Podcasts about Big Five

Nederland leunt hard op wankele digitale fundamenten, maar merken we wel op tijd hoe kwetsbaar we écht zijn? Te gast is onafhankelijk tech-expert Bert Hubert. Gasten in BNR's Big Five van Nederland in het defensief -Marcel Levi, internist, hoogleraar geneeskunde en voorzitter van de NWO -Gwenda Nielen, desinformatie-expert, verbonden aan onderzoeksinstituut TNO, en oud-luitenant-kolonel bij de luchtmacht -Bert Hubert, tech-expert -Tom Middendorp, voormalig Commandant der Strijdkrachten -Lucia van Geuns, energie-expert bij HCSSSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Can Buzzfeed quizzes, Myers-Briggs Types, and Enneagrams tell us anything valid about who we are? In episode 163 of Overthink, Ellie and David discuss personality. They talk through the Big Five personality test and its legitimacy, the history of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator test (MBTI), and how the concept of personality emerged out of abnormal psychology. Why did the concept of personality replace using literature to understand the self? How does the concept of personality presuppose a fixed concept of the self? And what is the connection between MBTI and World War II? In the Substack bonus segment, your hosts think about how personality tests might be susceptible to the Barnum effect and their reduction of the self to egos. Works Discussed:Theodor Adorno, The Authoritarian PersonalityMerve Emre, What's Your Type? The Story of the Myers-Briggs, and How Personality Testing Took Over the WorldColin Koopman, How We Became Our Data: A Genealogy of the Informational PersonEnjoy our work? Support Overthink via tax-deductible donation: https://www.givecampus.com/fj0w3vJoin our Substack for ad-free versions of both audio and video episodes, extended episodes, exclusive live chats, and more: https://overthinkpod.substack.com/See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Beyond Europe's traditional "Big Five" lies a footballing landscape that defies conventional financial logic. In this episode, we dive into the secret sauce of Istanbul's heavyweights, Galatasaray and Fenerbahçe, to understand how they consistently lure global icons to the banks of the Bosphorus. From the intimidating "hell" of RAMS Park to the tactical reinvention of stars like Victor Osimhen and Talisca, we explore the powerful trifecta of unmatched fan devotion, heavy-hitting corporate sponsorships, and a culture of prestige that offers players a second life. It's a masterclass in how identity and atmosphere can compete with the world's richest leagues, proving that in Istanbul, passion is the ultimate currency. Galatasaray vs Fenerbahçe, Turkish Süper Lig transfers, Victor Osimhen, Istanbul football atmosphere, European football finance.

We horen steeds vaker dat Nederland zich moet voorbereiden op oorlog, sabotage of langdurige energie-uitval. Maar wat als de echte ontwrichting zich niet met een knal aankondigt, maar te werk gaat als een sluipmoordenaar: via desinformatie. Te gast is Gwenda Nielen, desinformatie-expert bij TNO en voormalig luitenant-kolonel bij de landmacht, in BNR's Big Five van Nederland in het defensief. Gasten in BNR's Big Five van Nederland in het defensief -Marcel Levi, internist, hoogleraar geneeskunde en voorzitter van de NWO -Gwenda Nielen, desinformatie-expert, verbonden aan onderzoeksinstituut TNO, en oud-luitenant-kolonel bij de luchtmacht -Bert Hubert, tech-expert -Tom Middendorp, voormalig Commandant der Strijdkrachten -Lucia van Geuns, energie-expert bij HCSSSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Bij een grote natuurramp, een aanval door een ander land, of een pandemie moeten ziekenhuizen in een mum van tijd klaarstaan om grote aantallen patiënten op te vangen. In hoeverre zijn ziekenhuizen daarop voorbereid? En wat gebeurt er als het ziekenhuis zélf het doelwit is van een (cyber)aanval? Te gast is Marcel Levi, internist, hoogleraar geneeskunde en voorzitter van de NWO, in BNR's Big Five van Nederland in het defensief. Gasten in BNR's Big Five van Nederland in het defensief -Marcel Levi, internist, hoogleraar geneeskunde en voorzitter van de NWO -Gwenda Nielen, desinformatie-expert, verbonden aan onderzoeksinstituut TNO, en oud-luitenant-kolonel bij de luchtmacht -Bert Hubert, tech-expert -Tom Middendorp, voormalig Commandant der Strijdkrachten -Lucia van Geuns, energie-expert bij HCSSSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

L'Eurovision est-il en train de vivre la fin d'une ère ?

Ist unsere vertraute Arbeitswelt an ihrem Ende angekommen? Nein, aber sie verändert sich radikal. In dieser zweigeteilten Folge diskutiert Dr. David Bausch live und im Studio über Regression, Glaubenssätze, moderne Führung und die Big Five of human Work. Eine Episode über Organisationsentwicklung, Transformation und die Frage, wie eine humane und zugleich performante Arbeitswelt konstruiert sein sollte.

People high in the Big Five personality trait of neuroticism generally experience more negative than positive feelings each day. In this second episode of our three-part series on the psychology of neuroticism from Two Guys on Your Head, Dr. Art Markman, Dr. Bob Duke, and Rebecca McInroy talk about the impact of social media, the […] The post Neuroticism Part II: Social Media and Personality Tests appeared first on KUT & KUTX Studios -- Podcasts.

Nederland wil maar wat graag de energieafhankelijkheid verkleinen door op de Noordzee zelf meer gas te winnen. Milieuorganisaties zijn minder enthousiast over die ontwikkeling, zij vrezen voor schade aan het zeegebied. Gaat gaswinning in de Noordzee samen met het behalen van de ambitieuze klimaatdoelen en het beschermen van het milieu? Te gast is Chris de Ruyter van Steveninck, algemeen directeur van het gaswinningsbedrijf ONE-Dyas. Hij moet met deze twee conflicterende belangen zien om te gaan. Het bedrijf exploiteert het zogeheten N05-A gasveld zo'n 20 kilometer (en verder) ten noorden van Schiermonnikoog en hoopt op korte termijn nabijgelegen gasvelden te kunnen aansluiten op de bestaande infrastructuur. Gasten in BNR's Big Five van De slag om de Noordzee -An Stroobandt, Country Lead Offshore Wind België en Nederland bij energiebedrijf RWE -Nathalie Steins, onderzoeker bij het Wageningen Marine Research -Arita Baaijens, bioloog, schrijver en ontdekkingsreiziger -Chris de Ruyter van Steveninck, algemeen directeur van het gaswinningsbedrijf ONE-Dyas See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

What if the “stubborn” dog at your feet is actually curious, independent, or just overwhelmed? We break down the Big Five puppy personality traits—sociability, confidence, biddability, resilience, and independence—and show how each one changes the way training should look, feel, and progress. Instead of forcing a one-size plan, we share how to read the dog in front of you and tailor sessions that build trust, reduce stress, and get results.Support the showFollow us on social mediaInstagram @BAXTERandBella Facebook @TheOnlinePuppySchool YouTube @BAXTERandBellaSubscribe to our site for FREE weekly training tips! Check out our FREE resources!Join our membership here.

Director Jason Wheeler and actors Delores Strider, Ginevra Robbins, Ben Baldassarre joins Host Nick Tanaka discussing the Tehachapi Community Theater Association's first play of 2026 -- The Big Five Oh! To learn more, purcahse tickets, or become a member, visit www.tctaonstage.com

In Nederland zijn we de Noordzee steeds meer als economisch wingebied gaan zien – een plek waar geld te verdienen valt. Maar is het ook nog een levend ecosysteem dat recht heeft op bescherming? Is het tijd om de Noordzee zelf een stem te geven in het debat? Te gast is Arita Baaijens, bioloog, schrijver en ontdekkingsreiziger, in BNR's Big Five van De slag om de Noordzee Gasten in BNR's Big Five van De slag om de Noordzee -An Stroobandt, Country Lead Offshore Wind België en Nederland bij energiebedrijf RWE -Nathalie Steins, onderzoeker bij het Wageningen Marine Research -Arita Baaijens, bioloog, schrijver en ontdekkingsreiziger -Chris de Ruyter van Steveninck, algemeen directeur van het gaswinningsbedrijf ONE-Dyas See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

De Noordzee wordt drukker en drukker met windparken, zeekabels en olie- & gasboringen. Wat doet dat met het leven onder water? En is er nog toekomst voor Nederlandse vissers? Te gast is Nathalie Steins, onderzoeker bij het Wageningen Marine Research in BNR's Big Five van de Slag om de Noordzee. Gasten in BNR's Big Five van De slag om de Noordzee -An Stroobandt, Country Lead Offshore Wind België en Nederland bij energiebedrijf RWE -Nathalie Steins, onderzoeker bij het Wageningen Marine Research -Arita Baaijens, bioloog, schrijver en ontdekkingsreiziger -Chris de Ruyter van Steveninck, algemeen directeur van het gaswinningsbedrijf ONE-Dyas See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome back to the Fintech Takes podcast. I'm Alex Johnson, joined in this episode by two guests, Steve Boms (Executive Director at FDATA) and Dan Murphy (Founder of Sunset Park Advisors; formerly CFPB). We're talking about Canada, and why a country that has spent the better part of a decade moving at a pace I have occasionally made fun of in the newsletter is now arguably ahead of the U.S. on open banking regulation. Dan and Steve walk through how Canada deliberately corrected what other countries got wrong, and how timing and learning play a role, too. Canada watched the BPI lawsuit play out in the U.S. They saw the gap between banks' stated preferences and revealed preferences once implementation became real. They built voluminous, specific legislation partly because they learned what happens when you leave room for interpretation. The conversation explores the global policy learning ecosystem, the cultural conservatism baked into Canadian financial services (Steve calls it "conservatism with the lowercase c"), and how a Big Five oligopoly holding 90% of consumer deposits accidentally created conditions for comprehensive reform when external pressure finally arrived. Highlights include: Steve's argument that write access might actually solve liability problems by creating traceable ledgers of who changed what and when Dan's observation about the Amazon Perplexity lawsuit and how it echoes every open banking access fight  The distinction between domestic competition policy and international competitiveness policy, and why they usually point in opposite directions This episode is brought to you by Plaid.  Most lenders see the value of cash flow data. The hard part is getting started—and knowing what to do with it once you have it. Plaid makes it easy to access real-time cash flow and behavioral insights in seconds, through a familiar experience borrowers already trust. No heavy lift. No added friction. Learn more at www.plaid.com/ftt Sign up for Alex's Fintech Takes newsletter for the latest insightful analysis on fintech trends, along with a heaping pile of pop culture references and copious footnotes. Every Monday and Thursday: https://workweek.com/brand/fintech-takes/ And for more exclusive insider content, don't forget to check out my YouTube page. Follow Steve: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stevenboms/ Follow Dan: https://www.linkedin.com/in/danieljmurphy01/ Follow Alex Johnson:  YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJgfH47QEwbQmkQlz1V9rQA/videos LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexhjohnson X: https://www.twitter.com/AlexH_Johnson

Episode SummaryWhy do we play the video games that we play? Is interest in the strategy game genre truly waning globally over time? Greg and Lewis sit down with gaming psychology pioneer and Quantic Foundry co-founder Nick Yee to answer these and many other questions. From dissecting the Proteus effect to comparing and contrasting the psychological motivations that drive GTA Online, Fortnite, and Europa Universalis players, Dr. Yee takes us on a whirlwind tour of his company's Gamer Motivation Model that contains insights from >1.75 million gamers.What You'll LearnThe Proteus effect: How inhabiting an attractive or tall avatar can impact your real-world confidence level and negotiating tactics.The Strategy genre slump: Why interest in strategic thinking has dropped from the 50th to the 33rd percentile since 2015 in Quantic Foundry's gamer database, and how it appears to be linked to a global drop in conscientiousness (one of the "Big Five" personality traits).Gamer motivation models: What are some of Quantic Foundry's 12 psychological traits that drive video game play (i.e., Destruction, Power, Community, Strategy, Completion, Excitement) and how is this framework used to answer different questions than SDT (Self-Determination Theory).Industry Insights: How studios psychologically segment players to help guide their future content roadmaps, drive UA, and more.The RPG accident: Why the RPG genre is actually a bundle of two different player types.Episode Timestamps01:45 – The "wildly optimistic" era of mid-2000s MMOs .02:35 – VR Lab Experiments: Putting people in bodies that aren't their own .05:30 – Does the "virtual" you linger after you log off? .08:50 – The 12-Factor Gamer Motivation Model explained .11:50 – The "Bummer" Stat: The steady decline of strategy games .14:50 – Is Social Media or AI "shortening" our collective attention span? .18:50 – Why Balatro succeeds in a world that hates long-term planning .21:10 – Quantic Foundry vs. Self-Determination Theory (SDT) .32:10 – The hidden psychology of Idle Clicker games .35:45 – Breaking down the player profiles of GTA Online vs. Fortnite .Resources MentionedQuantic Foundry: quanticfoundry.comGamer Motivation Profile: Take the 5-minute survey here .Games Discussed: World of Warcraft, Civilization VI, Europa Universalis V, Balatro, GTA V, and Fortnite.Connect with our Guest:Nick Yee: LinkedInCall to ActionDiscover your "Gaming Posse": Take the Gamer Motivation Profile to see which of the 2 million surveyed gamers share your psychological DNA and get custom game recommendations.Join the Player Driven Discord: https://discord.gg/kPS6yPrB

Personal style might look like a surface-level thing, but it’s actually one of the most psychologically loaded choices we make every day. What we wear shapes how we’re perceived, how we feel, and sometimes even what parts of ourselves we give permission to show. In this episode, we’re unpacking the psychology of personal style - why we’re drawn to what we’re drawn to, what shapes our wardrobe, and how to find a style that actually feels like you. We explore: • How upbringing and early experiences shape what feels safe, flattering, or off-limits• The role of the Big Five personality traits• Style as identity signalling• How clothes shift out mood• The role of trends and fast fashion in conformity• How to rediscover your personal style If you’ve ever felt like your wardrobe doesn’t quite match who you are, this episode is for you. Watch on Netflix Follow Jemma on Instagram: @jemmasbeg Follow the podcast on Instagram: @thatpsychologypodcast Subscribe on Substack: @thepsychologyofyour20s For business: psychologyofyour20s@gmail.com The Psychology of your 20s is not a substitute for professional mental health help. If you are struggling, distressed or require personalised advice, please reach out to your doctor or a licensed psychologist.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

OSFF Toronto 2026 Preview: FINOS Ecosystem, AI, HPC, Fluxnova, CALM, CDM & Open Data CommonsIn this episode of the Open Source in Finance Podcast, host Grizz Griswold delivers an essential preview of the upcoming inaugural OSFF Toronto. Grizz breaks down why Toronto's unique position as a top-tier global financial hub—home to Canada's "Big Five" banks and a world-class AI research community—makes it the perfect environment for the next evolution of open-source collaboration. The episode explores the shift from Canadian institutions being open-source consumers to becoming active leaders in projects like FDC3 and Common Cloud Controls, providing a roadmap for what to expect when the forum debuts in the "6ix."

People high in the Big Five personality trait of neuroticism generally experience more negative feelings and fewer positive feelings each day. In this first episode of a three-part series on the psychology of neuroticism from Two Guys on Your Head, Dr. Art Markman, Dr. Bob Duke, and Rebecca McInroy discuss some new research that explores […] The post New Research in Neuroticism appeared first on KUT & KUTX Studios -- Podcasts.

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De Europese solidariteit stond in januari onder ongekende druk. Zorgt die druk ervoor dat Europa weer werk gaat maken van de verdere integratie? Te gast is Harald Benink, Hoogleraar Banking & Finance aan de Tilburg University, BNR's Big Five van de Economische Veerkracht. Gasten in BNR's Big Five van de economie veerkracht -Bas Jacobs, hoogleraar economie en overheidsfinanciën aan de Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam -Stan Westerterp, managing partner en eigenaar van Bond Capital Partners -Tjerk Kroes, Directeur Economisch Beleid en Onderzoek bij DNB -Wendy van Ierschot, oprichter VIE People, ondernemer en investeerder -Harald Benink, hoogleraar Banking en Finance aan de Universiteit TilburgSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Les Gunners ont fait des phases arrêtées, notamment les corners, une arme offensive redoutable. Quel est l'impact de ces séquences sur la qualité du jeu d'Arsenal ? Comment le club a-t-il construit cette domination ? L'ensemble de la Premier League accorde-t-elle une place trop importante aux phases arrêtées ? « Big five » aborde aussi la course au titre, relancée après le 2-2 entre Arsenal et Wolverhampton ce mercredi. Un podcast présenté par Marie-Amélie Motte, avec Pierre-Alexandre Conte et Pierre-Étienne Minonzio. Hébergé par Ausha. Visitez ausha.co/politique-de-confidentialite pour plus d'informations.

Terwijl onze economie boven verwachting draait, is het ondernemers vertrouwen wel iets positiever, maar nog lang niet wat het moet zijn. Wat zegt dat over onze economie? Ik bespreek het met ondernemer en tech-investeerder Wendy van Ierschot in BNR's Big Five van de Economische Veerkracht. Gasten in BNR's Big Five van de economie veerkracht -Bas Jacobs, hoogleraar economie en overheidsfinanciën aan de Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam -Stan Westerterp, managing partner en eigenaar van Bond Capital Partners -Tjerk Kroes, Directeur Economisch Beleid en Onderzoek bij DNB -Wendy van Ierschot, oprichter VIE People, ondernemer en investeerder -Harald Benink, hoogleraar Banking en Finance aan de Universiteit TilburgSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Angela's hearty dish makes quite the impression! Tom Davis is an actor, comedian, podcaster, writer and proud south Londoner. Fresh from delivering the goody bag for Romesh Ranganathan, he settles in with us for a proper catch-up over a delicious pie.  Tom's latest tour, Spudgun, sees him return to the comedy circuit after a period away from the stage. You'll have seen and heard from him plenty in that time, though, with acting credits including Wonka and A Thousand Blows plus TV appearances on shows including A League Of Their Own and, of course, his weekly podcast with Romesh, Wolf & Owl.  Tom famously started out in comedy when he was working on building sites, but less is known about his time in the restaurant industry. He chats to us about his work in the kitchen, including a spell at The Connaught, which sadly didn't overlap with Angela's time there. The chat begins over sliced bread and a glass of Botivo with elderflower cordial and soda, before we hit the pie. Angela serves a steak pie, using a recipe by Diana Henry, with a gluten free version for Nick, all accompanied by a side of Savoy cabbage. The Waitrose wine experts have paired this meal with a glass of Norton Winemaker's Reserve Malbec.  Tom knows his food and possesses some excellent eating credentials, none more so than his completion of The Big Five eating challenge, as well as his unwavering passion for bread and potatoes. We also hear the loveliest story about Olivia Colman, which is always an excellent way to spend your time. Now, pass the Croydon croutons! You can watch full episodes of Dish on YouTube and on Spotify.  All recipes from this podcast can be found at waitrose.com/dishrecipes The recipe for steak pie was created for Waitrose by Diana Henry.  A transcript for this episode can be found at waitrose.com/dish If you want to get in touch with us about anything at all, contact dish@waitrose.co.uk Dish from Waitrose is made by Cold Glass Productions Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This post contains affiliate links, which means I may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you.What happens when a swoony rom-com set in Venezuela meets fake dating, music, and telenovela-level drama? I'm joined by debut author Maria José Morillo to talk about romance, bilingual reading, and writing against the odds.In this episode, I'm chatting with Maria José Morillo, a Venezuelan author making her Big Five debut with The Ex-Perimento. We talk about growing up bilingual, discovering romance through Harry Potter and Twilight, and what it means to write English-language romance from Venezuela.We also dive into celebrity rom-com tropes, Latin American pop culture (yes, Miss Universe matters), and how Maria José went from fanfiction to landing a traditional publishing deal. If you love high-concept rom-coms, global romance, or behind-the-scenes publishing journeys, this episode is for you.

Ondanks geopolitieke spanningen en wereldwijde onzekerheid presteerde de Nederlandse economie afgelopen jaar beter dan verwacht. Welke krachten houden onze economie overeind? Te gast is Tjerk Kroes, Directeur Economisch Beleid en Onderzoek bij De Nederlandsche Bank, in BNR's Big Five van de economische veerkracht Gasten in BNR's Big Five van de economie veerkracht -Bas Jacobs, hoogleraar economie en overheidsfinanciën aan de Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam -Stan Westerterp, managing partner en eigenaar van Bond Capital Partners -Tjerk Kroes, Directeur Economisch Beleid en Onderzoek bij DNB -Wendy van Ierschot, oprichter VIE People, ondernemer en investeerder -Harald Benink, hoogleraar Banking en Finance aan de Universiteit TilburgSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome, writers and book lovers. The Bleeders is a podcast about book writing and publishing. Make sure you subscribe to the companion Substack: https://thebleeders.substack.com/welcomeToday's guest is Courtney Maum—novelist, memoirist, and author of Before and After the Book Deal—and she talks candidly about the reality of a writing career, the myth of the breakout book, and why longevity matters more than literary hype.In this episode, Courtney breaks down what publishing actually looks like across every lane: Big Five launches with national tours, indie presses that nurture your inner “art witch,” and self-publishing born out of necessity. She shares the story behind the book that almost never happened—and how the lowest advance of her career became the one that defined her platform—plus why the industry now expects authors to function as marketers, publicists, event planners, and content creators all at once.We also discuss building an audience in the newsletter era, the limits of social media, and why “a thousand true fans” is a better goal than virality. Courtney explains how writers can protect their mental health in a system built on comparison, what's actually changed since 2020 (AI, proposals, platform pressure), and why readers—not gatekeepers—ultimately determine a book's shelf life. This conversation is essential listening for any writer trying to build a sustainable creative career in today's publishing landscape.Preorder Courtney Maum's latest book Alan Opts Out and preorder Courtney Kocak's debut memoir Girl Gone Wild.Subscribe to Courtney Maum's Substack Before & After The Book Deal. Follow her on Instagram @cbmaum, and buy your copy of Before and After the Book Deal on Bookshop.org, or wherever books are sold!The Bleeders is hosted by Courtney Kocak. Follow her on Instagram @courtneykocak and Bluesky @courtneykocak.bsky.social. For more, check out her website courtneykocak.com.Courtney is teaching some upcoming workshops you might be interested in:Land Big Bylines by Writing for Columns: https://writingworkshops.com/products/land-big-bylines-by-writing-for-columns-zoom-seminarSo You Want to Start a Podcast?: https://writingworkshops.com/products/start-podcast-workshop-courtney-kocakEdit & Elevate: Revision Intensive: https://writingworkshops.com/products/edit-elevate-revision-intensive-zoom-seminar-with-courtney-kocakHow to Build a “Platform” for Writers Who Shudder at the Thought: https://writingworkshops.com/products/how-to-build-a-platform-for-writers-who-shudder-at-the-thought-zoom-seminarStart a Newsletter to Supercharge Your Platform, Network and Business: https://writingworkshops.com/products/start-a-newsletter-to-supercharge-your-platform-network-business-zoom-seminar

Terwijl Europa geopolitiek onder druk staat, zetten de beurzen nieuwe records neer. Zo brak de AEX brak onlangs voor het eerst door de 1000 punten. Hoe kan het dat de beurzen nauwelijks lijken te reageren op de geopolitieke onrust? Te gast is Stan Westerterp, managing partner en eigenaar van Bond Capital Partners in BNR's Big Five van de economische veerkracht Gasten in BNR's Big Five van de economie veerkracht -Bas Jacobs, hoogleraar economie en overheidsfinanciën aan de Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam -Stan Westerterp, managing partner en eigenaar van Bond Capital Partners -Tjerk Kroes, Directeur Economisch Beleid en Onderzoek bij DNB -Wendy van Ierschot, oprichter VIE People, ondernemer en investeerder -Harald Benink, hoogleraar Banking en Finance aan de Universiteit TilburgSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Nederland komt uit een periode van grote economische onzekerheid. Toch presteerde onze economie afgelopen jaar onverwacht goed. Zijn we te negatief over onze economie? Wat zijn de dreigingen, kansen en vooral gemiste kansen voor de Nederlandse economie? En is Europa het antwoord op alle problemen, of moet Nederland nog verder buiten de grenzen kijken om economisch sterk te blijven? Te gast is Bas Jacobs, hoogleraar economie en overheidsfinanciën aan de Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Gasten in BNR's Big Five van de economie veerkracht -Bas Jacobs, hoogleraar economie en overheidsfinanciën aan de Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam -Stan Westerterp, managing partner en eigenaar van Bond Capital Partners. -Tjerk Kroes, Directeur Economisch Beleid en Onderzoek bij DNB -Wendy van Ierschot, oprichter VIE People, ondernemer en investeerder. -Harald Benink, hoogleraar Banking en Finance aan de Universiteit Tilburg.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In this episode Mark interviews Ka-Yee Essoe about the power of stories to instil empathy, resilience, joy, and hope, based on her experiences in the academic world, in research, in teaching, and in writing an epic fantasy novel. Prior to the interview Mark shares a brief personal update and word from this episode's sponsor. This episode is sponsored by Toronto Indie Author Conference, taking place in Toronto, ON in April 2026. In the interview, Mark and Ka-Yee talk about: Mark and Ka-Yee's connection to Joshua EssoeKa-Yee's background with two different careers in academia Studying how to help people learn therapeutic techniques better Starting her creative writing journey in 2021 How this story (that became the first of a trilogy she is writing) started to unfold in her head as dialogue 128,000 words of the first draft coming out in about 2 months of writing Ka-Yee's move into an academic teaching role, which is something she's always wanted to do One of the classes that Ka-Yee co-teaches for writers HEXACO - the six-dimension personality test Some of the opposite-character writing exercises that derive from this test Debunking Myers-Briggs because it's not as science-based Ka-Yee's desire to help writers to write who has some sort of disability Helping students understand what therapy looks like and how to depict that relationship Techniques on how to learn memory enhancement How to evaluate routines and your process as a writer The problem with getting into a habit of doing things a certain way and missing out on how to make it better Ka-Yee not realizing she had ADHD until she was an adult The side-effect of suffering from long Covid The concept of deliberate rest Applying the scientific principle to writing an epic fantasy novel How people tend to have two different careers in their life The Kickstarter that Ka-Yee is running for her new book SHAZZWICK OF LAND VOL1: Time Becomes Relevant Aaron Fors as the talented narrator for the audiobook version What Ka-Yee's book is about How she sees the world differently now that she has written this novel   After the interview Mark shares a few reflections inspired by the interview. Notes from Ka-Yee as mentioned in the interview: Guidance I provided students to create their own weekly evaluation on their writing process Before you begin, I encourage you to take stalk of your current process. What's your goal, what's your why, what works/doesn't, how often do you write, what resources do you need -- not what you WANT it to be, but what it is now. Then create a survey using the guideline below. Answer the questions now as your baseline, then check in every week (ideally on the same day), revise the questions as you go.  There is no wrong way to do this. These can be any format as you see fit, or a combination of. You can make the questions open-ended, some form of rating scales (e.g., rate from 0 to 10, or 1 = Completely Disagree to 5 = Complete Agree), multiple choice, or fill in the blanks.  Just don't get too attached, you should be adjusting these as your process evolves or as life encroaches.  Ask yourself 6-10 (ish) questions 1-3 questions on what you did in the past week: e.g., did you change/stick with your process? did try something new? how did it go? were you able to stick to it? 2-3 questions on how "productive" or "successful" you are--but remember, every one's measure of success is different. E.g., how much did you write? how good were the writing? how brave were you in sharing your work with others? how zen you were about taking feedback. 2-3 questions on how you are flourishing vs languishing: e.g., do I have mental space to do OTHER things I love? Did I spend time with people who matter to me? Did I feel my life has purpose, joy, satisfaction, and meaning? Last question: ask yourself something that gets to the "why" of your creative endeavour. WHY did you write this week? Did you remember to keep your eyes on that which drives you and keeps you up at night when you forget it. That which makes your writing something that you must do. (okay, then the last last question: do I need to revise these questions for next week?)  The most important thing is: again, update these questions as you go. This needs to be a living document, otherwise you aren't giving yourself room to grow and learn.    Links of Interest: Snow Quill Press The Novel: Shazzwick of Land, Vol. 1: Time Becomes Relevant Kickstarter for Shazzwick of Land Vol 1 HEXACO Personality Inventory-Revised (by Drs. Lee and Ashton (2009, 2018)) HEXACO is a 6-factor personality test that measures personality across six dimensions: Honesty-humility, Emotionality, Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, and Openness. There's also a bonus trait, Altruism, that pools from subscales within the 6 larger traits.  The Big Five Personality Inventory (by Goldberg (1992)) The Big Five is probably the most widely used personality test in psychology. It measures personality across five dimensions, often forming the acronym of OCEAN or CANEO: Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism. Episode 137 - Action Sequences and Sex Scenes with Joshua Essoe Episode 260 - Mood, Atmosphere, and Worldbuilding with Joshua Essoe Superstars Writing Seminars Stark Reflections on Pushing for Better (Team Landing Page) CMHA (Canadian Mental Health Association) Mental Health Meter What's Your Stress Index? Manuscript Report (Mark's affiliate link - use MARK10 to save 10%) Buy Mark a Coffee Patreon for Stark Reflections Mark's YouTube channel ElevenLabs (AI Voice Generation - Affiliate link) Mark's Stark Reflections on Writing & Publishing Newsletter (Signup) An Author's Guide to Working With Bookstores and Libraries The Relaxed Author Buy eBook Direct Buy Audiobook Direct Publishing Pitfalls for Authors An Author's Guide to Working with Libraries & Bookstores Wide for the Win Mark's Canadian Werewolf Books This Time Around (Short Story) A Canadian Werewolf in New York Stowe Away (Novella) Fear and Longing in Los Angeles Fright Nights, Big City Lover's Moon Hex and the City Only Monsters in the Building Once Bitten (Novella) The Canadian Mounted: A Trivia Guide to Planes, Trains and Automobiles Yippee Ki-Yay Motherf*cker: A Trivia Guide to Die Hard Merry Christmas! Shitter Was Full!: A Trivia Guide to National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation I Think It's A Sign That The Pun Also Rises   Ka-Yee Essoe, Ph.D. (Psychology, UCLA; Psychiatry Postdoc, Johns Hopkins Medicine) is an assistant professor at a small, public university at rural Maine. As a cognitive neuroscientist specialising in learning enhancement, she understands the power of stories to instil empathy, resilience, joy, and hope. She began writing novels to do just that. As an East Asian immigrant who enjoys many intercultural friendships, rich cultural diversity permeates the worlds and conflicts she crafts in her epic fantasy novels with integral love-story threads. Drawing on her personal experience and 10+ years mentoring others to navigate anxiety, disabilities, abuse, discrimination, trauma, and grief, her stories follow characters facing these struggles to encourage readers through their journeys and growth.     The introductory, end, and bumper music for this podcast ("Laser Groove") was composed and produced by Kevin MacLeod of www.incompetech.com and is Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0

Europa is onderdeel van een wereld van machtspolitiek. Hoe moet de EU zich manifesteren, welke hervormingen zijn nodig, en wie moet dan dat Europese leger gaan aanvoeren? De Amerikaanse regering wil radicaal-rechtse denktanks en organisaties in Europa financieel ondersteunen, zo schreef de Financial Times onlangs. Hoe kan je de EU wapenen tegen dit soort praktijken? Te gast is Reinier van Lanschot, Europarlementariër namens Volt. Gasten in BNR's Big Five van De (on)macht van Europa -Geert Jan Hahn, BNR's Europaverslaggever -Frans Osinga, hoogleraar Oorlogsstudies aan de Universiteit Leiden -Louise van Schaik, klimaat-expert van Instituut Clingendael -Steven Brakman, internationaal econoom en emeritus hoogleraar internationale economie aan de Rijksuniversiteit Groningen. -Reinier van Lanschot, Europarlementariër voor VoltSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

¡Viva España! Mais attention... sans l'Espagne ?

Une première saison pleine de promesses, une seconde beaucoup plus inconstante : jamais Roberto De Zerbi n'aura trouvé de réelle stabilité à Marseille. Son management bouillonnant, ses changements de composition incessants, les mercatos XXL du club… « Big five » questionne les raisons de cet échec. Quelle trace le coach italien va-t-il laisser à l'OM ? Un podcast présenté par Marie-Amélie Motte, avec Baptiste Chaumier et Mathieu Grégoire (au téléphone depuis Marseille). Hébergé par Ausha. Visitez ausha.co/politique-de-confidentialite pour plus d'informations.

Hoe moet Europa omgaan met wereldmachten die alle economische regels overboord lijken te gooien? Dit is hèt belangrijkste onderwerp dat wordt besproken op een informele EU-top in een kasteel in het Belgische Alden Biesen. Moet Europa, net zoals Trump, protectionistischer te werk gaan, of zou dat onze positie in de wereld juist verzwakken? Te gast is internationaal econoom Steven Brakman. Gasten in BNR's Big Five van De (on)macht van Europa -Geert Jan Hahn, BNR's Europaverslaggever -Frans Osinga, hoogleraar Oorlogsstudies aan de Universiteit Leiden -Louise van Schaik, klimaat-expert van Instituut Clingendael -Steven Brakman, internationaal econoom en emeritus hoogleraar internationale economie aan de Rijksuniversiteit Groningen. -Reinier van Lanschot, Europarlementariër voor VoltSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Europa draait op energie van buitenaf. Hoe kwetsbaar maakt dat ons in een wereld waarin energie steeds vaker een wapen is? En kan Europa ooit echt op eigen benen staan? Te gast is Louise van Schaik, klimaat-expert van Instituut Clingendael, in BNR's Big Five van de macht van Europa Gasten in BNR's Big Five van De (on)macht van Europa -Geert Jan Hahn, BNR's Europaverslaggever -Frans Osinga, hoogleraar Oorlogsstudies aan de Universiteit Leiden -Louise van Schaik, klimaat-expert van Instituut Clingendael -Steven Brakman, hoogleraar economie aan de Rijksuniversiteit Groningen -Reinier van Lanschot, Europarlementariër voor VoltSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Europa is als continent in decennia niet zó dichtbij oorlog geweest. Wat zijn onze sterke en zwakke plekken? En hoe zou een Europese verdedigingsstrategie eruitzien? Te gast is Frans Osinga, hoogleraar Oorlogsstudies aan de Universiteit Leiden. Gasten in BNR's Big Five van De (on)macht van Europa -Geert Jan Hahn, BNR's Europaverslaggever -Frans Osinga, hoogleraar Oorlogsstudies aan de Universiteit Leiden -Louise van Schaik, klimaat-expert van Instituut Clingendael -Steven Brakman, hoogleraar economie aan de Rijksuniversiteit Groningen -Reinier van Lanschot, Europarlementariër voor Volt See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

How do you juggle multiple book projects, a university teaching role, Kickstarter campaigns, and rock albums—all without burning out? What does it take to build a writing career that spans decades, through industry upheavals and personal setbacks? Kevin J. Anderson shares hard-won lessons from his 40+ year career writing over 190 books. In the intro, Draft2Digital partners with Bookshop.org for ebooks; Spotify announces PageMatch and print partnership with Bookshop.org; Eleven Audiobooks; Indie author non-fiction books Kickstarter; Bones of the Deep – J.F. Penn This podcast is sponsored by Kobo Writing Life, which helps authors self-publish and reach readers in global markets through the Kobo eco-system. You can also subscribe to the Kobo Writing Life podcast for interviews with successful indie authors. This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn Kevin J. Anderson is the multi-award-winning and internationally bestselling author of over 190 books across different genres, with over 24 million copies in print across 34 languages. He's also the director of publishing at Western Colorado University, as well as a publisher at WordFire Press, an editor and rock album lyricist, and he's co-written Dune books and worked on the recent Dune movies and TV show. You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights, and the full transcript is below. Show Notes Managing multiple projects at different stages to maximise productivity without burning out Building financial buffers and multiple income streams for a sustainable long-term career Adapting when life disrupts your creative process, from illness to injury Lessons learned from transitioning between traditional publishing, indie, and Kickstarter Why realistic expectations and continuously reinventing yourself are essential for longevity The hands-on publishing master's program at Western Colorado University You can find Kevin at WordFire.com and buy his books direct at WordFireShop.com. Transcript of Interview with Kevin J. Anderson Jo: Kevin J. Anderson is the multi award-winning and internationally bestselling author of over 190 books across different genres, with over 24 million copies in print across 34 languages. He's also the Director of Publishing at Western Colorado University, as well as a publisher at WordFire Press, an editor, a rock album lyricist, and he's co-written Dune books and worked on the recent Dune movies and TV show. Welcome back to the show, Kevin. Kevin: Well, thanks, Joanna. I always love being on the show. Jo: And we're probably on like 200 books and like 50 million copies in print. I mean, how hard is it to keep up with all that? Kevin: Well, it was one of those where we actually did have to do a list because my wife was like, we really should know the exact number. And I said, well, who can keep track because that one went out of print and that's an omnibus. So does it count as something else? Well, she counted them. But that was a while ago and I didn't keep track, so… Jo: Right. Kevin: I'm busy and I like to write. That's how I've had a long-term career. It's because I don't hate what I'm doing. I've got the best job in the world. I love it. Jo: So that is where I wanted to start. You've been on the show multiple times. People can go back and have a listen to some of the other things we've talked about. I did want to talk to you today about managing multiple priorities. You are a director of publishing at Western Colorado University. I am currently doing a full-time master's degree as well as writing a novel, doing this podcast, my Patreon, all the admin of running a business, and I feel like I'm busy. Then I look at what you do and I'm like, this is crazy. People listening are also busy. We're all busy, right. But I feel like it can't just be writing and one job—you do so much. So how do you manage your time, juggle priorities, your calendar, and all that? Kevin: I do it brilliantly. Is that the answer you want? I do it brilliantly. It is all different things. If I were just working on one project at a time, like, okay, I'm going to start a new novel today and I've got nothing else on my plate. Well, that would take me however long to do the research and the plot. I'm a full-on plotter outliner, so it would take me all the while to do—say it's a medieval fantasy set during the Crusades. Well, then I'd have to spend months reading about the Crusades and researching them and maybe doing some travel. Then get to the point where I know the characters enough that I can outline the book and then I start writing the book, and then I start editing the book, which is a part that I hate. I love doing the writing, I hate doing the editing. Then you edit a whole bunch. To me, there are parts of that that are like going to the dentist—I don't like it—and other parts of it are fun. So by having numerous different projects at different stages, all of which require different skill sets or different levels of intensity— I can be constantly switching from one thing to another and basically be working at a hundred percent capacity on everything all the time. And I love doing this. So I'll be maybe writing a presentation, which is what I was doing before we got on this call this morning, because I'm giving a new keynote presentation at Superstars, which is in a couple of weeks. That's another thing that was on our list—I helped run Superstars. I founded that 15 years ago and it's been going on. So I'll be giving that talk. Then we just started classes for my publishing grad students last week. So I'm running those classes, which meant I had to write all of the classes before they started, and I did that. I've got a Kickstarter that will launch in about a month. I'm getting the cover art for that new book and I've got to write up the Kickstarter campaign. And I have to write the book. I like to have the book at least drafted before I run a Kickstarter for it. So I'm working on that. A Kickstarter pre-launch page should be up a month before the Kickstarter launches, and the Kickstarter has to launch in early March, so that means early February I have to get the pre-launch page up. So there's all these dominoes. One thing has to go before the next thing can go. During the semester break between fall semester—we had about a month off—I had a book for Blackstone Publishing and Weird Tales Presents that I had to write, and I had plotted it and I thought if I don't get this written during the break, I'm going to get distracted and I won't finish it. So I just buckled down and I wrote the 80,000-word book during the month of break. This is like Little House on the Prairie with dinosaurs. It's an Amish community that wants to go to simpler times. So they go back to the Pleistocene era where they're setting up farms and the brontosaurus gets into the cornfield all the time. Jo: That sounds like a lot of fun. Kevin: That's fun. So with the grad students that I have every week, we do all kinds of lectures. Just to reassure people, I am not at all an academic. I could not stand my English classes where you had to write papers analysing this and that. My grad program is all hands-on, pragmatic. You actually learn how to be a publisher when you go through it. You learn how to design covers, you learn how to lay things out, you learn how to edit, you learn how to do fonts. One of the things that I do among the lectures every week or every other week, I just give them something that I call the real world updates. Like, okay, this is the stuff that I, Kevin, am working on in my real world career because the academic career isn't like the real world. So I just go listing about, oh, I designed these covers this week, and I wrote the draft of this dinosaur homestead book, and then I did two comic scripts, and then I had to edit two comic scripts. We just released my third rock album that's based on my fantasy trilogy. And I have to write a keynote speech for Superstars. And I was on Joanna Penn's podcast. And here's what I'm doing. Sometimes it's a little scary because I read it and I go, holy crap, I did a lot of stuff this week. Jo: So I manage everything on Google Calendar. Do you have systems for managing all this? Because you also have external publishers, you have actual dates when things actually have to happen. Do you manage that yourself or does Rebecca, your wife and business partner, do that? How do you manage your calendar? Kevin: Well, Rebecca does most of the business stuff, like right now we have to do a bunch of taxes stuff because it's the new year and things. She does that and I do the social interaction and the creating and the writing and stuff. My assistant Marie Whittaker, she's a big project management person and she's got all these apps on how to do project managing and all these sorts of things. She tried to teach me how to use these apps, but it takes so much time and organisation to fill the damn things out. So it's all in my head. I just sort of know what I have to do. I just put it together and work on it and just sort of know this thing happens next and this thing happens next. I guess one of the ways is when I was in college, I put myself through the university by being a waiter and a bartender. As a waiter and a bartender, you have to juggle a million different things at once. This guy wants a beer and that lady wants a martini, and that person needs to pay, and this person's dinner is up on the hot shelf so you've got to deliver it before it gets cold. It's like I learned how to do millions of things and keep them all organised, and that's the way it worked. And I've kept that as a skill all the way through and it has done me good, I think. Jo: I think that there is a difference between people's brains, right? So I'm pretty chaotic in terms of my creative process. I'm not a plotter like you. I'm pretty chaotic, basically. But I come across— Kevin: I've met you. Yes. Jo: I know. But I'm also extremely organised and I plan everything. That's part of, I think, being an introvert and part of dealing with the anxiety of the world is having a plan or a schedule. So I think the first thing to say to people listening is they don't have to be like you, and they don't have to be like me. It's kind of a personal thing. I guess one thing that goes beyond both of us is, earlier you said you basically work at a hundred percent capacity. So let's say there's somebody listening and they're like, well, I'm at a hundred percent capacity too, and it might be kids, it might be a day job, as well as writing and all that. And then something happens, right? You mentioned the real world. I seem to remember that you broke your leg or something. Kevin: Yes. Jo: And the world comes crashing down through all your plans, whether they're written or in your head. So how do you deal with a buffer of something happening, or you're sick, or Rebecca's sick, or the cat needs to go to the vet? Real life—how do you deal with that? Kevin: Well, that really does cause problems. We had, in fact, just recently—so I'm always working at, well, let's be realistic, like 95% of Kevin capacity. Well, my wife, who does some of the stuff here around the house and she does the business things, she just went through 15 days of the worst crippling migraine string that she's had in 30 years. So she was curled up in a foetal position on the bed for 15 days and she couldn't do any of her normal things. I mean, even unloading the dishwasher and stuff like that. So if I'm at 95% capacity and suddenly I have to pick up an extra 50%, that causes real problems. So I drink lots of coffee, and I get less sleep, and you try to bring in some help. I mean, we have Rebecca's assistant and the assistant has a 20-year-old daughter who came in to help us do some of the dishes and laundry and housework stuff. You mentioned before, it was a year ago. I always go out hiking and mountain climbing and that's where I write. I dictate. I have a digital recorder that I go off of, and that's how I'm so productive. I go out, I walk in the forest and I come home with 5,000 words done in a couple of hours, and I always do that. That's how I write. Well, I was out on a mountain and I fell off the mountain and I broke my ankle and had to limp a mile back to my car. So that sort of put a damper on me hiking. I had a book that I had to write and I couldn't go walking while I was dictating it. It has been a very long time since I had to sit at a keyboard and create chapters that way. Jo: Mm-hmm. Kevin: And my brain doesn't really work like that. It works in an audio—I speak this stuff instead. So I ended up training myself because I had a big boot on my foot. I would sit on the back porch and I would look out at the mountains here in Colorado and I would put my foot up on another chair and I'd sit in the lawn chair and I'd kind of close my eyes and I would dictate my chapters that way. It was not as effective, but it was plan B. So that's how I got it done. I did want to mention something. When I'm telling the students this every week—this is what I did and here's the million different things—one of the students just yesterday made a comment that she summarised what I'm doing and it kind of crystallised things for me. She said that to get so much done requires, and I'm quoting now, “a balance of planning, sprinting, and being flexible, while also making incremental forward progress to keep everything moving together.” So there's short-term projects like fires and emergencies that have to be done. You've got to keep moving forward on the novel, which is a long-term project, but that short story is due in a week. So I've got to spend some time doing that one. Like I said, this Kickstarter's coming up, so I have to put in the order for the cover art, because the cover art needs to be done so I can put it on the pre-launch page for the Kickstarter. It is a balance of the long-term projects and the short-term projects. And I'm a workaholic, I guess, and you are too. Jo: Yes. Kevin: You totally are. Yes. Jo: I get that you're a workaholic, but as you said before, you enjoy it too. So you enjoy doing all these things. It's just sometimes life just gets in the way, as you said. One of the other things that I think is interesting—so sometimes physical stuff gets in the way, but in your many decades now of the successful author business, there's also the business side. You've had massive success with some of your books, and I'm sure that some of them have just kind of shrivelled into nothing. There have been good years and bad years. So how do we, as people who want a long-term career, think about making sure we have a buffer in the business for bad years and then making the most of good years? Kevin: Well, that's one thing—to realise that if you're having a great year, you might not always have a great year. That's kind of like the rockstar mentality—I've got a big hit now, so I'm always going to have a big hit. So I buy mansions and jets, and then of course the next album flops. So when you do have a good year, you plan for the long term. You set money aside. You build up plan B and you do other things. I have long been a big advocate for making sure that you have multiple income streams. You don't just write romantic epic fantasies and that's all you do. That might be what makes your money now, but the reading taste could change next year. They might want something entirely different. So while one thing is really riding high, make sure that you're planting a bunch of other stuff, because that might be the thing that goes really, really well the next year. I made my big stuff back in the early nineties—that was when I started writing for Star Wars and X-Files, and that's when I had my New York Times bestselling run. I had 11 New York Times bestsellers in one year, and I was selling like millions of copies. Now, to be honest, when you have a Star Wars bestseller, George Lucas keeps almost all of that. You don't keep that much of it. But little bits add up when you're selling millions of copies. So it opened a lot of doors for me. So I kept writing my own books and I built up my own fans who liked the Star Wars books and they read some of my other things. If you were a bestselling trad author, you could keep writing the same kind of book and they would keep throwing big advances at you. It was great. And then that whole world changed and they stopped paying those big advances, and paperback, mass market paperback books just kind of went away. A lot of people probably remember that there was a time for almost every movie that came out, every big movie that came out, you could go into the store and buy a paperback book of it—whether it was an Avengers movie or a Star Trek movie or whatever, there was a paperback book. I did a bunch of those and that was really good work. They would pay me like $15,000 to take the script and turn it into a book, and it was done in three weeks. They don't do that anymore. I remember I was on a panel at some point, like, what would you tell your younger self? What advice would you give your younger self? I remember when I was in the nineties, I was turning down all kinds of stuff because I had too many book projects and I was never going to quit writing. I was a bestselling author, so I had it made. Well, never, ever assume you have it made because the world changes under you. They might not like what you're doing or publishing goes in a completely different direction. So I always try to keep my radar up and look at new things coming up. I still write some novels for trad publishers. This dinosaur homestead one is for Blackstone and Weird Tales. They're a trad publisher. I still publish all kinds of stuff as an indie for WordFire Press. I'm reissuing a bunch of my trad books that I got the rights back and now they're getting brand new life as I run Kickstarters. One of my favourite series is “Dan Shamble, Zombie P.I.” It's like the Addams Family meets The Naked Gun. It's very funny. It's a private detective who solves crimes with monsters and mummies and werewolves and things. I sold the first one to a trad publisher, and actually, they bought three. I said, okay, these are fast, they're fun, they're like 65,000 words. You laugh all the way through it, and you want the next one right away. So let's get these out like every six months, which is like lightning speed for trad publishing. They just didn't think that was a good idea. They brought them out a year and a half apart. It was impossible to build up momentum that way. They wanted to drop the series after the third book, and I just begged them—please give it one more chance. So they bought one more book for half as much money and they brought it out again a year and a half later. And also, it was a trad paperback at $15. And the ebook was—Joanna, can you guess what their ebook was priced at? Jo: $15. Kevin: $15. And they said, gee, your ebook sales are disappointing. I said, well, no, duh. I mean, I am jumping around—I'm going like, but you should have brought these out six months apart. You should have had the ebook, like the first one at $4. Jo: But you're still working with traditional publishers, Kevin? Kevin: I'm still working with them on some, and I'm a hybrid. There are some projects that I feel are better served as trad books, like the big Dune books and stuff. I want those all over the place and they can cash in on the movie momentum and stuff. But I got the rights back to the Dan Shamble stuff. The fans kept wanting me to do more, and so I published a couple of story collections and they did fine. But I was making way more money writing Dune books and things. Then they wanted a new novel. So I went, oh, okay. I did a new novel, which I just published at WordFire. But again, it did okay, but it wasn't great. I thought, well, I better just focus on writing these big ticket things. But I really liked writing Dan Shamble. Somebody suggested, well, if the fans want it so much, why don't you run a Kickstarter? I had never run a Kickstarter before, and I kind of had this wrong attitude. I thought Kickstarters were for, “I'm a starving author, please give me money.” And that's not it at all. It's like, hey, if you're a fan, why don't you join the VIP club and you get the books faster than anybody else? So I ran a Kickstarter for my first Dan Shamble book, and it made three times what the trad publisher was paying me. And I went, oh, I kind of like this model. So I have since done like four other Dan Shamble novels through Kickstarters, made way more money that way. And we just sold—we can't give any details yet—but we have just sold it. It will be a TV show. There's a European studio that is developing it as a TV show, and I'm writing the pilot and I will be the executive producer. Jo: Fantastic. Kevin: So I kept that zombie detective alive because I loved it so much. Jo: And it's going to be all over the place years later, I guess. Just in terms of—given I've been in this now, I guess 2008 really was when I got into indie—and over the time I've been doing this, I've seen people rise and then disappear. A lot of people have disappeared. There are reasons, burnout or maybe they were just done. Kevin: Yes. Jo: But in terms of the people that you've seen, the characteristics, I guess, of people who don't make it versus people who do make it for years. And we are not saying that everyone should be a writer for decades at all. Some people do just have maybe one or two books. What do you think are the characteristics of those people who do make it long-term? Kevin: Well, I think it's realistic expectations. Like, again, this was trad, but my first book I sold for $4,000, and I thought, well, that's just $4,000, but we're going to sell book club rights, and we're goingn to sell foreign rights, and it's going to be optioned for movies. And the $4,000 will be like, that's just the start. I was planning out all this extra money coming from it, and it didn't even earn its $4,000 advance back and nothing else happened with it. Well, it has since, because I've since reissued it myself, pushed it and I made more money that way. But it's a slow burn. You build your career. You start building your fan base and then your next one will sell maybe better than the first one did. Then you keep writing it, and then you make connections, and then you get more readers and you learn how to expand your stuff better. You've got to prepare for the long haul. I would suggest that if you publish your very first book on KU, don't quit your day job the next day. Not everybody can or should be a full-time writer. We here in America need to have something that pays our health insurance. That is one of the big reasons why I am running this graduate program at Western Colorado University—because as a university professor, I get wonderful healthcare. I'm teaching something that I love, and I'm frankly doing a very good job at it because our graduates—something like 60% of them are now working as writers or publishers or working in the publishing world. So that's another thing. I guess what I do when I'm working on it is I kind of always say yes to the stuff that's coming in. If an opportunity comes—hey, would you like a graphic novel on this?—and I go, yes, I'd love to do that. Could you write a short story for this anthology? Sure, I'd love to do that. I always say yes, and I get overloaded sometimes. But I learned my lesson. It was quite a few years ago where I was really busy. I had all kinds of book deadlines and I was turning down books that they were offering me. Again, this was trad—book contracts that had big advances on them. And anthology editors were asking me. I was really busy and everybody was nagging me—Kevin, you work too hard. And my wife Rebecca was saying, Kevin, you work too hard. So I thought, I had it made. I had all these bestsellers, everything was going on. So I thought, alright, I've got a lot of books under contract. I'll just take a sabbatical. I'll say no for a year. I'll just catch up. I'll finish all these things that I've got. I'll just take a breather and finish things. So for that year, anybody who asked me—hey, do you want to do this book project?—well, I'd love to, but I'm just saying no. And would you do this short story for an anthology? Well, I'd love to, but not right now. Thanks. And I just kind of put them off. So I had a year where I could catch up and catch my breath and finish the stuff. And after that, I went, okay, I am back in the game again. Let's start taking these book offers. And nothing. Just crickets. And I went, well, okay. Well, you were always asking before—where are all these book deals that you kept offering me? Oh, we gave them to somebody else. Jo: This is really difficult though, because on the one hand—well, first of all, it's difficult because I wanted to take a bit of a break. So I'm doing this full-time master's and you are also teaching people in a master's program, right. So I have had to say no to a lot of things in order to do this course. And I imagine the people on your course would have to do the same thing. There's a lot of rewards, but they're different rewards and it kind of represents almost a midlife pivot for many of us. So how do we balance that then—the stepping away with what might lead us into something new? I mean, obviously this is a big deal. I presume most of the people on your course, they're older like me. People have to give stuff up to do this kind of thing. So how do we manage saying yes and saying no? Kevin: Well, I hate to say this, but you just have to drink more coffee and work harder for that time. Yes, you can say no to some things. My thing was I kind of shut the door and I just said, I'm just going to take a break and I'm going to relax. I could have pushed my capacity and taken some things so that I wasn't completely off the game board. One of the things I talk about is to avoid burnout. If you want a long-term career, and if you're working at 120% of your capacity, then you're going to burn out. I actually want to mention something. Johnny B. Truant just has a new book out called The Artisan Author. I think you've had him on the show, have you? Jo: Yes, absolutely. Kevin: He says a whole bunch of the stuff in there that I've been saying for a long time. He's analysing these rapid release authors that are a book every three weeks. And they're writing every three weeks, every four weeks, and that's their business model. I'm just like, you can't do that for any length of time. I mean, I'm a prolific writer. I can't write that fast. That's a recipe for burnout, I think. I love everything that I'm doing, and even with this graduate program that I'm teaching, I love teaching it. I mean, I'm talking about subjects that I love, because I love publishing. I love writing. I love cover design. I love marketing. I love setting up your newsletters. I mean, this isn't like taking an engineering course for me. This is something that I really, really love doing. And quite honestly, it comes across with the students. They're all fired up too because they see how much I love doing it and they love doing it. One of the projects that they do—we get a grant from Draft2Digital every year for $5,000 so that we do an anthology, an original anthology that we pay professional rates for. So they put out their call for submissions. This year it was Into the Deep Dark Woods. And we commissioned a couple stories for it, but otherwise it was open to submissions. And because we're paying professional rates, they get a lot of submissions. I have 12 students in the program right now. They got 998 stories in that they had to read. Jo: Wow. Kevin: They were broken up into teams so they could go through it, but that's just overwhelming. They had to read, whatever that turns out to be, 50 stories a week that come in. Then they write the rejections, and then they argue over which ones they're going to accept, and then they send the contracts, and then they edit them. And they really love it. I guess that's the most important thing about a career—you've got to have an attitude that you love what you're doing. If you don't love this, please find a more stable career, because this is not something you would recommend for the faint of heart. Jo: Yes, indeed. I guess one of the other considerations, even if we love it, the industry can shift. Obviously you mentioned the nineties there—things were very different in the nineties in many, many ways. Especially, let's say, pre-internet times, and when trad pub was really the only way forward. But you mentioned the rapid release, the sort of book every month. Let's say we are now entering a time where AI is bringing positives and negatives in the same way that the internet brought positives and negatives. We're not going to talk about using it, but what is definitely happening is a change. Industry-wise—for example, people can do a book a day if they want to generate books. That is now possible. There are translations, you know. Our KDP dashboard in America, you have a button now to translate everything into Spanish if you want. You can do another button that makes it an audiobook. So we are definitely entering a time of challenge, but if you look back over your career, there have been many times of challenge. So is this time different? Or do you face the same challenges every time things shift? Kevin: It's always different. I've always had to take a breath and step back and then reinvent myself and come back as something else. One of the things with a long-term career is you can't have a long-term career being the hot new thing. You can start out that way—like, this is the brand new author and he gets a big boost as the best first novel or something like that—but that doesn't work for 20 years. I mean, you've got to do something else. If you're the sexy young actress, well, you don't have a 50-year career as the sexy young actress. One of the ones I'm loving right now is Linda Hamilton, who was the sexy young actress in Terminator, and then a little more mature in the TV show Beauty and the Beast, where she was this huge star. Then she's just come back now. I think she's in her mid-fifties. She's in Stranger Things and she was in Resident Alien and she's now this tough military lady who's getting parts all over the place. She's reinvented herself. So I like to say that for my career, I've crashed and burned and resurrected myself. You might as well call me the Doctor because I've just come back in so many different ways. You can't teach an old dog new tricks, but— If you want to stay around, no matter how old of a dog you are, you've got to learn new tricks. And you've got to keep learning, and you've got to keep trying new things. I started doing indie publishing probably around the time you did—2009, something like that. I was in one of these great positions where I was a trad author and I had a dozen books that I wrote that were all out of print. I got the rights back to them because back then they let books go out of print and they gave the rights back without a fight. So I suddenly found myself with like 12 titles that I could just put up. I went, oh, okay, let's try this. I was kind of blown away that that first novel that they paid me $4,000 for that never even earned it back—well, I just put it up on Kindle and within one year I made more than $4,000. I went, I like this, I've got to figure this out. That's how I launched WordFire Press. Then I learned how to do everything. I mean, back in those days, you could do a pretty clunky job and people would still buy it. Then I learned how to do it better. Jo: That time is gone. Kevin: Yes. I learned how to do it better, and then I learned how to market it. Then I learned how to do print on demand books. Then I learned how to do box sets and different kinds of marketing. I dove headfirst into my newsletter to build my fan base because I had all the Star Wars stuff and X-Files stuff and later it was the Dune stuff. I had this huge fan base, but I wanted that fan base to read the Kevin Anderson books, the Dan Shamble books and everything. The only way to get that is if you give them a personal touch to say, hey buddy, if you liked that one, try this one. And the way to do that is you have to have access to them. So I started doing social media stuff before most people were doing social media stuff. I killed it on MySpace. I can tell you that. I had a newsletter that we literally printed on paper and we stuck mailing labels on. It went out to 1,200 people that we put in the mailbox. Jo: Now you're doing that again with Kickstarter, I guess. But I guess for people listening, what are you learning now? How are you reinventing yourself now in this new phase we are entering? Kevin: Well, I guess the new thing that I'm doing now is expanding my Kickstarters into more. So last year, the biggest Kickstarter that I've ever had, I ran last year. It was this epic fantasy trilogy that I had trad published and I got the rights back. They had only published it in trade paperback. So, yes, I reissued the books in nice new hardcovers, but I also upped the game to do these fancy bespoke editions with leather embossed covers and end papers and tipped in ribbons and slip cases and all kinds of stuff and building that. I did three rock albums as companions to it, and just building that kind of fan base that will support that. Then I started a Patreon last year, which isn't as big as yours. I wish my Patreon would get bigger, but I'm pushing it and I'm still working on that. So it's trying new things. Because if I had really devoted myself and continued to keep my MySpace page up to date, I would be wasting my time. You have to figure out new things. Part of me is disappointed because I really liked in the nineties where they just kept throwing book contracts at me with big advances. And I wrote the book and sent it in and they did all the work. But that went away and I didn't want to go away. So I had to learn how to do it different. After a good extended career, one of the things you do is you pay it forward. I mentor a lot of writers and that evolved into me creating this master's program in publishing. I can gush about it because to my knowledge, it is the only master's degree that really focuses on indie publishing and new model publishing instead of just teaching you how to get a job as an assistant editor in Manhattan for one of the Big Five publishers. Jo: It's certainly a lot more practical than my master's in death. Kevin: Well, that's an acquired taste, I think. When they hired me to do this—and as I said earlier, I'm not an academic—and I said if I'm going to teach this, it's a one year program. They get done with it in one year. It's all online except for one week in person in the summer. They're going to learn how to do things. They're not going to get esoteric, analysing this poem for something. When they graduate from this program, they walk out with this anthology that they edited, that their name is on. The other project that they do is they reissue a really fancy, fine edition of some classic work, whether it's H.G. Wells or Jules Verne or something. They choose a book that they want to bring back and they do it all from start to finish. They come out of it—rather than just theoretical learning—they know how to do things. Surprise, I've been around in the business a long time, so I know everybody who works in the business. So the heads of publishing houses and the head of Draft2Digital or Audible—and we've got Blackstone Audio coming on in a couple weeks. We've got the head of Kickstarter coming on as guest speakers. I have all kinds of guest speakers. Joanna, I think you're coming on— Jo: I'm coming on as well, I think. Kevin: You're coming on as a guest speaker. It's just like they really get plugged in. I'm in my seventh cohort now and I just love doing it. The students love it and we've got a pretty high success rate. So there's your plug. We are open for applications now. It starts in July. And my own website is WordFire.com, and there's a section on there on the graduate program if anybody wants to take a look at it. Again, not everybody needs to have a master's degree to be an indie publisher, but there is something to be said for having all of this stuff put into an organised fashion so that you learn how to do all the things. It also gives you a resource and a support system so that they come out of it knowing a whole lot of people. Jo: Brilliant. Well, thanks so much for your time, Kevin. That was great. Kevin: Thanks. It's a great show. The post Managing Multiple Projects And The Art of the Long-Term Author Career with Kevin J. Anderson first appeared on The Creative Penn.

We praten in Europa vaak alsof we te klein en te verdeeld zijn om echt mee te tellen. Maar ondertussen kan geen enkele grootmacht om de Europese markt en regels heen. Is Europa geopolitiek zwakker dan het lijkt... of juist sterker dan ooit? Te gast is Europaverslaggever Geert Jan Hahn in BNR's Big Five van de macht van Europa Gasten in BNR's Big Five van De (on)macht van Europa -Geert Jan Hahn, BNR's Europaverslaggever -Frans Osinga, hoogleraar Oorlogsstudies aan de Universiteit Leiden -Louise van Schaik, klimaat-expert van Instituut Clingendael -Steven Brakman, hoogleraar economie aan de Rijksuniversiteit Groningen -Reinier van Lanschot, Europarlementariër voor VoltSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

It's tax season… but not for our city's largest nonprofits, aka the Big Five. Mayor Corey O'Connor got some big wins with a pair of one-time donations from UPMC and PNC Bank's foundation last week, but what happens now? Our health care giants and major universities — UPMC, Highmark Health, the University of Pittsburgh, Carnegie Mellon University, and Duquesne University — collectively own about one-eighth of all the land in Pittsburgh. But because PA law considers them "purely public charities," they  don't have to pay property taxes like the rest of us. Host Megan Harris and executive producer Mallory Falk are talking about the rage people feel about that, how the courts created this mess, and various local efforts over the years to get these big nonprofits to "pay their fair share."  Have any special insight into negotiations with the nonprofits before the 2000s? Call or text our HOW DID THIS HAPPEN? HOTLINE at 412-212-8893. Learn more about the sponsor of this February 5th episode: P3R - Use code CITYCAST15 to save 15% off any event registration Become a member of City Cast Pittsburgh at membership.citycast.fm. Want more Pittsburgh news?  Sign up for our daily morning Hey Pittsburgh newsletter. We're on Instagram @CityCastPgh. Text or leave us a voicemail at 412-212-8893. Interested in advertising with City Cast? Find more info here. 

Encore en course en Liga et en C1, le Real Madrid vit une saison contrastée, illuminée par l'enchaînement des buts de Kylian Mbappé. Mais le contenu des matches inquiète depuis plusieurs mois, entre manque d'intensité, déficit collectif et absence de leadership. Alvaro Arbeloa peut-il inverser la tendance ? Où se situe la responsabilité des dirigeants madrilènes ? Un podcast présenté par Marie-Amélie Motte, avec Thymoté Pinon et Antoine Simonneau (au téléphone depuis Madrid). Hébergé par Ausha. Visitez ausha.co/politique-de-confidentialite pour plus d'informations.

In this episode I talk with Christian Genco about IQ, the pros and cons of high intelligence, the Big Five personality traits, evolutionary differences between men and women, hypergamy, the origins of money, and whether Yuval Harari's "shared fiction" concept holds up. We never got to the AI topic we planned.Links:Nonsense Monthly

We are approaching the 35th Anniversary of what is likely one of the most celebrated and influential movies of the 1990's.  Adapted from Thomas Harris' best-selling novel of the same name, this is the story of student FBI agent Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster) on her first assignment: to develop a psychological profile of the infamous serial killer, Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins) who is currently incarcerated in Baltimore.  Of course, she also finds herself on a hidden mission as well dispatched by her superior, Jack Crawford (Scott Glenn) - she meets with the intimidating Dr. Lecter to also glean clues on how to best catch another serial killer who is currently on the loose, Buffalo Bill (Ted Levine).  And what results is an intensely brutal and psychogical cat-and-mouse between Clarice, Hannibal, and Bill.  Not only was this film a suprise box office smash upon release in February '91 but it would also go on to win the rare "Big Five" at the Academy Awards: Best Picture, Best Actress, Best Actor, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Director for the late, great Jonathan Demme (Philadelphia, Talking Heads: Stop Making Sense, Something Wild).    Host: Geoff GershonEdited By Ella GershonProducer: Marlene Gershon  Send us a textSupport the showhttps://livingforthecinema.com/Facebook:https://www.facebook.com/Living-for-the-Cinema-Podcast-101167838847578Instagram:https://www.instagram.com/livingforthecinema/Letterboxd:https://letterboxd.com/Living4Cinema/

Read the full transcript here. The Clearer Thinking Podcast listener survey is here! If you've ever listened to the Clearer Thinking podcast before, we'd love it if you'd take our listener survey so we can learn about your experience and improve the podcast based on your feedback. Give feedback to help us improve the Clearer Thinking podcast! What does personality capture beyond momentary behavior, and how do traits differ from life specific adaptations? How stable are traits across the lifespan when we separate rank order from mean level change? Can psychotherapy shift core traits like neuroticism or mainly improve functioning at the same level? How much of behavior is the person, the situation, or their interaction, and how do traits shape the environments we end up in? What trade offs come with being high or low on extroversion, conscientiousness, agreeableness, openness, and neuroticism? Why do people high in neuroticism both perceive more stress and land in more stressful situations? Which life events reliably nudge traits and why do the same events push different people in opposite directions? When should we replace categorical diagnoses with dimensional spectra that align with the Big Five and guide unified treatments? Colin G. DeYoung is a professor of psychology at the University of Minnesota. DeYoung's research in personality psychology has examined the theoretical structure of personality and the biological basis of personality. He currently directs the DeYoung Personality Lab at University of Minnesota. Links: Our platform with more than 1 million correlations Colin's Personality Lab The Big Five Aspect Scale Staff Spencer Greenberg — Host + Director Ryan Kessler — Producer + Technical Lead WeAmplify — Transcriptionists Igor Scaldini — Marketing Consultant Music Broke for Free Josh Woodward Lee Rosevere Quiet Music for Tiny Robots wowamusic zapsplat.com Affiliates Clearer Thinking GuidedTrack Mind Ease Positly UpLift [Read more]

A single moment on a New York subway platform can flip a life. That's where author and coach Deborah Mallow decided to stop living by default and design days that actually felt good. We invited her to share how that choice turned into a practical, design-forward guide: Six Steps to Fewer Days That Suck.We walk through each step with real-world examples. Start with the decision to change, then strip away the habits that feed worry and fear. Feed your mindset with bravery, not doubt. Take action with balance so your progress is sustainable, and choose an attitude that reflects the self you want to project. Finally, make the commitment to stay the course when results wobble. Deborah grounds every step in accessible brain science, how cortisol shapes mornings, why negativity bias traps our focus, and how small rituals like a self-hug, a smile, and a one-line affirmation can trigger endorphins and set a positive pattern for the day.As a designer, Deborah built her book for how we actually consume content: fast, visual, and memorable. Double-page spreads deliver quotes, questions, mantras, and start-now activities you can use in minutes. She also pulls back the curtain on her self-publishing strategy, from combining Amazon with IngramSpark to sourcing a cover from Big Five talent and planning bulk sales that bring positivity into workplaces. It's a masterclass in aligning creative vision with smart distribution, all while protecting your voice.If you're ready to enjoy more and worry less, you'll leave with a morning micro-ritual, a clearer sense of purpose, and a repeatable way to reduce the days that drain you. Have a comment? Text me! Support the show

Welcome to Episode 164 of Wrestling Tonight, powered by G FUEL and Dick Lazers. Use code TAVERN for 20 percent off. Acefield Retro and Chad are back, and this week is built around the road to Royal Rumble: Riyadh, while also zooming out to examine how WWE, AEW, TNA, AAA, NJPW, Stardom — and the global wrestling economy itself — are all adjusting direction at the same time. We open with a full preview of Royal Rumble: Riyadh, taking place January 31, 2026 at the King Abdullah Financial District as part of Riyadh Season. This marks the first traditional Royal Rumble ever held outside North America, the first Royal Rumble in Saudi Arabia, and the first of WWE's "Big Five" events to take place in the Kingdom. We break down why this Rumble matters more than usual, with both the men's and women's winners earning world championship matches at WrestleMania 42 in Las Vegas, the event's return to its traditional January slot, and the shift in distribution with ESPN streaming the Rumble in the U.S. for the first time while Netflix carries most international markets. From there, we dig into what's already locked in for Riyadh: the Men's and Women's Royal Rumble matches, Drew McIntyre defending the Undisputed WWE Championship against the winner of the Saturday Night's Main Event four-way, and Gunther vs. AJ Styles in a career-threatening match where Styles must retire if he loses. We also run through the early betting odds, where Roman Reigns and Bron Breakker sit at the top of the board, followed by Sami Zayn, Gunther, and Cody Rhodes, and discuss what those numbers tell us about WWE's short-term and long-term thinking. We cover the growing list of announced entrants on both the men's and women's sides and how the field is already beginning to take shape. We then pivot into Saturday Night's Main Event fallout from Montreal, breaking down Cody Rhodes vs. Jacob Fatu, AJ Styles vs. Shinsuke Nakamura, the Women's Tag Team Championship defense with Rhea Ripley & IYO SKY against Liv Morgan & Roxanne Perez, and the massive four-way number one contender's match featuring Damian Priest, Randy Orton, Sami Zayn, and Trick Williams, with the winner stepping directly into McIntyre's title picture at the Royal Rumble. From there, we widen the lens to WrestleMania season planning. We discuss WWE's current reluctance to turn Cody Rhodes heel, how WrestleMania 42 plans remain fluid, and why AJ Lee vs. Becky Lynch is shaping up as one of the most locked-in matches on the card. We also look ahead to WrestleMania 43 in Saudi Arabia, with The Rock openly addressing his excitement for the event and internal speculation swirling about possible appearances from Rock and Stone Cold Steve Austin as WWE enters its busiest stretch of the year. We then shift fully into the global business of wrestling, as Dave Meltzer reports that Místico has headlined 13 consecutive sellouts at Arena Mexico in 2026, a venue that holds approximately 16,000 fans. Meltzer called the run unprecedented, noting that sustained, high-frequency sellouts in the same building represent a business pattern rarely seen in wrestling history. We contextualize the streak against past drawing eras, the legacy of El Santo, and why comparisons to Japan or North American touring models often miss the structural realities of how wrestling draws actually function. We also discuss the growing push for Místico to capture a major championship currently held by talent from All Elite Wrestling, and what that would signal about CMLL's place in the current power structure. Outside WWE, AEW remains in a moment of transition. We break down Powerhouse Hobbs officially signing with WWE, the company parting ways with longtime executive Nik Sobic, and what those exits say about AEW's current phase. We also cover Will Ospreay's next step toward a return as he undergoes a medical evaluation, Hikaru Shida being backstage in Orlando as she edges closer to U.S. competition, and clarity emerging on AEW's streaming future as reports indicate the promotion is expected to remain aligned with Warner-backed platforms rather than moving to Netflix. TNA continues to operate within a shared ecosystem, as we revisit the fallout from Genesis and Impact's AMC debut amid lingering visa issues, the accidental TNA+ audio leak revealing No Surrender plans, Trey Miguel's emotional return, and the Knockouts Tag Team picture coming into focus with ZaRuca crowned as new number one contenders. We also hit international headlines, including AAA's FOX era officially beginning, Dominik Mysterio's accidental AEW belt graphic during a promo, El Hijo del Vikingo emerging as number one contender for the Mega Championship, NJPW seeing TMDK lose the NEVER Six-Man titles at Korakuen Hall, and Stardom keeping its options open following an alleged intellectual property violation involving trading cards. Episode 164 is a full-scale snapshot of the wrestling industry at a turning point — Royal Rumble season underway, WrestleMania plans coming into focus, media rights shifting, talent moving, and promotions everywhere adjusting direction rather than delivering final outcomes as the calendar heats up.  

What if the secret to writing a compelling novel—and querying it successfully—starts with understanding what's deeply meaningful to you? In this episode, I sit down with author Karin Gillespie to explore how to identify the personal connection in your writing and translate it into a pitch that agents and editors can't ignore.Karin, author of nine novels and creator of the popular Substack "Pitch Your Novel," shares her 20+ year publishing journey—from traditional publishing with the Big Five to indie publishing and back again. She's seen the industry from every angle, and she's here to help you navigate today's competitive landscape with wisdom, warmth, and practical guidance.In this episode, we discuss:Why your personal connection to your story matters more than you thinkHow to write a novel with a clear desire line that drives your narrative forwardThe essential elements every query letter needs (including the one-sentence pitch most writers forget)How to identify and pitch your book's genre in today's marketWhat "comps" are and why they're crucial to your query successThe reality of submission in 2025—and why it's so different from even five years agoHow to create your pitch before you write your novel (and why this can save you heartbreak)Finding joy in the writing process, even when the business side feels overwhelmingWhether you're drafting your first manuscript or querying your fifth novel, this conversation offers both tactical advice on how to query a literary agent and gentle encouragement to stay connected to what makes your writing meaningful.Connect with Karin Gillespie: Substack: Pitch Your NovelMentioned Resources:Publisher's MarketplaceQuery TrackerAmazon for comp researchIf you're ready to learn how to write a novel that matters to you and stands out in the marketplace, this episode is your roadmap.The Whole Writer is a podcast for fiction writers who want to nurture both their craft and their creative well-being. Hosted by Nicole Meier, multi-published author and book coach.Want more support on your writing journey? Visit nicolemeier.com to explore coaching programs for fiction writers.If this episode resonated with you, please leave a rating and review—it helps other writers discover the show!

FULL EPISODE | FN Barn Burner: Boomer, Pinder & WarrenerTIMESTAMPS ⏰0:00 Rhett Birthday Montage14:00 Rhett Birthday Party19:00 Conroy Joins The Show29:00 Pinder Report56:00 Bet36559:00 SuperchatsSubscribe to TNN on Youtube

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How can you build iconic characters that your readers want to keep coming back to? How can you be the kind of creator that readers trust, even without social media? With Claire Taylor In the intro, Dan Brown talks writing and publishing [Tetragrammaton]; Design Rules That Make or Break a Book [Self-Publishing Advice]; Amazon's DRM change [Kindlepreneur]; Show me the money [Rachael Herron]; AI bible translation [Wycliffe, Pope Leo tweet]. Plus, Business for Authors 24 Jan webinar, and Bones of the Deep. Today's show is sponsored by Bookfunnel, the essential tool for your author business. Whether it's delivering your reader magnet, sending out advanced copies of your book, handing out ebooks at a conference, or fulfilling your digital sales to readers, BookFunnel does it all. Check it out at bookfunnel.com/thecreativepenn This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn Claire Taylor is a humour and mystery author, the owner of FFS Media, and a certified Enneagram coach. She teaches authors to write stronger stories and build sustainable careers at LiberatedWriter.com, and her book is Write Iconic Characters: Unlocking the Core Motivations that Fuel Unforgettable Stories. You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights, and the full transcript is below. Show Notes Why Claire left social media and how she still markets her books and services What the Enneagram is and how core fears and desires shape character motivation Using Enneagram types (including Wednesday Addams as an example) to write iconic characters Creating rich conflict and relationships by pairing different Enneagram types on the page Coping with rapid change, AI, and fear in the author community in 2026 Building a trustworthy, human author brand through honesty, transparency, and vulnerability You can find Claire at LiberatedWriter.com, FFS.media, or on Substack as The Liberated Writer. Transcript of the interview with Claire Taylor Joanna: Claire Taylor is a humour and mystery author, the owner of FFS Media, and a certified Enneagram coach. She teaches authors to write stronger stories and build sustainable careers at LiberatedWriter.com, and her book is Write Iconic Characters: Unlocking the Core Motivations that Fuel Unforgettable Stories. So, welcome back to the show, Claire. Claire: Thank you so much for having me back. I'm excited to be here. Joanna: It's great to have you back on the show. It was March 2024 when you were last on, so almost two years now as this goes out. Give us a bit of an update. How has your writing craft and your author business changed in that time? Claire: One of the things I've been focusing on with my own fiction craft is deconstructing the rules of how a story “should” be. That's been a sort of hobby focus of mine. All the story structure books aren't law, right? That's why there are so many of them. They're all suggestions, frameworks. They're all trying to quantify humans' innate ability to understand a story. So I'm trying to remember more that I already know what a story is, deep down. My job as an author is to keep the reader's attention from start to finish and leave them feeling the way I hope they'll feel at the end. That's been my focus on the craft side. On the author business side, I've made some big shifts. I left social media earlier this year, and I've been looking more towards one-on-one coaching and networking. I did a craft-based Kickstarter, and I'd been focusing a lot on “career, career, career”—very business-minded—and now I'm creating more content again, especially around using the Enneagram for writing craft. So there's been a lot of transition since 2024 for me. Joanna: I think it's so important—and obviously we're going to get into your book in more detail—but I do think it's important for people to hear about our pivots and transitions. I haven't spoken to you for a while, but I actually started a master's degree a few months back. I'm doing a full-time master's alongside everything else I do. So I've kind of put down book writing for the moment, and I'm doing essay writing and academic writing instead. It's quite different, as you can imagine. It sounds like what you're doing is different too. One thing I know will have perked up people's ears is: “I left social media.” Tell us a bit more about that. Claire: This was a move that I could feel coming for a while. I didn't like what social media did to my attention. Even when I wasn't on it, there was almost a hangover from having been on it. My attention didn't feel as sharp and focused as it used to be, back before social media became what it is now. So I started asking myself some questions: What is lost if I leave? What is gained if I leave? And what is social media actually doing for me today? Because sometimes we hold on to what it used to do for us, and we keep trying to squeeze more and more of that out of it. But it has changed so much. There are almost no places with sufficient organic reach anymore. It's all pay-to-play, and the cost of pay-to-play keeps going up. I looked at the numbers for my business. My Kickstarter was a great place to analyse that because they track so many traffic sources so clearly. I could see exactly how much I was getting from social media when I advertised and promoted my projects there. Then I asked: can I let that go in order to get my attention back and make my life feel more settled? And I decided: yes, I can. That's worth more to me. Joanna: There are some things money can't buy. Sometimes it really isn't about the money. I like your question: what is lost and what is gained? You also said it's all pay-to-play and there's no organic reach. I do think there is some organic reach for some people who don't pay, but those people are very good at playing the game of whatever the platform wants. So, TikTok for example—you might not have to pay money yet, but you do have to play their game. You have to pay with your time instead of money. I agree with you. I don't think there's anywhere you can literally just post something and know it will reliably reach the people who follow you. Claire: Right. Exactly. TikTok currently, if you really play the game, will sometimes “pick” you, right? But that “pick me” energy is not really my jam. And we can see the trend—this “organic” thing doesn't last. It's organic for now. You can play the game for now, but TikTok would be crazy not to change things so they make more money. So eventually everything becomes pay-to-play. TikTok is fun, but for me it's addictive. I took it off my phone years ago because I would do the infinite scroll. There's so much candy there. Then I'd wake up the next morning and notice my mood just wasn't where I wanted it to be. My energy was low. I really saw a correlation between how much I scrolled and how flat I felt afterwards. So I realised: I'm not the person to pay-to-play or to play the game here. I'm not even convinced that the pay-to-play on certain social media networks is being tracked in a reliable, accountable way anymore. Who is holding them accountable for those numbers? You can sort of see correlation in your sales, but still, I just became more and more sceptical. In the end, it just wasn't for me. My life is so much better on a daily basis without it. That's definitely a decision I have not regretted for a second. Joanna: I'm sorry to keep on about this, but I think this is great because this is going out in January 2026, and there will be lots of people examining their relationship with social media. It's one of those things we all examine every year, pretty much. The other thing I'd add is that you are a very self-aware person. You spend a lot of time thinking about these things and noticing your own behaviour and energy. Stopping and thinking is such an important part of it. But let's tackle the big question: one of the reasons people don't want to come off social media is that they're afraid they don't know how else to market. How are you marketing if you're not using social media? Claire: I didn't leave social media overnight. Over time, I've been adjusting and transitioning, preparing my business and myself mentally and emotionally for probably about a year. I still market to my email list. That has always been important to my business. I've also started a Substack that fits how my brain works. Substack is interesting. Some people might consider it a form of social media—it has that new reading feed—but it feels much more like blogging to me. It's blogging where you can be discovered, which is lovely. I've been doing more long-form content there. You get access to all the emails of your subscribers, which is crucial to me. I don't want to build on something I can't take with me. So I've been doing more long-form content, and that seems to keep my core audience with me. I've got plenty of people subscribed; people continue to come back, work with me, and tell their friends. Word of mouth has always been the way my business markets best, because it's hard to describe the benefits of what I do in a quick, catchy way. It needs context. So I'm leaning even more on that. Then I'm also shifting my fiction book selling more local. Joanna: In person? Claire: Yes. In person and local. Networking and just telling more people that I'm an author. Connecting more deeply with my existing email lists and communities and selling that way. Joanna: I think at the end of the day it does come back to the email list. I think this is one of the benefits of selling direct to people through Shopify or Payhip or whatever, or locally, because you can build your email list. Every person you bring into your own ecosystem, you get their data and you can stay in touch. Whereas all the things we did for years to get people to go to Amazon, we didn't get their emails and details. It's so interesting where we are right now in the author business. Okay, we'll come back to some of these things, but let's get into the book and what you do. Obviously what underpins the book is the Enneagram. Just remind us what the Enneagram is, why you incorporate it into so much of your work, and why you find it resonates so much. Claire: The Enneagram is a framework that describes patterns of thoughts, feelings, and actions that tend to arise from nine different core motivations. Those core motivations are made up of a fear–desire pair. So, for instance, there's the fear of lacking worth and the desire to be worthy. That pair is the Type Three core motivation. If you're a Type Three, sometimes called “The Achiever,” that's your fundamental driver. What we fear and desire above all the other fears and desires determines where our attention goes. And attention is something authors benefit greatly from understanding. We have to keep people's attention, so we want to understand our own attention and how to cultivate it. The things our attention goes to build our understanding of ourselves and the world. Being intentional about that, and paying attention to what your characters pay attention to—and what your readers are paying attention to—is hugely beneficial. It can give you a real leg up. That's why I focus on the Enneagram. I find it very useful at that core level. You can build a lot of other things on top of it with your characters: their backstory, personal histories, little quirks—all of that can be built off the Enneagram foundation. Why I like the Enneagram more than other frameworks like MBTI or the Big Five is that it not only shows us how our fears are confining us—that's really what it's charting—but it also shows us a path towards liberation from those fears. That's where the Enneagram really shines: the growth path, the freedom from the confines of our own personality. It offers that to anyone who wants to study and discover it. A lot of the authors I work with say things like, “I'm just so sick of my own stuff.” And I get it. We all get sick of running into the same patterns over and over again. We can get sick of our personality! The Enneagram is a really good tool for figuring out what's going on and how to try something new, because often we can't even see that there are other options. We have this particular lens we're looking through. That's why I like to play with it, and why I find it so useful. Joanna: That's really interesting. It sounds like you have a lot of mature authors—and when I say “mature,” I mean authors with a lot of books under their belt, not necessarily age. There are different problems at different stages of the author career, and the problem you just described—“I'm getting sick of my stuff”—sounds like a mature author issue. What are some of the other issues you see in the community that are quite common amongst indie authors? Claire: One that comes up a lot, especially early on, is: “Am I doing this right?” That's a big question. People say, “I don't know if I'm doing this right. I'm going to mess it up. This person told me this was the way to do things, but I don't think I can do it this way. Am I doomed?” That's the fear. A lot of what I help people with is seeing that there isn't a single “right” way to do this. There's a way that's going to feel more aligned to you, and there are millions of ways to approach an author career because we're all constructing it as we go. You were there in the early days. We were all just making this up as we went along. Joanna: Exactly. There was a time when ebooks were PDFs, there wasn't even a Kindle, and there was no iPhone. We were literally just making it up. Claire: Right. Exactly. That spirit of “we're all making it up” is important. Some of us have come up with frameworks that work for us, and then we tell other people about them—“Here's a process; try this process”—but that doesn't mean it's the process. Understanding what motivates you—those core motivations—helps you see where you're going to bump into advice that's not right for you, and how to start making decisions that fit your attention, your life, your desires in this author role. Early on we do a lot of that work. Then there are the authors who started a while ago and have a bunch of books. They hit a point where they say, “I've changed so much since I started writing. I need to figure out how to adjust my career.” Joanna: Tell us more about that, because I think that's you and me. How do we deal with that? Claire: Well, crying helps. Joanna: That is true! There's always a bit of crying involved in reinvention. From my perspective, my brand has always been built around me. People are still here—I know some people listening who have been with the podcast since I started it in 2009—and I've always been me. Even though I've done loads of different things and changed along the way, at heart I'm still me. I'm really glad I built a personal brand around who I am, rather than around one genre or a single topic. How about you? How do you see it? Claire: I'm the same. I just can't stick with something that doesn't feel right for me anymore. I'll start to rebel against it. There's also that “good girl” part of me that wants to do things the way they're supposed to be done and keep everybody happy. I have to keep an eye on her, because she'll default to “this is the way it should be done,” and then I end up constricted. As we advance through our careers, positioning around what motivates us and what we love, and allowing ourselves to understand that it's okay to change—even though it's painful—is crucial. It's actually destructive not to change over time. We end up forfeiting so many things that make life worth living if we don't allow ourselves to grow and change. We end up in this tiny box. People sometimes say the Enneagram is very restrictive. “It's only nine types, you're putting me in a box.” It's like: no. These are the boxes we've put ourselves in. Then we use the Enneagram to figure out how to get out of the box. As we start to see the box we've put ourselves in with our personality—“that's me, that's not me”—we realise how much movement we actually have, how many options we have, while still being ourselves. Joanna: So many options. This kind of brings us into your book, because part of the personal brand thing is being real and having different facets. Your book is Write Iconic Characters, and presumably these are characters that people want to read more about. It uses the Enneagram to construct these better characters. So first up— What's your definition of an iconic character, as opposed to any old character? And how can we use the Enneagram to construct one? Claire: An iconic character, in my imagination, is one that really sticks with us after we've finished the story. They become a reference point. We'll say, “This person is kind of like that character,” or “This situation feels like that character would handle it this way.” It could be our friends, our enemies, someone we meet on the bus—whoever it is might remind us of this character. So they really get lodged in our psyche. An iconic character feels true to some fundamental part of the human condition, even if they're not strictly human. So, all the alien romance people listening, don't worry—you're still in! These characters take on a life of their own. With an iconic character, we may hear them talking to us after the book is done, because we've tapped into that essential part of them. They can become almost archetypal—something we go back to over and over again in our minds, both as writers and as readers. Joanna: How can we use the Enneagram to construct an iconic character? I'm asking this as a discovery writer who struggles to construct anything beforehand. It's more that I write stuff and then something emerges. But I have definitely not had a hit series with an iconic character, so I'm willing to give your approach a try. Claire: It works with whatever your process is. If you're a discovery writer, start with that spark of a character in your head. If there's a character who's just a glimmer—maybe you know a few things about them—just keep writing. At some point you'll probably recognise, “Okay, it's time to go deeper in understanding this character and create a cohesive thread to pull all of this together.” That's where the Enneagram becomes useful. You can put on your armchair psychologist hat and ask: which of the nine core fears seems like it might be driving the parts of their personality that are emerging? Thankfully, we intuitively recognise the nine types. When we start gathering bits for a new character, we tend to pull from essentially the same constellation of personality, even if we don't realise it. For instance, you might say, “This character is bold and adventurous,” and that's all you know. You're probably not going to also add, “and they're incredibly shy,” because “bold and adventurous” plus “incredibly shy” doesn't really fit our intuitive understanding of people. We know that instinctively. So, you've got “bold and adventurous.” You write that to a certain point, and then you get to a place where you think, “I don't really know them deeply.” That's when you can go back to the nine core fears and start ruling some out quite quickly. In the book, I have descriptions for each of them. You can read the character descriptions, read about the motivations, and start to say, “It's definitely not these five types. I can rule those out.” If they're bold and adventurous, maybe the core fear is being trapped in deprivation and pain, or being harmed and controlled. Those correspond to Type Seven (“The Enthusiast”) and Type Eight (“The Challenger”), respectively. So you might say, “Okay, maybe they're a Seven or an Eight.” From there, if you can pin down a type, you can read more about it and get ideas. You can understand the next big decision point. If they're a Type Seven, what's going to motivate them? They'll do whatever keeps them from being trapped in pain and deprivation, and they'll be seeking satisfaction or new experiences in some way, because that's the core desire that goes with that fear. So now, you're asking: “How do I get them to get on the spaceship and leave Earth?” Well, you could offer them some adventure, because they're bold and adventurous. I have a character who's a Seven, and she gets on a spaceship and takes off because her boyfriend just proposed—and the idea of being trapped in marriage feels like: “Nope. Whatever is on this spaceship, I'm out of here.” You can play with that once you identify a type. You can go as deep with that type as you want, or you can just work with the core fear and the basic desire. There's no “better or worse”—it's whatever you feel comfortable with and whatever you need for the story. Joanna: In the book, you go into all the Enneagram types in detail, but you also have a specific example: Wednesday Addams. She's one of my favourites. People listening have either seen the current series or they have something in mind from the old-school Addams Family. Can you talk about [Wednesday Addams] as an example? Claire: Doing those deep dives was some of the most fun research for this book. I told my husband, John, “Don't bother me. I need to sit and binge-watch Wednesday again—with my notebook this time.” Online, people were guessing: “Oh, she's maybe this type, maybe that type.” As soon as I started watching properly with the Enneagram in mind, I thought: “Oh, this is a Type Eight, this is the Challenger.” One of the first things we hear from her is that she considers emotions to be weakness. Immediately, you can cross out a bunch of types from that. When we're looking at weak/strong language—that lens of “strength” versus “weakness”—we tend to look towards Eights, because they often sort the world in those terms. They're concerned about being harmed or controlled, so they feel they need to be strong and powerful. That gave me a strong hint in that direction. If we look at the inciting incident—which is a great place to identify what really triggers a character, because it has to be powerful enough to launch the story—Wednesday finds her little brother Pugsley stuffed in a locker. She says, “Who did this?” because she believes she's the only one who gets to bully him. That's a very stereotypical Type Eight thing. The unhealthy Eight can dip into being a bit of a bully because they're focused on power and power dynamics. But the Eight also says, “These are my people. I protect them. If you're one of my people, you're under my protection.” So there's that protection/control paradox. Then she goes and—spoiler—throws a bag of piranhas into the pool to attack the boys who hurt him. That's like: okay, this is probably an Eight. Then she has control wrested from her when she's sent to the new school. That's a big trigger for an Eight: to not have autonomy, to not have control. She acts out pretty much immediately, tries to push people away, and establishes dominance. One of the first things she does is challenge the popular girl to a fencing match. That's very Eight behaviour: “I'm going to go in, figure out where I sit in this power structure, and try to get into a position of power straight away.” That's how the story starts, and in the book I go into a lot more analysis. At one point she's attacked by this mysterious thing and is narrowly saved from a monster. Her reaction afterwards is: “I would have rather saved myself.” That's another strong Eight moment. The Eight does not like to be saved by anyone else. It's: “No, I wanted to be strong enough to do that.” Her story arc is also very Eight-flavoured: she starts off walled-off, “I can do it myself,” which can sometimes look like the self-sufficiency of the Five, but for her it's about always being in a power position and in control of herself. She has to learn to rely more on other people if she wants to protect the people she cares about. Protecting the innocent and protecting “her people” is a big priority for the Eight. Joanna: Let's say we've identified our main character and protagonist. One of the important things in any book, especially in a series, is conflict—both internal and external. Can we use the Enneagram to work out what would be the best other character, or characters, to give us more conflict? Claire: The character dynamics are complex, and all types are going to have both commonalities and conflict between them. That works really well for fiction. But depending on how much conflict you need, there are certain type pairings that are especially good for it. If you have a protagonist who's an Eight, they're going to generate conflict everywhere because it doesn't really bother them. They're okay wading into conflict. If you ask an Eight, “Do you like conflict?” they'll often say, “Well, sometimes it's not great,” but to everyone else it looks like they come in like a wrecking ball. The Eight tends to go for what they want. They don't see the point in waiting. They think, “I want it, I'm going to go and get it.” That makes them feel strong and powerful. So it's easy to create external and internal conflict with an Eight and other types. But the nature of the conflict is going to be different depending on who you pair them with. Let's say you have this Eight and you pair them with a Type One, “The Reformer,” whose core fear is being bad or corrupt, and who wants to be good and have integrity. The Reformer wants morality. They can get a little preachy; they can become a bit of a zealot when they're more unhealthy. A One and an Eight will have a very particular kind of conflict because the One says, “Let's do what's right,” and the Eight says, “Let's do what gets me what I want and puts me in the power position.” They may absolutely get along if they're taking on injustice. Ones and Eights will team up if they both see the same thing as unjust. They'll both take it on together. But then they may reach a point in the story where the choice is between doing the thing that is “right”—maybe self-sacrificing or moral—versus doing the thing that will exact retribution or secure a power-up. That's where the conflict between a One and an Eight shows up. You can grab any two types and they'll have unique conflict. I'm actually working on a project on Kickstarter that's all about character dynamics and relationships—Write Iconic Relationships is the next project—and I go deeper into this there. Joanna: I was wondering about that, because I did a day-thing recently with colour palettes and interior design—which is not usually my thing—so I was really challenging myself. We did this colour wheel, and they were talking about how the opposite colour on the wheel is the one that goes with it in an interesting way. I thought— Maybe there's something in the Enneagram where it's like a wheel, and the type opposite is the one that clashes or fits in a certain way. Is that a thing? Claire: There is a lot of that kind of contrast. The Enneagram is usually depicted in a circle, one through nine, and there are strong contrasts between types that are right next to each other, as well as interesting lines that connect them. For example, we've been talking about the Eight, and right next to Eight is Nine, “The Peacemaker.” Eights and Nines can look like opposites in certain ways. The Nine is conflict-avoidant, and the Eight tends to think you get what you want by pushing into conflict if necessary. Then you've got Four, “The Individualist,” which is very emotional, artistic, heart-centred, and Five, “The Investigator,” which you're familiar with—very head-centred and analytical, thinking-based. The Four and the Five can clash a bit: the head and the heart. So, yes, there are interesting contrasts right next to each other on the wheel. Each type also has its own conflict style. We're going into the weeds a bit here, but it's fascinating to play with. There's one conflict style—the avoidant conflict style, sometimes called the “positive outlook” group—and it's actually hard to get those types into an enemies-to-lovers romance because they don't really want to be enemies. That's Types Two, Seven, and Nine. So depending on the trope you're writing, some type pairings are more frictional than others. There are all these different dynamics you can explore, and I can't wait to dig into them more for everyone in the relationships book. Joanna: The Enneagram is just one of many tools people can use to figure out themselves as well as their characters. Maybe that's something people want to look at this year. You've got this book, you've got other resources that go into it, and there's also a lot of information out there if people want to explore it more deeply. Let's pull back out to the bigger picture, because as this goes out in January 2026, I think there is a real fear of change in the community right now. Is that something you've seen? What are your thoughts for authors on how they can navigate the year ahead? Claire: Yes, there has been a lot of fear. The rate of change of things online has felt very rapid. The rate of change in the broader world—politically, socially—has also felt scary to a lot of people. It can be really helpful to look at your own personal life and anchor yourself in what hasn't changed and what feels universal. From there you can start to say, “Okay, I can do this. I'm safe enough to be creative. I can find creative ways to work within this new environment.” You can choose to engage with AI. You can choose to opt out. It's totally your choice, and there is no inherent virtue in either one. I think that's important to say. Sometimes people who are anti-AI—not just uninterested but actively antagonistic—go after people who like it. And sometimes people who like AI can be antagonistic towards people who don't want to use it. But actually, you get to choose what you're comfortable with. One of the things I see emerging for authors in 2026, regardless of what tools you're using or how you feel about them, is this question of trustworthiness. I think there's a big need for that. With the increased number of images and videos that are AI-generated—which a lot of people who've been on the internet for a while can still recognise as AI and say, “Yeah, that's AI”—but that may not be obvious for long. Right now some of us can tell, but a lot of people can't, and that's only going to get murkier. There's a rising mistrust of our own senses online lately. We're starting to wonder, “Can I believe what I'm seeing and hearing?” And I think that sense of mistrust will increase. As an author in that environment, it's really worth focusing on: how do I build trust with my readers? That doesn't mean you never use AI. It might simply mean you disclose, to whatever extent feels right for you, how you use it. There are things like authenticity, honesty, vulnerability, humility, integrity, transparency, reliability—all of those are ingredients in this recipe of trustworthiness that we need to look at for ourselves. If there's one piece of hard inner work authors can do for 2026, I think it's asking: “Where have I not been trustworthy to my readers?” Then taking that hard, sometimes painful look at what comes up, and asking how you can adjust. What do you need to change? What new practices do you need to create that will increase trustworthiness? I really think that's the thing that's starting to erode online. If you can work on it now, you can hold onto your readers through whatever comes next. Joanna: What's one concrete thing people could do in that direction [to increase trustworthiness]? Claire: I would say disclosing if you use AI is a really good start—or at least disclosing how you use it specifically. I know that can lead to drama when you do it because people have strong opinions, but trustworthiness comes at the cost of courage and honesty. Transparency is another ingredient we could all use more of. If transparency around AI is a hard “absolutely not” for you—if you're thinking, “Nope, Claire, you can get lost with that”—then authenticity is another route. Let your messy self be visible, because people still want some human in the mix. Being authentically messy and vulnerable with your audience helps. If you can't be reliable and put the book out on time, at least share what's going on in your life. Staying connected in that way builds trust. Readers will think, “Okay, I see why you didn't hit that deadline.” But if you're always promising books—“It's going to be out on this day,” and then, “Oh, I had to push it back,” and that happens again and again—that does erode the trustworthiness of your brand. So, looking at those things and asking, “How am I cultivating trust, and how am I breaking it?” is hard work. There are definitely ways I look at my own business and think, “That's not a very trustworthy thing I'm doing.” Then I need to sit down, get real with myself, and see how I can improve that. Joanna: Always improving is good. Coming back to the personal brand piece, and to being vulnerable and putting ourselves out there: you and I have both got used to that over years of doing it and practising. There are people listening who have never put their photo online, or their voice online, or done a video. They might not use their photo on the back of their book or on their website. They might use an avatar. They might use a pen name. They might be afraid of having anything about themselves online. That's where I think there is a concern, because as much as I love a lot of the AI stuff, I don't love the idea of everything being hidden behind anonymous pen names and faceless brands. As you said, being vulnerable in some way and being recognisably human really matters. I'd say: double down on being human. I think that's really important. Do you have any words of courage for people who feel, “I just can't. I don't want to put myself out there”? Claire: There are definitely legitimate reasons some people wouldn't want to be visible. There are safety reasons, cultural reasons, family reasons—all sorts of factors. There are also a lot of authors who simply haven't practised the muscle of vulnerability. You build that muscle a little bit at a time. It does open you up to criticism, and some people are just not at a phase of life where they can cope with that. That's okay. If fear is the main reason—if you're hiding because you're scared of being judged—I do encourage you to step out, gently. This may be my personal soapbox, but I don't think life is meant to be spent hiding. Things may happen. Not everyone will like you. That's part of being alive. When you invite in hiding, it doesn't just stay in one corner. That constricted feeling tends to spread into other areas of your life. A lot of the time, people I work with don't want to disclose their pen names because they're worried their parents won't approve, and then we have to unpack that. You don't have to do what your parents want you to do. You're an adult now, right? If the issue is, “They'll cut me out of the will,” we can talk about that too. That's a deeper, more practical conversation. But if it's just that they won't approve, you have more freedom than you think. You also don't have to plaster your picture everywhere. Even if you're not comfortable showing your face, you can still communicate who you are and what matters to you in other ways—through your stories, through your email list, through how you talk to readers. Let your authentic self be expressed in some way. It's scary, but the reward is freedom. Joanna: Absolutely. Lots to explore in 2026. Tell people where they can find you and your books and everything you do online. Claire: LiberatedWriter.com is where all of my stuff lives, except my fiction, which I don't think people here are necessarily as interested in. If you do want to find my fiction, FFS Media is where that lives. Then I'm on Substack as well. I write long pieces there. If you want to subscribe, it's The Liberated Writer on Substack. Joanna: Brilliant. Well, thanks so much for your time, Claire. That was great. Claire: Thanks so much for having me.The post Leaving Social Media, Writing Iconic Characters, and Building Trust With Claire Taylor first appeared on The Creative Penn.

Anxiety is something every leader deals with. The best leaders learn to recognize and manage it before it becomes contagious and spreads in their organization. In this episode, Andy Stanley and Steve Cuss explore why many leaders don’t recognize anxiety in themselves until it begins shaping their teams and culture. You’ll discover how false needs like control, perfectionism, and people-pleasing fuel reactivity—and why unmanaged anxiety is contagious. This conversation equips leaders with practical tools to respond with clarity, create emotionally healthy environments, and lead without transferring their anxiety to others. Download the application guide: http://bit.ly/44Y0RJ5 Here is what they cover in this episode: Anxiety in the room is real (2:51) “I’m not anxious”… until you see it as reactivity (6:27) Two reactive moves: “bigger than human” or “smaller than human” (8:08) The Big Five false needs that drive (and spread) anxiety. (13:18) How to interrupt stuck patterns. (19:45) Special thanks to our sponsor BELAY for offering a free download of their ebook, 10 Tactics to Boost Productivity. This resource is full of helpful tips to make your workdays more sustainable, productive, and fulfilling. Just text the word ANDY to 55123 to claim your free ebook now. Recognized as one of Forbes' 6 Leadership Podcasts To Listen To In 2024 and one of the Best Leadership Podcasts To Stay in the Know for CEOs, according to Industry Leaders Magazine. If this podcast has made you a better leader, you can help it by leaving a quick Spotify or Apple Podcasts review. You can visit Spotify or Apple Podcasts, and then go to the “Reviews” section. Thank you for sharing! ____________ Where to find Andy: Instagram: @andy_stanley Facebook: Andy Stanley Official X: @andystanley YouTube: @AndyStanleyOfficial See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.