Podcasts about Big Five

Designing a construction business with the right systems and processes from day one is how you build for lasting profit and freedom. New Hampshire home builder Tom Raisanen shares how he set up pre-construction, project handoffs, a CEO schedule, and his first hire so the company can eventually run without him. ⚡Schedule a Business Evaluation Call with The Construction Leading Edge Team:  HERE

Cat and Pat chat about Broad Strokes, things that happened in 1727, The Big Five in track, and if Pat should go to the beach. Watch the full episode on our YouTube and follow below!Show Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/seektreatmentpodShow Tiktok: https://www.tiktok.com/@seektreatmentpodCat: https://www.instagram.com/catccohenPat: https://www.instagram.com/patreegsSeek Treatment is a production of Headgum Studios. Our producer is Allie Kahan. The show art was created by Carly Jean Andrews.Like the show? Rate Seek Treatment on Spotify and Apple Podcasts and leave a review.Advertise on Seek Treatment via Gumball.fmSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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!

When we first dicsussed the Summer of Simulative AI in 2024 we knew it would be a brief summer, but it has recently come back with a vengeance with SimGym in April and now Simile AI's $2B Series B, backed by GreenOaks and Index Ventures with prominent backers like Fei-Fei Li and Andrej Karpathy, running tens of millions of simulations for Fortune 100 clients like CVS and 85–99% accuracy vs human focus groups. Time to catch up on why this Second Summer of simulation is working!From creating Smallville, the landmark 2023 paper on Generative Agents that showed AI characters could remember, plan, socialize, and develop emergent behaviors, to now building foundation models of human behavior, Joon Sung Park is trying to answer a much bigger question: what if we could simulate the world before making decisions in it? In this episode, the Simile co-founder and CEO joins us to unpack the path from generative agents to digital twins, why today's frontier models still fail to capture how humans actually behave, and what it would take to eventually simulate all 8 billion people on Earth.We go deep on Simile's approach to modeling human behavior: long-form interviews, observational and transaction data, randomized controlled trials, population-level and individual-level models, and post-training on the causal mechanisms behind why people make decisions. Joon explains how his research created digital twins that reproduced human behavior and attitudes 85% as accurately as people reproduced their own responses, why models optimized to be rational can be bad simulations of irrational humans, and why understanding “social physics” may require changing model weights rather than simply prompting frontier LLMs.We also explore the much larger ambition behind simulation: testing products and policies before deploying them, finding counterintuitive paths toward desired outcomes, modeling emergent behavior across entire societies, and potentially tackling problems like climate change, democratic instability, and UBI. Joon reflects on scaling laws for simulation, the economics of data-center-scale simulated worlds, the connection to Thomas Schelling and psychohistory, why simulation is surprisingly similar to painting, and whether we might already be living in one.We discuss:* How Smallville and Generative Agents led to Simile* Why Joon's team asked: “What if we can just recreate the world that we live in?”* Why useful personal agents require deep models of their users* Memory architectures, Markdown files, and the limits of prompting* “Social physics” and behavioral foundation models* Why web data captures what people say more than what they actually do* Interviews, transactions, observational data, and randomized controlled trials* Why predicting the future matters less than understanding how to shape it* How Simile creates representative simulated populations* Simulation versus prediction and the connection to Foundation's psychohistory* How to evaluate simulations instead of simply stacking LLM hallucinations* Creating digital twins of 1,000 real people and reaching 85% behavioral accuracy* Why frontier models can struggle to reproduce real human behavior* Why good simulations need to reproduce human biases and mistakes* Post-training models on randomized controlled trials* Population-level versus individual-level simulation* Scaling laws for human simulation* The long-term ambition to simulate all 8 billion people on Earth* Whether simulations could help solve climate change or detect collapsing democracy* Thomas Schelling and the history of agent-based modeling* Why future simulations could require an entire data center* Multi-agent simulations and what happens when simulated people interact* Replacing expensive human panels with synthetic populations* Why market research is only the starting point for simulation* Why Joon sees simulation as surprisingly similar to painting* Using simulation to study questions like UBI* Whether we are already living in a simulation* Why AGI and simulation may be the twin technologies of advanced civilizationsJoon Sung Park* LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joonspark* X: https://x.com/joon_s_pk* Website: https://www.joonsungpark.com* Simile: https://www.simile.comTimestamps00:00:00 Introduction and Joon's Path from Art to AI00:01:46 Smallville, Generative Agents, and the Origins of Simulation00:05:03 “Let's Just Create a World” and the Future of Personal Agents00:09:53 Social Physics and Behavioral Foundation Models00:14:08 Prediction vs. Simulation: How Do You Shape the Future?00:16:59 How Simile Models Real People and Populations00:25:35 Evaluating Simulations, Digital Twins, and 85% Accuracy00:30:23 Post-Training Models to Reproduce Human Behavior00:40:04 Scaling Laws and Simulating 8 Billion People00:43:10 From Schelling to Society-Scale Agent Simulations00:46:13 The Cost and Economics of Simulating the World00:52:05 Real-World Use Cases, Synthetic Populations, and the Market00:57:27 The Future of Simulation, Painting, and UBI01:04:23 Are We Already Living in a Simulation?01:06:08 Building Simile and HiringTranscriptIntroduction: Joon Sung Park, Simile, and the Story So FarVibhu [00:00:00]: Today, we have Joon in the podcast. Excited to kick this one off. Very exciting company. I wanna kick off and ask you the question, talk us through the story of your life. How have you gotten here?Joon [00:00:13]: Yeah, for sure. I'm really excited to be here. A story of my life. So I was born in Korea, and I lived there for a good 11 years or so of my life, and then my family moved to Boston. So we moved when I was 11, and my parents were doctors, so they were going through their postdoctoral studies. My dad was a surgeon, so he was doing his sabbatical years at the Boston Children's Hospital. So I grew up there, not too close to tech. I was very much a music and artsy, painting kind of guy.Vibhu [00:00:49]: Painting.Joon [00:00:49]: Exactly. I got into painting a little bit later, in high school, but that's what I used to do. And then I grew up mostly in the East Coast after Korea. So I lived a good number of years in New Hampshire, and then I went to college in Pennsylvania. And I got into more of this tech scene, in college. So I was originally trained to be an artist. I thought that would be my professional career. So it wasn't a hobby. It was like, “Hey, let's make a living out of this.” And then gradually, I got really interested in this idea of, hey, the greatest artist often creates their own medium, and the best medium that we had available today was in computation. So I decided to go deeper into that, and one thing led to another, and we can go deeper into this, but I decided that research was something that I gradually got interested in, and here I am.Smallville, Generative Agents, and the 2023 Breakout PaperSwyx [00:01:46]: So there's a lot that you packed into the research components. You had one of the best papers of 2023, which was the generative agents paper, commonly known as the Smallville paper.Swyx [00:01:58]: Feel free to call back to anything else that you mentioned, but most people would have heard of you from this. Do you have any statistics on how many people have, like, read it? arXiv gives you something, right? Some stats.Joon [00:02:10]: Yeah, it's a good question. How many people have read it, I'm not sure.Joon [00:02:14]: I know we do keep track of citations, and they are going up quite fast.Swyx [00:02:23]: Yeah, Google Scholar has 7,200 citations.Vibhu [00:02:25]: I feel like it made a bigger hit than that, and it was a pretty instrumental paper. It got cited so many times.Swyx [00:02:34]: It is frequently the answer when people ask, “What is the best paper you've read recently?” It's this one.Vibhu [00:02:39]: I thought the memory component was pretty underrated. It was a very good early memory system, and one of the biggest papers.Foundation Models and the Search for Killer ApplicationsJoon [00:02:47]: Yeah, so maybe I can talk a little bit about how this particular paper came together. So when I got into research, it was back in 2020 when I started my PhD program at Stanford, and that was the year, when we were about to get GPT-3 to be available. So we already had GPT-2, and you could sense that there was this new class of models that was just becoming available in the market, and the team got very intrigued. And the general consensus was, “Well, is this model going to be useful for anything?” “It's really strange that these models are not trained to do any particular task.” But we decided to take a bet. So a large group of scholars at Stanford, and it was led by one of my co-founders, Percy Liang, and we came togetherSwyx [00:03:35]: Who coined foundation models.Joon [00:03:36]: Who coined the term foundation models. We wrote this paper, where that term came from called Opportunities and Risks of Foundation Models. And during that process, really the thing that I started to think deeply about was, here is a model that is fundamentally new in our ecosystem. The reason why this was new was it wasn't, again, trained to do anything in particular, but its premise was it could do anything and everything. It was like a stem cell, if you were to take a biology analogy. And I got really interested in this idea that, well, if we were to really think about what are the killer applications that this particular technology would enable, what would that be? Many of my colleagues were using this for simple classification, simple generations. Interesting that these models can do that, but from an interaction perspective, not that interesting. We've known how to do that for many decades. And what we came down to was these models are trained on this very broad data from the web, right? So these are human behavioral data. It's social media, Wikipedia, all these data. So if you poke at the right angle, then you could see human behavior that would just pop out that's quite realistic, and we've never seen that before.The Time Machine Game and Recreating the WorldJoon [00:04:45]: So that got us really interested. The exercise that we decided to do, with this particular group of colleagues, Michael Bernstein, Percy Liang, and myself, who ended up becoming my co-founder at Simile, we sat down and we played this game that we call the time machine game.Joon [00:05:03]: Imagine we were to get on a time machine and fast-forward 10 years and look back. What would have been the single application that will have mattered that would be the most interesting and inspiring? And when we thought, “Well, what if we can just recreate the world that we live in?” it's really hard to get more ambitious than that. Like, let's just create a world.Joon [00:05:24]: And that's where we started. And initially, we had this paper that was a precursor to the generative agents paper called Social Simulacra.Swyx [00:05:32]: Before you go further, were there other candidates for the most ambitious thing in the time machine exercise? What was number two or number three?Personal Agents, User Models, and Why Simulation Came FirstJoon [00:05:44]: There is a close second that we were considering, which ended up becoming more of these automation tools, especially the vision around really personalized agents that would do things for you.Swyx [00:05:59]: That's also happening.Joon [00:06:00]: It's also happening. But it was interesting for us, right, in that the reason why, we decided to go with the idea of simulation, one, I was a huge science fiction nerd, and this idea of creating simulation, I was personally really just fascinated. I loved the idea. It's really cool to see, like, a game town like this and just see these agents live in it. But at the same time, my bet was if you were to create a really amazing personal assistant out of this technology, what you need first is an amazing model of your users. So I told a model, “Hey, can you go buy late dinner for me?” And it orders Hawaiian pizza, and I do not like pineapples on my pizza. Then it totally failed. The way for it to not make that mistake is only by having a deep understanding of who I am. And I gave a very simple and dumb example here, but you can imagine how this core understanding of people is instrumental. This is how, if we have our family and closest friends, they have a good mental model of who we are. That's the basis of our social connection. So our bet also was this technology around simulation, creating accurate representation of people ought to precede the more complex agents that would automate the world that we live in. So that was the bet. But that was a very close second, and I'm still very much fascinated by it. I think there's a lot of interesting work that's going around. My hot take here, though, is I don't think we've seen a true personal assistant that's useful, in ways that meet the ambition of that particular line of work. I think there are early applications that are interesting, and if you talk to even ChatGPT nowadays or Claude, they know a lot about us. So a lot of the generation it's doing, I do think it's much more tailored, but I think the ambition is quite large in that field, and I don't think we quite have all the right ingredients just yet.Swyx [00:08:01]: So OpenClaw and these personal agents, what do you want to see from them that they don't currently have?Memory, Markdown, and the Limits of PromptingJoon [00:08:09]: I do think it's slowly getting there, but I do generally want them to have much deeper understanding of the person. Right now, you look at the models. OpenClaw, what it's leveraging is a Markdown file, and I think it's quite clever, right? So if you look at the generative agents paper, this was the same intuition that we had, where initially when we were creating the memory architecture for the generative agents, and, like, this is, like, back in 2022, so we didn't really quite have the idea of even agentive architecture or the term agent. But the intuition that we shared with some of the work that's coming out today was we initially thought, “Well, do we want to make the memory into, let's say, knowledge graph? Do we want to train a bespoke model?” All of these things. And what we decided to do was, “No. Just forget about all this.” These language models are quite good at modeling text and understanding and reasoning about text. So just put everything in a Markdown file or a text file. You're done. I thought that was quite interesting that we could do that, and there's a lot of strength in doing that. But also, there are limitations. It's the way you retrieve and make sense of data that's extremely large, it takes a lot of work. So I think that technology is getting better. I also do, however, think, there are certain things you just cannot shape just by prompting the model. So to some degree, you do need to touch the parameters of the model itself. So there is this work that I do think does need to happen, and it is happening. The question is, how far can we take it? How do we source data, and how do you also create an ecosystem where people are continuously feeding data to this model so it's learning about you?Vibhu [00:09:50]: What's the intuition between why you need to do it in the model?Social Physics and Behavior Foundation ModelsJoon [00:09:53]: My intuition behind the actual when do you train or even post-train a model versus just prompt a model is if the model has to learn the underlying physics of the world that it's operating in. So it has to learn new social physics. The places where it doesn't have to train are the places where it already has the physics. We trust the physics. It already has the base statistics, but it's just trying to react to an environment. Then I think you can just prompt your way into getting the actions out of it. I don't think the models that are out in the open have yet learned the complete mapping of social physics of humanity. This is one of the core theses of Simile, right? And one of the core reasons why that is the case is if you look at the data that the model was trained on, these models were trained on the web data, like, whatever was available on the web. And these are really interesting data sets, but they are fundamentally the self-exposed attitudinal data with some behavior data that's sprinkled around here and there. And it has yet to learn the really deep behavioral nature of people, not just what people say they do online, but what they do in real life. And this is one of what I would consider to be the dark knowledge of humanity that we haven't quite captured. And it's these data that would also need to get factored into the model creation.Vibhu [00:11:21]: You call it behavior foundation model.Vibhu [00:11:23]: There's a good one-liner here, but outside of that, what type of data do you need? What are you changing on the model level? How do you go about modeling, doing a behavior foundation model?The Three Data Buckets: Interviews, Behavior, and CausalityJoon [00:11:35]: We think about data in three buckets. So one bucket is interview data. It's quite interesting. Rich qualitative data is interesting. It's not behavioral, but we would literally ask people, “Hey, tell me the story of your life.”Vibhu [00:11:53]: It's just what we're doing here exactly.Joon [00:11:54]: The question that you all asked at the beginning of this interview literally is the question we also ask. And we ask our participants to go a little bit deeper, than how far I went. Maybe I can give more of my life story in lieu of this. But the reason why that data is interesting is by learning about this very long-tail information about people, you get a lot of texture around this model, like, this person as a model. So even understanding their childhood memory or even their trauma, their first love, these things, quite informative in ways that's really hard to predict. So that's one. Then there are two tranches of what I would consider to be the behavioral data. One kind of behavioral data is observational. So these might be like transaction data, or these might be data that you can get by scraping the web, right? So you can imagine why these data sets would be interesting, right, because they give you the base statistics of people's behavior.Joon [00:12:55]: But then there is the last category of data, that I personally think is perhaps the most important, which is the data that describes the causal mechanism, the whys of people. Some of this is covered by the interview data, the qualitative, because people talk about why they made certain decisions. But really, where you get to see the most behavioral aspect of this is in randomized controlled trials, like RCTs. Imagine you have the same setup, but you have a few different variables that you are trying to tweak. Can you get realistic human behavior out of it in ways where, imagine you had this particular option. Imagine you're even trying to choose whether you're going to drink coffee or not. The day you drink coffee versus the day you didn't drink coffee, does your behavior change? That's a data set that describes a causal mechanism. This is quite important in modeling people. The reason why this is important is oftentimes when people come to us, or not just to us, but the reason why people are interested in simulation isn't because they want to predict the future. If you're trying to win against the stock market, predicting the future is interesting.Prediction vs. Simulation: Shaping the FutureJoon [00:14:08]: But most people, most decision-makers, what they want to know is, how can we shape the future? It doesn't really help you to hear that your sales are going to tank in two quarters. They're just gonna say, “Wow, that sucks.” What they want to know is, well, what do we need to do now to avoid that future? That's the causal mechanism. And this is also very hard data to come by, right, because the world is our ground truth, but it happens once. So in a very controlled setup where everything is equal except for one variable, this kind of data set rarely happens. So this is a reason why this data set is both hard to come by and quite important if you're trying to model human behavior.Swyx [00:14:50]: So behavior, I think, is the hardest data set to acquire. What is out there? What is even possible? You're not going to know a lot of details about my life. I don't even have data for myself on my own health or habits, and I just don't log everything. So how can you have that data?Joon [00:15:14]: So we run a lot of randomized controlled trials.Swyx [00:15:17]: But you put people in the lab, they watch them sleep, or what?Joon [00:15:20]: We do care a lot about the consent process. People know that we invite them to be a member of this community to both share data and have themselves represented in different forms. But we bring a lot of people to the lab, or virtual lab, where we design experiments that would pose them real behavioral decisions. And often in these experimental setups, what makes the difference between what is attitudinal versus behavioral is whether the stake in your decision is real. That's ultimately what makes it behavioral. So in these setups, we are inspired by our colleagues in social sciences, psychology, and so forth. So when they run studies, the techniques they utilize is imagine there's an online store that you're inviting people to come by. Then whatever they purchase in this experiment, they actually get that item delivered. Like, these are the things that make the stakes real. So we run a lot of these experiments, and we also do partner with firms. Right now, we also have customers who are quite excited to at least give us a glimpse of the behaviors that their users exhibit so that we can get a little bit deeper understanding of how people behave in these different platforms.How Customers Use Simile: Populations, Queries, and ExperimentsVibhu [00:16:39]: I think on the customer side, they have a lot of data about their users, who has bought. They have the action data.Vibhu [00:16:47]: Can you walk us through an example of what someone comes to you for? What questions would they want solved? Do you customize a model for them? Do you have something off the shelf? What does that look like?Joon [00:16:59]: Today, when people leverage our models, it's often to better understand the population of their interest. So usually, the start of the relationship, we come together and hear about what population they want us to model, right? So it might be that if you're a CPG company that's selling to all of the US, then maybe it's fairly straightforward. You want to model the gen pop of the US. But at the same time, if there is a vertical or if there's a market that they're trying to go into, imagine, they want to better understand, let's say, people in their 20s and 30s living in California. That's a much more specific population. So we hear about this population, and we go recruit these people, with consent, and with incentives, and we collect some of their data and create a model of these people. Then what our product allows you to do is query them. So it can take as input a filter that is a description of the population that you want to talk to, just like the one I just mentioned, and an environment. The environment can literally be survey questions, behavioral experiments, It can be A/B testing. Oftentimes, the core use cases are things like concept testing, to start with. But also, people sometimes want to do focus groups or one of the fun use cases that we also serve is even modeling things like earnings calls for public companies.Joon [00:18:21]: So these are the use cases that we often start with.Swyx [00:18:23]: Concept testing, is that an established term? I've never heard of concept testing.Concept Testing, Gallup, and PoliticsJoon [00:18:27]: Yeah. So it has to do with they have, let's say, different messaging, different products, different ideas.Swyx [00:18:32]: It's like a marketing exercise.Swyx [00:18:33]: Okay, got it. Got it. Politics?Joon [00:18:36]: We do, have a strategic partnership with Gallup, and of course, Gallup is deep into policy space and so forth. Right now, we have not worked deeply with politics, like that area just yet, however.Swyx [00:18:49]: I'm curious if there is demand or if they really would have different needs that somehow fundamentally don't mix with your existing, users or people.Joon [00:19:00]: I think there's certainly demand.Joon [00:19:02]: But we are very much mindful of how this technology gets adopted and the societal impact that we'll end up having with this technology. And I do see politics as an area where a company has to be particularly thoughtful about the way they operate and make impact. So this is where we also want to make sure that we form enough of guardrail and perspective on how to leverage this technology before we go on to serve markets like the politics.Swyx [00:19:29]: I'll give people an example. one of my favorite shows is The West Wing. I don't know if people have watched.Swyx [00:19:34]: One of the key storylines is, like, the president has, multiple sclerosis, but they haven't. they need to figure out how to disclose it. So they run a poll with a fake governor and ask people to respond on the poll,Counterfactuals, Polling, and When Simulation Is UsefulSwyx [00:19:47]: They try to make decisions based on the results of that poll on, like, how well they'll be received, like where, how should we play this?Swyx [00:19:54]: And I'm like, well, I think those counterfactual things, I would use a simulation for this if I could trust it.Joon [00:20:01]: For sure.Joon [00:20:02]: In that show, how'd it go?Swyx [00:20:04]: In that show, it was, like a foregone conclusion. They were like, “We know it's bad. We just don't know how bad.” And then the poll came back. It was like, “It's really bad.” And then they just did it anyway.Joon [00:20:14]: Part of it is to show, right? So you're, you're looking at the ideaSwyx [00:20:17]: Maximizing drama.Joon [00:20:18]: How bad could it be? Oh, it's horrible.Swyx [00:20:20]: And to some extent, I think that is part of the trick of the, or the challenge or with being a customer of yours, which is that if I know it's. if I roughly know and can intuitSwyx [00:20:35]: What the effect is going to be, do I need you? What sensitivity of it, of effect do I need in order to make a decision, right? So for example, if I, my approval rating is 50%Swyx [00:20:48]: And I, they have this negative piece, news item comes out, and it drops to 30.Swyx [00:20:52]: If it drops to 20, if it drops to 40, do I care? No. It, I know it drops. It's negative. So when do I care about simulations?Joon [00:21:01]: You do something that's clearly bad, that's not popular, and people don't like you, like, yeah, it's likeSwyx [00:21:05]: You don't need a simulation.Joon [00:21:07]: Yeah. Well, so there are a couple of things. one is, there are use cases where, like every day, developers, designers, policymakers, marketers, every single day, they create assets. They create new products. And turns out, it's many of the decisions in hindsight is obvious. Yes, of course this is bad, but we still run those studies because understanding the magnitude and understanding how acute something is quite difficult, even if, we feel like, of course, like this makes sense. this is the reason why we make so many mistakes. Like, every time somebody goes online and say something that has huge backlash, you look at that and like, “What an idiot.” However, it's tough. That's one. There's also another aspect here, which is, again, this is the reason why simulation is different from prediction. In simulation, in the ideal case scenario. So what simulation is trying to show is it's trying to show each step of the way or each step that we need to take to get to a certain outcome, right? So in the most advanced simulations, sometimes the next step that we're suggesting might be quite counterintuitive. The analogy that I sometimes give, and I ground it in a more realistic example, but, I, as I mentioned, I'm a huge fan of science fiction, and I don't know how, many of the audience members have read, like, things like the Foundation series by Asimov.Simulation as a Path, Not Just a PredictionSwyx [00:22:37]: Oh, yeah. We've mentioned psychohistory a number of times.Joon [00:22:39]: Okay, fantastic. So I might be, talking to the right crew. If you read Foundation series, literally the first act is there's a group of scientists who have found out that, “Oh, our galactic empire is going to collapse, and we're going to have 30,000 years of unrest.” And they run psychohistory, the simulator that tries to teach them, “Okay, how can we keep this unrest to a 1,000 years?” And they plan this out, and the first step of that plan is to get the scientists who say, “Okay, this is coming,” exiled into this random place in this, galax- galaxy.Swyx [00:23:18]: Terminus.Joon [00:23:19]: Exactly. And that's so counterintuitive. Like, what a strange move that you literally sent the group of scientists who was raising voice around this potential collapse of galactic empire into nowhere. How is that the right first move? Well, it turns out in this particular simulation, that was the move.Joon [00:23:40]: It's these things, right? And the reason why these reasoning is possible is because you're showing the step function or each step that results in a particular outcome. So really what simulation allows you to do in its highest form is you give it not a problem or question, like what would people answer to the survey? That's not what we do. What we tell it is, “Here is a goal that we have. In the context of foundation, we want to keep the unrest to a 1,000 years. What is the path that we need to take now to get to that particular future?” And that's what simulation allows you to do. Now, translating that into real market, imagine you're a automobile company and you're about to release a, EV, and you're trying to understand, well, how do we market EV, to make sure that our stock price goes up? But what if the answer comes down that, well, you can market your EV in XYZ way, but that might change people's perception around the cars that's not EV and make your overall sales to go down. Not very intuitive, especially all you're trying to optimize is EV salesss, and that's the only thing that you're tracking, then that might result in a completely wrong solution, or at least different solution than what you would have expected, whether it's right or wrong.Joon [00:24:57]: That's the power of simulation.Swyx [00:24:58]: For listeners, we covered a similar topic with Mikhail Parakhin from Shopify, where they are working on SimGym. I don't know if he ever talked to you about it. it's very similar.Joon [00:25:07]: ISwyx [00:25:07]: The goal is increased conversion, but then the journey is very unusual.Joon [00:25:12]: Journey is unusual.Swyx [00:25:12]: Yeah. The-- He's trying to look for interventions on a shopping trajectory, which is similar to what you're saying. Like, it's not about the attitudinal, is your word for it.Swyx [00:25:24]: It's about behavior.Joon [00:25:25]: It's about behavior.Swyx [00:25:25]: And that's exactly the difference, right? It's, like, not about the near-term direction about-- but it's more about, like, how do you affect multiple turns of interactions.Vibhu [00:25:35]: You had a good quote at the start about this as well. It's not about people wanting to know the outcome. It's about how they can change it, change the way to get there, something like that. But I wanna take it back to how do we know this is grounded? LikeGrounding and Evaluating Digital TwinsVibhu [00:25:47]: How do you run evals? How do you test that simulations come through? if I was to do the same thing that you described with, say, your favorite LLM, Opus, GPT-5.6, have some agent to map out these thingsVibhu [00:26:02]: How different are the answers we would get if I give it the same goal, the same objective, make a decent system? You're saying that you need to change the model weight. You have your own solution to this. But how far off are we, and how do you check if it's grounded? you have some interesting stuff on your site that points to how you run real evals, but if you could take us through that side. I think that's one of the big concerns that people have. They're like, “LLMs hallucinate.”Vibhu [00:26:27]: “You're just hallucinating layer after layer,” right?Joon [00:26:30]: The way we do this, and this is the paper that we worked on after the generative agents paper that really became the, at least for Simile and also the field of simulation and synthetic panels, really became the foundation. Yeah, this is the paper. the paper is called Generative Agent Simulations of 1000 People. Here's what we've done. For this paper, we brought 1,000 people that's representatively sampled from the US to a virtual lab. And what we have done was we spent two hours collecting fairly wide-ranging data. In this particular study, we focused a lot on this interview data, that was, whose script was taken from this project called American Voices Project. And then we would also pair that with a lot of behavior data and so forth, whatever we can collect within two hours. And then we would send these people away for a couple of weeks. And during that time, I would use this data to create their digital twins. And I would bring the humans, participants back after 2 weeks and have them complete a battery of surveys, experiments, behavior studies. So we have the list here, which included things like behavioral economics games. We would run literally, like, Big Five personality test, General Social Survey. We would also go ahead and run the randomized controlled trials that were published on PNAS. And we would have their digital twins predict how the source individuals would have acted in these studies and surveys. And this is where we could replicate people's behaviors and attitudes 85 percent as accurately as people would replicate their own. So that was the first really paper that gave this validated results that we can model individuals in an accurate way. And what we ended up finding now, of course, in AI space, so this paper came out at the end of 2024. AI space, a year and a half, 2 years, that's a lifetime.85% Accuracy and Why Frontier Models Miss Human BehaviorSwyx [00:28:24]: Yeah. Just, for listeners who are not seeing the YouTube, I just wanna say, like, the headline figure is 85 percent accuracy, like, which is a big improvement over all the otherSwyx [00:28:34]: Methods that you showed.Joon [00:28:36]: But the part that was particularly striking to us, especially as we improved this technology even further, was the generative AI models like ChatGPT, Claude that's coming out, it does give you the right foundation. However, what they do not consider is the true attitudinal and behavioral aspect of people, especially in the population that you care about. So what these models are really good at today is they're trying to become the super rational, objective machines, right? So you go get their data from places like Mercor, Scale. You talk to professional programmers, scientists to create model that's amazing at reasoning. That's what they do. Simile doesn't care about any of this. The models that we're talking about here, what we're trying to create are models that are as dumb as I am, right? So if I make some mistakes, the model has to make the same mistake.Swyx [00:29:34]: Oh, that's very hard.Joon [00:29:35]: That's very hard.Swyx [00:29:36]: You're solving Murphy's paradox.Joon [00:29:37]: That's exactly. And this is a completely different data and training objective. This is also where we see quite a bit of discrepancy in the performance in human behavior prediction between the frontier models, Simile's model, and the models being created in this space, where in some cases, the model performance of frontier models go all the way down to 20, 30 percent, especially if you go into that more niche population on topics that our customers would care about. On more gen pop, it might be around 50 to 60 percent. So it's not very robust. Like, you wouldn't want to make your decision off of these and these findings. If you can bring that up to 85 percent, that is ultimately what people end up getting very excited about.Swyx [00:30:20]: Yeah. Do we wanna keep going on the paper, routes?Joon [00:30:23]: Yeah, for sure. So the last one, was an interesting one. So this, paper was the follow-up paper that we had, to the 1000 agents paper, where the idea was now can we augment the models even further and post-train a model based on a lot of randomized controlled trials? So this was an interesting one. The data is always the most interesting part of modeling in many ways. The data that we got here was there's this, there's this platform called Open Science Framework. So some, the audience might be familiar with this. And there has been, especially in the social sciences over the past 5 years or so, there has been this concern around replicability of studies. And so it was a bit of a crisis, the scientists acknowledged, where we rerun the study and we don't see the same finding.Post-Training on RCTs and Replication StudiesVibhu [00:31:12]: Oof.Joon [00:31:12]: It's tough. And the reason why it's there-- that was often the case was there's this survival bias where the papers that get published often need to maintain what we call the value of less than 0.05 in the experiments that we ran. That suggests that only-- there's only 5% chance that the results that we saw is false positive. But the tricky part was all the papers that were not published, and there's still a 5% chance that whatever we publish is totally just randomly generated. Like, there's a 5% chance that, hey, this effect is not real, but it just happened to be real because of the sampling bias. So because of that, what scientists started to do was they started to register their studies. So before running an experiment, they would go to this platform and say, “Here is the data. Here is the population that we're collecting, and here's the hypotheses.” And they would just say, “Here is our hypothesis.” Like, “This is what we believe.” And you cannot retroactively change those hypotheses. This is what gives us more scientific statistical confidence that whatever effect that you ended up seeing is true. So that ended up creating this really interesting platform where there's one platform that has now contains tens of thousands of real-world experiments and hypotheses. And a lot of these are really high-quality, like, professionally designed behavior studies and random- randomized controlled trials. So we got the data and the studies from this platform and used that to make a point. And this particular, model is not, something that we're serving commercially because this was a part of the open science. But this particular data set, helped us make a point that by collecting a lot of these randomized controlled trials, that are really well-designed, we can make significant improvement in model's capability to predict human behaviors. So that's what this paper was about.Vibhu [00:33:10]: Is this stuff done on a individual level? Like, do I need to tune the model per individual, per company? Is there foundation model changes and then some slight post-training? Anything you can share there?Population-Level vs. Individual-Level ModelsJoon [00:33:21]: So this particular model was trained. the data we had at the level of individuals, but this particular model was trained. We experimented with both. And this is what we end up doing at Simile too. We always train 2, distinct model. One is what we call the population-level model. The other is what we call the individual-level model. And both take very similar input, which is the description of a subpopulation or individual and a stimuli. In this particular work, we've done the same. Here, the results that we are reporting are much more geared towards individuals because we do think that is a harder task in many ways, but that's what we have done.Vibhu [00:34:02]: You seen anything on the questions that humans can solve that models can't solve? So likeHuman Biases, Mundane Choices, and What Models MissVibhu [00:34:09]: Currently, it's, I live 5 minutes walk away from a car wash. It's a 10-minute drive. Should I walk or drive?Joon [00:34:16]: Huh.Vibhu [00:34:16]: The model will say, “Oh, walk to the car wash.” And, you don't have your car.Vibhu [00:34:20]: Is anything like this a problem in simulation? You would assume, like, very simple for human to think about, but if the model is saying you should walk to the car wash, anything here?Joon [00:34:32]: It's less, what can we solve, but I think it's more about what biases or mistakes do people make that models miss. Like, imagine that you are, like the. When I was still at Stanford, I lived in Palo Alto. So it's about, I would say, 40-minute walk from the campus. You ask the model, “Okay, let's go home. What can I, what can I do?” It would likely call an Uber or, give me, the bus time. But for the longest time, I really liked walking back. And the reason why I wanted to do that was not for efficiency. It really helped me think. And I like to walk for, half an hour or 40 minutes or so a day, where I just get to, just think about ideas, research, just get lost in my thoughts. That's very human activity. Unless the model has seen that and understands the importance of that activity, it would miss these kinds of features. So that I think, is fundamentally what we're trying to model. Like, what is fundamentally human might not be the most efficient thing to do, might not be the right thing to do, but things that make us who we are.Swyx [00:35:43]: I'm curious if, there are some data sets that you really want that would materially help you. One version of this may be interesting, which is more valuable to you to acquire as a data set, all of LinkedIn, all of Twitter, all of Facebook?What Data Matters: Social Media, Transactions, and FacebookJoon [00:35:57]: It's a little bit hard to rank, in part because, there's, there's this product saying where no feedback is wrong because it teaches you something about your users. Doesn't matter what feedback.Joon [00:36:11]: I think it's a little bit like that.Swyx [00:36:12]: So just whatever is bigger.Vibhu [00:36:13]: What about a different domain? Say it was. What about all of Amazon data?Joon [00:36:17]: Oh, yeah.Vibhu [00:36:18]: Shopping data, right?Joon [00:36:18]: Shopping data. So Amazon data is interesting in that it's very much behavioral, although, like, what people do on social media, you could squint and say that is also behavioral. But the transaction data is always interesting. It is also most commonly available, however.Joon [00:36:33]: If we were to look at purely social media, like if you really, if I were, if I had to really pick, Facebook likely is interesting because I do think it is most a default version of people. Because you go to LinkedIn, it's very much professional environment. So people put up their, they have their guards up, right? And that still is interesting because that is true human attitude and behavior, but it is not your base state. you go to Twitter- Twitter, people have their own crazy personas, or depending on who you are. Like, my Twitter profile and, persona is very much, initially was I was very much an academic. “Hey, I'm here to share my studies.” Now, I share, things that's related to Simile. But Facebook is one of those more private space where people just connect with their friends. In that way, I do think it shows you a little bit more about who that person is. So if I had to pick, I'd likely pick, Facebook.Swyx [00:37:30]: Yeah. And you're interested in, like, the whole person and their background and philosophy. I, is it too clinical or too machine learning-oriented to just say this is just ways to inject variance and biases? The broad question, is, like, is this any better than a randomized, like, combinatorial explosion version? So we have a link to the TencentBillion Personas, Synthetic Demographics, and Bespoke DataSwyx [00:37:54]: Billion persona paper, where they did not do any of the groundwork that you are doing.Swyx [00:37:59]: They just did like a cross matrix of here's all the professions in the world, here's all the people, possible backgrounds in the world, do a dot product across all of them, and that's it. That's your prompt for a billion people.Swyx [00:38:12]: This will do something. I don't know if it'll do what you do, but it gets you some way, some percent of the way there.Joon [00:38:18]: So this was an interesting paper. Like, what I admired about this paper when it came out was the scale. And you do gradually want to be able to simulate really large societies and interactions. So the scale is definitely admirable. it is relying heavily on the known statistics that went into training the model. So to the extent that you believe that statistics is correct, this is not a bad way to go about this. But the thesis here, and this is something that we also have seen in the market, like if this works, then we have solved simulation.Joon [00:38:54]: It,Swyx [00:38:55]: Because I survey, like, okay, 5% of the US population is in construction.Swyx [00:39:01]: The other 5% is in medicine, whatever, right? And then you just keep going down the list, and then you do the other side. 5% has, like, the big 5 personalitySwyx [00:39:08]: Of, like, neurotic or whatever. That's it.Joon [00:39:11]: That's it. So if you believe that the underlying data set and the platform that we're leveraging has all the right statistics, then this will have solved it. you're at that point merely retrieving the knowledge that is already embedded in the model, in the model parameters. That's not, unfortunately, what we see, where there is such detailed and also niche knowledge about people that if you just take one example, it might feel very mundane, but it's quite rich when you put together, that you do need to do a lot of bespoke data collection to better understand people. And this is also, I think what makes this particular, job fun, which you want to deeply understand people, and the process of deeply understanding them requires a lot of attention to the details. And you do need to pay attention to and pay respect to the daily lives that people lead.Scaling Simulation: From Thousands to SocietiesVibhu [00:40:04]: I wanna talk about scaling simulation.Vibhu [00:40:07]: So what can't we simulate, what can we simulate, and how does scaling affect this? So how big are the models? What if we go from, 8B, like, couple 100 billionVibhu [00:40:18]: Like billion000 parameters, billion000? Do we get scaling? Any interesting emergence? Like, at a certain scale, at a certain amount of training, you uncover anything unusual and any learnings from that?Joon [00:40:31]: What we are seeing is at Simile, so we do post-train our own model. The thing that we're seeing is the early glimpse of scaling law in simulations. The more data about humans and more compute you ingest, you start to get predictive and predictable gains of the model performance in simulating it, simulating people.Vibhu [00:40:51]: Ooh. We need a scaling law curve.Joon [00:40:52]: It's scaling law. Whenever you find it's a beautiful thing. And we're starting to see the glimpse of it, which is quite exciting. But if you talk about the ambition of simulation as a whole, it's not merely about building a model. It's about building a model, then creating the agents that become the individuals in a much larger ecosystem. So they're creating this multi-agent simulation. Down the line, you want these multi-agent simulation to also live in a very rich environment, right? What we are really trying to get to at that point is, hey, can we create. All right, let's do a time machine game again, and 5 years, 10 years into the future, can we create a simulation of 8 billion people living on Earth? I think that's quite interesting. And that really is the vision. And once you get to that state, the questions that you can help answer for the society also start to change from my perspective. The answers are fundamentally about emergence of the emergent behavior of society and large groups of people.Joon [00:41:53]: So the questions that I get excited by, and maybe this is a stodgy- a bit. I have my, academic side of me.Joon [00:42:01]: And for me, it's questions like, can we help solve climate change? If you look at climate change as a problem space, this is what we, like social scientists would often call it the wicked problems, problem where you have many actors with competing incentives for trying to make a very complex decision and coordinating that coordination decision. Very difficult to really solve in real life, which is also the reason why we couldn't solve it. Can simulation help us solve that? Another one is, can we understand the signals for collapsing democracy, or can we understand or can we uncover the origin story of the monetary system? These are societal questions that we never really had a good way of answering. If we can create simulations of our society, you have to believe that these are the problems that we can solve. So that's really the ambition of this field. And, I also think, yes, I think there's a Nobel Prize to be won there, which wouldn't be surprising. And I think there's some amazing societal impact that we can have to help people make better decisions.Climate Change, Democracy, and Societal SimulationSwyx [00:43:04]: Nobel Prize in economics?Joon [00:43:06]: In economics.Swyx [00:43:06]: Oh, I see. I see. Rooting for you to write that paper.Joon [00:43:10]: One of these days. But, one of the scholars that I was deeply inspired by, When I was coming into the space of simulation, is this scholar, named Thomas Schelling.Schelling, Agent-Based Models, and the Nobel PrizeSwyx [00:43:23]: Schelling point?Joon [00:43:24]: So the canonical example of the work that he's done was he was one of the creators of agent-based modeling. So this was, like, in the 1970s and 80s. It's very early days, but this was truly one of the first exemplars of simulations. And one of the canonical model from that time, and of course many of these simulations are trying to tackle the societal problems that's most relevant for their era, it was called the model of segregation. So racial segregation was a big topic, that, we cared about. And what they've done was they created this grid world where they had red dots and blue dots. And these dots were, back in the day, like, they were the agents, and they had a simple rule that governed their behavior. If certain percentage of your neighbors are of different color and if that goes above certain threshold, then you move to a new location at random.Joon [00:44:21]: One of the striking finding of this paper or this agent-based model was for the longest time, people thought the segregation within society was caused by explicit and overt racism.Joon [00:44:34]: But if you look at this model, people's preference towards living with people of the same color, that preference can be very minute.Joon [00:44:42]: But the very small difference causes the society to segregate completely over time. This was very counterintuitive for a lot of people. And this particular work ended up informing housing policies. Mixed income housing, got really inspired by this work. And Thomas Schelling ends up winning the Nobel Prize for having laid the groundwork for very early versions of simulations. The opportunity that I do see here in the more scientific terms, is agent-based models for the longest, had impact in the 1980s, 90s, to some extent, early 2000s, but it has now gotten forgotten by the community a little bit. Because as you can imagine, red dots and blue dots is not really a rich description of people.Joon [00:45:31]: But with the emergence of things like generative AI and, in particular, generative agents, we do have an opportunity to create these agent-based models that are high fidelity enough to help us make really complex decisions. And that's the opportunity that I see. If that truly works, then yes, that is the work that will result in a Nobel Prize.Swyx [00:45:53]: Yeah. For what it's worth, and I grew up in Singapore. 80% of Singapore is in public housing, and public housing has, enforced racial quotas for exactly that reason, which is very interesting. okay, so we talk about scaling, we talk about all these, the agent possible applications.Cost, Reuse, and the Economics of SimulationSwyx [00:46:13]: I'm scared about the cost. if you even-- let's just keep it to the US, about 8 billion people.Swyx [00:46:21]: But, how much does it cost to model so many hundreds of millions of people?Joon [00:46:26]: Oftentimes today, we don't start at that scale, this stage of the, of industry and simulation as technology. But we can get our users extremely rich and meaningful insights even by modeling thousands, tens of thousands of people. And today what we do is every week we are collecting data on the scale of tens of thousands people's data, and we have panel partnerships that gets us to tens of millions of people globally. So that's what we do today.Swyx [00:46:55]: And just as a side note once you've collected one person for one studySwyx [00:46:59]: Can you reuse that same person for all the subsequent studies?Joon [00:47:03]: That's exactly right.Swyx [00:47:03]: Okay.Joon [00:47:04]: The beauty of this model and these agents is the fact that they are domain-agnostic.Joon [00:47:08]: That what you're really trying to understand is what is the fundamental nature of these people? What's their social physics? And there are a lot of, a lot of, people that does change over time. Like, even, like, even things like, how many times have you gone have you been to, like, CVS the past week? that will change. But there's so many traits about people that are also known to never change. Like, your risk tolerance doesn't really change over time. It's very consistent. So it's these things that we're trying to learn. But the scale we are operating is right now hundreds or, tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands. And in many of the core use cases that we are deployed in, and this is more than enough population, to cover those. Really, at that point, what you care about is less the number of people, but more do you have the right subpopulation of interest covered? And this is also the reason why people want a larger sample. It's not because they want, stronger statistical guarantees. It's more that can they filter down to any population of their interest. However, you can also imagine in 10 years, if we truly believe that the compute is going to scale, that we'll have much more availability for compute, and our ambition for simulation is also going to scale accordingly, there's definitely a reason for us to create an entire data center worth of simulations.Joon [00:48:35]: Or in my hunch here is I do think in the next some number of years, we will start creating simulations that will cost as much as training a foundation model. But perhaps it's going to be so valuable to the society that it would be a no-brainer. Right now, even today, like, we are training bunch of new foundation model just so we can say we trained one and we spent tens of millions. But if we can create a simulation at the level of society that would solve climate change, I would run that today. I would raise the money right now just to run that.Multi-Agent Simulation and Social InfluenceSwyx [00:49:10]: Amazing. the follow-up question is, does it also compound if you let the simulations talk to each other?Swyx [00:49:18]: Or do they already do that today? They don't, right, as far as I understand?Joon [00:49:22]: It depends on what simulation you're trying to run.Joon [00:49:24]: In the multi-agent simulation setup, the agents do talk to each other.Swyx [00:49:28]: Right, which is exactly Smallville, right?Joon [00:49:29]: That's right.Swyx [00:49:30]: But a lot of times, for example, in commerce, you're just by yourself, so there's no point talking. which is way cheaper.Vibhu [00:49:37]: But they use all these levels, right? Like, you decide what you will buy based on what other people around you buy and talk about, right?Swyx [00:49:43]: It depends.Vibhu [00:49:44]: It depends.Swyx [00:49:45]: Again, I'm, I'm coming at this from a cost point of view. I'm like, “Oh my God.” LikeVibhu [00:49:48]: I thinkSwyx [00:49:49]: If there is, like, some combinatorial thing of, like, thousands of people talking to thousands of people, then that one million X's might cost.Vibhu [00:49:56]: I have a very different view as the cost point aside. Like, running these studies in reality is a lot more expensive, right? Running any study like this is you gotta have people do it, you gotta sign people up. It's very expensive and sometimes, like, not feasible to run the study.Vibhu [00:50:14]: But the outcome or the decisions you make are very expensive on them, right? So spend X million on something that, the overall process costs 100 million might as well, right? There's, there's a lot of value to be had there. It's a small cost, but I'm excited on the cost side.Joon [00:50:33]: To some extent, and when you deploy technology, you often want to deploy in a way where you can replace existing budget or you can make things more efficient, and that is the best way to deploy. However, the way you capture the long-term value of the technology is making the argument that, no, it's the upside, that by making this better decision using simulation, you have saved yourself or made yourself hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars, and that's a case to be made.Vibhu [00:51:06]: Random tangent question. So if you're doing a lot of inference, a lot of model multi-agent stuff, are you at the point where it makes sense to, train a model that' very sparse? You're expecting to do multi-million dollar runs. Are you thinking about this in model architecture standpoint or inference efficiency, or, you're still at the research phase of it works, we're not super there yet?Joon [00:51:34]: Efficiency, we do think quite a bit about. this is technology that is deployed now in some of the largest enterprise companies in the world, and we do process significant number of queries, that are trying to, simulate the populations in the world. So efficiency is a consistent thing. we don't want to over-optimize too early, so I wouldn't say, like, this is the higher bid Right now, but this is definitely something that we think pretty carefully about.Swyx [00:52:05]: Yeah. Are there other case studies? So we, you talked about CVS, talked about Gallup, Deloitte, Wealthfront.Efficiency, Enterprise Use, and Real-World Case StudiesJoon [00:52:12]: Wealthfront is an interesting one, because one of the things they were trying to do, they were one of the first customers that wanted to do product testing that goes beyond just asking people what they think about, let's say, behavior experiments and so forth. So there, really what we had to do was reason about multimodal input, so images, but also you can also imagine, like, these agents traversing through Figma mockups or websites. So some of the things that our agents can also do is it can be given a domain, like, or, like, a website URL and go use it for a while. It's these things. And Wealthfront was one of the first, customers, that was very excited about this possibility.Vibhu [00:52:53]: What have people been asking? Like, is there any demand that we have not covered? Like, UI testing, right?Vibhu [00:52:59]: I wanna try a new. I wanna ship a new feature, test the UI, simulate how people will do it. Any interesting things that you're seeing demand for?Product Testing, Websites, and Synthetic PanelsJoon [00:53:08]: Today, a lot of the demand does come from like, the places where people have historically used human panels, we can now replace with agents, and these synthetic populations. And this is not replacing human panel. in many ways, the simulation that Simile is building is grounded. So the way that I think about this is we are trying to represent humanity at scale. And in that way, the use cases are what we would expect, but it's the scale of deployment that surprises me.Joon [00:53:44]: Turns out there are so many decisions that people make every day in these organizations, groups, and we want to be able to say, “We listen to people. We have consulted our users.” But in reality, that is rarely the case because getting to people and asking them many questions, it's difficult. It's both costly, time-consuming, but most importantly, people are just not available. If I had to answer 1000 survey questions for this one particular, vendor, even if I wanted to do that, like, I would never do it. And that's very much the case. What simulation can do is ensure that the voices of people are always represented in rooms where the decisions for them is made, right? So all the stakeholders of this particular product launch, ideally they're consulted. That's what this technology really is trying to enable.Market Size, TAM, and Human Decision-MakingSwyx [00:54:39]: In my mind, that means it skews towards more consumer focus, right? Like, anything with a wide enough customer base where you do benefit from the diversity that you represent. What are some rough statistics, just for people who are not familiar with this market in general, what's the market size that. I'm sure you have some, like, rough numbers. market size is, like, a vague questionSwyx [00:55:01]: But, like, how much do people spend?Joon [00:55:03]: So market research is a $100 billion industry.Joon [00:55:06]: But the thing about simulation is not a tool for market research. Simulation is a tool for human decision-making. So the question around what is a TAM here is quite tricky, right? Because it's easy to say, “Well, market research TAM is roughly 100 million or 100 billion.” so is it a TAM? And not really, right? Because in many ways, you're trying to inform all human decision-making. You're trying to inform every decision that are made about humans for humans. What is a TAM for that? It's really unclear. And I'll be honest. Like, I have a scientific background, I have a research background, so I didn't come into the field calculating, oh, what is the TAM for human decision-making? But I just had to assume, well, if we can inform every decision that is made about human for human, that has to be big.Swyx [00:55:58]: Some- something valuable.Joon [00:55:59]: Exactly.Swyx [00:55:59]: To some extent, you are a unicorn founder now, and you have to care as a CEO. But, like, I do think, like, yeah, when you go into these boardrooms with people that you're quoting millions of dollars of contracts for, like, you have to say, “Well, here's what you spend on humans-”Swyx [00:56:15]: “. And here's what we save you, and it's 85% similar.”Joon [00:56:19]: And certainly, the value case, is something that we care deeply about. Like, what is the value that we provide to the users and the decision-makers? But this is also where, like, as a founder, I think valuation only tells one very superficial aspect of the story, and I try not to think too much about valuation, in general, because that's not what also motivates a team or certainly doesn't. I'm, I-- Again, the interesting thing about researchers is we are happy living in academia, getting paid next to. we get paid okay. we don't get paid that much, as a researcher here in academia, but it's the impact and it's the, it's the value that we can provide to the individuals and the society that really drives us. And in that way, ultimately what drives us is the impact. Does the simulation we provide have a real impact in people's decision-making in ways that progresses our society forward? If the answer is yes, then yes. that has to be great business, and we see that in numbers, and we do care deeply about that upside story, but that's the heart of it.Where Simulation Goes NextVibhu [00:57:27]: Do you have any timeline predictions? So we talked about scaling laws of simulations.Vibhu [00:57:33]: You brought up, okay, maybe one day we can simulate how to solve climate change.Vibhu [00:57:38]: Where are we now?Vibhu [00:57:40]: If that's not the end state, what is an end state, and what does progress look like?Joon [00:57:45]: So what I sometimes tell people is simulation as industry, it feels a lot like where GPT-3.5, GPT-4 was, for the AGI saga, which is we have now technology that is powerful enough to do real damage on the verticals that we are tackling. At the same time, there's a lot of progress that is yet to come. And that's, I think, where this is. So the way I see it, I do think there will continue to be breakthroughs both in data, in algorithms, and there will be much more aggressive scaling that will also happen over the next few years. But I think that's roughly where we are.Swyx [00:58:27]: I think that was about the ro

Het jaar is nog maar halverwege, maar er ligt nu al een bewogen tijd achter ons. Vol politieke, maatschappelijke en economische uitdagingen, in binnen- en buitenland. Deze zomer laten we zes spraakmakende Big Five-thema's van de afgelopen tijd aan je horen. Deze week hoor je vijf kopstukken over hoe je sterk de zomer ingaat (en uitgaat). Met vandaag: voormalig topwielrenster Annemiek van Vleuten. Ze is een van de meest succesvolle Nederlandse wielrenners ooit. Haar hoogtepunten bereikte ze juist ná haar gruwelijke val op de Spelen van 2016. Hoe ga je om met dit soort heftige tegenslagen? En hoe zet je die om in nieuwe topprestaties? Gasten in BNR's Big Five van sterk de zomer in: -Annemiek van Vleuten, voormalig profwielrenster -Elke Geraerts, doctor in de psychologie en CEO van Better Minds -Jaap Seidell, voedingswetenschapper en emeritus hoogleraar voeding en gezondheid aan de Vrije Universiteit -Ray Klaassens, oud-commando en presentator van Kamp van Koningsbrugge -Guido Witpen, investeerder ex-ondernemer en adviseur en commissaris bij verschillende bedrijvenSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Het jaar is nog maar halverwege, maar er ligt nu al een bewogen tijd achter ons. Vol politieke, maatschappelijke en economische uitdagingen, in binnen- en buitenland. Deze zomer laten we zes spraakmakende Big Five-thema's van de afgelopen tijd aan je horen. Deze week hoor je vijf kopstukken uit de wereld van het nieuwe winkelen. TikTok Shop is live in Nederland. Maar wie houdt er eigenlijk toezicht op deze nieuwe manier van winkelen? En zijn de regels die we kennen uit de fysieke winkelstraat nog wel voldoende in een wereld van influencers, algoritmes en livestreams? Te gast is Martijn Snoep, bestuursvoorzitter van de Autoriteit Consument en Markt. Gasten in BNR's Big Five van het nieuwe winkelen -Liam Tjoa, CEO van social media-marketingbureau GoSpooky -John Lin, China-retaildeskundige -Margriet Sitskoorn, hoogleraar Klinische Neuropsychologie aan de Tilburg University -Kitty Koelemeijer, hoogleraar Marketing aan de Nyenrode Business Universiteit -Martijn Snoep, bestuursvoorzitter van de Autoriteit Consument en Markt (ACM)See 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 novelist and essayist Emily J. Smith, author of the debut novel Nothing Serious. After years of writing, rewriting, and more than 100 agent rejections across two novels, Emily finally found the agent who understood her vision—and sold her debut to a Big Five publisher within weeks.In this episode, Emily pulls back the curtain on her long road to publication, including why she abandoned her first novel, what she learned from agent feedback, and how embracing plot and suspense helped her break into publishing without sacrificing her literary ambitions. We get into working with a developmental editor, landing a Big Five deal, advances and rights, the emotional minefield of cover design, and what publishers actually do—and don't do—for debut authors. Emily also shares the realities of funding your own book tour and publicity, building a platform when you hate social media, growing her Substack, and the personalized outreach that helped generate press and word of mouth.Plus, Emily reflects on the widening gap between blockbuster books and smaller deals, why getting a traditional book deal can feel more like a foot in the door than a guarantee of support, and the publishing lesson she wishes she'd learned sooner.Subscribe to Emily's Substack Unresolving. Follow her on Instagram @emjsmith, and buy your copy of Nothing Serious on Bookshop.org, Amazon, or wherever books are sold!Get your copy of Courtney's debut memoir Girl Gone Wild from ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Bookshop.org⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ or ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Amazon⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠.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 classes you might be interested in:The Multi-Passionate Writer's Life: https://writingworkshops.com/products/the-multi-passionate-writers-life-zoom-seminar-with-courtney-kocak12 Months to a Full Memoir in Essays Incubator: Write Your Memoir in a Year: https://writingworkshops.com/products/memoir-in-essays-incubator-nonfiction-writing-workshop-online-june-2026How 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-seminarLand Big Bylines by Writing for Columns: https://writingworkshops.com/products/land-big-bylines-by-writing-for-columns-zoom-seminarHow to Make 2027 Your Best Writing Year Yet: Manifest Your Writing Goals Seminar: https://writingworkshops.com/products/how-to-make-2027-your-best-writing-year-yet-manifest-your-writing-goals-zoom-seminar-with-courtney-kocakSo 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-kocak

Check out the new Smart Travel PodcastThis episode is supported by Smart Travel a new podcast from Nerd Wallet. Travel smarter — and spend less — with help from NerdWallet. Follow Smart Travel wherever you get your podcasts. Smart Travel PodcastSHOW NOTES — GoNOMAD Travel Podcast — Hosted by Max Hartshorne Featuring Senior Writer Chin Liang & guest Reint Grobler of Harvest Table BistroEpisode OverviewToday we head to South Africa's Western Cape — but not the version most travelers think they know. Yes, Cape Town is spectacular, but this episode is all about the offbeat, the gritty, the authentic experiences that lie just beyond the city limits.Chin Liang sits down with Reint Grobler, owner of Harvest Table Bistro in Wolseley, to map out a road trip filled with spice‑laden cooking lessons, quad‑bike adrenaline, whitewashed fishing villages, tractor‑powered wine tastings, and a safari just two hours from Cape Town.What You'll Hear in This EpisodeA Craft Distillery That Feels Like a Science LabReint recommends starting at Pienaar & Son, a small‑batch distillery at the V&A Waterfront Cruise Terminal. It's “science meets spirit,” with gins inspired by the Cape's history — like the cucumber‑and‑cardamom “Empire” gin and the spicy‑sweet “Orient.”Cooking Safari in Bo‑KaapWalk the colorful streets of Bo‑Kaap, then step into a family home for a hands‑on Cape Malay cooking workshop. You'll learn to fold samosas, mix masalas, and knead your own roti before sitting down for a communal feast.“YOU WILL LEARN THE ART OF FOLDING THE PERFECT SAMOSA AND THE SECRET TO A BALANCED CAPE MALAY CURRY.”Quad‑Biking the Atlantis Sand DunesTwelve square miles of shifting white dunes, the Atlantic on one side, Table Mountain on the other — a visceral, high‑speed way to feel the West Coast's raw geography.Paternoster: A Greek‑Style Fishing Village on the CapeStrict building codes keep every house whitewashed with blue trim. Eat fresh rock lobster straight from the wooden boats and breathe in the cold West Coast air.A Safari Without Flying to KrugerAquila and Inverdoorn Game Reserves offer a full Big Five experience in the semi‑arid Ceres Karoo — lions, leopards, rhinos, elephants, buffalo — plus unforgettable stargazing if you stay overnight.Paarl's Granite Dome & Afrikaans Language MonumentExplore wine farms, legendary brandy distilleries, and the striking monument that honors the Afrikaans language.The Wine Tractor in Devon ValleySkip the bus. Ride an open‑air tractor between vineyards, sipping Chenin Blancs and Pinotages while the Stellenbosch mountains glow in the afternoon sun.Bain's Kloof Pass: The Ultimate Sunday Road TripA dry‑stone engineering masterpiece from 1853, winding through cliffs, mountain pools, and the gateway to the Breede River Valley.A Traditional South African Sunday LunchReint's own Harvest Table Bistro serves slow‑roasted meats, fresh vegetables, rustic sides, and baked pudding — the heart of Cape Country hospitality.“A GENEROUS SERVING OF SLOW‑ROASTED MEATS, FRESH VEGETABLES AND RUSTIC SIDES…”Travel Tips from ReintRent a car — South Africans drive on the left.Uber and Bolt are widely available.Best seasons: Autumn and Spring.Best time for wildflowers and fynbos: September to November.Listen & SubscribeApple PodcastsVoyascape: https://voyascape.comhttps://ceresrestaurants.co.za/https://www.facebook.com/winterbergmountaininn/Check out all of our other travel podcasts from aroundthe worldThis podcast is part of the Voyascape Network, a collection of some of the world's best travel podcasts. Explore more at Voyascape Podcast Network For advertising or sponsorship opportunities on this show and across the network, email advertising@voyascape.com or you can find more information at Voyascape Ads.

Het jaar is nog maar halverwege, maar er ligt nu al een bewogen tijd achter ons. Vol politieke, maatschappelijke en economische uitdagingen, in binnen- en buitenland. Deze zomer laten we zes spraakmakende Big Five-thema's van de afgelopen tijd aan je horen. Deze week hoor je vijf kopstukken uit de wereld van het nieuwe winkelen. Steeds meer consumenten kopen hun producten via sociale media. Wat dat betekent voor de winkelstraat? Te gast is hoogleraar Marketing Kitty Koelemeijer Gasten in BNR's Big Five van het nieuwe winkelen -Liam Tjoa, CEO van social media-marketingbureau GoSpooky -John Lin, China-retaildeskundige -Margriet Sitskoorn, hoogleraar Klinische Neuropsychologie aan de Tilburg University -Kitty Koelemeijer, hoogleraar Marketing aan de Nyenrode Business Universiteit -Martijn Snoep, bestuursvoorzitter van de Autoriteit Consument en Markt (ACM)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Het jaar is nog maar halverwege, maar er ligt nu al een bewogen tijd achter ons. Vol politieke, maatschappelijke en economische uitdagingen, in binnen- en buitenland. Deze zomer laten we zes spraakmakende Big Five-thema's van de afgelopen tijd aan je horen. Deze week hoor je vijf kopstukken uit de wereld van het nieuwe winkelen. Hoe verleiden webshops jou om zo snel mogelijk zo veel mogelijk te kopen? Volgens neuropsycholoog Margriet Sitskoorn (Tilburg University) zijn we als samenleving verslaafd aan online bestellen. Algoritmes, sociale media en apps voor achteraf betalen versterken die verslaving. Is het tijd dat we afkicken? Gasten in BNR's Big Five van het nieuwe winkelen -Liam Tjoa, CEO van social media-marketingbureau GoSpooky -John Lin, China-retaildeskundige -Margriet Sitskoorn, hoogleraar Klinische Neuropsychologie aan de Tilburg University -Kitty Koelemeijer, hoogleraar Marketing aan de Nyenrode Business Universiteit -Martijn Snoep, bestuursvoorzitter van de Autoriteit Consument en Markt (ACM)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Personlighet är de varaktiga mönster av tankar, känslor och beteenden som präglar vilka vi är. Frågan är hur mycket av vår personlighet som är medfödd och hur mycket som formas av det liv vi lever. Lyssna på alla avsnitt i Sveriges Radios app. Vissa människor är lugna i kaos, andra reagerar starkare på stress. En del söker förändring och nya upplevelser, medan andra trivs bäst med det välbekanta. Temperament och personlighetsdrag påverkar hur vi hanterar motgångar, bygger relationer och ser på världen omkring oss – men formas också av vår uppväxt, våra erfarenheter och de människor vi möter genom livet.Den här veckan pratar vi om vad som formar våra personligheter och varför vi människor har ett behov av att förstå oss själva och andra genom att dela in personligheter i olika typer. Vi tittar närmare på personlighetsforskningens mest använda modell, Big Five, och de personlighetstester som inte bara finns i självhjälpsböcker och livsstilsmagasin utan också används inom rekrytering.Medverkande:Petri Kajonius, personlighetsforskare vid Lunds universitet och Bo Melin, senior professor och forskare inom kognitiv epidemiologi vid Karolinska Institutet. Vi hör också Magnus Lindwall, professor i psykologi vid Göteborgs universitet och medförfattare till boken Psychobusiness, Sara Henrysson Åkerlund, Lotta Wikström och Rami Kaminski.Programledare: Ulrika Hjalmarson NeidemanProducent: Linnéa WanneforsReporter: Olivia Sandell

Het jaar is nog maar halverwege, maar er ligt nu al een bewogen tijd achter ons. Vol politieke, maatschappelijke en economische uitdagingen, in binnen- en buitenland. Deze zomer laten we zes spraakmakende Big Five-thema's van de afgelopen tijd aan je horen. Deze week hoor je vijf kopstukken uit de wereld van het nieuwe winkelen. TikTok, Alibaba, Temu, Shein. Allemaal Chinese bedrijven en merken die onze manier van winkelen fundamenteel veranderen. Waarom is China zo'n voorloper op dit gebied? En waar blijft de Nederlandse concurrentie? Te gast is China-retaildeskundige John Lin. Gasten in BNR's Big Five van het nieuwe winkelen -Liam Tjoa, CEO van social media-marketingbureau GoSpooky -John Lin, China-retaildeskundige -Margriet Sitskoorn, hoogleraar Klinische Neuropsychologie aan de Tilburg University -Kitty Koelemeijer, hoogleraar Marketing aan de Nyenrode Business Universiteit -Martijn Snoep, bestuursvoorzitter van de Autoriteit Consument en Markt (ACM)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

2026.8.9 | Pastor Preston Keller

Het jaar is nog maar halverwege, maar er ligt nu al een bewogen tijd achter ons. Vol politieke, maatschappelijke en economische uitdagingen, in binnen- en buitenland. Deze zomer laten we zes spraakmakende Big Five-thema's van de afgelopen tijd aan je horen. Deze week hoor je vijf kopstukken uit de wereld van het nieuwe winkelen. Halverwege juni ging TikTok Shop live in Nederland. Winkelen en scrollen vloeien daarmee nog verder in elkaar over. Wat betekent de komst van social commerce voor webwinkels, merken en consumenten? Te gast is Liam Tjoa, CEO van social media-marketingbureau GoSpooky. Gasten in BNR's Big Five van het nieuwe winkelen -Liam Tjoa, CEO van social media-marketingbureau GoSpooky -John Lin, China-retaildeskundige -Margriet Sitskoorn, hoogleraar Klinische Neuropsychologie aan de Tilburg University -Kitty Koelemeijer, hoogleraar Marketing aan de Nyenrode Business Universiteit -Martijn Snoep, bestuursvoorzitter van de Autoriteit Consument en Markt (ACM) See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Het jaar is nog maar halverwege, maar er ligt nu al een bewogen tijd achter ons. Vol politieke, maatschappelijke en economische uitdagingen, in binnen- en buitenland. Deze zomer laten we zes spraakmakende Big Five-thema's van de afgelopen tijd aan je horen. Deze week hoor je vijf kopstukken uit de wereld van de afslankmedicatie. Steeds meer mensen en zelfs kleine kinderen hebben ernstig overgewicht, oftewel obesitas. Welke gezondheidsramp staat ons te wachten? Liesbeth van Rossum, internist en hoogleraar obesitas aan de Erasmus Universiteit, vertelt over deze obesitas-epidemie, en welke rol afslankmedicijnen hebben in het bestrijden hiervan. Gasten in BNR's Big Five van de afslankmedicijnen: -Vera Spaans, journalist en columnist Parool -Joep de Groot, bestuursvoorzitter van zorgverzekeraar CZ -Marco Frenken, algemeen directeur van farmaceut Eli Lilly -Anne Roefs, hoogleraar psychologie en neurowetenschappen van abnormaal eetgedrag -Liesbeth van Rossum, internist en hoogleraar obesitas en stresshormonen aan het Erasmus MC in Rotterdam. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Zoe Sankey sits down with Crémieux (the pen name of researcher Jordan Lasker), the formerly anonymous X writer-researcher whose data threads on genetics, demographics and metabolic drugs have drawn a following of more than 260,000 — including some very prominent readers. It's a wide-ranging conversation. They cover collapsing fertility rates and the Victorian obscenity trial he argues helped set them falling; his case that dog breeds — pit bulls especially — behave the way they were bred to, and why he thinks people resist that; what he makes of the evidence on GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic and retatrutide, microplastics, and the wellness industry; El Salvador's transformation under Nayib Bukele; IQ testing, genetics and embryo selection; populism, personality and politics; free will; and being Jewish and atheist at once. ⏱️ Chapters: 00:00 Intro — who Crémieux is and how he built his following 02:24 Fertility collapse and the Bradlaugh–Besant trial 05:00 Silphium, abortion and the long human history of family planning 06:00 Strong convictions, and why he wants to live forever 07:49 Brian Johnson, longevity and the wellness-hype problem 10:56 Microplastics: what the evidence actually shows 13:24 Zinc, Accutane and the biology of acne 18:08 Ivermectin, Demodex mites and skin 20:22 Pet rats, lab rats, and which animals we call "cute" 22:56 UFOs and the Trump-era document releases 25:11 Pit bulls: breeding, behaviour and public denial 30:06 Ira Glass, greyhounds and virtue-signal dog ownership 34:11 GLP-1 drugs: Ozempic, retatrutide and the medical turnaround 36:00 His own weight loss, muscle and travel-for-work 37:57 Próspera, El Salvador and Bukele's gang crackdown 42:49 Duterte, Hanania's Kakistocracy and populism 45:42 IQ, classical liberalism and organising society 47:12 China, dumping, open-source AI and pharmaceutical free-riding 50:36 Tariffs and the destination-based cash flow tax 51:49 Hope, ageing, and the generational wealth question 55:14 Truth-seeking, reform, and why people don't change their minds 56:46 Jewishness, identity and defining who counts as a Jew 59:11 Antisemitism, zero-sum thinking and its long tradition 1:01:05 The future of Israel and the Hilonim birth rate 1:04:04 IQ tests, Mensa and gaming the matrices 1:05:27 Embryo selection and raising smart kids 1:08:36 Nature, nurture and what mothers influence 1:09:20 Politics shaping personality — and the La Piere study 1:14:30 The Big Five, intelligence and conscientiousness 1:18:14 Free will: Pinker vs. Harris 1:20:38 The name "Crémieux" and Adolphe Crémieux 1:21:59 Wrap-up —

Het jaar is nog maar halverwege, maar er ligt nu al een bewogen tijd achter ons. Vol politieke, maatschappelijke en economische uitdagingen, in binnen- en buitenland. Deze zomer laten we zes spraakmakende Big Five-thema's van de afgelopen tijd aan je horen. Deze week hoor je vijf kopstukken uit de wereld van de afslankmedicatie. Afslankmedicatie is met een flinke opmars bezig. Gaan we hier te makkelijk mee om, zijn we straks allemaal verslaafd? Te gast is Anne Roefs, hoogleraar psychologie en neurowetenschappen van abnormaal eetgedrag aan de Maastricht University en zij is kritisch. Gasten in BNR's Big Five van de afslankmedicijnen: -Vera Spaans, journalist en columnist Parool -Joep de Groot, bestuursvoorzitter van zorgverzekeraar CZ -Marco Frenken, algemeen directeur van farmaceut Eli Lilly -Anne Roefs, hoogleraar psychologie en neurowetenschappen van abnormaal eetgedrag -Liesbeth van Rossum, internist en hoogleraar obesitas en stresshormonen aan het Erasmus MC in Rotterdam. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Het jaar is nog maar halverwege, maar er ligt nu al een bewogen tijd achter ons. Vol politieke, maatschappelijke en economische uitdagingen, in binnen- en buitenland. Deze zomer laten we zes spraakmakende Big Five-thema's van de afgelopen tijd aan je horen. Deze week hoor je vijf kopstukken uit de wereld van de afslankmedicatie. Afslankmedicijnen worden niet zomaar vergoed. Hoe zorg je ervoor dat de juiste medicijnen voor de juiste mensen betaalbaar blijven? Ondertussen is de concurrentie onder farmaceuten moordend, hoe blijf je de concurrentie voor? Te gast is Marco Frenken, algemeen directeur van Eli Lilly Nederland Gasten in BNR's Big Five van de afslankmedicijnen: -Vera Spaans, journalist en columnist Parool -Joep de Groot, bestuursvoorzitter van zorgverzekeraar CZ -Marco Frenken, algemeen directeur van farmaceut Eli Lilly -Anne Roefs, hoogleraar psychologie en neurowetenschappen van abnormaal eetgedrag -Liesbeth van Rossum, internist en hoogleraar obesitas en stresshormonen aan het Erasmus MC in Rotterdam. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey, Brad Kearns here with some thoughts from my morning walk about the foundation of any excellent, well-rounded fitness program for peak performance, vitality, fat loss, and longevity. Did you know half of regular runners get an overuse injury every year, and 25% of regular runners are injured at any given time? In this episode, I explain why the modern endurance running approach is deeply flawed, why walking provides an excellent aerobic conditioning effect with minimal impact load or injury risk, and why it should be the foundation from which you launch your more ambitious fitness activities. I also share why resistance training is the missing link for many people, including Dr. Doug McGuff's “Big Five” workout, and why true sprinting—not long HIIT sessions—is the single best workout ever known to mankind in terms of return on investment for reducing excess body fat, promoting overall functional fitness, and supporting longevity. Research reveals that anaerobic muscle fibers decline at a rate of around 40% per decade without intervention, compared to roughly 10% for the aerobic system. That's why we have a critical obligation for longevity to hone the anaerobic system with brief, explosive maximum efforts. The three fitness laws are simple: move frequently at a slow pace, lift heavy things, and sprint once in a while. That is the winning ticket for true fitness, weight loss, and longevity. TIMESTAMPS: Brad emphasizes the importance of walking as an activity from which to launch your more ambitious fitness activities. [01:51] Steady state cardiovascular exercise and other extreme endurance exercises often create injuries. [03:01] Sprinting is the single best workout known to mankind! It's all about quality, explosiveness, power, lots of rest in between. [08:30] LINKS: Brad Kearns.com BradNutrition.com B.rad Whey Protein Superfuel - The Best Protein on The Planet! Brad’s Shopping Page BornToWalkBook.com B.rad Podcast – All Episodes Peluva Five-Toe Minimalist Shoes B.rad Podcast – All Episodes Peluva Five-Toe Minimalist Shoes The Primal Blueprint Body by Science We appreciate all feedback, and questions for Q&A shows, emailed to podcast@bradventures.com. If you have a moment, please share an episode you like with a quick text message, or leave a review on your podcast app. Thank you! Check out each of these companies because they are absolutely awesome or they wouldn’t occupy this revered space. Seriously, I won’t promote anything that I don't absolutely love and use in daily life: B.rad Nutrition: Premium quality, all-natural supplements for peak performance, recovery, and longevity; including the world's highest quality whey protein! Get 20% OFF your first order! Peluva: Comfortable, functional, stylish five-toe minimalist shoe to reawaken optimal foot function. Use code BRADPODCAST for 15% off! Jaspr Air Scrubber: Ultra high-performance air purifier - blows other air filters away! Save $200 on your unit with code BRAD. Get Stride: Advanced DNA, methylation profile, microbiome & blood at-home testing. Hit your stride the right way, with cutting-edge technology and customized programming. Save 10% with the code BRAD. Online educational courses: Numerous great offerings for an immersive home-study educational experience Primal Fitness Expert Certification: The most comprehensive online course on all aspects of traditional fitness programming and a total immersion fitness lifestyle. Save 25% on tuition with code BRAD! #bradpodcastSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Het jaar is nog maar halverwege, maar er ligt nu al een bewogen tijd achter ons. Vol politieke, maatschappelijke en economische uitdagingen, in binnen- en buitenland. Deze zomer laten we zes spraakmakende Big Five-thema's van de afgelopen tijd aan je horen. Deze week hoor je vijf kopstukken uit de wereld van de afslankmedicatie. Afslankmedicijnen zijn razend populair en steeds meer wordt vergoed door de zorgverzekeraars. Is dat een medische doorbraak of slechts een dure pleister op een veel groter probleem? Te gast is Joep de Groot, bestuursvoorzitter van zorgverzekeraar CZ. Gasten in BNR's Big Five van de afslankmedicijnen: -Vera Spaans, journalist en columnist Parool -Joep de Groot, bestuursvoorzitter van zorgverzekeraar CZ -Marco Frenken, algemeen directeur van farmaceut Eli Lilly -Anne Roefs, hoogleraar psychologie en neurowetenschappen van abnormaal eetgedrag -Liesbeth van Rossum, internist en hoogleraar obesitas en stresshormonen aan het Erasmus MC in Rotterdam. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In this episode, Bradley sits down with Bob Ruffolo, founder of Impact, to talk about what drives customer acquisition now that buyers finish most of their research before they contact a company. Bob traces his path from freelancing during the recession, to building a top HubSpot partner agency, to merging with Marcus Sheridan and rebuilding the business as a coaching and training company.They discuss the zero moment of truth and why roughly 80 percent of the buying decision is complete before a company knows the buyer exists. Bob breaks down the Big Five content topics buyers care about most, why differentiation starts with a promise or guarantee competitors will not make, and what AI looks at when it recommends a single company to a buyer.This conversation moves beyond channel tactics and into how buying decisions actually get made. What does your market find when it researches your category? Are you answering the questions buyers ask before they are ready to talk? And if AI returns one company name in your market, what would make it yours? If you want a clearer view of how to earn trust before the first conversation, this conversation is for you.Visit https://workshop.blueprintos.com to register for the upcoming Above The Business workshop.ResourcesLearn more about Bob Ruffolo and Impact: impactplus.comPick up the book behind the system, Endless Customers: https://a.co/d/07MzFWx5 Check out the book Bradley references, The Road Less Stupid by Keith Cunningham: https://a.co/d/0iwqLCSl Check out the book Bob references, Traction by Gino Wickman: https://a.co/d/01royaHy Connect with Bob on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bobruffolo/ Thanks to our sponsorsCoach P ConsultingCoach P found great success as an insurance agent and agency owner, leading a large and stable team of top-performing professionals. Today, he shares the systems, delegation strategies, and specialization methods he developed along the way. Gain access to weekly training calls and mentoring at:https://www.coachpconsulting.comBe sure to mention you heard about it on the Above The Business Podcast.Autopilot RecruitingAutopilot Recruiting helps small business owners solve staffing challenges by taking the stress out of hiring. Their dedicated recruiters work on your behalf every business day, optimizing your applicant tracking system, posting job listings, and sourcing candidates through social media and local communities.https://www.autopilotrecruiting.comMention Above The Business Podcast when you reach out.Direct ClicksDirect Clicks is built by business owners, for business owners. They specialize in custom marketing solutions that drive real results. From paid search campaigns to SEO and social media management, they provide comprehensive digital marketing support to help your business grow.Exclusive offer for listeners:https://directclicksinc.com/abovethebusinessGet a free marketing campaign audit and actionable recommendations.About Above The BusinessAbove The Business is hosted by Bradley Hamner, founder of BlueprintOS, and focuses on helping small business owners transition from Rainmaker to Architect by building systems, teams, and operations that scale.

Het jaar is nog maar halverwege, maar er ligt nu al een bewogen tijd achter ons. Vol politieke, maatschappelijke en economische uitdagingen, in binnen- en buitenland. Deze zomer laten we zes spraakmakende Big Five-thema's van de afgelopen tijd aan je horen. Deze week hoor je vijf kopstukken uit de wereld van de sociale media. Met vandaag: Lokke Moerel, privacy-advocaat en hoogleraar Global ICT Law aan Tilburg University. Meta, het moederbedrijf van onder meer Facebook en Instagram, is volgens een Amerikaanse jury aansprakelijk voor de verslaving die een jonge vrouw had opgelopen. Is dit een definitieve doorbraak tegen de macht van de Amerikaanse sociale media platforms? Te gast in BNR's Big Five van sociale media onder vuur -Kim van Sparrentak, Europarlementariër namens Pro -Steven Pont, ontwikkelingspsycholoog -Joe van Burik, Techjournalist bij BNR -Thekla Reuten, actrice en voorzitter & mede-oprichter van de stichting Smartphonevrij Opgroeien -Lokke Moerel, hoogleraar Global ICT aan Tilburg University en Senior of Counsel bij Morrison & FoersterSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Het jaar is nog maar halverwege, maar er ligt nu al een bewogen tijd achter ons. Vol politieke, maatschappelijke en economische uitdagingen, in binnen- en buitenland. Deze zomer laten we zes spraakmakende Big Five-thema's van de afgelopen tijd aan je horen. Deze week hoor je vijf kopstukken uit de wereld van de afslankmedicatie. Afslankmedicijnen worden steeds populairder. Ook Parool-columnist Vera Spaans koos ervoor het te gebruiken om van haar extra kilo's af te komen. Waarom ze juist met medicatie begon, en wat haar ervaringen hiermee zijn, vertelt ze uitgebreid in deze aflevering. Gasten in BNR's Big Five van de afslankmedicijnen: -Vera Spaans, journalist en columnist Parool -Joep de Groot, bestuursvoorzitter van zorgverzekeraar CZ -Marco Frenken, algemeen directeur van farmaceut Eli Lilly -Anne Roefs, hoogleraar psychologie en neurowetenschappen van abnormaal eetgedrag -Liesbeth van Rossum, internist en hoogleraar obesitas en stresshormonen aan het Erasmus MC in Rotterdam. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The Prophet Playoff Theory returns with one of our biggest episodes yet as we rank every NFL starting quarterback from 32 all the way to No. 1. Which QBs are overrated, underrated, and who just missed the elite tier? We break down the Browns' quarterback disaster and what the future holds in Cleveland (3:40). Then we dive into the development of the league's young signal callers, discussing what Year 2 could look like for Cam Ward, Tyler Shough, and Jaxson Dart, and whether they have what it takes to become franchise quarterbacks (23:02)Rashad explains why he's getting dangerously close to giving up on Jordan Love (39:00), while we debate just how high Caleb Williams' ceiling really is (44:10). We also ask if we're placing Justin Herbert a little too high in our rankings, or if he's finally ready to make the leap into the NFL's elite (49:40). Finally, we reveal a major shake-up at the top of our quarterback rankings as the Big Four become the Big Five, with another quarterback earning a spot in our top tier—a player we believe is building a résumé worthy of a first-ballot Hall of Fame career (54:33). Who landed where? Who will spark the biggest debate? Tune in and find out on Preach Kev Preach with Rashad.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/preach-kev-preach-w-rashad--2977392/support.

Het jaar is nog maar halverwege, maar er ligt nu al een bewogen tijd achter ons. Vol politieke, maatschappelijke en economische uitdagingen, in binnen- en buitenland. Deze zomer laten we zes spraakmakende Big Five-thema's van de afgelopen tijd aan je horen. Deze week hoor je vijf kopstukken uit de wereld van de sociale media. Met vandaag: actrice en moeder Thekla Reuten vertelt waarom zij haar kind geen smartphone geeft en dat bewust uitstelt tot in ieder geval 14 jaar. En waarom inmiddels tienduizenden ouders haar volgen. Te gast in BNR's Big Five van sociale media onder vuur -Kim van Sparrentak, Europarlementariër namens Pro -Steven Pont, ontwikkelingspsycholoog -Joe van Burik, Techjournalist bij BNR -Thekla Reuten, actrice en voorzitter & mede-oprichter van de stichting Smartphonevrij Opgroeien -Lokke Moerel, hoogleraar Global ICT aan Tilburg University en Senior of Counsel bij Morrison & FoersterSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Our first guest Robin Baker describes three big black cat sightings from the Forest of Dean and two pieces of his resulting artwork which include black leopards. Robin also explains his ‘Big Five' creatures of the Dean which feature in his artwork.Robin also explains the scowles of the Forest of Dean, a landform which inspired Tolkein's Lord of the Ring's Middle-earth landscape. The scowles are gullies in the woods, produced by ancient iron ore mining and now used as eerie backdrops to Star Wars and Harry Potter film scenes. These channels are also highly suited to big cats, for their routes and their ambush positions.Our second guest is Gary Ridley, back from episode 131. He fronted the recent Big Cat Investigator program in the BBC Our Lives series, available on I Player. Gary responds to podcast listeners' different feedback on the program. The program had an emphasis of the quest rather than the proof, and Rick and Gary discuss a key item which didn't make the final edit…   Word of the week:   scowles29 July 2026

Het jaar is nog maar halverwege, maar er ligt nu al een bewogen tijd achter ons. Vol politieke, maatschappelijke en economische uitdagingen, in binnen- en buitenland. Deze zomer laten we zes spraakmakende Big Five-thema's van de afgelopen tijd aan je horen. Deze week hoor je vijf kopstukken uit de wereld van de sociale media. Met vandaag: techourrnalist Joe van Burik. We spenderen bijna allemaal uren per dag scrollend op sociale media, vaak langer dan we zelf willen. En dus groeit de kritiek. Zullen sociale media platforms veranderen onder de maatschappelijke druk of is dat een illusie? Te gast in BNR's Big Five van sociale media onder vuur -Kim van Sparrentak, Europarlementariër namens Pro -Steven Pont, ontwikkelingspsycholoog -Joe van Burik, Techjournalist bij BNR -Thekla Reuten, actrice en voorzitter & mede-oprichter van de stichting Smartphonevrij Opgroeien -Lokke Moerel, hoogleraar Global ICT aan Tilburg University en Senior of Counsel bij Morrison & FoersterSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Before you do anything else, pause this episode and go take the Big Five personality test at https://bigfive-test.com/ — it's free, open source, and it's the entire point. Dee Kei and Lu share their results live on the show, and if you don't know your own numbers, this episode won't hit the same.The Big Five — also called the OCEAN model — is the only personality framework that psychologists actually take seriously. Unlike Myers-Briggs and 16 Personalities, which studies have found are closer to horoscopes in predictive power, the Big Five is clinically validated, cross-cultural, and remarkably consistent over time. Dee breaks down exactly why — the difference in test-retest reliability, the Barnum Effect, and what it actually means to score on a continuous spectrum instead of being dropped into a binary personality type.From there, the episode gets into the part that's most relevant to anyone building a career in audio: what each trait actually predicts in a professional creative context. High neuroticism and how it maps to taking client feedback personally, spiraling on revisions, and undercharging to avoid confrontation. High conscientiousness and how it shows up differently in recording versus mixing workflows. The relationship between openness and musical taste — and why, despite what you might assume, personality and music preference are barely correlated at all.Then Dee and Lu read their actual results out loud — and it gets surprisingly candid. Lu's strengths and blind spots, including the gap between his external warmth and his internal sensitivity to criticism. Dee's near-perfect openness scores, his low cautiousness, and why his directness can sometimes outrun his warmth in ways people misread. The moment where the AI-generated analysis of Dee's personality is so accurate that he and Lu both go silent.It's equal parts psychology, self-awareness, and career development — wrapped in one of the more honest conversations the show has had.Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

I spent last week in a cabin outside Ellijay, Georgia, a couple of hours north of here. I'd thought about doing something more epic with my one week away, driving out to Chaco Canyon or somewhere like it, and then realized I'd spend most of the week driving and arrive exhausted. So, a cabin. I went to work on the nonfiction book I've been close to finishing and then taking apart again more times than I care to admit.I brought a lot of music gear with me too, just in case the writing didn't go. Turns out that having only so much time is its own kind of help. I didn't play much.This week's episode came out of that.I want to talk to two people. The first has never written a book and can't get past the question of who am I to do this. No platform. A few hundred people on Facebook, half of them from high school. Write the thing and you're speaking into the wilderness. The second already wrote the book. It came out, it did fine or it didn't, and now they're quietly wondering whether it was worth what they gave it.Here's the honest part, and I think the honest version is more useful than the pitch. Books don't make people famous anymore. Even really good ones. That's most of the reason the Big Five look for authors who already have an audience, because they aren't in the platform-building business so much as the fire-to-it business. But a book is still a different form of distribution, and it reaches people who will never find you in a feed. Somebody they trust hands them a copy and says you should read this. That's a door your other work doesn't open.So the question I've landed on isn't whether you should write a book. It's whether you want to inhabit the identity of someone who writes. If you want somebody to read your one book, shouldn't they be able to see that you're a person who writes?I also get into why three-year and five-year plans have never worked for me, what David Perell's 250,000 subscribers actually took in years, why a book that doesn't sell in its first year is the moment most people quit and the wrong moment to do it, and my own fairly fragmented record of sticking with anything.The difficulty in life is the choice.If you're sitting on a manuscript, a proposal, or an idea you can't shake loose, Crossroads Publishing Group is my press. Editorial, design, print, ebook, audio, distribution. Take a look at crossroadspublishing.group and see what you think. If you decide it isn't for you, that's a real answer and a fine one.I also coach writers toward the harder part, which is hearing yourself into committing to the thing you actually want to do. That's a conversation, not a purchase.And I'm taking on a handful of new projects this fall. If you know someone with a book they keep almost writing, or a story you know is worth telling, send them my way or just send me their name. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit chadprevost.substack.com

Het jaar is nog maar halverwege, maar er ligt nu al een bewogen tijd achter ons. Vol politieke, maatschappelijke en economische uitdagingen, in binnen- en buitenland. Deze zomer laten we zes spraakmakende Big Five-thema's van de afgelopen tijd aan je horen. Deze week hoor je vijf kopstukken uit de wereld van de sociale media. Met vandaag: ontwikkelingspsycholoog Steven Pont. We proberen schermtijd te beperken, telefoons verdwijnen uit de klas, maar ondertussen groeit een hele generatie op met sociale media. Wat doet dat met hun ontwikkeling? We weten dat kinderen en jongeren steeds meer tijd op hun scherm doorbrengen, en maken ons daar collectief zorgen over. Maar wie moet kinderen beschermen tegen de impact ervan: ouders, scholen of de platforms zelf? Te gast in BNR's Big Five van sociale media onder vuur -Kim van Sparrentak, Europarlementariër namens Pro -Steven Pont, ontwikkelingspsycholoog -Joe van Burik, Techjournalist bij BNR -Thekla Reuten, actrice en voorzitter & mede-oprichter van de stichting Smartphonevrij Opgroeien -Lokke Moerel, hoogleraar Global ICT aan Tilburg University en Senior of Counsel bij Morrison & FoersterSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alaina (@molars.and.miles) is an Ohio mom of three, dentist, and expert trip planner who takes an annual couples trip with her husband and another couple. After traveling to 10 countries together, their latest adventure took them all the way to South Africa in April 2025—and this may have been their most unforgettable trip yet!In just eight days, they experienced three completely different sides of South Africa: vibey Cape Town with its incredible restaurants and breathtaking scenery, a dreamy night in the Franschhoek wine country, and a thrilling luxury safari where they saw the Big Five.Alaina shares how the safari experience actually works—from early-morning game drives and animals roaming just feet away to sunset happy hours in the bush, cozy lodge dinners, and the excitement of tracking lions, leopards, elephants, rhinos, and buffalo. Add in beautiful hotels, unforgettable meals, a wine tram, and plenty of spontaneous travel magic, and this trip was truly a foodie and adventure lover's dream.This episode is available to watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@kelseygravesIf you'd like to share about your trip on the podcast, email me at: kelsey@triptalespodcast.comBuy Me A Coffee: https://buymeacoffee.com/kelseygravesFollow me on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kelsey_gravesFollow me on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@mskelseygravesJoin us in the Trip Tales Podcast Community Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1323687329158879Link to Trip Tales podcast on Apple: Mentioned in this episode:- Alaina's Instagram: www.instagram.com/molars.and.miles and website: www.molarsandmiles.com- CAPETOWN: Cape Grace Hotel, Table Mountain, Time Out Market, Chapman's Peak drive, Boulders Beach, Simon's Town, "Just Mich" Tour Guide, Groot Constantia Wine Farm, Chef's Warehouse, Marble- FRANSCHHOEK: Babylonstoren (Cape Dutch Farm), Leeu Estates, Wine Tram- SAFARI: Hoedspruit Airport, Greater Kruger National Park, Kapama Private Game Lodge, Safari Game Drives, the Big FiveTrip Tales is a travel podcast sharing real vacation stories and trip itineraries for family travel, couples getaways, cruises, and all-inclusive resorts. Popular episodes feature destinations like Marco Island Florida, Costa Rica with kids, Disney Cruise Line, Disney Aulani in Hawaii, Beaches Turks & Caicos, Park City ski trips, Aruba, Italy, Ireland, Portugal's Azores, New York City, Alaska cruises, and U.S. National Parks. Listeners get real travel tips, itinerary recommendations, hotel reviews, restaurant recommendations, and inspiration for planning their next vacation, especially when traveling with kids.

Het jaar is nog maar halverwege, maar er ligt nu al een bewogen tijd achter ons. Vol politieke, maatschappelijke en economische uitdagingen, in binnen- en buitenland. Deze zomer laten we zes spraakmakende Big Five-thema's van de afgelopen tijd aan je horen. Deze week hoor je vijf kopstukken uit de wereld van de sociale media. Met vandaag: Kim van Sparrentak, Europarlementariër namens Pro. De belofte van sociale media was zo mooi: mensen dichter bij elkaar brengen, de wereld kleiner maken. Maar intussen zijn we verslaafd aan de eindeloze stromen van content en zijn we digitaal overgeleverd aan de Amerikanen. Hoe groot is de invloed van Amerikaanse techgiganten in Brussel? En hoe valt er tegen die macht op te boksen? En waarom is het verbieden van sociale media juist niet de oplossing? Te gast in BNR's Big Five van sociale media onder vuur -Kim van Sparrentak, Europarlementariër namens Pro -Steven Pont, ontwikkelingspsycholoog -Joe van Burik, Techjournalist bij BNR -Thekla Reuten, actrice en voorzitter & mede-oprichter van de stichting Smartphonevrij Opgroeien -Lokke Moerel, hoogleraar Global ICT aan Tilburg University en Senior of Counsel bij Morrison & Foerster See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Het jaar is nog maar halverwege, maar er ligt nu al een bewogen tijd achter ons. Vol politieke, maatschappelijke en economische uitdagingen, in binnen- en buitenland. Deze zomer laten we zes spraakmakende Big Five-thema's van de afgelopen tijd aan je horen. Deze week hoor je vijf kopstukken uit de wereld van de verzorgingsstaat. Met vandaag: FNV-voorzitter Hans Spekman. In het coalitieakkoord staan flinke bezuinigingen op de sociale zekerheid. Hans Spekman kreeg al een deel van tafel, maar hij wil meer. 'De rekening voor noodzakelijke investeringen, zoals defensie, mag niet worden neergelegd bij mensen die afhankelijk zijn van de sociale zekerheid; er zijn eerlijkere alternatieven', zegt hij. Gasten in BNR's Big Five van de Verzorgingsstaat onder druk: -Coen van Oostrom, voorzitter VNO-NCW -Martine Wolzak, politiek verslaggever bij Het Financieele Dagblad -Joyce Sylvester, voorzitter van de Staatscommissie tegen Discriminatie en Racisme -Kim Putters, voorzitter Sociaal-Economische Raad (SER) -Hans Spekman, voorzitter vakbond FNVSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Do you keep doing brilliant work and getting warm reviews while the VP title goes to someone you outwork every single day? If you want to know how to get promoted from director to vice president, the answer is not working harder. It is becoming someone your senior leaders can already picture in that next chair.In this episode of the SisterSmart Leadership podcast, executive coach Jill Avey takes you inside one woman's year. The year she went from passed over to promoted. Hidden inside her story are the five things that actually separate directors from VPs. We call them the Big Five of Strategy®.You will learn why a promotion is a bet on your future rather than a prize for your past, what the feedback "be more strategic" actually means and how to let senior leaders watch you think so your best ideas stop staying locked inside your head.Jill also shares research from Yale, MIT and the University of Minnesota on 30,000 employees that reveals the real reason so many high performing women keep getting passed over for promotion.In this episode you will learn:Why being the most capable person on the team can keep you stuck at the director levelThe Big Five of Strategy® senior leaders look for when they fill a VP seat: grasp the present, shape the future, move the system, deliver the results and adapt to changeHow narrating your reasoning out loud changes how leaders rate your potentialWhy one gap in the five is enough to cost you a promotion cycle even when the other four are strongThree shifts you can make this week to become imaginable in the next chairChapters:

Het jaar is nog maar halverwege, maar er ligt nu al een bewogen tijd achter ons. Vol politieke, maatschappelijke en economische uitdagingen, in binnen- en buitenland. Deze zomer laten we zes spraakmakende Big Five-thema's van de afgelopen tijd aan je horen. Deze week hoor je vijf kopstukken uit de wereld van de verzorgingsstaat. Met vandaag: Kim Putters, voorzitter van de Sociaal-Economische Raad (SER). Polarisatie is misschien wel de grootste vijand van onze verzorgingsstaat. Hoe creëer je dan toch draagvlak in de samenleving? Gasten in BNR's Big Five van de Verzorgingsstaat onder druk: -Coen van Oostrom, voorzitter VNO-NCW -Martine Wolzak, politiek verslaggever bij Het Financieele Dagblad -Joyce Sylvester, voorzitter van de Staatscommissie tegen Discriminatie en Racisme -Kim Putters, voorzitter Sociaal-Economische Raad (SER) -Hans Spekman, voorzitter vakbond FNVSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Het jaar is nog maar halverwege, maar er ligt nu al een bewogen tijd achter ons. Vol politieke, maatschappelijke en economische uitdagingen, in binnen- en buitenland. Deze zomer laten we zes spraakmakende Big Five-thema's van de afgelopen tijd aan je horen. Deze week hoor je vijf kopstukken uit de wereld van de verzorgingsstaat. Met vandaag: Joyce Sylvester, voorzitter van de Staatscommissie tegen Discriminatie en Racisme. Onlangs presenteerde zij het eindrapport van de staatscommissie. De conclusie: de huidige aanpak van discriminatie in Nederland schiet tekort. Is de verzorgingsstaat er wel voor iedereen? En hoe is het institutioneel racisme aan te pakken? Gasten in BNR's Big Five van de Verzorgingsstaat onder druk: -Coen van Oostrom, voorzitter VNO-NCW -Martine Wolzak, politiek verslaggever bij Het Financieele Dagblad -Joyce Sylvester, voorzitter van de Staatscommissie tegen Discriminatie en Racisme -Kim Putters, voorzitter Sociaal-Economische Raad (SER) -Hans Spekman, voorzitter vakbond FNVSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

For more information about our Safari Group Trip in June 2027, Click HERE. If you are looking to plan a private custom safari, please click here. We have a form specific to safari planning. We just got back from another Kenya safari, and once again, it's confirmed what we already knew: this is our favorite trip in the world. In this episode, we walk through our full itinerary and share why each stop earns its place on our 2027 group safari. Some links are affiliate links. See our disclosure. What you'll discover in this episode: Why were're adding Nairobi National Park game drive on day one for our group trips— and the rhinos, giraffes, hippos, and more we spotted right on the edge of the city Our visit to the Sheldrick Wildlife Trust elephant orphanage and why we now sponsor an orphaned elephant for our granddaughter Learning about endangered Rothschild giraffes at the Giraffe Center near Giraffe Manor Solio Ranch - one of the best places anywhere to see black and white rhinos, plus a rare evening feeding a baby rhino at the rhino orphanage and why we may not be able to continue to visit here long term, but will in 2027. Samburu National Reserve — the "Samburu Special Five," riverside elephant families, and our first big cat sightings The scenic (and slightly wild) bush-plane transfer into the Maasai Mara Big cat encounters in the Mara, lion pride dynamics, and seeing the Big Five twice on one trip Exploring the quieter Mara Triangle and staying at Mara Engai Lodge Why we personally visit and vet every camp and lodge before recommending it to clients Details on our June 2027 small-group safari through Solio, Samburu, and the Maasai Mara More Resources & Links: Want to learn more about making money planning and booking travel for yourself and others. Learn more at https://www.sunshinetravelersexperiences.com/become-an-advisor Get Our FREE Ultimate Packing Guide See ALL our Favorite Travel Resources Don't waste your precious vacation time with Jet Lag, get Flykitt and watch Jet Lag disappear! Protect your privacy, boost your security, and keep your browsing data safe with Express VPN. Plus, get 3 months free with a yearly plan. Follow Sunshine Travelers Listen on Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube Read more about this and other travel destinations on our BLOG Follow our travels on TikTok @sunshinetravelerspodcast Follow us on X @sunshinetrvlrs Connect with us on LinkedIn @sunshinetravelerspodcast Get travel tips and follow our travels on Instagram: @sunshinetravelerspodcast Follow us on Facebook @sunshinetravelerspodcast Connect with us on Threads @sunshinetravelerspodcast See our travel videos on YouTube @sunshinetravelerspodcast Save our travel ideas on Pinterest @sunshinetravelerspodcast Music: This Acoustic Happy Music by Dmitrii Kolesnikov from Pixabay

Het jaar is nog maar halverwege, maar er ligt nu al een bewogen tijd achter ons. Vol politieke, maatschappelijke en economische uitdagingen, in binnen- en buitenland. Deze zomer laten we zes spraakmakende Big Five-thema's van de afgelopen tijd aan je horen. Deze week hoor je vijf kopstukken uit de wereld van de verzorgingsstaat. Met vandaag: Martine Wolzak, politiek verslaggever bij het Financieel Dagblad. De verzorgingsstaat komt meer en meer onder druk te staan, zie ook de huidige strijd rond de sociale zekerheid in de polder. Wat voor een Nederland willen we zijn? Gasten in BNR's Big Five van de Verzorgingsstaat onder druk: -Coen van Oostrom, voorzitter VNO-NCW -Martine Wolzak, politiek verslaggever bij Het Financieele Dagblad -Joyce Sylvester, voorzitter van de Staatscommissie tegen Discriminatie en Racisme -Kim Putters, voorzitter Sociaal-Economische Raad (SER) -Hans Spekman, voorzitter vakbond FNVSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Het jaar is nog maar halverwege, maar er ligt nu al een bewogen tijd achter ons. Vol politieke, maatschappelijke en economische uitdagingen, in binnen- en buitenland. Deze zomer laten we zes spraakmakende Big Five-thema's van de afgelopen tijd aan je horen. Deze week hoor je vijf kopstukken uit de wereld van de verzorgingsstaat. Met vandaag: Coen van Oostrom, de kersverse voorzitter van werkgeversorganisatie VNO-NCW. De polder is nog lang niet klaar met onderhandelingen over sociale zekerheid. Minister Hans Vijlbrief wil al begin augustus een akkoord sluiten. Hoe haalbaar is dat? Wat is VNO‑NCW bereid in te leveren om eruit te komen? Gasten in BNR's Big Five van de Verzorgingsstaat onder Druk: -Coen van Oostrom, voorzitter VNO-NCW -Martine Wolzak, politiek verslaggever bij Het Financieele Dagblad -Joyce Sylvester, voorzitter van de Staatscommissie tegen Discriminatie en Racisme -Kim Putters, voorzitter Sociaal-Economische Raad (SER) -Hans Spekman, voorzitter vakbond FNVSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The Big Five Project returns to cover one of the threshold moments in WWE history as we continue to transition from the New Generation to the Attitude Era. On this episode, Dave and PC Tunney are thrilled to welcome Christopher Platt to the Big Five project for the very first time. On this installment, we review and analyze WrestleMania XIII. While certainly not the strongest of the Attitude Era WrestleManias, this March evening in Chicago, in 1997, would forever change the landscape of WWE. It was a night that saw the Undertaker win the WWF Championship for the first time in six years. It was also a night that saw a wild Street Fight between Chicago's favorite sons, the Legion of Doom, teaming up with Ahmed Johnson, to tangle with the Nation of Domination. On this evening, Rocky Maivia would make his WrestleMania debut and would share a WrestleMania moment with his father, Rocky Johnson. But, all of those pales in comparison to one of the greatest matches in WrestleMania history as Stone Cold Steve Austin and Bret "Hitman" Hart squared off in a brutal submission match, that would culminate in the most famous double turn in pro wrestling history. For most of us, it was a WrestleMania that was quite a but better than we recalled. Will you agree? Tune in and find out!Chairshot Radio Network Launched in 2017, the Chairshot Radio Network presents you with the best in sports, entertainment, and sports entertainment. Wrestling and wrestling crossover podcasts + the most interesting content + the most engaging hosts = the most entertaining podcasts you'll find! MONDAY - Bandwagon Nerds (entertainment & popular culture) TUESDAY - 4 Corners Podcast (sports) WEDNESDAY - The Greg DeMarco Show (wrestling) THURSDAY - Nefarious Means FRIDAY - DWI Podcast (Drunk Wrestling Intellect) SATURDAY - The Mindless Wrestling Podcast SUNDAY - 30 Mindless Minutes CHAIRSHOT RADIO NETWORK PODCAST SPECIALS Attitude Of Aggression Podcast: The Big Five Project (chronologically exploring WWE's PPV/PLE history), Unidentified History (Ufology), & Game Gone Wrong (Game of Thrones Universe) Chairshot Radio Network Your home for the hardest hitting podcasts... Sports, Entertainment and Sports Entertainment! All Shows On DemandAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

On this episode of The Big Five, Howie and The Chief, Jason Dunstall, tackle one of Australia’s most hotly debated topics… the greatest bakery items of all time.

This episode is presented by Wispr Flow, a tool that turns voice notes into clear writing. I use it every day and recommend it to every writer I know. Try it for free at ref.wisprflow.ai/howiwrite Learn more about Alpha School at go.alpha.school/howiwrite David Shelley is on the show today and he's the CEO of Hachette, one of the Big Five publishers. In this conversation, I focused on two things. First, how should writers navigate the publishing industry? Second, how does the publishing industry actually work? Who better to learn from than someone at the top of the field? David has spent more than 30 years in book publishing, and his company sells roughly 220 million books every year, generating about $3.5 billion in annual revenue. About the host Hey! I'm David Perell and I'm a writer, teacher, and podcaster. I believe writing online is one of the biggest opportunities in the world today. For the first time in human history, everybody can freely share their ideas with a global audience. I seek to help as many people publish their writing online as possible. Follow me Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/how-i-write/id1700171470 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@DavidPerellChannel Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/2DjMSboniFAeGA8v9NpoPv X: https://x.com/david_perell Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 author, writing coach, and sobriety expert Tawny Lara, the author of Dry Humping: A Guide to Dating, Relating, and Hooking Up Without the Booze.In this episode, Tawny pulls back the curtain on her publishing journey—from blogging and viral essays to finding an agent, switching from memoir to more journalistic nonfiction, completely rewriting her proposal, and ultimately selling her book. We get into querying, indie publishing vs. the Big Five, advances, audiobooks, and DIY book publicity. She also shares why every writer needs a newsletter, how she built an effective Substack strategy, the publicity tactics that landed her major media coverage, and why tapping into your existing network is often more powerful than chasing social media algorithms.Plus, Tawny explains how she sold a sobriety card deck to Penguin Random House, why rejection is an essential part of every publishing career, and the simple writing advice that transformed her creative practice.Subscribe to Tawny's Substack Beyond Liquid Courage. Follow her on Instagram @tawnymlara, and buy your copy of Dry Humping on Bookshop.org, Amazon, or wherever books are sold!Get your copy of Courtney's debut memoir Girl Gone Wild from ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Bookshop.org⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ or ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Amazon⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠.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 classes you might be interested in:Midsummer Pitch Party: https://www.courtneykocak.com/store/midsummerpitchpartySo 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-kocakThe Multi-Passionate Writer's Life: https://writingworkshops.com/products/the-multi-passionate-writers-life-zoom-seminar-with-courtney-kocak12 Months to a Full Memoir in Essays Incubator: Write Your Memoir in a Year: https://writingworkshops.com/products/memoir-in-essays-incubator-nonfiction-writing-workshop-online-june-2026How 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-seminarLand Big Bylines by Writing for Columns: https://writingworkshops.com/products/land-big-bylines-by-writing-for-columns-zoom-seminar

Matty Dalrymple talks with Kat Caldwell about WRITING BETTER CHARACTERS WITH THE BIG FIVE PERSONALITY, including what the five traits are and how they function as a spectrum rather than fixed categories; why a character's "need" is really about the unconscious ways their personality causes hurt to the people they love; how to use the Big Five as a diagnostic tool when your story feels like something's off; and why a satisfying character arc means growth and not a 180-degree reversal.   Interview video at https://www.youtube.com/@TheIndyAuthorPodcast/podcasts Show notes at https://www.theindyauthor.com/episodes-all and on Substack @TheIndyAuthor.   If you find the information in this video useful, please consider supporting The Indy Author! https://www.patreon.com/theindyauthor https://www.buymeacoffee.com/mattydalrymple   Kat is a novelist and short story writer and loves to teach fiction. She writes love stories in several genres including historical romance, contemporary romance, and contemporary fiction. Kat is the creator of the Pencils&Lipstick podcast, a podcast for writers with author interviews, craft talk and insight into the publishing world. In between conducting interviews for her podcast and writing, you can find Kat traveling the world, reading, or volunteering with her church—always with a cup of cold brew close by.   Matty Dalrymple is the author of the Lizzy Ballard Thrillers, beginning with ROCK PAPER SCISSORS; the Ann Kinnear Suspense Novels, beginning with THE SENSE OF DEATH; and the Ann Kinnear Suspense Shorts. She is a member of International Thriller Writers and Sisters in Crime. More at mattydalrymple.com. Matty also writes, speaks, and consults on the writing craft and the publishing voyage, and shares what she's learned on THE INDY AUTHOR PODCAST. She writes nonfiction books for authors; her articles have appeared in Writer's Digest magazine; and she is a Partner Member of the Alliance of Independent Authors. More at theindyauthor.com. She also guides professionals in building their presence through a sideline or second act through her platform From Expertise to Authority. More at theindyauthor.com/authority.

What are the five greatest old school TV shows of all time?

The difficulty in life is the choice. And every choice is a crossroads.This week's Working Writer roundup covers three stories that land on the same square, plus an announcement I've been sitting on.1. Simon & Schuster relaunched Pocket Books as a home for indie and hybrid authors.One of the oldest names in American paperback publishing, rebuilt around signing successful self-published writers to print deals. Their own words: “a home for forward-thinking writers, including bestselling indie and hybrid authors looking to amplify their reach.” Translation: New York is no longer asking who has a manuscript. It's asking who has readers. The room you build around your work isn't the consolation prize anymore. It's the asset.2. The industry is counting its robots.BISG and BookNet Canada opened their 2026 “AI in the Book Industry” survey (through July 17). Last year's round found about half the industry using AI, almost entirely in the plumbing: admin, marketing, data. Not the voice. I talk about where Crossroads stands: machines in the machinery, humans in the writing, audiobooks narrated by human beings. The flood of machine-made content drowns the generic. It can't drown a voice a reader trusts.3. Fourteen thousand librarians walked into Chicago.The American Library Association held its 150th annual conference: 14,801 registrants making plans for the future of reading. The quiet answer to “nobody reads anymore,” and a reminder that the professional middle (librarians, book clubs, spiritual directors, retreat leaders) is where books actually travel.And some news of our own: starting this Friday, I'm launching a new live series with Genesis the Greykid, fine-art poet and co-owner of Home, the bar at the corner of Fourth and Market in downtown Chattanooga. A crossroads city, a bar on an intersection, and conversations about the in-betweens: the hard choices, and the constraints (time, money) we build a creative life inside. It can be beautiful.If you're a writer with a message standing at your own crossroads, that's what we build at Crossroads Publishing Group. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit chadprevost.substack.com

LeBron James has told the Lakers to move on. Now the Golden State superteam is no longer a rumor. Covino & Rich break down the Big Four: LeBron, Anthony Davis, Steph Curry, and Draymond Green. Plus the Big Five with Jimmy Butler, why Miami and Giannis are still in play, and the one stat that proves wherever LeBron lands next is a real championship threat: he has won a title with every team he has ever played for.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Award-winning novelist and founder of The Novelry Louise Dean on what separates storytelling from beautiful prose, planning a novel without killing the joy, and how to edit your own first draft. You'll learn Why learning to craft perfect sentences can quietly delay your path to publication. How a single shift from style to storytelling turns a promising writer into a published one. What treating each chapter like a short story does to the terror of a blank novel. The reason every novel is a moral journey (and why you have to throw rocks at your hero). A one-page planning method that steers a draft without smothering the joy of writing it. The one question every writer should be able to answer about their reader. Why your main character should never be a thinly veiled version of yourself. When you can't afford an editor, how to run a developmental edit on your own work. What to do in the month after finishing a first draft A five-part structure built for the long moral journey of a novel, and why three acts fall short. Resources & Links

How can horror writing help readers — and writers — work through psychological trauma? Why does cross-genre fiction take longer to find an audience, but pay off in the long run? Is running a direct sales store actually worth the inventory, postage, and learning curve? And how can SubStack work for fiction authors? With psychotherapist and award-winning author P.D. Alleva. In the intro, thoughts on why in-person conferences are still worth it, even when they are a challenge for sensitive introverts! and tips for making the best of conferences [Self-Publishing Show]. Today's show is sponsored by Draft2Digital, self-publishing with support, where you can get free formatting, free distribution to multiple stores, and a host of other benefits. Just go to www.draft2digital.com to get started. This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn P.D. Alleva is the award-winning author of horror, sci-fi, thrillers, and fantasy books. He's also a psychotherapist. 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 horror puts the human condition on display better than any other genre Emotional trauma as the silent psychological killer most people overlook The pros and challenges of cross-genre writing and finding your audience Practical lessons from running a direct store, including integration and signed-copy fulfilment How a 3 a.m. writing routine keeps the writing separate from the marketing and admin Serialising fiction on Substack, multiple newsletters, and avoiding paid subscriber promotions Why Facebook groups, TikTok Lives, and the three-to-one rule are working right now You can find P.D. at PDAlleva.com or on Substack. Transcript of the interview with P.D. Alleva Jo: P.D. Alleva is the award-winning author of horror, sci-fi, thrillers, and fantasy books. He's also a psychotherapist. So welcome, Paul. PD: Thank you very much. Thank you for having me. This is a great opportunity. I love doing interviews, and I love talking to great people. Jo: Oh, good. Well, first up— Tell us a bit more about you and how you got into writing and being an indie author. PD: So I've been writing since I was a kid, at least second grade and more than likely even before that. I've always had that creative itch. Getting into indie author publishing, I published my first book in 2011. At the time I was also operating my own business, which took up about 24 hours of my time every single day. Then I kind of got through that and sold that in 2016, and I'm like, you know what? The time has come. I'd always written books, poetry, short stories, but never really did anything with them because I just didn't have the time. So in 2017, that's when I really came out and said, all right, the time is now. Indie publishing was doing great. The one good thing I do love about Amazon is they allowed us to come out there and start showing our craft to people. So in 2017, I just started—let's do this. Let's write full time. Let's put books out there. Let's be creative. Let's really get those juices flowing. Plus, I was getting a little bit old, and I was like, now is definitely the time to do this. Since then I've been publishing consistently, and most of my books are horror books, but I dabble. I have a sci-fi series, and I'm starting to get into psychological thrillers too. I've got a new psychological thriller that'll be published in early 2027 called Girl on a Mission. For the most part, I'm definitely into the horror genre—books, short stories, all that good fun stuff. Jo: Right, so a couple of follow-ups. You said you're a bit old. Can you give us what decade you're in at least? PD: Well, I'm 51, so born in 1971. Jo: Oh, there you go. Same age as me. PD: All right, good. See that? So we're going head-to-head there. Jo: I don't think that's old at all. Also, you mentioned you sold your business in 2016. So what was your business before? Because I think business experience is so important. PD: Agreed 100%. So I'm a psychotherapist, and I had owned a treatment centre for mental health and addiction. That was started in 2011, and in 2016 is when it sold. Since then, my wife and I started a private practice. So I still, even to this day—well, about a year and a half ago is when I stopped. I specialise in trauma, PTSD, and addiction. Trauma mostly. Most of my caseload has always been trauma, PTSD, sexual abuse, psychological abuse, war-type trauma. I was doing that mostly individually since 2016 in private practice, and I'll still go into treatment centres and see patients there too, specifically for trauma. About a year and a half ago is when I started wanting to do writing 100% full time. I thought about becoming a professor, maybe going to college, but then I wasn't sure if I wanted to get into that full time, as far as a caseload and school and everything like that. So I decided to just do group therapy, group facilitation, and I've been doing that consistently since then. It may be 15 hours a week. I do love to give back, and to me, it's more what I teach. I specialise in neuro-linguistic programming, bilateral stimulation or EMDR, hypnotherapy, science of mind concepts, psychopharmacology, biological bases of behaviour—which is pretty much how your brain works—ancient wisdom, quantum physics. I do this in a drug addiction treatment centre mostly, also mental health. And of course, just living an addictive lifestyle is traumatic, too, in and of itself. So pretty much I'm teaching them. Behaviour modification is a big part of what I'm teaching during that time. You'll see that, too, if you read my books. There's two things you can figure out from my books. You can figure out how to murder people and get away with it, and two, you can figure out how to overcome trauma as well. The whole “murder people and get away with it” comes from my upbringing. I have a very sorted past, let's put it that way. My upbringing was very different than what most people grow up in. Jo: Oh, can you give us any more than that? Now everyone's like, “Oh.” PD: “What's going on with this guy, right?” So I grew up, let's say, quote unquote, “in an Italian New York family.” Jo: Okay. All right. PD: That might give people ideas, right? Jo: That's going to give people a lot of ideas. PD: If you've ever seen the movie Goodfellas, I kind of grew up in that atmosphere, and with even some of those people too. My family had connections to those people in that movie, which I find very funny. If you watch that movie with me, you get a very different perspective on what's going on in the movie. Jo: Wow. So you're an interesting guy with an interesting background, with a very interesting backstory job as well. Some people are like, “Well, of course he's writing horror because horror is just awful and full of slasher gore and all that.” I often have to say to people who don't read horror, “Look, it's not like that.” Maybe some of it is, sure. But most of it isn't. Could you talk about how reading and writing horror can also be psychologically healthy? How do these worlds intertwine for you? PD: Well, sure. It 100% can be healthy. Especially over the last few years, there's a trend going on out there right now where people are taking their trauma and putting it into a creative process through poems, short stories, and even novels. They're taking their trauma and giving it a face, like a monster, where people are overcoming that monster within the creative process. I always say that horror is the genre that puts on display, better than any other genre out there, the human condition. Why is that? When people are in a terrifying situation, you really see who they are. You get to the heart of the matter of who that person is by putting them in these horrific but undefinable situations where it's like, what are they going to come out as? That real true personality needs to come out, and that courage comes out. That's huge in horror, and I think horror gets such a bad name. Now, I know there's the extreme horror and the splatterpunk, and that has its kind of role too in what I'm saying, but that's where horror is getting its bad reputation out there with the over-the-top type of gore. For the most part, that's a small part of the horror genre. It's a subgenre for a reason. It has its readership, and that's fine. Nothing wrong with it. I read it all the time. I find a lot of joy in it, a lot of excitement. However, for the most part, any horror novel that is not completely with the gore and stuff like splatterpunk can be seen as a psychological thriller, and a lot of psychological thrillers can be seen as a horror novel. Look at books like The Silence of the Lambs, Red Dragon. That's horrific as well, but if you read the novel, it's in there. It just gets that bad rap right now, and it's not all gore. Most horror novels that I read today are psychological horror. It's tame on the gore, and the psychological aspect is there. I always see that psychological aspect—it's like psychological trauma. Most people, even in my industry, when people are out there and you mention trauma, PTSD, they're thinking about sexual abuse, physical abuse, or war-type trauma. The silent psychological one—I once wrote an article called “Emotional Trauma: The Silent Psychological Killer.” The one that's out there is the psychological trauma, the emotional trauma that is widespread. Most people go through that, and it could even be from parent to child, and most people don't understand that that's a traumatic experience. It's like a distortion of reality that you're experiencing that then creates a belief system in your brain, and you're constantly acting out that belief system. That's where the psychological component of horror really comes out. People breaking through that psychological belief system that was created through a traumatic experience by reaching courage and coming out through a horrific situation. Jo: Yes, it really annoys me, because with romance, of course people understand that romance is a huge genre. Something like a small town sweet romance is a world away from the bully romantasy, dark, or mafia. Mafia romance is a really big thing with very dark themes. I'm like, well, how can you understand that romance is a huge genre with all these different subgenres, and not think that horror or thriller or fantasy or sci-fi all have so many different subgenres within them? I personally read a lot of supernatural horror, but rarely the slasher gore kind of stuff. So I'm really glad you said that, and hopefully more people will open up a bit more. I did also want to ask you about what you write. You write all these different things. You write standalone—I mean, often horror is standalone—but you also have some series. How do you balance it? What are the benefits of cross-genre writing, but also the challenges of it? PD: Okay. So obviously I love cross-genre writing. To me, I use fantasy to explain the supernatural elements. I blend mostly a tad of fantasy to help explain the supernatural components in my supernatural novels. When I write sci-fi, specifically sci-fi, that has the fantasy element in it too, but there's also a tad of horror in there as well. It's just who I am. When I grew up, I had a lot of different influences. I had Star Wars on one side, and then I'm watching B-rated '80s slasher films on the other side. Those two mixes just kind of followed me throughout my life, and that's why I like putting them into my novels. As I tell my patients, don't limit yourself. Never limit yourself. If you're just limiting yourself to one genre, you're missing out on so much more that's out there. So I love the blend of mixing genres. It just gets my goat each and every time. It is a challenge though. I remember when I first started getting into indie publishing, I was never big into Facebook and social media up until I started becoming an indie author. Before that, with my type of upbringing, you don't advertise yourself. You don't advertise where you're going. That's a big no-no. So I always had this aversion to social media. I'll tell you a funny story. It was the late 2000s, probably 2006. I was a full-time single father at that time, and I was living in Florida. My family—brothers and sisters-in-law—were living in New York, and my sister-in-law said, “Get a Facebook account so we can see pictures of the kids.” I said, “Oh.” I didn't want to do it, but I said, “Okay,” so I did it. And I'm thinking, looking at this Facebook thing, “How do I put pictures on here?” So I figured out how to put pictures in folders. Then I phone called her, and I'm like, “Okay, so they're on there.” And they're like, “Well, where are they?” I'm like, “I put them in these folders. You can go and look at them.” She's like, “No, you've got to post them.” That to me was like, “I'm not posting pictures of my kids.” That was a big no-no. It didn't click. When I got on there finally in 2016, 2017, I'm like, “Okay, so I need to figure out social media. As an indie author, I need to be on there, so I need to get through this aversion and get on there.” I started noticing how people are so particular with their genres. If they're reading a romance, it had to be very specific with that exact type of romance, and if you deviated from it, they're not going to like it. So that was the challenge. I was like, “All right, number one, I'm not going to dilute myself” and say, “All right, take things out of my writing or out of my novel just so I could cater to a certain type of audience.” I'm like, “I'm not going to do that.” I know with me, myself, as a reader, I'll read everything. I don't limit myself to a specific genre. I'll read psychological thrillers. I'll read romance. I've been doing that all my life. So I'm like, if there's a person like me out there—and look at this, I just met like four other people who also read cross genres—then I know that there's at least another 30,000 people, and I know that at least then there's 300,000, then there's three million people out there. So just write the books that you're writing and find your audience. Now, that takes longer. So you've got to chip away. Chip away. You're going to find readers here and there, and then that reader kind of tells a few people about you, and then you've got a few more readers. Then you keep going, and you go on these Facebook groups, and you do a whole bunch of different things, and then you gather a few more readers. Then they're telling some friends, and then you've got more. The process takes a lot longer, yes, 100% agreed, but I would say be true to yourself and you can never go wrong. Jo: Yes, I agree. I write cross-genre as well, and I've browsed your collection. Golem was the one I was like, “Ooh, yes, I like that one.” I haven't read it yet, it's on my list. I think when you're cross-genre, my people come to my store as well, and it's like, “Okay, I'm interested in lots of things, but this is the one by this author that I'm interested in.” Whereas with other authors who only write one type of thing, then I might not like any of their stuff. So I think there are definitely pros and cons and different ways into our world. I also wanted to ask you about the differences in business. Obviously you ran this treatment centre and there were physical humans on all sides, and now you've got a business as an author. So what have you learned in business from what you used to do and what you do now? PD: Okay. You're right. The treatment centre industry is very different from what I'm doing now, but it's still people. Treat those people right, have integrity. If you say you're going to do something, follow through with it. My word is my bond type of thing. That definitely has fed into the writing and publishing industry that I'm in now in a huge way. Just connecting with people is, to me, the biggest part of it. I mean, treatment centres, you've got to connect with people. When I would market the treatment centre, where would I go? I would go to hospitals, residential facilities, detoxes, and talk to them about my programme and why they should be referring clients there. It's the same thing here. Why should you be reading my books? You get there through interviews like what I'm doing here with you. Other podcasts. You get there by doing Facebook Lives, TikTok. I haven't started TikTok Lives yet, but I actually love that platform. I'm falling in love with it. IG Lives, anything like that where you're talking to people and you're making a connection with those people. Through that, I've gathered so many different types of readers who are like, “Yes, I'll give this book a shot.” And then they read it and they're like, “Hey, this is really good, and I'm going to read another book.” With my books, I have very different books. Golem is my psychological horror novel. It's my slow-burn psychological horror novel, heavily inspired by Frankenstein and the Pygmalion myth. It's my first true horror book that I published. Then there's Jigglyspot and the Zero Intellect, which is inspired by B-rated '80s horror movies and the old grindhouse movies of the '70s, and it's mind manipulation. It's just wild and bizarre. And then The Sleepy Hollow Incident is my Gothic tale—it's like a dark romance mixed in with Gothic horror. So I always try to put something for everyone that's out there. To me, when I'm writing, it's got to be about depth, psychological depth. I always refer to my books to be like peeling layers off a Texas-sized onion. The more you read, the more in-depth you get into not only the characters, but the story. It's just something that comes out of me. It's part of me. That's the way I always have to do it. I always have to put that depth in there. To me, that's good storytelling. When I grew up, I read a lot of classic literature. Yes, Edgar Allan Poe, but also Dante's Inferno, Milton's Paradise Lost, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, the Brontë sisters. Keep going. Ray Bradbury, Ayn Rand, Daphne du Maurier, Shirley Jackson. Those to me are my books that I absolutely love. So there's a sweet science in today's fast-paced, social media type of world in marrying the depth of the old classic literature and the entertainment value that is required today for being an author. There's that sweet science behind it, and I love just hitting that nail on the head every time. Jo: So did you ever pitch traditional publishing, or have you thought about going that way? Because I also find that a lot of horror actually sits very close to literary. Like, I read a lot more literary horror than I do in some of the other genres. PD: Correct. So in the beginning, yes. Not in a long time. I maybe went to a couple of indie publishers, but as far as traditional, the Big Five publishers, I have an aversion to them for a big reason. I know people who have worked in that industry that have told me some pretty bad horror stories about those places. So I haven't sent anything to that type of place in a very, very long time. Maybe close to 20 years. Indie publishers, the small presses, yes, here and there, but even then, I'm always moving at a fast pace. So if I've got a book and I'm sending it out as a query letter, by the time that query letter is even read, I'm almost done publishing. I love that aspect of it. The control of my story, where I know where this character's going. And listen, I've got my beta readers, I've got my ARC readers. They're there to tell me, “Hey, maybe you should change this or change that.” Whether I take that advice or not, of course my editor too, is really up to me. I always put out the book that I know is the one I want to read. And to me, I haven't gone wrong in doing so. I know with traditional publishing, you sometimes get too many thoughts in the pot there. Let's put it that way. Jo: Okay, so coming back to being indie then. You mentioned Amazon earlier, but you have a store where you sell direct. Many authors are doing this now, but it can be a challenge. So what have you found are the pros and cons of your direct store? What's working? Any lessons there? PD: Okay. So I use a place called Big Cartel. They're the platform where the books are on. They're hosting my website, PDAlleva.com. The big challenge was actually just starting it. It was so overwhelming. How do I put this on there? At the time, I've got all these books, so how do I present them? I'm even going to be doing another revamp with it too, because I want better pictures—taking pictures of the books, stuff like that, instead of just having the covers on there. I also have a lot of shirts that I'm selling. So I think the biggest challenge is just getting on there and starting it. Then of course, you've got to learn a whole new platform, and the mechanics, and how people are going to be downloading, and how that's done on an e-book versus a print version of the book. So it's a huge learning curve that you've really got to put your focus on and give it time. What most people like in indie publishing is signed copies. It's a huge part of indie publishing, selling those signed copies. People love a signed copy, and that's primarily what my website is for. You can order signed copies from me. I also use a place called IngramSpark, and they're more like a distributor. They're used by everyone. They've been around for a very long time. Traditional publishing uses them too, and they're just distributing your novel. I'd say about a year ago, maybe two years ago, they started where you can sell your books on discount through them as well. So I have that on my website too, where you're just clicking on the book and you're pretty much going directly to their site and you're buying paperbacks and hardbacks at a discount. That's going well too. For the most part, people are definitely coming to my site because they want the signed copies. A good thing with indie publishing is limited editions, first print copies, special editions. That type of stuff really just takes off. People love to see that, especially in the indie community. You can sell them too. I go to a few different book conventions during the year, and the limited editions are there. Like I said, people love the signed copies. They love being a part of that and getting that signed copy. They treasure it, just like I treasure my books too. I'm not referring to my books that I've written, but books that I have as well. I love my e-reader, don't get me wrong, but I still prefer the physical copy—the paperback, and even more so than the paperback, the hardback. So people love those signed copies, and that's why I created the website, to sell on there for them. Jo: Yes, I mean, we're getting to a point now though where I think some people are questioning the pros and cons of it. For example, you doing the signed copies—I don't do that from my Shopify store because I don't want to hold stock and I don't want to deal with postage. So I only do it when I do a Kickstarter. I've just finished one recently, Bones of the Deep, and I'm going up to the printer, and I'm going to sign a couple of hundred copies and then they do the postage. That's the only way I'm willing to do it because of the pain of getting books to your house, signing them, getting them in the post. So how do you manage that practically? PD: Okay, so the inventory's there. I don't go and sign everything right away. I just keep the inventory. Once somebody buys the book, then I'll pull out the book, log it and all that good fun stuff, sign it, and then ship it out immediately. Here in my country, we get discounts at the United States Post Office because they're books. So they pass that shipping cost over to the reader too, so it's a little bit cheaper for shipping. I'll just take books once or twice a week over to the United States Postal Service and ship those books out. I don't sign them until I actually get that order. Jo: How many do you have in your house? It's the holding stock of all the backlist that is the problem. PD: Ooh, gotcha. All right. That's why I have a two-car garage. But here's the thing, I won't order 500 at a time. I'll order 20 at a time. Jo: Okay. Right. PD: When I see that inventory's getting low, I'll order another 20 at a time. Jo: And you get those from IngramSpark? PD: Correct. When the new one comes out, maybe at that time I'm just selling those, bringing those to conventions that I go to. Or maybe doing a sale on those books at that time to get rid of the inventory so it's not sitting around anymore. Jo: I think that's so important. Then like you mentioned, you do T-shirts or shirts. That is also really hard because of sizing. So is that all print on demand? PD: Yes. So I don't really hold the stock on the shirts. When I get an order, whatever the size is at that time, I go directly to the place and order it. I use a place called Sublimation Station that's here in Orlando. They do great all-over print T-shirts. They're fantastic. I just did one for The Sleepy Hollow Incident. So The Sleepy Hollow Incident is one long story, and it's broken up into four books. Each book has its own. The covers are fantastic. I use a lady named Cherie Foxley. She's a phenomenal cover designer. So the shirts are, like, book one is on the front of one shirt with book two on the back, and then the second shirt is book three on the cover and book four on the back. However, I can customise those. I just did a giveaway in my Facebook group and I let people know I could customise them, and she wanted book one and book four, so I just got that and sent it out to her. Now, if people go ahead and order that on the website, I can just order it right away from them, boom, and that place will get it shipped right then and there. Jo: Right, so they do the shipping. These are all sort of practical things that people need to answer because I feel like sometimes it's like, “Oh, yes, having a direct store is great,” but there's actually quite a lot of work that goes into it, isn't there? PD: There is. There's a lot of work. You're pretty much opening almost like your own brick-and-mortar store at that point. You just don't have walk-in traffic coming in—your traffic is all coming online. So there is a lot to it, but it's worth it. If you're a self-published author or even a small indie press, it's good to have. Because like I said, people love the signed copies. Jo: When you say it's worth it, is it worth it financially or just because you like to serve the customers in that way? PD: Both. Jo: Right. So it is financially worth it for you? PD: Yes. Jo: I was talking to a friend of mine and saying, are you valuing your time in terms of things like taking the books to the post office and stuff like that? Do you find it eats into your writing at all, or do you just manage it all separately? PD: No, I manage it separately. So I'm an early morning riser. I get up at 3:00 in the morning, and that's when I write my books or do editing or brainstorming. I'm about to write a new novella now called The Adam and Eve Story, which is actually based on a little-known CIA shelved book from the 1990s called The Adam and Eve Story as well. So I've been brainstorming that, and I was doing that this morning. I get up at 3:00 a.m. and I do my writing, and by the time the kids are up and by the time the wife is up, it's like 8:00 a.m. is rolling around and I'm pretty much done at that point. Then I have my days. Tuesday I'm completely working from home and I do my thing in the morning, and then the rest of the day is marketing, fulfilling orders, stuff like that. On the days when I'm going to do group facilitation, I'll of course still get up at 3:00 o'clock in the morning, and then I'll plan out the day. I've got an hour between this group and I can go ahead and do that, and I'm already there so it's not a problem. The post office is right around the corner. You kind of figure out all the logistics for yourself. There are some days, like on Monday, I don't facilitate groups until the afternoon, so I've got the whole morning to work on marketing and do other things, and fulfilment. Then of course Saturday's a big day for that too. Jo: Oh, that's good. I feel like people always need to know how to balance their time, but it sounds like you manage, because at 3:00 a.m., as you say, there's not much else to do other than write. You mentioned marketing, and you have a Substack, pdsalternativefiction.substack.com. Talk about that and serialising fiction and how Substack works. Because I feel like a load of people are jumping in but might not necessarily know how it works, especially for fiction. PD: Correct. It is becoming quite popular out there. I think the one before that was Patreon, and Patreon is pretty big for that too, kind of the same thing. I wanted to start something and just get the work out there. I was very interested when Amazon came out a few years ago with what was called Vella. They kind of started that. I was like, “This is kind of cool.” Couple chapters at a time. I'm writing the books anyway, so why don't we kick this off and see how it goes—a type of experiment. I had a lot of fun doing it. I started on October 4th, 2024. I've done four novels so far. One is still going, which is Volume 3 of my Dark Veil serie— that's a sci-fi series. I wrote three other novels. The Hypnotist, which is a thriller, heavy on the sci-fi and a tad of horror in there too. And then I wrote Girl on a Mission, which is my psychological thriller, and then Cat Fight, which is a horror novel—all within that time. I think I finished all three of those novels in January, and then the first week of February they were all pretty much done. Now what I'm doing is, I went paid recently on the Substack. It's like everything else that's out there—chip away, chip away. I fell into that hole where they say, “Hey, we can promote you and get people to sign up for your newsletter.” And I'll be honest with you, don't do it. It's not worth it. You spend money, and what happens is they're what I refer to as dead leads. They don't click. You wind up shuffling them off after three to six months, because they're just not clicking. Everybody gets a star rating, so you know—are they clicking, are they staying on, are they not? So I got rid of pretty much all of those people, and I'll never do that again. It's got to be done organically. That's why when you read my books, especially the new books, towards the end it'll say, “Sign up for my newsletter.” I do more with that newsletter too. If you're on the free tier, every month I do a monthly newsletter, which is just me talking about updates, things going on in the publishing industry, things going on with me. My daughter puts together a weekly Horror and Sci-Fi Chronicles newsletter, which gives what's going on in new releases in the industry—sci-fi, horror, books, movies, television. She does deep dives into industry tropes, historical tidbits, and a weekly quiz. I also do a monthly Terrors and Tales newsletter. I started this last year, and it was a quarterly newsletter. It's other authors who are new, upcoming, never been published before, looking to get published. It's a chance for them to be on the newsletter where they have a flash fiction story or poem or even a short story that I publish for them. It's called the Terrors and Tales newsletter. What happened is I would put out calls for submissions. And a place called Duotrope—I don't even know who these people are, but all of a sudden I got an email from them stating, “Hey, we found that you're looking for submissions, and we posted your link. We hope you don't mind.” I'm like, “No, of course I don't mind.” I got so many submissions from that one link. I'm like, “Okay.” Do I really want to deny people? I'm not like that. I want to help promote other authors. I know what it's like when you're new and upcoming, no matter what age you are, to say, “Hey, here's a platform for you to see your stuff in print.” Obviously, I read through them just to make sure they're up to a certain standard, but for the most part, if you submit, you're getting in there. With Duotrope, I'm like, I have enough here to put out one a month. So in May 2026, the first one goes out, and then I'll have one each month until December, and then who knows? In 2027 I might go back to quarterly. I might get enough submissions to just keep it going once a month. So that's the Terrors and Tales newsletter, and it usually comes out towards the end of the month—the last two weeks. I have nothing to do with it in terms of content. None of my stories are on there. None of my poems are on there. None of my flash fiction. It's all other authors, just for them to see their name in print, see their work in print, share it with their friends, and put something on their resume, and to encourage people to keep reading and keep the craft going. Jo: When you say in print, you don't mean in physical print? PD: Oh, I mean in the newsletter. I'm sorry. Jo: I think that's important, or you're going to get a lot more submissions, and you will need to do publishing contracts and all that kind of thing. I think that's the difficult thing with a Substack newsletter approach—it's difficult to know where to categorise it. Is it marketing? Is it publishing? It's all of these things, I suppose. A bit like this podcast, it's all kinds of things. In terms of Substack actually making money on its own or leading to book sales that make money, do you think it does serve that purpose? PD: I think I've gotten more book sales through it, and also ARC readers who are enjoying the books and giving reviews. As far as the paid tiers, that's kind of a little bit slow, and that's where I'm saying chip away at it. Keep it up there. Keep it going. Over time, you're going to build that type of audience where it's going to be like, “Hey, this is financially feasible for me to continue to do this.” That's the response that I'm getting out there. Jo: Yes. Before, you mentioned you were doing Facebook Lives and you're looking at TikTok, but— Is anything else working for you in book marketing? If people have a few books and they're like, “What is working for book marketing right now?”—what do you recommend? PD: Okay. For me, the thing that has made the most sense is making sure the reader knows the book is out there through some sort of social media. I've had really good success on TikTok since the beginning of this year especially. I started it about a year ago, year and a half ago, but then my father got sick and passed away, and it was a new venture and I put it off to the side. I really got the flavour going at the beginning of this year. February, March of this year. It seems to be going really well, and I've noticed an uptick in sales from just getting the videos out there and getting it in front of people's eyes. There's an event I'm going to in August called ShiverCon, which is a pretty big event. After that event, I'm going to look to see what type of inventory I have left over from the event, and I'm going to start doing TikTok Lives. I'm very comfortable being on camera. So I'm like, “Yeah, that seems like a good way to go.” I know there's a few other horror authors who are doing it and having good success with TikTok Lives as well. A guy named Jason Davis is doing really well with TikTok Lives, and a few other authors too. I'm like, “Yes, I could definitely do that.” I want to get up to a certain number of people, and I want these events. I'm going to one in July, and then ShiverCon in August. Once those are done, I'm going to have more time to do the TikTok Lives. As far as Facebook is concerned, what I've had really great success with on Facebook is being in the groups and meeting other authors. That's not always about my book per se, but whatever books I'm reading, I'm posting my reviews about those books in those groups and meeting readers. Then obviously, they always say the three-to-one rule. Post about three different books and then post about your own book, whether you're doing a sale or a new release or a re-release or whatever. I've found success through that just by interacting with readers. When they post a book, I'll comment, “Hey, I've read that book,” or, “Hey, that book looks really cool. I like the review.” Commenting on it so you start these relationships with people who are out there in these Facebook groups. I've recently started my own Facebook reader group. I kind of go with the same thing. Last night, we did a live reading for another author. I like other authors to be on there. I always like to think, what does the reader need? What do I want to see as a reader? I would love to hear live readings from authors. So I kind of learn about them, learn about the book, and get a live reading. To me, that's a good way to go. So I started that recently, and it seems to be going well. I've got a new folk horror coming out soon, and I put out a call for ARC readers and got a fantastic response from that. That kind of drives the sales anyway, because when you get those reviews, then people see it gives credibility to the book, and then other people see it, and then they're buying it too. So that comes from the groups. There's so many wheels to spin in this industry as an indie author when you're doing this, especially when you're doing 99% of it on your own. You've got to get out there. No one's going to know your book exists if you don't get out there and tell somebody about it. Jo: Brilliant. Well, tell us— Where can people find you and your books online? PD: All right. Perfect. So obviously I'm on Amazon like everyone. Most of my books are worldwide, so you'll find them in Barnes & Noble as well. And of course, if you want the signed copies or discount print books, I always lead people straight to my website, PDAlleva.com. Then, of course, if you go to my Substack, you'll get all the updates, and you'll get all the links to purchase or find out where they are on Amazon and Barnes & Noble and things like that too. Jo: Brilliant. Well, thanks so much for your time, Paul. That was great. PD: Thank you very much for having me. It was great chatting with you. The post Writing Cross-Genre, Selling Direct, And Serialising On SubStack With P.D. Alleva first appeared on The Creative Penn.

Rebeccasode! Kirk and Rebecca answer patron/member emails. June 12, 2026This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/KIRK to get 10% off your first month.Support us by... Become a member: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCOUZWV1DRtHtpP2H48S7iiw/joinBecome a patron: https://www.patreon.com/PsychologyInSeattleContact us/more info... Email: https://www.psychologyinseattle.com/contactAbout Dr. Kirk: https://www.psychologyinseattle.com/about-dr-kirk-hondaWebsite: https://www.psychologyinseattle.comGet stuff... Merch: https://psychologyinseattle-shop.fourthwall.com/KIRKgram (like Cameo): https://www.psychologyinseattle.com/kirkgramThe Psychology In Seattle Podcast ®Trigger Warning: This episode may include topics such as assault, trauma, and discrimination. If necessary, listeners are encouraged to refrain from listening and care for their safety and well-being. Disclaimer: The content provided is for educational, informational, and entertainment purposes only. Nothing here constitutes personal or professional consultation, therapy, diagnosis, or creates a counselor-client relationship. Topics discussed may generate differing points of view. If you participate (by being a guest, submitting a question, or commenting) you must do so with the knowledge that we cannot control reactions or responses from others, which may not agree with you or feel unfair. Your participation on this site is at your own risk, accepting full responsibility for any liability or harm that may result. Anything you write here may be used for discussion or endorsement of the podcast. Opinions and views expressed by the host and guest hosts are personal views. Although we take precautions and fact check, they should not be considered facts and the opinions may change. Opinions posted by participants (such as comments) are not those of the hosts. Readers should not rely on any information found here and should perform due diligence before taking any action. For a more extensive description of factors for you to consider, please see www.psychologyinseattle.com