Heroes

The Tesla CEO has a reputation for being unconventional and unpredictable, but his accomplishments are undeniable. These are the leadership tactics he deploys when building and running companies.

3 of Elon Musk's highly unusual leadership principles

How you fun. Elon Musk is one of the most fascinating business people in the world. His approach is so unconventional. The guy has a very belligerent management style. He's very hard to work for. Were he not the owner or the lead shareholder or the controlling shareholder? All of these companies, some of which don't even have boards of directors, any conventional board of the actors. Were he a hired hand would have fired him a long time ago. But look what he's accomplished. Everyone wants to know how he does it right? What are his daily management principles? It really made it worthwhile to dig in and look at kind of the tools that he uses that have built him an empire but also an empire that many question may be built on sand. One of the principles I learned about it from one of his engineers who spent 10 years with him at spacex is that he loves to keep turning over the workforce. There were a lot of people doing things that didn't seem to have a lot of value. And I think that's true. Probably most Silicon Valley companies maybe not to the degree to which it was at Twitter. But yeah, there's a potential for significant cuts. I think out of the companies without affecting their productivity. In fact, increasing their productivity, his personnel policy is extremely demanding and extremely belligerent. This engineer was telling me if I made a mistake in February, I'd spend the next 11 months worrying about making a second mistake because if you make two mistakes a year, you're out at this point. I think I know more about manufacturing than anyone currently alive on earth. I can tell you how every damn part in that car is made. He demands that everyone know everything there is to know about what he calls the idiot index and the idiot index is knowing what the raw materials are that go into every part, what the cost of each of them is adding them up and then knowing what that finished part costs. And if you don't know that number twice, you're out. Musk's greatest talent may be his ability to sell a vision. He doesn't want his shareholders or his investors to think too hard about returns on equity or what dividends are going to be or any of these kind of conventional metrics because you can never get to a $650 billion market cap for Tesla using conventional metrics. You really have to believe and he gets people to believe it's going to move to just a truly massive scale scale that no company has ever achieved in the history of humanity. The vision is essentially the Teslas that are out on the road and the ones he's going to sell in the future are going to be worth multiples of what you paid for them. Here's why he's going to send you self driving software that you can install in the car. You drive the car nine hours a week on average. But with this software, your car can circulate all day as a Robo taxi, 50 hours a week, you've got this money making car picking people up. Therefore, the Tesla that you paid $40,000 where it's going to be worth $200,000. Therefore, he's saying, who cares about what our margins are? Who cares that they're going down? The point for us is to sell as many Teslas as possible. We're going to discount, we can sell this software for so much money. That's where the big money is going to come from. This is a tech company, not a metal vending car company, like all the others that have market caps that are 10% of Tesla. Frankly, Tesla, cars are robots on wheels. Um Anything that's connected to the internet is effectively an endpoint actuator for artificial intelligence. One of his tactical strengths is his ability to spin these situational arguments that we'll use completely different points of view depending on what he wants to accomplish for the same company at the same time. For example, in the case of X, it's in his interest to paint a very bad short term portrait of what's going on there. That philosophy is aimed at his banks, the worse they think things are going, the better his chance of buying out the debt at a huge discount because they can't get rid of the debt because the interest rates are too low. On the other situational side, he's looking at the future. It's another gauzy vision that he's promoting about how it's going to be worth $150 billion be among the biggest market cap companies in the country. And that's aimed at satisfying all of his big investors who are probably not so happy right now. Kind of a good cop, bad cop argument in the short term. We're doing horribly that's aimed at the banks in the long term. We're going to do great. That's aimed at placating the shareholders. I think there's a certain music man element to Elon Musk and that his arguments have to be taken with a lot of skepticism and that has not been the case so far. But now you're in a situation where a lot of people are getting disappointed. Clearly, all of the big names that he pulled into X. These folks can't be happy with what's happened to the valuation of that. He's got 13 billion in debt. The interest rates are eating him alive. They're absorbing most of the cash flow. A lot of Tesla investors are not happy either with the decline in the margins and the decline in the share price, who knows how much lower it's going to go? So really things are not going well for him now and we may be in for something of a revaluation of his promises and pledges.

Here are the 5 largest companies in Europe based on revenue.

Introducing the Fortune 500 Europe

Untapped Leaders founder Jenny Vazquez-Newsum explains how our view of leadership is shaped by the past and offers advice on elevating more diverse voices.

3 tips for becoming a more inclusive leader

There is under representation in the highest ranks of our organizations with women and people of color. 10% of the Fortune 500 CEO S are now represented by women. And all I see in that is that 90% are represented by men. That's just one example of why inclusive leadership is so essential, we have to widen the roads to be able to move many others to those roles. And really think about how we define leadership based off of modes of inclusion. There are includers and then there are those who are included. And so if you're exercising inclusive leadership, you should be really aware of that power dynamic of how you are including others. And why that is the exchange that is happening? Leadership frameworks really began with what was called Great Man theory in the 19th century. And it was just that Great men were connected to leadership. And ever since our frameworks are kind of scaffolded there, we have a long and deep foundation of leadership models that only represent some of us and not everyone. And that's really where I think we think about what inclusion actually means in redefining, what leadership looks like leaders for today's age, uh really need to be skilled at describing the what, you know, the, the goals, the outcomes of of an organization, what we're moving towards and then letting the team members really think about the how uh having room to approach their work, their roles in ways that are resonant for them um that are authentic, they may bring different approaches and really just allows room for the leader to get out of the way a bit and let people thrive very often. Still someone kind of makes a misstep, you know, a leader comes in and redirects and really just kind of takes charge. And I don't think that's the approach that allows leaders of all backgrounds to thrive. We want to relinquish that control a bit and see what emerges as far as the leadership that is authentic to those who you work with. I will often see, you know, a lot of workplaces that will leave the feedback conversations to the annual review or maybe biannual, very limited and very formal and very top down exchanges for feedback that really limits the potential of understanding and being inclusive of all the perspectives at an organization. When we build a culture of feedback where feedback is given often uh where it's in conversation, where it's in the weekly stand up, then it becomes part of this dynamic process that starts to shape the impact of an organization we need to build in ways for team members to actually give feedback up and really speak to ways that, you know, a supervisor, a leader can improve. Once we get to a certain position, we don't stop growing, we don't stop needing to know how we're doing the best place to learn where our impact is felt or where it's, it's, you know, misaligned is to hear from those that are experiencing that.

Fortune's 100 Fastest-Growing Companies list ranks global companies that have seen the most growth in revenues, profits, and stock returns over a three-year period.

This industry showed the fastest growth in the past three years

And what the landmark court case tells us about how the crypto industry has operated in the last three years.

The biggest bombshells from Sam Bankman-Fried's trial so far

Welcome to, let's discuss where we discuss some of the hottest topics of the week. I'm Leo Schwartz. I'm joined here by my colleague, Ben Weiss. Uh We spent the better part of the last three weeks at the Sam Bateman free trial. Yeah, I mean, we've pretty much seen the prosecution's entire case. Uh They started with their first witness which was a victim who lost about $100,000 on FTX when it collapsed in November 2022. And since then, they've rolled out a suite of other witnesses to testify against Beman Fried, including the three star witnesses in the case, Gary Wong, then Caroline Ellison and then Masha say, Leo, what do you think has been the biggest bombshell to come out of the trial so far? So as you mentioned, the prosecutors have brought up their three star witnesses who were all members of Sam Bakeman Fried's inner circle. We knew they were going to testify. But I still think seeing them up on the stand basically saying definitively that they committed crimes, they took customer funds for their own purposes and it was the direction of their former friend, Sam Bateman Fried has been pretty stunning. We've seen a lot of very raw emotional moments. I think a climax of the trial has been Caroline Ellison crying on the stand discussing the crimes that she did commit. Nasha Singh described the actions as evil. It's been pretty shocking even expecting what was going to happen. Ben, I'm curious, how do you view the impact of the trial on the crypto industry the way I was thinking about this trial is, it's essentially a look under the hood of how the crypto industry pretty much interacted with each other. Um, from 2020 to 2022 there's been looks into these crazy lending practices between these big firms and trading firms. Um And there's also been pretty explicit declarations that um, some tokens like, you know, F TT or B and we are essentially equity like instruments. Um So, and I think there's probably more to come. So the prosecution has pretty much presented its entire case with its three star witnesses. Next, we'll see the defense come up. They're expected to take around a week, a week and a half. The big lingering question is whether Sam Bakeman Fried himself is going to testify. That's still unknown. We should know that by end of October early November and then the case should wrap up. That's all the time we have for today. This has been, let's discuss. Please go to fortune dot com for more

Laxman Narasimhan tells Fortune that if anyone gets a minute of his time after 6 p.m. they "better be sure that it's important."

Starbucks CEO on work-life balance: "It's got to be a pretty high bar to keep me away from the family"

Starbucks CEO: "It's got to be a pretty high bar to keep me away from the family"

When I wake up, I meditate for 20 minutes. It helps me get ready for the day. I also meditate at the end of the day for about 10 minutes. And it helps me prepare uh to go to sleep. But it also helps me reflect on the day in order for us to connect with ourselves. What I have realized over my 30 years of work is I find meditation to be truly powerful. It's a way for you to get mindful for you to get centered. And so given that coffee at the heart of it is about connecting with yourself in order to connect with others when we have coffee tastings at the start of major meetings and we have them for all our major meetings. I thought it's important for us to meditate during this coffee tasting so that we can connect with ourselves. And through that be open to connecting with others, we start meetings at five after the hour, which sometimes is a bit confusing for me. I sometimes show up early, but the five minute break between meetings helps us in subway center and helps us get ready for what comes next. I'm very disciplined about balance. If there's anything after 6 p.m. and if I'm in town, it's got to be a pretty high bar to keep me away from the family. Anybody who gets a minute of time after that better be sure that it's important because if not, I'll just wait for another day. I do schedule about 100 and 50 to 250 minutes of personal exercise over the course of the week. Sometimes I find myself catching up on a Sunday. I must confess, but I do have a time and I find myself being driven by that time. So at seven pm, on Sunday, I hit 250 minutes as you get to run bigger and more consequential parts of the organization or even the organization, you get a lot more thematic in your leadership in a very simple messages that you, you know, cascade and repeat for years. And I found that to be really quite important. And I find that part of my role has changed as well because what I'm doing now, in particular, as I think about culture change and leading culture change. I work in mindsets and what mindsets do I believe that people need to evolve in order for the culture change to stick. And so my messaging also includes the kind of mindset changes that we have to evolve to an example would be an empathetic mindset, you know, we're a customer service business and we have to be empathetic, given customers walk into our door or a no ex shells mindset, which is really about how we all, you know, courageous in the choice as we make and the facts we present. I think resilience is a big uh element of what, you know, drives me and I've always believed in renewal in terms of leadership, you know, 57 years, you renew yourself by doing something different, even in the same company. But you end up doing something quite different.

Fortune's Most Powerful Women is a comprehensive list of executives, 67 of whom are CEOs, from around the globe who are leading companies across industries.

Fortune's Most Powerful Women: 100 execs running the world's most influential companies

Fortune's most powerful women list is a ranking of the top women in business all over the world. We look at the size of that executives, company or profit and loss line in her executive role, her impact on society and the world around her both positive and negative as well as her company's broader impact beyond its own wall. This year for the first time, we have 100 women on the MP W list and it is a combined list of domestic and international executives. Number one for the third consecutive year is Karen Lynch, the CEO of CV S Health CV S Health is the largest company in the world run by a female CEO with 322 billion in revenue. In 2022 the health care system is changing dramatically when we laid out a strategy and we've been very deliberate in the execution of that strategy and, and technology will be an important part. The other top executives on the MP W list include Julie Sweet of accenture, Mary Barra of GM Jane Fraser of Citigroup and Jessica Tan of P. It's really exciting to even be able to have a list of 100 female executives around the world. When you think back to when this franchise started more than 20 years ago, it would have been impossible to find 100 women working at this level in global business. I fundamentally believe that talent is created equally, opportunity is not so intentionality is the only way progress can be done, especially when you're talking about gender and racial gaps. The US has been ahead of other regions when it comes to gender diversity in business and other parts of the world are catching up. This year, 67 women on the NPW list are CEO S 10.4% of fortune 500 companies have female CEO S and that is a record that allows us to bring these 67 CEO S global and domestic onto this list. We have women from finance, tech, retail, energy, health care and more industries. There is a real opportunity for next gen technologies to improve the biggest challenge of our sector, which is the productivity of R and D Discover, develop and invent new medicines and vaccines. It's the most profound challenge of our industry. This year's list has a bit more representation from the luxury industry with Delphine Arne, the CEO of Dior and heiress and potential successor to the LVMH Empire, and Lena Na the new CEO of Chanel who was an outsider who came from Unilever. This year's list includes some women who work at startups rather than established companies. And that speaks to how influential the startups can be on the world stage before they are decades old businesses. It's taken a long time. It's taken 10 years to achieve what we set out in our original vision deck. Um So it has been a long time in the making, but you kind of learn a little more every, every step of the way. Um And every time you achieve a goal, then you be ready and more prepared for the next one. The list has 53 newcomers. We have Linda Yacono, the CEO of X. Formerly Twitter Kim Kardashian is the co founder of Skims and now Sky Partners, a private equity firm, Sue NAVI the CEO of Cody, which is the beauty giant behind brands like Covergirl. She's a trans woman and it's still rare for a trans woman to hold this kind of role in global business. Susan Lee, the CFO of Meta, she got the job in 2022 at 36 years old, which is remarkable given that the average fortune 500 CFO is 53 in the first half of 2023 about 100 CEO S left their jobs and 13% of their replacements were women. That's a huge increase from 2018 when only about 2% of CEO replacements were women that speaks to how women leaders are meeting this moment of rapid societal change and executive turnover. If some of the rapid change of the past few years calms down. We'll see if those doors stay open. But for now, women leaders are ready and able to meet this moment.

Electric vehicles, food waste prevention, and helping displaced people find jobs are some of the priorities on this year’s Change the World list, Fortune’s yearly roundup of companies enacting positive impact on people and the planet.

59 companies that are changing the world: From Tesla to Chobani

Electric vehicles, food waste prevention, and helping displaced people find jobs are some of the priorities on this year’s Change the World list.

To change the world. This recognizes companies that are using the profit motive and using their business models to have a positive impact on people and on the planet. It's also important to us that you are making money. We do want to make sure that this is not charity but business. The list isn't ranked. I like to use the metaphor of a hall of fame, for example, in football or baseball. Each year, a new class of great performers gets elected to the hall of Fame, but nobody really tries to rank them by how good they are relative to each other. This year, especially with climate change awareness. Becoming more and more urgent. We zeroed in a little more tightly on efforts to sharply lower carbon dioxide emissions. We gave quite a bit of space to companies in the United States that are working to accelerate the rate at which Americans convert from internal combustion engines to electric drivers are worried that they might not have access to electric chargers if they buy an ev one of the companies that's doing the most to fight against that is a company called Charge point. They operate a huge network of charging stations across North America and all these evs are going to need batteries as well. So we are recognizing a South Korean company called SK on. They have been partnering with Ford and Hyundai and Volkswagen and other companies to essentially build battery factories here in the United States. So that the United States has a safe supply chain, food waste actually generates quite a bit of greenhouse gas when it rots in landfills. So we look at companies that are trying to make sure that less of the food that we produce winds up getting thrown away. This year. In particular, we saw more companies than usual that are working on figuring out how to reach displaced people. There's a record high number of displaced people in the world right now and a lot of companies are trying to figure out how can I give them the skills to have some economic security? How can I help them find the right place to settle, help them become my customers by making their lives more economically stable. For example, we're recognizing Chobani which launched a few years ago what's called tense Partnership for refugees. This is a coalition of about 300 companies worldwide that have all committed to providing job training and jobs for the displaced populations that does not immediately generate a profit, but it does create a workforce that can then work for those companies. So in the long run, they are benefiting by filling their own labor needs with a population that really needs the help. There's a lot of attention being given by companies to helping younger people and people who aren't sort of financially established in their lives get a little bit of traction in the broader economy. Isu they help younger people and people who have been having financial difficulties, build up their credit scores. So what is Susu will do is help these people essentially earn credit for things like on time rent payments is Suu reports. Those to credit bureaus, the credit bureaus register them and it bumps up the payers scores that's going to help them down the road when they need to borrow money for an auto loan or to get a mortgage. Abbi the big health care company, they have a very innovative a program designed to help younger employees use the company's 401k program to help them pay down their student loans whenever they make a payment on those loans. The company puts a matching contribution in their retirement savings. That's important because often younger people have to really choose between saving for the future and paying off their education. Thanks to some recent changes in federal tax law, a lot of other companies are going to be able to follow their lead. Starting next year, the population of companies that are trying to have a positive social impact is definitely growing younger workers, millennials, Gen Z very much want to work for companies that have a positive purpose. More and more companies are recognizing that to invest in protecting the planet, to invest in building up the skills of the people in their communities is going to essentially protect their revenue and their profits and allow them to continue to operate and continue to create wealth. Fortune publishes the change the world list partly because we're still quite bullish and quite optimistic about the ability of business to solve different social problems. In fact, in a lot of instances, we think that businesses can act and make a difference when governments are struggling to do so. At the same time, we are a really established business media brand. Our voice means something in the business community. And we believe that by recognizing companies that are making a difference, we're adding another incentive for people to do great things and boast about them.

Founders Forum 2023

Jona founder Leo Grady thinks pairing A.I. capabilities with the evolving science around the microbiome can lead to big health improvements—and be the basis for a successful business.

A.I. is uncovering the secrets of your body's microbiome

Jona founder Leo Grady thinks pairing A.I. capabilities with the evolving science around the microbiome can lead to big health improvements


I think if you're not continuing to learn and continuing to grow as, as both a person and as an entrepreneur, then you're probably in the wrong place. Jonah is building these large language models on the microbiome specifically because the microbiome is so complex and the science is evolving very quickly. Every single month, more than 2000 papers are being published in PUBMED on the microbiome. No human being can read all of those papers but a large language model can and what these papers are showing is that the microbiome really underpins so much of human health, not just G I and autoimmune conditions, but cancer, obesity, liver disease, diabetes, even Parkinson's Alzheimer's depression anxiety. And so we have the opportunity to really bring this world's knowledge to interpreting a microbiome test and evolve that toward the clinical mainstream. So we're starting with a wellness product that is cash pay. And so selling that really through two channels. One is through uh concierge medicine, integrated medicine, functional medicine where patients are are paying cash for excellent services that really go beyond the normal mainstream of of clinical medicine. And then we're also selling direct to consumer on our website. As we move forward, our goal is to go beyond the current literature and build a whole platform of microbiome data and an A I layer on top of that. And then from that platform, be able to build whole new diagnostics, whole new therapeutics and uh and really work with the life sciences industry, the BioPharma industry, even the food and beverage industry to take this information to make better medications and better food. So I've had a number of people in my family who have Crohn's disease, colitis, celiac undiagnosed G I issues. And as I've watched them go on this journey of, of trying to get a diagnosis or even when they have a diagnosis, trying to manage these diseases, trying to understand what they can eat, what drugs are going to work for them. The demand and the need out there is, is real. And I think it's something that's very energizing and motivating for both myself and the team. You know, the funny thing is I've never actually been at the earliest stage of a company before. You know, when I joined, when I finished my phd, I joined Seamen. It was 400,000 employees, right? The ninth largest employer in the world. And then heart flow. When I joined, there were 50 when we grew to about 500. When I joined page, there were about 15 and we grew to about 100 and 70. But this stage is actually quite a bit different. And so my, my comfort zone is probably like, you know, a year from now when, when we have a little bit further, we're a little further along with processes. So just, you know, all of that initial stuff, setting up payroll in the beginning and, and all of that, um, were things I hadn't done before. I think you need conviction on what you're doing and it needs to be something that you wake up every day and, and want to do.

Nasrin Mostafazadeh and Omid Bakhshandeh are the founders of Verneek.

This couple is on a mission to create helpful A.I., and they are starting in the grocery store

This couple is on a mission to create helpful A.I

We've been obsessed with making human language, the new machine language and we literally couldn't let go of it. And I'm so thrilled that the technology is finally working. Our mission is to build the most helpful A I that augments human knowledge for anyone anywhere at any time. What we have done is to build this A I platform that can basically make these very seamless interfaces that you can put on top of any digital environment, any data that you have in any shape or form and make you as a consumer to make better, faster decisions using voice and text interfaces. So the very first use case that we could spin off of our platform happens to be in the shopping domain. So in the commerce, so e-commerce or physical retail and brick and mortar stores. So what Quin shopping A I does is it follows, it helps you get answer to your personalized questions with the most accurate up to date. In, for example, uh Mama four can ask, what is the healthiest peanut butter I can buy that costs under $4 in this particular store. And then Quinn literally immediately spontaneously gives you the very particular peanut butter. That is why health metrics, the healthiest, the questions could range from that being about product as store to any store questions, just customer service questions like when you close the store, what is your return policy could be about? Recipes could be like, I'm looking to cook, you know, meal that costs under $20 and my kids hate fish. So something that we have found is that in the places that it has been launched right now is most loved by store associates themselves. They love it. And this is helping them to do the real job better, make the store run, better manage the inventory better. So, so bringing that gap of like knowledge and helpfulness all together, it just helps everyone. The hardest problem for A I is actually the easiest one for human being. So there's this thing called paradox that tells you that's language capabilities and doing basic reasoning that a three year old child can do is the easiest for humans, but the hardest for machines. So we including myself, I switch gears, working on language A I ever since. And so the rest of this kind of history, we like all, all of our time, like all the time that we had back in Iran, we were like kind of working extremely hard to make sure that we can like accomplish like the biggest thing that we can accomplish. We were always like looking for the what is the biggest opportunity and biggest opportunity for us was the hardest problem. And the hardest problem just, just going after the hardest problem every time that we could, we thought that we might be able to solve that problem that we came to us 10 years ago to do our phd and kind of go after our dreams. And right now we are sitting here say that having started a company, especially in the middle of the pandemic has been the hardest thing we've ever done. And the most rewarding one as well at the same time, it's just been incredibly satisfying to go through this roller coaster that it is to uh basically navigate your way to, to start something from scratch. And if you really don't love it, you will fail. The only reason we are doing what we are doing is that we obsessively love it. If you don't love it every day that you wake up, it's gonna be a tough journey.

Founder and CEO Uzoma Orchingwa says making it easy and affordable for inmates to communicate with people outside of prison will cut recidivism and ultimately reduce the prison population.

Startup Ameelio believes helping inmates succeed after prison starts with a simple phone call

CEO Uzoma Orchingwa says making it easy and affordable for inmates to communicate with people outside of prison will cut recidivism

Ameelio believes helping inmates starts with a phone call

I had no experience in startups. I was a philosophy undergrad. I didn't know anything about running a business. All ideas seem crazy before you succeed. Emilia is a non profit technology company that is working to fundamentally transform incarceration. So what we do is we build a free to use communication and education, software and hardware that we provide to incarcerated people, completely free of charge. A communication suite, a full communication suite and that includes video calls, voice calls, e messaging. But the unique thing about what we do because often get questions like, hey, can zoom do this. One of the biggest challenges in this space is that every security is of vital importance to the primary correction clients we work with. So we have to build in a ton of security features that allows them to, you know, safely manage their facilities, enabling access to the outside for the incarcerated has been proven to reduce recidivism. There's an abundance of studies that show that more contact with love. One can have an up to 56% reduction in incarceration. So imagine, you know, someone's incarcerated, they're away from their families. They're in an eight by 10 cell and they can't be able to communicate with their families. It causes an extreme amount of distress. But you also learn that it's one of the real major cause of in prison violence and future recidivism is idle time and lack of hope. My parents were both college educated, college and education was always something that I was expected to do and accomplish. But a lot of my friends were from single parent households, parents who had been incarcerated, brothers have been incarcerated, or the vast majority of them actually ended up being incarcerated. And that really kind of set me off on this path, this academic path to understand the system, understand what's going wrong. And to figure out solutions to solve it. As a nonprofit, we need to find of philanthropic capital, get off the ground. So in the early days, you know, especially with Criminal Justice Foundation, it was almost impossible to get funding because their assumption was that this, this industry is so predator or so monopolized that, you know, what is a small tech nonprofit going to be able to do? But the way we actually crystallized it was COVID hit prisons had to shut down on prison visitation. So remote communication, virtual communication became so vitally important and we were able to break in. And then we're because we had that, that use case a case study, we were then able to kind of expand into other departments and other counties across the country. One piece of knowledge that I wish I knew back when I was starting. Emilio is to not dwell in the uncertainties because you're going to learn it. You know, if you really want to be a fund, you really have a passion and vision to build something. Be relentless all the way through. Ok.

Air Protein CEO Lisa Dyson's mission is to find a sustainable solution to the world's demand for protein.

This company is transforming air into meat

The way that we make food today. It has led to the clearing of an amount of land equivalent to the size of South America and Africa combined and it emits more greenhouse gasses than the entire transportation sector. So how do we make food as we continue to grow in our population in a way that doesn't break the planet air protein is focused on being a part of that solution. In 2005, I was one of the many people who went to New Orleans after hurricane Katrina hit and that experience impacted me in many different ways. One of the ways is that I knew that my work had to have an impact in this world and fast forward a few years, the fact that I'm trained as a scientist I began to think about and study what the climate, climate scientists have been saying about the fact that these types of weather events were going to be more intense and more frequent seeing when I was there in 2005. Just how that affected people's lives directly made me want to be a part of the solution. So ultimately, we built Air protein as a way to try to be a part of the solution. We were very creative with the science, but with the name, we're very straightforward, we make protein from air. And so how does one do that? You might ask? Well, it's based on work done by NASA during the space program where they were trying to figure out how to feed astronauts on long space journeys. This is back in the sixties and seventies during the Apollo Space Program. And as you can imagine, if you're on a long journey to Mars or a distant planet, you don't have acres and acres of farmland to deal with. So you have to figure out how to feed astronauts in a way that's super resource efficient use what you have available and it can grow quickly, very quickly, very fast. And so the process that we have, we are commercializing based on their pioneering work is a process that's very similar to fermentation. But the difference is there's no agricultural inputs whatsoever. We use elements of the air, air, water and energy and we make protein from that, we have raised 107 million to date in the beginning. People ask is this science fiction, you know, is this real? Can it be real? How can you make protein from air? So we had to prove it. So the challenges are always initially around demonstrating that this was actually possible. And once we demonstrated it, it was possible. That's when we were able to start building this ecosystem and that we're getting more and more companies and partners as is really around the table to help us create the future that we're working to create. And we've just opened our first air farm in San Leandro, California where we're excited to bring to the world a way of making nutritious proteins with no arable land, no farmland, no agricultural inputs required whatsoever. George Bernard Shaw has this quote that goes something like the reasonable person adapts himself to the world. The unreasonable person persists in trying to adapt the world to him or herself. And therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable person. As a founder, we're doing things that haven't been done before. And so as there are these highs and low lows along the way, it's important for founders to keep their eyes on the prize and inspire the people around them and tap into what inspire them and bring them along on the journey. The only way to predict the future is to create it. And so the future that I'm working to create is a future where more and more and eventually all of our protein is sustainably sourced. The first day when I was able to take a bite of air protein was a day that I realized that this can have the impact that we wanted to have

Kathryn Minshew tackled the problem by building The Muse, a website originally designed for job seekers.

What to do when your dream career is not so dreamy

I could write a book on the mistakes that I made as an early stage founder. And I imagine if most founders were being very candid, they could to, I grew up thinking for several years that I wanted to go into foreign service or the CIA or something kind of international and global. And my family had moved to the Washington DC area when I was 12, 13. And I just got it in my head that I knew what I wanted to do. Um that television show alias starring Jennifer Garner was very big at the time and I thought I want to be her in 2007. I had the chance to work at a US Embassy in Nicosia Cyprus in the Regional Security Department. It was what I thought the job of my dreams. And I realized very quickly this is not actually what I thought it was this this job while I have so much respect for, it probably isn't as great of a fit for my personality and my aspirations. And so I spent, you know, a few months feeling really lost and adrift, like a lot of people do early in their career and I was trying to figure out what is it that I want. And online job sites were so transactional. They were incredibly boring. They just, they just had lists of jobs and what I was interested in was like, what does a company really like to work for it? And so I started the muse to help give other people access to the resources and the information and the insight about companies that I didn't have. Myself. I started working on the business in the summer of 2011. And we launched that fall, we had a very, very simple site at the beginning because we had no money. You know, I was 25 with a big dream and very very few resources to pull it off. And so the very first version of the news that was called the Daily News, it actually just had career advice and then we added in the company profiles a few months later and job listings a few months after that today, the Muse has 5 to 7 million people every single month who come to the dot com to apply to jobs, research companies and get career advice. And we work with about 20% of the Fortune 500. I wish I could tell my younger self, you know, uh it, it's just really hard to build a business, it's really hard to raise capital. And so just because it's hard for you doesn't mean you're doing it wrong. I think I took on a lot of, you know, self blame because I felt like, oh, if I could just find the right thing to say, it would be, it would be easy. Also, you know, when I was raising for the first time in 2011, 2012, even for a few years around, then people weren't very open about the challenges. So a lot of the entrepreneurs on stage would say, you know, oh, I had this great idea and then I just raised a bunch of money and, you know, now look, we're successful and I've loved the trend towards entrepreneurs, being more honest about the challenges. I also think that I have a really high degree of comfort with being wrong. You know, I recognize that there's a lot that I don't know. And so I think that's both allowed me to pivot and adapt quickly. It's allowed me to learn from others and to create space for other people to come together and contribute their ideas. For me. I think being really, really open to what you're not good at or you're, you're not an expert in is a very powerful thing when you're trying to build something new.

In The Ground Up we sit down with entrepreneurs to get the story on how they were able to build a successful business.

The Ground Up

Jenny Nguyen was sick of watching women’s games on mute at sports bars, so she opened her own. The Sports Bra bar in Portland, Ore. shows only women’s sports. In just 9 days, she raised $50,000 to open the bar.

How I raised $50K in 9 days to open a bar showing only women’s sports

The Sports Bra bar in Portland, Ore. shows only women’s sports.

How I raised $50K in 9 days to open a women's sports bar

How I Raised $50K In 9 Days To Open A Bar Showing Only Women’s Sports

My name is jenny Win. I'm the founder and owner of the sports bra here in Portland Oregon. It's a women's sports bar. When you walk into a sports bar, traditional sports bar, you expect 24 7 coverage because there is 24 7 coverage of men's sports. Statistically 95% of all sports that are on tv or men's sports. And so our goal here is to take the 5% that is on tv and just put it on blast. I just knew I wanted to feel familiar. I wanted people to walk in and just feel like it was a regular sports bar. It's just a lot of decor stuff, memorabilia and that kind of that warmth of being in a familiar sports bar kind of dark, a little bit cozy. But then you change what's represented, you change what's on the tv. These are women's team flags. All the athletes are female athletes. That kind of stuff. When people say women's sports aren't popular. It's because people aren't seeing it. It's a bit of a catch 22. It's like, well nobody's watching women's sports. Well, no women's sports remain shown. It's really difficult. It's really difficult. It's like you have to be in an Internet detectives in order to find where to watch women. I was trying to stream the national team game the other day at work with some friends and we couldn't find it. I love the idea that if this place was packed, people driving by walking by talking about it would see that there are women's sports fans and they would see it. They'd hear about it and they'd be like, oh, people are into it. It shouldn't be a novelty, but it is a novelty. There's been women's athletics that have been agreeable on media for years. You know, women's tennis has always been an agreeable sport, you know, that people watched. And I think what, what I saw happen is that I saw women's basketball. Uh and ESPN really developed a strong relationship and we began to see more and more women's basketball. Um you also have that sec, you have the PAC 12, you have so many of those networks now that need more content. And so there's much more women's content available for about 14.5 years. I played pickup basketball with this hodgepodge group of women, we shared a love of sports and so we would go out before or after, um pick up and try to watch games and it was always a chore, you know, always trying to find Bar that was big enough to take a group of 12 and then also who would change the channel for us. And then not only that, but some of the people in our group are vegan, those dietary restrictions are really hard to find at sports bars. And then a large portion of our basketball group are queer folks or non binary folks. And so looking the way we do kind of feels unsafe in a lot of the traditional sports bars, There was one particular moment that stands out in my mind when it kind of clicked and it was in 2018 when our basketball group went to go watch the N. C. Double A women's championship. And I think there was like three seconds left, the game was tied and eric takes one dribble and launches a three pointer right at the buzzer and it goes in. So here we were like a dozen of us just going crazy on our own. I threw my hat across the bar and while I was standing, I realized that no one else in the entire bar was watching our game. So everybody's staring at us like we're absolutely bonkers. Anyway, we're leaving the bar and we're kind of like milling around the parking lot still kind of just high off of the game. And I was just like, oh my God, that was the best game I've ever seen. And one of my friends was just like, yeah, it would have been so awesome if the sound had been on, I hadn't realized that we'd watched the whole game with no sound. Right. Then I said, the only way we're ever going to watch a women's game in its full glory is if we had our own place. And I remember driving home and I was like, oh, we had our own place, what we call it, you know? And the very first name that popped into my head was the sports bras. It just made so much sense. All you're doing is you're taking a sports bar and you're changing the channel on the tv. So it's like a tiny switch and then it just became an inside joke. Whenever we went out to sports bars and we were frustrated with something, we'd be like, oh at the sports bra, this game would be on, oh, it's a sports bra. You know, they have gluten free buns for my burger with the sports bra. We'd never run out of toilet paper in the women's restroom or like all the things that, you know, sports bars kind of fall short on all the time. We got to talking about how when we were kids, if our parents had taken us to a place like a sports bra, how much of a difference that would have made in our lives to have a place that we walked into and felt represented or felt seen once I launched the Kickstarter, it was the first time that I put it out into the world. And by day three I was getting emails from all across the country right away. I had people coming up and being like, thank you for doing this, thank you for being an asian woman who opened a business and then people coming up and being like, oh a lesbian owned bar. I didn't think about it. I was just so focused on the sports bra and getting this off the ground. I created a space that I want to be in. So it is me in the end, but when I was conceptualizing it, I didn't think about it like that. I just wanted it to be a place that I felt good. I thought being a chef would help and I think it has, I mean, I think it's helped me like 0.5% 99 point whatever, 95% I don't know anything about. That was hard reaching out to people asking for help learning as much as possible. I mean, the learning curve for me was like a straight up and down wall for like the last year, I would say doing things with intentionality was really huge for me. And so I thought about how women's sports is underrepresented. And then I thought about what else is underrepresented. And if you want to create a space that's for everybody, you gotta try to represent everybody if we can do that through our menu. If we can do that through our physical space, let's do it. At the very beginning, I reached out to like network streaming services, All these things to get permission to play a bunch of different things that on top of trying to open a business was a lot of work. I felt like it was somebody else's full time job to try to find content. So just women's sports is a national sports media company and they have like hundreds and hundreds of hours of digital media on Youtube. So I reached out to them and I just told them about the sports bra, this concept and they're like, we love what you're doing, what do you need from us. And I was like, I'd love to have your digital content and they were like, okay, what else? Like literally that's how it went and like my heart like burst out of my chest. And then I reached out to ESPN and the same thing happened. I was on a call with seven like female executives from ESPN W and they were just over the moon with the concept. But once the word got out, the roles got reversed, then it was networks streaming services, all of these other things reaching out to us asking us to play their stuff at the very beginning, we definitely had some issues with haters. There was some like right wing blog that came out and I probably got like 45 1 star reviews saying things like oh they wouldn't let me in because I had a beard or oh they spent my burger when they found out I was a man or you know, like just all kinds of ridiculous stuff. One of them said that I held them down and made them watch the W. N. B. A. Playoffs. I would read the comment, I'd be like, oh what do I say back to this guy. And as I was thinking it like 16 other people responded with like way better things than I could have said. And I was just like, Oh the community has got this and that's how it's always been. We were able to be there on their opening night and I think that that was the moment that you could see that Portland was here to lift jenny and her organization up. I get tingles when I think about that night because the line went around the corner, there's definitely a community that just kind of I think was already here and now has a place to gather at the bronze, which is really nice. It feels like a place that I feel really comfortable in a place where I can be myself and watch things that actually are interesting to me and have that not be something that is viewed as an inconvenience to other people, but it's celebrated. People ask me jenny, why hasn't anyone done this before? Seeing how difficult it was for me to get open and get the content and all the, all the stuff that we need to make it a success so far. I don't think it would have been possible five years ago with the content that was on tv or with the investment or the interest in women's support. And I think timing was just right now for it to happen. I honestly think in the next 10 years women's sports could overshadow men's sports as far as popularity goes. I think a company like the sports bra is proving too many other companies within Portland's or outside of Portland that you can have a successful business focusing on women's sports. You know, like the, the NWSL championship game was played on broadcast on CBS and like a ton, almost a million people tuned in and that's a really big deal. So like, it's nice to finally see that. I think the kind of powers that be in sports economics are paying attention to women's sports and starting to recognize the value and we don't need to question whether it's a good idea or not and just commit to supporting women in athletics for real cultural change to happen. And I think women's sports is about cultural change, real cultural change takes, you know, according to Gloria steinem takes about 100 years. And so I think we're about halfway through that as women's sports are shown over time, we get a chance to fall in love with the athletes the same way that we do for men's sports. You know, so we can show women's sports and we can be able to prove that women will watch, men will watch families will watch women playing sports. I've had, I don't know, maybe 70 people reach out asking to open a sports bra in their town or city, um, multiple investors, just hordes of interest. Um, but besides that I've had people reach out who want to open their own thing. That is a women's sports bar. I've had sports bar owners reach out and ask how they can incorporate more women's sports into their sports bar. And so all of these things to me is part of the mission jenny. And the people around this saw a need and they're like, well, we're not gonna wait for anyone to do it, we're just gonna make it happen. So much of what we experience is, what is in existence, right? It's hard to know what the possibilities are if you can't see it. And so I think that having created this space when people come in here, I feel like it opens up a whole new set of possibilities to introduce a women's sports bar where the culture is built around celebrating and empowering and supporting women's sports. It's about time take one

Slutty Vegan founder Pinky Cole dives into her story of how she came up with a provocative way to sell vegan food and turn it into a $100 million brand from the ground up. The Ground Up showcases founders and entrepreneurs who worked their way up with a business ideas and turned it into a success story.

How I started a $100 million fast casual restaurant called Slutty Vegan

Slutty Vegan founder Pinky Cole dives into her story of how she came up with a provocative way to sell vegan food and turn it into a $100 million brand from the ground up.

Because of my confidence, I got me at least paying $1,200 in a 650 square foot space. And at my grand opening, I had about 1200 people, I couldn't believe that so many people would stand out in line to support me and that's when I knew I had something really big. I was on the front page of the New York Times in the food section. Like we built a multimillion dollar business and that was game changing for me. Yeah, Hey, what's up? It's pinky cole. I'm 35 years old and I'm the founder and ceo of the world famous $100 million brand, slutty vegan A. T. L. Born and bred in Atlanta Georgia, having a television background. I said, you know what, I know what people watch when they watch tv, they want stuff that's in your face, racy raunchy, that's going to make them pay attention. But when you think about veganism, veganism has always been known to be pure flavorless, clean, very clean, very green. And I said the two most pleasurable experiences in life is sex and food. If I can make people think about sex and think about food at the same time, I know that I can peel the layer back and educate you about veganism in a way that you've never seen it before. I'm originally from Baltimore Maryland. I grew up in a single parent household. My father did 23 years in prison while my mother worked multiple jobs to make sure that she took care of the family. I can remember my mom working so many jobs and learning how to cook with my grandmother because my mother was always gone working or pursuing her own entrepreneurial endeavors as a musician. My father was and is an entrepreneur even behind bars, he would call me and tell me books to read, he would teach me about stocks, he would teach me how financial independence was the most important thing in this world and I became a hustler at a very young age, I used to throw parties, I used to sell candy, I would sell food when I graduated from college, I didn't have any job lined up except for teach for America and I'm like, I don't want to be a teacher, no shade to the teachers, but I knew that it was in the middle of a recession and I had to figure it out. So I packed up my bags and moved to Houston texas to work at teach for America. I was out there for five days and I realized that I do not want to do this and my friend gave me $40 and I went to the airport and I can remember sitting in the airport with my yorkie Rudy and a guy walked up to me and I was bawling crying and was like, what's wrong with you? And I'm just like, I'm not happy, I don't want to be a teacher inside of the classroom, I'm gonna in other ways and he said I'll be right back. Do you know this man walked away from me and he came back and he gave me $240 just enough money to get me and my dog Rudy home and I never looked back after that. I moved to los Angeles California to be an actress and then I started doing background work and I thought that I was good at it. But then one of my sorority sisters said, listen, you were broke, you need some money, I'm gonna give you a job working in television while I was working at the Maury show. I had this bright idea to open up a jamaican restaurant and don't ask me why I just like a Jamaican restaurant, let's do it. I actually took over somebody's lease and I was paying $2400 a month, which is crazy now because you can barely $2400 a month, that's a light bill. Now. I went to Google and Youtube and I started learning everything I could learn about the restaurant industry, I barely knew what I was doing. I still don't know what I'm doing, but I barely knew what I was doing. I had the restaurant for about two years and then I had a grease fire and literally lost everything in the grease fire. My car got refold, I got kicked out of my apartment, I went flat broke, I got an opportunity to work in tv again, I was working as a casting director and I was done with restaurants, I was working on a Tv show, they had a hiatus and I started delivering for doordash and while I was delivering for doordash, I'm like okay, cool ghost kitchens, I've never heard of ghost kitchens, but I see it happening in L. A. I realized I was just preparing for what I was about to create just a couple of months later and when they asked me to go to Atlanta temporarily to work on the show, it hit me like a light bulb and I came up with this crazy as concept called slutty vegan. I didn't have anything written down, I didn't have a blueprint, I didn't have a business plan, it was just an idea that sounded good. I started slutty vegan as a ghost kitchen, It was like a $5,000 startup cost to start slutty vegan. So I had to get my permits, I had to get the facility which was like $1,200. I had to order my food. I had to get my first employees, I had to set up all of my online digital delivery platforms. A lot of entrepreneurs don't realize that if you really want to grow a company, you have to reinvest everything. When I tell you every single time I was reinvesting, I was not taking any money for myself. At first I was just making sure that my employees were paid and that I had food in my business. The reason why I started a food truck is because the facility told me that I had too many people coming to the building so I had to go, so they put me in a parking lot and I had to find a food truck on the fly, didn't know anything about a food truck. The food truck was $45,000, so I had to put $10,000 down and every single week I was paying like $3400 every single week to make sure that I could pay it off and I paid that off in like like two months, two or three months. I got a DM from somebody on Instagram and he told me that there was a restaurant that they were leaving the restaurant and it was available if I wanted to rent it because of my confidence, I got me at least paying $1,200 and 650 square foot space. And at my grand opening I had about 1200 people. I couldn't believe that so many people would stand out in line to support me and that's when I knew I had something really big. It's the people who are the meat eaters that come to slutty vegan most because one, they want to learn what the hype is about to, they have an idea that they can try this vegan thing and if it's good, maybe I can continue on this path and three slutty vegan is a vibe. Uh I'll be honest, I wasn't the most savvy business person when I started study vegan, but when it came to like price and I'm just like, okay, $16 sounds like it would make sense, that's the price. Like I didn't do any like extra calculations, but I grew as a business owner, I actually met the ceo of shake shack first randy Geraghty and I reached out to him, I'm like, hey, randy, you don't know me, but I got a really popular restaurant in Atlanta and I would love to be able to sit down with you because one thing about pinky cole is, I'm gonna shoot my shot, He responded, we went to lunch and and we built a friendship and ever since then he has been such a great mentor to me. And then a few months later I get a call saying that Danny meyer came to slutty vegan on a late night with a few of his friends and he loved the experience and they wanted to talk. It took a long time to get the investment. It took about nine months slutty vegan will be a billion dollar company from my mouth to everybody's ears is listening to this. Four years ago, slutty vegan was just a ghost kitchen concept and four years later the company is now valued at $100 million when you come to slutty vegan, it's a party, The atmosphere is just amazing, the music is booming through the speakers, the employees are dancing, everybody wants to be a part of that. The fact that I have $100 million business, I still pinch myself every day. Like I'm not talking about a million, I ain't talking about five million, I'm talking about a black woman who owns $100 million business. Forget the fact that I'm just a black woman, a woman, a minority owned business, A woman whose family is from Jamaica who comes from humble beginnings who literally has never had a silver spoon in her mouth. Like you are looking at the new american dream, I don't care if you're black, white, blue, yellow, green, funny vegan, it's for everybody.

Award-winning songwriter Barry Dean and brother Jered Dean cofounded LUCI, a company that's changing an industry by turning “dumb wheelchairs into smart wheelchairs.”

How we started a company helping 500,000 people In wheelchairs

Photograph by Ted Willis and Corey Shepherd for Fortune

LUCI is changing an industry by turning “dumb wheelchairs into smart wheelchairs.”

How LUCI is helping 500,000 people In wheelchairs

Rhiannon is active, she races in the winter special olympics every year she likes to play indoor soccer, she wants that full life. And so for her to have that full book of memories, she's got to be able to get out and do things and lucy makes it easier and easier and the easier something is, the more we can pack into a day. Lucy is truly an innovative product by the most innovative product I've seen in about 10 years that can really impact clients functionally help them to either drive a power chair where perhaps they couldn't do that at all before or certainly drive it with much better confidence, competence and safety. So it's very exciting. Were the first company in this industry to ever make a smart connected device. Our ability to push out over the air update and have lucy keep getting smarter and smarter over time is a completely new idea in this industry. So lucy is an add on accessory for a power wheelchair that turns a dumb wheelchair into a smart wheelchair. We add sensors in the brain and connectivity to the power wheelchair so that the user has increased independence. That helps not run into things. Not drive off things, connects the user to their team and to the modern world. Obviously its mission. All we're you know, we're dealing with my daughter, his niece going, we need to solve a problem and all her friends, you know that are in the same boat. She has cerebral palsy. She gets a power chair when she's maybe five or about to be five and she touched the trigger. And it the speed had not been a justice. And it took off you know six miles an hour straight into a wall and she was fine. But I then promptly parked in the garage because I was like this is too scary. I wish I could say we sat down and said we're going to start a company. It was absolutely not that it was weird solve a technical problem, build the I. P. And the prototypes and then surely there will be companies that you know that that will do this. My basement became the headquarters of lucy for a while about a year later. I think we got our first three employees and then got an actual space. But yeah Catherine's been the north star from the beginning and then we've added two and met so many amazing people. Rhiannon was born with a rare birth defect called skit successfully. So it's a development delay in the brain and it affects her motor and verbal. Um So she's highly intelligent but you know she's not able to walk. My name is I am 16. I am my high school junior with her skits and hopefully she also has spasticity. So when she's trying to make her body do something sometimes the body will go the opposite direction or her tone will kick in and she'll go full forward and you can see the scars around the house where the chair would get up against and nothing slows it down. There's a lot of injuries in the wheelchair space more than there are people having motorcycle injuries and ending up in the er, 175,000 year. People ending up in the er, because of wheelchair injuries using a power chair is actually tougher than I think a lot of people think it takes learning in order to operate this very heavy device within an environment. These wheelchairs cost as much as a car. They weigh 3 to £500 without the person in them, but there's no modern technology on them. I mean, it's really kind of a boat, battery, some wheels and a joystick. Uh and good luck. The only safety stuff on a wheelchair would be a seatbelt. I mean, we we did crash testing with one of the top independent facilities in the country and they're saying that just running into a wall in one of these chairs at full speed violates the laws set up for cars and forward crashes and there's no bumper, the knees, the feet, your toes, That's the bumper in a wheelchair. I have had some clients I've worked with who have tipped over a chair and maybe broken an arm or injured their head. So, these are very, very serious concerns, Lucy is always looking looking for the clear path and if there's no clear path, it just brings you to a stop. We're seeing now with the users, we have, we're preventing over 10,000 collisions or drop offs, tip overs every week. This is the alpha prototype, the very first prototype, March 2017. It's off the shelf sensors, just whatever I could get from spark fund and find in the garage. It proved the theory that we could do it. So we really quickly went to a beta prototype about a month later. Katherine used this data prototype for a year and a half and during that time we tracked all the data from it learned where it worked and what didn't work well. And so we took all the stuff we learned here and developed what lucy product is without today. So lucy product looks like this. We call this the smart frame and this mounts onto a power wheelchair. And so you take this smart frame mounted down there, it plugs in between the joystick or the drive method and the motors and adds multiple kinds of sensors. So we have cameras um, one on each side of the user and one in the back. And then we have our own type of ultrasonic sensor that we develop and then hidden in here and down on the foot plate of the wheelchair. We have our own proprietary millimeter wave radar. And so take all that put it on the chair and that means your chair doesn't run into things. Doesn't drive off things is connected to the modern world. You can interact with lucy through Alexa through your phone. So turns it into a modern device. So when I first heard about lucy, I have to admit the first time I heard about it all I thought this can't possibly be true. And then when I learned more about it, started seeing some videos and had a chance to finally see lucy, I was really quite amazed that it worked as well as it did. It's an extremely sophisticated system. I was also excited because I work with very complex clients and anything that I can bring to them that helps them to be more functional than they are. I'm all in. We were hoping that it would be safer but it it is so much more with all of the independence and the confidence and watching Ryan and smile as she heads out the back door by herself and just her and ninja her dog and they're just off and they're gonna go for a walk and you're just not worried. It's fantastic Lucy has given me so much confidence. I am able to be more independent and do the things I want to do. She's 16 years old, she doesn't want mom and dad looming over all the time. Now she can go act like a teenager, we have a saying internally which is, life is a team sport. We have different clinicians, we have activity, people, we have specialists involved and doctors, so we set up the, my lucy app so that people can actually set up a team and choose what information to share the right or the driver of the chair can decide. This information needs to go to my doctor. This information needs to go to my caregiver. They can share uh battery status so that an alert goes out and let people know, hey, um, you know, Katherine's at this location, her battery's low, She may get stranded soon. You might want to check in right. One of the next things that we're working on. It sounds really simple, but it's just a pressure monitor for air cushions. That's not a hard tech list. That is just a knowing that there's a problem and getting the tech into the hands of the people that need it. Now that you actually have a computer and connectivity and a smart wheelchair. It becomes a freeing device not just for mobility but also for health. One of the things I'm really excited about that we just announced is the pediatric solution. Now you can get a wheelchair for a very young child with lucy on it once kids start crawling their vision and visual perceptual skills really explode all sorts of the area areas of the brain. Just like if kids don't have this ability to have independent mobility before the age of five, it changes the whole waterfall of development of possibilities for them for their whole life. You can't get that back. I think this is going to really change a lot of people's lives. So lucy is right now getting funded by insurance and Medicaid and the V. A. But usually there's some pushback because it's new technology. So if I recommend a power chair for a client, it's being paid for by an insurance company or by a state Medicaid program or perhaps a federal Medicare program. Well, the problem is something new comes along and there's not room in our current construct for how do we deal with a truly new product once these funders see it that first time in real life, what it can do for that user, we found that people tend to flip pretty quickly to, oh this actually makes a lot of sense. I think they're starting to come around especially on the lucy device because they're starting to see what long term It actually will save them money. Rhiannon is priceless but her equipment around her is $30,000 every time she rolls out the door and goes somewhere. So you obviously you don't want it bouncing off of things. It's been an interesting learning curve for us to learn how to combine the fact that there's that passion, there's that personal need That has built a real company that's really doing things in a real market now. We're at that place of raising our first funding and doing all that and that's going very well. But it's a very different path I think than most companies go on because it's already for sale. It's already in 40 states, you know, I mean hundreds of users, a lot of people see this and it is a mission all company. We have a cause, you know, we talk about moving at the speed of the need, you know, the internally those kinds of things. But the fact of the matter is although suddenly realized this is a real incredible business opportunity as well. There's an assumption that wheelchairs are a real niche that there's not very many people using wheelchairs in the world. And that assumption is wrong. Uh, there's, you know, a million more people in wheelchairs in the US than there are electric vehicles in the US. We have a lot of these conversations about equity. But what is sometimes left off of that scale are people with disabilities. It's a broad range of people. Some of those people will require a power wheelchair to be as independent as possible. It's easy to look down upon people who are less functional than ourselves. And I think we need to remember that one of the beauties of assistive technology. One of the reasons that I enjoy assistive technology so much is it levels the playing field. So now someone who didn't have mobility before can be mobile. You look five years down the road and I think this will be um, inevitable that this technology is on every power wheelchair sold and you'll start seeing a lot of interesting new health and wellness options for wheelchair users, manual and power. There we go, Oh, now you're giving love.

On The Clock

<p>I've had many jobs in my life and I got to say that that designing Lego models is definitely by far the best. You really can build anything with these little bricks. I'm Eric Hunter. I'm 53 years old. I'm a professional LEGO artist. Welcome to the art of LEGO. This is my kitchen and here are a few portraits I've designed out of LEGO. This is a mosaic of penny, my roommate. And down here, here's one of me, this is my studio as well. Back here, this whole first floor is one giant room that's been converted into several smaller areas. I actually sleep here. We've got the dining room and then back here is where all the fun happens. This is where I I I store my office right next to my living room. Actually, more like in my living room, I've had models in the 10,000, 90,000 range. And now just last week, I got my biggest commission to date. Actually, a six figure budget. This is the beginnings of a 1 to 1 scale 1968 Camaro S S for the estimate I calculated 245,000 Lego bricks to complete this model. Most of my clients models would probably fall in the between, I'd say 1200 to $3000 range. The budget doesn't have to be that large. If you can make a car this big or you know, as big as you want anything, it's all about scale and then about detail, thousands. As far as how the money is spent, I have three different rates. You of course have to buy the Lego and I have design time and then I have build time and miscellaneous time, which is basically buying organizing and shipping time. I've actually returned money to a client because it didn't cost as much as I thought it was. I'm not here to get rich, you know, I'm here to do what I love this tiny little walkie talkie piece is now usable as an actual walkie talkie human size. What I love about my job is seeing the final model. I love to see it to hold it. It's tangible and then it's done. I don't have to work on it, believe it or not. When I am not working, I will build a Lego set to relax. I like to look at the instructions and flip through the pages and build the model that somebody else designed. Takes the pressure off me. The most challenging thing with working with LEGO models is lighting every brick has a tiny little hair space in between it and it becomes a real challenge to have a fully lit model look good. I think a car is, is definitely the most popular. Just my freelance since 2013, I'd say I've designed between cars and trucks. Probably 2025 different different vehicles. I think people love their cars and they want to immortalize them on their desk. Now, I have a potential client. They want a model of a truck. I ask them to make model in the year, what color they want? After a client has ordered a model, I'll go and digitally design the model in the computer. I usually use a program called LEGO Digital designer. It's a free program by LEGO. After you design the model in there, you can basically rebuild it piece by piece. Once it is approved, I will then go and order the lego. I order from brick link, brick link is basically like ebay for lego. It's anything lego you need. It's new lego or lego. Here in my studio. I personally chose to not keep too much LEGO on hand. I order LEGO as needed for each project as I go and each project ends up with a little over and slowly builds my collection. As everybody knows, storing lego can be a challenge. I choose open top bins and bin cups. I use some like tackle box and tiny drawer storage as well. The building is the fun part. Of course, I glue the models I use methyl ethyl ketone, which is actually any K for short and it's, it's a solvent, it melts the Lego together. It doesn't really glue it together. It's pretty impermeable and very durable. So a model should pretty much last forever. I use many different tools. You name it. I mean, I use belt Sanders, drill presses, planers, Lego rulers. This ruler is a vertical ruler. This ruler is for horizontal measuring. I use glue clamps, I use anything industrial. It really depends on the model on the inside of many of the Lego models I design. There will be infrastructures, there might be a steel frame, there might be access panels, mounting points. But the trick is, it's all on the inside. It's pretty much hidden away the tool that I use most here. Good old mallet, save my fingertips. I have been going with Lego since I was, I would say four years old. This is a book that really inspired me to get more into LEGO as an adult in the back. It shows a picture, a picture that was really inspirational to me. It shows a group of ladies actually who are all the model designers for Lego land in Denmark. They were only accepting creative resumes. And I thought, well, I found a product, what product might I be? And rice crispies? Was it because Eric and Rice, this was a perfect fit. I got a job at Legoland California back in 2005 as an associate, a model associate. It was a dream come true for me. Within about a year's time, I went from associate to designer. At that point, I started designing buildings for Miniland and doing life size sculptures of people and anything else. Legoland Parks might need the tallest Lego model. I was a part of was the Lego Land, Malaysia Petronas Towers model which took about six months. I had 1000 an hour budget to design that I was then responsible for managing and guiding the team to build it. At one point, I believe we had 23 or 24 people in the model shop all working on the same project. I think we ordered 100 and 20,000 Lego one by two pieces for the windows. The final model ended up being just under 33 ft tall for about a four year period. I believe it was the world's tallest Miniland structure. So I actually had a world record. Unofficially after I left Legoland in 2013, I decided to start a Lego design company. My friend Penny, who was actually my roommate in college way back in the late eighties. She said, hey, why don't you come out to Connecticut? I found this really unique place that used to be a mechanic shop for a buick dealership. And it is now my home and my Lego studio. Since I started my company, I have made, I would say upwards of 400 LEGO models for, for clients. Some of my corporate clients have included names like Microsoft New York Life. My latest is Children's Hospital. They really enjoy adding LEGO into their, their world. Back in 2013, it was a one man operation as it is again today. At one point I had eight employees. I really do enjoy being a one man operation because it allows me full control, but it's very limiting. Ultimately, I see growing my company into having a model shop with several employees full time, constantly building all of the designs that I am designing. And of course, I'd help build too when and if I could, I kind of see a little young Richard Nixon in here. So this is actually Pee-wee Nixon.</p>

Eric Hunter is a professional Lego artist who designs and builds Lego models for private and corporate clients, including Microsoft, New York Life, and Children’s Hospital. Before starting his own company, The Art of LeGogh, in 2014, he worked as a model designer at Legoland California Resort for eight years. 

How I make a living as a professional Lego builder

Eric Hunter, owner of The Art of LeGogh, designs and builds Lego models professionally for clients, such as Microsoft, New York Life, and Children’s Hospital.

Eric Hunter is a professional Lego artist and owner of The Art of LeGogh, under which he designs and builds Lego models for private and corporate clients, including Microsoft, New York Life, and Children’s Hospital.

Eric Hunter is a professional Lego artist and owner of The Art of LeGogh. He designs and builds Lego models for clients, such as Microsoft, New York Life, and Children’s Hospital.

I've had many jobs in my life and I got to say that that designing Lego models is definitely by far the best you really can build anything with these little bricks. I'm Eric Hunter. I'm 53 years old. I'm a professional LEGO artist. Welcome to the art of LEGO. This is my kitchen and here are a few portraits I've designed at a LEGO. This is a mosaic of penny, my roommate. And down here, here's one of me, this is my studio as well. Back here, this whole first floor is one giant room that's been converted into several smaller areas. I actually sleep here. We've got the dining room and then back here is where all the fun happens. This is where II I store my office right next to my living room. Actually more like in my living room, I've had models in the 100,000 range. And now just last week, I got my biggest commission to date. Actually, a six figure budget. This is the beginnings of a 1 to 1 scale 1968 Camaro Ss for the estimate I calculated 245,000 Lego bricks to complete this model. Most of my clients models would probably fall in the between, I'd say 1200 to $3000 range. The budget doesn't have to be that large. If you can make a car this big or, you know, as big as you want anything, it's all about scale and then about detail thousands. As far as how the money is spent, I have three different rates. You of course, have to buy the Lego and I have design time and then I have build time and miscellaneous time, which is basically buying, organizing and shipping time. I've actually returned money to a client because it didn't cost as much as I thought it was. I'm not here to get rich, you know, I'm here to do what I love this tiny little walkie talkie piece is now usable as an actual walkie talkie human size. What I love about my job is seeing the final model. I love to see it to hold it. It's tangible and then it's done. I don't have to work on it, believe it or not. When I am not working, I will build a Lego set to relax. I like to look at the instructions and flip through the pages and build the model that somebody else designed. Takes the pressure off me. The most challenging thing with working with lego models is lighting. Every brick has a tiny little hair space in between it and it becomes a real challenge to have a fully lit model look good. I think a car is, is definitely the most popular. Just my freelance since 2013, I'd say I've designed between cars and trucks. Probably 2025 different different vehicles. I think people love their cars and they want to immortalize them on their desk. Now, I have a potential client. They want a model of a truck. I ask them to make model in the year, what color they want? After a client has ordered a model, I'll go and digitally design the model in the computer. I usually use a program called LEGO Digital designer. It's a free program by LEGO. After you design the model in there, you can basically rebuild it piece by piece. Once it is approved, I will then go and order the lego. I order from brick link, brick link is basically like ebay for lego. It's anything LEGO you need. It's new lego or lego. Here in my studio. I personally chose to not keep too much LEGO on hand. I order LEGO as needed for each project as I go and each project ends up with a little over and slowly builds my collection as everybody knows, storing lego can be a challenge. I choose open top bins and bin cups. I use some like tackle box and tiny drawer storage as well. The building is the fun part. Of course, I glue the models I use methyl ethyl ketone, which is actually any K for short. And it's, it's a solvent, it melts the Lego together. It doesn't really glue it together. It's pretty impermeable and very durable. So a model should pretty much last forever. I use many different tools. You name it. I mean, I use belt Sanders, drill presses, planers, Lego rulers. This ruler is a vertical ruler. This ruler is for horizontal measuring. I use glue clamps. I use anything industrial. It really depends on the model on the inside of many of the Lego models I design. There will be infrastructures, there might be a steel frame, there might be access panels, mounting points. But the trick is it's all on the inside. It's pretty much hidden away the tool that I use most here. Good old mallet, save my fingertips. I have been going with Lego since I was, I would say four years old. This is a book that really inspired me to get more into Lego as an adult in the back. It shows a picture, a picture that was really inspirational to me. It shows a group of ladies actually who are all the model designers for Lego land in Denmark. They were only accepting creative resumes. And I thought, well, I found a product, what product might I be? And rice crispies? Was it because Eric and Rice, this was a perfect fit. I got a job at Legoland California back in 2005 as an associate a model associate. It was a dream come true for me. Within about a year's time, I went from associate to designer. At that point, I started designing buildings for Miniland and doing life size sculptures of people and anything else Legoland Parks might need the tallest Lego model. I was a part of was the Lego Land, Malaysia Petronas Towers model which took about six months. I had 1000 an hour budget to design that I was then responsible for managing and guiding the team to build it. At one point, I believe we had 23 or 24 people in the model shop all working on the same project. I think we ordered 100 and 20,000 Lego one by two pieces for the windows. The final model ended up being just under 33 ft tall for about a four year period. I believe it was the world's tallest Miniland structure. So I actually had a world record. Unofficially after I left Legoland in 2013, I decided to start a Lego design company. My friend Penny, who was actually my roommate in college way back in the late eighties. She said, hey, why don't you come out to Connecticut? I found this really unique place that used to be a mechanic shop for a buick dealership and it is now my home and my Lego studio. Since I started my company, I have made, I would say upwards of 400 lego models for, for clients. Some of my corporate clients have included names like Microsoft New York life. My latest is Children's Hospital. They really enjoy adding LEGO into their, their world. Back in 2013, it was a one man operation as it is again today. At one point I had eight employees. I really do enjoy being a one man operation because it allows me full control, but it's very limiting. Ultimately, I see growing my company into having a model shop with several employees full time, constantly building all of the designs that I am designing. And of course, I'd help build too when and if I could, I kind of see a little young Richard Nixon in here. So this is actually P Nixon.

Toshihiro Saito, the assistant director of F&B operations at Hotel Barrière Fouquet's New York, delves into what it takes to become a certified cicerone, also known as a beer sommelier. He also shows us how to pair five different beers with food. Please note: The following beers are not sold at Hotel Barrière Fouquet's New York and prices may vary.

What it's like drinking beer on the job as a cicerone, or beer sommelier

Toshihiro Saito of Hotel Barrière Fouquet's New York delves into what it takes to become a certified cicerone, or beer sommelier.

Being paid to drink beer as a cicerone, or beer sommelier

Toshihiro Saito, the assistant director of F&B operations at Hotel Barrière Fouquet's New York, delves into what it takes to become a certified cicerone, also known as a beer sommelier. He also shows us how to pair five different beers with food. 

Toshihiro Saito, the assistant director of F&B operations at Hotel Barrière Fouquet's New York, delves into what it takes to become a certified cicerone, also known as a beer sommelier.

Bye, slight bitterness but not anything extreme. I am a certified C, it's also known as I think the very first idea of beer or c sort of comes off as a person who's drinking beer all day. Unfortunately, it's, it's not as glamorous as that. There's actually a lot of leg work that actually goes into it before the beer actually ever gets presented to the guest. You need to start doing tastings, you need to start doing pairings, you need to start building out beer menus, finding the right glassware, getting the right chillers. I was working at Gastro Pub at the Venetian. There weren't too many people in Las Vegas that actually had such a wide selection of beers. They had a actually on our staff when I started talking to him. I, I started figuring out, you know what, there's so much more to learn about beer than I actually already knew. I knew about IP A si knew about ports. I knew about stouts, but to start talking about beer in a way that was almost like so romantic to become a, I think you really just sort of need to be a beer nerd. At heart, you need to start picking up books. You need to actually start doing your research, your knowledge about all the different styles of beer. You have to know about the srm, the gravity of each beer, how it's been brewed, how it's been made, the history behind it. What it's supposed to taste like being able to talk about it, almost like wine. I think I've tasted about 500 beers now. Maybe even more. There has been one or two instances where I have become slightly inebriated, opening up magnums of chime or doing these fantastic beard tastings, beard dinners. It's just one of the first of the job becoming Saron was probably one of the most difficult tests and exams that I've actually ever come across. There's actually four different certifications. Each one has to be completed before you can go on to the next level. The exam was actually the course of an entire day. It was tasting for a major portion of it. The knowledge and theory portion of it was probably over 50%. And then beer pairing was, I think another 25% of the actual exam. It was an extremely arduous test but very fulfilling. Rewarding. Even after everything was done today, we're here at Hotel Barrier Phuket and we're going to be trying five different beers. We have a really nice, beautiful assortment going from light to dark. This is Gaffle cos this is a very unique solid beer that actually hails from the region of cologne in Germany. Think of champagne. Ok. I would pair this with fried chicken. It would be really nice carbonation just to go ahead and cut through the fat on the chicken. This is Dupont. There's a really nice malt background to it. It is a farmhouse ale so it has a little bit of like a barnyard y sort of characteristic to it. But phenomenal. One of the best pairings of my entire life was actually done with the ce on. I had this particular style with a triple cream cheese, a little bit of honey comb and with a really nice crusty baguette. And that was the absolute moment where the light bulb went off. And I said, wow, pairing beer and food is such a magical experience. This beer is, is trace Fontaine from dust translation. It means three Fountains. The style is an oat goose is actually a blend of three different lambic. One year, two year, three year lambic from Linda. It actually pairs extremely well with a hot lobster roll the butter, the bread, the sweetness of the lobster itself, extremely delightful pairing. This is, it is a Flemish bread coming from Belgium. However, this beer itself is actually brewed in Italy is triple fermented first time in stainless steel and then a in cognac barrels. This beer pairs extremely well with barbecued meats such as brisket and also strawberry cheesecake. So this beer is poo. It's an Imperial Baltic porter hailing from the region of Estonia, it actually comes from the area of the Baltic Sea. Yeah, is much more malt driven. So you have flavors of coffee, chocolate, even really nice rich molasses. This particular beer pairs extremely well with say a coffee crusted steak or even a flourless chocolate cake. When I first started. I thought that 300 beers was the crazy exorbitant amount for a beer list. Now, in days, I mean, I've come across places that are even over 506 100 different skews for beers. CS are definitely more in demand. Now, people are much more in tune to what's in their glass. They want to know more. They want to be able to go ahead and find these fantastic beers and they're asking the right questions. Is there a time that's too early that I drink beer? No, I come from Las Vegas. Absolutely not.

I love being around horses for so many reasons. I was the child who was the "horse girl." And my love affair with horses started probably before I can remember. My name is Leah Goldman and I am an equine coach. Equine coaches are relatively new to the coaching industry. So turn his head to the left. Head to the left. They're not coming to learn how to ride. They're just coming to learn about themselves in a very unique and different way. What makes this work really powerful is the horse as the mirror. The exercise for you is about creating space, right? And creating boundaries and keeping those boundaries in place. Back, back. Are we having fun? And stop. You can maybe qualify for some of these larger therapeutic programs, which are so wonderful, or you could be interested in riding horses, but there wasn't anything in the middle. This really is quite a long journey of how I got here. I entered into a relationship and spent three years with this man who I thought was going to be my lifelong partner. He had been living a double life and had been in a relationship with somebody else for the entire time that we had been together. And it was a life-altering moment. Two weeks before I had found that out, I hadn't been around horses in a while and was really missing it. And I started riding when I was six. I found a horse that I signed on to lease for the summer. It just all started to come together. So while I was grieving the loss of not only this person who I loved, but you know the loss of this life that I thought I was going to have, I had this space to go to. A lot of what I just needed was somebody to be with me, right? And that somebody was a horse. That's really where my own healing started to begin. I was mentored and trained under a master coach out in Santa Fe, New Mexico. There's five horses. Every single one of them was laying down, except for one. I was like, I just, I think that's the horse that I'm the most connected to. And he walked right by me. And I was like, oh. I was like, of course, like I'm not good enough. And yeah, why would he come over here? And then all of a sudden, I kid you not, he turned around, circled in front of me, dropped to the ground, and dropped his head in my lap. I just, I lost it. I just completely broke down. It does something for you that sometimes people can't give you, right? You're looking for answers or you're searching for something. You're just searching for it and you can't get it you can't find it. And all of a sudden, you have this like powerful, majestic being giving you exactly what you need. And it was just like the two of us in that moment. And it was just like, everything's gonna be okay. I get a lot of people who have lost spouses, some people who have lost pets, and they need a place that they come to where they feel a sense of comfort and safety Let's head into the indoor today. Okay, come on, Booboo, we got some work to do. So before you do that, you know, remember, we want to always set the intention of what we're doing. So to conjure up or bring up things that really fill you with joy, right? That make you feel light, that make you feel warm, and go see what happens. C'mon Boo. When I try to explain it to people, they're often like, "You're not riding the horse?" Like no, I'm not riding—I'm never gonna ride the horse. I've never ridden a horse. It's not about that. It's about the being, not the doing. I am a psychotherapist. I sought Leah out because it was the middle of COVID I was seeing 40 patients a week, which is way too many. So getting out of my head, not thinking about my patients. Not wondering about COVID. Not worrying about my kids and all the things that they were missing. I didn't have to do any of that here in any way. It was just about finding peace in myself. I think the lesson for me is that I don't need to hold other people's things quite as tightly as I do sometimes. And as soon as I get here, I'm just centered. Thank you. They're not going to be able to take Saint home. But the hope is that you have a felt sense experience that will remind you when you're not on the farm, and life gets tough or chaotic or stressful, and you can have this moment of like, "Okay, let me just pretend like I'm in the field with Saint and I'm breathing with Saint." And I actually have many people who keep photos of Saint as a reminder, right? To slow down, to breathe, to just take a moment for yourself. I was mid-pandemic diagnosed with a rare chronic illness, called idiopathic subglottic stenosis. Essentially, my body will suffocate itself. I have always told Leah that the doctor saved my life, but Leah and Saint saved my soul. I have my fourth surgery coming up on Monday. Just really trying to get myself in a good position where I'm in the zone and really focused on myself, so I can come back even stronger. There's science behind it, and why this works that I can explain to you. But there's also this other side of it where things happen that I can't explain. Those are the moments, those magical moments a lot of the time that make a huge difference for people. So I'd already earned my credential, my ICF-credential as a certified professional coach, which is the International Coaches Federation, and spent about a year and a half going through that. The equine piece was really just taking my 30 plus years of horse knowledge, and just combining them together. So I had that idea, the summer of 2018. And by 2020, I was launched and ready to go. I mostly see women, although men are welcome to come. It just for whatever reason seems like women are more drawn to this space than men. I have worked with anyone, you know, as young as 18, all the way up to women in their 70s. Somebody who is an equine coach has to be incredibly observant. They have to be incredibly thoughtful. You have to be able to hold both the human heart and the equine heart masterfully. The client has to lead it because I'm here to help them. You'll always hear me check in with the client, "How are things going? How have you been? You know, we talked about this last time." I have probably like 10 to 15 go-tos that I use. Some of them are super short, really simple. Others take a lot longer. Saint is my heart horse. He is a manifestation of a horse that I have dreamed of since I was an adolescent. I remember thinking to myself as a child, "Someday, I am going to have a horse who has 16 one-hands, who is a chestnut, a gelding, a Warmblood. He's going to have a white blaze, and he's going to have white socks. When I started looking for a horse, I had posted in a Facebook group and a woman messaged me and she said, I think I have the perfect horse for you. And she sent me some photos of him and I was like, 16 one-hands, chestnut horse, gelding, Warmblood, white blaze, white socks. And I was like, "What's his name?" She goes, "Saint." And I was like, I can't—I mean, you can't make this stuff up if you tried. It's the perfect name for a horse that's doing this work. Heart Math is a research organization. What they did was they basically discovered that horses sync their heartbeats with one another. So essentially, if a horse is heart rate goes up, it kind of pings to another horse, and that's like, "Oh, do we need to be on alert? Do we need to be worried about something? Should we start moving?" What they found was that horses can sink their hearts with humans as well, from up to four feet away. But what that does is it can lower our heart rate. It can also lower our blood pressure, and basically puts us in this state of neutrality, which is just a place of ease. This job has changed my life in every way. In every way. I'm doing what I'm passionate about. I've always wanted to help people. I've always loved horses, I get to combine those two things and I get to give this to others. That's what makes it so worthwhile. You know, when I'm here and I'm doing something for myself, that's when the positivity comes out. Like when I'm with this guy. It kind of just melts everything away.

Leah Goldman is a self-described “horse girl” who turned her passion into a career after a devastating breakup. Goldman founded Fika Coaching to offer equine coaching sessions for personal growth and development. She draws on her skills as an International Coaching Federation–certified professional coach and more than 30 years of experience with horses. 

How horses healed my heartbreak and led me to an equine coaching career

Leah Goldman is a self-described “horse girl” who turned her passion into a career after a devastating breakup.

How horses and heartbreak led me to a coaching career

12, 12. Yeah, I love being around horses for so many reasons. I was the child who was the horse girl and my love affair with horses started probably before I can remember. My name is Leah Goldman and I am an equine coach. Equine coaches are relatively new to the coaching industry. So turn his head to the left head to the left. They're not coming to learn how to ride. They're just coming to learn about themselves in a very unique and different way. What makes this work really powerful is the horse as the mirror, the exercise for you is about creating space, right? And creating boundaries and keeping those boundaries in place back back. Uh Are we having fun and stop? Can maybe qualify for some of these larger therapeutic programs which are so wonderful or you could be interested in riding horses? But there wasn't anything in the middle. This really is quite a long journey of how I got here. I entered into a relationship and spent three years with this man who I thought was going to be my lifelong partner. He had been living a double life and had been in a relationship with somebody else for the entire time that we had been together. And it was a life altering moment. Two weeks before I had found that out, I hadn't been around horses in a while and was really missing it. And I started riding when I was six. I found a horse that I signed on to lease for the summer. It just all started to come together. So, while I was grieving, the loss of not only this person who I loved, but you know, the loss of this life that I thought I was going to have, I had the space to go to a lot of what I just needed was somebody to be with me, right? And not somebody with a horse. That's really where my own healing started to begin. I was mentored and trained under a master coach out in Santa Fe, New Mexico. There's five horses. Every single one of them was laying down except for one. I was like, I just, I think that's the horse that I'm the most connected to. And he walked right by me. And I was like, oh, I was like, I was like, of course, like I'm not good enough. And yeah, why would he come over here? And then all of a sudden I kid you not, he turned around, circled in front of me, dropped to the ground and dropped his head in my lap. I just, I lost it. I just completely broke down. It does something for you that sometimes people can't give you right. You're looking for answers or you're searching for something you're just searching for it and you can't get it, you can't find it. And all of a sudden you have this, like, powerful majestic being giving you exactly what you need. And it was just like the two of us in that moment and it was just like everything is going to be ok. I get a lot of people who have lost spouses. Um some people who have lost pets and they need a place that they come to where they feel a sense of comfort and safety. Let's head into the today. Ok. Come on, boo boo. We got some work to do so before you do that, you know, remember we wanna always set the intention of what we're doing so to conjure up or bring up things that really fill you with joy, right? That make you feel light that make you feel warm and go see what happens. Come on when I try to explain it to people, they're often like I, you're not riding the horse. I'm like, no, I'm not riding. I'm never going to ride the horse. I've never ridden the horse. It's not about that. It's about the being not the doing. I am a psychotherapist. I sought Leah out because it was the middle of COVID. I was seeing 40 patients a week which is way too many. So getting out of my head, not thinking about my patients, not wondering about COVID, not worrying about my kids and all the things that they were missing. I didn't have to do any of that here in any way. It was just about finding peace in myself. I think the lesson for me is that I don't need to hold other people's things quite as tightly as I do sometimes. And as soon as I get here, I'm just centered. Thank you. They're not going to be able to take Saint home. But the hope is that you have a felt sense experience that will remind you when you're not on the farm and life gets tough or chaotic or stressful. And you can have this moment of like, OK, let me just pretend like I'm in the fields of Saint and I'm breathing with Saint. And I actually have many people who keep photos of Saint as a reminder, right? To slow down, to breathe, to just take a moment for yourself. I was mid pandemic diagnosed with a rare chronic illness called idiopathic subglottic stenosis. Essentially, my body will suffocate itself. I have always told Leah that the doctor saved my life, but Leah and Saint save my soul. I have my fourth surgery coming up on Monday, just really trying to get myself in a good position where I'm in the zone and um really focused on myself so I can come back even stronger. There's science behind it and why this works that I can explain to you. But there's also this other side of it where things happen that I can't explain. Those are the moments, those magical moments, a lot of the time that make a huge difference for people. So I had already earned my credential, my IC F credential as a certified professional coach, which is the International Coaches Federation and spent about a year and a half going through that the equine piece was really just taking my 30 plus years of horse knowledge and just combining them together. So I had that idea the summer of 2018 and by 2020, I was launched and ready to go. I mostly see women, although men are welcome to come. It just for whatever reason seems like women are more drawn to this space than men. I have worked with anyone, you know, as young as 18, all the way up to women in their 70's. Somebody who is an equine coach has to be incredibly observant. They have to be incredibly thoughtful. You have to be able to hold both the human heart and the equine heart masterfully, the client has to lead it because I'm here to help them. You'll always hear me check in with the client. How are things going? How have you been? You know, we talked about this last time. I have probably like 10-15, go to that I use. Some of them are super short, really simple. Others take a lot longer. Saint is my my heart horse. He is a manifestation of a horse that I have dreamed of since I was an adolescent. I remember thinking to myself as a child someday, I am going to have a horse who is 16, 1 hand who is a chestnut, a gelding, a warm blood. He's going to have a white blaze and he's going to have white socks. When I started looking for a horse, I had posted in a Facebook group and a woman messaged me and she said, I think I have the perfect horse for you. And she sent me some photos of him and I was like 16 1 hands chestnut horse gelding, warm blood white blaze, white socks. And I was like, what's his name? She goes saint. And I was like, I can't, I mean, you can, you can't make this stuff up if you try. And I'm like, it's the perfect name for a horse that's doing this work. Heart Maths is a research organization. What they did was they basically discovered that horses think their heartbeats with one another. So essentially, if a horse's heart rate goes up, it kind of pings to another horse. And that's like, oh, do we need to be on alert? Do we need to be worried about something we start moving? What they found was that horses can sink their hearts with humans as well from up to 4ft away. But what that does is it can lower our heart rate. It can also lower our blood pressure and basically puts us in this state of neutrality, which is just a place of ease. This job has changed my life in every way, in every way I'm doing what I'm passionate about. I've always wanted to help people. I've always loved horses. I get to combine those two things and I get to give this to others. That's what makes it so worthwhile. You know, when I'm here and I'm doing something for myself. That's when the positivity comes out. Like when I'm with this guy, it kind of just melts everything away.

Anna Leigh Waters is the top female pickleball player at 16 after becoming a professional player at 12. Waters won eight triple crowns in 2022 and is coached by her mother Leigh Waters, who is also her doubles partner. According to her rep, she now earns a high-six-figure salary and is sponsored by Fila, Paddletek, and Carvana among others. 

Meet this pro pickleball player earning six figures at 16 years old

Anna Leigh Waters is the top female pickleball player at 16 after becoming a professional player at 12.

Teen pickleball player Anna Leigh Waters earns six figures

At the beginning of the year. This was my first ever triple crown at the end of the year. This is actually my eighth triple crown of 2022. This is the biggest trophy I have ever received. I'm Anna Lee Waters. I'm 16 years old and I'm the number one female professional pickle ball player. Mhm. Pickle ball has become so popular because anyone can play, any age can play and any skill level can play. You can have fun, you can be competitive. It's just a sport for everyone with the first pick in the 2023 major league pick a ball draft. The new Jersey fives select Anna Lee Waters so good everywhere on the court. There is no weakness in this young lady, Anna Lee was unquestionably the number one pick I think for everybody in the draft, people are picking men and women and to have a number one pick that was a female player and to have more women's picks in the top 10 than men was really remarkable and says something about pickle ball. She is a young phenom ranked number one in the world, both in singles, mixed doubles and women's doubles. She is the most dominant player in the game at the tournament of champions. I won the most or had the most points in that tournament. I was ranked the number one women's singles player at 14 years old. I feel like the achievement that I'm most proud of didn't actually happen this year. It happened in 2019 when I won nationals with my mom. I remember after we won the match, she like jumped and then she started like running around the court and I was like chasing her, like wanting to hug her and like celebrate with her waters and waters. It was our first huge tournament that we went together. I think I had an out of body experience. We had reached a goal that, you know, that we had set because I never thought of pickleball as a job. But at the same time, like, I guess it kind of is, it's a very fun job, especially this year. A lot of big companies have gotten into the sport. I've also seen a big growth in like celebrity pickleball. I've had a lot of sponsorship opportunities. I have an agent now. I am so young and to, you know, learn as many things as I'm learning and, you know, be a part of sponsorship deals and learning about contracts. Sometimes I'll see like the checks that come in and I'm like, save it. I'm saving, I'm put in the bank. I try not to spend my money. You see someone like Michael Jordan who can like design their own shoe and then I'm sponsored by. So I'm kind of designing a shoe with them. It's just kind of cool that I can be kind of grouped into like an athlete that's making their own shoe, which, which is amazing. Annie and I started playing pickle ball at the exact same day, the exact same second, we evacuated our home in Florida due to a hurricane and we went to visit my father who lived in Pennsylvania and he asked us, you know, do you want to go play pickle ball? And at first we were kind of like, no, because we didn't know what it was. And I was pretty young. I think I was 10. So we thought it was an older person sport, but we went and from the moment we stepped on the court, we were, we were hooked. First time I hit the ball, I was like in love with the sport. We played like three times a day for like two weeks straight while we were up there. From when I first started playing, I played with my grandfather and my mom and I can still play with my grandfather and my mom. It's fun, but it's also embarrassing. Uh, as I got older and older, obviously, I got worse and worse and as she got older, she got better and better. Unfortunately, at the previous national tournament Lee was injured. So when Anna Lee was going into a finals match, she had nobody to warm her up. So I actually warmed her up. I really don't know the outcome of the success of the warm up, but she won. So I guess I did something right. Anna Lee and I play a few times a week. Some of that is playing, some of that is drilling, watching Annaly compete. She's feisty. She's an animal. She's an absolute beast on the court. I'm a full time student, but I am also a full time professional pickleball player. So hopefully I'm gonna make a career out of this. You got that right on his mic. Can you send it to me? Yeah, when I'm home, I usually play pickle ball five days a week. I usually drill like two times a week and then I'll play games three times a week. If I'm drilling, it's around two hours. And if I'm playing games, it can be anywhere from like 2 to 3 hours. And I'm usually in the gym five days a week as well. I would say average in a day, I'm working out like four hours and even on my off days, I'm doing either some kind of cardio or walking. She started off as a soccer player and tennis player converted, I think at 11 and she learned the game went pro at 12 lightning quick hands. Great court awareness, great court coverage. I have a lot of different skill sets from different sports for soccer. It was, it's definitely like the footwork and the fast sprinting and the lateral movement and stuff for tennis. It's definitely the form. The form is very similar if you watch tennis and pickle ball. But there is a big difference between like strategy and pickleball and tennis. So I had to learn that Anna Lee and I had come from tennis and the minute I stepped on the court, I just wanted to hit the ball hard and everybody kept telling us like you're not playing correctly. This isn't how you play. You have to hit soft, you have to hit these dinks. But it's just what came so true to, to me and Anna Lee was this power game. So we just continued with our game. And the next thing you know, we were winning national championships at the pro level and we were known for our aggressive style of play. A lot of people ask the question like, how do you guys play on the court together? Isn't it hard that she's your mom and that she's your daughter is in the dynamic. Weird. But I feel like for us it's the opposite. Like we have this mother daughter intuition where we know where the other one's gonna be on the court. And if we miss a shot, we know the other person is not going to be mad at us. So we just feel like you know, we can play how we want to play. We don't have to worry about disappointing our partner because no matter what happens on the court, we're a family and that's what families do. They stick together. I travel with not only my mom but also my dad win or lose. Me and my family always go out to eat and I have a really special bond with my grandmom. She's been home schooling me from third grade on, I'm in 11th grade. Even before I started playing pickleball, I was home schooling and it just really worked out because I couldn't travel and do all the things that I'm doing with pickleball right now becoming a professional athlete. I am so proud of Anna Lee. Her coaches and her other sports have always told us what an athlete she was and what potential she had. But you still don't necessarily go to like, oh professional athletes. This is probably a very futuristic goal, but I want to play pickle ball in the Olympics one day I grew up watching the Olympics and I think it would be really cool to represent my country. And I also want to see pickleball grow like in other countries. I also want to see pickle ball grow in like high schools and get younger kids involved. And that's something that I'm working on now. So in the beginning of this year, one of my goals was to get a triple crown and I ended up getting eight this year, which was amazing. If I've accomplished the goal, there's still something better you can do. So I feel like next year I'm gonna try to get nine triple crowns, uh, which would be, might be difficult, but I'm gonna try to do it. I'm just really, you know, enjoying the ride and I wanna keep going as long as I can. Uh When we came home, we decided we were going to get a ping pong table. I think we played about two weeks before Anna Lee got so good that nobody wanted to play with her anymore. And I don't think we've played ping pong since.

All right, so this is our studio. This is [Studio] 3K and this is where everything happens. I'm Janice Huff. I'm the chief meteorologist at NBC News 4 New York. We are the station scientists, even when it's not the weather, even when it's earthquakes, even when it's—anything that has to do with science, NASA, space, whatever. You have to be a scientist and a presenter, both. We don't use a script because the graphics that we show, like the satellite pictures, radar, and all the other graphics with all the fronts and things and the 10-day and all that—we're basically telling it through through the pictures. I've been doing this job here at NBC in New York for 28 years. I've been in television, weather broadcasting, probably closer to 40 years. This is one of our touchscreen monitors. We can use this for weather, as well as this large monitor right here, also useful. And then over here is our green screen. We stand here and do weather here. It's a big studio with lots of monitors that we take full advantage of. These are not all my clothes. Only this stuff is mine. But we have lots of weather anchors here. So six of us. And between the six of us, we all have clothes back here and lockers, and places to put our shoes. People do recognize me, people always have something to say about the weather. We are extremely accurate, but that's not what people remember. They always remember the one time when you may not get the snowfall right, or you may not get the area that gets the rain versus the snow. And everybody always remembers those times, of course. Blizzards are our big thing here on the East Coast. Forecasting itself is probably one of the biggest challenges. And we are most accurate, at least 90 to 95% of the time. There's very few times when the forecast is doesn't turn out the way we had hoped or the way we have predicted it. There's 10 meteorologists in our family that are helping each other all the time and collaborating, especially when there are big, big storms. We probably have the biggest team of anybody here in this area, we're the envy of most. Janice has such a rich history here. She is so kind and warm and welcoming to everyone. It is just so easy to work with her. And the person you see on camera who's so inviting and warm and welcoming to the viewers, someone who really cares—she's like that off the air. When we have the breaking weather situations, a lot of times that can be serious, but kind of we just watch her and it's just—it comes so easy to her. So I would say kind of, we watch an awful lot of us because it just rolls right off the tongue. She's a pro. She's really ready for anything at any time. We are in the Storm Team 4 Weather Center for NBC. It's right behind our studio walls. Our studio is just on the other side of this wall. It's a team effort. It takes a lot of people to get this act together every day. We have several shows throughout the day, starting with our morning news at 4 a.m. We also have an 11 a.m. newscast. This is where all of the work gets done every day for all of our weather casts that go into each and every newscast. That's all of the forecasting. That's all of the graphics that gets done for the actual weather cast, and all the discussion. And we have our lunch here. We live here pretty much. There are people here practically 24/7. There's only a couple of hours at night when no one's here. We collaborate with Janice. It's pretty much an ongoing conversation between the members of the weather team. We use Microsoft Teams to basically keep everybody abreast of any changes in the forecast. Any interesting tidbits in the forecast that one of us is saying, we'll put it into a team's note so that everybody can see it. Janice is pretty much on call 24/7. I go home and about 11:45 Every night and get right back up at 9:40 in the morning and start all over again. That's interesting. I knew I wanted to be a meteorologist when I was about 10, I think. I discovered the word "meteorology" by reading the encyclopedia because back then we didn't have computers at home. That's when I figured out what a meteorologist does. And I loved the weather since I was a little little kid. And so I decided then when I was 10 that that's what I was going to study when I went to college. My degree is a Bachelor of Science in meteorology from Florida State University. My minor is mathematics. Graduating from college, I was the first person in my family to do that. Even though it was many years ago, I still look back on that as a major accomplishment. And to also get a degree in meteorology, which is a major accomplishment for anybody. Once I got to interview President Obama. A bunch of meteorologists, including myself, were picked to come to the White House when he was president and talk about the climate report, the climate assessment. And it was amazing to be there and actually speak to the President about the state of the climate and the weather and be at the White House which is really cool. Definitely as a woman of color, I didn't see people who looked like me doing weather on television when I was growing up in the '60s and '70s. There were a handful of women, one being June Bacon-Bercey, who actually broke that barrier before I did, and became the first African American woman with a degree in meteorology to actually do the weather on TV back in the '70s. So there were a couple of people that came before me. Yet, I never saw her on TV when she was actually on television back then, because she was in Buffalo, New York, and I was in South Carolina. So I didn't see anyone who looked like me doing what I do. That's why I never thought about having a career on TV doing it. I bought this when I was in Tanzania in the Serengeti. We went on vacation. It was more than just going on vacation. It was kind of symbolic, in a way. I've never been to Africa, so. And since the majority of my roots are in Africa, not from that country. But it was my first trip to the motherland, as you say, and it was quite the experience of being in a country where practically everybody looks like you. But that's the flag of Tanzania. And I've wear it all the time. I never take it off. That was in 2018. It's just just a reminder of my trip and when it meant to be there. We expect it to be quiet night tonight. The fun part about this job is just being able to do what I love. It's not really work when you do what you love, right? Most people are never going to be able to say they've worked anywhere for 28 years. But to say that I've worked at 30 Rock for 28 years is a tremendous accomplishment. Of course, there's a little bit of luck involved and things that I have no control over. But that's a huge deal now when I think about it, and I'm really happy that I've been able to be here this long. If you want to be a meteorologist, focus on your studies, math and science.

Chief Meteorologist Janice Huff shares a behind-the-scenes look at how weather forecasting at NBC 4 New York comes together. She delves into her successful journey of nearly 40 years in the field, from wanting to be a meteorologist at age 10 to meeting President Barack Obama. She also honors June Bacon-Bercey, the first on-air Black female meteorologist in the U.S.

Meet this NYC meteorologist who's been predicting weather for 40 years

Chief Meteorologist Janice Huff shares a behind-the-scenes look at how weather forecasting at NBC 4 New York comes together.

Meet this NYC meteorologist predicting weather for 40 years

Bye. All right. So this is our studio and this is where everything happens. I'm Janice Hoff. I'm the chief meteorologist at NBC News for New York. We are the station scientist even when it's not the weather, even when it's earthquakes, even when it's anything that has to do with science, NASA Space, whatever you have to be a scientist and a presenter. Both we don't use a script because the graphics that we show like the satellite pictures, radar and all the other graphics with all the fronts and things and the 10 day and all that, we're basically telling it through, through the pictures. I've been doing this job here at NBC in New York for 28 years. I've been in television. Weather broadcasting probably closer to 40 years. This is one of our three monitors. We can use this for weather as well as this large monitor also use. And then over here is our Green Street. We stand here and do weather here. It's a big studio with lots of monitors that we take full advantage of. These are not all my clothes. Um Only this stuff is mine, but we have lots of weather anchors here. So, uh, six of us and between the six of us, we all have clothes back here and lockers and places to put our shoes. People do recognize me. People always have something to say about the weather. We are extremely accurate, but that's not what people remember. They always remember the one time when you may not get the snowfall, right? Or you may not get the area that gets the rain versus the snow. And everybody always remembers those times. Of course, blizzards are our big thing here on the east coast forecast itself. Probably one of the biggest challenges and we are most accurate at least 90 to 95% of the time. There's very few times when the forecasts doesn't turn out the way we had hoped or the way we have predicted it, there's 10 meteorologists in our family that are helping each other all the time and collaborating, especially when there are big, big storms. We probably have the biggest team of anybody here in this area. We're the envy of, of most Janice has such a rich history here. She is so kind and warm and welcoming to everyone. It is just so easy to work with her and the person you see on camera who's so inviting and warm and welcoming to the viewers, someone who really cares. She's like that off the air when we have the breaking weather situations. A lot of times that can be serious, but kind of, we just watch her and it's just, it comes so easy to her. So I would say kind of, we watch in all a lot of us because it just rolls right off the tongue. She's a, she's really ready for anything at any time. We are in the storm. Team four weather center for NBC. It's right behind our studio wall. So our studio is just on the other side of this wall. It's a team effort. It takes a lot of people to get this act together every day. We have several shows throughout the day, starting with our morning news at four AM. We also have an 11 AM news cast. This is where all of the work gets done every day for all of our weather casts that go into each and every newscast. That's all of the forecasting. That's all of the graphics that gets done for the actual weather cast and all of the discussion. And we have our lunch here. We live here pretty much. There are people here practic 24/7 and there's only a couple of hours at night when no one's here. We collaborate with Janice. It's pretty much an ongoing conversation between the members of the weather team. We use Microsoft teams to basically keep everybody abreast of any changes in forecasts, any interesting tidbits in the forecast that one of us is seeing. We'll put it into a team's note so that everybody can see it. Janice is pretty much on call 24 7. I go home at about 1145 every night and get right back up at 9:45 AM and start all over again. That's interesting. I knew I wanted to be a meteorologist when I was about 10. I think I discovered the word meteorology by reading the encyclopedia because back then we didn't have computers at home. That's when I figured out what a meteorologist does. And I love the weather since I was a little, little kid. And so I decided then when I was 10, that that's what I was going to study when I went to college. My degree is a Bachelor of Science in meteorology from Florida State University. My minor is mathematics. Graduated from college. I was the first person in my family to do that even though it was many years ago, I still look back on that as a major accomplishment and to also get a degree in meteorology, which is a major accomplishment for anybody. Once I got to interview President Obama, a bunch of meteorologists including myself, were picked to come to the White House when he was president and talk about the climate report, the climate assessment. And it was amazing to be there and actually speak to the president about the state of the climate and the weather and be at the White House, which is really cool. Definitely as a woman of color. I didn't see people who looked like me doing weather on television when I was growing up in the sixties and seventies, there were a handful of women, one being June Bacon Bey, who actually broke that barrier before I did and became the first African American woman with a degree in meteorology to actually do the weather on TV, back in the seventies. So there were a couple of people that came before me yet. I never saw her on TV when she was actually on television back then because she was in Buffalo, New York and I was in South Carolina. So I didn't see anyone who looked like me doing what I do. That's why I never thought about having a career on TV, doing it. I bought this when I was in Tanzania in the Serengeti. We went on vacation. It was more than just going on vacation. It was kind of symbolic in a way, I've never been to Africa. So, and since the majority of my roots are in Africa, not from that country, but it was on my first trip to the motherland, as you say. And it was quite the experience of being in a country where practically everybody looks like you. But that's the flag of Tanzania and I wear it all the time. I never take it off. That was in 2018. It is just a reminder of my trip and what it meant to be there. We expect it to be a quiet night tonight. The fun part about this job is just being able to do what I love. It's not really work when you do what you love. Right. Most people are never going to be able to say they've worked anywhere for 28 years. But to say that I've worked at 30 rock for 28 years is a tremendous accomplishment. Of course, there's a little bit of luck involved in things that I have no control over. But that's a huge deal now, when I think about it and I'm really happy that I've been able to be here this long if you want to be a meteorologist. Focus on your studies, math and science.

Fortune Well

Burnout among CEOs and founders is not only a risk to personal well-being, but can make or break a business. Alli Webb, cofounder of Drybar, the nationwide chain of hairstyling salons, shares how she navigated personal struggles amid her success as an entrepreneur.

The cofounder of Drybar sold her business for millions before 40—and ‘almost lost herself’ in the process

Burnout among CEOs and founders is not only a risk to personal well-being, but can make or break a business.

The cofounder of Drybar sold her business for millions before 40—and ‘almost lost herself’

As an entrepreneur or a leader, you are in this world of like go go go work, work, work and rest later burn out can, can really take down a business and certainly a person as an entrepreneur or just anybody who's really dedicated to their job, their craft, you know, you work so hard and when you're in the throes of it, I feel like you love it and you just want to do it all the time. And then all of a sudden you wake up one day and you're like, I, I can't get out of bed. I have no more energy and being aware of that and figuring out ways to help yourself not get to that burnout and step away from things for a little while so that you can regroup and recharge, you know, is, is a big lesson that I, that took me a long time to learn. It took me a long time to embrace delegating, allowing other people to help me grow this business. And once I did, it was incredibly freeing to be like, oh I have a little bit of time and not constantly, constantly working. I, I've learned how to, like, connect to my body so much more. And I can feel when I have, you know, something doesn't feel right when like, stress and anxiety starts coming up for me. It's like a fire in my belly and I'm really mad about something and now it, it almost sets up like an alarm. Like, ok, you gotta chill out. I love all the meditation apps and I use the inside timer and I'll be like, OK, I'm putting my phone on focus mode or sleep mode or just not be bothered mode and we'll do like a five or 10 minute meditation on like stress and anxiety. And it's really amazing how breathwork and like getting out of your head for like five or 10 minutes can really like reset you. And so that's been a really big tool for me. I think there's really something to be said for offering up the authenticity of what it looks like. Like to really be in the throes of running a business to be a leader, to be a CEO. It's so much. And I think that the more transparent and honest we are about what we're going through and dealing with the, you know, the more permission it gives everybody else to kind of speak their truth and to feel like we can talk about what's really going on and we don't need to hide behind this curtain of perfection.

How do you unlock the secrets of a long and healthy life? With their SuperAgers Family Study, researchers at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine hope to identify the natural and inherited factors that allow humans to fight aging and related diseases.

Here’s how scientists at the cutting edge of aging research are working to extend ‘health span’

How do you unlock the secrets of a long and healthy life? With their SuperAgers Family Study, researchers hope to identify the natural and inherited factors that allow humans to fight aging.

We scientists have found that we can actually intervene with aging. What we understand about the biology and the ability to target it has increased tremendously. This has led to investment and creation of longevity, biotech to develop drugs that target aging. What is aging? I think it's a million dollar question. I think we all recognize that as we age, uh certain processes in our bodies break down or don't work as well. Scientists have recognized there's something happening on the cellular level that's causing the body to deteriorate, right and move in that direction, which is what we call aging. So we found a mutation in a gene that's called 36. And we know already from animals that if you express this 36 in animals, they live 20% longer and healthier. So once we identify the genes that contribute to healthy aging, longevity, we don't stop there. Our goal is then to use that information to develop medications that will mimic the action of those genes. With the ultimate goal of giving, you know, general population the benefit of healthy longevity that right now is only accessible to people who won the genetic lottery. We are doing this Super Asure initiative. We have 750 centenarians in their families and we're studying in variety of ways, but we're really interested in their genetics. You could say maybe there's one gene, that's all one gene that provides longevity for everyone. But that's not the case. There are actually several ways to get to age 100. So we want to find everything the CDC have looked at the medical cost in the last two years of life of somebody who dies after the age of 100. And it's third of the cost of those who die at their 70. There is an economical value, not only for the fact that you're not in the hospital, but if you're not in the hospital, what do you do? You travel, you shop, you buy things for your grandkids. So the economical value of extending health spend is just amazing. It's actually something like $380 trillion by the year 2030 even even if we extend health by two years. So it's really not about living to 100 and 20 or you know, or beyond that, it's really about living healthy maybe for 80 years or 90 years, but being able to maintain one's independence, good health, to be able to do the things that one enjoys.

Diving into the world of Medicare can be tricky. What are the differences between Medicare Part A, Part B, Part C, and Part D, and what do each of these parts cover? Jane Sung, senior strategic policy advisor with the AARP Public Policy Institute, explains.

Here’s what to know about the ABCs of Medicare

What are the differences between Medicare Part A, Part B, Part C, and Part D, and what do each of these parts cover?

Diving into the world of Medicare can be tricky. What are the differences between Medicare Part A, Part B, Part C, and Part D, and what do each of these parts cover?

Many people might be surprised to learn that there are actually four different parts of Medicare, part ABC and D. Medicare. Part A is known as hospital insurance. It covers things like hospitalization, skilled nursing care, some home health care and hospice care among other things, Medicare part B is known as medical insurance and it covers more routine medical care, things like doctors visits, specialty care, preventative services and other things together. Medicare parts A and part B make up what we call original Medicare or traditional Medicare. Now Medicare part C is Medicare advantage. That's the alternative way to get your Medicare part A and Part B services. Medicare advantage is operated through private insurance companies operating networks of providers in each area. Medicare part B is Medicare's prescription drug program. This includes coverage for prescription medicines that you get at the pharmacy. For people who have original Medicare, they would sign up for a separate stand alone Medicare prescription drug plan for people who have Medicare Advantage. Their part D coverage is typically provided within their plan. Different people may choose different paths to getting their Medicare coverage based on the features that are most important to you, as we've learned, Medicare enrollment decisions are complicated. So it's important not to wait until the last minute.

Luxury postnatal retreats, long a staple in countries like South Korea, provide a range of care options to help new parents ease into the postpartum period. New York City–based Boram Care is hoping to bring the trend Stateside.

Inside NYC's $1,000-per-night 'postnatal hotel' for new moms

Luxury postnatal retreats, long a staple in countries like South Korea, provide a range of care options to help new parents ease into the postpartum period.

A stay at this luxurious postpartum retreat can cost $1,000 a night

So the boring postnatal retreat is located in New York City at the Thompson Central Park. The Mission and Vision of Bo and postnatal retreat is to make postnatal care essential in the US, whether that's through Bo and postnatal retreats or just bringing more of a focus and education as to why postnatal care is needed. That's our number one mission in America. My first child came out in 2010. My second one was born in 2014 and both times, I had mild postpartum depression and the recovery journey was really rough, going straight into recovery while taking care of an infant and working full time. That struggle really became the founding motivation for us. Most birth complications, whether it's physical or emotional or mental happen postpartum and go often undetected in a place like w we are able to detect early and often any emotional or mental struggles that women are having during this critical period. And the studies show that perceived support of new families leads to higher mental wellness later on which can impact both mother baby and the entire family unit. The average cost of a Boreham stay can range anywhere between 900 $1000 a night. So, Boum postnatal retreat stay includes obviously a beautiful hotel room, a 24 7 nursery and individualized care from our care team. There are two important causes of postpartum depression and we're trying to address those two elements all year inclusively during their stay. One important cause is postpartum anxiety and the other cause is postpartum fatigue and we are really supporting you to really carve the time out to focus on you to heal and rest and we can take care of the baby. We also provide evidence-based education, three meals a day provided for our mothers that are catered towards postpartum healing. 24 7 feeding support. So whether that's bottle feeding or lactation support, of course, if there's any emotional or physical needs, we're also there to provide that support. We have all newborn and postnatal supplies available for guests. The guests will stay here, rest, recover, get educated and then on their way home, we have what's called a transition home conversation and we help parents to take small pieces of Borum home with them. And then we have a follow up call at the end of their first week after being checked out. And during that call, we can connect them to any additional resources they may need. This culture of supporting women after giving birth has been around for centuries, but it really turned into business about 20 years ago in South Korea where people were, you know, migrating to the city, living more in the urban setting away from their village, away from their families. And it really became a business idea to set up a facility to support women. Right after giving birth, I remember creating this Excel chart to compare pros and cons of giving birth here versus going to Korea. Because in Korea, more than 84% of women that give birth go through postpartum care centers. So it is a part of the norm. It's a part of a culture and that's so huge. And I think what we are doing now is also part of starting a movement to increase the awareness, educating people to advocate for their recovery. So what we try to create here is not really a replication of what they have in Korea or other parts of Asia, but we really wanted to create something that fits the needs of our clients here. Our guests here are living in the States, especially in New York. It's been about 14 months since we launched. We are already seeing more than half of our guests who are coming to stay with us are not Asian Americans, meaning they're finding out about this option for the first time. And I think we already began to revolutionize the way people understand about this post partum recovery. So the overarching goal at bum is to make postnatal care essential and to do that, we need to also make it more affordable. So we are working with companies um with B to B projects to try and have companies invest in their female employees to provide this as a health care benefit. We're also working to get this covered by insurance. Looking at the percentage of the guests who who have come to stay with. About 5% came from the corporate partners. We want to make it 10 this year and greater in 2024 you know, one of the fast growing postnatal retreat in a boarding center in China were bought by, by Dance, which is a Tik Tok parent company for over a billion dollars. And I think that can indicate the growth potential for for this industry.

Need to enroll in Medicare? This simple visual explainer will make sign-up easier.

A step-by-step guide to signing up for Medicare online

Step-by-Step Guide to Signing up for Medicare

Co-founder and CEO Dave Long takes Fortune through his daily routine and wellness 'hacks' for better sleep and slower aging.

Orangetheory CEO: My daily routine 'biohacks' for better sleep and slower aging

Life balance for a CEO or an entrepreneur really doesn't, it doesn't really exist. It's because you're carrying your passion, your work with you, no matter where you go, you can pretend to kind of bury it, but it's always there. Hello, I'm Dave Long, the co founder and CEO of Orange. Very fitness. I'm 45 years old and this is my daily routine. The typical time that I wake up in the morning is, uh between six and 6:30 a.m. I'm up fairly early. Um, definitely a coffee person. So my first thing in the morning is coffee often I'll work out fast food. So, besides the coffee, I'll, I'll eat after working out like my go to breakfast most days is kind of a custom smoothie with protein, some fruit Greek yogurt right now. I'm really just focused on, you know, a balanced diet, making sure I'm getting enough fuel for the workouts, enough fuel for the work day and whatever I'm trying to, I got into cold plunging years ago, you know, first off for the recovery benefits and then actually as a sleep aid, it actually, it sounds, maybe sounds wild, but the cold plunge at night actually helps you really sleep. And when I was doing it at night, I would do sauna first for a session and then finish with a cold plunge. But I kind of just had an epiphany and, and a lot of other people were doing it in the morning. Like, why not just start the day with? It's literally 3 to 4 minutes. Why not just start the day? Because I have a cold plunge in the garage. So it's readily available. I'm at the point with my daily workout routine where I really feel like I need to work out every single day to kind of feel my best and perform on any given day. It could be an orangey class on other days. I'll do either an outdoor run, which is probably 30 to 60 minutes, you know, kind of 4 to 8 miles. Um Other days, I'll do a one hour jiu jitsu session and then probably once a week, I'll do an additional strength focused workout usually about an hour, but it averages about an hour per day. The office is only about six miles from my house. So it's a pretty easy 15 minute commute. I'd say anywhere between 8 a.m. and 9 a.m. is where I'm typically arriving. So I'd say, you know, 66 meetings a day. There are times when I'll do some rapid fire and some skip level meetings that are 15 or 20 minutes where I may hit 10 or 12 meetings. I think it's rare that I'm in a meeting that I shouldn't be in. I spend a lot of time really curating that. So, even though there's a lot, I think, you know, it's doing it through prioritization, all very necessary. A typical, like office day. I'm usually winding down between 5 36. It's super important for me to, you know, to get home for dinner. Recently, the thing of this Hodi from Chobani was talking about that work life balance for a CEO or an entrepreneur really doesn't, doesn't really exist. It's because you're carrying your passion, your work with you, no matter where you go, you can pretend to kind of bury it, but it's always there and it's a really important part of, you know, that type of person's life. So really, I've been thinking about it, more of what he said is really, it's more about harmony. Like how do you find the harmony and the fact that you have something that's a very dominant part of your life and it's gonna be there. But finding the tending to find the balance and knowing that it's there and not always spending so much energy trying to kind of push it down and really focus on being more present, whatever you're doing, if you're at work, being all the way there. And if you're not just working towards being present, whether it's for your kids, whether it's for whatever else you're doing that. You're focused in the moment, working to unplug from the work day almost every night, a family dinner or some sort of kids activity before that. And then, um, it's kind of a wind down. We do a walk with the family al almost every night. A lot of times I'll actually do a ruck where I'll wear a weighted backpack as part of that walk. And often the kids are on scooters or bikes as part of it. Many nights I'll do sauna 2025 minutes and then one more coal plunge before bed sleeps. One of the most important things you could possibly do for literally for everything. And so 10 o'clock is my goal. It's probably, I probably average about 10 30. My goal is absolutely, um, eight hours I average right now, probably seven hours and 10 minutes. That's how close I try. I try to sleep.

In this Southeast Asian city-state—the newest ‘blue zone’ where people live extraordinarily long lives—life expectancy has risen about 25 years over recent decades. Experts say the government’s policies and thoughtfully-designed ‘ecosystem’ are responsible for the country’s health outcomes.

Why are Singaporeans living so long—and what can we learn from them?

In this Southeast Asian city-state—the newest ‘blue zone’ where people live extraordinarily long lives—life expectancy has risen about 25 years over recent decades.

My name is Chan. So my age of 83 years old, I'm Singapore. Very healthy. I do exercise almost every day. I'm also the Chong instructor, Chi Kong is a pretty stretching exercise. So I teach all my friends of five days a week. Every time we appreciate about 1 to 2 hours Singaporeans. They like to do exercise every morning in the Park Community Center. You see what they did, they do the exercise. That's why Singaporeans nowadays, they put longer and longer. Singapore is a relatively tiny island in Southeast Asia near the equator. It's home to about 5.5 million people. And in the last 50 years or so, we've seen the life expectancy go up there by about 25 years. People in Singapore have among the highest healthy life expectancy in the world. The story of Singapore is really remarkable. They really thought carefully about how policy influences our health and also how the health system should really be designed around keeping people healthy. How did they do it? It really began in about 1970 Lee Kuan Yew, the Prime Minister there systematically shaped an environment to produce greater health and long what did they do? First of all, transportation, they made driving really expensive. So only about 11% of Singaporeans have cars yet. It's really easy to walk anywhere. There are covered walkways, there are safe sidewalks. You're no more than 400 m away from a safe, fast, efficient subway system. So as a result, people, there are getting a lot of steps a day without even thinking about it. The public has already for the LDD in most other places in the world, including the United States. We have more of a sick care system than a health care system in Singapore. I think they've been very deliberate about making sure they're investing in all of those other drivers of health. They spend a bigger percentage of their GDP on the elderly than just about any place in the world. Singapore has really had a concerted focus on older adults in part because of the demographic shift that they are undergoing by the year 2031 in four, Singaporeans will be older than the age of 65. And so this means that they're having to contend with what all of us go through, you know, as we age. And so they're being very deliberate about shaping the environments that older adults live in, in Singapore. It's not about people trying to change their behavior nearly as much as the ecosystem people live in that has been very carefully engineered. The national steps challenge is just one example of how Singapore is thinking broadly about what keeps us healthy, especially by the Singapore health. The government do a work that we have judge. What about more than 10,000 steps a day? You get the point to p to the voucher and get them to buy food or buy other things by your shopping. It's not just about doctors or medicine, it's about what we do every single day, you know, in between our visits to the doctor. Because that's really what shapes health are we walking more? Are we reaching out to our friends? Are we eating healthy food after we go with? We also together have a breakfast dinner together, discuss how to improve our q skill, how to make ourselves more healthy. We have to think about human connection as something that is as fundamental as food or water. Each of us can ask ourselves, are we contributing to a society that fosters connection that strengthens relationships? Are our institutions doing the same thing or are they eroding it? You know, the big lesson when it comes to Singapore is for our government to think about how to nudge people to make a better healthier choice and to engineer spaces that bring people who are on foot together. It's worked throughout time eternal and we ought to be paying more attention to it today.

Is it your first time navigating Medicare? Are you curious about what your options are, what a "Medigap" plan is, or simply when you should sign up? Jane Sung, senior strategic policy advisor with the AARP Public Policy Institute, explains.

Just starting Medicare? Here's where to start

Is it your first time navigating Medicare? Are you curious about what your options are, what a "Medigap" plan is, or simply when you should sign up?

Is it your first time navigating Medicare? Here is where to start. The key time period for people to pay attention to is called the initial enrollment period. That's the seven month window around your 65th birthday. It includes the three months before you turn 65 and the three months after you turn 65. For most people. If you miss that window of time, there's other opportunities to sign up later. There's a general enrollment period that happens in the first three months of the year. Once you signed up, there's also an annual open enrollment window that happens every fall. Generally, this is people who are switching plans or want to switch between Original Medicare and Medicare Advantage. There are two paths that people can take to get their Medicare coverage. One is the traditional Medicare program known as Original Medicare. The other is a private insurance alternative known as Medicare Advantage. With original Medicare. People can see any provider across the country who accepts Medicare. Medicare pays their claims directly and there's no insurance company involved in the middle cost sharing for original Medicare tends to be relatively high. So the majority of people who have virgin Medicare also have another form of supplemental coverage. This might be a Medicap policy that they purchase on their own in their own local areas. Medicare Advantage. On the other hand, is operated through private insurance plans approved by the Medicare program. These insurance companies typically use networks of health care providers in each area. Medicare Advantage plans do offer extra benefits including dental, vision and hearing and people can get their supplemental coverage and drug coverage as well. If you're ready to sign up for Medicare, you can do so through the Social Security Administration, you can sign up directly online and enroll through the website or you can visit your local social security office. Signing up for Medicare can seem intimidating and complicated, but you should know that there are resources available out there to help you navigate your choices.

Fortune’s annual list of health innovators features people working tirelessly to create a happier, healthier, and more equitable world. The list includes doctors, scientists, architects, activists, and more. Fortune Well editor Jennifer Fields explains.

These innovators are shaping the future of health

Fortune’s annual list of health innovators features people working tirelessly to create a happier, healthier, and more equitable world.

Fortune's annual list of innovators who are shaping the future of health is really a way to highlight some of the people who are doing really creative things in health care. I'm just really excited to see that these innovations exist and they go far beyond what I would think is possible. We're looking at people from all different kinds of fields. They can be scientists, they can be medical experts, they can be developers of an app. We are really looking for people who are making meaningful change in health care and have had a big development within the last year. The frame is a neuroscience based platform to help people cut back on drinking alcohol and to help them become the best version of themselves. We want to champion the rights of women and people to determine their own sexual journey and access the solutions that they won't. One recurring theme in this year's list is around accessibility and equity. We have the creators of a robotic boot that is going to help people with mobility issues. We have the developers of a housing project in Brooklyn that is providing affordable housing. But modeling it after the blue zones where people live the longest, creating more access to improved health outcomes for a lot of people, not only their personal health but on the community's health. So it's important to highlight the people in the institutions that are really working to make things more equitable for people. Alonza is a platform built specifically to serve the one in 10 women living with the most common chronic condition that you've never heard of. That's endometriosis. We are trying to bridge a crucial gap in our understanding of health and disease management. By studying that one innovation we are really excited about is the development of this shelf stable blood. As you may know, the country is facing a blood shortage. So we're really excited to have these innovators who have been working on developing sort of a blood substitute. It doesn't require refrigeration, it's not dependent on donors. It could be something that could save lives in the event of a mass casualty or some other trauma like that. This year, we're also really excited to have the surgeon general Dr Murphy on our list. It's amazing to see a public health figure talk so openly, not only about mental health in general and how important it is to your overall well being, but your own mental health, loneliness is actually a lot more than a bad feeling. It's an experience that we all have from time to time. But when it's persistent or when it's extreme, it can actually come with significant health risks actually comparable to the increased risk of premature death related to smoking 15 cigarettes a day. I love thinking about people having more access to good health care, whether that's older adults or people of color or women or people who are typically left out of the health care system or get substandard health care. There are so many people who are working on innovative and creative ways to make sure that they get the health care they deserve. And I'm very excited about that.

This national health insurance program serves over 65 million Americans, but how exactly does it work? Jane Sung, senior strategic policy advisor with the AARP Public Policy Institute, explains.

What is Medicare? Here’s what you need to know

Medicare serves over 65 million Americans, but how exactly does it work? Jane Sung, senior strategic policy advisor with the AARP Public Policy Institute, explains.

What exactly is Medicare and why should we care? Medicare is a nation's health insurance program for people ages 65 and older as well as for people under the age of 65 with disabilities. Medicare is a federal program that helps pay for health care bills so that we can access the health care services that we need. Many people get confused between Medicare and Medicaid. Now, Medicaid is a state and federal program that serves people of all ages with limited incomes and resources. Medicare was established in 1965 to address what the pressing need in our society, which is older adults lack of access to affordable health care. Most people relied on their jobs as their source of health coverage as they do today. What happened was that as people stopped working and didn't have access to health insurance, they began to struggle with accessing the health care that they needed. Congress tried to address this issue, enacted the Medicare law and the Medicare program was born today, the Medicare program serves about 65 million people. By the year 2030 the number of people eligible for Medicare is projected to increase to 77 million at a national level. Medicare is important because it serves nearly 20% of the entire US population. That's one in every five people in this country. Even those of us who are not currently eligible for Medicare. I think we all hope to reach that age when we too would be eligible for Medicare. And most of us have family members, parents, friends or loved ones who have or will soon have Medicare. So it does impact all of us.

Dementia impacts 55 million people globally. While there is no cure, you can adopt some lifestyle changes to reduce the risk of developing the disease.

5 things you can do to reduce the risk of dementia

Try this quick and healthy rice cake recipe from registered dietitian Rena Shapiro, containing ingredients that can help improve your sleep.

Want better sleep? Try this simple snack recipe

Try this quick and healthy recipe with ingredients that can help improve your sleep.

Today's snack is a peanut butter rice cake. We'll be using ingredients that can help improve your sleep. Let's get started. First, we have our brown rice cakes. We're gonna add a few tablespoons of peanut butter. We're going to use fresh peanut butter with no additives. Just peanuts. Peanut butter is a great extra source of protein. So here we have bananas which are rich in nutrients, fiber and potassium and help to control blood sugars and appetite. Then we're going to add are walnuts which are high in omega three fatty acids, magnesium and fate. These are all associated with positive sleep quality. And here we are with our quick healthy snacks, using all these ingredients together can help improve your sleep.

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