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The Critic Who Finally Came Around | Jeanine Pt. 5 Sep 24, 2026

Show notes

For the finale, Forrest flips the format and puts four multiple-choice questions to Jeanine about the product she spent years building. She handles the first one easily — heat is the enemy, though she notes for the record that she'd prefer to worry about curious seagulls.

The quiz opens into the best running conversation of the series, about zippers. Jeanine has strong feelings here, having wrestled with a two-zip cooler that she says takes an act of God to close, and she wants to know whether there's a balance between waterproof and usable. Her own bag runs tight, she admits, which is why it ships with zipper lube — a term Forrest has never heard in his life. She explains the application, then confesses she's only used it once herself. Her husband is the one who bothers. She just muscles it. Forrest catches the shot fired and asks his name, and that's how Jeff ends up mentioned on the podcast.

The last question is about freezer discipline, and the answer is all of the above, which leads Jeanine to explain why skipping a pack to make room defeats the purpose — the modular pieces can be repositioned along the bag wall instead of removed, so you keep the full chill while making space for larger bottles or food.

Then comes the moment worth staying for. Asked who's been her biggest supporter, Jeanine names her husband, who's watched her stay up half the night with manufacturers. But her biggest critic was her middle daughter, who'd heard years of "I'm going to invent that" and called the ideas silly. When she finally saw this one, she stopped — and thought of every bachelorette party she'd hauled champagne to in a cardboard box. She closes with discount codes for listeners and where to find 3rd Bottle online.

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She Designed It Around TSA Rules | Jeanine Pt. 4 Sep 22, 2026

Show notes

This is the practical episode. Jeanine walks through what you'll find at 3rdbottle.com: two bags, a six-pack and a twelve-pack, each with the interlocking modular ice packs that lie flat in a freezer. The six-pack holds six to eight hours depending on how well you keep it sealed. You can also buy the ice packs on their own if you already own a cooler tall enough to take a wine bottle — the measurements are posted on the site — though she's careful to say she can't promise chill times in a cooler she didn't design. Every bag ships with the ice packs and a condensation towel, the latter existing purely because the packs sweat a little and she didn't like the small pool of water at the bottom, so she had one made to absorb it.

Then Forrest asks the question that opens up the best part of the episode: why fill them with water instead of using the pre-filled gel packs everyone else uses? The answer turns out to have four separate layers. Cost and customs came first — chemical fills are treated differently at the border and would have driven the price up. Performance came second, and this is the part that surprised her: she prototyped with gels, even pulled the beads out of a commercial gel pack and tested them in her own design, and found that plain water chilled just as long. Liability came third. She didn't want to be responsible for a child getting into a broken pack.

The fourth reason is the one nobody would predict. She designed the whole system to clear TSA, because she flies to Europe, buys wine, and brings it home in cargo — and she didn't want to stand at a checkpoint answering questions about hazardous chemicals. When Forrest compliments the foresight, she gives it up easily: she used to be a flight attendant, and she heard those speeches every single day.

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The Tuesday Wine vs. the I-Just-Closed-Something Bottle Pt. 4 Sep 21, 2026

Show notes

Victoria wrote a book about building a personal brand, and then people kept asking her the same follow-up question: fine, I built it — now what? That question became the sequel. Influence Unleashed taught the construction. Influence Activated teaches what you do once it's standing. Her diagnosis of where most people go wrong is uncomfortable and probably correct: they lead with credentials and industry and job titles, when the truth is people do business with people.

She never takes a meeting cold. Prospective hire, new client, old client — she looks them up first, and she assumes they're doing the same to her. That's the whole argument in a sentence. Write your own narrative or accept the one strangers assemble for you. She's honest about using AI, honest about the filters, and firm that none of it works without something real underneath. And she has little patience for the quiet hope so many professionals live on: that doing excellent work will simply be noticed.

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Can You Ace the CLINQ ZERO Pop Quiz? Find Out Now! Sep 19, 2026

Show notes

WHAT YOU'LL LEARN:
- The inspiration behind the name CLINQ ZERO
- Anto's previous corporate experience
- How CLINQ ZERO differs from traditional wines
- The business model of non-alcoholic wine
- Future plans for CLINQ ZERO varieties

TIMESTAMPS:
[00:00] Welcome and Introduction
[00:06] Overview of CLINQ ZERO and Anto's Background
[00:30] Round 1: The Making of CLINQ ZERO Begins
[04:00] Round 2: The Business of CLINQ ZERO Starts
[06:12] Closing Remarks and Where to Find CLINQ ZERO

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The MBA Means Almost Nothing to Her. Here's What Does Pt. 3 Sep 18, 2026

Show notes

India, twenty-some years ago: the site manager who addressed her male employee instead of her

Aggressive versus assertive — and the word that gets used on women

Guilt aimed at driven mothers; Canada's six-month, now one-year, maternity leave

Working the day she gave birth to her second child; back at the desk after two weeks

"Well, ask a man"

Being the only woman in the room, routinely

Forrest on golf, the email he never got, and what exclusion feels like from the inside

"I drive a mean golf cart and I buy drinks incredibly well"

Finding other avenues to build relationships

Hiring for real-life experience over polish; MBAs rank low on her list

The seven-out-of-ten rule, and the coaching that fills the gap

Agility, growth mindset, good humans, good fit

#Unstoppable and #NoExcuses — the philosophy in two tags

The books: Unstoppable (co-authored, opening chapter), a personal branding book, The Power of Whole Human Leadership, a leadership transitions book, and the new Influence Activated

LinkedIn ranked her the #1 social seller worldwide during her IBM years

Forrest's promise to the audience: the wine is coming

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You Missed the Mark on the Wine Industry — Jeanine vs. Hydro Flask Pt. 3 Sep 17, 2026

Show notes

This part is where the numbers come out. Jeanine wanted twelve to fifteen hours of chill, driven by a specific need: she and her husband keep a second home in Albuquerque, the drive runs through desert heat, and she favors black vehicles, which is one more thing working against the wine in the back. What the finished product actually delivers exceeded her target — the twelve-pack holds for twenty-four hours and beyond, and she's tested it under a truck cover, deliberately engineering a heat trap, across the full twelve-hour run from Orange County to Albuquerque. The six-pack is the short-trip version: picnics, concerts, a day at the beach, six to eight hours as long as you keep it zipped.

She also talks about what she had to let go. She wanted a collapsible bag for boats and RVs, and the engineering wouldn't support it — the design couldn't hold temperature. That's the moment, she says, where her stubbornness had to give way to someone who actually knew better.

Then there's everyone else. Once word gets out that you're building something, people arrive with suggestions, and Jeanine's response to the two-pack and three-pack crowd is that she's already thought it through — the ice pack system doesn't earn its keep at that size, and plenty of simple bags already exist for a dinner out. Her real problem was never dinner. It was tasting rooms: buying six or nine or twelve bottles, then facing the next winery with nowhere to put them. Her husband wouldn't carry them in and wouldn't leave them in the car. What she needed, as she puts it, was a wine mule. He quit.

The centerpiece is her conversation with Travis Rosbach, co-founder of Hydro Flask, who asked her the obvious business question: why rebuild the entire cooler instead of just selling the ice packs? Her answer is the thesis of the whole product. The cooler companies built for beer, and wine bottles are taller. Loose ice chills unevenly and can overchill a bottle, and soaking labels means losing them — which matters not only for knowing what you're drinking but for the artist whose work is on the bottle. Rosbach laughed and conceded the point

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Graduated High School at 16, Bought a House at 19 - Victoria Pt. 2 Sep 16, 2026

Show notes

The Canadian tell — "out and about"

Growing up in Calgary; talked into the University of Calgary at sixteen despite offers elsewhere

Scholarship in hand, room and board free, and moving out anyway that first semester

Relocated to Toronto straight out of university, later to the US

One, two, sometimes three jobs at a time through school: banking, a doctor's office, acting and commercial work

Four or five hours of sleep at twenty — and what sleep looks like now

Her son's objection: "but then you have no social life"

The tuition bargain — maintain the GPA or repay the semester

C-suite, decoded: chief executive officer, chief operating officer, and the functions that reported to her

Recruited at twenty-four as COO and general manager, three months into new motherhood

Everything but finance in her remit, in a lean outsourcing P&L where mistakes cost money

Confidence read as competence — "rightfully or wrongfully so"

Just over forty M&A and divestiture transactions across the career

Twenty-six years in B2B professional services: outsourcing, consulting, technology

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They're About the Beers and the Bros — Why Wine Coolers Don't Work Pt. 2 Sep 15, 2026

Show notes

Every product story has a stretch in the middle that nobody puts in the marketing copy, and this is Jeanine Lum's. Her first project manager had never had a drink in his life, which made explaining the value of what she was trying to protect a losing battle from the start. He took her concept, produced designs that failed, then redesigned and remolded without consulting her — and charged her for a new mold every single time. A year and several molds later, she was ready to quit.

What she says next is the part that stops you. Twenty years in law enforcement, and she had never cried as much as she did during that first year of design work.

She found a second manufacturer, and the difference was immediate: they didn't charge for redesigns, and their engineers apologized for not having reached her solutions first. Three mold revisions, billed once. Running alongside all of it was a patent process that went nearly as badly — the first attorney turned her away claiming a conflict of interest so fast she's certain he never opened her email, the second loved the product but couldn't hold to deadlines, and the third, who also doesn't drink, turned out to be the one who saw it. She now holds a design patent, a utility patent, and two registered trademarks.

Then Forrest asks the question that gets to the heart of it, and Jeanine explains the interlocking ice pack system — a modular grid that freezes flat enough to fit an RV freezer, then slides together inside the bag, with pieces you can remove and reposition to make room for food and charcuterie. She designed it that way because she and her husband have lived with small refrigerators on a boat and in an RV, and because the coolers already on the market weren't built with wine in mind at all. Most of them, as she puts it, aren't even tall enough.

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Adopted at 4, Unstoppable by 14 - Victoria Pt. 1 Sep 14, 2026

Show notes

Getting the name right, first thing — P-E-L-L-E-T-I-E-R

Only child, gifted kid, self-described loner: the bike as an instrument of exploration

Streetlights as the only curfew, and what kids lose without that

People-watching from a bicycle seat, and inventing stories about strangers — a habit that never left her

First job at eleven: booking appointments, running cash, sweeping floors, laundering towels

Babysitting at $2 an hour

Assistant manager at fourteen, coaching adults decades older

"Turtle shell outside, marshmallow inside — somewhere between don't mess with me and do you want a hug"

Why the all-business mask came first, and why vulnerability came later

Adopted at four out of a violent early childhood

"Tori, you need to do better than us" — and the crucial distinction between better than where I came from and better than any person

No money for the high school graduation trip

Book 5 is in stores now!

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Wine Mule Replacement: Jeanine Lum's Journey to Building 3rd Bottle Pt. 1 Sep 10, 2026

Show notes

Jeanine Lum never set out to become an inventor. A W2 employee with no manufacturing background, she stumbled into her business idea the hard way, through a series of wine mishaps that most collectors will wince at. A bottle left in a car in Paso Robles pushed its own cork out from heat. A year later, a cardboard box holding roughly $1,400 worth of wine tipped over on a winding road trip. Those two moments sent her looking for a real solution, and she quickly discovered that nothing on the market actually protected the wine itself, only the bottle.

What follows is a candid look at the long road from idea to finished product. Jeanine talks about working with a project manager who had never had a drop of wine in his life and struggled to understand what she was trying to protect, the costly cycle of redesigned molds, and the patent attorneys who came and went before she found the right partner. She eventually landed on an interlocking, modular ice pack system inspired by an ice pack she received in a box of chocolates, built specifically to accommodate the height of wine bottles, something she says most coolers on the market completely ignore.

Forrest and Jeanine also dig into the practical side of the product, from the six-pack and twelve-pack ice systems and how long each holds its chill, to the zipper lube that keeps the airtight seal easy to manage, to why she intentionally avoided pre-filled gel packs in favor of simple water. Along the way, she shares a great story about a conversation with Hydro Flask's Travis Rosbach, who admitted his industry had missed the mark entirely on wine drinkers. It's a fun, honest conversation about persistence, unexpected mentors, and building something from a problem nobody else thought to solve.

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