a quick 30 -35 minutes. Mike and I were both on the Morning Mike show this morning, which is a lot of fun. So we've gotten a good 15 -20 minute head start and we're rip run ready to go. We're going to bounce around a little bit, of course. We've got a bunch of topics. I've got to start with this one, Mike. This is top of mind for local Western New York, of course, as they continue to shift migrants from one hotel to another. You brought up a great point in the Morning Mike's podcast this morning when we were live and you mentioned that they're not putting any of these migrants, interestingly enough, in inner city hotels. No. It seems like they'd have the space, but yet they don't seem to want to put these migrants in a downtown hotel. If you remember correctly, I believe this is the Democrats' version of equity. You folks in Amherst are living way too well. Your houses are too nice, your crime rate is too low, your schools are too good, they're too successful, your grades are too high, your graduation rates are way too high. That can't be. And so what they tried to do initially was they wanted to pass Section 8 housing they were going to put in every single community. Still trying. Still trying. If you don't like that... What is that? Is that me? Sorry. If you don't like that... That is good theme music for you, though. It is perfect, yeah. But if you don't like the Section 8 housing in your community and you're going to try to shoot that down, which many communities did, well, now what is going to bring in these migrants and these asylum seekers, right? Look, here's the deal. Some people, I get it, like Venezuelans, we stopped helping them in their own country because apparently now we believe socialism is good, but yet these people are starving, they do need help. But this is a headline that I wanted to read to you, Mike. This is crazy. These countries need to help themselves, right? When you look at Venezuela as an example, which was one of the most prosperous areas in the world. They've got all the natural resources. It was all about free market capitalism and that allowed them to be able to have a very clean Venezuela, a very prosperous Venezuela, and what happened? Well, they wanted big government, they wanted social programs, and within 10 years all the jobs went away, all the social programs are now shit because they can't afford them. Oh, and guess what? It's filthier than it's ever been. And they destroyed other industries. They destroyed their industry. Everything these left -wing radicals touched turns to crap. That's right. Venezuela... That's right. Venezuela was the richest country in South America. There's no question. They were the wealthiest country. They had the second largest known oil reserves in the world and the government took over the oil reserves and destroyed every industry they touched, from oil to healthcare to then they moved on to banking. A million percent inflation. Crazy. But here's a headline I wanted to read to you. And not a headline. This is from WIVB and this is a quote from our illustrious Amherst town supervisor, Brian Kolpa. Just as UB students come and go throughout the year, just as hundreds, if not thousands of people come in and out of Amherst on a regular basis, whose name we don't know, who pass through this town, this is no different. This is a response to a contentious town hall meeting that they had last night in Amherst where a lot of residents came out and said... Those are legal people that roam in and out, not illegal people that roam in and out. You're making a comparison. Let's be honest here. You're making a comparison with an 18 -year -old college kid coming in to go to college. Whose parents? You're going to compare that with somebody that you just plucked out of a refugee camp in Somalia. Could be an MS -13 gang member. Seriously. You're going to compare that to somebody who we have no idea if he murdered his last girlfriend. We're just hearing that in headlines lately. We have a fugitive running loose. A 17 -year -old girl whose parents are very well educated and are now paying $20 ,000 a year to have that student there. Compared to the El Salvadorian gang member, an MS -13. Good comparison, Brian. That's reasonable. We let 50 of them into Erie County. We had two rapes. We had multiple felonies. So you're looking at least a 2 to 3 to 4 percent conversion rate. We know at least 4 to 5 percent of these folks have caused major crimes. Brian, those are not the stats.
The Eric Metaxas Show
A highlight from Chynna Phillips
"Folks, welcome to the Eric Metaxas show, sponsored by Legacy Precious Metals. There's never been a better time to invest in precious metals. Visit Legacy PM investments dot com. That's Legacy PM investments dot com. Hey, you have you checked your bucket list lately? Are you ready to take care of item number seven? Listening to the Eric Metaxas show? Well, welcome. Tune in and then move on to item number eight. Skydiving with Chuck Schumer and AOC here now is Mr. Completed my bucket list at age 12. Eric Metaxas. Hey there, folks. As I hope I promised you previously, we have the joy of a few minutes with Pastor John MacArthur, someone I admire profoundly. He is in a film that I have seen and recommend highly. It's called The Essential Church. Pastor MacArthur, welcome. Thank you. Good to be with you. Well, I have to say that, you know, yours was one of the braver voices in the last few years, and I'm thrilled that somebody tells the story in this film, The Essential Church for my audience. That's not familiar with it. Would you just share the basic storyline of what happened to you and to your church when the covid madness was launched in this country? Well, I think California was one of the most extreme states in trying to handle covid, so they basically said lockdowns, you know, all of that mask distancing and this then hit the churches. They shut the churches down while they left the casinos and the the marijuana places and some of the strip clubs open because they were essential. And it was at the same time that the BLM riots were happening everywhere. And you could you could put your mask aside and go to a riot. But you couldn't go to church. So we we we were hit pretty hard by that. And we thought if there's a real pandemic here and people are going to die, the church needs all the more to be open because you're cutting off a lifeline where spiritual truth is going to be desperately needed for people who think they're liable to die. And some actually will. So what do we do? Well, for the first few weeks, we we just kind of said, well, you know, maybe this is true, maybe we're all we're all going to perish. But after a few weeks, we knew that wasn't the case. So we we decided to open the church. We just opened it with no mask, no, no, no distancing, no nothing. We didn't follow any of the protocols whatsoever. So the state came after us kind of with a vengeance, the county of Los Angeles, the health department, the governor, Newsom, the state to try to shut us down. They threatened to take away our property, our parking lot. They were relentless. They fined me. They were laying out week by week additional prison sentence times. And we decided, look, we've got to react. So we we sued them on the basis of the violation of the First Amendment. And that launched this long, drawn out thing that went on for about a year and a half. They kept postponing and postponing and postponing that. The hearing twelve times, because the judge kept saying, you guys can't deal with the facts of this issue until you climb the mountain of the First Amendment. You've got to deal with the First Amendment. Well, they didn't want to do that. So finally we demanded, OK, we want a trial, no more hearings. We want a trial. And the first thing we're going to do is depose the county supervisors who are in charge of all this and all the health officials. OK, we're going to depose the health officials and we're going to make them tell the truth. Twenty four hours later, they rolled over, gave us everything we wanted, picked up three and a half million dollars of legal fees. They gave us a permanent injunction that the county and the state can never come against Grace Church again in the future. How did we get that? Because we threatened to depose them and make them tell the truth about Covid. And in order to protect themselves from doing that, they forked over. I mean, they wanted to close us instead of that. They gave us a permanent opening and paid three and a half million dollars. You know, part of this, the reason it's so wonderful to hear you tell this story and why I'm glad that this this film exists, folks, is called The Essential Church, is that this lie has crept in to American Christendom, that we're not supposed to fight back. We're not supposed to be political. We're just supposed to roll over and do what the government tells us to do, which is utterly unbiblical. But there are so many in the church that have really imbibed this lie and they privatized their faith and they would say, oh, you know, that's Pastor MacArthur. He's a hothead suing the government. Whoa, he's supposed to be, you know, friendly, making friends with everybody. What do you say? What do you say to folks like that? Well, well, first of all, I've never made friends with everybody, you know, my whole life because I preach the gospel. And the first message of the gospel is you're going to perish and end up in eternal judgment if you don't come to Christ. That's about as offensive a message as you could give. And that's where the gospel starts. But beyond that, we have to I mean, the church is the pillar and ground of the truth. We have to tell the truth. So this is what I can answer your question with one illustration. When we first did that, one of the leading evangelical organizations in the country wrote against us and said, why is MacArthur doing this? This is this is a virus. This this is not where this is not the hill to die on. Wait for the big battle. You know, save your ammunition for the homosexuals when they come after us or whatever it is. And my answer was, look, people said to me, how do you decide which battle to fight? And my answer is we fight every battle. We fight every battle for the truth. For the purity of the church, doesn't matter what it is, it's the it's the little battles that when they accumulate, you end up with a liberal, nonexistent church over time. We fight every battle. We earnestly contend for the faith, and that's right out of the New Testament. I mean, we're told to do that. So it's not that we're angry about it. It's that the church and the truth is, if anything, is worth defending. That's worth defending for the sake of people's eternal souls. And what do you make of the idea that so many in the church missed it? In other words, they did not stand up the way you did or Pastor Che on dead or Jack Hibbs or Rob McCoy. There are a number of folks who understood we need to stand against this, that this is the biblical stand. We need to stand and pay a price if need be. But the majority, it seems to me, in the church did not. And it's it's a shameful moment in the church. And I guess I wonder if some of them are getting it now. They're waking up. Are they repenting of their inaction? What is your sense of how that happened? You know, I think this goes back to the feminization of the culture, and it ends up with the feminization of the church. You just have you have too many weak men, too, too many men who have been influenced by the raison d 'etre of the current zeitgeist. You might say of this culture, that men have been, you know, just emasculated. And that shows up in the church. I mean, you've got you've got weak men and weak leadership, such weak leadership in the church. I mean, look, if you don't think we have weak leadership, look at the president. I mean, that's the best we can do for the entire nation. This is this is talk about not being talk about beta male. I mean, I don't know where that is in the alphabet, but it's far down below that. So there's just a dearth of strong men. You know, the New Testament says, act like men, be strong, be courageous. And it isn't it isn't that you do that to protect your own investment or your own ministry. It's you do that because you're standing for God's truth. It's a much higher it's a transcendent cause, but it takes some courage and conviction. The courage is not something you have to muster. If you love the truth, if you believe the truth with all your heart, you end up defending it. Well, I'm just thrilled to know that you did and that they made a film about it. How can people see the essential church? If you don't have that answer, I can find out and tell folks in the next segment. But perhaps they can go to the the essential church movie dot com. The essential church movie, and it'll list all the theaters all across America, and they can even order tickets there. Yeah. OK, pick their time. The essential church movie dot com. Folks, you need to see this. You need to be inspired. You need to see what actual Christian leadership looks like, because if we don't stand up, God will not hold us guiltless for our cowardice. John MacArthur, thank you for this and everything else. Thank you, Eric. Pleasure. We're doing a campaign for food for the poor. Actually, I take that back. It begins today, Monday, July 31st. People who listen to this program know that we partner with food for the poor. They are total heroes. Food for the poor steps up because there is always there are always hurricanes flooding other natural disasters at this time of year. So because of poverty or collapse infrastructure in a lot of these countries, by the way, in case you didn't know, America is an amazing country. These other countries do not have a lot of infrastructure, so we need to step up those of us who have the ability to step up. I want to encourage you to go to Metaxas talk dot com and give what you can. Let's get a good start. Go to Metaxas talk dot com. Do what you can or just text Eric to nine one nine nine nine. Please do this. Text Eric to nine one nine nine nine or phone eight four four eight six three hope eight four four eight six three. Hope eight four four eight six three. Legacy Precious Metals has a revolutionary new online platform that allows you to invest in real gold and silver online. In a few easy steps, you can open an account online, select your metals of choice and choose to have them stored in a vault or shipped to your door. You'll have access to a dashboard where you can track your portfolio growth in real time. Any time you'll see transparent pricing on each coin and bar. This puts you in complete control of your money. The platform is free to sign up for. 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RADCast Outdoors
"supervisor" Discussed on RADCast Outdoors
"And <Speech_Male> <Speech_Music_Male> <Silence> so <Speech_Male> just, <Speech_Male> yeah, whether there's <Speech_Male> a lot or a little, <Speech_Music_Male> there's a chance. I <Speech_Male> live down the road here. <Speech_Male> We're in the middle of farm <Speech_Male> country for those of you who <Speech_Male> don't know where our studio <Speech_Male> is. 40 <Speech_Male> miles from any mountain. <Speech_Male> Yeah. Not close to <Speech_Male> the mountains. <Speech_Male> And I remember one morning <Speech_Male> because my dad <Speech_Male> worked for a game in fish <Speech_Male> back in the day. <Speech_Male> He got <Speech_Male> a call that there was a <Speech_Male> there was actually <Speech_Male> a black bear <Speech_Male> and they wanted to know if I <Speech_Male> wanted to come see it because <Speech_Male> they knew we were in the area, <Speech_Male> you know, the lander folks. <Speech_Male> <Speech_Male> I got to go see this <Speech_Male> BlackBerry. It wandered <Speech_Male> into <Speech_Male> someone's <Speech_Male> trailer <Speech_Male> because they have the door <Speech_Male> cracked for the dogs. <Speech_Male> So <Speech_Male> this black bear, <Speech_Male> it's just a <Speech_Male> young one. <Speech_Male> It comes in <Speech_Male> and this gal <Speech_Male> feels something <Speech_Male> brushing up against her <Speech_Male> foot. She's in bed. <Speech_Male> She feels <Speech_Male> this thing brushing up <Speech_Male> against her foot. <Speech_Male> Thinks it's the <Speech_Male> dog, no big deal. <Speech_Male> Then she sits <Speech_Male> up and sees that <Speech_Male> it's a black bear <Speech_Male> and she's <Speech_Male> screams and <Speech_Male> <Speech_Male> goes flying <Speech_Male> out the door, <Speech_Male> almost knocked the <Speech_Male> door off of the <Speech_Male> off of the trailer. <Speech_Male> It goes up this <Speech_Male> huge cottonwood tree <Speech_Male> on their place. <Speech_Male> <Speech_Male> And I showed up <Speech_Male> after they had <Speech_Male> darted it and <Speech_Male> it was down on the ground and <Speech_Male> they were working it up. <Speech_Male> But yeah, <Speech_Male> they can be <Speech_Male> anywhere. <Speech_Male> Even down here. <Speech_Music_Male> You were talking about <Speech_Music_Male> <Speech_Music_Male> the <Speech_Male> Laramie Cheyenne country <Speech_Male> Vito. <Speech_Male> I was over there <Silence> at <Speech_Male> our headquarters once <Speech_Male> for some meeting <Speech_Male> or something and <Silence> they had <Speech_Male> a black bear show up with the <Speech_Male> Walmart distributing <Speech_Male> center, which <Speech_Music_Male> is on the Internet. <Speech_Music_Male> <Speech_Music_Male> <Speech_Male> Does this happen, <Speech_Music_Male> but <Speech_Music_Male> you ended up catching <Speech_Male> a bear right there. Burial <Speech_Music_Male> track can happen. <Speech_Music_Male> It can <Speech_Music_Male> happen anywhere. <Speech_Male> But that's the beauty of Wyoming. <Speech_Male> Yeah. <Speech_Male> It is. <Speech_Male> And you know, we have <Speech_Male> a wild state and wild <Speech_Male> place and <Speech_Male> I think it's cool <Speech_Male> because we have people <Speech_Male> like you that are <Speech_Male> dedicated to helping <Speech_Male> with that stewardship <Speech_Male> of that resource. <Speech_Male> Because it truly is a <Speech_Male> resource. <Silence> And it's a wonderful <Speech_Male> thing. So <Speech_Male> again, Dan, <Speech_Male> it's been awesome, <Speech_Male> man. Thank you so much for <Speech_Music_Male> <Speech_Music_Male> coming on the show. <Speech_Male> Until <Speech_Male> next time, and we'll <Speech_Male> do this again. All right, <Speech_Male> sounds good. Thank you. <Speech_Male> Thanks. <Speech_Male> Thanks again for <Speech_Male> listening to the rag <Speech_Male> cast outdoors <Speech_Male> podcast. <Speech_Male> We hope that you've <Speech_Male> enjoyed the show. <Speech_Male> If so, <Speech_Male> please go to Apple <Speech_Male> podcasts, <Speech_Male> Spotify, <Speech_Male> or whether you're listening to <Speech_Male> this podcast <Speech_Male> and subscribe, <Speech_Male> share, and <Speech_Male> give us a 5 star <Speech_Male> rating, which really <Speech_Male> helps other people find the <Speech_Music_Male> show. <Speech_Music_Male> You can find all of <Speech_Male> our shows, recipes, <Speech_Male> giveaways, <Speech_Male> videos, and much <Speech_Male> more. At <Speech_Male> rag cast outdoors <Speech_Male> dot com. <Speech_Music_Male> While you're <Speech_Male> there, please help support <Speech_Male> the show by purchasing <Speech_Male> a rag cast outdoor <Speech_Male> shirt <Speech_Music_Male> or hat. <Speech_Male> Please don't forget <Speech_Male> to follow us on Facebook <Speech_Male> and Instagram. <Speech_Male> We also have <Speech_Male> a rag cast <Speech_Male> community on Facebook <Speech_Male> called rag cast nation, <Speech_Male> and we'd <Speech_Male> love for you to join in on <Speech_Male> the conversation there. <Speech_Male> And <Speech_Male> of course, please <Speech_Male> help support our sponsors <Speech_Male> who make this show <Speech_Male> possible. Thank you again to <Speech_Male> PK lures, <Speech_Male> both spider <Speech_Male> and high mountain <Speech_Male> seasonings. <Speech_Male> Until next time, <Speech_Male> get out there and enjoy <Speech_Male> the outdoors.
RADCast Outdoors
"supervisor" Discussed on RADCast Outdoors
"They hound me all the time. And even a couple of guys have bought it. Got it to their house opening up and said, oh, I realize it didn't work for my crossbow in our turn. Yes, you certainly. Do I need huge big red disclaimer? I'm a compound bow hunter, guys. But I get it. We actually had a gentleman drawn out of state Elk tag. And he had had rotator cuff surgery on both shoulders earlier in that spring, and he worked all summer trying to get up to the 55 pound minimum, and he just couldn't do it. Couldn't do it. And he's like, I don't want to turn my tag in. I don't want him. Crossbows are legal, dude, go grab one and you know what he did. And that was where the lightbulb kind of came on for me is because guys have been requesting. I'm like, yeah, you crossbow guys are weird, go away. And as I said it out loud and you can get after me, but after seeing him struggle to carry that thing through the Woods because on a sling, it's bouncing off his leg, right? And it's heavy enough and awkward enough when we're going up a steep trail where I've got both my hands on hiking poles and going. He's back there just custom this crossbow. And we kept buckling it on his backpack form and then we'd have to get the top of the ridge and unbuckle and hand it to him. You don't feel like you can be a solo hunter with a crossbow. So those spider is going to open up a whole world of a spot in stock archery, but I will say whether you use a crossbow or a vertical bow, especially these out of state guys, you know, we don't shoot at hair. We pick 6 point folds, right? Make sure you know what your target is and you're shooting behind it. This idea of I'm just going to cock and lock and shoot at anything that moves. I don't know where it came from. And it seems to be a little more prevalent in the crossbow community that I'm just set up and ready to go and hair trigger. But yeah, definitely identify your target. And with the crossbows, they scare me because you can carry them with an arrow cocked and loaded, right? They're more of a rifle than they are. A traditional bow, and I did hear a story. We're going to harp on safety here for a second. A compound guy killed his hunting buddy. Just by walking into the back of him. They were stocking up a road. There was Elk in the road. This was in the Pacific Northwest, and the guy in the back had an arrow knocked up. The guy in the front stopped, again, in the back was focused on the Elk, not his buddy up front and pushed that broadhead right through his kidney and killed him. No kidding. No kidding. He bled out before we got to hospital, and then it happens every year guys, so just because it's not a gun and it doesn't throw a bullet. You know, you got a sharp pointy stick that will cut arteries and you'll bleed out pretty dang quick. Yikes. So for thousands of years, yes. Yes, safety is, it kind of scares me, especially in Alaska with knives when we were on kodiak. I was kind of got after the guy's a little bit when we were trying to break down critters this fall. We were very successful on a goat and black tail hunt and sitka. But it's 70 mile plane flight to the hospital. And the plane might be a day away. You got to pay attention to what you're doing. You got to have some backup safety equipment and be conscientious of that. But I do want to know what is what is kind of the minimum legal recommendation and then kind of your personal recommendation for bears, bears are as far as hunting equipment, whether archery or rifle. Well, I think you already alluded to it. And we have minimum requirements as far as poundage and calibers. Well, I mean, it's based on the cartridge. But the main thing is, again, knowing your target, but also practicing and knowing where the vitals are. It's all about it. I'm not going to tell someone they need to have an 80 pound bow when 55. I mean, Fred bear, one of the most famous videos of killing a brown bear is him with a 45 pounder. He killed everything with a 45 pound and non wheeled ball, of course. But I think that there's minimum requirements. And that's done just based on penetration and the hides of a bear. But mainly be comfortable with the gun or bow that you're using. Shot points chop placement, knowing where and bears are a little different shot placement than an ungulate. So that's important to know. And there's a lot of information about that. And that was one thing when we did our the mandatory training for the grizzly bear hunt. We went through that, and we actually had moving videos of bears and showed people where the shot placement is. And so especially if you're on a beta situation, you have time. And so make sure you have a caliber that's legal that you're comfortable with and know where to take that shot. When and where to take it. Because they are built really well. And if you hit them in the shoulder, that bone is pretty tough. Yeah, and I mean, yeah, it's up to, you know, it's our privilege is hunters to do things ethically. And it doesn't matter what species you're talking about. If it's a squirrel or a or else before I'm concerned. And so it's about that. And knowing your target and we talked about this already, especially with bears, you know, there's different species out there, but knowing your target and knowing your shot and being comfortable with the shop for you take it. I think black bears are just so fascinating and it's been fun to listen to you talk about them, but I want to ask you another question and then that is what are some little known things about black bears that the general populist just isn't aware of. Are there any unique aspects to a black bear that the implant delayed in place? Absolutely my mind. You know, the fact that grizzly bears have their offspring with them a year longer than a black bear. And so when black bears go into fall, black players and gooseberries are zeroing the yearlings going to the den with the female for grizzly bears, but they'll split off with black bears. And so there's some different maternal trades. And that's why we can see black bear populations grow a little quicker than grizzly bear populations. You know, that whole climbing, the different claws and the evolutionary things through time is very interesting to me and the less aggressive behavior of a black bear and the defense mechanism built in with climbing trees and that's why they're more associated with forested areas, obviously. They like trees. Yeah, and so it's interesting there. Talk about the medial ridge between a Blackburn, grizzly bear. As far as it's just the size difference. There's more muscle attributed to a grizzly bear. So you need more more of that bone to for that to attach to. That's going to increase the grizzly bears. The bite strength, the bike strength of grizzly bear. I think the brown hyena, I think, is like the highest bite force of any of any predator predatory mammal. But and if you've seen not that BlackBerries don't, but yeah, if you see the skull, the sagittal crest that runs in the spine of there, those older grids, it's so pronounced and because yeah, their heads are there's just so much muscle. And that's what we see in so many scenarios, and it can be with black browsers, there's such a bite force in a defensive encounter with grizzly bears. They're not trying to kill person. We've had a few people that we know in the past that were just bit and because of where they were on there as an individual in Yellowstone, unfortunately they hit the femoral and
RADCast Outdoors
"supervisor" Discussed on RADCast Outdoors
"A brown bear at the bait. Now, and then in what we see is if one of those big black bears here, those dominant males, if people can be patient enough to wait till the females go into estrus, that's when they get dumb. And they start showing up. And now they're not nocturnal as much. And so that's when we get some really nice, there's a really good black bear hunting right here, you know, right up in the winds right here above lander. So what he's saying, guys, is that last couple of weeks a season. Wait, wait and pass the little berries. Towards the end of season, they become less nocturnal and more active. Well, that's the good part about baiting is it allows for selectivity. And it basically we protect females with young independent young and if you have time to look, you can tell. And then those animals aren't even available for harvest. And so, and it's tough to sit and watch, you know, especially if you're new to it. But it's fun. When you're new to it, it's tough, but once you've done it while it's like, oh, I got to take these questions. If you have the patience for it, and we've increased a lot of our limits that it's to still maintain stable populations, but there is that chance to give it that extra effort and maybe a larger male will come in, which is what most people are seeking. So can you talk about the management of the bears using hunting? I mean, we're kind of moving over into the hunting part of this because that's what David loves and I'm curious about just because I don't bear hunt. But as a management tool, why is hunting a good one? Why is it something that's so popular? It's gaining popularity. I think there's a lot more people that are just interested in and a black bear as an animal to go out and hunt. You know, it's kind of a new idea. It's a different mindset than going out and getting your Elk. And I think there's a learning curve because a lot of the hunting with BlackBerries is in the spring. It's associated with spring hunting. So if you've got to think spring hunting like turkeys, your spring hunting with for black bears. And so there's a learning curve there, but it's fun and it's a different time to be in the Woods, and you get to see a lot of cool things. And the meat is really good. And so there's more interest in that, and then you also get a really cool hide with it. And basically we see that hunting is something that that's how we quantify what's going on in a population. And until again, until in 2013, we hadn't no other insight into black bears other than our hunting information. So we look at the proportion of harvest, what's coming in for adult males and females and then as you get into a population what you would expect to see as far as proportions of males and females and ages. And so that's actually how we assess the population. And we've changed from we've changed from basically no regulations, obviously, to regulations of harvest and using that data to manage for differing levels of the population. But by and large, again, we're seeing stable increasing populations in most areas. And we still, again, we have a very active conflict management program. To deal with the problem individuals as far as not using just how to deal with that, we deal with the problem individuals. If we can put a hunter on a conflict situation, we will do that. But it's more about having a chance to go out in the Woods, have another animal that you can haunt and also view and just see out in the Woods at a different time of year, maybe than you would be out there. And I know the bear is really good. I had a friend who harvested one a couple of years ago. We were on a memorial trip camping trip in Glendale and he's like, have you ever had black bear steak? No, I've never had black bear steak, and he got some out and we did surf and turf because I just got a bunch of wall ice that we had while I and then we had some black bear steaks, and that was excellent. I was really surprised at how good it was. Yeah, there's a lot of different ways to cook it. And. Small time period we did have a grizzly bear hunt going. We had mandatory orientation and training for the hunters and we actually provided recipes and talked about how to cook bear meat and so there's a lot of information out there. It's been in Wyoming wildlife as well. And so it's another, it's another wildlife species that's there for viewing for photography, but also for to hunt. And consumption and yeah, it's something that I think is gaining interest. American bear foundation is having their banquet this Saturday and Cody with wowing while a federation and that that's that group has grown to American bear foundation from western bear foundation and they do a lot of on the ground work and we're just seeing an increase interest in bear hunting. I mean, it's more than doubled since in the last 20 years and the amount of harvest is doubled as well. And yet we have more bears. Yes. Well, that's a little contradictory. How do we have more bears if we have more bears harvested? Great question. People forget animals reproduce sometimes, unfortunately. Well, the hunters are really focused on the bears that are kind of on their way out anyway. And that helps too, right? David has talked about this at length with big bull Elk versus a young Bullock and you can look at it across a lot of different species, but yeah, it's something that when I was younger, I never really considered, but then I hear people talking about harvesting bears and having the stakes, which were really good. Bear oil using that to cook with. And I guess it's excellent. Pie crust in the world. I have a couple bear rugs and they're kind of cool. Yeah, so I mean, there's a lot more to a bear than you've really would typically think. Because when I think of going and harvesting something to eat, I think Elk analog deer, those things, right? But yeah, bears another great option just like we talked about on the mountain line episode mountain lions good too. There's more options than we normally consider. And there's definitely this has been talked about and drilled on other podcasts, but there's a hierarchy of Patrick puts a picture of a walleye on there or a rainbow trout or we put a picture of a turkey or move on to a deer and Elk it's still okay, that's food, right? All of a sudden you put a picture with a cat or a bear, had a predator and now it's like, well, wait a second, that's not food, right? And there's definitely a societal kickback for harvesting predators. For sure. But that bear steak that I had, I'll tell you. That was excellent. I was really impressed with it. Now, I think we do need to talk about this because cooking bear, you have to be a little more careful than you do with maybe cooking. Yeah, the suggestion is to cook it all the way through. Non non rare bear meat basically. And so for those. Just a different things that because they eat a lot of different things. So those of you who don't know the same thing with pork. You have to be really careful because of what they eat. You can get some nasties in your system and make you very sick. So you have to cook all the way through. There's a good example, Stephen renell. Who's on, I think it was, I think he's out of keen eye Alaska, actually. And they were trying to cook bear steak over a fire, willow, and didn't get it hot enough, and it's close enough and ate it and they all got very sick for quite a while. And so why does that when they're kind of like with pigs when they're getting stuff out of the ground? Yeah, like I said, they ate a lot of different things. And so it's a function of what they eat and especially an animal that has a propensity for scavenging, has the ability to pick up things. I don't know if you guys saw last week, I think it was put out that there's some grizzly bears in Montana that had avian bird.
RADCast Outdoors
"supervisor" Discussed on RADCast Outdoors
"It's radio. So I can't see my hands. And we do some den work on black bears. We do not on grizzly bears, but we will do some den work on some of these areas where we've done the hair snare work. We'll go in and collar bears before we do the hair synergies to get an idea of their home range. And then we can set up our good size. And that's one thing after doing this in multiple areas, we don't have to color an animal in order to put out the correct grid size. So that's less invasive now. But when we do have a marked, we will go in on those dans and either replace colors or see if they had offspring and just kind of quantify that. And so yeah, I mean, you get gratuitous bear cub picks that are really cute in the den. But it doesn't bother him. They wake up, but we put them back together and then they come out in the spring. So do they typically have two, two to three? Two to three. And that's standard. Most of the time, right? So on our bear bait, we got a bare bait up above things canyon there, had it for years. We had a bear repeated year after year after year. He actually had an ear tag, came in and found out that he'd been trapped at the lander dump. Collared and tagged and hauled up. And I mean, we were targeting this bear specifically because he was huge. I mean, he dwarfed every other bear, but he was extremely nocturnal. I mean, I think we had four years of consecutive trail camera pictures on the bait of this bear. Year three or four, he actually lost ear tag. But because I'm a little off of my dates, but it was like 6 or 8 years prior to that that that bear had been collared tagged and moved probably a young adolescent, right? Sure. And he had never got back in trouble that we know of, right? You guys didn't know about that. How long would a bear like that live? Because assuming that he was probably it was 6 years prior before we first saw him on our trail camera, he was probably three or four or maybe two, but he wasn't one. So I'm saying he was three, 6 years, he was 9 when we first saw him. So he was in the early teens when we no longer saw him anymore. How long in the wild in kind of that habitat is a bear going to live? What's an average? We'll see him in their 20s, young 20s, and they could get older. We've seen grizzly bears just over 30, which is pretty rare, but grizzly bears will definitely have been in their mid to late 20s. BlackBerries, we don't have as much data on them, but they'll live over 20. And what we see through time is their teeth start to wear down and through time. And then that's where that omnivorous lifestyle allows them to live potentially longer because they don't have to catch their prey like a wolf or a lion does if they lose their teeth, but we see those bears. It all starts senescing potentially in late teens, early 20s, for black bears, but yeah, they're a long lived animal. And that's why we mark all those animals if they're involved in a conflict, but depending on that, I was just a bad place, wrong place wrong time. It's cool that he was able to be moved and seen through time. And bears aren't always, especially grizzly bears, I've heard the relocations aren't always as successful. They kind of tend to show back up on the same branch. Actually, they have a real strong homing behavior. So we'll move them across as far as we can and they'll come right back sometimes. The relocations for grizzly bears worked 20 years ago or more when there was a density. Food was more pleasurable, right? Yeah, and a lot of times you'll move a bear so you can secure and attract it. And so when it comes back, it doesn't have that. And so we still will do that. But it's just tougher. And these put the black bears. If they're involved in any type of human conflict, we're less apt to move them quite honestly, just because we know it doesn't work that well with them and we don't have the constraints of ESA protections and things like that. Well, we have a robust population too. And we'll find his number and you can go get that. If you have a number, I can tell you whatever happened with that, bran, we can see how old he was in. That would be interesting to find out and just kind of get some details on him. You know, you mentioned the cameras on Bates. It's a lot of people, especially if they've been very hot for a long time. They kind of get over the killing part. And they just like to look at those and that we have people that will have their family groups come back and have the same color cubs through time and things like that. It's kind of neat to see that through time. No, I really enjoy bow hunting over a bait for BlackBerry. And you mentioned it. It's not about a harvest. I mean, deeply deeply want to shoot a grizzly bear. I get to go this spring to kodiak and go grizzly bear hunting, right? And we'll leave the grizzly bear hunting out of here for this. We're on black. We've covered that. I'm gonna go back to, for me, hunting black bears over a bait, I kind of like to take the camera and get the trail cam pictures and it's no longer about getting a bear, right? If a sub adult comes in or a sound with cubs, nah, she gets to live, right? I'm looking either for that Uber old big bear or a really cool color phase. And I'm more about I just want to take pictures and be 20 years away from a bear and he doesn't know you're there. It's something creepy when you're sitting in that tree stand, you're almost falling asleep and all of a sudden you catch movement because you don't hear anything. You hear nothing. And here comes this bare floating in. And then the barrel starts moving and the logs start moving and your eyes fool you two or three times, you have to look down and go, is that really, I don't hear anything. They are super stealthy when they want to be especially because they're not as aggressive when they're coming into the bay. They are really wary of the bears. Great point, because especially in areas that have grizzly bears and, you know, we don't have baiting in most years. But grizzly bears occur, but because the fact that they're not necessarily the dominant one, they're pretty leery because they know there's going to be other animals around there checking it out. And like you said, the sub adults, the females, they're looking out for the big boys, which are more nocturnal. And so yeah, just around that abate site, you can sit and watch all these little behavioral social things occurring with these bears. Those sub adults are those the south with cubs will tell you when another big bear is coming before you even tell them they know that other things. Even I baited a little bit on kenai Alaska and it was on the legal on the refuge. You could go through their class and get a permit and get a bait square, but you could only harvest black bears. And so I have all these trail cameras and footage of grizzly and one thing I did to deter the grizzlies was on my steel drum I cut about an 8 and a half inch hole. So those big coastal brownies couldn't even get their power in the bait. They sat there and smacked the side of my barrel and crushed it like a beer can't just you can see it in the pictures after three or four weeks the barrel kept getting smaller and smaller because they'd smack it hard enough and a little bit of the bait would shake out but what was very interesting is predominantly those big, big males would come in right at daylight rated dark. The big coastal brownies and the black bears were in there at noon. Full sun, noon they'd run in. They'd eat, they'd run out because if that exact same. They don't want to have that conflict with
RADCast Outdoors
"supervisor" Discussed on RADCast Outdoors
"You using barbed wire. Yeah, put those grids out and just put it about because I found a couple places where there's one strand of barbed wire about waste shoulder height. Yeah, exactly. And then there's like a blood lore in the middle. So it's not a food reward. It's just something they smell. And they'll go and check it out, and then they'll leave it a little chunk of hair. And we go in and clean those out. On a weekly basis and do that throughout the course of the summer, in a grid approach. And that allows you to actually quantify the density of bears in area. And so the thought process there is that we're doing that across the state and a systematic approach. And then revisit these areas in say 5 to ten years. And look at how that coincides with our harvest data, where we look at the population trend and we're able to convey what's going on in population based on what we see on the ground as far as harvest, this is a great way to ground truth that. And that's the future of bare management and Wyoming is that we'll continue to do that across the state and potentially I would like to do this with grizzly bears. Get a point in time estimate for grizzly bears in the gy. I think that is probably what eventually will have to do. There's enough consternation as far as numbers. I think that would let us start from ground zero. But I like this approach and we've been able to make it more efficient and that really helps the local people talk about what's going on with their very populations as well. So when you're doing these, obviously, you're probably going to get grizzly bear in the grizzly areas, right? You're going to pick up hair from that. So is that pretty common that you're also getting data? Grizzlies? We haven't done it in an area with grizzly bears yet. And so, but I think my thought process is that as we've made this process more efficient and smaller grid cells, we looked at this, probably a decade ago, as far as trying to do a hair snare type of an estimate for the gy and it was we estimated $13 million and it was just unreal to be able to do it based on the technology, but since then, there's been a lot of efficiencies gained and the reality of actually doing it on the ground is out there. And so I'm not saying that that's going to happen, but I think something that could be in the future for that area. And then yes, if it was an area where grizzly bears and black bears co occur, we would be able to basically two for one type of a deal. But we have done it in the grades we ever and we did it in the big horns and did not pick up any grizzly bears, which is very important for people to know, 'cause everybody thinks there's grizzly bears there and but the other places we've done it, we have not picked up those other animals, but they seem to be working that direction. I mean, I think eventually they'll be there. I mean, across the board grizzly bears are expanding, for sure. And we're seeing them in places they haven't been for hundreds of years. How about black bears on a micro scale just the state of Wyoming? Are they expanding? Are they across the state? What are they going to ranging? They have expanded. And just in my tenure here in Wyoming, we've seen expansion. And some of those areas east of the bighorns were starting to pick up more bears in that country. The Ferris is the seminoles, areas like that, used to hear. So we have seen some expansion between and among mountain ranges, and there's a couple that have shown up in the black hills, and so we have seen expansion of black bear populations in Wyoming. We don't have well, it's not for me to say what's good or bad, black bear habitat, but it's not the prolific berry producing habitats that some areas get where they can get really big densities, but they're going to have to be more carnivorous and some of those areas just because they don't have that berry resource. Exactly. And you just won't see the density. So you're doing some of those areas as well. Yeah, I remember growing up near Cheyenne. If you go to that little pile of rocks is what I call in between there and Larry, you have Vita V and that area had quite a few bare dens and you'd find bear scout in there because there's a lot of black bears in there, but there's also forage. You know how they have a fair amount of stuff to eat. Yeah, yeah, and we've seen that basically with regulation and management of these species we've seen an expansion of black bears and other carnivores in Wyoming. So speaking, I mean, we're kind of on black bears, but I want to know how well do grizzly bears and black bears coexist. There's obviously a hierarchy there, but yeah, and so obviously grizzly bears are the dominant one in that. And what we've seen, and it's been a while since we've looked closely at this, but research has shown that in areas with grizzly bears and black bears that BlackBerries are more active during the day. And so they live in the same area, but they those BlackBerries, you know, it's a spatial temporal thing. When grizzly bears are not as active, BlackBerries are more active. I mean, if there's a choke cherry bush that grizzly bears in BlackBerry is not going to try and go get those choke chairs. So they find other places that go, but that is a question we get from a lot of black bear hunters. And it's something we might try to look into in the future to see what kind of changes we could see, but right now we see that they basically figure out ways to live on the same landscape just in a different using different habitats using the same habitat in different ways. Do you see a lot of predation of grizzly bears on black bears? You know, we really don't. It happens. It can happen, but there's not so much of that just because black bears are wary enough. And they're going up a tree and yeah, exactly. And unless it's a really desperate grizzly bear, it's just going to look up at the bottom and probably keep going almost likely. So yeah, just kind of following along on that. I know there's been some videos, people have found grizzlies going after black bears in a den, and it's pretty wild, but does a BlackBerry even have a chance fighting back against a grizzly bear like size wise in Wyoming. I know it varies like if you go to Facebook. If you go to Vancouver Island, those black bears are big enough to hold their own against just about anything. But a Wyoming black bear, I just don't know what that would look like. I mean, again, if it's a young grizzly bear going up against an old mature male black bear, a male black bear might have the would have the upper higher ground on that one. But for the most part, just behaviorally, a grizzly bear is going to be more dominant than a black bear. And that makes sense. Yeah. They've got the attitude. That's for sure. It's that chihuahua in town. They got a tough no matter where they're at. What is I mean, when we talk grizzly bears a little bit, we talked about their dietary and we've found that they're kind of ungulate predominant, especially in the gye. What's the makeup of a black bear's diet kind of annually? Very high in vegetation. And so the black bears definitely follow green up. And grizzly bears do too. Just GY grizzly bears are have more meat in their diet, but that's not all meat. And so both black and grizzly bears are definitely following that, especially that fresh green up, just like on you, let's do the early green up has a high nutrients. And so they follow that and they try to time their den emergence with as that fresh green forge, and then as that progresses up the mountain, then they move up and do that. Black bears also do a lot of digging and eating grubs and things like that as well. And in certain areas, we see black bears probably king and on gut piles a little more in the gy, it's more the grizzly bears are the top dog there. So I mean, BlackBerries will take it. But again, any type of a food source like that, they'll take as well. They're very opportunistic. How about calves? You know, a little bit. We haven't seen it much in Wyoming. There's an areas of really high black bear densities and like the western coast, and California there was some neonate studies with deer were a black bears were taken neonates and all the work that we've done or the university has done it, at least with deer,
RADCast Outdoors
"supervisor" Discussed on RADCast Outdoors
"Of that
The Tennis.com Podcast
"supervisor" Discussed on The Tennis.com Podcast
"And then yes, I think there is that aspect of being able to capitalize on the local market more. But also at the same time, not only having live matches that people but how do you create highlights that are being able to distribute it through different streaming services to TV and get that exposure more and more because I think as you said and that's one of the hardest things because it's individual. So you're cheering for that one player that might not be playing every single torn, right? So I think there's all these different challenges, but again at the same time, there's beautiful opportunities is just there are multiple ways that I'm sure you know being involved in tennis, you have been exposed to 50 different ideas on how the structure of tournaments and level tiers players and so on can be. Because there needs to be, I guess, a concrete way for me as a fan to watch and I'll get confused. Sometimes it's hard to see there's three tournaments going on. And then top 20 players are planning different parts of the region and you're like, for me, if I'm not a huge fan of tennis, but I like to watch, I will be confused, right? Yeah, and I think one of the things, you know, like I've got, you know, I was in tennis, and obviously they had friends and supporters when I'm coaching, they like to keep up and watch. But one of the things I think we start to do better is to be able to tell the story of a match in 15 minutes. So like if I'm scouting like, you know, my players next opponent, I'm gonna go on YouTube and I'm not pride not gonna watch, like the kiss of death is when I pull up a YouTube video and the only video is two hours and 21 minutes. I'm like, I'm not gonna watch all two hours, right? But I think the tour they gotten better on trying to tell the story of the match within 15 minutes of video, right? And I think there is a fan base. Let's say, you know, if I got like four of my best friends playing the NBA, right? They're not gonna watch what happened in Beijing, right? But they will watch the story of the match. I'd be like, you know, I talked to him like, oh man, how'd it go? Why I saw what happened in that 5 four. I'm like, oh, okay, you know, so they kind of can get into the match if it's told right. Mister Wright's story. And if it's told concisely, conversely, as a coach, the person that's choosing eclipse, if I'm using that clip for scouting, that could be the wrong clip I want to see. That could be like, yeah, long story of the match. And it's been a few times with a full match wasn't available. And I'm watching the highlights. This is not happening in a way that, you know what? That's what I'm tricky, but I understand what you're saying in terms of this thing on TV for one second.
The Tennis.com Podcast
"supervisor" Discussed on The Tennis.com Podcast
"But my transition was that I worked on the operations department, which it takes a lot of the entries withdrawals, all the rooms, the Dow was very, again, on the back end, where you see all the players entering the tournament that withdrawing, why not getting the quotes from the agents, getting calls from the coaches, how much are they going to get find and all those fun stuff? Which continue to intrigue me, okay, you know, hopefully the next step will be to actually be at the tournaments, facing those people which actually growing up, you see and you want to either be there or be a part of it. And I think I had a great chance where did it say allowed me to start as a player relations, which basically you were there to be the player's voice within the tour. So you travel a lot to the tournament, be there for just talking to players about new rules, coming in, your businesses coming into the getting their feedback and portraying back to the management of the WCA to hear, okay, what are the players thinking? And then after that, which was my final two years and a half headed a route, I went on to be a tourist supervisor, which then, you know, it's more on the aspect of doing this schedules. Making sure that the tournaments are up to a standard dealing with players, coaches, agents, which has definitely brought me a lot of learning life and great networks such as yourself. Well, let me ask you this because when I view college tennis players, right? I think all of us, we all go out and we try to play a few tournaments. And then that doesn't work out for us. And then we try to find a job in tennis. And for me, it was like, how do I delay entry into the real world? Like, how do I not move to New York? Go for Goldman Sachs. Work 18 hours a day. Go to sleep, do it all over again. How can I kind of like
Eu tava la
"supervisor" Discussed on Eu tava la
"The blow tech and elegance really are more slinky. Banana won't but and a fascinating trigger who are brass down the southern cup young bull q. Guests to i remember who follow alien essentially jimmy apostle running level up real cloud follow prayer yemen. Mccolm someone that fought the newsprint margaret. When was fought the falcons whose curricula karaoke and yellow villa you since bill bill guitar. Mona in togo have taken meal. So careful bouma migrelief conducive vehicle yankee. North of aluminum can follow. Bustan she best. He went to bench quad G or do kacoos commitment for yeah file. A boot bronco. Do fema booking policy your article brain. Quite inter is used to picot could lizzy comp- ravel's are shula commute to by zona sway. Bunka will do it can prophylactic cash. Yeah yeah live so far i. Put key Nancy's the la follow kwaley by attacking drag it out that i regard them near the pagoda peaks ease the sabbath ultimo vets-go frequently for numerous past saddle. Qian cave sack Bridgetown do we've got professional on Dzhabrailov after the drunk will simply whatever program or visit fai view heck skill myse- border legible. Max your print to bone but should they call me story since she hex front almost inquisivi on keenum as a fear on the worst of those. Yes hopefully prayed towel for back in the eight which he will. The boys were key next for like my voice. Enjoins the as we start the little alka usually Avella for quasi cousy contour my storage g quasimodo route because elite for medical also for any religion of inquisitive cohesion issue would kill energy sorta mazda possession duis sisters view view the preseason windmills musi. Es episode really started his own. Triple borrowing on those across the. But i disagree. Kenya fuzzy dragged. John is a yearly per year airfoil evolves recognizing us because for belhadj angeles stab dossier review videos making us daily route was a see curious to three steers clear up casual soviet doctors quiz. I in it's so you might as you not going to take your sokaia. Feel against back over for plasmas meas- nicole this last goodbye. That can f the dark. Yahoo this individual stampa's as you follow most muslim margaret mojo..
Eu tava la
"supervisor" Discussed on Eu tava la
"You check quiz program at the father's persuade. Calogero fetch falter Now the jennifer blue was whether or not sack with g. Midsize programmers Generally gonna coach juice. Fish are william and then black magic yoga chas. But other netscape sir. Can you get our broader. Cutting thrown nogi share at musburger farraj raise positional to just watch. Clark put up thirty sabbath. Soy contained but for four year post on we started warm meals following the miracle. Guard the moon that instrument. But i'll ask how the people bows make Felisa began schedule. Yeah you're moving to mom on dopamine as he talks the back for mass in england. But i will. The fourth he fought was but another for Lebron liberal is sponsored by this young post state. the main don't t- phillies moments. Kelly Mckee davis condo flinch. That they want the leaks logged poising kyosai because all phony bill to pate for new margaret. I-it's i were to sil- what issa basements they do. Chain desma quest for the yamagata the persona of course offer new michael schumacher instrumental. Hold other helen. But when their followers ya human jaguar schumi cockrel few mcdermot. Whoever follows simba in memorial. Do more of the cosmic say when they can an entry. Noah's makiko salvage yovany skeet. Nikolai go to Big you wouldn't add East why the zuma munoz's of kim phillies mink as naming racial. Allows you to you to stop in so Seemed for cop. Pessoa key was francie. Do civil ceo customized additional guard. Was he's gonna have. We'll get into super game us for the to you margaret source Cheer moon confer kavak wedged into paolino's homa marker and keep. Don't watch me for case you think you're correct. Yes jacobin capriccio opinion. Listen share bring cavern about trump in your pocket itchy. one god. You're buying in themselves. Daily who've been getting pinpointing goofy cerebral key house. he don't get physical flow fizzle flow. You been tarum cough phone. Cheekily cina policies associated The zinc dodgy karaoke. Indonesia are if not gives us alaska. Lap cage yeah. He's got them and don't take to choice. Daily vehicle cuisine. Watch porno for that without the so for quest is will normally calling for those beginning falcon. Yeah two billion marks on and on she goes baths beanie all-spanish muslim pina. Pseudo pignon chris. Stylus elemental courage for flow publishing. Alberton football yes. Senior shingles casino kind of. She got to in tiny finger. Us out is good. Medicine nausea golf of confer diva's council both muslim migrant among those presents yet. She believes the guy. Simply kavak apology. Pinkett who See your sheet. Mommy women woman fast song. Carl spinach piggy. The both amazed that there is turbines meeting using Kia which one follow quayle. No for you for then june for medicine for them april on on the migra visit more qian Quite user sued gossip different quashing vista the leaves. I watch golf. The kazakh terrorist.
Eu tava la
"supervisor" Discussed on Eu tava la
"Cantelmo malaria. Key simply a co field days before settling sabic staff. Palumbo almost yellow. Adam to nash myself. I'm lacking putting thoroughly fowler. His phone them the the donut near the same era pornography alpha moon to espn to sabatini. sabic changed. She was going to kill maga summer. Jamir thought throwing requisite mickey Becky looked was huge. To take his muscle mice forge it. Try to meet your attributes entails nutrient until the donahue mute. The who mueller for you might see what all the issues of poverty and abuse cisco was divy facia gassing and like what do you mean dollars each festival yours there. But your zooms ops. I your host fleet vaki enormous problem in milan. That op association. But i would maneuver assignment. Fair washes performing liberal. Your host club. Premie your bloomberg here. My shorty fit kundun. I do we should him is gonna mark magas mopus and with my spouse which is called the sale no doubt donahue nudo schori fee to comb their neither do conde naturally. Es yet there there might commodity to care over ashland. Social is kill inadequate zone disease and all that other shortly copious manger will new gussied tomago from Malvo cheer for sure of jeff fiasco fiasco the such as priority shorter shorter Physical is this curb illegal. Dial i cheer about y heap. You never Moscow us loose talk gentlemen alleged app march daily kin-. My man of twisted yours. Speaking mr slimbridge lambere at evil at ask him. If virus quiz equals von commits. another vacuum. a scheme you're go by those says linda piji guests to fuzzy end will move to budge. Cash do route hookah siles premier propelled. Look as this no meager can't feel at of course that which may feel assume elliott. It smells to do the which part of the zoo desi religion our senior if combustion another guy that a key added to just followed you. Portalegre who commit suicide ilk moravian. Who is allowed to do the moon. If say now who will love think you still care for now is yet to fix that of quiz. Where so much are they book me. Krishna started because mommy and paul brakha elmo patterson adult yamile putter former use technology online. Do brasil issue. Asandra gordon ludicrous. Kapalua bay utah. Houma thing cis bravo sylvie should have non wassenaar inch dial lewis online at residue. Mass not blown assiniboine. Jakarta on my. You mucus tinkle's program so infringing data scientists. Don't pass your mice nas workout here. Decision was shot to oman of. Tim's diverse scale out. That could you versus you. Bex g-o-v inches. Donald them with iraq. I here a millionaire fuzzy new courses now lulu it is poured ciroma desa specialist up on komo bay bob remus by -uilt avella interest league upper way to see how guidance privacy of equity more into eastern holiday also while achieve inclusive oppourtunity diets on..
Eu tava la
"supervisor" Discussed on Eu tava la
"Ekiti push to further mafia-style amos team or original in W v them. Nope caused because that zoe's for the networking for him into law casino frequency of those roy. Details sela cataldi lugo we yes get is key for the usable for the sales took like a product sales. The may lereah balloon is at facilities author e la trophies. Virus passes niche put over reach was did luneta Our the hebrew sweeter it. Dave volvo by the sokolow coulda eve fish passage quiz question much more nineties. The democrat mama. Quaker chat there was a mainstay scattered. Discuss all others do it sale i'll be increased fallacy. Bass we say that starts in foul davidge own premier premiere senior risks musical jeremiah Yeah email nam avenue. The pa the rela by mars daughter mining sugar the amurri greater fatally zach levine input lag even avalon indochino into for this sequence failures. Dan could sa hydro. A hydrogen is. Okay yet. I'm the bovina commiserate. No no arkansas carter. He may open cycle mode and breaking fist. Juve yankee nail shot. You follow this page of aussie so come across l. c. l. a. between july muslim conversation ninty diplomat and i ended up but spectacular each poodle. Hydro check checkup. Signed the hajj choose for coaching opium. I support gay. Naoto my ukraine and also magical which cash you're moving towards fires a or israel messina about commodity will do my car in still. Don't not to each all the lookout issue veteran fuzzy on the dow she facilities tammy conquest phillies. The mccaw came on film. Christopher lieke shabas came on few mikhail which caskey's stuff went said By volusia gye mark owner kind of keeps. You got a few who tom cat. Watch you through the oscar film calmly daily e use master. Those certainly orca for cooperative. That boko v know assault fusi. We will probably mckinley destroy humorous. Abort coaching you single stage. That are gonna ball into icepick. Touch up is when she was that you've big supermarket. Mothers pick that you can view few museums. I've been killing a cap. yeoman's who bill by taos skyrocketed. That typical are source of ee. Came fast community. Oh came on. Female shepherd spoke with your kitchen. She issue follow furniture..
The Workr Beeing Podcast
"supervisor" Discussed on The Workr Beeing Podcast
"They attribute the reason why they didn't get help to right so they had three different types of attributions right so it could have been like. I didn't get the help and partially that's my fault I didn't get the help and my supervisors is at fault. Or i didn't get the help and my company is at fault which makes sense sometimes. Supervisor doesn't have the power to give you. the answer doesn't have the answer right so when they looked at that so just kind of as an additional tidbit.