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Questioning Everything Was Just the StartThis wasn't a planned episode. This was me hitting record because I couldn't keep carrying everything in my head.Lately, I've been tired. Not just physically. Mentally. Spiritually. Creatively. And it had me asking some uncomfortable questions. About the podcast. About my direction. About whether I'm burned out or just done.Somewhere in all of that, one question kept coming back up:What's my why? And maybe more importantly… is it even mine?In this episode, I talk through burnout, pressure, comparison, and the boxes we put ourselves in trying to be liked, understood, or validated. I don't have a neat answer. I'm not teaching a framework. I'm just being honest about what it feels like to realize the way you've been moving no longer fits.If you've ever felt disconnected from something you once loved, or stuck trying to live up to expectations that aren't really yours, this one's for you.No perfection. No polish. Just a real moment in the middle of a shift.It's About DAMN Time SegmentIt's about damn time I stop moving for everyone else and start defining my why for myself.D.A.M.N. ChallengeTake some time this week to discover or rediscover your why. Not the one that sounds good. Not the one that makes other people comfortable. The one that actually belongs to you.Write it down. Sit with it. Let it change if it needs to.

Narcissism/Living with a Narcissist / How to Get Rid of One With Guest Angie AtkinsonJournalist, author and certified life coach who also blogs and studies the science that is social media (and related focus areas) on an ongoing basis, among a variety of other passions.Creatively charged and organizationally different. Angie goes through the stages of a life with a narcissist.Watch Conversation Herehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xsO9eTTTXQAListen Here on Spotify with B Rad and Angie on Spotifyhttps://open.spotify.com/episode/20bPiZV7Gq9e30YVWKd6NA?si=ix2NYR_xQrOVAuivC1AMow Follow B Rad Celebrity Hairstylist on Instagramhttps://www.instagram.com/bradcelebrityhairstylist

From Palantir and Two Sigma to building Goodfire into the poster-child for actionable mechanistic interpretability, Mark Bissell (Member of Technical Staff) and Myra Deng (Head of Product) are trying to turn “peeking inside the model” into a repeatable production workflow by shipping APIs, landing real enterprise deployments, and now scaling the bet with a recent $150M Series B funding round at a $1.25B valuation.In this episode, we go far beyond the usual “SAEs are cool” take. We talk about Goodfire's core bet: that the AI lifecycle is still fundamentally broken because the only reliable control we have is data and we post-train, RLHF, and fine-tune by “slurping supervision through a straw,” hoping the model picks up the right behaviors while quietly absorbing the wrong ones. Goodfire's answer is to build a bi-directional interface between humans and models: read what's happening inside, edit it surgically, and eventually use interpretability during training so customization isn't just brute-force guesswork.Mark and Myra walk through what that looks like when you stop treating interpretability like a lab demo and start treating it like infrastructure: lightweight probes that add near-zero latency, token-level safety filters that can run at inference time, and interpretability workflows that survive messy constraints (multilingual inputs, synthetic→real transfer, regulated domains, no access to sensitive data). We also get a live window into what “frontier-scale interp” means operationally (i.e. steering a trillion-parameter model in real time by targeting internal features) plus why the same tooling generalizes cleanly from language models to genomics, medical imaging, and “pixel-space” world models.We discuss:* Myra + Mark's path: Palantir (health systems, forward-deployed engineering) → Goodfire early team; Two Sigma → Head of Product, translating frontier interpretability research into a platform and real-world deployments* What “interpretability” actually means in practice: not just post-hoc poking, but a broader “science of deep learning” approach across the full AI lifecycle (data curation → post-training → internal representations → model design)* Why post-training is the first big wedge: “surgical edits” for unintended behaviors likereward hacking, sycophancy, noise learned during customization plus the dream of targeted unlearning and bias removal without wrecking capabilities* SAEs vs probes in the real world: why SAE feature spaces sometimes underperform classifiers trained on raw activations for downstream detection tasks (hallucination, harmful intent, PII), and what that implies about “clean concept spaces”* Rakuten in production: deploying interpretability-based token-level PII detection at inference time to prevent routing private data to downstream providers plus the gnarly constraints: no training on real customer PII, synthetic→real transfer, English + Japanese, and tokenization quirks* Why interp can be operationally cheaper than LLM-judge guardrails: probes are lightweight, low-latency, and don't require hosting a second large model in the loop* Real-time steering at frontier scale: a demo of steering Kimi K2 (~1T params) live and finding features via SAE pipelines, auto-labeling via LLMs, and toggling a “Gen-Z slang” feature across multiple layers without breaking tool use* Hallucinations as an internal signal: the case that models have latent uncertainty / “user-pleasing” circuitry you can detect and potentially mitigate more directly than black-box methods* Steering vs prompting: the emerging view that activation steering and in-context learning are more closely connected than people think, including work mapping between the two (even for jailbreak-style behaviors)* Interpretability for science: using the same tooling across domains (genomics, medical imaging, materials) to debug spurious correlations and extract new knowledge up to and including early biomarker discovery work with major partners* World models + “pixel-space” interpretability: why vision/video models make concepts easier to see, how that accelerates the feedback loop, and why robotics/world-model partners are especially interesting design partners* The north star: moving from “data in, weights out” to intentional model design where experts can impart goals and constraints directly, not just via reward signals and brute-force post-training—Goodfire AI* Website: https://goodfire.ai* LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/goodfire-ai/* X: https://x.com/GoodfireAIMyra Deng* Website: https://myradeng.com/* LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/myra-deng/* X: https://x.com/myra_dengMark Bissell* LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mark-bissell/* X: https://x.com/MarkMBissellFull Video EpisodeTimestamps00:00:00 Introduction00:00:05 Introduction to the Latent Space Podcast and Guests from Goodfire00:00:29 What is Goodfire? Mission and Focus on Interpretability00:01:01 Goodfire's Practical Approach to Interpretability00:01:37 Goodfire's Series B Fundraise Announcement00:02:04 Backgrounds of Mark and Myra from Goodfire00:02:51 Team Structure and Roles at Goodfire00:05:13 What is Interpretability? Definitions and Techniques00:05:30 Understanding Errors00:07:29 Post-training vs. Pre-training Interpretability Applications00:08:51 Using Interpretability to Remove Unwanted Behaviors00:10:09 Grokking, Double Descent, and Generalization in Models00:10:15 404 Not Found Explained00:12:06 Subliminal Learning and Hidden Biases in Models00:14:07 How Goodfire Chooses Research Directions and Projects00:15:00 Troubleshooting Errors00:16:04 Limitations of SAEs and Probes in Interpretability00:18:14 Rakuten Case Study: Production Deployment of Interpretability00:20:45 Conclusion00:21:12 Efficiency Benefits of Interpretability Techniques00:21:26 Live Demo: Real-Time Steering in a Trillion Parameter Model00:25:15 How Steering Features are Identified and Labeled00:26:51 Detecting and Mitigating Hallucinations Using Interpretability00:31:20 Equivalence of Activation Steering and Prompting00:34:06 Comparing Steering with Fine-Tuning and LoRA Techniques00:36:04 Model Design and the Future of Intentional AI Development00:38:09 Getting Started in Mechinterp: Resources, Programs, and Open Problems00:40:51 Industry Applications and the Rise of Mechinterp in Practice00:41:39 Interpretability for Code Models and Real-World Usage00:43:07 Making Steering Useful for More Than Stylistic Edits00:46:17 Applying Interpretability to Healthcare and Scientific Discovery00:49:15 Why Interpretability is Crucial in High-Stakes Domains like Healthcare00:52:03 Call for Design Partners Across Domains00:54:18 Interest in World Models and Visual Interpretability00:57:22 Sci-Fi Inspiration: Ted Chiang and Interpretability01:00:14 Interpretability, Safety, and Alignment Perspectives01:04:27 Weak-to-Strong Generalization and Future Alignment Challenges01:05:38 Final Thoughts and Hiring/Collaboration Opportunities at GoodfireTranscriptShawn Wang [00:00:05]: So welcome to the Latent Space pod. We're back in the studio with our special MechInterp co-host, Vibhu. Welcome. Mochi, Mochi's special co-host. And Mochi, the mechanistic interpretability doggo. We have with us Mark and Myra from Goodfire. Welcome. Thanks for having us on. Maybe we can sort of introduce Goodfire and then introduce you guys. How do you introduce Goodfire today?Myra Deng [00:00:29]: Yeah, it's a great question. So Goodfire, we like to say, is an AI research lab that focuses on using interpretability to understand, learn from, and design AI models. And we really believe that interpretability will unlock the new generation, next frontier of safe and powerful AI models. That's our description right now, and I'm excited to dive more into the work we're doing to make that happen.Shawn Wang [00:00:55]: Yeah. And there's always like the official description. Is there an understatement? Is there an unofficial one that sort of resonates more with a different audience?Mark Bissell [00:01:01]: Well, being an AI research lab that's focused on interpretability, there's obviously a lot of people have a lot that they think about when they think of interpretability. And I think we have a pretty broad definition of what that means and the types of places that can be applied. And in particular, applying it in production scenarios, in high stakes industries, and really taking it sort of from the research world into the real world. Which, you know. It's a new field, so that hasn't been done all that much. And we're excited about actually seeing that sort of put into practice.Shawn Wang [00:01:37]: Yeah, I would say it wasn't too long ago that Anthopic was like still putting out like toy models or superposition and that kind of stuff. And I wouldn't have pegged it to be this far along. When you and I talked at NeurIPS, you were talking a little bit about your production use cases and your customers. And then not to bury the lead, today we're also announcing the fundraise, your Series B. $150 million. $150 million at a 1.25B valuation. Congrats, Unicorn.Mark Bissell [00:02:02]: Thank you. Yeah, no, things move fast.Shawn Wang [00:02:04]: We were talking to you in December and already some big updates since then. Let's dive, I guess, into a bit of your backgrounds as well. Mark, you were at Palantir working on health stuff, which is really interesting because the Goodfire has some interesting like health use cases. I don't know how related they are in practice.Mark Bissell [00:02:22]: Yeah, not super related, but I don't know. It was helpful context to know what it's like. Just to work. Just to work with health systems and generally in that domain. Yeah.Shawn Wang [00:02:32]: And Mara, you were at Two Sigma, which actually I was also at Two Sigma back in the day. Wow, nice.Myra Deng [00:02:37]: Did we overlap at all?Shawn Wang [00:02:38]: No, this is when I was briefly a software engineer before I became a sort of developer relations person. And now you're head of product. What are your sort of respective roles, just to introduce people to like what all gets done in Goodfire?Mark Bissell [00:02:51]: Yeah, prior to Goodfire, I was at Palantir for about three years as a forward deployed engineer, now a hot term. Wasn't always that way. And as a technical lead on the health care team and at Goodfire, I'm a member of the technical staff. And honestly, that I think is about as specific as like as as I could describe myself because I've worked on a range of things. And, you know, it's it's a fun time to be at a team that's still reasonably small. I think when I joined one of the first like ten employees, now we're above 40, but still, it looks like there's always a mix of research and engineering and product and all of the above. That needs to get done. And I think everyone across the team is, you know, pretty, pretty switch hitter in the roles they do. So I think you've seen some of the stuff that I worked on related to image models, which was sort of like a research demo. More recently, I've been working on our scientific discovery team with some of our life sciences partners, but then also building out our core platform for more of like flexing some of the kind of MLE and developer skills as well.Shawn Wang [00:03:53]: Very generalist. And you also had like a very like a founding engineer type role.Myra Deng [00:03:58]: Yeah, yeah.Shawn Wang [00:03:59]: So I also started as I still am a member of technical staff, did a wide range of things from the very beginning, including like finding our office space and all of this, which is we both we both visited when you had that open house thing. It was really nice.Myra Deng [00:04:13]: Thank you. Thank you. Yeah. Plug to come visit our office.Shawn Wang [00:04:15]: It looked like it was like 200 people. It has room for 200 people. But you guys are like 10.Myra Deng [00:04:22]: For a while, it was very empty. But yeah, like like Mark, I spend. A lot of my time as as head of product, I think product is a bit of a weird role these days, but a lot of it is thinking about how do we take our frontier research and really apply it to the most important real world problems and how does that then translate into a platform that's repeatable or a product and working across, you know, the engineering and research teams to make that happen and also communicating to the world? Like, what is interpretability? What is it used for? What is it good for? Why is it so important? All of these things are part of my day-to-day as well.Shawn Wang [00:05:01]: I love like what is things because that's a very crisp like starting point for people like coming to a field. They all do a fun thing. Vibhu, why don't you want to try tackling what is interpretability and then they can correct us.Vibhu Sapra [00:05:13]: Okay, great. So I think like one, just to kick off, it's a very interesting role to be head of product, right? Because you guys, at least as a lab, you're more of an applied interp lab, right? Which is pretty different than just normal interp, like a lot of background research. But yeah. You guys actually ship an API to try these things. You have Ember, you have products around it, which not many do. Okay. What is interp? So basically you're trying to have an understanding of what's going on in model, like in the model, in the internal. So different approaches to do that. You can do probing, SAEs, transcoders, all this stuff. But basically you have an, you have a hypothesis. You have something that you want to learn about what's happening in a model internals. And then you're trying to solve that from there. You can do stuff like you can, you know, you can do activation mapping. You can try to do steering. There's a lot of stuff that you can do, but the key question is, you know, from input to output, we want to have a better understanding of what's happening and, you know, how can we, how can we adjust what's happening on the model internals? How'd I do?Mark Bissell [00:06:12]: That was really good. I think that was great. I think it's also a, it's kind of a minefield of a, if you ask 50 people who quote unquote work in interp, like what is interpretability, you'll probably get 50 different answers. And. Yeah. To some extent also like where, where good fire sits in the space. I think that we're an AI research company above all else. And interpretability is a, is a set of methods that we think are really useful and worth kind of specializing in, in order to accomplish the goals we want to accomplish. But I think we also sort of see some of the goals as even more broader as, as almost like the science of deep learning and just taking a not black box approach to kind of any part of the like AI development life cycle, whether that. That means using interp for like data curation while you're training your model or for understanding what happened during post-training or for the, you know, understanding activations and sort of internal representations, what is in there semantically. And then a lot of sort of exciting updates that were, you know, are sort of also part of the, the fundraise around bringing interpretability to training, which I don't think has been done all that much before. A lot of this stuff is sort of post-talk poking at models as opposed to. To actually using this to intentionally design them.Shawn Wang [00:07:29]: Is this post-training or pre-training or is that not a useful.Myra Deng [00:07:33]: Currently focused on post-training, but there's no reason the techniques wouldn't also work in pre-training.Shawn Wang [00:07:38]: Yeah. It seems like it would be more active, applicable post-training because basically I'm thinking like rollouts or like, you know, having different variations of a model that you can tweak with the, with your steering. Yeah.Myra Deng [00:07:50]: And I think in a lot of the news that you've seen in, in, on like Twitter or whatever, you've seen a lot of unintended. Side effects come out of post-training processes, you know, overly sycophantic models or models that exhibit strange reward hacking behavior. I think these are like extreme examples. There's also, you know, very, uh, mundane, more mundane, like enterprise use cases where, you know, they try to customize or post-train a model to do something and it learns some noise or it doesn't appropriately learn the target task. And a big question that we've always had is like, how do you use your understanding of what the model knows and what it's doing to actually guide the learning process?Shawn Wang [00:08:26]: Yeah, I mean, uh, you know, just to anchor this for people, uh, one of the biggest controversies of last year was 4.0 GlazeGate. I've never heard of GlazeGate. I didn't know that was what it was called. The other one, they called it that on the blog post and I was like, well, how did OpenAI call it? Like officially use that term. And I'm like, that's funny, but like, yeah, I guess it's the pitch that if they had worked a good fire, they wouldn't have avoided it. Like, you know what I'm saying?Myra Deng [00:08:51]: I think so. Yeah. Yeah.Mark Bissell [00:08:53]: I think that's certainly one of the use cases. I think. Yeah. Yeah. I think the reason why post-training is a place where this makes a lot of sense is a lot of what we're talking about is surgical edits. You know, you want to be able to have expert feedback, very surgically change how your model is doing, whether that is, you know, removing a certain behavior that it has. So, you know, one of the things that we've been looking at or is, is another like common area where you would want to make a somewhat surgical edit is some of the models that have say political bias. Like you look at Quen or, um, R1 and they have sort of like this CCP bias.Shawn Wang [00:09:27]: Is there a CCP vector?Mark Bissell [00:09:29]: Well, there's, there are certainly internal, yeah. Parts of the representation space where you can sort of see where that lives. Yeah. Um, and you want to kind of, you know, extract that piece out.Shawn Wang [00:09:40]: Well, I always say, you know, whenever you find a vector, a fun exercise is just like, make it very negative to see what the opposite of CCP is.Mark Bissell [00:09:47]: The super America, bald eagles flying everywhere. But yeah. So in general, like lots of post-training tasks where you'd want to be able to, to do that. Whether it's unlearning a certain behavior or, you know, some of the other kind of cases where this comes up is, are you familiar with like the, the grokking behavior? I mean, I know the machine learning term of grokking.Shawn Wang [00:10:09]: Yeah.Mark Bissell [00:10:09]: Sort of this like double descent idea of, of having a model that is able to learn a generalizing, a generalizing solution, as opposed to even if memorization of some task would suffice, you want it to learn the more general way of doing a thing. And so, you know, another. A way that you can think about having surgical access to a model's internals would be learn from this data, but learn in the right way. If there are many possible, you know, ways to, to do that. Can make interp solve the double descent problem?Shawn Wang [00:10:41]: Depends, I guess, on how you. Okay. So I, I, I viewed that double descent as a problem because then you're like, well, if the loss curves level out, then you're done, but maybe you're not done. Right. Right. But like, if you actually can interpret what is a generalizing or what you're doing. What is, what is still changing, even though the loss is not changing, then maybe you, you can actually not view it as a double descent problem. And actually you're just sort of translating the space in which you view loss and like, and then you have a smooth curve. Yeah.Mark Bissell [00:11:11]: I think that's certainly like the domain of, of problems that we're, that we're looking to get.Shawn Wang [00:11:15]: Yeah. To me, like double descent is like the biggest thing to like ML research where like, if you believe in scaling, then you don't need, you need to know where to scale. And. But if you believe in double descent, then you don't, you don't believe in anything where like anything levels off, like.Vibhu Sapra [00:11:30]: I mean, also tendentially there's like, okay, when you talk about the China vector, right. There's the subliminal learning work. It was from the anthropic fellows program where basically you can have hidden biases in a model. And as you distill down or, you know, as you train on distilled data, those biases always show up, even if like you explicitly try to not train on them. So, you know, it's just like another use case of. Okay. If we can interpret what's happening in post-training, you know, can we clear some of this? Can we even determine what's there? Because yeah, it's just like some worrying research that's out there that shows, you know, we really don't know what's going on.Mark Bissell [00:12:06]: That is. Yeah. I think that's the biggest sentiment that we're sort of hoping to tackle. Nobody knows what's going on. Right. Like subliminal learning is just an insane concept when you think about it. Right. Train a model on not even the logits, literally the output text of a bunch of random numbers. And now your model loves owls. And you see behaviors like that, that are just, they defy, they defy intuition. And, and there are mathematical explanations that you can get into, but. I mean.Shawn Wang [00:12:34]: It feels so early days. Objectively, there are a sequence of numbers that are more owl-like than others. There, there should be.Mark Bissell [00:12:40]: According to, according to certain models. Right. It's interesting. I think it only applies to models that were initialized from the same starting Z. Usually, yes.Shawn Wang [00:12:49]: But I mean, I think that's a, that's a cheat code because there's not enough compute. But like if you believe in like platonic representation, like probably it will transfer across different models as well. Oh, you think so?Mark Bissell [00:13:00]: I think of it more as a statistical artifact of models initialized from the same seed sort of. There's something that is like path dependent from that seed that might cause certain overlaps in the latent space and then sort of doing this distillation. Yeah. Like it pushes it towards having certain other tendencies.Vibhu Sapra [00:13:24]: Got it. I think there's like a bunch of these open-ended questions, right? Like you can't train in new stuff during the RL phase, right? RL only reorganizes weights and you can only do stuff that's somewhat there in your base model. You're not learning new stuff. You're just reordering chains and stuff. But okay. My broader question is when you guys work at an interp lab, how do you decide what to work on and what's kind of the thought process? Right. Because we can ramble for hours. Okay. I want to know this. I want to know that. But like, how do you concretely like, you know, what's the workflow? Okay. There's like approaches towards solving a problem, right? I can try prompting. I can look at chain of thought. I can train probes, SAEs. But how do you determine, you know, like, okay, is this going anywhere? Like, do we have set stuff? Just, you know, if you can help me with all that. Yeah.Myra Deng [00:14:07]: It's a really good question. I feel like we've always at the very beginning of the company thought about like, let's go and try to learn what isn't working in machine learning today. Whether that's talking to customers or talking to researchers at other labs, trying to understand both where the frontier is going and where things are really not falling apart today. And then developing a perspective on how we can push the frontier using interpretability methods. And so, you know, even our chief scientist, Tom, spends a lot of time talking to customers and trying to understand what real world problems are and then taking that back and trying to apply the current state of the art to those problems and then seeing where they fall down basically. And then using those failures or those shortcomings to understand what hills to climb when it comes to interpretability research. So like on the fundamental side, for instance, when we have done some work applying SAEs and probes, we've encountered, you know, some shortcomings in SAEs that we found a little bit surprising. And so have gone back to the drawing board and done work on that. And then, you know, we've done some work on better foundational interpreter models. And a lot of our team's research is focused on what is the next evolution beyond SAEs, for instance. And then when it comes to like control and design of models, you know, we tried steering with our first API and realized that it still fell short of black box techniques like prompting or fine tuning. And so went back to the drawing board and we're like, how do we make that not the case and how do we improve it beyond that? And one of our researchers, Ekdeep, who just joined is actually Ekdeep and Atticus are like steering experts and have spent a lot of time trying to figure out like, what is the research that enables us to actually do this in a much more powerful, robust way? So yeah, the answer is like, look at real world problems, try to translate that into a research agenda and then like hill climb on both of those at the same time.Shawn Wang [00:16:04]: Yeah. Mark has the steering CLI demo queued up, which we're going to go into in a sec. But I always want to double click on when you drop hints, like we found some problems with SAEs. Okay. What are they? You know, and then we can go into the demo. Yeah.Myra Deng [00:16:19]: I mean, I'm curious if you have more thoughts here as well, because you've done it in the healthcare domain. But I think like, for instance, when we do things like trying to detect behaviors within models that are harmful or like behaviors that a user might not want to have in their model. So hallucinations, for instance, harmful intent, PII, all of these things. We first tried using SAE probes for a lot of these tasks. So taking the feature activation space from SAEs and then training classifiers on top of that, and then seeing how well we can detect the properties that we might want to detect in model behavior. And we've seen in many cases that probes just trained on raw activations seem to perform better than SAE probes, which is a bit surprising if you think that SAEs are actually also capturing the concepts that you would want to capture cleanly and more surgically. And so that is an interesting observation. I don't think that is like, I'm not down on SAEs at all. I think there are many, many things they're useful for, but we have definitely run into cases where I think the concept space described by SAEs is not as clean and accurate as we would expect it to be for actual like real world downstream performance metrics.Mark Bissell [00:17:34]: Fair enough. Yeah. It's the blessing and the curse of unsupervised methods where you get to peek into the AI's mind. But sometimes you wish that you saw other things when you walked inside there. Although in the PII instance, I think weren't an SAE based approach actually did prove to be the most generalizable?Myra Deng [00:17:53]: It did work well in the case that we published with Rakuten. And I think a lot of the reasons it worked well was because we had a noisier data set. And so actually the blessing of unsupervised learning is that we actually got to get more meaningful, generalizable signal from SAEs when the data was noisy. But in other cases where we've had like good data sets, it hasn't been the case.Shawn Wang [00:18:14]: And just because you named Rakuten and I don't know if we'll get it another chance, like what is the overall, like what is Rakuten's usage or production usage? Yeah.Myra Deng [00:18:25]: So they are using us to essentially guardrail and inference time monitor their language model usage and their agent usage to detect things like PII so that they don't route private user information.Myra Deng [00:18:41]: And so that's, you know, going through all of their user queries every day. And that's something that we deployed with them a few months ago. And now we are actually exploring very early partnerships, not just with Rakuten, but with other people around how we can help with potentially training and customization use cases as well. Yeah.Shawn Wang [00:19:03]: And for those who don't know, like it's Rakuten is like, I think number one or number two e-commerce store in Japan. Yes. Yeah.Mark Bissell [00:19:10]: And I think that use case actually highlights a lot of like what it looks like to deploy things in practice that you don't always think about when you're doing sort of research tasks. So when you think about some of the stuff that came up there that's more complex than your idealized version of a problem, they were encountering things like synthetic to real transfer of methods. So they couldn't train probes, classifiers, things like that on actual customer data of PII. So what they had to do is use synthetic data sets. And then hope that that transfer is out of domain to real data sets. And so we can evaluate performance on the real data sets, but not train on customer PII. So that right off the bat is like a big challenge. You have multilingual requirements. So this needed to work for both English and Japanese text. Japanese text has all sorts of quirks, including tokenization behaviors that caused lots of bugs that caused us to be pulling our hair out. And then also a lot of tasks you'll see. You might make simplifying assumptions if you're sort of treating it as like the easiest version of the problem to just sort of get like general results where maybe you say you're classifying a sentence to say, does this contain PII? But the need that Rakuten had was token level classification so that you could precisely scrub out the PII. So as we learned more about the problem, you're sort of speaking about what that looks like in practice. Yeah. A lot of assumptions end up breaking. And that was just one instance where you. A problem that seems simple right off the bat ends up being more complex as you keep diving into it.Vibhu Sapra [00:20:41]: Excellent. One of the things that's also interesting with Interp is a lot of these methods are very efficient, right? So where you're just looking at a model's internals itself compared to a separate like guardrail, LLM as a judge, a separate model. One, you have to host it. Two, there's like a whole latency. So if you use like a big model, you have a second call. Some of the work around like self detection of hallucination, it's also deployed for efficiency, right? So if you have someone like Rakuten doing it in production live, you know, that's just another thing people should consider.Mark Bissell [00:21:12]: Yeah. And something like a probe is super lightweight. Yeah. It's no extra latency really. Excellent.Shawn Wang [00:21:17]: You have the steering demos lined up. So we were just kind of see what you got. I don't, I don't actually know if this is like the latest, latest or like alpha thing.Mark Bissell [00:21:26]: No, this is a pretty hacky demo from from a presentation that someone else on the team recently gave. So this will give a sense for, for technology. So you can see the steering and action. Honestly, I think the biggest thing that this highlights is that as we've been growing as a company and taking on kind of more and more ambitious versions of interpretability related problems, a lot of that comes to scaling up in various different forms. And so here you're going to see steering on a 1 trillion parameter model. This is Kimi K2. And so it's sort of fun that in addition to the research challenges, there are engineering challenges that we're now tackling. Cause for any of this to be sort of useful in production, you need to be thinking about what it looks like when you're using these methods on frontier models as opposed to sort of like toy kind of model organisms. So yeah, this was thrown together hastily, pretty fragile behind the scenes, but I think it's quite a fun demo. So screen sharing is on. So I've got two terminal sessions pulled up here. On the left is a forked version that we have of the Kimi CLI that we've got running to point at our custom hosted Kimi model. And then on the right is a set up that will allow us to steer on certain concepts. So I should be able to chat with Kimi over here. Tell it hello. This is running locally. So the CLI is running locally, but the Kimi server is running back to the office. Well, hopefully should be, um, that's too much to run on that Mac. Yeah. I think it's, uh, it takes a full, like each 100 node. I think it's like, you can. You can run it on eight GPUs, eight 100. So, so yeah, Kimi's running. We can ask it a prompt. It's got a forked version of our, uh, of the SG line code base that we've been working on. So I'm going to tell it, Hey, this SG line code base is slow. I think there's a bug. Can you try to figure it out? There's a big code base, so it'll, it'll spend some time doing this. And then on the right here, I'm going to initialize in real time. Some steering. Let's see here.Mark Bissell [00:23:33]: searching for any. Bugs. Feature ID 43205.Shawn Wang [00:23:38]: Yeah.Mark Bissell [00:23:38]: 20, 30, 40. So let me, uh, this is basically a feature that we found that inside Kimi seems to cause it to speak in Gen Z slang. And so on the left, it's still sort of thinking normally it might take, I don't know, 15 seconds for this to kick in, but then we're going to start hopefully seeing him do this code base is massive for real. So we're going to start. We're going to start seeing Kimi transition as the steering kicks in from normal Kimi to Gen Z Kimi and both in its chain of thought and its actual outputs.Mark Bissell [00:24:19]: And interestingly, you can see, you know, it's still able to call tools, uh, and stuff. It's um, it's purely sort of it's it's demeanor. And there are other features that we found for interesting things like concision. So that's more of a practical one. You can make it more concise. Um, the types of programs, uh, programming languages that uses, but yeah, as we're seeing it come in. Pretty good. Outputs.Shawn Wang [00:24:43]: Scheduler code is actually wild.Vibhu Sapra [00:24:46]: Yo, this code is actually insane, bro.Vibhu Sapra [00:24:53]: What's the process of training in SAE on this, or, you know, how do you label features? I know you guys put out a pretty cool blog post about, um, finding this like autonomous interp. Um, something. Something about how agents for interp is different than like coding agents. I don't know while this is spewing up, but how, how do we find feature 43, two Oh five. Yeah.Mark Bissell [00:25:15]: So in this case, um, we, our platform that we've been building out for a long time now supports all the sort of classic out of the box interp techniques that you might want to have like SAE training, probing things of that kind, I'd say the techniques for like vanilla SAEs are pretty well established now where. You take your model that you're interpreting, run a whole bunch of data through it, gather activations, and then yeah, pretty straightforward pipeline to train an SAE. There are a lot of different varieties. There's top KSAEs, batch top KSAEs, um, normal ReLU SAEs. And then once you have your sparse features to your point, assigning labels to them to actually understand that this is a gen Z feature, that's actually where a lot of the kind of magic happens. Yeah. And the most basic standard technique is look at all of your d input data set examples that cause this feature to fire most highly. And then you can usually pick out a pattern. So for this feature, If I've run a diverse enough data set through my model feature 43, two Oh five. Probably tends to fire on all the tokens that sounds like gen Z slang. You know, that's the, that's the time of year to be like, Oh, I'm in this, I'm in this Um, and, um, so, you know, you could have a human go through all 43,000 concepts andVibhu Sapra [00:26:34]: And I've got to ask the basic question, you know, can we get examples where it hallucinates, pass it through, see what feature activates for hallucinations? Can I just, you know, turn hallucination down?Myra Deng [00:26:51]: Oh, wow. You really predicted a project we're already working on right now, which is detecting hallucinations using interpretability techniques. And this is interesting because hallucinations is something that's very hard to detect. And it's like a kind of a hairy problem and something that black box methods really struggle with. Whereas like Gen Z, you could always train a simple classifier to detect that hallucinations is harder. But we've seen that models internally have some... Awareness of like uncertainty or some sort of like user pleasing behavior that leads to hallucinatory behavior. And so, yeah, we have a project that's trying to detect that accurately. And then also working on mitigating the hallucinatory behavior in the model itself as well.Shawn Wang [00:27:39]: Yeah, I would say most people are still at the level of like, oh, I would just turn temperature to zero and that turns off hallucination. And I'm like, well, that's a fundamental misunderstanding of how this works. Yeah.Mark Bissell [00:27:51]: Although, so part of what I like about that question is you, there are SAE based approaches that might like help you get at that. But oftentimes the beauty of SAEs and like we said, the curse is that they're unsupervised. So when you have a behavior that you deliberately would like to remove, and that's more of like a supervised task, often it is better to use something like probes and specifically target the thing that you're interested in reducing as opposed to sort of like hoping that when you fragment the latent space, one of the vectors that pops out.Vibhu Sapra [00:28:20]: And as much as we're training an autoencoder to be sparse, we're not like for sure certain that, you know, we will get something that just correlates to hallucination. You'll probably split that up into 20 other things and who knows what they'll be.Mark Bissell [00:28:36]: Of course. Right. Yeah. So there's no sort of problems with like feature splitting and feature absorption. And then there's the off target effects, right? Ideally, you would want to be very precise where if you reduce the hallucination feature, suddenly maybe your model can't write. Creatively anymore. And maybe you don't like that, but you want to still stop it from hallucinating facts and figures.Shawn Wang [00:28:55]: Good. So Vibhu has a paper to recommend there that we'll put in the show notes. But yeah, I mean, I guess just because your demo is done, any any other things that you want to highlight or any other interesting features you want to show?Mark Bissell [00:29:07]: I don't think so. Yeah. Like I said, this is a pretty small snippet. I think the main sort of point here that I think is exciting is that there's not a whole lot of inter being applied to models quite at this scale. You know, Anthropic certainly has some some. Research and yeah, other other teams as well. But it's it's nice to see these techniques, you know, being put into practice. I think not that long ago, the idea of real time steering of a trillion parameter model would have sounded.Shawn Wang [00:29:33]: Yeah. The fact that it's real time, like you started the thing and then you edited the steering vector.Vibhu Sapra [00:29:38]: I think it's it's an interesting one TBD of what the actual like production use case would be on that, like the real time editing. It's like that's the fun part of the demo, right? You can kind of see how this could be served behind an API, right? Like, yes, you're you only have so many knobs and you can just tweak it a bit more. And I don't know how it plays in. Like people haven't done that much with like, how does this work with or without prompting? Right. How does this work with fine tuning? Like, there's a whole hype of continual learning, right? So there's just so much to see. Like, is this another parameter? Like, is it like parameter? We just kind of leave it as a default. We don't use it. So I don't know. Maybe someone here wants to put out a guide on like how to use this with prompting when to do what?Mark Bissell [00:30:18]: Oh, well, I have a paper recommendation. I think you would love from Act Deep on our team, who is an amazing researcher, just can't say enough amazing things about Act Deep. But he actually has a paper that as well as some others from the team and elsewhere that go into the essentially equivalence of activation steering and in context learning and how those are from a he thinks of everything in a cognitive neuroscience Bayesian framework, but basically how you can precisely show how. Prompting in context, learning and steering exhibit similar behaviors and even like get quantitative about the like magnitude of steering you would need to do to induce a certain amount of behavior similar to certain prompting, even for things like jailbreaks and stuff. It's a really cool paper. Are you saying steering is less powerful than prompting? More like you can almost write a formula that tells you how to convert between the two of them.Myra Deng [00:31:20]: And so like formally equivalent actually in the in the limit. Right.Mark Bissell [00:31:24]: So like one case study of this is for jailbreaks there. I don't know. Have you seen the stuff where you can do like many shot jailbreaking? You like flood the context with examples of the behavior. And the topic put out that paper.Shawn Wang [00:31:38]: A lot of people were like, yeah, we've been doing this, guys.Mark Bissell [00:31:40]: Like, yeah, what's in this in context learning and activation steering equivalence paper is you can like predict the number. Number of examples that you will need to put in there in order to jailbreak the model. That's cool. By doing steering experiments and using this sort of like equivalence mapping. That's cool. That's really cool. It's very neat. Yeah.Shawn Wang [00:32:02]: I was going to say, like, you know, I can like back rationalize that this makes sense because, you know, what context is, is basically just, you know, it updates the KV cache kind of and like and then every next token inference is still like, you know, the sheer sum of everything all the way. It's plus all the context. It's up to date. And you could, I guess, theoretically steer that with you probably replace that with your steering. The only problem is steering typically is on one layer, maybe three layers like like you did. So it's like not exactly equivalent.Mark Bissell [00:32:33]: Right, right. There's sort of you need to get precise about, yeah, like how you sort of define steering and like what how you're modeling the setup. But yeah, I've got the paper pulled up here. Belief dynamics reveal the dual nature. Yeah. The title is Belief Dynamics Reveal the Dual Nature of Incompetence. And it's an exhibition of the practical context learning and activation steering. So Eric Bigelow, Dan Urgraft on the who are doing fellowships at Goodfire, Ekt Deep's the final author there.Myra Deng [00:32:59]: I think actually to your question of like, what is the production use case of steering? I think maybe if you just think like one level beyond steering as it is today. Like imagine if you could adapt your model to be, you know, an expert legal reasoner. Like in almost real time, like very quickly. efficiently using human feedback or using like your semantic understanding of what the model knows and where it knows that behavior. I think that while it's not clear what the product is at the end of the day, it's clearly very valuable. Thinking about like what's the next interface for model customization and adaptation is a really interesting problem for us. Like we have heard a lot of people actually interested in fine-tuning an RL for open weight models in production. And so people are using things like Tinker or kind of like open source libraries to do that, but it's still very difficult to get models fine-tuned and RL'd for exactly what you want them to do unless you're an expert at model training. And so that's like something we'reShawn Wang [00:34:06]: looking into. Yeah. I never thought so. Tinker from Thinking Machines famously uses rank one LoRa. Is that basically the same as steering? Like, you know, what's the comparison there?Mark Bissell [00:34:19]: Well, so in that case, you are still applying updates to the parameters, right?Shawn Wang [00:34:25]: Yeah. You're not touching a base model. You're touching an adapter. It's kind of, yeah.Mark Bissell [00:34:30]: Right. But I guess it still is like more in parameter space then. I guess it's maybe like, are you modifying the pipes or are you modifying the water flowing through the pipes to get what you're after? Yeah. Just maybe one way.Mark Bissell [00:34:44]: I like that analogy. That's my mental map of it at least, but it gets at this idea of model design and intentional design, which is something that we're, that we're very focused on. And just the fact that like, I hope that we look back at how we're currently training models and post-training models and just think what a primitive way of doing that right now. Like there's no intentionalityShawn Wang [00:35:06]: really in... It's just data, right? The only thing in control is what data we feed in.Mark Bissell [00:35:11]: So, so Dan from Goodfire likes to use this analogy of, you know, he has a couple of young kids and he talks about like, what if I could only teach my kids how to be good people by giving them cookies or like, you know, giving them a slap on the wrist if they do something wrong, like not telling them why it was wrong or like what they should have done differently or something like that. Just figure it out. Right. Exactly. So that's RL. Yeah. Right. And, and, you know, it's sample inefficient. There's, you know, what do they say? It's like slurping feedback. It's like, slurping supervision. Right. And so you'd like to get to the point where you can have experts giving feedback to their models that are, uh, internalized and, and, you know, steering is an inference time way of sort of getting that idea. But ideally you're moving to a world whereVibhu Sapra [00:36:04]: it is much more intentional design in perpetuity for these models. Okay. This is one of the questions we asked Emmanuel from Anthropic on the podcast a few months ago. Basically the question, was you're at a research lab that does model training, foundation models, and you're on an interp team. How does it tie back? Right? Like, does this, do ideas come from the pre-training team? Do they go back? Um, you know, so for those interested, you can, you can watch that. There wasn't too much of a connect there, but it's still something, you know, it's something they want toMark Bissell [00:36:33]: push for down the line. It can be useful for all of the above. Like there are certainly post-hocVibhu Sapra [00:36:39]: use cases where it doesn't need to touch that. I think the other thing a lot of people forget is this stuff isn't too computationally expensive, right? Like I would say, if you're interested in getting into research, MechInterp is one of the most approachable fields, right? A lot of this train an essay, train a probe, this stuff, like the budget for this one, there's already a lot done. There's a lot of open source work. You guys have done some too. Um, you know,Shawn Wang [00:37:04]: There's like notebooks from the Gemini team for Neil Nanda or like, this is how you do it. Just step through the notebook.Vibhu Sapra [00:37:09]: Even if you're like, not even technical with any of this, you can still make like progress. There, you can look at different activations, but, uh, if you do want to get into training, you know, training this stuff, correct me if I'm wrong is like in the thousands of dollars, not even like, it's not that high scale. And then same with like, you know, applying it, doing it for post-training or all this stuff is fairly cheap in scale of, okay. I want to get into like model training. I don't have compute for like, you know, pre-training stuff. So it's, it's a very nice field to get into. And also there's a lot of like open questions, right? Um, some of them have to go with, okay, I want a product. I want to solve this. Like there's also just a lot of open-ended stuff that people could work on. That's interesting. Right. I don't know if you guys have any calls for like, what's open questions, what's open work that you either open collaboration with, or like, you'd just like to see solved or just, you know, for people listening that want to get into McInturk because people always talk about it. What are, what are the things they should check out? Start, of course, you know, join you guys as well. I'm sure you're hiring.Myra Deng [00:38:09]: There's a paper, I think from, was it Lee, uh, Sharky? It's open problems and, uh, it's, it's a bit of interpretability, which I recommend everyone who's interested in the field. Read. I'm just like a really comprehensive overview of what are the things that experts in the field think are the most important problems to be solved. I also think to your point, it's been really, really inspiring to see, I think a lot of young people getting interested in interpretability, actually not just young people also like scientists to have been, you know, experts in physics for many years and in biology or things like this, um, transitioning into interp, because the barrier of, of what's now interp. So it's really cool to see a number to entry is, you know, in some ways low and there's a lot of information out there and ways to get started. There's this anecdote of like professors at universities saying that all of a sudden every incoming PhD student wants to study interpretability, which was not the case a few years ago. So it just goes to show how, I guess, like exciting the field is, how fast it's moving, how quick it is to get started and things like that.Mark Bissell [00:39:10]: And also just a very welcoming community. You know, there's an open source McInturk Slack channel. There are people are always posting questions and just folks in the space are always responsive if you ask things on various forums and stuff. But yeah, the open paper, open problems paper is a really good one.Myra Deng [00:39:28]: For other people who want to get started, I think, you know, MATS is a great program. What's the acronym for? Machine Learning and Alignment Theory Scholars? It's like the...Vibhu Sapra [00:39:40]: Normally summer internship style.Myra Deng [00:39:42]: Yeah, but they've been doing it year round now. And actually a lot of our full-time staff have come through that program or gone through that program. And it's great for anyone who is transitioning into interpretability. There's a couple other fellows programs. We do one as well as Anthropic. And so those are great places to get started if anyone is interested.Mark Bissell [00:40:03]: Also, I think been seen as a research field for a very long time. But I think engineering... I think engineers are sorely wanted for interpretability as well, especially at Goodfire, but elsewhere, as it does scale up.Shawn Wang [00:40:18]: I should mention that Lee actually works with you guys, right? And in the London office and I'm adding our first ever McInturk track at AI Europe because I see this industry applications now emerging. And I'm pretty excited to, you know, help push that along. Yeah, I was looking forward to that. It'll effectively be the first industry McInturk conference. Yeah. I'm so glad you added that. You know, it's still a little bit of a bet. It's not that widespread, but I can definitely see this is the time to really get into it. We want to be early on things.Mark Bissell [00:40:51]: For sure. And I think the field understands this, right? So at ICML, I think the title of the McInturk workshop this year was actionable interpretability. And there was a lot of discussion around bringing it to various domains. Everyone's adding pragmatic, actionable, whatever.Shawn Wang [00:41:10]: It's like, okay, well, we weren't actionable before, I guess. I don't know.Vibhu Sapra [00:41:13]: And I mean, like, just, you know, being in Europe, you see the Interp room. One, like old school conferences, like, I think they had a very tiny room till they got lucky and they got it doubled. But there's definitely a lot of interest, a lot of niche research. So you see a lot of research coming out of universities, students. We covered the paper last week. It's like two unknown authors, not many citations. But, you know, you can make a lot of meaningful work there. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.Shawn Wang [00:41:39]: Yeah. I think people haven't really mentioned this yet. It's just Interp for code. I think it's like an abnormally important field. We haven't mentioned this yet. The conspiracy theory last two years ago was when the first SAE work came out of Anthropic was they would do like, oh, we just used SAEs to turn the bad code vector down and then turn up the good code. And I think like, isn't that the dream? Like, you know, like, but basically, I guess maybe, why is it funny? Like, it's... If it was realistic, it would not be funny. It would be like, no, actually, we should do this. But it's funny because we know there's like, we feel there's some limitations to what steering can do. And I think a lot of the public image of steering is like the Gen Z stuff. Like, oh, you can make it really love the Golden Gate Bridge, or you can make it speak like Gen Z. To like be a legal reasoner seems like a huge stretch. Yeah. And I don't know if that will get there this way. Yeah.Myra Deng [00:42:36]: I think, um, I will say we are announcing. Something very soon that I will not speak too much about. Um, but I think, yeah, this is like what we've run into again and again is like, we, we don't want to be in the world where steering is only useful for like stylistic things. That's definitely not, not what we're aiming for. But I think the types of interventions that you need to do to get to things like legal reasoning, um, are much more sophisticated and require breakthroughs in, in learning algorithms. And that's, um...Shawn Wang [00:43:07]: And is this an emergent property of scale as well?Myra Deng [00:43:10]: I think so. Yeah. I mean, I think scale definitely helps. I think scale allows you to learn a lot of information and, and reduce noise across, you know, large amounts of data. But I also think we think that there's ways to do things much more effectively, um, even, even at scale. So like actually learning exactly what you want from the data and not learning things that you do that you don't want exhibited in the data. So we're not like anti-scale, but we are also realizing that scale is not going to get us anywhere. It's not going to get us to the type of AI development that we want to be at in, in the future as these models get more powerful and get deployed in all these sorts of like mission critical contexts. Current life cycle of training and deploying and evaluations is, is to us like deeply broken and has opportunities to, to improve. So, um, more to come on that very, very soon.Mark Bissell [00:44:02]: And I think that that's a use basically, or maybe just like a proof point that these concepts do exist. Like if you can manipulate them in the precise best way, you can get the ideal combination of them that you desire. And steering is maybe the most coarse grained sort of peek at what that looks like. But I think it's evocative of what you could do if you had total surgical control over every concept, every parameter. Yeah, exactly.Myra Deng [00:44:30]: There were like bad code features. I've got it pulled up.Vibhu Sapra [00:44:33]: Yeah. Just coincidentally, as you guys are talking.Shawn Wang [00:44:35]: This is like, this is exactly.Vibhu Sapra [00:44:38]: There's like specifically a code error feature that activates and they show, you know, it's not, it's not typo detection. It's like, it's, it's typos in code. It's not typical typos. And, you know, you can, you can see it clearly activates where there's something wrong in code. And they have like malicious code, code error. They have a whole bunch of sub, you know, sub broken down little grain features. Yeah.Shawn Wang [00:45:02]: Yeah. So, so the, the rough intuition for me, the, why I talked about post-training was that, well, you just, you know, have a few different rollouts with all these things turned off and on and whatever. And then, you know, you can, that's, that's synthetic data you can kind of post-train on. Yeah.Vibhu Sapra [00:45:13]: And I think we make it sound easier than it is just saying, you know, they do the real hard work.Myra Deng [00:45:19]: I mean, you guys, you guys have the right idea. Exactly. Yeah. We replicated a lot of these features in, in our Lama models as well. I remember there was like.Vibhu Sapra [00:45:26]: And I think a lot of this stuff is open, right? Like, yeah, you guys opened yours. DeepMind has opened a lot of essays on Gemma. Even Anthropic has opened a lot of this. There's, there's a lot of resources that, you know, we can probably share of people that want to get involved.Shawn Wang [00:45:41]: Yeah. And special shout out to like Neuronpedia as well. Yes. Like, yeah, amazing piece of work to visualize those things.Myra Deng [00:45:49]: Yeah, exactly.Shawn Wang [00:45:50]: I guess I wanted to pivot a little bit on, onto the healthcare side, because I think that's a big use case for you guys. We haven't really talked about it yet. This is a bit of a crossover for me because we are, we are, we do have a separate science pod that we're starting up for AI, for AI for science, just because like, it's such a huge investment category and also I'm like less qualified to do it, but we actually have bio PhDs to cover that, which is great, but I need to just kind of recover, recap your work, maybe on the evil two stuff, but then, and then building forward.Mark Bissell [00:46:17]: Yeah, for sure. And maybe to frame up the conversation, I think another kind of interesting just lens on interpretability in general is a lot of the techniques that were described. are ways to solve the AI human interface problem. And it's sort of like bidirectional communication is the goal there. So what we've been talking about with intentional design of models and, you know, steering, but also more advanced techniques is having humans impart our desires and control into models and over models. And the reverse is also very interesting, especially as you get to superhuman models, whether that's narrow superintelligence, like these scientific models that work on genomics, data, medical imaging, things like that. But down the line, you know, superintelligence of other forms as well. What knowledge can the AIs teach us as sort of that, that the other direction in that? And so some of our life science work to date has been getting at exactly that question, which is, well, some of it does look like debugging these various life sciences models, understanding if they're actually performing well, on tasks, or if they're picking up on spurious correlations, for instance, genomics models, you would like to know whether they are sort of focusing on the biologically relevant things that you care about, or if it's using some simpler correlate, like the ancestry of the person that it's looking at. But then also in the instances where they are superhuman, and maybe they are understanding elements of the human genome that we don't have names for or specific, you know, yeah, discoveries that they've made that that we don't know about, that's, that's a big goal. And so we're already seeing that, right, we are partnered with organizations like Mayo Clinic, leading research health system in the United States, our Institute, as well as a startup called Prima Menta, which focuses on neurodegenerative disease. And in our partnership with them, we've used foundation models, they've been training and applied our interpretability techniques to find novel biomarkers for Alzheimer's disease. So I think this is just the tip of the iceberg. But it's, that's like a flavor of some of the things that we're working on.Shawn Wang [00:48:36]: Yeah, I think that's really fantastic. Obviously, we did the Chad Zuckerberg pod last year as well. And like, there's a plethora of these models coming out, because there's so much potential and research. And it's like, very interesting how it's basically the same as language models, but just with a different underlying data set. But it's like, it's the same exact techniques. Like, there's no change, basically.Mark Bissell [00:48:59]: Yeah. Well, and even in like other domains, right? Like, you know, robotics, I know, like a lot of the companies just use Gemma as like the like backbone, and then they like make it into a VLA that like takes these actions. It's, it's, it's transformers all the way down. So yeah.Vibhu Sapra [00:49:15]: Like we have Med Gemma now, right? Like this week, even there was Med Gemma 1.5. And they're training it on this stuff, like 3d scans, medical domain knowledge, and all that stuff, too. So there's a push from both sides. But I think the thing that, you know, one of the things about McInturpp is like, you're a little bit more cautious in some domains, right? So healthcare, mainly being one, like guardrails, understanding, you know, we're more risk adverse to something going wrong there. So even just from a basic understanding, like, if we're trusting these systems to make claims, we want to know why and what's going on.Myra Deng [00:49:51]: Yeah, I think there's totally a kind of like deployment bottleneck to actually using. foundation models for real patient usage or things like that. Like, say you're using a model for rare disease prediction, you probably want some explanation as to why your model predicted a certain outcome, and an interpretable explanation at that. So that's definitely a use case. But I also think like, being able to extract scientific information that no human knows to accelerate drug discovery and disease treatment and things like that actually is a really, really big unlock for science, like scientific discovery. And you've seen a lot of startups, like say that they're going to accelerate scientific discovery. And I feel like we actually are doing that through our interp techniques. And kind of like, almost by accident, like, I think we got reached out to very, very early on from these healthcare institutions. And none of us had healthcare.Shawn Wang [00:50:49]: How did they even hear of you? A podcast.Myra Deng [00:50:51]: Oh, okay. Yeah, podcast.Vibhu Sapra [00:50:53]: Okay, well, now's that time, you know.Myra Deng [00:50:55]: Everyone can call us.Shawn Wang [00:50:56]: Podcasts are the most important thing. Everyone should listen to podcasts.Myra Deng [00:50:59]: Yeah, they reached out. They were like, you know, we have these really smart models that we've trained, and we want to know what they're doing. And we were like, really early that time, like three months old, and it was a few of us. And we were like, oh, my God, we've never used these models. Let's figure it out. But it's also like, great proof that interp techniques scale pretty well across domains. We didn't really have to learn too much about.Shawn Wang [00:51:21]: Interp is a machine learning technique, machine learning skills everywhere, right? Yeah. And it's obviously, it's just like a general insight. Yeah. Probably to finance too, I think, which would be fun for our history. I don't know if you have anything to say there.Mark Bissell [00:51:34]: Yeah, well, just across the science. Like, we've also done work on material science. Yeah, it really runs the gamut.Vibhu Sapra [00:51:40]: Yeah. Awesome. And, you know, for those that should reach out, like, you're obviously experts in this, but like, is there a call out for people that you're looking to partner with, design partners, people to use your stuff outside of just, you know, the general developer that wants to. Plug and play steering stuff, like on the research side more so, like, are there ideal design partners, customers, stuff like that?Myra Deng [00:52:03]: Yeah, I can talk about maybe non-life sciences, and then I'm curious to hear from you on the life sciences side. But we're looking for design partners across many domains, language, anyone who's customizing language models or trying to push the frontier of code or reasoning models is really interesting to us. And then also interested in the frontier of modeling. There's a lot of models that work in, like, pixel space, as we call it. So if you're doing world models, video models, even robotics, where there's not a very clean natural language interface to interact with, I think we think that Interp can really help and are looking for a few partners in that space.Shawn Wang [00:52:43]: Just because you mentioned the keyword

It's our Valentine's Day special, and we're not in the mood for any of your bullshit! In this episode: an unexpected love connection before the first break, "novelty" cake pops, really unpleasantly big conversation hearts, limp Pencils, "ladies and gentlemen, Cranberries Can Bounce are taking center stage in five minutes!", Bob Kowchanski presents us with another hilariously unhinged quiz ---------------------- Help us save the multiverse! Join our Discord server today!  https://discord.gg/vb2YAqHjMA  ---------------------- Join the Patreon!  https://www.patreon.com/c/multibuddies  ---------------------- https://tmasm.com YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@TMAMultiverse   Podbean: https://storytimewithtomandmike.podbean.com   ---------------------- Songs from the Multiverse: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLQcalQzDVAr1FVJ0uVVMi11XESJpo2RKW   https://music.amazon.com/user-playlists/3e2645637ff4439d8c456a2279b008basune?ref=dm_sh_LxlNtOgSDWefrpg81jBaPakSz    

Episode Notes This week, the crew wraps up their 2025 Game of the Year series by debating a variety of award categories. Stay tuned until the end of the episode for the reveal of the Crossplay Conversations Top 10 Games of 2025! Find Timestamps for this Episode Below: 0:00 - Intro 2:50 - The Luke Lewis Chill Out With a Coffee on a Rainy Weekend Afternoon Award 25:11 - Hooper's Puzzle Paradise Award 41:51 - Claire's Creatively Cozy Award 57:40 - Best Music 1:12:05 - Best Visuals Technical 1:30:52 - Best Visual Art Direction 1:36:59 - Spoilers: The Drifter 1:37:45 - End of Spoilers: The Drifter 1:42:35 - Best Narrative 2:00:15 - Our Top 10 Games of 2025 Reveal Video 2:15:51 - Outro Find us on BlueSky for show updates and more: Podcast: @crossplayconvos.bsky.social Jacob: @jacob.bsky.social Luke: @lukewarmlewis.bsky.social Claire: @clairebearrose.bsky.social Joseph: @th3hoopman.bsky.social CantPause on Instagram Check out our other shows: Player Player Podcast   Left Behind Game Club The LukeWarmGames Podcast   Cutscenes: A Video Game Movie Podcast Video Game Trivia **

On the latest edition of This is Wrestling, Lee Versage and Zach McGibbon look at TNA's debut on AMC. The guys go through all the segments on the show including the main event of Frankie Kazarian and Mike Santana for the TNA Championship. Also discussed is the recently recirculating Top 20 WWE Wrestlers list from Sports Illustrated, and more! This is another edition of the show you do not want to miss!Questions for the show? Make sure to reach out at our social media or send in your question via email at ⁠⁠⁠versagelee@gmail.com⁠⁠⁠. Follow on social media:Twitter: @TIW_AudioFollow Zach on Twitter: @RawIsGibbyInstagram: @TIW_Audio Facebook: ⁠⁠⁠https://www.facebook.com/thisiswrestlingaudio Threads: @TIW_Audio

All Hail Unicron: Episode 109: Creatively Bankrupt with an extra Nipple INTRODUCTION Anybody Get Anything? Movie/Show News New Transformers Animated comic coming! https://news.tfw2005.com/2025/12/29/transformers-animated-mirror-mirror-comic-miniseries-first-look-553728 Third Party CT Toys Bayverse MP scale Prime https://news.tfw2005.com/2025/12/31/ct-toys-ct-10-super-leader-masterpiece-scale-bayverse-trilogy-optimus-prime-color-prototype-553771 What, you want MORE Bayverse MP scale Primes? Fine, Magnificent Mecha has you covered with their RoTF and DotM Primes https://news.tfw2005.com/2026/01/01/magnificent-mecha-mm-02a-2007-rotf-mm02b-dotm-optimus-prime-color-prototipes-553802 Dr Repaint hits us with some Sideswipe repaints and Deluxe Insecticons https://news.tfw2005.com/2026/01/02/dr-wu-dw-e68-gansters-dw-e69-rambo-micromaster-scale-early-draft-sweep-g2-sideswipe-color-sketches-553820 Dr Repaint is doing the Datsun brothers and regular Insecticons too (2 links) https://news.tfw2005.com/2026/01/04/dr-wu-dw-e47-smoke-dust-dw-e48-beetle-horn-micromaster-scale-smokescreen-bombshell-color-prototypes-554052 https://news.tfw2005.com/2026/01/04/dr-wu-dw-e45-silver-lightning-dw-e48-claw-worm-micromaster-scale-bluestreak-sharpnel-color-prototypes-554055 https://showzstore.com/drwu-dw-e43-patrolman-prowl-dw-e44-grasshopper-kickback-set-of-2_p6501.html Dr It's My News Week Battletrap reveal https://news.tfw2005.com/2026/01/07/dr-wu-dw-es02-trap-maker-micromaster-scale-battletrap-color-prototype-554273 Rising Force joins the retro WFC/FoC video game releases with their take on Fall of Cybertron Bruticus https://news.tfw2005.com/2026/01/02/rising-force-war-for-cybertron-combaticons-bruticus-prototypes-553826   Unique Toys is going back to the Bayverse with their take on an MP Age of Extinction Bumblebee https://news.tfw2005.com/2026/01/05/unique-toys-r-11-buzz-guardian-masterpiece-scale-aoe-bumblebee-color-prototype-554097 AotP Superion getting a little more super https://news.tfw2005.com/2026/01/06/dna-design-dk-77-upgrade-kit-for-age-of-the-primes-superion-554199 Big ol' sword add-on https://news.tfw2005.com/2026/01/09/dna-design-dk-69r-max-sword-upgrade-kit-554390 Official: Yolopark Stepper coming to BotCon https://news.tfw2005.com/2025/12/29/yolopark-amk-mini-autobot-ricochet-images-553738 Yolopark week continues with reformatting Megatron https://news.tfw2005.com/2025/12/30/yolopark-amk-mini-g1-transformers-wave-3-g1-megatron-clear-purple-version-official-promotional-video-553749 TRA(sh) Core Tiny Turbo Changers first look https://news.tfw2005.com/2026/01/03/tra-core-tiny-turbo-changers-first-look-553947 Transforming Autobot and Decepticon symbols coming? https://news.tfw2005.com/2026/01/04/transformers-autobot-decepticon-symbols-coming-554074 Missing Link Grimlock, MPG Hot Rod, and more coming from Takara (2 links) https://news.tfw2005.com/2026/01/05/new-takara-teasers-mpmn-sideswipes-ml-grimlock-mpg-hot-rod-more-554124 https://news.tfw2005.com/2026/01/09/takara-mpmn-sideswipes-missing-link-grimlock-mpg-hot-rod-new-legends-green-lio-convoy-full-images-554414 40th TF The Movie Anniversary Hot Rod preorders up and gone in a blink! But more preorders coming? (2 links) https://news.tfw2005.com/2026/01/06/transformers-more-than-meets-the-eye-collection-hot-rod-official-images-554168 https://news.tfw2005.com/2026/01/07/new-transformers-more-than-meets-the-eye-collection-pre-orders-coming-in-january-554255 Studio Series TF One Orion Pax https://news.tfw2005.com/2026/01/06/transformers-studio-series-a-level-deluxe-transformers-one-orion-pax-in-hand-images-554216 Bought the five pack just for Hound did ya? GOT 'EM! https://news.tfw2005.com/2026/01/08/studio-series-86-mtmte-collection-hound-first-look-554343 Human Centipede Dino edition 5-pack coming! https://news.tfw2005.comwd/2026/01/07/transformers-swapticons-dino-mission-5-pack-official-images-554261 Questions? Discussion: Email your questions to: Hailunicroncast@gmail.com    Special Shoutouts: Dustmightz for providing the beats for the theme song! Check the Realm of Collectors on Facebook! https://www.facebook.com/groups/realmofcollectors   Everyone who followed us from Shattered Cast Uncut, we are grateful to each and everyone of you for joining us on this journey!   Hosts: T2RX6 http://www.youtube.com/user/T2rx6 Rich “Preordered” H. Oscar Alonso https://www.youtube.com/user/oscarnjboy Robert Duyjuy-sabado-gigante

For Woven client, Abby, the experience of cycle charting provided far more insight than simple family planning. It opened up a whole new world of discovery as she recognized the role her reproductive hormones played in her emotional state and creative potential. After charting her cycles with the Creighton Model System, she began working with these natural rhythms instead of against them and her creative and personal endeavors came alive. As a professional dancer and athlete, she used to berate herself for having needs and strengths that morphed throughout her cycle. Now, she changed her perspective to honor them. I'm excited for you to hear more from Abby herself in this episode. Enjoy!NOTE: This episode is appropriate for all audiences.GUEST BIO: Abby is a Jesus follower and professional dancer. She serves as the Artistic Director of a Christian ballet company in Kansas City, Dramatic Truth Ballet Theatre. OTHER HELPFUL EPISODES:Ep. 28: When your body feels brokenEp. 134: Realistic Cycle Syncing for Every Woman, with Megan FallerSend us a textSupport the showOther great ways to connect with Woven Natural Fertility Care: Learn the Creighton Model System with us! Register here! Get our monthly newsletter: Get the updates! Chat about issues of fertility + faith: Substack Follow us on Instagram: @wovenfertility Watch our episodes on YouTube: @wovenfertility Love the content? The biggest gift you could give is to click a 5 star review and write why it was so meaningful! This podcast is provided for educational and informational purposes only and does not constitute providing medical advice or professional services. The information provided should not be used for diagnosing or treating a health problem or disease, and those seeking personal medical advice should consult with a licensed physician. Always seek the advice of your doctor or other qualified health provider regarding a medical condition. If you think you may have a medical emergency, call 911 or go to the nearest emergency room immediately. Neither Woven nor its staff, nor any contributor to this podcast, makes any represe...

Send us a text"Perhaps I must pick me up/ Perhaps I must carry me home gently." How do artists survive in a world gone mad? How can we find ways to hold space for ourselves and for others? Can our art really be a safe space for us to both fall apart and piece ourselves back together?In the first Journey of an Artist of 2026, Emmeline tackles these questions and more with one of DFW's most beloved poets, River. River shares how various art forms have served as coping mechanisms for her over the years--from her poetry to her visual art--and how creation is not only a response to, but an antidote to destruction. She also shares two poems from her beautiful book of poetry, Still River.To learn more about River, or to follow River's artistic journey, find her on Instagram. You can also grab any of her books at her next live show!For behind-the-scenes information and more about Journey of an Artist, visit the Journey of Series official webpage, or follow Emmeline on social media at @EmmelineMusic.

This episode chats about how you can get unstuck creatively, as well as emotionally, and how both are connected.   Join my new creative community for women here.

Ready to Work Creatively Whether Our Organization Likes It Or Not | Dare to Be Ready Live at #IMSH2026 Chris Roussin reacts to Tania Katan Keynote Lecture at #IMSH2026 on The Dare to Be Ready Podcast “You need to be different from the status quo to make change.” What does it mean to be called to innovate and work creatively in an organization that is ready and asking for it, versus in an organization that isn't? Some organizations have leadership that is passionate about quickly squashing creativity. How do we help people to create change and create readiness in a new way without it feeling like we're launching it at them from a consultant helicopter as we fly away? Some advice from the talk that verged away from rah-rah and into the practical that we really liked: 1) Think about a limitation that you have at work, and consider how that limitation could actually be an opportunity for you; 2) Say what your job title is and then imagine a job title more accurate and appropriate to what you do. More live reactions from Jenny Rudolph, Roxane Gardner, and Grace Ng coming in the next few days! #daretobeready #healthcaresimulation #medicine #nursing

As we step into a new year, this episode of The Happy Menopause explores what it really means to age creatively – and how we can rediscover joy, confidence and adventure as we grow older.I'm delighted to welcome back Jo Moseley, six years after she first shared her story of breaking down in a Tesco biscuit aisle during perimenopause - a moment that became the catalyst for a powerful midlife transformation. Since then, Jo has become the first woman to paddleboard coast-to-coast across England, written award-winning books, made short films and championed joyful, adventurous ageing.In this warm and inspiring conversation, we talk about the healing power of nature, the confidence that comes from gentle challenges, and why being a beginner can be one of the most liberating things we do in mid and later life. Jo also shares how the outdoors has supported her through grief, heartbreak and major life changes, and why small, consistent steps matter far more than big resolutions.If you're feeling overwhelmed, tired or stuck at the start of the year, this episode offers reassurance, perspective and practical inspiration. You don't need to be fearless or fit -just willing to begin, exactly where you are. If you're a fan of The Happy Menopause, please tell your friends and family about it, and make sure you click the follow or subscribe button on whichever platform you listen on to make sure you never miss an episode. It really does make a huge difference to the algorithms which influence the visibility of the podcast, so that more women can find the show. After all, every woman deserves to have a happy menopause. Check out the full Show Notes for this episode on my website www.well-well-well.co.uk/podcast, where you'll find all the relevant links and references for each guest. Learn how to build your own menopause diet to manage your symptoms with my book The Happy Menopause: Smart Nutrition to Help You Flourish. And if you're tired of feeling tired and grappling with brain fog, check out my new book: The Happy Menopause Guide to Energy; Nutrition to Rejuvenate Your Brain & Body. It's available in all the usual places.

3 Ways to Feel More Creative and Think More Creatively to find Inner BalanceCreativity is something we all have in common.Maybe not to the same extent, as not everyone holds creativity to an equal standing. Finding a creative outlet, regardless of what you typically do professionally or even personally, can be a great way to find balance, grounding and maintain a sense of personal wellness.Exercising that creativity muscle is beneficial, whether you're the next Picasso in the making, or good at making stick figures. In 2026, prioritize finding that creative outlet that gives you that sense of balance and recharge.Do you have any questions? Send us an email: inquiries@spe-projectpurpose.com#creativity #creator #balance #wellness 0:00 - 1:30 - Introduction1:30 - 11:30 3 Ways to Feel More Creative11:30 - Wrap Up*RESOURCES*For all topics related to renewing and rebuilding family, communities and relationships, check out our blogs! We post bi-weekly:https://www.spe-projectpurpose.com/blogsMake sure to come visit us, subscribe to the website, and join our Member's Area for more valuable content:*SOCIALS*Website: www.spe-projectpurpose.com Facebook Page: @ProjectPurposeSPEInstagram: @ProjectPurposeSPE or my personal account @realistraeTwitter: @Purpose_SPEPinterest: @ProjectPurposeSPE

If you've ever felt mentally exhausted, emotionally overwhelmed, or physically unwell despite doing everything “right,” this conversation will change how you understand burnout, productivity, and the signals your body is sending. In this episode, we explore the moment when high performance turns into self-abandonment—and why burnout isn't about weakness or laziness, but long-term misalignment. Burnout isn't just about working too much. It's about the beliefs underneath the work. My guest, Haley Scruggs, shares her breaking point—from severe burnout and panic to questioning her own sanity—and how her body ultimately forced her to listen. What looked like dysfunction was actually a signal calling her back into alignment. We talk about how ADHD, chronic stress, and the pressure to prove worth through productivity quietly rewire the nervous system—until the body speaks through anxiety, insomnia, migraines, digestive issues, and shutdown. This isn't a conversation about hacks or routines. It's about asking the question most people avoid: What do I actually need?

Antonio Sanchez has become one of the most sought-after drummers in the international jazz scene. Following 18 years and 9 albums as one of the most revered collaborators with guitarist/composer Pat Metheny, he also has recorded and performed with many other most prominent artists like Chick Corea, Gary Burton, Michael Brecker, Charlie Haden and Toots Thielemans. In 2014 Sanchez popularity soared when he scored Alejandro González Iñárritu's Birdman which ended up winning 4 Academy awards (including best picture) and for which Antonio won a Grammy award. He currently has many recordings as a leader and solo artist. Some recent recordings include Beatrio w/ Bela Fleck, Edmar Castaneda as well as his own group Migration. You can hear Anotino's masterful compositions and drumming on the award winning show The Studio on Apple TV In this episode, Antonio talks about  Why he calls Barcelona, Spain his home Creating a strong reputation The realities a seasoned pro has to contend with Antonio's journey into jazz and notoriety  Staying artistically and creatively curious  Using your own voice when making music Composing for the movie Birdman & the TV series The Studio Creating a counter culture to social media ⁠⁠⁠Here's our Patreon⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠Here's our Youtube⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠Here's our Homepage

For many client-facing financial advisors the word "retirement" stirs up strong, negative feelings. Rather than seeing retirement as an opportunity for creativity and to author a new, satisfying chapter of life many advisors find it difficult to think about retirement at all. In this fast paced conversation, Ken explores the origins of these feelings with Cara Grey founder of Third Act Consulting and considers how advisors can think (and act) differently about their own retirement. Also in this episode, the AllianceBernstein Digital Coach – see practice management solutions for advisor success: abfunds.com/go/digitalcoach DISCLAIMER Note to All Readers: The information contained here reflects the views of AllianceBernstein L.P. or its affiliates and sources it believes are reliable as of the date of this podcast. AllianceBernstein L.P. makes no representations or warranties concerning the accuracy of any data. There is no guarantee that any projection, forecast or opinion in this material will be realized. Past performance does not guarantee future results. The views expressed here may change at any time after the date of this podcast. This podcast is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice. AllianceBernstein L.P. does not provide tax, legal or accounting advice. It does not take an investor's personal investment objectives or financial situation into account; investors should discuss their individual circumstances with appropriate professionals before making any decisions. This information should not be construed as sales or marketing material or an offer or solicitation for the purchase or sale of any financial instrument, product or service sponsored by AllianceBernstein or its affiliates.

Interview Date: July 14th, 2025Episode Summary:Eden Shabtai shares how a kid from a tiny Israeli kibbutz—obsessed with MTV and training in ballet and modern—willed her way into New York's scene and eventually L.A.'s major stages. She opens up about the unglamorous decade of artist development, underpaid gigs, and nonstop outreach that built the foundation for her “overnight” break assisting on Chris Brown's Loyal, leading to major award shows and TV. A six-month backpacking trip through India reshaped her idea of success, while the O-1 visa process taught ruthless persistence. Eden also speaks candidly about receiving an aggressive breast-cancer diagnosis while five months pregnant, undergoing chemo with cold-cap treatments, and protecting her peace by avoiding toxic workrooms.Creatively, Eden explains why she builds choreography live in the studio—feeding off dancers and music—and why energy, individuality, and attitude matter more than stacked résumés. Listeners will gain insight into using social media strategically, differences between NYC training and L.A. work volume, how to stand out in auditions (presence, styling, quick adjustments), and the mindset that sustains a career: humility, resilience, and community.Shownotes:(0:00) – Welcome and guest introduction(8:20) – Early roots: ballet, modern, MTV influence(13:53) – India trip reframes success and happiness(15:24) – Visa grind: persistence, evidence, good lawyer(18:53) – Moving to L.A.: training vs. booking realities(21:08) – Breakthrough: assisting on “Loyal”(26:44) – Favorite projects: BET 2014, Fleur East(29:31) – Cancer while pregnant: resilience and boundaries(42:05) – Creative process: energy-first choreography(51:19) – What makes dancers stand outBiography:Originally from a kibbutz in northern Israel, Eden began training in ballet and modern at age 7. With no formal hip-hop classes available at the time, she learned by watching MTV. Determined to pursue dance professionally, she left home at 16 to study at a specialized dance school. After serving in the IDF, she spent six transformative months traveling India before moving to New York City to chase her dream.In NYC, Eden trained at Broadway Dance Center and quickly became a sought-after teacher for over 150 young students while choreographing for up-and-coming artists. Realizing her long-term goals required a move west, she relocated to Los Angeles in 2010.Since then, Eden has worked across NBC, ABC, BET, FOX, CBS, VH1, CW, and MTV. Her credits include the VMAs, Grammys, Billboard Awards, Dancing with the Stars, iHeart Radio Awards, BET Awards, Soul Train Awards, X Factor, The Ellen Show, James Corden, American Idol, Jimmy Kimmel, Jimmy Fallon, and more. She has choreographed campaigns for Hasbro, Office Max, Office Depot, HEB, and Clark's.Eden has worked with artists including Chris Brown, Ariana Grande, Demi Lovato, Pitbull, Ava Max, Jason Derulo, Enrique Iglesias, Jamie Foxx, Ne-Yo, Lil Wayne, Marc Anthony, Flo-Rida, Brandy, Omarion, Miguel, Pia Mia, Little Mix, Sevyn Streeter, No Doubt, Snoop Dogg, Kehlani, Janelle Monáe, Fleur East, Priyanka Chopra, Machine Gun Kelly, Tinashe, WizKid, Serayah, DJ Snake, Hardwell, YungBlud, Jack & Jack, and many more.In 2017 Eden served as a Judge/Mentor on a new Israeli dance competition series, where she became the winning mentor. Today she works as a choreographer, artistic director, artist developer, and consultant—living by her belief that with hard work, mental strength, and determination, anything is possible.Connect:Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/theedengarden/Website – https://edenshabtai.com/

Behind every successful property turnaround is a set of choices that shape the outcome. In this solo episode of the Real Estate Investor Podcast, Gary Lipsky walks listeners through a detailed case study of Icon on Spanish Trail, the 256-unit Tucson property he acquired in December 2023. He explains why the deal stood out (an institutional-quality asset purchased at a discount during a period of low transaction volume) and how his team crafted a business plan centered on water savings, staff optimization, and cost-effective upgrades. Gary breaks down the improvements that delivered the biggest impact, from high-efficiency plumbing fixtures and privacy fences to selective painting and smart amenity additions. He also shares the early challenges, including occupancy dips and renovation difficulties, and how focusing on controllables helped stabilize the asset and lift NOI (Net Operating Income) by 36% in the first year. Tune in for a transparent look at the wins, struggles, and strategic pivots behind this value-add execution!Key Points From This Episode:Why Gary chose to spotlight Icon on Spanish Trail as a case study.How limited deal flow in Tucson in 2023 created a rare buying opportunity.What was appealing about the deal: scale, quality, and discounted pricing.An overview of the business plan's focus on water savings and operational efficiencies.Targeted upgrades, including low-flow fixtures and privacy fences.Selective repainting and amenity improvements to enhance the property.How cost controls and efficiencies lifted NOI by more than 36% in year one.Navigating early struggles with occupancy and constraints on pushing rents.Capital-raising challenges due to tight liquidity and investor uncertainty.Washer-dryer additions as a controllable income-generating upgrade.Refinancing the property to lower-rate debt and greater savings.Community-building as a driver of retention and resident satisfaction.Gary's key lessons for focusing on controllables, efficiency, and stability.Current investment opportunities, from Class A and C options to Icon on Headley.Links Mentioned in Today's Episode:Icon on Spanish TrailIcon on HeadleyEmail Andy Huang, Investor Relations ManagerAndy Huang on LinkedInAsset Management Mastery Facebook GroupInvest SmartBreak of Day CapitalBreak of Day Capital InstagramBreak of Day Capital YouTubeGary Lipsky on LinkedIn

Unlock the secrets to powerful storytelling and effective leadership with bestselling author and book coach Stacy Ennis! In this inspiring conversation, Stacy shares her journey from a young lover of books to ghostwriting for a Nobel Prize winner and empowering global leaders to harness the power of their stories.Discover why storytelling isn't just a tool for writers but a crucial skill for every leader, how to balance vulnerability with professionalism, and why EVERYONE has a story worth telling. Stacy also explores practical tips for building creativity, overcoming self-doubt, and using books as sustainable business tools.If you're an aspiring author, leader, or anyone passionate about personal growth and communication, this episode is packed with wisdom and actionable tips to help you share your story with the world!

End of year. Time to reinvent yourself. Sometimes tweaking what you've got just doesn't cut it. Sometimes you need to blow it up and start fresh. I call it creative destruction. This episode digs into why waiting for perfect alignment keeps you stuck. You're tired because you're not inspired. And why your current activity might be completely incompatible with your future self. Ready to stop patching and start building? This conversation gives you permission to make radical changes. No apologies needed. Featured Story I was sitting with a client who looked defeated. Completely stuck. He kept saying he was trying to figure out how to become his future self. But everything he was doing today just wouldn't get him there. He thought he could figure it out. I gave him the shortcut. Ditch it. Do something else. The relief on his face was instant. He didn't need my solution. He needed permission to walk away from what obviously wasn't working so he could figure out what would. That's creative destruction. Not giving up. Clearing space for what's next. Important Points Your current activity might be completely incompatible with your future self, and that's okay. Waiting for stars to align before making a move is exhausting and impossible. Sometimes you can't upgrade what you've got—you have to tear it down first. Memorable Quotes "The reason you're tired is because you're not inspired." "Sometimes you can't go over. Sometimes you can't go around. Sometimes you can't go under. Sometimes you're completely trapped. The only thing you do is blow it up." "Don't worry about what anybody else thinks. You know why? Because as soon as you do it, they're going to say, what took you so long?" Scott's Three-Step Approach Give yourself permission that everything might need to change—not just minor adjustments, but radical shifts in direction. Stop trying to upgrade what's fundamentally broken or incompatible with where you want to go. Embrace the scary moment of decision, then act—everything changes the second you commit to blowing it up. Chapter Notes 0:00 - New theme song and big YouTube announcement coming 1:01 - When your current self can't become your future self 2:55 - How creative destruction actually works in real life 4:39 - Give yourself grace to make radical changes this year 6:15 - Stop patching and painting what needs replacing 7:12 - The obstacle is the way: sometimes you blow it up Connect With Me Search for the Daily Boost on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify Email: support@motivationtomove.com Main Website: motivationtomove.com YouTube: youtube.com/dailyboostpodcast Instagram: @heyscottsmith Facebook Page: facebook.com/motivationtomove Facebook Group: Join the Daily Boost Community Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Justin Bieber BioSnap a weekly updated Biography.In the rapidly shifting world of pop culture Justin Bieber has surfaced in headlines this week more for his personal life than traditional music drama. Us Weekly and AOL report that Justin is currently “happier than he's been in a long time” and looking comfortable and lowkey while spotted at spas in New York City and out on public outings with his wife Hailey Bieber. The two attended a Knicks game, dined at The Corner Store, and grabbed popcorn at the IPIC movie theater—all in plain sight of fans and paparazzi. Any public speculation about marriage woes is being forcefully rebuffed by those close to the couple insiders tell People that Justin and Hailey are focused on their marriage and “very much in it together,” with friends noting their mutual support and maturity.GQ published a new interview with Hailey in which she candidly described their marriage as something they take “one day at a time,” opening up about existing under intense public scrutiny. Despite skipping the 2025 Grammys for the second year running—fueling the usual internet chatter that maybe he's retreating from the limelight—a recent source shared with People that Hailey loves seeing Justin get back into his “creative process,” especially in the studio creating with friends.Grammys chatter is always intense at this time of year, but the spotlight is on nominations and no confirmed Bieber wins or performances are making waves right now with final voting for 2026 not wrapping up until January according to the Times of India.On the cultural tribute front Justin's impact is still being felt—a Candlelight Tribute concert dedicated to Justin Bieber music is scheduled for November 22 in Los Angeles, confirming his music's continuing influence among fans. Social media has picked up on clips from a YouTube event called “DAY 11” featuring Justin with Hailey and WETHEBAND on November 11 but there's nothing to indicate a secret album drop or surprise music project based on available footage so far.Business-wise there is zero movement on new ventures apart from earlier reported news that Justin exited his streetwear brand Drew House recently as summarized on the Spreaker audio biography series. No new deals or partnerships have surfaced this week according to official channels.The upshot Justin Bieber remains a cultural mainstay with his personal life and relationship still commanding major headlines but no confirmed headline-grabbing music or business bombshells in recent days. Any speculations about a retreat or comeback remain just that—unconfirmed and mostly fan-fueled at this stage.Get the best deals https://amzn.to/3ODvOtaThis content was created in partnership and with the help of Artificial Intelligence AI

Click here to send me a quick message :) What does it mean to connect with your inner wild woman (or wild womb)? And how can you more fully embody this innate creative, sensual, generative, wisdom-keeping part of yourself in ways that feel inspiring and unique to you?It can be easy to look online at social media accounts painting with menstrual blood or embodying some fierce quality of themselves with animal hides and think... "that's what the wild woman looks like"...But really, as wild woman photographer Vanessa Wingerath shares, it's not about looking outside of us for what others wild womb expressions are, but tuning into the unique ways YOUR being expresses that archetype that matters.If you're curious to hear about Vanessa's journey to her "wild woman era" and how you can begin to engage with these parts of yourself too - through photography, circles, retreats etc - as well as HOW transformational this kind of practice can be, this week's episode is perfect for you.Resources:Today's shownotes: Grab links to any of Vanessa's offeringsFree Womb connection and Clearing Guided Practice (22 mins)Episode 65: Grief & pleasure postpartum & beyond w Stacey RamsowerIf you loved this episode, share it with a friend, or take a screenshot and share on social media and tag me @herbalwombwisdom.  And if you love this podcast, leave a rating & write a review! It's really helpful to get the show to more amazing humans like you.  ❤️DISCLAIMER: This podcast is for educational purposes only, I am not providing any medical advice, I am not a medical practitioner, I'm an herbalist and in the US, there is no path to licensure for herbalists, so my role is as an herbal educator. Please do your own research and consult your healthcare provider for any personal health concerns.Support the show

Live from IMEX America in Las Vegas, Bart sits down with Kevin Brown — Senior Manager of Go-to-Market and Editorial Strategies at Alliants. From an unexpected encounter with a hotel CEO to building a career on creativity, Kevin shares how gut checks, human connection, and breaking norms have shaped his professional journey and his philosophy on hospitality.Major Takeaways /LearningsGut Checks Lead to Growth: Kevin's career pivots from music industry to hospitality were guided bylistening to instinct and embracing change, not rigid plans.Creativity Is a Muscle: His early years experimenting with acting, painting, writing, and failingforward built resilience and problem-solving skills.No One Succeeds in Isolation: Great ideas emerge through collaboration and challenging conventional thinking.Redefining Roles: At Alliants, Kevin's hybrid position was created around his strengths and passions a model for modern organizations.Connection Through Better Questions: Asking meaningful questions like “What makes you come alive?” creates deeper, faster rapport.Technology as an Enabler: Alliants builds tools that reduce admin tasks and increase time for real guestconnection blending context with hospitality.Trust as ROI: Hospitality success is built on human trust more than on loyalty points or amenities.Happiness as a Metric: Kevin champions measuring “Happiness Per Employee” as a driver of service excellence.Competitive Socialization: Shared experiences (like F1 racing simulators) can teach workplace lessons oncollaboration, patience, and communication. Memorable Quotes“Failure's only a failure if you don't learn anything fromit.” — Kevin Brown“It's not about your idea. It's about the best idea — andthat comes from collaboration.”“Most people don't put people first… but they should.”“Technology should give time back to humans, not take itaway.” “Ask better questions, and you'll build betterconnections.” Why It Matters / How to Use It For Leaders: Create roles around people's passions, not just job descriptions.For Teams: Lead conversations with curiosity and connection not titles or logos.For Hospitality Pros: Use tech to build context, not walls. Every second saved on admin is a secondgained for real service.For Event & Sales Teams: Break formalities, ask meaningful questions, and connect on a human level.For Organizations: Measure and prioritize employee happiness to elevate guest experience.For Culture Builders: Gamified experiences (like F1 Arcade) can double as learning labs for communication and teamwork.Resources and Links:Bart Berkey: MostPeopleDont.com | LinkedIn

An insider's take on Jerry Seinfeld's recent struggles with his comedy, reactions to Colin Jost's controversial joke on SNL, and updates on ongoing and upcoming comedy shows. The podcast also touches on Joe Rogan's political comments, Gavin Newsom's attempts to engage with Rogan, and Pete Davidson's luxurious date with his pregnant girlfriend. Additionally, recent developments in long-running TV shows like 'South Park' and 'The Simpsons' are discussed, along with major announcements from the Great Outdoors Comedy Festival and Mel Hall's debut comedy special.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/daily-comedy-news-with-johnny-mac--4522158/support.Become a premium subscriber! (no ads). For Apple users, hit the banner on your Apple podcasts app which says UNINTERRUPTED LISTENING and the bonus “DCN8” show.You also get 25+ other series  (it's only $4.99 a month with a free-trial month)Contact John at john@thesharkdeck dot com  Media Thoughts is mcdpod.substack.com dailycomedynews.substack.com DCN on Threads: https://www.threads.net/@dailycomedynews https://linktr.ee/dailycomedynews www.buymeacoffee.com/dailycomedynews  

In this week's Flagship Flashback episode of the Wade Keller Pro Wrestling Podcast from ten years ago (10-20-2015), PWTorch editor Wade Keller was joined by Jason Powell from ProWrestling.net and the Pro Wrestling Boom podcast. They discussed the Steve Austin interview with Brock Lesnar, plus reaction to last night's Raw and the breaking news of Raw's rating. They also field phone calls from live listeners on a variety of WWE-related topics.Then, in the previously VIP-exclusive Aftershow, they follow up on the Livecast to absorb the ratings news, plus answer a wide range of email topics including Global Force Wrestling, a Kane-Seth Rollins PPV prediction, a bold declaration from Keller regarding Seth, TNA in India, and more.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/wade-keller-pro-wrestling-podcast--3076978/support.

Fredrik Haren, a 'creativity explorer,' shares insights from his extensive global journey covering 75 countries, explaining how different cultures perceive and harness creativity. He highlights the importance of understanding one's personal creative process and environment, debunking the myth that creativity is facilitated solely through structured processes and techniques. Instead, he emphasises the role of inspiration and the need to balance it with actual creative production. Frederick also discusses his upcoming book 'The World of Creativity,' which explores diverse perspectives on creativity across different cultures and professions. 00:00 Introduction01:07 Meet Fredrik Haren: The Creativity Explorer02:37 Defining Creativity: Perspectives and Insights06:59 Global Exploration of Creativity14:05 The Role of Environment in Creativity16:47 Exploring Your Creative Process with AI17:48 Creating a Culture of Innovation in Teams18:36 Understanding Group Creative Processes20:23 The Myth of Brainstorming21:26 Unique Creative Journeys22:30 Fredrik's Speaking Insights25:15 The World of Creativity Book26:28 The Essence of Curiosity28:58 Connecting with Fredrik30:22 Conclusion and FarewellLinkedIn* Connect with Fredrik Haren⚡️ In each episode, Paddy Dhanda deep dives into a new human Superpower to help you thrive in the age of AI.Host: Paddy DhandaPaddy works at the largest Tech training organisation in the UK and is passionate about helping tech professionals build human skills to thrive in the age of AI.Contact Paddy: paddy@superpowers.schoolSubscribe to my newsletter:

Support our Show:bit.ly/BuyMeACoffeeUKGEver solved a problem with duct tape, prayer, and a dash of drama? My friend, you're more creative than you think, and that is no accident. Whether you're navigating heartbreak, deadlines, or burnt pan de sal, your unique way of thinking is part of God's plan.

This week on Skip the Queue, we're stepping into the turret and turning up the tension, as we explore one of the UK's most talked-about immersive experiences.Our guest is Neil Connolly, Creative Director at The Everywhere Group, who have brought The Traitors Live Experience to life. With over 10 million viewers watching every betrayal, backstab and banishment on the BBC show, expectations for the live version were nothing short of murderous.So, how do you even begin to transform a TV juggernaut into a thrilling, guest-led experience? Let's find out who's playing the game… and who's about to be banished…Skip the Queue is brought to you by Rubber Cheese, a digital agency that builds remarkable systems and websites for attractions that helps them increase their visitor numbers. Your host is Paul Marden.If you like what you hear, you can subscribe on iTunes, Spotify, and all the usual channels by searching Skip the Queue or visit our website SkiptheQueue.fm.If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave us a five star review, it really helps others find us. And remember to follow us on LinkedIn. Show references: The Traitors Live website: https://www.thetraitorslive.co.uk/Neil's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/neil-connolly-499054110/Neil Connolly is a creative leader of design and production teams focused on development, production and installation of live theatre, entertainment, multi-media and attractions for the themed entertainment industry worldwide.Neil began his career as a performer, writer, producer & artist in Londons alternative theatre/art scene. It was during this time Neil developed a love and passion for story telling through the platform of interactive playable immersive theatre.Having been at the vanguard of playable & immersive theatre since 2007, Neil had a career defining opportunity in 2019 when he devised, wrote & directed an immersive experience as part of Sainsbury's 150th Birthday Celebrations. Making him the only immersive theatre & game maker in the world to have HRH Elizabeth Regina attend one of their experiences.In a distinguished career spanning 20 years, Neil has brought that passion to every facet of themed entertainment in the creative direction and production of attractions such as; Handels Messiah, Snowman & The Snowdog, Peppa Pig Surprise Party, Traitors Live, The Crystal Maze Live Experience, Tomb Raider Live Experience & Chaos Karts, an AR go-kart real life battle. Other clients and activations include: Harrods, Sainsbury's, Camelot/The National Lottery, Samsung, Blenheim Palace, Land Rover and Warner Brothers.Neil has worked across 4 continents for many years with private individuals; designing, producing and delivering live entertainment on land, sea & air. A world without boundaries requires freethinking.Neil is currently working with Immersive Everywhere on creative development of show and attraction content for projects across U.K, Europe, North America & Asia. Transcriptions:  Paul Marden: This week on Skip the Queue, we're stepping into the turret and turning up the tension as we explore one of the UK's most talked about immersive experiences.Paul Marden: Our guest is Neil Connolly, Creative Director at The Everywhere Group, who've brought The Traitor's live experience to life. With over 10 million viewers watching every betrayal, backstab and banishment on the BBC show, expectations for the live version were nothing short of murderous. So how do you even begin to transform a TV juggernaut into a thrilling guest-led experience? Let's find out who's playing the game and who's about to be banished.Paul Marden: So, we're underground. Lots of groups running currently, aren't they? How did you make that happenNeil Connolly: Yeah, so now we're two floors under us. There's a lower basement and some other basement. So the building that we are in, there's a family in the 1890s who owned all of the land around Covent Garden and specifically the Adelphi Theatre.Paul Marden: Right.Neil Connolly: And they wanted their theatre to be the first theatre in the UK to have its lights powered by electricity. So they built their own private power station in this building. Like, literally like, all this, this is a power station. But unfortunately for these the Savoy had taken to that moniker, so they quickly built their important institution. The family had this building until the 1980s when the establishment was assumed through the important UK network.Neil Connolly: And then it was sat there empty, doing nothing for 40 years. And so the landlord that is now started redeveloping the building 10 years ago, added two floors onto the top of the building. So now what we're in is an eight-storey structure and we've basically got the bottom four floors. Two of which are ground and mezzanine, which is our hospitality area. And the lower two floors, which are all in the basement, are our experience floors. What we're looking at right now is, if you look off down this way to the right, not you people on audio, but me here.Neil Connolly: Off this side is five of the round table rooms. There's another one behind me and there's two more upstairs. And then I've got some Tretters Towers off to the left and I've got my show control system down there.Neil Connolly: On the floor above me, we've got the lounges. So each lounge is connected to one of the round table rooms. Because when you get murdered or banished, one of the biggest challenges that I faced was what happens to people when they get murdered or banished? Because you get kicked out of the game. It's not a lot of fun, is it? Therefore, for me, you also get kicked out of the round table room. So this is a huge challenge I face. But I built these lounge concepts where you go— it's the lounge of the dead— and you can see and hear the round table room that you've just left. We'll go walk into the room in a while. There's lots of interactivity. But yeah, super fun. Neil Connolly: But unfortunately for these the Savoy had taken to that moniker, so they quickly built their important institution. The family had this establishment until the 1980s when the establishment was considered through the important UK network.Paul Marden: Yeah. So we've got 10 million people tuning in to Traitors per episode. So this must be a lot of pressure for you to get it right. Tell us about the experience and what challenges you faced along the way, from, you know, that initial text message through to the final creation that we're stood in now.Neil Connolly: So many challenges, but to quote Scroobius Pip on this, do you know Scroobius Pip? Paul Marden: No. Neil Connolly: Great, he's amazing. UK rapper from Essex.Neil Connolly: Some people see a mousetrap and think death. I see free cheese and a challenge.Neil Connolly: There's never any problems in my logic, in my thinking. There's always just challenges to overcome. So one of the biggest challenges was what happens to people when they get murdered or banished. The truth of the matter is I had to design a whole other show, which happens after this show. It is one big show. But you go to the Lounge of the Dead, there's more interactivity. And navigating that with the former controller, which is O3 Media and IDTV, who created the original format in the Netherlands, and basically designing a game that is in the world and follows the rules of their game with some reasonable adjustments, because TV and live are not the same thing.Neil Connolly: It takes 14 days to film 12 episodes of The Traitors. Paul Marden: Really? Okay. Neil Connolly: So I was like, how do I truncate 14 days of somebody's life down into a two-hour experience and still deliver that same impact, that same power, that same punch?Paul Marden: Yep.Neil Connolly: But I knew from the beginning of this that it wasn't about time. There is a magic triangle when it comes to the traitors, which is time, space, atmosphere. And time was the thing that I always struggled with. I don't have a Scottish cattle show, and I don't have two weeks. No. So I'm like, 'Cool, I've got to do it in two hours.' So our format follows exactly the same format. We do a breakfast scene, then a mission, then a roundtable banishment, then there's a conclave where the traitors meet and they murder somebody. And I do that in a seven-day structure, a seven-day cycle. But it all happens within two hours around this round table.Neil Connolly: I'm the creative director for Immersive Everywhere. We're a vertically integrated structure in the sense that we take on our own venues. So we're now standing in Shorts Gardens in the middle of Covent Garden. So we've leased this building. We've got a lease that is for a number of years and we have built the show into it. But we also identify the IP, go after that ourselves, we capitalise the projects ourselves. We seek strategic partners, promoters, other people to kind of come involved in that journey. But because we're also the team that are licensing the product, we are also the producers and I'm the creative director for that company. So I developed the creative in line with while also getting the deal done. This is incredibly unusual because other producers will be like, 'Hey, I've identified this IP and I've got it.' Now I'm going to approach a creative agency and I'm going to get them to develop the product. And now I've done all of that, I'm going to find someone else to operationally put it on, or I'm going to find a venue to put it on in, and then I'm going to find my ticketing partner.  But we don't do that. We have our own ticketing platform, and we have our own database, so we mark our own shoulders.Neil Connolly: As well as other experiences too. Back, we have our own creative industry, we are the producers, we are the female workers. So we cast it, we hire all the front of house team, we run the food and beverage, we run the bars. The operations team is our operations team because they run the venue as well as the show at the same time. So that's what I mean. We're a vertically integrated structure, which means we do it, which makes us a very unusual proposition within... certainly within the UK market, possibly the world. It makes us incredibly agile as a company and makes us to be able to be adaptive and proactive and reactive to the product, to the show, to the market that we're operating in, because it's all under one roof.Neil Connolly: This show started January 24th, 2023. Right. It's very specific because I was sitting on my sofa drinking a lovely glass of Merlot and I had just watched... UK Traitors, Season One. Yep. Because it came out that Christmas. Immediately I was like, 'Oh my God, this is insane.' And then I got a text message that particular night from our head of licensing, a guy named Tom Rowe, lovely man. And he was like, Neil, I'm at a licensing event with some friends of mine and everyone's talking about this thing called Traitors. I've not watched it. Have you watched it? Sounds like it might be a good thing. And so I sat back and drank my Merlot. And about five minutes later, I text him back and I was like, Tom, get us that license.Neil Connolly: And then I sent him a bunch of other details of how the show in my head would work, both from a commercial standpoint, but also from a creative standpoint, because I'm a commercially minded creative. Right. So I instantly took out my notebook and I started writing down exactly how I thought the show was going to do, the challenges that we would face and being able to translate this into a live thing. But I literally started writing it that night. And then he watched the first episode on the train on the way home. And then he texted me the next morning and he was like, 'I love it.' What do we need to do? And I was like, 'Get us in the room.' Two days later, we were in the room with all three media who own the format globally.Paul Marden: Okay.Neil Connolly: So we sat down and then they came to see one of our other shows and they were like, 'Okay, we get it now.' And then that was like two and a half years of just building the show, getting the deal done and facing the myriad of challenges. But yeah, sometimes it just starts with the text message.Paul Marden: So they get to experience all the key parts of the TV.Neil Connolly: All the key beats. Like right now, I'm holding one of the slates. They're not chalkboard slates. Again, this is... Oh, actually, this is a good challenge. So in the TV show, they've got a piece of slate and they write on it with a chalkboard pen. This seems so innocuous and I can't believe I'm talking about this on a podcast.Neil Connolly: Slategate was like six months of my life. Not in its entirety, but it was a six month long conversation about how we do the slates correctly. Because we do... 48 shows a day, six days a week. And those slates will crack. They will bash. And they're kind of a bit health and safety standards. I was like, can't have them. Also, they write on them with chalk pens, white ink chalk pens. But in the TV show, you only do it once a night. Yeah.Paul Marden: And then you have a producer and a runner.Neil Connolly: They just clean them very, very leisurely and set them back for the next day. And I was like, no, I've got to do a whole bunch of roundtable banishments in two hours. So we talked a lot about material, about style, literal viewership, because if you take a seat at the table. Yeah. If you're sitting at the table here, you'll notice that we've got a raised bit in the middle. If I turn mine around, the other person on the other side can't see it. So I was like, 'Okay, cool.' So we had to do a whole bunch of choreography. But also, the room's quite dark. Yes. At times, atmospheric. Yeah. In that magic triangle time-space atmosphere. So anything that was darker, or even that black slate, you just couldn't read it. And then there was, and then I had to— this is the level of detail that we have to go into when we're designing this kind of stuff. I was like, 'Yeah, but I can't clean off these slates with the white ink because everyone will have to have like a wet cloth chamois. Then I've just got loads of chamois around my venue that I just don't need.' And so then we're like, 'Oh, let's use real slates with real chalk.' And I was like, 'No, because dust will get everywhere.' I'll get chalk just all over my table. It'll just ruin everything. It'll ruin the technology that's inside the table because there's lots of hidden tricks inside of it. Paul Marden: Is there really? Yeah, yeah, yeah.  Neil Connolly: There's loads of hidden tricks inside the table. So after a while, going through many different permutations, I sat down with Christian Elenis, who's my set designer and my art director. And we were, the two of us were nearly in tears because we were like, 'We need,' and this only happened like.Neil Connolly: I would say two, three weeks before we opened. We still hadn't solved how to do the slate, which is a big thing in the show. Anybody who's seen the show and loves the show knows that they want to come in, they want to write somebody's name on the slate, and they want to spell the name incorrectly.Neil Connolly: Everyone does it on purpose. But I wanted to give people that opportunity. So then eventually we sat down and we were like, Christian, Neil. And the two of us in conversation went, why don't we just get a clear piece of Perspex, back it with a light coloured vinyl. And then Christian was like, 'Ooh,' and I'll make it nice and soft and put some felt on the back of it, which is what I'm holding. And then why don't we get a black pen? And we were like, 'Yeah,' like a whiteboard marker. And then we can just write on it. And then A, I can see it from the other side of the table. Thing one achieved. Two. Every marker pen's got an eraser on the top of it. I don't know why everyone thinks this is important, but it is. That you can just rub out like that, and I'm like, 'There's no dirt, there's no mess, and I can reuse this multiple times, like dozens of times in the same show.' And I know that sounds really weird, but that's the level of design I'm going to need.Paul Marden: I was just about to say, and that is just for the chalkboard. Yeah. Now you need to multiply that. How many decisions?Neil Connolly: How many decisions in each game. But also remember that there are eight round tables in this building. Each round table seats 14 people. And we do six sessions a day. So first ones at 10 a. m. Then we do 12, 2, 4, 6, and 8 p. m. So we do 48 shows a day, six days a week.Paul Marden: I love the concept that these are shows. This is not this is not visitor attraction. This is theater repeated multiple times a day for multi audience is concurrently.Neil Connolly: And I've just spent five minutes describing a slate to you. Yeah. But like, I haven't even got— it's like the sheer amount of technology that is in the show. And again, theatrical, like, look above our heads. Yeah. You've got this ring light above every seat. It's got a pin light. There's also microphones which are picking up all the audio in the room, which again is translating to the lounge of the dead. Every single one of the round table rooms has four CCTV cameras. Can you see that one in the corner? Each one of them is 4K resolution. It's quite high spec, which is aimed at the opposite side of the table to give you the resolution in the TV. In the other room. Then you've got these video contents. This is constantly displaying secret information through the course of the show to the traitors when they're in Conclave because everyone's in blindfolds and they took them off. They get secret instructions from that. There's also a live actor in the room. A live actor who is Claudia? They're not Claudia. They're not pastiches of Claudia. They are characters that we have created and they are the host of The Traitor's Game. Right. They only exist inside this building. We never have them portrayed outside of this building in any way whatsoever.Neil Connolly: They are characters, but they live, they breathe— the game of Traitors, the world of Traitors, and the building that we have designed and constructed here. And they facilitate the game for the people. And they facilitate the game for the people. One actor to 14 people. There are no plants, even though everyone tries to tell me. Members of the public will be convinced that they are the only person that's in that show and that everyone else is a plant. And I'm like, no, because that would be insane.Neil Connolly: The only actor in the room is the host.Paul Marden: 14 people that can sit around this table. How many of them are in the same group? Are you with your friends or is it put together where there are other people that you won't know in the room? If you book together, you play together.Neil Connolly: Yes. Okay, so if you don't book 14 people... Ah, we also capped the number of tickets that you can purchase to eight. Right. So you can only purchase a maximum of eight tickets unless you do want a full table of 14, at which point you have to then purchase a VIP package because you are booking out a whole table for yourselves. The game doesn't work if there's less than 10 people at the table. So there has to be 10, 11, 12, 13 or 14 people sat at a round table for the show to actually happen, for it to work. By capping the number of tickets that you book for eight, then that guarantees that strangers will be playing together. And that is the basis of strangers. Yeah, yeah. Like, you need to be sat around a table with people you know, you don't know, that you trust and you don't trust. Yeah. Fact of the matter. And do you see people turning on the others in their own group? Every single time. People think genuinely, and I love this from the public, you would think that if you're turning up as a group of eight and a group of four and a group of two, that the bigger group would just pick everybody off to make sure that someone in their group gets through to the end game.Neil Connolly: I'm sure they think that and they probably plot and plan that before they arrive on site. As soon as this game starts, gloves are off and everyone just starts going for each other. We've been open nearly two months now. I have seen, like, children murdered of their mothers.Neil Connolly: Husbands murder their wives, wives murder their husbands. I've seen, like, three generations—like, we get, because it's so intergenerational, like our lowest, the lowest age that you can play this is 12. Right. And then it's upwards. I've seen three generations of family come in and I've seen grandkids murder their own nan.Neil Connolly: Absolutely convinced that they're a traitor. Yeah, yeah, yeah. 100%. Or they banish them. Like, it's just mental. I've also seen nans, who are traitors, murder their grandkids.Neil Connolly: Like, and this is in a room full of strangers. They're just like, 'No, I'm not going to go for Barbara, who I met two hours ago in the bar. I'm going to go for my own grandson. It's mental.'Neil Connolly: The very, very first thing that I always think about whenever I'm creating an experience or whenever I'm designing a show is I put myself in the position of 'I'm a member of the public.' I have bought a ticketNeil Connolly: What's the coolest thing that I am going to do for my money? What is my perceived value of my ticket over actually what is the value of that ticket? I wanted to give people the experience of knowing what it was like to be sitting in one of these chairs at this table and feeling their heart. The pounding in their chest and I mean, the pounding in their chest, that rush of adrenaline from doing nothing— from sitting in a chair and all you were doing was sitting in a room talking to people and your heart is going.Neil Connolly: Because you're either being accused of being a liar. And trying to defend against it. And trying to defend against it. Or you actually are lying and you're trying to whittle your way out of it. And that feeling is the most alive that you will ever feel. Not ever. Like, I'm sure they're... No, no, no. But, like, give people that opportunity and that experience, as well as, like, access to the world of traitors and the law and everything else. But also, it's like any other theme park ride. People go on roller coasters because the imminent fear of death is always there. Yeah. And you feel alive. You're like, you've got such a buzz of adrenaline. Whereas, arguably, we do exactly the same thing as roller coasters, but in a much more longer-drawn format and multiple times. Yeah. And people do feel alive. When people walk out of the show, you see them go upstairs to the bar, and they are... Yeah.Paul Marden: You've said to me already that you don't use the word 'immersive,' but you know, I'm, I'm, I'm sat. The company is called 'immersive' everywhere. I'm sat behind the scenes. Okay. I'm sat in the room and the room is hugely convincing. It's like the highest fidelity escape room type experience that I've ever sat in. It feels like I'm on set, yeah, yeah. Um, I can totally believe that, in those two hours, you can slip. I sat on a game. It was only a two-minute game at iApple, but I was being filmed by one of the team. But within 30 seconds, I'd forgotten that they were there because I was completely immersed in the game. I can believe that, sitting in here right now, you could forget where you were and what you were doing, that you were completely submerged in the reality of the land that you're in.Neil Connolly: Yeah, 100%. Like, the world does not exist beyond these worlds. And for some people, like, I have my own definition. Everyone's got a different definition of what immersive is. I've got my own definition. But... I can tell you right now, as soon as people enter this building, they're in the bar, they're kind of slowly immersed in that world because the bar is a themed bar. It's done to the same, like we designed and built that bar as well. But as soon as they start descending that spiral staircase and coming into the gameplay floors, into the show floors, they just forget the rest of the world exists. And especially when they sit down at this table, it doesn't matter. I'm sat next to you here, but you could be sat at this table with your loved one, strangers, whatever. The gloves come off and just nothing exists apart from the game that you're about to go through.Paul Marden: You've been open now for a couple of months. More success than you were anticipating, I think. So pre-sales went through the roof? Yes. So you're very happy with the results?Neil Connolly: Yeah, yeah, we were. Yeah, well, we still are.Neil Connolly: We were very confident before we'd even started building the show, like the literal structural build, because we did very well. But then that set expectations quite high because I had a lot of people that had bought tickets and I was like, 'OK, I need to put on a good show for these people. And I need to make sure that they get satisfaction relative to the tickets that they bought.' But I don't feel pressure. I do feel anxiety quite a lot. Creatively? Yeah. I mean, I meditate every day.Paul Marden: But you've created this amazing world and you're inviting people into it. And as a creative, you're opening yourself up, aren't you? People are walking into the world that you've created.Neil Connolly: Yeah, this was said to me. This is not something that I came up with myself, and I do say this really humbly, but it was something that was said to me. It was on opening day, and a bunch of my friends came to playtest the show. And they were like, 'Oh, this is your brain in a building.'Neil Connolly: And I was like, 'Yeah, I hadn't thought about that.' But yeah, it is my brain in a building. But also that's terrifying, I think, for everybody else, because I know what happens inside my brain and it's really quite chaotic.Neil Connolly: But, you know, this I am. I'm so proud of this show. Like you could not believe how proud I am of this show. But also a huge part of my job is to find people that are smarter than me at the relative thing that they do, such as the rest of my creative team. They're all so much smarter than me. My job is vision and to be able to communicate that vision clearly and effectively so that they go, 'I understand.' The amount of times that people on the creative team turn around to me and go, 'Neil, that's a completely mental idea.' If people are saying to me, 'No one's ever done that before' or 'that's not the way things are done.'Neil Connolly: Or we can do that, but we're going to have to probably invent a whole new thing. If people are saying those things to me, I know I'm doing my job correctly. And I'm not doing that to challenge myself, but everything that I approach in terms of how I build shows is not about format. It's not about blueprints. It's not like, 'Hey, I've done this before, so I'm just going to do this again because I know that's a really neat trick.' I go back to, 'I made the show because I wanted people's heart to pound in their chest while they're sitting in a chair and make them feel alive.'Paul Marden: Is that the vision that you had in your head? So you're articulating that really, really clearly. Is that the vision that you sold to everybody on, not maybe day one, but within a couple of days of talking about this? No, it was day one.Neil Connolly: It was day one. Everyone went, that's a completely mental idea. But, you know, it's my job to try and communicate that as effectively and clearly as I can. But again, I am just one man. My job is vision. And, you know, there's lighting design, sound design, art direction, there's game logic. We haven't even gotten to the technology of how this show works yet, or how this room works.Neil Connolly: Actually, I'll wander down the corner. Yeah, let's do that. But, like, there's other, like, lots of hidden tricks. Like, this is one of the games, one of the missions. In the world and the lore of the show, the round table is sacrosanct.Paul Marden: Yes.Neil Connolly: Traitors is the game. The game is in other people. I can do so many missions and there's loads of missions and they're really fun in this show. But the game is in other people. It's in the people sat on the other side of the room. But also I wanted to do a thing where people could interact directly with the set. And so I designed one of the missions to be in the round table itself.Neil Connolly: So there's a course of these moon dials, which you basically have to align through the course of it. And there are sensors built into the table so that they know when they're in the correct position. How you find out the correct position is by solving a very, very simple puzzle and then communicating effectively to a bunch of strangers that you just met.Neil Connolly: And the sensors basically read it all. And when that all gets into position, the lights react, the sound reacts, the video content reacts, the whole room reacts to you. So I wanted to give people something tangible that they can touch and they make the room react to them. Yes, it's. I mean, I've designed, I've got background in escape rooms as well, right? Um, so I've done a lot of that kind of stuff as well. So I wanted people to feel in touch, same, but like, there's more tangible props over here. Um, yeah, that is a model box of the room that we are stood in, yeah. Also, there's an exact replica of it on the other side of it. There are very subtle differences between it, and that informs one of the missions. So that is two model boxes in this roundtable room. There's one of these in every single roundtable room. So there's 16 model boxes of the show that you're stood in on the set. And again, theatre. It's a show. But it's one of the missions, because I wanted people to kind of go, 'Oh, there's a live actor in front of me.' I'm having fun. Oh, look at all these lights and all the sound. Oh, there's a model box over here. That's in theatre land and blah, blah, blah. But that is also a really expensive joke. It's a really expensive joke. And there's other, like, lots of hidden tricks.Neil Connolly: Let's go look at backstage. Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely.Neil Connolly: I say backstage, like how we refer to it or how I always go. I use 'I' and 'we' very interchangeably. Like right now you're on the set. Like you're on the stage. Yes. We're just wandering around a long corridor. There are round table rooms off to either side. But like, you know, there's a green room upstairs where the actors get changed, where the front of house team are, where the bar team all are. But as soon as they go out onto the show floor, they're on stage—yes, completely. We'll very quickly have a look at the gallery—yes, show control. Hi, Robbo. Do you mind if I stand in your room for the purposes of the audio? I'm talking to the technical manager, Thomas Robson. We're recording a podcast.Paul Marden: Robbo, oh yeah, okay. My mind is absolutely blown. So you've got every single room up on screen.Neil Connolly: Yeah, so that's great. There's 164 cameras—something like that. But every roundtable room has four cameras in it. Each camera is 4K resolution. So we've got cameras on all of them. We've got audio into those rooms. That's two-way, so that if show control needs to talk directly to them, they just press a button here and they can talk directly to the room itself. Mainly just like, stop misbehaving, we're watching you.Neil Connolly: We've then got cameras into all of the lounges, all of the show spaces, all the front of house, all of the bar areas, the mezzanine and back of house. And then you've got QLab running across all of the different shows. We've got backups on all of these screens. So if one... of the computers goes down, we can very quickly swap it in for a backup that's already running. We've got show control, which is, there's a company called Clockwork Dog, who, they're an amazing company. What COGS, their show control system, is doing is pulling in all of the QLab from sound, all of the QLab from lighting, and also we built our own app. to be able to run the show. So there's a whole logic and decision tree based on the decisions that the public do through the course of the game. So yes, there is a beginning, a middle, and an end in terms of our narrative beats and the narrative story of the show that we're telling people. But also that narrative can go in. Hundreds of different directions depending on the actions and the gameplay that the people do during the course of the show. So, you haven't just learned one show— you have to learn like You have to learn a world, and you have to learn a whole game.Neil Connolly: Like, there's the server, stacks, which we had to build. You had to network and cable the entire building. So we have built an entire new attraction, which didn't exist before. And also we're pulling in information from the front of house system which is also going into the show itself because again, you put your name into the iPad when you arrive on site and then you tick a box very crucially to say, 'Do you want to be selected as a trader? Yes or No.' Because in the game, it's a fundamental rule. If you say no, you cannot be selected as a traitor by the host during traitor selection. That doesn't mean you can't be recruited.Paul Marden: By the traitors later on in the game. So you could come and do this multiple times and not experience the same story because there were so many different pathways that you could go down.Neil Connolly: But also, the game is in other people. Yes. The show is sat on the opposite side of the table to you because, like, Bob and Sandra don't know each other. They'll never see each other ever again. But Bob comes again and he's now playing against Laura. Who's Laura? She's an unknown quantity. That's a whole new game. That's a whole new show. There's a whole new dynamic. That's a whole new storyline that you have to develop. And so the actors are doing an incredible job of managing all of that.Paul Marden: Thanks, Robbo. Thank you. So you've worked with some really, really impressive leading IP, Traders, Peppa Pig, Doctor Who, Great Gatsby. What challenges do you face taking things from screen to the live experience?Paul Marden: Challenges do I face? We're wandering here.Neil Connolly: So we are in... Oh, we're in the tower.Neil Connolly: Excellent. Yep, so we're now in Traitor's Tower. Good time for you to ask me the question, what challenges do I face? Things like this. We're now stood in Traitor's Tower. Paul, let me ask you the question. Without the show lights being on, so we're just stood on a set under workers, what's your opinion of the room that we're stood in?Paul Marden: Oh, it's hugely impressive. It feels like, apart from the fact you've punched the fourth wall out of the telly, it does feel like you're on set.Neil Connolly: It's a really faithful reproduction of the set. So that's kind of one of the challenges is managing the public's expectations of what they see, do and feel on site. So that I don't change the show so that people come and play the game that they're expecting to play. But making reasonable adjustments within that, because TV and live are two very, very different things. So first and foremost was making sure that we get the format right. So the game that people play, which informs the narrative of the show and the narrative structure of the show. Breakfast, mission, round table, conclave. Breakfast, mission, round table, conclave. I've designed a whole bunch of new missions that are in this, taken some inspiration from missions that people know and love from the TV shows, whether that's the UK territory or other territories around the world. And also just other stuff is just clear out of my head. So there's original content in there. paying homage and respect to the world that they've built and allowing ourselves to also play and develop and build out that world at the same time. Other challenges.Neil Connolly: This is not a cheap project. No, no. I mean, the production quality of this is beautiful. Yeah, yeah, thank you. It is stunning. When people walk in here, they're like, 'Oh my God, this is... High end.' I am in a luxury event at a very affordable price.Paul Marden: Thank you. And then we're going back upstairs again. Yes. And in the stairwell, we've got the crossed out photos of all of those that have fallen before us.Neil Connolly: No, not quite. All of the people that are in this corridor, there's about 100 photos. These are all the people who built the show.Neil Connolly: So this is David Gregory. He's the sound designer. This is Kitty, who is Immersive Everywhere's office manager. She also works in ticketing. That is Tallulah and Alba, who work in the art department. Elliot, who's our lighting designer. So all of these people are the people who brought the show to life.Paul Marden: Amazing.Neil Connolly: And we wanted to pay homage to them because some of them gave years of their lives to building the show from literally the inception that I had in 2023. Through to now and others are the people who literally spent months of their life underground in these basements building hand-building this set and so we wanted to pay homage to them so we got all of their photos we did the iconic red cross through it yeah and we stuck them all up in the corridor just because we thought it'd be a nice thing to do.Paul Marden: You're in the business of trading and experiences and that ranges from art exhibitions to touring shows. There's always going to be a challenge of balancing innovation and profitability. What is the formula? What is the magic formula?Neil Connolly: I believe, first and foremost, going back to what I was telling you earlier about us being a collaborative organisation. We are not a creative crack that has been used for the show. We are also the producers of the show. And to make my point again, I'm a commercially minded creative. So I actually sit down with the producers and go, 'Okay, cool.' There are 112 seats in the show.Paul Marden: Yep.Neil Connolly: Therefore, how many shows do we need to do per day? How many shows do we need to do per week? How many shows do we need to do per year? Therefore, let's build out a P &L. And we build a whole business plan based around that.Paul Marden: By having everybody— that you need in the team— makes it much easier to talk about that sort of stuff. It makes it much easier for you to design things with the end result in mind. You don't have a creative in a creative agency going off— feeding their creative wants without really thinking about the practicalities of delivering on it.Neil Connolly: Exactly. So you've got to think like, literally, from the very, very beginning: you've got to think about guest flow. You've got to think about throughput. You've got to think about your capacities. Then you've got to basically build out a budget that you think— how much, hey, how much really is this going to cost? Yeah. Then you build out an entire business plan and then you go and start raising the money to try and put that on. And then you find a venue. I mean, like the other magic triangle, like the traitor's magic triangle is, you know, time, space, atmosphere. That's how you do a show. Like with my producer's hat on, the other magic triangle is show, money, venue.Neil Connolly: The truth of the matter, like I make no bones about it, I can design shows till the cows come home, but I'm always going to need money to put them on and a venue to put them in. Also, I want to stress this really important. I use the words 'I' and 'we' very interchangeably.Paul Marden: It's a team effort.Neil Connolly: You can see that in that corridor. I am not a one-man band. I am the creative director of a company. I am a cog that is in that machine, and everybody is doing... We are, as a team... I cannot stress this enough. Some of the best in the business are doing what we do. And everyone is so wildly talented. And that's just us on the producing side. That's immersive everywhere, limited. Then I've got a whole other creative team. Then we've got operations. Then we've got... It's just mad. It's just mad, isn't it? This is a job. Who would have thought, when you were at school, this was an opportunity? Not my principal or my maths teacher.Neil Connolly: So, sorry, just to balance the kind of economies of scale. That was the question, wasn't it?Paul Marden: Well, we were talking about what is the formula for making that an investment, but you know, the authority here is the effort you've put in to do this feels high, but at the same time, you have to find this thing. There is a lot of investment that goes into the front.Neil Connolly: But that comes back to creatives. Caring and I'm not saying the creatives don't, but I care. I care about building businesses. Yeah, not necessarily like building my own CV, like there's so many projects that across our desks. I'll be like, 'Yeah, that'd be really fun to work on.' But do I think that I can make that a touring product? Can it be a long-running location-based entertainment sit-down product? Can it be an art shop? Like you've kind of got a balance with what do you think is just creatively cool versus what can we do as a company that is a commercially viable and financially stable product? And so all that comes through in terms of the creative, but also in terms of the activities of how we run the building, how this model realizes. Because if you think about it, let's make Phantom of the Opera run in the West End. Yes. The show is very obvious, with many casts on a room, away, fruit team away, terrace, it's a big activity. If they haven't sold half that away, they have to use the whole show and play all those people.Neil Connolly: But if they haven't sold half that away from one of my shows... I only have to activate four of my rooms, not eight of them. Therefore, I don't have to call in four actors. I don't have to call in a bunch of the other front of house team and I can scale in the operations on the back. It's an entirely scalable process. Flexible, yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, 100%. But also, like, we've got eight rooms here. If we decide to take this to another territory, and that territory demands a much higher throughput, then instead of eight rooms, I can do 20 rooms, 30 rooms. As long as we know that the market is there to be able to kind of get people through it.Neil Connolly: I love this show and I'm so proud of it. The main reason why I'm proud of it is when the show finishes, let's go into one of the lounges. Have you been into one of the lounges?Paul Marden: I've had a nose around a lounge.Neil Connolly: There are different shapes and sizes. We won't go into that one. We'll go into this one down here. That one, that one. It's always such a buzz when you're stood in the bar and the shows kick out, and you see tables and tables of 14 people going up into the bar.Neil Connolly: Area and before they've even gotten a drink, they will run straight over to their friends, families, strangers, whoever they were playing with in that table of 14, and instantly be like, 'Right, I need to know everything that was going on inside your head, your heart, and your soul over the last two hours of my life because this was my experience.'Neil Connolly: And they'll just go, and they'll be like, 'And this is what I was thinking.' And then I thought it was you because you did this and you touched your nose in a weird way. And then I thought you were sending secret signals. And then everyone's like, 'No, that's not what I was doing.' I was just trying to be a normal person. And they were like, 'Well, why did you say that thing?' It sounded super weird. And they're like, 'That's just what I do.' And it's just totally mental. And then they all get a drink from the bar. And we call it the bar tab chat.Neil Connolly: It's another revenue stream.Neil Connolly: I do talk about this like it's a show. And it is a show. You've walked around, do you think it's a show? Completely. I talk to established houses all the time. Like, you know, the big theatres of the land. Organisations that are national portfolio organisations who receive a lot of Arts Council funding. The thing that they want to talk to us about all the time is new audiences. They're like, 'How do I get new audiences through my door?' What can I do? And I'm like, 'Well, firstly, make a show that people want to go and see.'Neil Connolly: Again, they're like, 'But I've got this amazing writer and he's a really big name and everyone's going to come because it's that name.' And I'm like, 'Yeah, that's wicked. That's cool.' And they can all go pay reverence to that person. That's really wonderful. Whereas when you look at the attractions landscape or the immersive theatre landscape or like anything like... Squid Game, or The Elvis, Evolution, or War of the Worlds, which has also laid reality, or any of that kind of stuff, across the landscape, it is nothing but new audiences. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It is nothing but actual ticket-buying audiences.Neil Connolly: And they come from all different walks of life. And what I love is that they do come in to this experience and we hit them with this like secret theatre.Neil Connolly: And they're like, 'Oh my God.' And often it's a gateway to them being like, 'Oh, I didn't realise that.' Maybe I'll go see a Western show or maybe I will go to the National Theatre and see something. Because that's the level of archery. Because those organisations, I love them and I've worked in a few of them, but those buildings can be quite austere, even though they're open and porous, but it's still very difficult to walk through that threshold and feel a part of it.Paul Marden: Whereas coming in here, coming into an event like this, can feel like a thing that they do.Neil Connolly: Because it's the same demographic as theme park junkies. People who love going to theme parks love going to stuff like this because it's an experience, it's an otherness, it's an other nature kind of thing. Because modern audiences want to play and do, not sit and watch. But we all exist in the kind of same ecosystem. I'm not taking on the National Theatre.Paul Marden: Gosh, no. I always talk about that. I think the reason why so many attractions work together in the collaborative way that they do is they recognise that they're not competing with each other. They're competing with sitting on your backside and watching Netflix.Paul Marden: Yeah, yeah.Paul Marden: Our job for all of us is to drag people away from their screens and drag people off of their sofas to do something. And then that's the biggest challenge that we all face.Neil Connolly: I think then that kind of answers the question that you asked me earlier, which I didn't answer. And I'm very sorry.Neil Connolly: is about identifying different pieces of IP. Like, yes, we largely exist in the world of licensing IP. And how do we identify that kind of IP to be able to translate? Not just how do we do it, but like, actually, how do we identify the right thing that's going to... How do you spot the winner? Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And that is one of the biggest challenges to your point of we're talking directly to people who consume arts, culture and media and technology in a slightly more passive way, whether that's just at home and watching Netflix and then bringing that to life. In a very, very different way. If you have a very clear marketing campaign that tells people what it is that they're buying and what they're expected to see or do on their particular night out, because that's what modern people really care about, what they do with their money. Yeah. And they want to have a good night out. And I'm in the business of giving people a good night out. We also happen to be murdering a lot of people in the course of the show.Neil Connolly: Still a good night out. Still a good night out. But I'm in a place where the dead sit. Yeah, exactly. Lounge of the dead. And like, you know, this is a really cool space. Oh, it's just beautiful. You know, we've got the telephone really works. There's lots of information that comes through that. The radio works, that does different things. The TV screen on the wall, that has the actual live feed into the round table room that you've just left. And there's other little puzzles and hints and tricks in this room, which means that after you've been murdered or banished and you come to the Lounge of the Dead, you're still engaged with the game to a degree. You just don't directly influence the outcome of the game. But you're still involved in it. You're still involved in it. It's super fun. Oh, and you can have a drink in here.Paul Marden: I don't let people drink in the round table. Even more important. What's this?Neil Connolly: The dolls, the creepy dolls. What this is, this is the void. Creatively speaking, this is where all the gold goes when people win or lose it. And the creepy dolls are from the TV show. Ydyn nhw'r un gwirioneddol o'r sioe? Felly, gafodd studio Lambert, sy'n gwneud y sioe tebyg, llawer o brops o'r sioe tebyg i ni eu rhoi ar y ddispleiddio yma. Felly, mae gennych chi'r Dolls Creepy o'r lles 3 yno. Rydyn ni'n mynd i fyny. Yn ôl yma, mae'r peintiwch Deathmatch.Paul Marden: Which is from season three.Neil Connolly: And they get the quill and they write the names and got the quill upstairs. We've also got over here, the cards that they used to play the death match with. Excellent.Paul Marden: So you began your career in theatre. How did that evolve into the world of immersive live experiences?Neil Connolly: Life story. I am the son of a postman and a cook. And if you haven't noticed already, I'm from Ireland. There was no theatre in our lives, my life, when I was growing up. And I stumbled into a youth theatre. It's called Kildare Youth Theatre. And the reason why I joined that is because there was a girl that I really fancied.Neil Connolly: She had just joined this youth theatre and I was like, 'Oh, I'm gonna join that as well' and that kind of opened the world of theatre for me. At the same time, I then got spotted by this guy, his name's Vijay Baton, his real name's Om, but he converted to Hare Krishnanism in the 90s. And he set up a street theatre company in Ireland. He just taught me street theatre. So he taught me stilt walk, he taught me juggling, he taught me how to build puppets. And so I spent years building puppets with him and going around Ireland doing lots of different street theatre while I was a teenager. And doing street theatre and doing my youth theatre and then kind of all of that kind of came to a head when I had to decide what I was going to do with my life. I applied to go to drama school. And I applied to two drama schools. One was Radha. Didn't get in. Didn't even get an audition. And the other one was Rose Bruford. And they took me. And the reason why they took me— I probably wasn't even that good. But on the day that I was auditioning to get into Rose Bruford was the same day as my maths exam for my final exams at school. You call them your A-levels, we call them the leaving certificate.Neil Connolly: And while all of my friends were back in Ireland doing their maths exam, I was in an audition room pretending to be a tree or the colour black.Neil Connolly: Who knows? And they kind of went, 'Well, if I fail my maths exam, I don't get into university in Ireland.' Like, it's just a blanket thing. And so I was like, 'I literally sat across the panel' and I was like, 'eggs, basket.' And they were like, 'cool.' So they let me in based off of that. So I got a classical training. Then what happened is I came out of university. I was living with two of my friends, Natalie and Joe. And we had our own little production company called The Lab Collective. And we just started making shows. In weird ways, we joined a company called Theatre Delicatessen. Let's get away from this. Yeah, yeah, yeah.Neil Connolly: So Theatre Deli was a company set up to take over disused spaces in London and convert them into art spaces.Neil Connolly: Basically legalised squatting. It's the same as like a guardianship. But we weren't living in the buildings. We were just putting on shows and we put on art shows, we put on theatre shows. We did Shakespeare for a while. We wrote our own work and we just did lots of really, really cool stuff. And I worked in music festivals, classically trained actor. So I was trying to do shows. I did a lot of devising. I also joined an improvisation group. And kind of through all that mix, like those years at Delhi, which was making these weird shows in these weird buildings, were very, very formative years for us. The Arts Council wouldn't support the kind of work that we were making. We were like, 'Cool, how do we get space?Neil Connolly: How do we get or make money to support ourselves? And what are the shows? There's the magic triangle all over again. Space, show, money. And that's your apprenticeship, I guess, that brings you to here. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And like, again, I make no bones about it. 10 years ago, I was selling programs on the door of the Royal Festival Hall while doing all of that stuff. So in one of the Theatre Daily buildings, we did a show called Heist, which is you break into a building and steal stuff. That's what the public do.Neil Connolly: And a bunch of us did that. I mean, it's so much fun— kind of doing it. And off the back of that, somebody else basically tried to chase down the crystal maze. And then they went away, and then they called me up and they were like, 'Hey, I've got the rights. Do you want to make the crystal maze?' And I was like, 'Yeah, sounds like fun.' So I got involved with that, did that for a while. And then, from there, this is the end of a very long story. I'm so apologised. Yeah, from there, all of those different things that I've done through the course of my life in terms of operations, designing experiences, being a creative, understanding business.Neil Connolly: Building a P&L, building a budget, talking to investors, trying to convince them to give you money. All of that stuff kind of basically came together. And over the last few years, like the wildest ride is that pre-2020.Neil Connolly: We were just a bunch of people doing a bunch of weird things, making weird shows and weird attractions in kind of different ways. And then that year happened. And I don't know what happened, but literally every single major studio, film, TV production, game designer, licensor in the world, suddenly just went— brand extensions, world extensions, and they all just started calling us. And they were like, 'Hi, I've got this thing.' Can you develop it into a thing? Because I need to extend my brand or I want to build a world and extend that for the public. And we were like, 'Yeah, okay, cool.' And we were just lucky, serendipitously, to be in the right place at the right time. To be those people that people can approach. And we're always, we're very approachable.Neil Connolly: As you can tell, I talk a lot. And, you know, so the last five years, it's just been a mad ride.Paul Marden: So look, Neil, it's been amazing. I have had the most fun. Last question for you. What's next? Are you putting your feet up now because you finished this? Or on to the next? Neil Connolly: Very much on to the next thing. So we're already in production with our new show, which is called Peppa Pig Surprise Party. And that is opening at the Metro Centre in Gateshead next year. Oh, how exciting is that? It's very exciting.Paul Marden: So quite a different demographic.Neil Connolly: The demographic for Peppa Pig is two to five year olds. It's been a really fun show to design and create. To go back to a question that you asked me very early on, there is no blueprint, there is no format. I have embraced the chaos tattooed on my arm. And always when I approach things, any new show or any new creative, I am thinking of it from a ticket buying perspective: 'I have paid my money.' What is the coolest thing that I can possibly do with that money? And so therefore, I'm now looking at families and, like, what's the coolest thing that they can do for that ticket price in the world of Peppa Pig?Paul Marden: Let's come back in the new year, once you've opened Peppa Pig, let's go to Gateshead and see that. That sounds pretty awesome to me. I reckon there's a whole new episode of Designing Worlds for two to five-year-olds that we could fill an hour on.Neil Connolly: Oh yeah, 100%. It's a totally different beast. And super fun to design.Paul Marden: Oh mate. Neil, it has been so wonderful having a wander around the inside of your crazy mind.Paul Marden: If you've enjoyed today's episode, please like it and leave a comment in your podcast app. It really does make it so much easier for other people to find us. This episode was written by Emily Burrows from Plaster, edited by Steve Folland, and produced by Sami Entwistle from Plaster and Wenalyn Dionaldo. Thanks very much. See you next week.  The 2025 Visitor Attraction Website Survey is now LIVE! Dive into groundbreaking benchmarks for the industryGain a better understanding of how to achieve the highest conversion ratesExplore the "why" behind visitor attraction site performanceLearn the impact of website optimisation and visitor engagement on conversion ratesUncover key steps to enhance user experience for greater conversionsTake the Rubber Cheese Visitor Attraction Website Survey Report

Aside From Dating Apps, How Have You Creatively Looked for Dates by Maine's Coast 93.1

- GM and Ford Creatively Extend EV Credit - Tesla Cybercab Production Moved Up - Honda Building Tesla-Like Rockets - Ford Says New Truck Not Really a Pickup - Toyota Improving in China - Toyota Exports RHD EVs from China - Buick Launches L7 Sedan in China - Porsche Engineering and Digital to Merge - Digital Lidar Critical for Robotaxis

- GM and Ford Creatively Extend EV Credit - Tesla Cybercab Production Moved Up - Honda Building Tesla-Like Rockets - Ford Says New Truck Not Really a Pickup - Toyota Improving in China - Toyota Exports RHD EVs from China - Buick Launches L7 Sedan in China - Porsche Engineering and Digital to Merge - Digital Lidar Critical for Robotaxis

Have you stopped to ask yourself: what is it that you want? And dared to listen to the answer.” - Beth Barany In the latest How To Write the Future podcast episode, “In the Age of AI, Think Critically, Write Creatively, Act Compassionately,” host Beth Barany encourages listeners to critically think about the tools they are using and to create a compassionate place to be curious about the systems they live within. She encourages listeners to learn from their mistakes: “feedback, not failure,” and asks, “Would you dare listen to the answer if you stopped to ask yourself what it is you wanted?”ABOUT THE HOW TO WRITE THE FUTURE PODCASTThe How To Write The Future podcast is for science fiction and fantasy writers who want to write positive futures and successfully bring those stories out into the marketplace. Hosted by Beth Barany, science fiction novelist and creativity coach for writers. We cover tips for fiction writers and get curious about the future of humanity.ABOUT BETH BARANYBeth Barany, an award-winning fantasy and science fiction novelist, teaches novelists how to write, edit, and publish their books as a coach, teacher, consultant, and developmental editor.RESOURCESFOR CREATIVE WRITING PROFESSIONALS - BUILD YOUR BUSINESS SERVING WRITERSSign up to be notified when our training opens and get a short Creative Business Style Quiz to help you create success.https://bethbarany.com/apprenticeship/Support our work for creatives!Buy me a coffee: https://ko-fi.com/bethbaranyGET HELP WITH YOUR WORLD BUILDING - START HEREFree World Building Workbook for Fiction Writers: https://writersfunzone.com/blog/world-building-resources/GET SOME FREE WRITING COACHING LIVE ON THE PODCASTSign up for the 30-minute Story Success Clinic with Beth Barany: https://writersfunzone.com/blog/story-success-clinic/GET SUPPORT FOR YOUR FICTION WRITING BY A NOVELIST AND WRITING TEACHER AND COACHSchedule an exploratory call here and see if Beth can support you today: https://writersfunzone.com/blog/discovery-call/ SHOW PRODUCTION BY Beth BaranySHOW CO-PRODUCTION + NOTES by Kerry-Ann McDadeEDITORIAL SUPPORT by Iman Llompartc. 2025 BETH BARANYhttps://bethbarany.com/Questions? Comments? Send us a text!--CONNECTContact Beth: https://writersfunzone.com/blog/podcast/#tve-jump-185b4422580Email: beth@bethbarany.comLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bethbarany/CREDITSEDITED WITH DESCRIPT: https://get.descript.com/0clwwvlf6e3jMUSIC: Uppbeat.ioDISTRIBUTED BY BUZZSPROUT: https://www.buzzsprout.com/?referrer_id=1994465

Wrestlepalooza Fallout: Is ESPN Regretting the WWE Deal? The dust has settled on Wrestlepalooza 2025, but the debates are just getting started! We're going live to break down the shocking results and ask the most important question facing the company right now: Is WWE creatively bankrupt? This event was a defining moment for the company's new era, but many fans are already questioning the direction. We'll discuss the controversial Brock Lesnar vs. John Cena squash match and what it says about WWE's booking philosophy. What was the point of a dominant Lesnar win on Cena's retirement tour? Plus, we'll dive into the mixed reactions to the highly anticipated return of AJ Lee and what it means for the WWE Women's Division. On top of the in-ring action, we'll explore the mounting public backlash against ESPN. With Wrestlepalooza being the first major WWE event on the new streaming service, we'll analyze the massive confusion, high pricing, and technical issues that plagued the broadcast. Is it a sign that ESPN regrets its deal with a creatively bankrupt WWE? Did the company make a mistake by not going with Netflix? We'll dissect the fallout and what it means for the future of wrestling on television. Don't miss this crucial debate! Share your thoughts on Wrestlepalooza, WWE's creative direction, and the ESPN deal in the live chat! Keywords: WWE, Wrestlepalooza 2025, Wrestlepalooza fallout, ESPN WWE deal, creatively bankrupt, WWE creative, John Cena, Brock Lesnar, AJ Lee, wrestling news, live stream, wrestling, WWE booking, ESPN, streaming service, fan backlash. Socials X: https://x.com/AGeekpodcast Instagram: Matt- IG @AbsoluteGeekPodcast Dom-IG@Domtober_oldman_fett Styx-IG @styxboy73 Twitch: http://www.twitch.tv/absolutegeekpod... TikTok: / absolutegeekpodcast Off The Mat on ALL Major Audio Platforms! -Apple Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast... -Spotify Podcast: https://tr.ee/iK5rClfkEZ -Link Tree: https://linktr.ee/absolutegeekpodcast...

In this first bite-sized installment of PodBites, Adam Barger chats with Mike Blum from William & Mary about practical strategies for engaging faculty. In under five minutes, Mike shares five quick, creative approaches, ranging from consistent, personal communication to partnering with faculty and valuing their expertise, that can help educational developers strengthen relationships and spark meaningful collaboration.This episode was edited and produced by Roy W. Petersen.Transcript

Join us in this episode as we explore the world of complex problem-solving across industries with Hunter S. Gaylor, an executive partner, financial expert, and author. Hunter is a highly accomplished business leader with a diverse range of expertise spanning mobile banking, corporate strategy, private aviation, and international relations. He holds a Bachelor of Liberal Arts degree from Harvard University, is the Founder of Spencer Pruitt, and is the author of Planes Plants and Politics: A Mental Framework To Help Overcome Challenges in Any Industry. Click play to find out: The one thing that kills more strategies more than anything else. The importance of being able to accurately articulate what you're doing and why you're doing it. The driving force behind discipline and action. Why identifying the motivating factors behind specific goals. Discover the strategies behind Hunter S. Gaylor's guidance that drives worldwide business success – join the conversation now! You can follow along with Hunter on X @HunterGaylor and LinkedIn. Episode also available on Apple Podcasts: http://apple.co/30PvU9

Creating art has been shown to support healing. It has been shown to reduce loneliness, anxiety and mood disorders.  Art and beauty have also been correlated with reduced need for pain medication an reduced recovery times.  We all have access to this powerful and fun way to grow and heal. Resources What Have I Mythed? […] The post BOO489 – Encore – Creatively Healing appeared first on Marcia Hyatt.

Episode Summary: Born out of both a DNA vision conference and the aftermath of Hurricane Mitch, the Nehemiah Center shows that real transformation requires more than relief—it demands a biblical worldview that shapes families, communities, and entire cultures. From creative outreach through sports and family activities to discipling over 100 families in a single year, their approach fosters reconciliation, integrity, and thriving communities. Their work with the indigenous Miskito people demonstrates how small acts of biblical living—like modeling honesty and refusing bribes—can spark lasting economic and social change.This special episode comes from DNA's 2025 Forum in Panama, where Luke and Tim sat down with Nehemiah Center leaders, Andy Baker and Daniel Borge, who are championing biblical worldview training in the beautiful nation of Nicaragua. Hear powerful stories of paradigm shifts, and how every believer can practically play a role in discipling their families, churches, communities, and even nations.Who is Disciple Nations Alliance (DNA)? Since 1997, DNA's mission has been to equip followers of Jesus around the globe with a biblical worldview, empowering them to build flourishing families, communities, and nations.

If you're feeling stuck in your author career, one of the best things you can do is learn to ask yourself better questions. Most of us get stuck when our brains latch onto stories that lead to dead ends. “Nothing is working” or “I've tried everything” or “why the heck can't I sell another book????” all end with you feeling defeated, frustrated, and maybe even a bit hopeless. In today's episode, you'll learn how to ask better questions so you can get unstuck and start moving forward in your career. *** The publishing industry is hard. That's why I created The Confident Author Academy. My 6-month coaching program (+ online course) helps you build the mindset & emotional resilience you need to thrive as an author. To learn more and get on the waitlist for when spots open again, go to http://www.isabelsterling.com/academy Looking for even more author advice and notifications about upcoming workshops? Sign up for my weekly Real Talk for Writers newsletter by clicking here. DM me on Instagram & let me know what you thought of this episode!

In this wide-ranging conversation, Rachael and Lauren discuss how they stay creatively grounded in periods of grief; they then realize that the conversations they've had as friends and co-hosts have had a grounding effect as well. This season's closing coincides with the closing of chapters in the respective lives of the Chaotic Creatives team and in this long indulgent sendoff, your gals are looking forward even while holding the sadness that comes with change. Episode MentionsBrené Brown: The Fast Track To Genuine Joy (HuffPost 2013)  King's Hawaiian Lilikoi Crunch Cookies  How to Keep House While Drowning by KC Davis Lauren's (mysterious) Adobe course, Perfecting Your Portfolio is out now!  Sponsors Creative Coaching with Rachael Renae  Mural Mockups by Hom Sweet Hom For a transcript of this episode, contact us at chaoticcreativespodcast@gmail.com Cover art designed and photographed by Kristle Marshall for Hom Sweet HomIf you love what we are doing and want to support us, head to patreon.com/chaoticcreativesFollow the pod on Instagram @chaoticcreativespod and tag us in the projects you're working on while listening!Say hi or tell us a silly lil joke: chaoticcreativespodcast@gmail.comLauren's links:WebsiteInstagramOnline ClassesRachael's links:WebsiteInstagramPrioritize Play WorkshopStyle Course

Syndication structures are changing—and in this episode, Beth Azor unpacks exactly how.From preferred returns and promotes to unusual LP terms and fee-loaded deals, Beth breaks down the many syndication models she's encountered—both as an LP and a GP. She shares what she looks for before investing, the red flags that turn her off, and the structure she prefers when raising money herself. Whether you're a new sponsor or an LP eyeing your next investment, you'll walk away with tactical insight on evaluating and designing win-win syndication deals.✅ Key Takeaways-Preferred returns vary with market conditions-Promotes typically kick in after full LP return-Sponsors should have skin in the game-Some are raising without preferred returns or promotes-Fee-heavy structures are common—but not always justifiedLPs want transparency, alignment, and realistic projections-Creatively structured deals can benefit all parties-Fundraising speed often reflects investor trustBECOME A COMMERCIAL REAL ESTATE ROCKSTAR: https://www.bethazor.com/https://www.azoracademy.com/For more commercial real estate training: https://www.bethazor.com/training/FOLLOW ME ON SOCIALFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/azoradvisoryservices/Twitter: https://twitter.com/bethazor1Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bethazor/Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/6315636/#retailleasing #commercialrealestateinvesting #retailleasingcoach #bethazor

In this episode, Joe Sanok speaks with NYT bestselling author Lawrence Armstrong about Layered Leadership and the role of creativity in effective leadership. Lawrence shares how drawing inspiration from the world around you, staying curious, and thinking in “synthesized layers” can lead to innovative strategies and solutions. He introduces the concept of “whole-brain thinking,” encouraging leaders to strengthen not only their natural abilities but also areas where they're less skilled—engaging in continuous learning to become more adaptable. Lawrence stresses the importance of creating collaborative environments where ideas can be freely shared, built upon, and refined, and advises hiring people with expertise beyond your own to strengthen the team's collective problem-solving power. For private practitioners and business owners, his key message is simple: you're already a leader—so keep learning, embrace creativity, and apply whole-brain thinking to drive growth and inspire others. The post Layered Leadership: How to lead Creatively with NYT Bestselling Author Lawrence Armstrong | POP 1246 appeared first on How to Start, Grow, and Scale a Private Practice | Practice of the Practice.

Learn to leverage commercial assets, develop partnerships, and scale outside of your state! Jennings is joined by investor and entrepreneur, Jason Cousineau. For the last few years, Jason has been converting commercial properties into salon suites, and has multiplied his cash flow in the process. Jason discusses how he plans to scale to 50 locations in 5 years.  Learn how to use creativity in your real estate business and how to scale through partnerships.  Find Jason Cousineau on socials or email him, Jason@thesuitesco.com Thanks for listening!

What if the quickest way to calm your nervous system didn't involve meditation, mindset work, or even deep breathing, but just a pen and a few minutes?In this episode of the Building Resilience Podcast, Leah Davidson shares three simple, science-backed tools to help you gently regulate your nervous system, using creative expression, not perfection. These practices don't require artistic skill or profound insights. Just a willingness to explore, express, and create a sense of safety in your body.You'll learn how doodling, gentle journaling prompts, and repetitive shapes can act as regulation anchors helping you shift out of survival mode and into a state of calm, clarity, and connection.Whether you're overwhelmed, shut down, overstimulated, or just looking for a way to reconnect with yourself this episode will give you three powerful ways to feel a little more regulated in under 10 minutes.✨ Want to go deeper? These are the exact kinds of practices we use weekly inside the Nervous System Journaling Club, a creative, supportive space to build safety and resilience from the inside out.We'll explore:Visual expression helps externalise internal states.Simple journaling prompts can shift your state.Repetitive patterns (like loops or spirals) create predictability.Containment matters more than perfection.Co-regulation can happen with the page.Every time you meet your system with curiosity, you build resilience.

“Learning how to say your truth as yourself is really, really hard to do—especially at first.” In a world increasingly geared toward disposable art, how do we make something that matters? How can we stay true to our inner artist AND work with the algorithm? Is it even worth the compromise?With the release of his four-part album, Triptychs, Court Hoang set out to answer these questions in a way that worked for him. In this episode, Emmeline and Court chat about how streaming has changed music, how creativity doesn't always work on a schedule optimized for consistent content generation, and how making something honest is always better than making something perfect.Court also shares how songwriting can be the opportunity for the coveted life do-over. Stick around until the end to meet Emmeline's dogs!To learn more about Court Hoang, or to follow his musical journey, visit his official website. To buy Triptychs, check out Court on Bandcamp.For behind-the-scenes information and more about Journey of an Artist, visit the Journey of Series official webpage, or follow Emmeline on social media at @EmmelineMusic.

The World's #1 Personal Development Book Podcast!  In today's episode, we have the pleasure to interview Marco Pasqua, author of From Potential to Purpose: Your Guide to Authentic Connections.Marco is an award-winning entrepreneur, accessibility consultant, and inspirational speaker. Born with cerebral palsy, he's spent over a decade helping global brands and organizations create more inclusive environments — all while showing others how to turn life's obstacles into fuel for growth. He's delivered TEDx talks, advised governments, and created a framework that's changing lives.In this episode, you'll learn how Marco's CUBE Principle can help you creatively utilize your best energy to overcome challenges, how to reframe limitations into launchpads for purpose, and why authentic connection — to people, passions, and yourself — is the key to lasting success.We hope you enjoy this incredible conversation with Marco Pasqua.To Learn More about Marco and buy his book visit: The Book: https://a.co/d/cx8355ZWebsite/Socials: https://www.marcopasqua.com/https://www.instagram.com/marcogpasqua/https://www.facebook.com/RealMarcoPasquahttps://www.youtube.com/@MarcoPasquahttps://twitter.com/Marco_PasquaChapters: 0:00 Intro1:30 “Back to the Future”'s impact on Marco's life and on how he sees life2:48 The importance of entertainment and action4:11 Identifying signs that you are on the right track in your life6:42 A story Nick has never shared before about the number 429:08 The importance of gratitude and acknowledging serendipity12:30 Why Marco didn't define himself with the word “disability”15:58 Marco's experience using NLP to influence someone18:56 Bradley Cooper's “Limitless” & NLP21:39 Creatively utilizing your best energy & connecting25:18 Finding your tribe28:47 Setting boundaries is as important as showing love (Parenting)30:49 Cultivating emotional intelligence as a parent32:58 Bringing an older version of yourself to give you wisdom34:51 The butterfly effect and being aware of your choices36:44 Nick's story with a member of the BookThinkers family in Croatia42:18 Where to find Marco's book and work43:56 Marco's one message to the world________________________________________________Join the world's largest non-fiction Book community!https://www.instagram.com/bookthinkers/The purpose of this podcast is to connect you, the listener, with new books, new mentors, and new resources that will help you achieve more and live better. Each and every episode will feature one of the world's top authors so that you know each and every time you tune-in, there is something valuable to learn. If you have any recommendations for guests, please DM them to us on Instagram. (www.instagram.com/bookthinkers)If you enjoyed this show, please consider leaving a review. It takes less than 60-seconds of your time, and really makes a difference when I am trying to land new guests. For more BookThinkers content, check out our Instagram or our website. Thank you for your time!

To be honest, I am feeling overwhelmed. On the outside, I am discouraged by endless news of our warmongering and dysfunctioning government. On the inside, I am still processing the years of intense social isolation during the pandemic, with no work prospects, after a vibrant pre-pandemic career and social life. I am hyper-vigilant and jumpy. Creatively, I feel uninspired. I find it difficult and awkward to socialize, sleep, or even rest. During periods of overwhelm, the best thing I can do for myself is to let my parasympathetic nervous system take over. This is the part of our nervous systems responsible for our 'rest and reset'. In today's meditation, we calm our nervous system. This podcast is made possible with great thanks to our subscribers on Patreon. Join our community at Patreon (dot) com (slash) theMeditationPodcast

If you've ever felt creatively blocked, stuck in the rat race, or like the people around you don't “get” who you're becoming, this episode is going to feel like a full body permission slip. James McCrae, the poet & meme author behind the viral IG account @wordsarevibrations joined me live in Austin for a juicy in person conversation.We chat00:12 - Why words are vibrations and how that changes the way we speak, post, & create08:04 - How to receive intuitive downloads (even if you're not “spiritual”)09:04 - The yin & yang sides of creativity15:11 - Losing your inner artist to hustle culture and reclaiming your soul16:09 - The surprising thing that finally got James to meditate20:21 - Outgrowing your hometown & the people who don't clap when you win31:19 - Finding your unique voice and content style on social media46:10 - Reinventing yourself (again and again) & owning the beginner mindset54:44 - The best way to handle hate comments & stay in your lane59:50 - Advice every young entrepreneur needs to hear

Join us in this episode as we explore the world of complex problem-solving across industries with Hunter S. Gaylor, an executive partner, financial expert, and author. Hunter is a highly accomplished business leader with a diverse range of expertise spanning mobile banking, corporate strategy, private aviation, and international relations. He holds a Bachelor of Liberal Arts degree from Harvard University, is the Founder of Spencer Pruitt, and is the author of Planes Plants and Politics: A Mental Framework To Help Overcome Challenges in Any Industry. Click play to find out: The one thing that kills more strategies more than anything else. The importance of being able to accurately articulate what you're doing and why you're doing it. The driving force behind discipline and action. Why identifying the motivating factors behind specific goals. Discover the strategies behind Hunter S. Gaylor's guidance that drives worldwide business success – join the conversation now! You can follow along with Hunter on X @HunterGaylor and LinkedIn. Episode also available on Apple Podcasts: http://apple.co/30PvU9

On today's episode I am speaking with fashion icon Cynthia Rowley and her daughter, content creator and entrepreneur Kit Keenan. They share an intimate look at their unique mother-daughter dynamic. From growing up in the world of fashion to building a brand that bridges generations, Cynthia and Kit discuss how they've evolved both personally and professionally. They open up about creative reinvention, the importance of routine and confidence, handling criticism online, and what it takes to stay relevant in a rapidly changing world. Whether you're building a business, navigating family dynamics, or simply seeking inspiration, this conversation offers real lessons on growth, resilience, and redefining success—together. Enjoy!To connect with Cynthia on Instagram, click HERE.To connect with Kit on Instagram, click HERE.To connect with Kit on Tiktok, click HERE.To connect with Siff on Instagram, click HERE.To connect with Siff on Tiktok, click HERE.To learn more about Arrae, click HERE. To check out Siff's LTK, click HERE.To check out Siff's Amazon StoreFront, click HERE. This episode may contain paid endorsements and advertisements for products and services. Individuals on the show may have a direct, or indirect financial interest in products, or services referred to in this episode.Treat your closet to a little summer glow-up with Quince. Go to Quince.com/dreambigger for free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Save 15% off my favorite Red Light Face Mask from BON CHARGE by using code DREAMBIGGER at www.boncharge.comFor 15% off your first purchase, visit linnebotanicals.com. Use code DREAMBIGGER at checkout. Offer cannot be combined.Produced by Dear MediaSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.