Podcasts about Environment

After last week's devastating floods, the Guardian's south Asia correspondent, Hannah Ellis-Petersen, tells Annie Kelly about her journey to some of Nepal's worst-hit areas, and what she found there. Help support our independent journalism at theguardian.com/infocus

Immerse yourself in calming waterfall sounds designed to enhance sleep, meditation, and relaxation. Let the soothing ambient nature noises wash away stress and create a peaceful atmosphere for deep focus and restful nights.

The UN has warned that the El Niño climate phenomenon is ‘supersizing before our eyes'. The event is forecast to be the largest in at least 1,000 years and will almost certainly shatter temperature records. After a summer of record-breaking heatwaves and extreme weather due to global heating, El Niño means 2027 is almost certain to be the hottest year ever recorded. Lucy Hough speaks to environment correspondent Damien Gayle – watch on YouTube. Help support our independent journalism at theguardian.com/infocus

Experience the gentle tapping of a woodpecker in a peaceful forest setting, perfect for deep sleep, meditation, and relaxation. Let these soothing ambient nature sounds calm your mind, reduce stress, and enhance focus naturally.

Methane is a potent greenhouse gas that traps more than 80 times as much heat than carbon dioxide over a 20-year period and causes 25% of global heating today. We definitely don't want this gas spewing needlessly into the atmosphere, but in 2023 that's exactly what environment editor Damian Carrington found was happening when he reported on 1,000 super-emitting methane leaks across the globe. Now Turkmenistan, the worst country for mega-leaks, has begun to plug them. Damian tells Madeleine Finlay why some experts call stopping leaks the climate ‘emergency brake' and reveals which countries are still failing to act. Help support our independent journalism at theguardian.com/sciencepod

Newscast from Capital Public Radio

Investigative journalist, blogger, and broadcaster Brad Friedman's investigative interviews, analysis and commentary, as ripped from the pages of The BRAD BLOG (BradBlog.com), today's current events (if they matter) and the rest of the stuff we have to live with.

Immerse yourself in the calming flow of natural river sounds, perfect for deep sleep, meditation, and relaxation. Let this peaceful ambient soundscape soothe your mind, reduce stress, and create a tranquil environment for rest and focus.

"When the government starts collecting money as a tax, they don't normally give it back." — Curtis Spencer, CEO, IMS Worldwide For most of the last sixty years, the average U.S. tariff rate was two and a half percent. Duty was a rounding error, and import networks got designed accordingly.  Curtis Spencer, CEO of IMS Worldwide, says the floor is now 20 percent, and plenty of importers are still treating that like weather that will pass. He has spent more than four decades in foreign-trade zones. When he started, the United States had twelve of them. Customs is about to issue number 302. In this episode of Art of Supply, Kelly Barner and Curtis Spencer discuss: - Why the business case for an FTZ went from 2- or 3-to-1 to 10-to-1 without the paperwork getting any harder -  What "substantial transformation" means now that customs is chasing country of origin into second- and third-tier suppliers -  The 1 percent of cases where a bonded warehouse beats a zone, and how to tell whether you are in it Links: Curtis Spencer on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/curtis-spencer-0a553010/  Kelly Barner on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kelly-barner-6884443/  Art of Supply LinkedIn newsletter: https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/art-of-supply-6895142546301960193  Art of Supply on AOP: http://www.artofsupply.com  Subscribe to the Art of Procurement Newsletter: https://resources.artofprocurement.com/art-of-procurement-podcast-subscribe   

What if faster and more regular earthquakes warnings also meant more false alarms? Lives would likely be saved, but just how many is too many warnings? Is natural hazard warning alert fatigue a real thing? These are some of the seismic questions Ben Kennedy, a Professor at the School of Earth and Environment at the University of Canterbury, and his team have been considering. He joins Jesse to discuss.

How can you redesign your author business for the publishing environment that actually exists, rather than the one you wish you had? And how do you decide which marketing efforts will still bring readers to your books in ten years' time? Tracy Cooper-Posey shares her solar sail theory after more than 25 years as an author. In the intro, reviving your backlist [The Indy Author]; AI as a medium [Tim O'Reilly]; How to Write, Publish, and Market Short Stories – Joanna Penn. ProWritingAid Storyteller sale: Thursday, 3rd September until September 13th 2026 — 25% off all annual licenses as well as Story Critique credits. Today's show is sponsored by ProWritingAid, writing and editing software that goes way beyond just grammar and typo checking. With its detailed reports on how to improve your writing and integration with writing software, ProWritingAid will help you improve your book before you send it to an editor, agent or publisher. Check it out for free or get 15% off the premium edition at www.ProWritingAid.com/joanna This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn Tracy Cooper-Posey is the multi-award-winning author of over 200 novels and works of nonfiction, science fiction, fantasy, romance, and historical fiction under three pen names. Her books for authors include The Indie Author Survival Guide and The Productive Indie Fiction Writer. You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below. Show Notes Learning to write again after chemo, one sentence at a time What enshittification means, and why it is the environment rather than you The hallmarks of an indie author business that persists over time The solar sail theory of long-term discoverability Why social media and paid ads have such a short half-life How to find and reduce the operational drag on your business You can find Tracy at ProductiveIndieFictionWriter.com or StoriesRulePress.com. Transcript of the interview with Tracy Cooper-Posey Jo: Tracy Cooper-Posey is the multi-award-winning author of over 200 novels and works of nonfiction, science fiction, fantasy, romance, and historical fiction under three pen names. Her books for authors include The Indie Author Survival Guide and The Productive Indie Fiction Writer. So welcome back to the show, Tracy. Tracy: Hi, Jo. It's great to be back. Jo: Yes. So you were last on the show in October 2023 talking about The Productive Indie Fiction Writer, and we went into depth then. So give us a bit of an update on your author business and also your life. Because it has been a bit of an up and down. Tracy: Yes, it's been a very interesting three years, because I had just gone into remission with cancer when we were talking last. Now I'm out of remission again and facing treatment in the next few weeks. My husband got cancer and went through treatment, and he's cured. So life has been pretty interesting. All that has made me do a lot of deep thinking about the indie author business and my own business and writing in general. So I'm still here. I'm still publishing, 200 plus books now. I had to learn how to write again. But the writing has shifted a lot towards science fiction and fantasy, including cosy science fiction now, which is the new genre that's just creeping in. All three pen names have been Aurealis Award finalists, which is nice. I'm still continuing the nonfiction work, which is something that you said the last time that we spoke. You said, “Now that you've written one, it's likely you'll write more nonfiction.” And I did. Jo: You did. They're excellent books. Just on that, you mentioned cosy sci-fi. For anyone who might not know, where is that genre? What's in that genre of cosy sci-fi? Tracy: It's not really officially a genre yet. It started off with cosy fantasy, which was where the cosy started. Actually, technically it started with cosy mystery, and everyone understands cosy mystery. The body and the murder are off stage. There's a lot of tea drinking. There's lots of friends, and it's all very polite and mannered. You're focusing more on the emotions and the feel, and they've picked up that cosy aspect of mystery and put it on fantasy. So you get books like, I think the primary one is Legends and Lattes. It's about an orc that's running a coffee shop because they got sick of fighting, and the adventures that they have trying to run their coffee shop. So if you pick up that same cosy sensation and put it on science fiction, that's cosy science fiction. But it's so new that it doesn't have a category on Amazon or anything like that. Cosy fantasy does now. Amazon just created a cosy fantasy category a while ago. But cosy science fiction is so new that people are still arguing over which books are cosy science fiction and which are not. Jo: Oh, that's interesting. You're incredibly prolific. You always have been. You mentioned there that you had to learn how to write again after cancer. What do you think happened, and how did you relearn? Because there are people listening who go through these similar things. Tracy: I think a lot of what happened was, well, life just became incredibly complex and challenging, and just getting through a day of pain took a lot of the energy, what they call the spoons. I didn't have the spoons to write anymore. Also you get chemo brain, which is the really interesting one. When I was going through chemo, I would look at a spreadsheet and just couldn't figure out how it worked. It just didn't make sense to me, so I had to hand over the finances and everything to Mark, which was rather interesting. The way I got myself back into writing again was, it was such an alien idea that writing wasn't even on my radar from day to day. I just didn't have the energy or the concentration to do it. So I started off really, really small. The first thing I did was read a lot of favourite books from other authors just to remember why I loved reading. Then I started reading my own books that I had written, just to remind myself of what I used to love about my own work. Then I just cracked the manuscript one day and read as far as I had written and thought, “Okay, what's the next sentence?” And that's the only thing that I would let myself do, was just write the next sentence. That's it. So I wrote the next sentence, and sat there and thought, “Do I want to write the next sentence?” On that particular day, no, I didn't. But I just kept opening the manuscript and looking and thinking about the next sentence, and eventually I wrote a few more. I think it was that coming back to the manuscript over and over with no pressure, just look at it, can you get the next sentence written? Very slowly I started building up, and now I'm pretty much back to the speed that I was at before the diagnosis. Jo: So I guess we could think about it in the same way that your body is physically recovering, your mind is also recovering. It almost feels like people want to disconnect the two. If you get a physical injury, that shouldn't affect your brain. But as you mentioned, having chemo, that in itself is difficult and has impacts on your brain. So if people think about it more as an injury you have to come back from, rather than day one you're back in, I guess. Tracy: Yes. It's really a rehabilitation-style process, and I think the key is you've got to take all pressure off yourself. I know that, for me in particular, because I was such a workhorse, I could feel this stress because I just wasn't getting things done. Once I gave myself permission to just take as long as it takes and just keep coming back to it, that helped enormously. It still took time for that rehabilitation process to actually work. There's a lot of forgiving yourself, and it has to be a gentle process, I think, because situations like cancer and chemo and whatever the situation is that's pulled you away from your manuscript, they're big life events, and there is a lot of stress involved with them both physically and mentally. So you have to give yourself time. Jo: Yes, it's so important. Okay, well, also in these last three years, as you said, you've got back to writing, and one of the books you have also written is The Anti-Enshittification Field Manual for Indie Authors. You also use Cory Doctorow's enshittification concept around the mature indie author industry. So just talk about what that term [enshittification] means? We think it is now established in the industry, in terms of what is going on there. How do we recognise it and adjust? Tracy: It's a very interesting term. The first time I heard it I raised my brows a bit. I was thinking, “Well, that's a bit cheeky.” The more you think about it, the more appropriate the name is. Basically, Cory Doctorow's idea is that any platform, so for the sake of this discussion, let's say Amazon, starts out serving its users extremely well because it needs them. When everyone first got into indie publishing, Amazon was open doors and you could just publish a book and it would sell, because they would push the book and they would do everything they could to make sure that readers saw your book. Then slowly and increasingly, the platform extracts value from those users for somebody else's benefit, usually shareholders, and ultimately for itself. You can track this process where it starts off really great for the users and then slowly shifts so that it becomes a less than stellar experience for the users. For indie authors, we're particularly exposed because our business sits on top of these platforms. So recognising that a lot of the platforms that we use now have enshittified, excuse me, or are in the process of doing that, that really helps. Because I think for years we were treating everything as a separate problem. We were worrying about organic reach, we were worrying about advertising becoming more expensive. There's subscription creep, there's deteriorating customer service, algorithm changes. Visibility was increasingly pay to play, and it's so much more than that now. The platforms keep removing features or changing the terms. Individually it just looks like a mess, but as soon as you put them together and say, “Oh, I understand now. The platform is enshittifying,” you can see the structural pattern. It actually applies to so many platforms and services. Once you see it, well, for me in particular, that was an enormously positive realisation, because until I saw the pattern, I thought I was failing, and nothing I was doing seemed to work anymore. Once I understood the environment itself had changed, I could stop trying to fix myself and start redesigning the business for the environment that actually exists. Jo: Yes, and that is the point. Redesigning your business for the environment that exists. Because what you mentioned there, I feel like some people still think that organic reach exists. I guess some people will say, “Oh, well, at the moment you can still put a video on, say, TikTok, and it might find an audience there.” Are people still building an audience in these newer platforms? But I think that's the point, isn't it? I guess Substack would be another one. Although we already see that heading in the same direction, with various things. As soon as you go in there thinking, “Yes, I'm going to get organic reach,” even if there is any, it follows this way, doesn't it? Tracy: It does. And this is what's so great about it, is once you recognise this pattern, you see it everywhere, and you can actually track a new platform through that process, and you can anticipate that, okay, maybe we're going to get organic discovery right now, but that's going to diminish. That way you're not disappointed, and you're all set up for when that happens. That means that you can reduce your dependency on these platforms and not expect them to behave like they did in 2011. Jo: It's interesting, though, with Amazon, for example, we've definitely seen that as authors. But on the other side, as a customer, as a reader particularly, I used to find a lot of books on Amazon directly. I'm almost entirely now finding books elsewhere, often through AI, actually, often through Claude. Tracy: Yes, exactly. Jo: And then going on Amazon to maybe get the book. It feels like for readers it's changed too, right? Tracy: Exactly. I mean, indie authors are particularly vulnerable because their entire business is built on these platforms, but this applies to everyone. It's not just indie authors. As you say, it's readers. They're noticing too that the decay of these platforms is starting to impact them as users. I'm exactly like you. I tend to buy my books from Kobo, but I will buy my books from anywhere, and I learn about those books from a dozen different places. I don't rely on just one platform anymore. It's really great once you understand this because then you can build an independent mindset that lets you flex around issues. Jo: Yes, and obviously we like to dwell on the positives here. So given that this is just a reality of the market and various platforms— What are the hallmarks of an indie author business that is more likely to persist over time given the reality of this? Tracy: Okay. Well, I think that the biggest part of it is, as I mentioned before, it's the mindset. Recognising these patterns is really a big one, recognising where a platform is in the process. Also developing a very independent mindset. I mean, we've been saying we're indie authors since 2011, but we were still really relying on those platforms to provide most of our business. I think these days the new indie author is much more independently minded. Even though you're using the platforms, and we're all using them, you develop a flexibility. You understand the industry, and you're making plans ahead of it, so you've got the flexibility there, and the business thinking, which really helps. You deal with any problems that come up. Every time there's an algorithm change, you're not going to wake up in the morning and just go through mourning because half your income has disappeared. You're ready with alternatives, and you've got different things that you can try. So that mindset, that thinking about and recognising patterns and how the industry is going, is critical. Once you've got that in place, then there's a huge number of strategies that you might want to incorporate. This is the thing, every indie author's business is different. We're all in different situations. I have health challenges, someone else may have a day job. I write a lot of books. Someone may be only able to produce a couple of books a year. We're writing in different genres. If you're writing literature, that's different from the sort of science fiction that I write. So the business and how it responds to the conditions out there is going to be different as well. So what you do as an author and for your business will be different. There's a lot of strategies that you can try and see which are most effective for you. One of the biggest, for instance, is something that you say a lot too, diversify your income. Have a durable backlist. Work to get your backlist built up. Direct sales is another strategy that I would say is almost mandatory for every indie author these days. I know a lot of indie authors are going, “Oh, but I've only got two books.” Doesn't matter. If you can sell from your site using just a PayPal link, that's direct sales, and that works. That gives you a lot more independence and agency. Owning your reader relationships, making sure that you keep the readers close, I think that's another critical one. Making sure that you're resilient for the platform so you can adjust when there's changes. And on and on. There's a lot of things that you can do to adapt. Jo: Yes. I think it's interesting just thinking about when you said, for example, direct sales is good for every indie author. I would say every indie author who wants to have a long-term business—and I think that's a really key thing. Because I feel like it's still important to have a difference between people who are writing primarily as a hobby or are not looking for the financial income that you and I think about. So I think that's one thing. I totally agree with you that just having a PayPal button or even selling some physical copies at a local fair or something, that all counts. I think it almost proves something and gives you that more independent mindset. It's like, “Yes, I can actually do this.” That is such a powerful reframe rather than, “I cannot do anything except upload my book on Amazon.” Tracy: Yes. And actually, funny you should mention the live markets, because we experimented over the last year with attending a few live markets and selling books, and there is a genuine power, a little thrill that you get when you sell a book, and you can sign it on the spot for them, and the reader is right there and you're face to face. That process is suddenly not this anonymous process, where you find that you've sold a book overnight and you've got no idea who it is that bought it. That person's right there in front of you, so you can sign the book for them and you have a little exchange. It's really empowering to build that independence into your business. Jo: Yes, and then you also mentioned the durable backlist. Do you think that having books in multiple genres, including nonfiction, is part of how you can make a living? As in, I think people often think, “Oh, maybe if I just write 20 books in one series.” I mean, maybe that works in some genres. I guess thrillers, actually, that can sometimes work, but you do so many things. Is it the 80/20 rule, that 20% of your books make 80% of the income, or does it literally vary from year to year? Tracy: Well, it does swing from year to year. But yes, generally the 80/20 rule holds. It's different from year to year, which 20% is making the 80% of the money. As I mentioned, I'm moving into science fiction and fantasy more, because that's actually more successful for me right now than the romance is. The other thing is, I think it really comes down to the individual author too. Some authors do very well just doing the one genre or even just the one series, and for them it's great. I always worry that that's putting all your eggs in one basket. I think, though, to counter that vulnerability, if you're just doing one series or one genre, go wide. Sell as wide as you can, and that gives you a bit of a hedge against vulnerability. It's a different situation for every author, and it's very hard for me to say, “Well, here's a 15-step list that'll give you all the answers,” because that 15-step list doesn't exist anymore, if it ever did. Just because everyone's business is so different. You need to do a lot of experimenting, I think, and find what works for you. That sounds like I'm waving off the answer, but I'm really not. You really do have to figure it out for yourself. If you do adopt that experimental mindset and say, “Okay, I'm going to do this for six months and track my statistics and see if there's any results there worth pursuing.” Jo: See what happens. Yes, and it's interesting you've also moved more into the nonfiction. Let's get into your solar sail theory, because I've followed you on and off since we met, like a decade ago. Tracy: It was 10 years ago. Jo: I know. It's crazy. It's really crazy. For those listening, we met in Oregon, at the Oregon Workshops with Dean Wesley Smith and Kristine Kathryn Rusch. I've been reading your blog pretty avidly around this solar sail theory, which I love, and now you're talking about writing science fiction, I can appreciate it more. What is your solar sail theory and some of the ways to build it? Tracy: Okay, so solar sail theory is a theory in science. Well, I was going to say science fiction, but there's solid science behind it. Solar sails are a way, they think, because it's never been proven yet, of propelling a spacecraft. You have this huge sail, like kilometres wide, and what it does is it captures photons. Photons are basically light. So when the light hits the solar sail, it gives it a minuscule amount of push, but there's no friction in space, so that push just keeps the ship going and going. So when you've got kilometres of sail, all the photons hitting that can bring a ship up to enormous speeds, like a fraction of light speed, which sounds small if you're not used to science, but a fraction of light speed is enormously fast, and these solar sails can bring a ship up to those sorts of speeds. So you can cross to the next star without needing faster-than-light travel or warp speed or something like that. Put that theory over the top of the indie publishing industry and you suddenly get a very interesting way of thinking about the industry, and it helps you make decisions. So it's not a prescription. Again, it's not a 15-step, here's how to conquer the universe. It's a decision matrix. It helps you figure out what's going to work for you. Whatever strategy or tactic it is that you're thinking about doing, you can ask the question, does this extend my sail? So does it leave something behind that can continue to make me discoverable? So for instance, a 30-second radio advertisement probably is not going to leave anything behind that'll let readers discover you, because once it's aired, it's gone. On the other hand, a podcast interview like this. The podcast interview that I did with you three years ago, I'm still getting people finding me and finding The Productive Indie Fiction Writer three years later because of that. So that's extending the sail, and it's just a little tiny push, like a photon. Blog posts also, they surface indefinitely, so readers can find them 10 years later. And because you're the host of your own podcast, all your podcast interviews and the website, they're also creating surface area, so people keep finding you years later. Also guest articles, and a book in a library. Your entire back catalogue is all part of the solar sail. Jo: I know people listening are going, “But what about social media?” Tracy: Yes. Social media is a tricky one because it's such a short half-life. I think on Facebook, if anyone sees your post at all, after two hours it's basically gone. They never see it unless they actually go to your account, and they need to have heard of you in order to go to your account and see the post. So that makes social media not really a good solar sail builder. It has other uses, and as long as you understand that it does have this very short half-life, then you can use it for the things that it's good at. Jo: Yes, the same with paid ads, for example. Paid ads are the same as social media. Perhaps a quicker push, but as you say, the half-life is quicker. Tracy: Yes. Exactly. Paid ads come and go. There's nothing out there that'll let the reader find you in a couple of years' time. So they're very short term. A lot of people can build their business on these short-term things. They spend thousands of dollars on paid ads each month, and that works for them, but if they stop doing it, then their business halts. It comes to a grinding halt. Whereas if you're building your solar sail, it's a long-term way of setting up your business, so it just keeps ticking on. Jo: Your series of posts on the solar sail, which are also in The Indie Author Survival Guide, they are nonfiction, useful things. So what about for the fiction side? What do you suggest people do around content marketing? Tracy: Well, it all applies to both fiction and nonfiction. I usually write, because The Productive Indie Fiction Writer is addressing fiction authors, this does all apply to fiction as well. As I was saying, your book catalogue, because you're on Amazon, and Barnes & Noble, and Kobo, and Apple, and maybe Google as well, all of those pages are part of your sail. Your own site, all the book pages on your own site are part of the sail. There's different ways to do it, but the common one is you have this standard sail out there that helps readers find you. You coax them to come to your site, and there you try to capture them as readers. So that usually means your email list. Some people use Substack now. There are other alternatives I'm sure I haven't thought of, but email seems to be the principal one. Then you can build that relationship with the readers over the long term. The solar sail just brings all those readers to you so that you can develop that relationship and keep the readers close. For fiction authors, I think this is critical. This helps you build independence from the retail platforms. Jo: Yes, it is interesting. I would put podcasting and YouTube in particular. So I had someone, they were in my Patreon, and they said, “I'm no longer subscribed to your email list because I hear from you in Patreon and on the podcast.” I was thinking about my own behaviour, and for the podcast that I am a hardcore fan of, I'm not on their email list. I was thinking it is because my relationship with those people is more auditory, I guess. The same with YouTubers. People end up subscribing to your YouTube channel. Then the problem still is, if I stop podcasting today, then I can't contact those people again. Except that I know lots of podcasters who stop podcasting and then maybe two years later they just pop on with an update episode. And people are like, “Oh, I never unsubscribed from you on my feed.” So that can appear years later. I definitely still agree that the email list is primary. But if you're somebody listening and you're a more audio or video person, I think we can probably think about the relationship with people on these different dimensions. Tracy: Yes, and some people definitely prefer the audio. I'm utterly text-based myself. I prefer to read. But yes, podcasting, apart from anything else, is a way of keeping contact with the readers, and they can email you in return. So it is a two-way process, so you can develop that relationship. So if that works for you, that is a good alternative. The other thing is too, of course, every episode that you've recorded and put on a webpage is also building your sail. So more and more people are finding you. So podcasting is interesting. If you're guest posting on someone else's blog, that's a somewhat time-consuming way, but it does build up your sail as well. Jo: The only problem with that, I would say, as someone who used to have guest posts, is it's still my website. When it came to auditing my website, about five years ago—and the thing is, because my website's been around since 2008, I had some people guest posting in the early days—and I was like, “This should not be here anymore.” So I am able to get rid of people's things when they're on my site, in the same way that Amazon can take down your book or whatever. Tracy: Yes, and that's where the anti-enshittification process comes in. That's where developing that independent mindset comes in. One of the questions that you need to ask is, how permanent is this? What happens if it goes away? Tat's why blogging on your own site is probably a stronger and better decision than guest blogging on other people's sites, because they have control of that. Jo: Yes, absolutely. So there's so much in these books. These are all excellent books. I feel like you know so much after decades in the trenches, and I love that you're putting out everything in these books. I did want to ask you one specific thing, because obviously we're increasing the size of our sail. But if we have massive amounts of drag, so we have sea anchors or whatever we want to call it in our metaphor, we have to sort that out too. So in The Indie Author Survival Guide, you have a section on protecting the margins. So I wondered if you would talk about the specific ways to think about what is operational drag and how can we reduce it? Tracy: Well, we just actually hit the perfect example. Guest blogging has more drag than blogging on your own site does, because you don't have control over it, so it can disappear. It requires maintenance. It takes your time. So drag is basically anything that is going to slow you down once you've built up speed, coming back to the solar sail theory. The sail will keep you moving, but because we're not working in a vacuum anymore, we're not in space, there are things that can slow you down. Particularly for mature author businesses, we accumulate all this cruft. For instance, Barnes & Noble recently changed their website so that all the URLs for a book changed, and that doesn't sound like a big deal, but I've got 200 books. So suddenly the links didn't work pointing to Barnes & Noble for every book. So the Books2Read universal book links had to be changed for all 200 books. Jo: Oh, I did know that and I haven't done it. Tracy: This is the thing, is when you've only got five books, it's like 10 minutes' worth of work, no problems, and you just move on. When you've got 200 books, that's suddenly a big deal. I only found out accidentally that they had changed them, and once I had confirmed that every single link no longer worked, it was suddenly a massive project. There's also the money drag. Everything these days is software as a subscription. Even Microsoft Office, you've got to pay the fee every year. It works well in theory, because you're getting updated software all the time, but you have a dozen of those or two dozen, suddenly you're spending a lot of money every year for software that once upon a time we used to pay a flat fee for and that was it. So it pays to go through and figure out what expenses you can get rid of or diminish, or can you find a cheaper version. There's advertising. Some advertising just isn't worth spending the money on. If you're doing pay-per-click advertising, you need to monitor it all the time, so that's a time sink that you're blowing money on, technically, because your time is money. There's also, you may not be managing it quite as well as you could, so you're actually burning more money because the ads are not working as effectively as they could. More drag. You need to go through every aspect. There's time drag, repetitive tasks. For instance, Mark and I have, for about, I think we're coming up on 11 years now, we track our sales. Every morning we sit down and go through every platform and record the sales for that day in a spreadsheet so that we can do analysis. It's a good way to spend time because it's got extreme uses. There's a lot of little tasks that you might do, especially if you've been working in the business as long as I have. All these little tasks will build up, and suddenly you forget why you're doing them. Or the conditions have changed and it's not worth doing them anymore. They may not be providing the value that they once used to. So you have to go through and make sure that you're reducing the drag on your business as much as possible so that you can keep moving. Jo: Yes. I had two more extra ones there. You mentioned the things that we do that perhaps we don't need to do anymore. If people are outsourcing, if you have virtual assistants, if you are paying for some kind of service outside your own time, sometimes you can have that going and then when you think, do I need that anymore? So I know some people still do pay for turning posts into social media or making book trailers. That's a good one. Or there's things that people are paying for, and then you might realise that you don't need that service anymore, or you don't need everything that that social media manager is doing anymore. So realistically looking at the benefits of what you're getting. Tracy: Yes, constant review. Jo: Yes. Constant review. Then the other thing I was thinking is a mindset drag. So right now, as we're recording this, in the author community, there's this witch hunting going on around AI usage. Tracy: Yes. Jo: It's the latest thing that's causing massive drama. I feel like it's almost mindset drag to get dragged into some of this drama, and it saps the energy. That can really pull on your boat, on your solar boat. Tracy: Well, actually, I've found that, and this is all part of the indie author mindset, and it's also part of the anti-enshittification process too. I did a lot of research on AI. I did a lot of reading. I listened to a lot of different discussions about it, and then I formed my own policy. What's my policy for AI? What's my policy around AI and its use and so forth? I find that once I had developed that policy for myself, suddenly there's not as much mental drag with all the AI discussions and the witch hunts and all the drama that's going on around it, because I know where I'm sitting and I'm quite comfortable with my position. So I think for a lot of people, it can become very emotional and draining if you still haven't figured out where you sit on the spectrum of AI use. But that's actually how I tackled it, because I was getting very tired of all the dramas. It is draining, and it worries you. So I deliberately went out and did a lot of research and reading, and figured out where I stood, and that made a huge difference for me. Jo: Yes. And again, that's something to look at on your schedule. So maybe in a year's time you re-look at things again and change your decision. I think the same thing with the traditional versus self-publishing versus wide versus KU, and you could just go on. There are pros and cons in every single direction, right? At the end of the day, it's almost the decision fatigue that's stopping you. Or you could say, again, our solar boat has to go in a particular direction. You can't go in every direction at the same time. You just have to make a decision, right? Tracy: Yes. I think being as informed as possible about the industry is one of the big ones. I've spent a lot of time doing a lot of reading, not just about indie publishing over the last few years, but everything to do with publishing and also everything to do with business, because we are in business. That's a bit of a cliché, that a lot of indie authors, their eyes just glaze over when they hear that you're in business. There are aspects of running a business that we just don't get taught as indie authors or as creatives that I think we should be teaching each other or getting each other to learn, because it's basic business survival. Things like pricing, that is an enormously complex business topic, pricing. Most of us are, “Well, what's everyone else doing? Okay, I'll do that.” That's how they make their decisions. There's a lot more to it than that, and it's very complex. We don't have to get a PhD in business management, but I think a little bit more awareness about basic business principles would serve all of us much better. Jo: Yes, there's always so much to learn, but I actually think you've done a really good job with your books. I mean, The Indie Author Survival Guide is a great place to start. They're super, super useful. I do want to talk about—as we come to an end—you've been doing this a long time, as have I, and we've both got some battle scars along the way. You do end your books with hopeful realism, which I like. Now, I'm definitely more of an optimist than you, but I feel like hopeful realism is a good place. So how can people cultivate that feeling of hopeful realism around the business? Tracy: I don't know. Are you more of an optimist than me? Anyway. Well, let's see, because for me, all the book writing and all the research and all the reading that I've been doing over the last few years have given me back a lot of optimism that I didn't have. As I was saying, it was feeling as though I couldn't do anything right. So learning that it wasn't just me that's the problem gave me back my confidence. So that's where the hopeful realism and the optimism came in. So hopeful realism, okay, it comes from understanding, from agency, and from choice. If you understand the industry as it actually exists, not the way you wish it did, and you understand the forces acting on your business and where you sit within them, that helps enormously. Just having that knowledge there, you can see what's going on, you understand what's going on. It's not all a mystery, and you're not scratching your head wondering what to do next. Because of that understanding, you get agency. You're not helpless. When circumstances change, you can respond. You can make decisions instead of simply having things happen to you, and all of that gives you choice. You can go out and research and find out what your options are, and you can choose the best option for you. If that doesn't work, you can go and try something else. So you've got a lot of choices, and you've got things that you can do. You're not helpless. So hopeful realism, I think, is pretty optimistic. Jo: Brilliant. So where can people find you and your books online? Tracy: If you're interested in my nonfiction, the best place to find me is at The Productive Indie Fiction Writer. If you want to find out more about my fiction, the best place to find that is to go to StoriesRulePress.com. My three pen names are there, and also Mark, my husband, who is a writer as well. And shortly, I think, another member of the family's going to be joining us as well. So it's a very family affair on Stories Rule Press. Jo: Well, thanks so much for your time, Tracy. That was great. Tracy: Thank you very much. I'm thrilled I was able to come back and talk again. Thanks, Joanna. The post How To Redesign Your Author Business For The Environment That Actually Exists, With Tracy Cooper-Posey first appeared on The Creative Penn.

We are raiding the Guardian long read archives to bring you some classic pieces from years past, with new introductions from the authors. This week, from 2023: While the world becomes drier, profit and pollution are draining our resources. We have to change our approach By Tim Smedley. Read by Sid Sagar. Help support our independent journalism at theguardian.com/longreadpod

Immerse yourself in gentle babbling brook sounds, perfect for deep sleep, meditation, and relaxation. Let the soothing ambient nature noise calm your mind, ease stress, and create a peaceful atmosphere for focus and restful rest.

Independent investigative journalism, broadcasting, trouble-making and muckraking with Brad Friedman of BradBlog.com

After record-setting temperatures across the country, dangerous summer heat continues to spill into September. The number of heat-related deaths in the Phoenix area are on track to triple last year's numbers. Schools, businesses, and events are shutting down across the Midwest from Iowa to Michigan. Institutions are also forced to close down in Pennsylvania and other states along parts of the Eastern Seaboard. Tribal officials are busy reacting to the current threat while also preparing for the likelihood that adapting to such conditions is a permanent concern. We'll look at the affect on people and the environment as the heat moves in. GUESTS Caine Palone (Quechan), Tribal Employment Rights Office director and emergency manager for the Fort Yuma Quechan Indian Tribe David Simeral, associate research climatologist for the Desert Research Institute and Western Regional Climate Center Dr. Paul Charlton, emergency medicine physician and emergency department director for the Gallup Indian Medical Center Break 1 Music: Bird Song (song) Joe Guachino, JR Holmes, & Wally Antone (artist) Bird Songs of the Colorado River (album) Break 2 Music: Mountain by the Sea (song) Various Artists (artist) Traditional Voices: Historic Recordings of Traditional Native American Music (album)

SpaceTime Series 29 Episode 105 More evidence Mars once had liquid water More than 20 years after NASA's Mars Spirit rover landed on the red planet scientists have uncovered new evidence that suggests liquid water – essential for life as we know it -- may once have covered large parts of the Martian surface. Are mysterious little red dots hiding something big A new study claims mysterious Little Red Dots seen near the dawn of the universe are likely to reside in small, dense compact star forming galaxies. Chang'e-7 lunar mission delayed Beijing has scrubbed for now its Chang'e-7 mission to the Moon sighting a failure to meet strict launch conditions. The Science Report A promising new way to tackle one of the most aggressive forms of breast cancer. Proof that alumni relationships between judges and lawyers are affecting court rulings. Looking for inexpensive and safer alternatives to dangerous lithium-ion batteries. The new app helping blind or visually impaired people navigate outdoors. Alex on Tech: Meta gets a slap on the wrist.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/spacetime-with-stuart-gary--2458531/support.

Plus: Quebec switches its paper ballots to French only for upcoming elections, a man is arrested on charges of causing around $100,000 in damage to Edmonton transit infrastructure, and a mysterious floating island reappears on a northern B.C. lake. We love feedback at The Big Story, as well as suggestions for future episodes. You can find us: Through email at hello@thebigstorypodcast.ca Or @thebigstory.bsky.social on Bluesky Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Crucial warnings that Wellington's Moa Point could catastrophically flood were missed, according to an Independent Crown Review into the February disaster. 14 billion litres of raw sewage has since spewed into the sea off the city's South Coast as a result of the plant failure. The review, released today, points to systemic failures in leadership by the city council, Wellington Water and plant operator Veolia as contributing to the meltdown. Reporter Ellen O'Dwyer spoke to Melissa Chan-Green. 

Hundreds of seagulls are plaguing a northern Auckland district, leaving business owners at their wit's end. The birds are damaging roofs, while their excrement blocks drains and contaminates water in Dairy Flat - well away from the nearest beach. Locals are stumped about how they can solve a problem no one is taking responsibility for. Evie Richardson reports.

Cole Sikes, communications specialist at the Auburn University School of Forestry, Wildlife & Environment, visits with Nina Payne, research scientists with Auburn University and the Southern Forest Nursery Management Cooperative, about a developing technique to deal with nutsedge on pine plantations.Find out more about our sponsor, Alabama Ag Credit, and also about Alabama Farmers Federation. 

Investigative journalist, blogger, and broadcaster Brad Friedman's investigative interviews, analysis and commentary, as ripped from the pages of The BRAD BLOG (BradBlog.com), today's current events (if they matter) and the rest of the stuff we have to live with.

Immerse yourself in gentle rain and evening traffic sounds to create a calming ambient atmosphere perfect for sleep, meditation, and relaxation. Let these soothing nature and city noises help you unwind, focus, and find peaceful rest.

Period underwear came out in 2013 but has increased in popularity, largely as they claim to be better for the environment and easy to use. However, in January 2023 Thinx, a leading US manufacturer of period underwear who branded themself as a sustainable alternative to single-use menstrual products has just settled a lawsuit regarding the presence of PFAs, also known as “forever chemicals.” Now people are wondering if period underwear is really as good as companies have made them out to be. What is period underwear? What are forever chemicals? What alternatives are there to period underwear? In under 3 minutes, we answer your questions! To listen to the last episodes, you can click here: ⁠⁠What are the best ways to keep warm outdoors?⁠⁠ ⁠⁠How can I avoid always feeling hungry?⁠⁠ ⁠⁠How did female body hair become taboo?⁠⁠ A Bababam Originals podcast, written and produced by Amber Minogue. First Broadcast: 10/4/2025 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the AI revolution, one of the critical constraints is how much additional electricity can be made available to power new data centers. And it is often argued that one of the key constraints on the growth of electricity supply is capacity in the equipment supply industry. The rate at which electricity supply can grow is determined in part by how fast the equipment industry can supply new turbines, transformers, switchgear and circuit breakers.In this episode Roger Martella, Chief Corporate Officer and Chief Sustainability Officer at GE Vernova, one of the world's largest suppliers of electrical equipment, joins the show to explain how the company is meeting the challenge of soaring demand. Roger talks to host Ed Crooks and regular contributor Melissa Lott, Partner for Energy at Microsoft, about his route from industrial Pennsylvania to the leadership team at GE, via the Environmental Protection Agency. And he explains why, when the old conglomerate GE broke up, he chose to go with the energy business. The company is driven by a sense of purpose, he says: bringing electricity to the world both raises living standards and supports decarbonization.Electricity demand growth created by new data centers for AI is one driver for GE Vernova's rapidly growing order book, but not the only one. The company is also responding to other sources of growing demand around the world, including the need to strengthen energy security in Europe and to support economic growth and development in emerging Asia.In the US, GE Vernova has announced $1.3 billion in investment and 1,800 new manufacturing jobs, to support expanded production of switchgear, circuit breakers and turbines. It plans to increase its turbine manufacturing capacity from 18 gigawatts a year to 30 gigawatts a year by 2030.Roger rejects the idea that equipment supplies are the main bottleneck restricting electricity supply growth. Other issues, including permitting and grid interconnections, are more fundamental difficulties for project developers. If anyone has built a turbine stand, but doesn't have a turbine to out on it, he says, he will find a turbine. Ed raises the issue of the industry's cyclicality. The gas turbine market has been through boom and bust in the past, and the uncertainty over the future of AI naturally raises the question of whether we are in another bubble today. Roger's answer is that the company is looking at the range of needs that are driving electrification, not making a bet solely on AI.As its production increases, GE Vernova needs to hire more workers. Roger, Ed and Melissa discuss the familiar consensus around skilled trades. Just about everyone agrees that America and other countries need more electricians, plumbers and welders to deloiver the build-out of infrastructure. But skills shortages persist. So what are the solutions that would actually increase the workforce in these sectors to meet demand? Are pay, job security, training and the status of industrial work being addressed in the right ways?One of the more exciting technologies for meeting electricity demand in the 2030s and beyond is the new generation of nuclear plants using small modular reactors (SMRs). GE Vernova has a new nuclear plant using SMRs under construction at Darlington in Ontario, and is targeting commercial operation by 2030. Ed pushes on the key question: can SMRs move from a promising concept to a repeatable, cost-competitive business? Roger says the first project has to be a proof point. The nuclear business cannot be run as a hobby, he says. The lessons from the first-of-a-kind Darlington plant must be used to drive down costs for subsequent units.The discussion also covers High-Voltage Direct Current (HVDC) transmission and cutting-edge technologies for grid management, including uses for drones and AI. Roger ends with a message to policymakers: the missing ingredient is policy durability. If the industry is to invest enough to meet long-term needs, it has to have policy frameworks that survive political cycles, court challenges and changes of administration.This episode of Energy Gang is brought to you by ENGIE, the smarter energy supplier. ENGIE doesn't just provide the power to run your business — they supply the energy to move it forward, with reliable, flexible solutions built for what's next. Learn more at engieresources.com.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

David Gelles, reporter on The New York Times climate team and leader of the Times' "Climate Forward" newsletter and events series, talks about his reporting on the economic effect of this summer's strong storms, and the weather effects of El Niño, which is happening but hasn't yet peaked. Photo: Operator monitoring wind speed and direction in the Pacific at the Peruvian National Emergency Operations Center (COEN) regarding preparations for the arrival of El Niño and national multi-hazard drills. (Carlos Garcia Granthon/Fotoholica Press/LightRocket via Getty Images) Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

While the podcast team is taking a Radical Sabbatical, Kim is interviewing authors of the books that have had a big impact on her in the past two years.  In this episode, Kim Scott speaks with Angela Duckworth. Her first book Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance, is a #1 New York Times bestseller. Her second book is Situated: Find the People and Places That Bring Out Your Best. In this conversation, Kim interviews Angela about her new book, 'Situated.' They explore a deceptively simple three-box model that explains all of human behavior. Angela emphasizes the power of environment in shaping our thoughts and leading us to–or away from–the results we want. She and Kim discuss the limitations of willpower. Angela describes the two key ingredients of a good situation: challenge and support. Kim and Angela explore why it is important to seek managers and peers who both challenge and support us. They discuss the importance of feedback and why Ruinous Empathy is so damaging to both personal and professional growth. If you're looking for one thing you can control to get better situated, Angela shares some practical advice on curating your personal space to foster positive habits and growth. Guest Background: Prof. Angela Duckworth, PhD, is the Rosa Lee and Egbert Chang Professor at the University of Pennsylvania and faculty co-director of the Penn-Wharton Behavior Change for Good Initiative.  Prior to her career in research, Angela founded an academic enrichment program for low-income children that was profiled as a Harvard Kennedy School case study and today serves hundreds of students each year. She has also been a McKinsey management consultant and a math and science teacher at public schools in New York City, San Francisco, and Philadelphia. Angela co-founded Character Lab, a nonprofit dedicated to advancing scientific insights that help children thrive. Angela completed her undergraduate degree in Advanced Studies Neurobiology at Harvard, graduating magna cum laude. With the support of a Marshall Scholarship, she completed an MSc with Distinction in Neuroscience from Oxford University. She completed her PhD in Psychology as a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania. Angela's TED talk is among the most viewed of all time. CHAPTERS (00:00) Introduction to Radical Sabbatical and Angela Duckworth's New Book (03:23) The Snorkeling Incident: A Metaphor for Situational Awareness (05:58) Finding Your Best Situations: The Power of Environment (08:31) The Three Boxes Model: Understanding Behavior and Thoughts (11:13) The Role of Situations in Shaping Our Thoughts (14:16) Changing Your Situation vs. Changing Your Thoughts (17:10) The Limitations of Willpower and Self-Control (20:13) The Quest for Control: Understanding Human Nature (23:15) Creating Supportive and Challenging Situations (27:11) Understanding Radical Candor (32:56) Navigating Ruinous Empathy (33:19) The Dilemma of Short-Term Comfort vs Long-Term Growth (34:30) Feeding the Good Wolf: A Metaphor for Growth (36:40) Economic Disparities and Their Impact (39:23) Agency and the Power of Choice (43:09) Curating Your Personal Space for Better Outcomes Connect with the Radical Candor team: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Website⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠LinkedIn⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠YouTube⁠⁠⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Wildfire season is underway in California, but the state's wildfire fund is running low after billions went to victims of last year's massive Altadena fire, sparked by faulty equipment owned by Southern California Edison. Governor Newsom and the legislature's debate over fixing the wildfire fund has hinged on the extent utilities, insurance companies and homeowners would pay into it. We'll dig into the details, and hear your thoughts on who should pay to rebuild after wildfires. Guests: Guy Marzorati, correspondent, KQED's California Politics and Government Desk Michael Wara, policy director for the Sustainability Accelerator at the Doerr School of Sustainability, director of the Climate and Energy Policy Program, senior research scholar at the Woods Institute for the Environment, Stanford University Joy Chen, executive director, Every Fire Survivor's Network Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Immerse yourself in gentle stream sounds and soothing nature ambiance perfect for deep sleep, meditation, and relaxation. Let the calming flow wash away stress and create a peaceful environment for rest and focus.

Ever since the earliest known recording of whale song was made in 1949, researchers have been captivated by the wails, rumbles, clicks, grunts and squeals of their communication. As technology improves, scientists are decoding the intricate patterns that make different species' vocalisations distinctive. Madeleine Finlay hears from Emma Bryce, a journalist who has spent months investigating human efforts to understand whale song. She explains how this knowledge could help us better protect whales from human-made harms. Credits: 1. Copyright 1978 National Geographic Society and 1977 Capitol Records, Inc. Commentary by Dr Roger Payne 2. Valeria Vergara/Raincoast Conservation Foundation 3. Footage courtesy of Raincoast Conservation Foundation - Obtained for research under SARA permit XMMS 4 2026 4. Video by Amanda Cotton/Project CETI 5. Footage courtesy of Valeria Vergara and GREMM. Obtained for research under SARA permits QUE-MM02-2016 and QUE-LEP-001-2018 6. Project CETI 7. Project CETI. Help support our independent journalism at theguardian.com/sciencepod

Eric Smith is the founder of Edacious, a company building the infrastructure to make food quality and nutrient density measurable, objective and comparable. After spending years building a nutrition-testing platform capable of measuring macronutrients, micronutrients, bioactives and phytochemicals, alongside the benchmarks and data systems needed to make those measurements useful, he returns to sit down with us to share what they have been building, how the field of nutritional testing has evolved, and the critical insights they have uncovered.At the heart of Eric's work is a simple belief:  if consumers can access and verify the quality of their food, they will demand products grown in ways that prioritize soil health and regenerative practices. This increased market demand will structurally direct more money into the pockets of farmers and land stewards, enabling them to expand regenerative agriculture across more hectares, creating a self-sustaining loop of human and ecological health. To ground this concept in science, Edacious leverages the GEMP framework—Genetics by Environment by Management practice equals Yield by Nutrition—moving beyond subjective labels to deliver objective, verified data.This episode is a deep, down-to-earth dive into the nuts and bolts of quality, nutrient density, and systemic agricultural change. Eric teases the science behind Edacious' preeminent nutrition lab, which has processed over 6,000 food samples and generated nearly a million analytical data points. The conversation exposes the compromises of industrial crop breeding through the story of carrots, compares apples to apples, reveals the massive nutritional differences hidden in the skins of produce, and explores how Eric's own eating habits have transformed since he gained direct access to the data, including a surprising advocacy for frozen food and ancient grains.More about this episode.Thoughts? Ideas? Questions? Send us a message!Find out more about our Generation-Re investment syndicate:https://gen-re.land/ Thank you to our Field Builders Circle for supporting us. Learn more hereSupport the show=======In Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food podcast show we talk to the pioneers in the regenerative food and agriculture space to learn more on how to put our money to work to regenerate soil, people, local communities and ecosystems while making an appropriate and fair return. Hosted by Koen van Seijen.

Every piece of productivity advice tells you the same thing: try harder, be more disciplined, muscle through the distractions. Igor thinks that advice is a trap. In this episode, he argues that focus is not a willpower problem but an environment problem — and that fighting distraction with discipline is like putting out a fire with a tiny bucket. Using the story of how he dug out from under a tsunami of notifications spread across fifteen platforms, he shows why the real fix is to stop fighting your environment and start redesigning it.

LAUSD wants to hear from the community on how students should use AI. Amazon is facing a multi state lawsuit including California and the federal government. And we'll bring you a preview of the L.A. mayoral forum happening this Thursday hosted here on LAist. Support The L.A. Report by donating at LAist.com/join and by visiting https://laist.comSupport the show: https://laist.com

Environmental decisions aren't always straight forward. Like, is it worth cutting down a forest to build a solar farm? This week on Possibly we take a look.

Dr. John All is a mountaineer and scientist who nearly lost his life after falling more than 20 meters down an icy crevasse while researching how quickly the Himalayas are melting. A week after a catastrophic flood struck the Nepal-Tibet border, he warns the tragedy we've seen in the region could be repeated as pollution and rising temperatures turn mountain ice into water.  Today, he speaks about researching climate change in treacherous terrain, and how soon the Himalayan glaciers could disappear.  Featured:  John All, mountaineer and co-founder of the American Climber Science Program 

Eustacy is a word used to describe worldwide changes of sea level. This is a new word for us: even though it seems we live in a eustatic world. We're using this newly-discovered word to distill the five areas of our existence where the ocean matters most: fresh water, the ocean-fresh water continuum, energy, food, health, and exchange.  About World Ocean RadioWorld Ocean Radio is a weekly series of five-minute audio essays available for syndicated use at no cost by college and community radio stations worldwide, providing coverage of a broad spectrum of ocean issues from science and education to advocacy and exemplary projects. Episodes of World Ocean Radio offer perspectives on global ocean issues and viable solutions, and celebrate exemplary projects. 

Nearly a week after a catastrophic glacier collapse struck the Nepal-China border, the death toll continues to rise as emergency teams search through heavy mud and submerged hydro tunnels. With thousands still unaccounted for, including dozens of Australian travellers, international rescue operations are racing against time. Guardian reporter Cait Kelly speaks to Rafqa Touma from Kathmandu about the devastation on the ground, the search for survivors and what happens next

Immerse yourself in gentle rainfall on a quiet sidewalk, perfect for sleep, meditation, and deep relaxation. Let these soothing ambient nature sounds calm your mind, ease stress, and create a peaceful atmosphere for rest and focus.

Southland's mayor says recent flooding events in Nepal emphasises the need for preparation, with Piopiotahi/Milford Sound at risk of a tsunami in case of large landslides. Mayor Rob Scott spoke to John Campbell.

The United States has entered into a significant and declaratory partnership with New Zealand to deliver a major port upgrade on the island of Penrhyn in the Cook Islands. Foreign Minister Winston Peters, Cook Islands PM Mark Brown and US Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau announced the project yesterday. Winston Peters spoke to John Campbell before leaving the Pacific Islands Forum in Palau.

This is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.Part I (00:14 – 09:54)A Devastating and Horrific Tragedy in Nepal: This is a Deadly Case of Natural Evil – Christians Need to Pray For All InvolvedPart II (09:54 – 12:36)The Script Was Already Ready: The Western Media Jumped to the Conclusion That Climate Change is Behind This, But the Jury is Still OutAn Explanation Without Evidence for the Nepal Flood by The Wall Street Journal (Matthew Hennessey)Disaster Experts Say Nepal Glacier Collapse Was Difficult to Predict by The New York Times (Laura Chung)Part III (12:36 – 22:26)The Progressive Strategy on ‘T': The Progressives in Politics and the WNBA See the Society ‘Moving Forward' on Transgenderism Once Americans Focus on Other IssuesMost Democrats Don't Want to Talk About Transgender Athletes. He's Leaning In. by The New York Times (Reid J. Epstein)WNBA will become an unstoppable force when it unites, outlasts culture wars by The Athletic (Ian O’Connor)Part IV (22:26 – 25:36)Log Cabin Republicans Drop the ‘T': Homosexual Republican Group Distances Itself From Transgenderism – But They're Still Defying Creation Order With LGBConservative Gay Rights Group Ends Support for Trans Causes by The New York Times (Richard Fausset)Log Cabin Republicans Renews Its National Advocacy Focus by Townhall (Ross Hemminger)Sign up to receive The Briefing in your inbox every weekday morning.Follow Dr. Mohler:X | Instagram | Facebook | YouTubeFor more information on The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, go to sbts.edu.For more information on Boyce College, just go to BoyceCollege.com.To write Dr. Mohler or submit a question for The Mailbox, go here.

Discipline, purpose, mindset, environment, and wealth-building can all be destroyed by the wrong voices if you let them stay around long enough. In this video, I break down how the “intoxicating whispers” of fear, doubt, entitlement, procrastination, envy, and bad environments can slowly pull you away from the person you were supposed to become. The biggest lesson is simple: A small misstep repeated long enough can completely change your trajectory.Join our Exclusive Patreon!!! Creating Financial Empowerment for those who've never had it.

Dan Kaufman, journalist and author of The Fall of Wisconsin: The Conservative Conquest of a Progressive Bastion and the Future of American Politics (W. W. Norton & Company, 2018), reports on the movement against data centers in Wisconsin, a major hub for the centers, and how it's turning into a major issue there and elsewhere ahead of the midterms. Photo: Protesters gather for a statewide data center day of action at the Wisconsin State Capitol on February 12, 2026 in Madison, Wisconsin. (Joe Timmerman/Catchlight/Wisconsin Watch via Getty Images) Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Immerse yourself in soothing rainfall and gentle ambient sounds perfect for deep sleep, meditation, and relaxation. Let the calming rhythm of nature ease your mind, reduce stress, and create a peaceful environment for rest and focus.

This episode is presented by Create A Video – The "Clean Break Fund" is targeting Republican politicians in their primaries over their opposition to the climate change agenda. But their messaging never mentions the climate. Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-pete-kaliner-show--6946691/support.Subscribe to the podcast My preferred podcast platform: SpreakerCheck out my preferred gold & silver company: Revelation Gold GroupAll the links to Pete's Prep are free! Plus get exclusive content here!Media Bias Check: GroundNews promo code!Advertising and Booking inquiries: Pete@ThePeteKalinerShow.com  

Independent investigative journalism, broadcasting, trouble-making and muckraking with Brad Friedman of BradBlog.com

Denis O'Shea, Founder of Mobile Mentor, helps organizations pursue a clear goal to simplify your tech environment while strengthening security and empowering employees to remain productive. Driven by the joy of learning and intellectual adventure, Denis left a 15-year career at Nokia to build a company that learns about emerging technologies, translates them into business outcomes, and mentors customers through change. In this conversation, Denis introduces The Tech Stack Streamlining Framework: Understand Current Tech Stack, Assess Capacity for Change, Benchmark to Peers, Build the Roadmap, and Deliver Simplified Tech Stack. He explains how immersing his team in a customer's environment, asking thoughtful questions, and benchmarking the organization against its peers can reveal a clear path toward a simpler technology stack. Denis also discusses Mobile Mentor's fast-growing mentoring service, how its Microsoft partnership transformed the business, the challenge of finding technology professionals who are natural mentors, and why people must remain responsible for the quality and accuracy of everything they produce with AI. — Simplify Your Tech Environment with Denis O’Shea  Good day, dear listeners. Steve Preda here, Management Blueprint Podcast. And today my guest is Denis O’Shea, the Founder of Mobile Mentor, a technology service provider helping thousands of clients find and maintain the right balance, securing devices, protecting data, and empowering people to be productive. Mobile Mentor is also a five-time Microsoft award winner. So Denis, welcome back to the show.  Thank you, Steve. Thank you for having me back. And I have to say, you look fantastic. You’re aging gracefully, and I hope I’m doing the same.  Well, unfortunately, my barber is on vacation, so I couldn’t visit him last week. But it’s great to have you back on the show, and we couldn’t agree whether it was two or four years ago that you were here. Anyhow, it’s great to have you back, and I’ve got some questions for you that I’m curious about. And first and foremost, the question is, what is your personal Why, and how are you manifesting it in your Mobile Mentor business?  My personal Why is probably learning. And I think the reason I went into business in the first place was to learn and grow as an individual. It certainly wasn’t money. I expect money as an outcome from the process, but I didn’t go into it for money. It was really to learn, and the trigger for me was I did an executive education program in Switzerland. I was living there for a few years, and that blew my mind. That just exploded my mind when I started learning all about mergers, acquisitions, turnarounds, management buyouts, all these different ways of growing a business that were nonlinear.  And that motivated me to go on and do an MBA, and that then motivated me to leave my employer, who was a great company. I was working for Nokia for 15 years. They were amazing, but I decided to leave them and go out and embrace all this nonlinear stuff and found a company from scratch. And one day I thought maybe I’ll do a spin-out, or maybe I’ll do an acquisition, and I’ll do all these different things. And it was purely for the joy of learning and the intellectual adventure. So I think that’s my Why. It’s learning.  Yeah. Well, learning is great, and it’s a big driver of businesses when they are able to learn, especially in today’s age. So tell me a little bit about how Mobile Mentor is reflecting this way of learning. Is it a learning organization, and in what way is it?  Oh, that’s an interesting question, Steve. I would hope we are a learning organization. Something I’ve been saying to my kids and my staff for years is, “We’re a learning species. We can learn anything we put our minds to.” And so I would hope we are a learning organization. And the word “mentor” plays a huge part in not just our brand, but how we work. So we’re a technology service company. We’re always unpacking the latest technology and helping customers figure out what to do with it and how to extract value from it.  So I would hope that we’re good at learning what the technology can do and then translating that into outcomes for customers and helping people unlock the full potential of the technology they’ve just purchased. And when we started 22 years ago, we were focused on mobile devices. That’s why the company’s called Mobile Mentor. Nowadays, it’s mainly AI and security and all that. And by the way, we’re going through a rebrand. The company’s just going to be called Mentor going forward. Just Mentor. So that we can work with all technology, so we remove any association with that small device where we started 22 years ago. So I think we are very good at learning, internalizing the new technology, and then translating that into business outcomes for our customers.  Yeah.  That’s what I feel like our core skill is.  Yeah. And I love this concept of mentoring because essentially it’s not about teaching people, it’s about helping people discover how to be great. And if you can do that, that’s amazing. So that brings me to the next question, which is about frameworks. So this, as you know, this podcast is about frameworks, and what I’m curious about is, what’s a framework that has helped you grow this company, build this company, or help your clients or mentor your clients? Maybe it’s a mentoring framework. Maybe it’s a technology framework. So something that comes to mind that can be explained in three to five steps to our listeners.  Sure. We have a really strong framework at the front end of our sales process. It’s an assessment and roadmap we do for customers. And it’s something that’s on our website. It has a price point, so it’s got a value, but we choose to give it away for free when we get a strong, well-qualified opportunity, or when we have a channel partner bring us a strong lead. We will use this assessment and roadmap process to build a vision for the customer. And the way we do it, we’ve got a good framework for this.  We go through an assessment. So we tell the customer, “We’re going to have a look at your environment holistically and get a really good understanding of the technology stack you have today, all the different technologies you’re using, and also get a good understanding of your organization’s capability and capacity for change, and how you embrace change, how you make change happen. “And we’re going to show you how you compare to a whole bunch of other organizations.” I think we’ve done 174, 175 of these in the last maybe three years. And so we show the customer how they compare to others in their industry and also against others roughly their same size. And then, most importantly, we build out a roadmap, and we show them, “Here’s how you can potentially go from where you are today with today’s technology stack,” which is usually very busy, it’s usually a long list of technologies, “to a much simpler technology stack in the future if they’re willing to consolidate on one or two platforms and do all the possible integrations, automations, and simplifications so that they’re extracting much more value from one or two platforms, like Microsoft, than having a whole colorful mix of different technology vendors.”  So we’ll say, “Here’s a journey you could go on,” and then we describe it in vivid detail, showing all the different parts and how they would go passwordless, how they would automate setting up new employees and all the technology they need, how they would automate all their patching and security, how they would embrace AI into their operations, how they would use AI for productivity improvements, and kind of show this technology journey. That process, or that framework, of doing an assessment, and it covers 120 different topics. So we do the assessment, the comparison, the roadmap.  We find that to be extremely powerful because customers will look at that, and they’ll look at the destination and say, “Right. We want to be there. We want to get that outcome,” and then they’re buying off us. We’re not selling to them. They’re basically saying, “Okay. We want to get there. How do we do it? Help us. How can you come in and help us do it?” So the narrative flips from us being a sales organization to then being a mentor and helping the customer figure out how to get there.  And of course, we want to sell services, and we want to sell long-term contracts to say, “Yes, we can take you from here to there, and it’s a three-year engagement to do all those changes.” So that’s what we want. But the customer is buying it off us because they’ve bought into the destination.  Yeah. And that’s the modern buyer’s journey, right? They research you. Before even they come to you, they want to listen to you because you might have something for them. So I love this framework. So what I noted down was step number one, understand the technology stack that they have. Step number two, assess their ability to manage change or to handle change.  Yeah.  Then you benchmark them to others in their industry or in their peer group. Then you build the roadmap, and then you show them the simplified end state, the simplified tech stack.  Correct. Correct. And then we give them options around how we can help them to get there. Usually, there’s three options. And we say, “Well, what style of engagement works best for you? How would you like us to work with you?” And then it becomes a very comfortable, easy sales process from there, and it becomes easy because we’ve done all the listening.  So when we do the assessment and we cover 120 topics, we do 60 questions in 60 minutes. So it’s two one-hour sessions. And we call it our “friendly interrogation.” But what happens during that time is what I call a selfless immersion in the customer’s world. So we don’t talk about us. We never talk about us. Everything is about them, their technology stack, their environment, their processes, their technical dependencies, all the things about their organization.  So we get this really rich understanding of their environment. And at the end, guess what they say, Steve? Or guess what they say at the end of that interrogation or that assessment session?  I don’t know. Give it to us. What do they say?  They say thank you, which is extraordinary, and it surprised me when it started happening. But people love to be heard. We’re not selling. We’re not pitching anything. We are just seeking to understand their environment and asking a whole bunch of really good questions. So we don’t need to tell them who we are and what we’ve done, that we’ve won Microsoft Partner of the Year and blah, blah, blah. We don’t need to do any of that.  They know that we know our stuff because of the questions we’re asking, because those questions have been refined and refined and refined. So we’re able to get right into the heart of their issues, and they tell us all about their environment and their issues and concerns and frustrations. And at the end of the assessment, they say, “Thank you.” And I remind them, I say, “We haven’t delivered anything yet. All we’ve done is asked you a whole bunch of questions.” But they feel like it was almost a cathartic process of unloading and sharing all of it. And then we do the second session, and the rapport gets even better, and they bring in some different people.  So by the time we get to the end of the assessment, we’ve had a really good conversation about 120 different things. There’s now a high degree of trust. And so when we come back in the third session, we say, “Okay, we heard you. Here’s where you are. Here’s how you compare to others. Here’s where you could be, and here’s what the journey would look like to get you there, taking all the complexities into account, all the dependencies, all the legacy, all the technical debt you might have. “Here’s what it would take to get you to where you want to be.” They’re now listening and they’re trusting us because we’ve listened to them.  Yeah. I love that. That is very powerful. And asking good questions is actually not always easy. In the age of AI, answers are omnipresent, but good questions, good prompts, that’s a skill, right? To ask the right question.  It is. And it’s interesting you mention AI because we’re not using any AI in the way we do this. We could choose to send out a form to the customer and say, “Please fill out this form.” Actually, we tried that. We tried that 10 or 12 years ago in our New Zealand operation, and it was a complete disaster. Nobody wants to fill out a long form and answer all those questions. But if you have a conversation face-to-face, on Teams or Zoom, whatever, you can have the conversation. You’ll get all the information.  But now we’re establishing rapport between us while we do that, and that also gives them a flavor of what it’s like to work with us. How we interact and how we follow up the question, how we drill down, how we clarify and confirm, “Did I understand that correctly?” in a way that you don’t get from just filling out a web form. And we also don’t use AI to analyze the transcript and try and fill it out. We actually do it based on us understanding it, because we find we get way more detail and nuance than relying on a transcript.  That’s very interesting. Definitely, when there’s a human on the other end who is interested in what you’re saying and is listening deeply, it’s a highly motivating and even inspiring thing. That’s why it’s hard to make a talk without the audience, because you need the energy of the audience. So you provide the energy for them to come up with the goods and explain where they are, right?  Yeah, yeah. So let me switch gears and ask you this. What drives growth in your business?  What drives growth? Two things. One, that process sets us up to be able to sell something. The fastest-growing thing that we sell is a service called mentoring, which is very closely aligned to our brand and the way we work, and it’s something that’s very unique to us. So what we figured out is that there are some customers who just want to bring in a partner to build something for them let’s say to deploy some new technology, and then they want the vendor to go away and leave them with it. There are other organizations who don’t want to touch the technology. They want somebody to provide a managed service, so you get all the outcomes.  And those two technology service categories have been around forever, right? Microsoft has 400,000 partners doing this kind of work, doing project work, or providing managed services. We found a huge white space in the middle between those two. We found there’s a big white space in the mid-market, in particular mid-market organizations, where they have their own IT team. They don’t want to give the keys away to a managed service provider and let go. They want to learn all about the new technology.  They want to internalize the knowledge, and they want somebody to come in and help them deploy it with them, and be hands-on-keyboard, and do it together with them, and do lots of knowledge transfer, and help them build the documentation and the knowledge base, and get the experience and the skills so that their skills grow, their confidence grows. And we call that service mentoring, where we’re doing that for them. So we’re not just building it and walking away, we’re building it together with them. And it can be a one-year, two-year, five-year engagement where we’re building out this complex technology capability, but we’re doing it together, and they become the experts over time. That is our fastest-growing, top-selling service.  That’s fascinating. So it’s essentially coaching, mentoring, and still you turn it into an ongoing engagement because it’s not simple, right? There are a lot of layers to it. And what’s the timeline of such a relationship?  Typically three years. Typically. It can be as short as one, it can be as long as five. But for most of the technology transformation projects we’re doing, I would say they’re two, three, four years for the organization to change and embed all the changes and turn off all the legacy technology and fully embrace the new way of working. So our typical contract is three years. And then we set up all the cadences so that we’re working together every week through specific things, and there’s a weekly cadence, our engineers doing all that stuff, and then monthly coming up for air to see how we’re doing against the roadmap. Do we need to make any changes? What’s the focus for next month? And that’s a rolling process that keeps going on and on. And so the two teams end up working extremely closely.  Our engineering team, and we’re bringing in different architects, engineers, and there’s obviously a consistent project manager across it. And on the customer side, they’re bringing different engineers or architects depending on the piece of work we’re doing. But it’s generally all modernizing the way they work with Microsoft technology primarily, and changing from legacy stuff to very modern, invisible security, embedded AI, really trying to accelerate their maturity as an organization.  Yeah. Love it.  Does that make sense?  So it makes sense. I’m wondering, I mean, most businesses these days, they want to have recurring revenue, and even though you have a three-year engagement, it’s still not an evergreen engagement. So what do you do to turn these engagements into more of an enduring one, or you’re not trying to do it because it’s not the purpose?  That’s the $64 million question for our business, Steve, is how do we turn a two-year or three-year engagement into something longer? And it actually comes back to where you started with the learning thing. So what we need to be doing, and this is a constant battle for us, is learning about the latest and the newest technologies and staying ahead of the customer. Always staying ahead in terms of our knowledge so that we can keep adding new things to the backlog of work that needs to be done.  So that we might deploy technology A and get that done and do the migration and modernization, but then we need to move on to B and C and D and E. And there’s always new stuff, and actually the rate of change is accelerating now with AI. Everything is changing so fast, it’s unbelievable. But our job is to stay ahead so that we can always have something new and edgy that we can bring to the relationship. That we’re always able to give new knowledge, information, value.  So is it a managed technology business or is it more of a consulting business?  Ah, we are three different things. We do a lot of project work where people will come in and say, “Migrate us from platform A to platform B.” So we do that. We do this mentoring service where we’re doing the change and modernization together with the customer. We’re also a managed service provider. We have a lot of small and medium businesses that say, “We don’t have an IT team. We don’t want to have an IT team. Manage this stuff, make it invisible to us. Just give us great service and give us great reports and be transparent with us.” And that’s part of our business too.  So I would say we’re roughly one-third professional services, project work, one-third mentoring, and one-third managed services. So more than half the business is recurring revenue in any given year.  So what makes this kind of business hard to scale, or what makes it easy to scale?  What makes it hard to scale is finding great people who can learn and share that learning with customers, so people who are natural mentors. So what we do not want is to hire geeks who want to just put on noise-canceling headsets and sit in front of a screen coding all day. They would not work for us. We want people who are head up, good people skills, want to learn it, but want to share it. Naturally very good at sharing. So getting the right people, that’s one constraint to growth. The thing that makes growth easy for us is our relationship with Microsoft. That’s unbelievable.  We didn’t have a relationship with Microsoft 11 years ago, and they came to us and asked us to become a partner, and we did. And they asked us to work with them on a specific technology that was very immature at the time. And I set a goal for our team. I said, “What would it take us to become the best in the world at that one specific technology? To become the best in the world on that technology as it matures and grows?” And we set that as our North Star and really went after that and focused everything on that.  And that enabled us then to win Microsoft Global Partner of the Year based on our focus on that. And by winning that award, that got us noticed because they got 400,000 partners. So at the time, I was based in New Zealand, so basically the second-last rock before the end of the earth. And so we were nobody in a nowhere place and not noticed, and we’re just one of 400,000, completely lost in the noise. We got noticed when we won Global Partner of the Year and when we got recognized for being the best in the world at that one technology, and that changed everything, and I moved to America.  Then Microsoft introduced us to a whole bunch of customers, including the largest healthcare organization in the world, the largest education provider in the world, and largest government departments. And so now our business is totally different to what it looked like 11 years ago before Microsoft. And this goes on and on. So almost every day, they contact us to say, “Hey, we got this customer over here, and they got this problem, and we thought of you.” And then they introduce us, and we do our assessment, show them how they compare, build a roadmap, and say, “What would you like to do from here?”  Yeah. I’m just very curious about what is that technology, and what is the ideal customer for you for that technology? That technology is a platform called Intune. It’s a device management platform, so it’s for managing desktops, laptops, MacBooks, smartphones, tablets, and all that. And everything we do, of course, starts with a device. And so it’s the technology that secures and manages and configures our devices. Microsoft Intune is the name of the product, and that’s where we’ve got very, very deep expertise. But that leads us to all the other parts of the Microsoft 365 environment, and most organizations are using Microsoft 365 to some extent.  So in most cases, they’re coming to us and saying, “Hey, this customer has bought our licenses. They’ve got Microsoft 365 E5 or E3, whatever. They’re not using it all. They’ve got all these overlapping competitive products. They want to consolidate, reduce costs, or they want to improve security, or they want to simplify their environment. Can you help?” And we’re like, “Hell yeah, we can help. That’s right in our wheelhouse.” And so we have a discovery call with the customer. They tell us what they want to achieve, and if they’re a good fit for our assessment and roadmap, then we’ll propose that. So we’re not trying to sell anything at that stage, and we’ll do that.  It’s many, many hours of work. We’ll do that roadmap and assessment at our cost. Sorry, that’s our investment. That’s our investment in the relationship, so that we’re showing that we’re giving value back to the customer and to Microsoft because they brought us that lead, and we’re creating value from day one. And sometimes the customer will go, “Thank you. We understand the journey. We’re going to do it ourselves,” or, “We’ve got an existing partner,” or, “We don’t have budget,” whatever. And so we don’t land them all, but we’ve got a very high conversion rate. We land a lot of them.  And even if we don’t, I know that we deliver a huge amount of value through the process, and the customer goes, “Wow, that was great. That was a great process. We learned a lot. We can see where we need to go. We might be back in touch in the future when we do have budget or when the stars align.”  Or they refer someone else.  Yeah.  So if you had a magic wand and you could fix one thing in your business in the next 12 months, what would that be?  I would say it would be doing more with AI internally. Some days I feel like an imposter because we are selling a lot of AI services, and we do a lot of AI work for our customers. But I, as the leader, I don’t do enough. I’m not doing enough with AI. I’m not building enough capability. I’m leading the charge, but I’m not savvy enough myself. And I feel like our leadership team could be doing more. So I feel like doing more, embedding more AI into how we work, is something I want to change or fix in the next year. Not just doing it for customers.  Yeah. I mean, you can never do enough with AI, right? There’s so much out there and so much changing, and to stay ahead of it, one’s head is spinning all the time. It’s very inspiring, but can be also overwhelming.  That’s true. And one of the things I’m dealing with is managing what we call AI slop, where we see people internally and externally producing things that are not good-quality outcomes because it hasn’t been double-checked. So just because it could be produced quickly and easily by AI doesn’t mean it’s great or specific enough or detailed enough or accurate enough for the result, whether that’s an internal report or an external thing.  So the coaching I’m giving people is you’re still responsible for the thing, the quality of the thing. You have to read it, make sure it’s on point, it’s detailed enough, the customer’s going to be happy with it or your manager’s going to be happy with it. We are still responsible for the thing we produce. Let’s not get lazy.  Yeah. And the more content you generate and the more solutions you generate with AI, the more the mental load on the decision-makers to actually filter out what’s not real and what’s real.  Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.  Yeah. I can see that happening. So if someone is listening to this and says, “Wow, I love this idea that you benchmark me, you figure out what our tech is, learn our tech, benchmark us, come up with a roadmap, and evaluate the organization, how fast we can manage change, and then come up with a roadmap and mentor us to get there and simplify our tech stack,” and would like to learn more and perhaps connect with you, where should they go? Where can they find out more information?  I’m on LinkedIn only. I’m not on other social platforms. I’m a bit of a Neanderthal in that regard. But Denis, with one N and O’Shea, O-S-H-E-A, on LinkedIn, and my company is Mobile Mentor. It will be Mentor soon, but we’ll keep the Mobile Mentor alive for quite a while. And so go to the company, mobile-mentor.com. And yeah, love to talk to any of your listeners and audience if this is a technology journey they want to go on or want a partner to work with them. That’s the role we play, being a mentor and helping people get the outcomes, but internalizing it and becoming experts while doing so.  Yeah. So if you want to filter out the AI slop and the AI noise, and you want real people who will look at your specific situations and help you and mentor you and help your staff get up to speed and simplify, then reach out to Denis. And if you enjoyed this conversation, stay tuned because every week I bring a couple of entrepreneurs who are sharing their frameworks of how they’re improving and growing their businesses, and you can implement some of these things yourself.  So thanks, Denis. Denis O’Shea, the founder and CEO of Mobile Mentor, soon to be called Mentor. Thanks for coming on the show, and thank you for listening. Thank you, Steve. Always a pleasure. Important Links: Denis's LinkedIn Denis's website

In this Resilience Unravelled episode, host Dr Russell Thackeray interviews Chris Hill, a London-based “lived experience practitioner” who helps people with mental health and addiction by teaching an educational “separation model” that distinguishes the conscious self from mind/body mechanisms.Hill shares his own 20-year history of addiction and explains addiction as dopamine-driven habitual wiring that can be harmful when it causes damage to self or others, spanning substances (nicotine, alcohol, drugs) and behaviours (gambling, sex, porn, shopping, social media).He argues modern society “hacks” survival mechanisms, highlights environmental risks such as youth vaping and its gateway effects, and criticises willpower-only approaches.Hill outlines his book Get Your Life Back, his private mentoring via beatmyaddictions.com, and his charity robhillfoundation.org, founded after his twin brother's fatal overdose in 2014.00:00 Welcome and Introductions00:37 Chris Hill Background01:10 Personal Addiction Journey02:49 What Addiction Means05:46 Physical vs Behavioural Addictions08:24 Who Is Most Vulnerable10:33 Environment and Youth Vaping13:48 Education and Rewiring Solution16:59 Separation Model Explained22:13 Natural State and Breaking the Cycle23:38 Book and Program Options26:24 Support Community and Faith28:01 Charity Links and ClosingYou can contact us at info@qedod.comResources can be found online or link to our website https://resilienceunravelled.com#resilience, #burnout, #intuition

Bob DeWaay critiques John Mark Comer's view of sin and atonement, contrasting Comer's multiple paradigms with the Bible's clear teaching that we are either in Adam or in Christ, under God's wrath or rescued through faith in Jesus and His atoning work. Click here to play

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Immerse yourself in gentle river sounds that create a peaceful ambient atmosphere perfect for sleep, meditation, and deep relaxation. Let the calming flow wash away stress and help you focus or unwind naturally.