Podcasts about Fiji

This week, we examine a herpes zoster vaccination that can reduce or delay dementia diagnosis. How does it work? Plus, the BBC's Zoe Kleinman explains a social media site for AI chatbots, the discovery of microplastics in remote parts of the Pacific Ocean, and why the Artemis II launch has been delayed once more... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

In this preseason interview filmed in Fiji, Jonathan Young reveals the unique preparation he undertook for his return in Survivor 50, including a personal letter of advice and three specific rules for success from legend Boston Rob. Known as the ultimate "challenge beast" of the New Era, Young explains why he is actually grateful his strategic game was downplayed in Season 42 and how he plans to use his status as a "free agent" to navigate a cast full of pre-existing alliances. From weaning himself off food to handle the island's starvation to identifying which old-school icons he wants to work with, Jonathan breaks down his evolving strategy for this milestone season.

In this preseason interview filmed in Fiji, Emily Flippen reveals the internal struggle behind returning for the milestone 50th season. She breaks down her fascinating psychological reads on legends like Cirie Fields and Coach at Ponderosa, explaining why she's already picking up on a massive divide in energy between the icons of the game. From calling the back-to-back players from season 49 "psychos" to her ruthless decision to vote against the cast receiving rice, Emily discusses leaning into her reputation as a "physical liability" and how she plans to navigate a fast-paced game where she feels like a permanent underdog.

Rizo Velovic & Stephenie LaGrossa Kendrick Survivor 50 Preseason Interviews Mike Bloom (@AMikeBloomType) is here to chat to the cast of Survivor 50! Join us to hear from your favorite returning Survivor players! Today, Mike Bloom brings together a special Vatu tribe duo for an in-depth round of preseason interviews. In this milestone episode, Mike sits down with returning Survivor 49 standout Rizo Velovic and legendary veteran Stephenie LaGrossa Kendrick to explore how new-school energy collides with old-school experience, all while strategists and super fans gear up for an epic season. Survivor 50's anticipation becomes even more intense as Rizo grapples with the notoriety of being the infamous “Riz God” and Stephenie reflects on her return to the game after more than a decade away. The discussion opens with Rizo sharing his whirlwind journey—playing Survivor 49, getting pulled aside by Jeff Probst just hours before leaving Fiji, and learning he's in for back-to-back seasons. Rizo talks openly about carrying the “Riz God” persona into Survivor 50 and his calculated read on how cast perception shapes his target level. He breaks down the division between old-school and new-school players, explaining why he feels safer aligning with Survivor's original legends over modern contestants who are deeply interconnected and more likely to view him as a threat. In the “Friend or Foe” game, Rizo offers rapid-fire takes on castaways, revealing his read on potential allies, rivals, and how he hopes to become “The Prodigy” under Coach's mentorship. On the flip side, Stephenie shares emotional stories from her years away—retiring from reality TV for family, overcoming personal loss, and what motivates her Survivor comeback. She considers her original reputation, lessons learned on Snake in the Grass and The Traitors, and her plan to build genuine bonds while dodging the threat radar. Both Rizo and Stephenie analyze the tribe's dynamics, assess loyalty, spotlight connections, and weigh who could shield them from an early exit. Rizo's strategy as the youngest contestant and navigating his “Riz God” identity The divide between old-schoolers and new-era players, and why Rizo prefers to work with Survivor legends Stephenie's return after years away and her plan to blend in, stay loyal, and play for her family Hints about pregame connections, potential alliances, and which players stand out as immediate threats or trusted allies Highlights from the “Friend or Foe” game—Rizo's picks for key alliances, who could be targeted first, and who both guests would bring back for Survivor 50 As Survivor 50 gets closer, will Rizo's superfan energy and calculated alliances help or hurt his chances? Can Stephenie prove she’s still a force or will her legendary status make her an early target? Tune in for Mike Bloom's deep-dive interviews to hear all the alliance tea, pregame stories, and cast dynamics before the game even begins. Chapters: 0:00 Intros 6:13 Embracing the “Riz God” Persona 13:17 Choosing Old School Versus New 19:32 Navigating New Era Alliances 27:51 Rizo Seeks Strategic Partnerships 34:53 Celebrity Loved Ones Fantasy Picks 39:47 Stephenie Returns After Long Hiatus 45:14 Balancing Motherhood and Gameplay 53:01 Survivor Friend or Foe Decisions 56:17 Emotional Tribute to Lost Brothers 1:00:00 Stephenie's Survivor 50 Wish Never miss a minute of RHAP's extensive Survivor coverage! LISTEN: Subscribe to the Survivor podcast feed WATCH:  Watch and subscribe to the podcast on YouTube SUPPORT:  Become a RHAP Patron for bonus content, access to Facebook and Discord groups plus more great perks!

Rizo Velovic & Stephenie LaGrossa Kendrick Survivor 50 Preseason Interviews Mike Bloom (@AMikeBloomType) is here to chat to the cast of Survivor 50! Join us to hear from your favorite returning Survivor players! Today, Mike Bloom brings together a special Vatu tribe duo for an in-depth round of preseason interviews. In this milestone episode, Mike sits down with returning Survivor 49 standout Rizo Velovic and legendary veteran Stephenie LaGrossa Kendrick to explore how new-school energy collides with old-school experience, all while strategists and super fans gear up for an epic season. Survivor 50's anticipation becomes even more intense as Rizo grapples with the notoriety of being the infamous “Riz God” and Stephenie reflects on her return to the game after more than a decade away. The discussion opens with Rizo sharing his whirlwind journey—playing Survivor 49, getting pulled aside by Jeff Probst just hours before leaving Fiji, and learning he's in for back-to-back seasons. Rizo talks openly about carrying the “Riz God” persona into Survivor 50 and his calculated read on how cast perception shapes his target level. He breaks down the division between old-school and new-school players, explaining why he feels safer aligning with Survivor's original legends over modern contestants who are deeply interconnected and more likely to view him as a threat. In the “Friend or Foe” game, Rizo offers rapid-fire takes on castaways, revealing his read on potential allies, rivals, and how he hopes to become “The Prodigy” under Coach's mentorship. On the flip side, Stephenie shares emotional stories from her years away—retiring from reality TV for family, overcoming personal loss, and what motivates her Survivor comeback. She considers her original reputation, lessons learned on Snake in the Grass and The Traitors, and her plan to build genuine bonds while dodging the threat radar. Both Rizo and Stephenie analyze the tribe's dynamics, assess loyalty, spotlight connections, and weigh who could shield them from an early exit. Rizo's strategy as the youngest contestant and navigating his “Riz God” identity The divide between old-schoolers and new-era players, and why Rizo prefers to work with Survivor legends Stephenie's return after years away and her plan to blend in, stay loyal, and play for her family Hints about pregame connections, potential alliances, and which players stand out as immediate threats or trusted allies Highlights from the “Friend or Foe” game—Rizo's picks for key alliances, who could be targeted first, and who both guests would bring back for Survivor 50 As Survivor 50 gets closer, will Rizo's superfan energy and calculated alliances help or hurt his chances? Can Stephenie prove she’s still a force or will her legendary status make her an early target? Tune in for Mike Bloom's deep-dive interviews to hear all the alliance tea, pregame stories, and cast dynamics before the game even begins. Chapters: 0:00 Intros 6:13 Embracing the “Riz God” Persona 13:17 Choosing Old School Versus New 19:32 Navigating New Era Alliances 27:51 Rizo Seeks Strategic Partnerships 34:53 Celebrity Loved Ones Fantasy Picks 39:47 Stephenie Returns After Long Hiatus 45:14 Balancing Motherhood and Gameplay 53:01 Survivor Friend or Foe Decisions 56:17 Emotional Tribute to Lost Brothers 1:00:00 Stephenie's Survivor 50 Wish Never miss a minute of RHAP's extensive Survivor coverage! LISTEN: Subscribe to the Survivor podcast feed WATCH:  Watch and subscribe to the podcast on YouTube SUPPORT:  Become a RHAP Patron for bonus content, access to Facebook and Discord groups plus more great perks!

In this preseason interview filmed in Fiji, Christian Hubicki opens up about his long-awaited return for Survivor 50 and the major life shifts—including earning tenure and becoming a father just six weeks before the game—that have reshaped his approach to the season. Christian explains his new "narrative warfare" strategy, a lesson he's stealing from Mike White to control the stories told on the island, while breaking down his fascinating "four role" hypothesis on how this legendary cast was built. From his pre-game observations of Coach and Cirie to his plan to become an "ace in the hole" that his competitors won't see coming, the robotics professor reveals why he is finally ready to crack the code of the final three.

In this preseason interview filmed in Fiji, Rick Devens reflects on his dramatic path to Survivor 50, revealing that he was nearly left off the cast as a late alternate before finally getting the call. Devens explains how that setback gave him a chip on his shoulder—and why it's pushed him to approach the game differently this time. From being one fire-making challenge away from winning his original season to intentionally playing down his threat level now, Devens breaks down his evolving strategy, his willingness to cause some trouble, and how he plans to navigate the massive old-school vs. new-era cast.

In this preseason interview filmed in Fiji, Aubry Bracco opens up about returning for Survivor 50 after stepping away from the Survivor community and how that time off — along with becoming a parent — has reshaped her perspective and strategy. Aubry explains why she plans to play as a free agent in the early game, focusing on one-on-one relationships, keeping her options open, and avoiding early commitments in a cast full of returning players with pre-existing alliances. She also reflects on adapting to the modern game and what she's watching for in the critical opening phase of Survivor 50.

After nearly a decade away from the game, Chrissy Hofbeck is back for Survivor 50—and she believes the timing couldn't be better. In this preseason interview, the Survivor 35 finalist sits down with host Sharon Tharp on set in Fiji to break down her strategy heading into Survivor 50: In the Hands of the Fans. Chrissy opens up about why being a “lone wolf” from her season could work to her advantage, how jury dynamics may shape the endgame, and why she thinks New Era players could become early targets. She also reflects on the “robbed” narrative from her original season, discusses managing her challenge reputation, and explains why she genuinely believes she has a path to win this time around.

In this preseason interview filmed in Fiji, Survivor legend Ozzy Lusth sits down with host Sharon Tharp ahead of Survivor 50 to size up the cast and reflect on how the game has evolved over the years. Ozzy shares his thoughts on old school versus new school Survivor, returning to the island after more than two decades with the franchise, and how existing relationships and reputations could shape the early game. He also opens up about who he's excited to play with, which unknowns intrigue him most, and what he hopes to do differently in this landmark season.

In this preseason interview filmed in Fiji, three-time Survivor alum Stephenie LaGrossa Kendrick opens up about returning for Survivor 50 more than two decades after her original seasons. Stephenie reflects on balancing motherhood with coming back to the game, her concerns about physical endurance, and why she believes the game begins the moment players arrive. She also shares her thoughts on old school versus new school Survivor, navigating pre-existing relationships, modern twists and advantages, and which players she's hoping to align with as the season begins.

Angelina Keeley & Aubry Bracco Survivor 50 Preseason Interviews Mike Bloom (@AMikeBloomType) is here to chat to the cast of Survivor 50! Join us to hear from your favorite returning Survivor players! Today, Mike Bloom starts a preseason deep dive into the Vatu tribe featuring returnees Angelina Keeley and Aubry Bracco. Angelina opens up about her major life changes since David vs. Goliath, while Aubry reflects on her evolution across her storied Survivor journey, setting the stage for a season full of big personalities, new alliances, and possible blindsides. Mike chats with Angelina about what it's like to be called back after seven years away from the game, including leaving behind a young family and a new business to take another shot at the title of Sole Survivor. Angelina breaks down her approach heading into the game, how being a mom and entrepreneur brings a new flavor to her gameplay, why her “BFF, friend, or foe” approach will guide her alliances, and how she handles being labeled “chaotic.” Aubry discusses her surprise at being invited back, what she's learned from her three previous seasons, and how she aims to play with more self-awareness, adaptability, and focus on one-on-one connections. Both women weigh in on their perceptions of fellow castaways, discussing new era strategists, obvious threats, and the push and pull between loyalty and gameplay. Angelina ranks her cast as BFF, friend, or foe in a candid alliances game, revealing beef, admiration, and strategic wariness, especially when it comes to winners and new era players. Aubry shares how being blindsided in Edge of Extinction changed her approach, and why she's focused on staying grounded and present this time around. Both discuss leaving behind kids, running businesses, and the “joyful warrior” mindset they hope to channel on the island. Each interview explores Survivor's evolving meta, including whether recent winners should be targeted, which returnees are most dangerous, and how pre-existing relationships will shape alliances. Funny moments include Angelina's dream “summer solstice” camp party and her family rooting for Ozzy right alongside her. As the anticipation for season 50 builds, Mike asks: Can Angelina or Aubry climb higher on the Survivor ladder, or will new threats and old friends stand in their way? How will personal growth off the island translate into better game performance in Fiji's high-stakes returnee showdown? Chapters: 0:00 Intros 6:25 Angelina Reflects on Major Life Changes 9:00 Friend or Foe Game Begins 13:32 Angelina Discusses Strongest Alliances 15:54 Value of Survivor Prize Money 18:20 Strategy Toward Returning Winners 21:29 Navigating New Era Castmates 26:16 Thoughts on Mystery 49ers Revealed 29:32 Aubry’s Surprising Return Explained 33:38 Aubry's Changed Perspective on Survivor 36:22 Lessons Learned from Past Losses 37:55 Building Connections and Playing Differently 41:12 Aubry's Approach to New Players 46:16 Final Cast Impressions and Hopes Never miss a minute of RHAP's extensive Survivor coverage! LISTEN: Subscribe to the Survivor podcast feed WATCH:  Watch and subscribe to the podcast on YouTube SUPPORT:  Become a RHAP Patron for bonus content, access to Facebook and Discord groups plus more great perks!

Angelina Keeley & Aubry Bracco Survivor 50 Preseason Interviews Mike Bloom (@AMikeBloomType) is here to chat to the cast of Survivor 50! Join us to hear from your favorite returning Survivor players! Today, Mike Bloom starts a preseason deep dive into the Vatu tribe featuring returnees Angelina Keeley and Aubry Bracco. Angelina opens up about her major life changes since David vs. Goliath, while Aubry reflects on her evolution across her storied Survivor journey, setting the stage for a season full of big personalities, new alliances, and possible blindsides. Mike chats with Angelina about what it's like to be called back after seven years away from the game, including leaving behind a young family and a new business to take another shot at the title of Sole Survivor. Angelina breaks down her approach heading into the game, how being a mom and entrepreneur brings a new flavor to her gameplay, why her “BFF, friend, or foe” approach will guide her alliances, and how she handles being labeled “chaotic.” Aubry discusses her surprise at being invited back, what she's learned from her three previous seasons, and how she aims to play with more self-awareness, adaptability, and focus on one-on-one connections. Both women weigh in on their perceptions of fellow castaways, discussing new era strategists, obvious threats, and the push and pull between loyalty and gameplay. Angelina ranks her cast as BFF, friend, or foe in a candid alliances game, revealing beef, admiration, and strategic wariness, especially when it comes to winners and new era players. Aubry shares how being blindsided in Edge of Extinction changed her approach, and why she's focused on staying grounded and present this time around. Both discuss leaving behind kids, running businesses, and the “joyful warrior” mindset they hope to channel on the island. Each interview explores Survivor's evolving meta, including whether recent winners should be targeted, which returnees are most dangerous, and how pre-existing relationships will shape alliances. Funny moments include Angelina's dream “summer solstice” camp party and her family rooting for Ozzy right alongside her. As the anticipation for season 50 builds, Mike asks: Can Angelina or Aubry climb higher on the Survivor ladder, or will new threats and old friends stand in their way? How will personal growth off the island translate into better game performance in Fiji's high-stakes returnee showdown? Chapters: 0:00 Intros 6:25 Angelina Reflects on Major Life Changes 9:00 Friend or Foe Game Begins 13:32 Angelina Discusses Strongest Alliances 15:54 Value of Survivor Prize Money 18:20 Strategy Toward Returning Winners 21:29 Navigating New Era Castmates 26:16 Thoughts on Mystery 49ers Revealed 29:32 Aubry’s Surprising Return Explained 33:38 Aubry's Changed Perspective on Survivor 36:22 Lessons Learned from Past Losses 37:55 Building Connections and Playing Differently 41:12 Aubry's Approach to New Players 46:16 Final Cast Impressions and Hopes Never miss a minute of RHAP's extensive Survivor coverage! LISTEN: Subscribe to the Survivor podcast feed WATCH:  Watch and subscribe to the podcast on YouTube SUPPORT:  Become a RHAP Patron for bonus content, access to Facebook and Discord groups plus more great perks!

In this preseason interview, Survivor 48 winner Kyle Fraser sits down with host Sharon Tharp on location in Fiji ahead of Survivor 50 to break down his mindset returning to the game so soon after winning. Kyle opens up about why being a winner isn't his biggest concern, which players and unknowns worry him most, and how pre-existing relationships and groups could shape the early game. He also reflects on adjusting his strategy for a returning-player season, balancing loyalty with cutthroat gameplay, and what he wants to experience differently this time around on Survivor 50.

Survivor 45 winner Dee Valladares returns for Survivor 50 with confidence, clarity, and nothing to prove. In this preseason interview, Dee sits down with host Sharon Tharp on set in Fiji to break down how she's approaching the game as a returning winner — from managing her threat level to why she sees her perceived disadvantages as advantages. Dee reacts to the Survivor 50 cast, opens up about who she's vibing with (and who she isn't), and explains why personal connections matter more to her than early-game strategy. She also reflects on playing with old-era competitors for the first time, navigating pregame dynamics, and what she truly wants out of her Survivor 50 experience.

Survivor 50 Cila Tribe Preview Rob Cesternino (@RobCesternino) and Mike Bloom (@AMikeBloomType) are here to share their thoughts on the Survivor 50 Cila Tribe consisting of Christian Hubicki, Cirie Fields, Emily Flippen, Jenna Lewis-Dougherty, Joe Hunter, Ozzy Lusth, Rick Devens and Savannah Louie! Rob Cesternino and Mike Bloom preview the Cila Tribe of Survivor 50, analyzing player interviews, preseason strategy, and early alliance potential. Drawing from Mike's conversations in Fiji, Rob and Mike assess how returning players are preparing for the milestone season and how past reputations may shape early gameplay. The discussion begins with Christian Hubicki's “theory of threes” and his concept of “narrative warfare.” Rob and Mike debate whether Christian's analytical approach will translate into practical influence or make him an early target. They also consider how his likability and intelligence could impact his longevity. Attention then turns to Cirie Fields' evolving mindset. Rob and Mike examine her reflections on flexibility, managing relationships, and learning from recent seasons. They evaluate her chances of reaching another deep run and the obstacles she faces in a faster, high-pressure format. Rob and Mike analyze Emily Flippen's self-described growth, questioning whether her claims of insecurity mask a highly strategic and capable player. They explore how her social adaptability and reputation from Season 45 could shape her positioning. Jenna Lewis' return is framed as one of the tribe's most unpredictable elements. Rob and Mike highlight her preparation, candid assessments of fellow players, and deliberate use of targeted flattery as a social tool. The episode also explores Joe's social strengths, loyalty, and potential path to victory, alongside broader themes of old-school versus new-era dynamics. With detailed breakdowns of relationships, threat perception, and strategic outlooks, the podcast sets the stage for how the Cila Tribe may influence the opening phase of Survivor 50. Never miss a minute of RHAP's extensive Survivor coverage! LISTEN: Subscribe to the Survivor podcast feed WATCH:  Watch and subscribe to the podcast on YouTube SUPPORT:  Become a RHAP Patron for bonus content, access to Facebook and Discord groups plus more great perks!

Survivor 50 Cila Tribe Preview Rob Cesternino (@RobCesternino) and Mike Bloom (@AMikeBloomType) are here to share their thoughts on the Survivor 50 Cila Tribe consisting of Christian Hubicki, Cirie Fields, Emily Flippen, Jenna Lewis-Dougherty, Joe Hunter, Ozzy Lusth, Rick Devens and Savannah Louie! Rob Cesternino and Mike Bloom preview the Cila Tribe of Survivor 50, analyzing player interviews, preseason strategy, and early alliance potential. Drawing from Mike's conversations in Fiji, Rob and Mike assess how returning players are preparing for the milestone season and how past reputations may shape early gameplay. The discussion begins with Christian Hubicki's “theory of threes” and his concept of “narrative warfare.” Rob and Mike debate whether Christian's analytical approach will translate into practical influence or make him an early target. They also consider how his likability and intelligence could impact his longevity. Attention then turns to Cirie Fields' evolving mindset. Rob and Mike examine her reflections on flexibility, managing relationships, and learning from recent seasons. They evaluate her chances of reaching another deep run and the obstacles she faces in a faster, high-pressure format. Rob and Mike analyze Emily Flippen's self-described growth, questioning whether her claims of insecurity mask a highly strategic and capable player. They explore how her social adaptability and reputation from Season 45 could shape her positioning. Jenna Lewis' return is framed as one of the tribe's most unpredictable elements. Rob and Mike highlight her preparation, candid assessments of fellow players, and deliberate use of targeted flattery as a social tool. The episode also explores Joe's social strengths, loyalty, and potential path to victory, alongside broader themes of old-school versus new-era dynamics. With detailed breakdowns of relationships, threat perception, and strategic outlooks, the podcast sets the stage for how the Cila Tribe may influence the opening phase of Survivor 50. Never miss a minute of RHAP's extensive Survivor coverage! LISTEN: Subscribe to the Survivor podcast feed WATCH:  Watch and subscribe to the podcast on YouTube SUPPORT:  Become a RHAP Patron for bonus content, access to Facebook and Discord groups plus more great perks!

Bamgboshe Happy Hour – Special Edition is in session

After 20 years and four previous runs, Cirie Fields is returning for Survivor 50 with unfinished business. In this preseason interview, the Survivor legend sits down with host Sharon Tharp on set in Fiji to reflect on how experience, perspective, and longevity have reshaped her approach since her first season. Cirie opens up about loyalty, reading people before the game begins, and navigating pre-existing relationships. She also discusses managing her threat level and why recent winners could face bigger targets in Survivor 50: In the Hands of the Fans.

After more than a decade away, Benjamin "Coach" Wade is returning for Survivor 50 with a clear goal: to win. In this preseason interview, the Survivor legend sits down with host Sharon Tharp on set in Fiji to reflect on how time, family, and personal growth have reshaped his approach since his previous seasons. Coach opens up about legacy, redemption, and why returning now feels like the right moment to rewrite how he's remembered in the game. He also discusses adapting to the modern era, navigating familiar faces, and what it would mean to finally leave Survivor 50: In the Hands of the Fans as a champion.

Emily Flippen & Jenna Lewis-Dougherty Survivor 50 Preseason Interviews Mike Bloom (@AMikeBloomType) is here to chat to the cast of Survivor 50! Join us to hear from your favorite returning Survivor players! Survivor 50 preseason interviews are here, as Mike Bloom sits down with Emily Flippen and Jenna Lewis Dougherty to uncover what's driving some of the season's most intriguing castaways. In this deep-dive episode, Survivor 45 standout Emily returns to Fiji after publicly swearing off a comeback, while OG icon Jenna Lewis makes her fierce return to the game after more than two decades away. Hear firsthand how these two women—each with unique Survivor journeys—plan to navigate the complex social web and shifting strategies of the milestone 50th season. The episode starts with Emily Flippen explaining how she surprised even herself by returning for Survivor 50, when she'd once insisted she was done with the game. Emily opens up about her mindset shift, wanting to control her narrative after feeling her “softer” story arc in season 45 left an incomplete lesson. She discusses the pressure of fan expectations, overcoming personal insecurities, and why she's aiming for a “Goldilocks zone” between directness and tact. Jenna Lewis Dougherty, meanwhile, reveals how the game has—and hasn't—changed since Borneo and All-Stars, describing her plan to weaponize being underestimated and use “conjecture flattery” as a tool. Mike explores their thoughts on the new era, their targeted alliances, and what it takes for an old-school or new-school player to thrive among legends and wildcards. Emily reflects on her evolution, admitting she didn't love the lesson viewers took from her arc on Survivor 45, and wants to prove you don't have to change your core to succeed. Jenna outlines her “mommy complex” strategy, aiming to bond with younger players and then outmaneuver them at critical moments. Both women assess their competition, highlighting who they see as friends or threats—with hilarious, candid takes on castmates like Coach, Aubry, Ozzy, and D. Emily weighs the impact of social media buzz and fan perception, while Jenna describes using her “real life” negotiation skills in the cutthroat Survivor world. Strategies for handling returning players, “winner killers,” alliance flips, and being underestimated are front and center. As the cast prepares to hit the beach, questions loom: Can Emily strike the right balance between bluntness and gameplay finesse? Will Jenna's old-school instincts keep her safe among the sharks—or lead to her early downfall? Who will take control in a game where every move is scrutinized? Chapters: 0:00 Intros 6:07 Emily Reflects On Survivor Return 12:07 Friend Or Foe Game Begins 18:25 Emily Assesses Her Competition 26:36 Jenna Lewis Dougherty's Big Comeback 32:29 Adapting To Modern Survivor Game 38:20 Strategic Prep And Challenge Training 44:10 Forming Alliances And Manipulation 50:15 Targeting Winners And Forming Bonds 56:05 Dream Loved One Choices Revealed Never miss a minute of RHAP's extensive Survivor coverage! LISTEN: Subscribe to the Survivor podcast feed WATCH:  Watch and subscribe to the podcast on YouTube SUPPORT:  Become a RHAP Patron for bonus content, access to Facebook and Discord groups plus more great perks!

Emily Flippen & Jenna Lewis-Dougherty Survivor 50 Preseason Interviews Mike Bloom (@AMikeBloomType) is here to chat to the cast of Survivor 50! Join us to hear from your favorite returning Survivor players! Survivor 50 preseason interviews are here, as Mike Bloom sits down with Emily Flippen and Jenna Lewis Dougherty to uncover what's driving some of the season's most intriguing castaways. In this deep-dive episode, Survivor 45 standout Emily returns to Fiji after publicly swearing off a comeback, while OG icon Jenna Lewis makes her fierce return to the game after more than two decades away. Hear firsthand how these two women—each with unique Survivor journeys—plan to navigate the complex social web and shifting strategies of the milestone 50th season. The episode starts with Emily Flippen explaining how she surprised even herself by returning for Survivor 50, when she'd once insisted she was done with the game. Emily opens up about her mindset shift, wanting to control her narrative after feeling her “softer” story arc in season 45 left an incomplete lesson. She discusses the pressure of fan expectations, overcoming personal insecurities, and why she's aiming for a “Goldilocks zone” between directness and tact. Jenna Lewis Dougherty, meanwhile, reveals how the game has—and hasn't—changed since Borneo and All-Stars, describing her plan to weaponize being underestimated and use “conjecture flattery” as a tool. Mike explores their thoughts on the new era, their targeted alliances, and what it takes for an old-school or new-school player to thrive among legends and wildcards. Emily reflects on her evolution, admitting she didn't love the lesson viewers took from her arc on Survivor 45, and wants to prove you don't have to change your core to succeed. Jenna outlines her “mommy complex” strategy, aiming to bond with younger players and then outmaneuver them at critical moments. Both women assess their competition, highlighting who they see as friends or threats—with hilarious, candid takes on castmates like Coach, Aubry, Ozzy, and D. Emily weighs the impact of social media buzz and fan perception, while Jenna describes using her “real life” negotiation skills in the cutthroat Survivor world. Strategies for handling returning players, “winner killers,” alliance flips, and being underestimated are front and center. As the cast prepares to hit the beach, questions loom: Can Emily strike the right balance between bluntness and gameplay finesse? Will Jenna's old-school instincts keep her safe among the sharks—or lead to her early downfall? Who will take control in a game where every move is scrutinized? Chapters: 0:00 Intros 6:07 Emily Reflects On Survivor Return 12:07 Friend Or Foe Game Begins 18:25 Emily Assesses Her Competition 26:36 Jenna Lewis Dougherty's Big Comeback 32:29 Adapting To Modern Survivor Game 38:20 Strategic Prep And Challenge Training 44:10 Forming Alliances And Manipulation 50:15 Targeting Winners And Forming Bonds 56:05 Dream Loved One Choices Revealed Never miss a minute of RHAP's extensive Survivor coverage! LISTEN: Subscribe to the Survivor podcast feed WATCH:  Watch and subscribe to the podcast on YouTube SUPPORT:  Become a RHAP Patron for bonus content, access to Facebook and Discord groups plus more great perks!

Q Burdette is back for Survivor 50 — and he knows exactly what went wrong last time. In this preseason interview, the Survivor 46 breakout sits down with host Sharon Tharp on set in Fiji to reflect on how moving too fast and embracing chaos cost him his shot at the end — and why he plans to start Survivor 50 by slowing down. Q opens up about the reputation he brings into the game, the fine line between unpredictability and control, and why boredom could be the moment everything flips. With more experience, a new mindset, and no shortage of confidence, Q explains how he plans to adapt his game for Survivor 50: In the Hands of the Fans — and what might happen if patience runs out.

Angelina Keeley is back for Survivor 50 — and she's playing a smarter game this time. In this preseason interview, the Survivor: David vs. Goliath finalist sits down with host Sharon Tharp on set in Fiji to reflect on how life, motherhood, and experience have reshaped her approach since her first season. Angelina opens up about learning from a zero-vote finish, dialing back theatrics, and balancing her big personality with a more controlled, intentional strategy. She also discusses navigating pre-existing relationships, the potential impact of her connection to Mike White, and how ambition and perception could shape the game in Survivor 50: In the Hands of the Fans.

Mike White is back for Survivor 50 — and he's ready to police the vibe. In this preseason interview from Fiji, the Survivor: David vs. Goliath finalist and The White Lotus creator sits down with host Sharon Tharp to discuss why the timing felt right to return, how stepping away from his day job helped reset his mindset, and why he's drawn to playing a looser, more mischievous game this time around. More than two decades into Survivor's legacy, Mike reflects on competing alongside old school and new school players, navigating a cast full of big personalities and past winners, and why creating the right energy on the island matters just as much as strategy as the milestone season approaches.

Ethan Roberts, leader of YWAM Suva, Fiji sits down to unpack the big questions surrounding the Bible - "Is it reliable? Why the Bible stands out from other religious texts? Why should I read it."YWAM Suva Website - https://www.ywamsuva.com/ Find out more about YWAM Furnace below

Hey guys and welcome back!!!Today we are chatting with ICON Maura Higgins from The Traitors!! Maura is here to chat about this season as I ask her all the JUICY questions! Maura talks about her showmance with Rob Rausch from Love Island and if they really knew each other before Traitors, what she thinks about him now and what she thinks about the internet shipping them. Maura shares she was sad to miss AfterSun last summer in Fiji because she was filming for #TheTraitors so we have to talk about all that and debrief since so many people were concerned! We love watching Maura host AfterSun on Love Island. Maura also chats the round table fights with Michael Rappaport and Ron Funches! Maura talks about her fashion and how she styled her outfits this season! Maura also teases what is to come this season and she is currently planning a very over the top, fabulous, extra outfit for the reunion. And if you come her her, she says she will come for you right back!Follow Maura Higgins:https://www.instagram.com/maurahiggins/Connect with me on social:Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/zacharyrealityTiktok: https://www.tiktok.com/@zacharyrealityTwitter: https://twitter.com/zacharyrealityYoutube: https://www.youtube.com/@ZacharyReality

Whether you’re a seasoned team member or preparing for your first trip, short-term mission trips have the potential to make a meaningful global impact. In this conversation, we’ll highlight five key principles that help ensure our efforts contribute to lasting, sustainable change in the communities we serve.

OligoScans prove population-wide near-universal aluminum toxicity and are now being used to quantify the effects of silica treatment. Fiji water works, but has toxins. A new silica compound is better.Support the show

Send us a textHallmark January movies are usually where joy goes to die, but  Lost in Paradise just changed the game. Hallmark stranded Lacey Chabert and Ian Harding on a tropical island in Fiji, and somehow, it resulted in the best banter I've heard in years!In this review, we're breaking down why this is Hallmark's perfect apology for years of disappointing January releases (looking at you, Love on the Right Course). We discuss the undeniable chemistry between Lacey and Ian, the surprisingly smart character writing for Sofia, and the most ridiculous "survival" details that I just couldn't stop laughing at.From the "Hallmark-style" plane crash to the pristine island fashion, find out why this movie is the perfect escape—and why we need Ian Harding in every Hallmark movie from now on.

Happy 2026 from the couch! As we jump back into routine, we reflect on this past Christmas break (which was awesome for us Randos). We also discuss if Christmas was more fun as kids or as parents, what we wish we would've paid more attention to in school, and play a little sliding scale game about rudeness (The Victory Couch is hosted by Rick and Julie Rando).Show notes: Connect with us on Instagram @thevictorycouch, Facebook,victorycouchpodcast@gmail.com, or www.thevictorycouch.comWant a new Victory Couch sticker for your water bottle, laptop, guitar case, etc.? Send us a message and we'll mail you one.SUBSCRIBE to The Victory Couch e-mail list by visitinghttps://www.thevictorycouch.com/ and click SUBSCRIBE at the top of your screen.https://www.americangirl.com/collections/isabel-and-nickiDuring Christmas break, which moments were you the happiest?It wasn't Fiji water https://www.fijiwater.com/Zootopia 2 https://www.imdb.com/title/tt26443597/?ref_=ext_shr_lnkMountain City Center for the Arts https://www.mymcca.com/Is it more fun to be a child on Christmas or a parent on Christmas?Which subject in school do you wish you paid more attention to and why?Sliding scale for rude acts (Julie & Rick's opinions)Couch crumbs: ants, putting away Christmas décor Prop your feet up: fantasy football winner, how nice break was together

Happy New Year! You may have noticed that in 2025 we had moved toward YouTube as our primary podcasting platform. As we'll explain in the next State of Latent Space post, we'll be doubling down on Substack again and improving the experience for the over 100,000 of you who look out for our emails and website updates!We first mentioned Artificial Analysis in 2024, when it was still a side project in a Sydney basement. They then were one of the few Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross' AIGrant companies to raise a full seed round from them and have now become the independent gold standard for AI benchmarking—trusted by developers, enterprises, and every major lab to navigate the exploding landscape of models, providers, and capabilities.We have chatted with both Clementine Fourrier of HuggingFace's OpenLLM Leaderboard and (the freshly valued at $1.7B) Anastasios Angelopoulos of LMArena on their approaches to LLM evals and trendspotting, but Artificial Analysis have staked out an enduring and important place in the toolkit of the modern AI Engineer by doing the best job of independently running the most comprehensive set of evals across the widest range of open and closed models, and charting their progress for broad industry analyst use.George Cameron and Micah-Hill Smith have spent two years building Artificial Analysis into the platform that answers the questions no one else will: Which model is actually best for your use case? What are the real speed-cost trade-offs? And how open is “open” really?We discuss:* The origin story: built as a side project in 2023 while Micah was building a legal AI assistant, launched publicly in January 2024, and went viral after Swyx's retweet* Why they run evals themselves: labs prompt models differently, cherry-pick chain-of-thought examples (Google Gemini 1.0 Ultra used 32-shot prompts to beat GPT-4 on MMLU), and self-report inflated numbers* The mystery shopper policy: they register accounts not on their own domain and run intelligence + performance benchmarks incognito to prevent labs from serving different models on private endpoints* How they make money: enterprise benchmarking insights subscription (standardized reports on model deployment, serverless vs. managed vs. leasing chips) and private custom benchmarking for AI companies (no one pays to be on the public leaderboard)* The Intelligence Index (V3): synthesizes 10 eval datasets (MMLU, GPQA, agentic benchmarks, long-context reasoning) into a single score, with 95% confidence intervals via repeated runs* Omissions Index (hallucination rate): scores models from -100 to +100 (penalizing incorrect answers, rewarding ”I don't know”), and Claude models lead with the lowest hallucination rates despite not always being the smartest* GDP Val AA: their version of OpenAI's GDP-bench (44 white-collar tasks with spreadsheets, PDFs, PowerPoints), run through their Stirrup agent harness (up to 100 turns, code execution, web search, file system), graded by Gemini 3 Pro as an LLM judge (tested extensively, no self-preference bias)* The Openness Index: scores models 0-18 on transparency of pre-training data, post-training data, methodology, training code, and licensing (AI2 OLMo 2 leads, followed by Nous Hermes and NVIDIA Nemotron)* The smiling curve of AI costs: GPT-4-level intelligence is 100-1000x cheaper than at launch (thanks to smaller models like Amazon Nova), but frontier reasoning models in agentic workflows cost more than ever (sparsity, long context, multi-turn agents)* Why sparsity might go way lower than 5%: GPT-4.5 is ~5% active, Gemini models might be ~3%, and Omissions Index accuracy correlates with total parameters (not active), suggesting massive sparse models are the future* Token efficiency vs. turn efficiency: GPT-5 costs more per token but solves Tau-bench in fewer turns (cheaper overall), and models are getting better at using more tokens only when needed (5.1 Codex has tighter token distributions)* V4 of the Intelligence Index coming soon: adding GDP Val AA, Critical Point, hallucination rate, and dropping some saturated benchmarks (human-eval-style coding is now trivial for small models)Links to Artificial Analysis* Website: https://artificialanalysis.ai* George Cameron on X: https://x.com/georgecameron* Micah-Hill Smith on X: https://x.com/micahhsmithFull Episode on YouTubeTimestamps* 00:00 Introduction: Full Circle Moment and Artificial Analysis Origins* 01:19 Business Model: Independence and Revenue Streams* 04:33 Origin Story: From Legal AI to Benchmarking Need* 16:22 AI Grant and Moving to San Francisco* 19:21 Intelligence Index Evolution: From V1 to V3* 11:47 Benchmarking Challenges: Variance, Contamination, and Methodology* 13:52 Mystery Shopper Policy and Maintaining Independence* 28:01 New Benchmarks: Omissions Index for Hallucination Detection* 33:36 Critical Point: Hard Physics Problems and Research-Level Reasoning* 23:01 GDP Val AA: Agentic Benchmark for Real Work Tasks* 50:19 Stirrup Agent Harness: Open Source Agentic Framework* 52:43 Openness Index: Measuring Model Transparency Beyond Licenses* 58:25 The Smiling Curve: Cost Falling While Spend Rising* 1:02:32 Hardware Efficiency: Blackwell Gains and Sparsity Limits* 1:06:23 Reasoning Models and Token Efficiency: The Spectrum Emerges* 1:11:00 Multimodal Benchmarking: Image, Video, and Speech Arenas* 1:15:05 Looking Ahead: Intelligence Index V4 and Future Directions* 1:16:50 Closing: The Insatiable Demand for IntelligenceTranscriptMicah [00:00:06]: This is kind of a full circle moment for us in a way, because the first time artificial analysis got mentioned on a podcast was you and Alessio on Latent Space. Amazing.swyx [00:00:17]: Which was January 2024. I don't even remember doing that, but yeah, it was very influential to me. Yeah, I'm looking at AI News for Jan 17, or Jan 16, 2024. I said, this gem of a models and host comparison site was just launched. And then I put in a few screenshots, and I said, it's an independent third party. It clearly outlines the quality versus throughput trade-off, and it breaks out by model and hosting provider. I did give you s**t for missing fireworks, and how do you have a model benchmarking thing without fireworks? But you had together, you had perplexity, and I think we just started chatting there. Welcome, George and Micah, to Latent Space. I've been following your progress. Congrats on... It's been an amazing year. You guys have really come together to be the presumptive new gardener of AI, right? Which is something that...George [00:01:09]: Yeah, but you can't pay us for better results.swyx [00:01:12]: Yes, exactly.George [00:01:13]: Very important.Micah [00:01:14]: Start off with a spicy take.swyx [00:01:18]: Okay, how do I pay you?Micah [00:01:20]: Let's get right into that.swyx [00:01:21]: How do you make money?Micah [00:01:24]: Well, very happy to talk about that. So it's been a big journey the last couple of years. Artificial analysis is going to be two years old in January 2026. Which is pretty soon now. We first run the website for free, obviously, and give away a ton of data to help developers and companies navigate AI and make decisions about models, providers, technologies across the AI stack for building stuff. We're very committed to doing that and tend to keep doing that. We have, along the way, built a business that is working out pretty sustainably. We've got just over 20 people now and two main customer groups. So we want to be... We want to be who enterprise look to for data and insights on AI, so we want to help them with their decisions about models and technologies for building stuff. And then on the other side, we do private benchmarking for companies throughout the AI stack who build AI stuff. So no one pays to be on the website. We've been very clear about that from the very start because there's no use doing what we do unless it's independent AI benchmarking. Yeah. But turns out a bunch of our stuff can be pretty useful to companies building AI stuff.swyx [00:02:38]: And is it like, I am a Fortune 500, I need advisors on objective analysis, and I call you guys and you pull up a custom report for me, you come into my office and give me a workshop? What kind of engagement is that?George [00:02:53]: So we have a benchmarking and insight subscription, which looks like standardized reports that cover key topics or key challenges enterprises face when looking to understand AI and choose between all the technologies. And so, for instance, one of the report is a model deployment report, how to think about choosing between serverless inference, managed deployment solutions, or leasing chips. And running inference yourself is an example kind of decision that big enterprises face, and it's hard to reason through, like this AI stuff is really new to everybody. And so we try and help with our reports and insight subscription. Companies navigate that. We also do custom private benchmarking. And so that's very different from the public benchmarking that we publicize, and there's no commercial model around that. For private benchmarking, we'll at times create benchmarks, run benchmarks to specs that enterprises want. And we'll also do that sometimes for AI companies who have built things, and we help them understand what they've built with private benchmarking. Yeah. So that's a piece mainly that we've developed through trying to support everybody publicly with our public benchmarks. Yeah.swyx [00:04:09]: Let's talk about TechStack behind that. But okay, I'm going to rewind all the way to when you guys started this project. You were all the way in Sydney? Yeah. Well, Sydney, Australia for me.Micah [00:04:19]: George was an SF, but he's Australian, but he moved here already. Yeah.swyx [00:04:22]: And I remember I had the Zoom call with you. What was the impetus for starting artificial analysis in the first place? You know, you started with public benchmarks. And so let's start there. We'll go to the private benchmark. Yeah.George [00:04:33]: Why don't we even go back a little bit to like why we, you know, thought that it was needed? Yeah.Micah [00:04:40]: The story kind of begins like in 2022, 2023, like both George and I have been into AI stuff for quite a while. In 2023 specifically, I was trying to build a legal AI research assistant. So it actually worked pretty well for its era, I would say. Yeah. Yeah. So I was finding that the more you go into building something using LLMs, the more each bit of what you're doing ends up being a benchmarking problem. So had like this multistage algorithm thing, trying to figure out what the minimum viable model for each bit was, trying to optimize every bit of it as you build that out, right? Like you're trying to think about accuracy, a bunch of other metrics and performance and cost. And mostly just no one was doing anything to independently evaluate all the models. And certainly not to look at the trade-offs for speed and cost. So we basically set out just to build a thing that developers could look at to see the trade-offs between all of those things measured independently across all the models and providers. Honestly, it was probably meant to be a side project when we first started doing it.swyx [00:05:49]: Like we didn't like get together and say like, Hey, like we're going to stop working on all this stuff. I'm like, this is going to be our main thing. When I first called you, I think you hadn't decided on starting a company yet.Micah [00:05:58]: That's actually true. I don't even think we'd pause like, like George had an acquittance job. I didn't quit working on my legal AI thing. Like it was genuinely a side project.George [00:06:05]: We built it because we needed it as people building in the space and thought, Oh, other people might find it useful too. So we'll buy domain and link it to the Vercel deployment that we had and tweet about it. And, but very quickly it started getting attention. Thank you, Swyx for, I think doing an initial retweet and spotlighting it there. This project that we released. And then very quickly though, it was useful to others, but very quickly it became more useful as the number of models released accelerated. We had Mixtrel 8x7B and it was a key. That's a fun one. Yeah. Like a open source model that really changed the landscape and opened up people's eyes to other serverless inference providers and thinking about speed, thinking about cost. And so that was a key. And so it became more useful quite quickly. Yeah.swyx [00:07:02]: What I love talking to people like you who sit across the ecosystem is, well, I have theories about what people want, but you have data and that's obviously more relevant. But I want to stay on the origin story a little bit more. When you started out, I would say, I think the status quo at the time was every paper would come out and they would report their numbers versus competitor numbers. And that's basically it. And I remember I did the legwork. I think everyone has some knowledge. I think there's some version of Excel sheet or a Google sheet where you just like copy and paste the numbers from every paper and just post it up there. And then sometimes they don't line up because they're independently run. And so your numbers are going to look better than... Your reproductions of other people's numbers are going to look worse because you don't hold their models correctly or whatever the excuse is. I think then Stanford Helm, Percy Liang's project would also have some of these numbers. And I don't know if there's any other source that you can cite. The way that if I were to start artificial analysis at the same time you guys started, I would have used the Luther AI's eval framework harness. Yup.Micah [00:08:06]: Yup. That was some cool stuff. At the end of the day, running these evals, it's like if it's a simple Q&A eval, all you're doing is asking a list of questions and checking if the answers are right, which shouldn't be that crazy. But it turns out there are an enormous number of things that you've got control for. And I mean, back when we started the website. Yeah. Yeah. Like one of the reasons why we realized that we had to run the evals ourselves and couldn't just take rules from the labs was just that they would all prompt the models differently. And when you're competing over a few points, then you can pretty easily get- You can put the answer into the model. Yeah. That in the extreme. And like you get crazy cases like back when I'm Googled a Gemini 1.0 Ultra and needed a number that would say it was better than GPT-4 and like constructed, I think never published like chain of thought examples. 32 of them in every topic in MLU to run it, to get the score, like there are so many things that you- They never shipped Ultra, right? That's the one that never made it up. Not widely. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I'm sure it existed, but yeah. So we were pretty sure that we needed to run them ourselves and just run them in the same way across all the models. Yeah. And we were, we also did certain from the start that you couldn't look at those in isolation. You needed to look at them alongside the cost and performance stuff. Yeah.swyx [00:09:24]: Okay. A couple of technical questions. I mean, so obviously I also thought about this and I didn't do it because of cost. Yep. Did you not worry about costs? Were you funded already? Clearly not, but you know. No. Well, we definitely weren't at the start.Micah [00:09:36]: So like, I mean, we're paying for it personally at the start. There's a lot of money. Well, the numbers weren't nearly as bad a couple of years ago. So we certainly incurred some costs, but we were probably in the order of like hundreds of dollars of spend across all the benchmarking that we were doing. Yeah. So nothing. Yeah. It was like kind of fine. Yeah. Yeah. These days that's gone up an enormous amount for a bunch of reasons that we can talk about. But yeah, it wasn't that bad because you can also remember that like the number of models we were dealing with was hardly any and the complexity of the stuff that we wanted to do to evaluate them was a lot less. Like we were just asking some Q&A type questions and then one specific thing was for a lot of evals initially, we were just like sampling an answer. You know, like, what's the answer for this? Like, we didn't want to go into the answer directly without letting the models think. We weren't even doing chain of thought stuff initially. And that was the most useful way to get some results initially. Yeah.swyx [00:10:33]: And so for people who haven't done this work, literally parsing the responses is a whole thing, right? Like because sometimes the models, the models can answer any way they feel fit and sometimes they actually do have the right answer, but they just returned the wrong format and they will get a zero for that unless you work it into your parser. And that involves more work. And so, I mean, but there's an open question whether you should give it points for not following your instructions on the format.Micah [00:11:00]: It depends what you're looking at, right? Because you can, if you're trying to see whether or not it can solve a particular type of reasoning problem, and you don't want to test it on its ability to do answer formatting at the same time, then you might want to use an LLM as answer extractor approach to make sure that you get the answer out no matter how unanswered. But these days, it's mostly less of a problem. Like, if you instruct a model and give it examples of what the answers should look like, it can get the answers in your format, and then you can do, like, a simple regex.swyx [00:11:28]: Yeah, yeah. And then there's other questions around, I guess, sometimes if you have a multiple choice question, sometimes there's a bias towards the first answer, so you have to randomize the responses. All these nuances, like, once you dig into benchmarks, you're like, I don't know how anyone believes the numbers on all these things. It's so dark magic.Micah [00:11:47]: You've also got, like… You've got, like, the different degrees of variance in different benchmarks, right? Yeah. So, if you run four-question multi-choice on a modern reasoning model at the temperatures suggested by the labs for their own models, the variance that you can see on a four-question multi-choice eval is pretty enormous if you only do a single run of it and it has a small number of questions, especially. So, like, one of the things that we do is run an enormous number of all of our evals when we're developing new ones and doing upgrades to our intelligence index to bring in new things. Yeah. So, that we can dial in the right number of repeats so that we can get to the 95% confidence intervals that we're comfortable with so that when we pull that together, we can be confident in intelligence index to at least as tight as, like, a plus or minus one at a 95% confidence. Yeah.swyx [00:12:32]: And, again, that just adds a straight multiple to the cost. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah.George [00:12:37]: So, that's one of many reasons that cost has gone up a lot more than linearly over the last couple of years. We report a cost to run the artificial analysis. We report a cost to run the artificial analysis intelligence index on our website, and currently that's assuming one repeat in terms of how we report it because we want to reflect a bit about the weighting of the index. But our cost is actually a lot higher than what we report there because of the repeats.swyx [00:13:03]: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And probably this is true, but just checking, you don't have any special deals with the labs. They don't discount it. You just pay out of pocket or out of your sort of customer funds. Oh, there is a mix. So, the issue is that sometimes they may give you a special end point, which is… Ah, 100%.Micah [00:13:21]: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly. So, we laser focus, like, on everything we do on having the best independent metrics and making sure that no one can manipulate them in any way. There are quite a lot of processes we've developed over the last couple of years to make that true for, like, the one you bring up, like, right here of the fact that if we're working with a lab, if they're giving us a private endpoint to evaluate a model, that it is totally possible. That what's sitting behind that black box is not the same as they serve on a public endpoint. We're very aware of that. We have what we call a mystery shopper policy. And so, and we're totally transparent with all the labs we work with about this, that we will register accounts not on our own domain and run both intelligence evals and performance benchmarks… Yeah, that's the job. …without them being able to identify it. And no one's ever had a problem with that. Because, like, a thing that turns out to actually be quite a good… …good factor in the industry is that they all want to believe that none of their competitors could manipulate what we're doing either.swyx [00:14:23]: That's true. I never thought about that. I've been in the database data industry prior, and there's a lot of shenanigans around benchmarking, right? So I'm just kind of going through the mental laundry list. Did I miss anything else in this category of shenanigans? Oh, potential shenanigans.Micah [00:14:36]: I mean, okay, the biggest one, like, that I'll bring up, like, is more of a conceptual one, actually, than, like, direct shenanigans. It's that the things that get measured become things that get targeted by labs that they're trying to build, right? Exactly. So that doesn't mean anything that we should really call shenanigans. Like, I'm not talking about training on test set. But if you know that you're going to be great at another particular thing, if you're a researcher, there are a whole bunch of things that you can do to try to get better at that thing that preferably are going to be helpful for a wide range of how actual users want to use the thing that you're building. But will not necessarily work. Will not necessarily do that. So, for instance, the models are exceptional now at answering competition maths problems. There is some relevance of that type of reasoning, that type of work, to, like, how we might use modern coding agents and stuff. But it's clearly not one for one. So the thing that we have to be aware of is that once an eval becomes the thing that everyone's looking at, scores can get better on it without there being a reflection of overall generalized intelligence of these models. Getting better. That has been true for the last couple of years. It'll be true for the next couple of years. There's no silver bullet to defeat that other than building new stuff to stay relevant and measure the capabilities that matter most to real users. Yeah.swyx [00:15:58]: And we'll cover some of the new stuff that you guys are building as well, which is cool. Like, you used to just run other people's evals, but now you're coming up with your own. And I think, obviously, that is a necessary path once you're at the frontier. You've exhausted all the existing evals. I think the next point in history that I have for you is AI Grant that you guys decided to join and move here. What was it like? I think you were in, like, batch two? Batch four. Batch four. Okay.Micah [00:16:26]: I mean, it was great. Nat and Daniel are obviously great. And it's a really cool group of companies that we were in AI Grant alongside. It was really great to get Nat and Daniel on board. Obviously, they've done a whole lot of great work in the space with a lot of leading companies and were extremely aligned. With the mission of what we were trying to do. Like, we're not quite typical of, like, a lot of the other AI startups that they've invested in.swyx [00:16:53]: And they were very much here for the mission of what we want to do. Did they say any advice that really affected you in some way or, like, were one of the events very impactful? That's an interesting question.Micah [00:17:03]: I mean, I remember fondly a bunch of the speakers who came and did fireside chats at AI Grant.swyx [00:17:09]: Which is also, like, a crazy list. Yeah.George [00:17:11]: Oh, totally. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There was something about, you know, speaking to Nat and Daniel about the challenges of working through a startup and just working through the questions that don't have, like, clear answers and how to work through those kind of methodically and just, like, work through the hard decisions. And they've been great mentors to us as we've built artificial analysis. Another benefit for us was that other companies in the batch and other companies in AI Grant are pushing the capabilities. Yeah. And I think that's a big part of what AI can do at this time. And so being in contact with them, making sure that artificial analysis is useful to them has been fantastic for supporting us in working out how should we build out artificial analysis to continue to being useful to those, like, you know, building on AI.swyx [00:17:59]: I think to some extent, I'm mixed opinion on that one because to some extent, your target audience is not people in AI Grants who are obviously at the frontier. Yeah. Do you disagree?Micah [00:18:09]: To some extent. To some extent. But then, so a lot of what the AI Grant companies are doing is taking capabilities coming out of the labs and trying to push the limits of what they can do across the entire stack for building great applications, which actually makes some of them pretty archetypical power users of artificial analysis. Some of the people with the strongest opinions about what we're doing well and what we're not doing well and what they want to see next from us. Yeah. Yeah. Because when you're building any kind of AI application now, chances are you're using a whole bunch of different models. You're maybe switching reasonably frequently for different models and different parts of your application to optimize what you're able to do with them at an accuracy level and to get better speed and cost characteristics. So for many of them, no, they're like not commercial customers of ours, like we don't charge for all our data on the website. Yeah. They are absolutely some of our power users.swyx [00:19:07]: So let's talk about just the evals as well. So you start out from the general like MMU and GPQA stuff. What's next? How do you sort of build up to the overall index? What was in V1 and how did you evolve it? Okay.Micah [00:19:22]: So first, just like background, like we're talking about the artificial analysis intelligence index, which is our synthesis metric that we pulled together currently from 10 different eval data sets to give what? We're pretty much the same as that. Pretty confident is the best single number to look at for how smart the models are. Obviously, it doesn't tell the whole story. That's why we published the whole website of all the charts to dive into every part of it and look at the trade-offs. But best single number. So right now, it's got a bunch of Q&A type data sets that have been very important to the industry, like a couple that you just mentioned. It's also got a couple of agentic data sets. It's got our own long context reasoning data set and some other use case focused stuff. As time goes on. The things that we're most interested in that are going to be important to the capabilities that are becoming more important for AI, what developers are caring about, are going to be first around agentic capabilities. So surprise, surprise. We're all loving our coding agents and how the model is going to perform like that and then do similar things for different types of work are really important to us. The linking to use cases to economically valuable use cases are extremely important to us. And then we've got some of the. Yeah. These things that the models still struggle with, like working really well over long contexts that are not going to go away as specific capabilities and use cases that we need to keep evaluating.swyx [00:20:46]: But I guess one thing I was driving was like the V1 versus the V2 and how bad it was over time.Micah [00:20:53]: Like how we've changed the index to where we are.swyx [00:20:55]: And I think that reflects on the change in the industry. Right. So that's a nice way to tell that story.Micah [00:21:00]: Well, V1 would be completely saturated right now. Almost every model coming out because doing things like writing the Python functions and human evil is now pretty trivial. It's easy to forget, actually, I think how much progress has been made in the last two years. Like we obviously play the game constantly of like the today's version versus last week's version and the week before and all of the small changes in the horse race between the current frontier and who has the best like smaller than 10B model like right now this week. Right. And that's very important to a lot of developers and people and especially in this particular city of San Francisco. But when you zoom out a couple of years ago, literally most of what we were doing to evaluate the models then would all be 100% solved by even pretty small models today. And that's been one of the key things, by the way, that's driven down the cost of intelligence at every tier of intelligence. We can talk about more in a bit. So V1, V2, V3, we made things harder. We covered a wider range of use cases. And we tried to get closer to things developers care about as opposed to like just the Q&A type stuff that MMLU and GPQA represented. Yeah.swyx [00:22:12]: I don't know if you have anything to add there. Or we could just go right into showing people the benchmark and like looking around and asking questions about it. Yeah.Micah [00:22:21]: Let's do it. Okay. This would be a pretty good way to chat about a few of the new things we've launched recently. Yeah.George [00:22:26]: And I think a little bit about the direction that we want to take it. And we want to push benchmarks. Currently, the intelligence index and evals focus a lot on kind of raw intelligence. But we kind of want to diversify how we think about intelligence. And we can talk about it. But kind of new evals that we've kind of built and partnered on focus on topics like hallucination. And we've got a lot of topics that I think are not covered by the current eval set that should be. And so we want to bring that forth. But before we get into that.swyx [00:23:01]: And so for listeners, just as a timestamp, right now, number one is Gemini 3 Pro High. Then followed by Cloud Opus at 70. Just 5.1 high. You don't have 5.2 yet. And Kimi K2 Thinking. Wow. Still hanging in there. So those are the top four. That will date this podcast quickly. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I love it. I love it. No, no. 100%. Look back this time next year and go, how cute. Yep.George [00:23:25]: Totally. A quick view of that is, okay, there's a lot. I love it. I love this chart. Yeah.Micah [00:23:30]: This is such a favorite, right? Yeah. And almost every talk that George or I give at conferences and stuff, we always put this one up first to just talk about situating where we are in this moment in history. This, I think, is the visual version of what I was saying before about the zooming out and remembering how much progress there's been. If we go back to just over a year ago, before 01, before Cloud Sonnet 3.5, we didn't have reasoning models or coding agents as a thing. And the game was very, very different. If we go back even a little bit before then, we're in the era where, when you look at this chart, open AI was untouchable for well over a year. And, I mean, you would remember that time period well of there being very open questions about whether or not AI was going to be competitive, like full stop, whether or not open AI would just run away with it, whether we would have a few frontier labs and no one else would really be able to do anything other than consume their APIs. I am quite happy overall that the world that we have ended up in is one where... Multi-model. Absolutely. And strictly more competitive every quarter over the last few years. Yeah. This year has been insane. Yeah.George [00:24:42]: You can see it. This chart with everything added is hard to read currently. There's so many dots on it, but I think it reflects a little bit what we felt, like how crazy it's been.swyx [00:24:54]: Why 14 as the default? Is that a manual choice? Because you've got service now in there that are less traditional names. Yeah.George [00:25:01]: It's models that we're kind of highlighting by default in our charts, in our intelligence index. Okay.swyx [00:25:07]: You just have a manually curated list of stuff.George [00:25:10]: Yeah, that's right. But something that I actually don't think every artificial analysis user knows is that you can customize our charts and choose what models are highlighted. Yeah. And so if we take off a few names, it gets a little easier to read.swyx [00:25:25]: Yeah, yeah. A little easier to read. Totally. Yeah. But I love that you can see the all one jump. Look at that. September 2024. And the DeepSeek jump. Yeah.George [00:25:34]: Which got close to OpenAI's leadership. They were so close. I think, yeah, we remember that moment. Around this time last year, actually.Micah [00:25:44]: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I agree. Yeah, well, a couple of weeks. It was Boxing Day in New Zealand when DeepSeek v3 came out. And we'd been tracking DeepSeek and a bunch of the other global players that were less known over the second half of 2024 and had run evals on the earlier ones and stuff. I very distinctly remember Boxing Day in New Zealand, because I was with family for Christmas and stuff, running the evals and getting back result by result on DeepSeek v3. So this was the first of their v3 architecture, the 671b MOE.Micah [00:26:19]: And we were very, very impressed. That was the moment where we were sure that DeepSeek was no longer just one of many players, but had jumped up to be a thing. The world really noticed when they followed that up with the RL working on top of v3 and R1 succeeding a few weeks later. But the groundwork for that absolutely was laid with just extremely strong base model, completely open weights that we had as the best open weights model. So, yeah, that's the thing that you really see in the game. But I think that we got a lot of good feedback on Boxing Day. us on Boxing Day last year.George [00:26:48]: Boxing Day is the day after Christmas for those not familiar.George [00:26:54]: I'm from Singapore.swyx [00:26:55]: A lot of us remember Boxing Day for a different reason, for the tsunami that happened. Oh, of course. Yeah, but that was a long time ago. So yeah. So this is the rough pitch of AAQI. Is it A-A-Q-I or A-A-I-I? I-I. Okay. Good memory, though.Micah [00:27:11]: I don't know. I'm not used to it. Once upon a time, we did call it Quality Index, and we would talk about quality, performance, and price, but we changed it to intelligence.George [00:27:20]: There's been a few naming changes. We added hardware benchmarking to the site, and so benchmarks at a kind of system level. And so then we changed our throughput metric to, we now call it output speed, and thenswyx [00:27:32]: throughput makes sense at a system level, so we took that name. Take me through more charts. What should people know? Obviously, the way you look at the site is probably different than how a beginner might look at it.Micah [00:27:42]: Yeah, that's fair. There's a lot of fun stuff to dive into. Maybe so we can hit past all the, like, we have lots and lots of emails and stuff. The interesting ones to talk about today that would be great to bring up are a few of our recent things, I think, that probably not many people will be familiar with yet. So first one of those is our omniscience index. So this one is a little bit different to most of the intelligence evils that we've run. We built it specifically to look at the embedded knowledge in the models and to test hallucination by looking at when the model doesn't know the answer, so not able to get it correct, what's its probability of saying, I don't know, or giving an incorrect answer. So the metric that we use for omniscience goes from negative 100 to positive 100. Because we're simply taking off a point if you give an incorrect answer to the question. We're pretty convinced that this is an example of where it makes most sense to do that, because it's strictly more helpful to say, I don't know, instead of giving a wrong answer to factual knowledge question. And one of our goals is to shift the incentive that evils create for models and the labs creating them to get higher scores. And almost every evil across all of AI up until this point, it's been graded by simple percentage correct as the main metric, the main thing that gets hyped. And so you should take a shot at everything. There's no incentive to say, I don't know. So we did that for this one here.swyx [00:29:22]: I think there's a general field of calibration as well, like the confidence in your answer versus the rightness of the answer. Yeah, we completely agree. Yeah. Yeah.George [00:29:31]: On that. And one reason that we didn't do that is because. Or put that into this index is that we think that the, the way to do that is not to ask the models how confident they are.swyx [00:29:43]: I don't know. Maybe it might be though. You put it like a JSON field, say, say confidence and maybe it spits out something. Yeah. You know, we have done a few evils podcasts over the, over the years. And when we did one with Clementine of hugging face, who maintains the open source leaderboard, and this was one of her top requests, which is some kind of hallucination slash lack of confidence calibration thing. And so, Hey, this is one of them.Micah [00:30:05]: And I mean, like anything that we do, it's not a perfect metric or the whole story of everything that you think about as hallucination. But yeah, it's pretty useful and has some interesting results. Like one of the things that we saw in the hallucination rate is that anthropics Claude models at the, the, the very left-hand side here with the lowest hallucination rates out of the models that we've evaluated amnesty is on. That is an interesting fact. I think it probably correlates with a lot of the previously, not really measured vibes stuff that people like about some of the Claude models. Is the dataset public or what's is it, is there a held out set? There's a hell of a set for this one. So we, we have published a public test set, but we we've only published 10% of it. The reason is that for this one here specifically, it would be very, very easy to like have data contamination because it is just factual knowledge questions. We would. We'll update it at a time to also prevent that, but with yeah, kept most of it held out so that we can keep it reliable for a long time. It leads us to a bunch of really cool things, including breakdown quite granularly by topic. And so we've got some of that disclosed on the website publicly right now, and there's lots more coming in terms of our ability to break out very specific topics. Yeah.swyx [00:31:23]: I would be interested. Let's, let's dwell a little bit on this hallucination one. I noticed that Haiku hallucinates less than Sonnet hallucinates less than Opus. And yeah. Would that be the other way around in a normal capability environments? I don't know. What's, what do you make of that?George [00:31:37]: One interesting aspect is that we've found that there's not really a, not a strong correlation between intelligence and hallucination, right? That's to say that the smarter the models are in a general sense, isn't correlated with their ability to, when they don't know something, say that they don't know. It's interesting that Gemini three pro preview was a big leap over here. Gemini 2.5. Flash and, and, and 2.5 pro, but, and if I add pro quickly here.swyx [00:32:07]: I bet pro's really good. Uh, actually no, I meant, I meant, uh, the GPT pros.George [00:32:12]: Oh yeah.swyx [00:32:13]: Cause GPT pros are rumored. We don't know for a fact that it's like eight runs and then with the LM judge on top. Yeah.George [00:32:20]: So we saw a big jump in, this is accuracy. So this is just percent that they get, uh, correct and Gemini three pro knew a lot more than the other models. And so big jump in accuracy. But relatively no change between the Google Gemini models, between releases. And the hallucination rate. Exactly. And so it's likely due to just kind of different post-training recipe, between the, the Claude models. Yeah.Micah [00:32:45]: Um, there's, there's driven this. Yeah. You can, uh, you can partially blame us and how we define intelligence having until now not defined hallucination as a negative in the way that we think about intelligence.swyx [00:32:56]: And so that's what we're changing. Uh, I know many smart people who are confidently incorrect.George [00:33:02]: Uh, look, look at that. That, that, that is very humans. Very true. And there's times and a place for that. I think our view is that hallucination rate makes sense in this context where it's around knowledge, but in many cases, people want the models to hallucinate, to have a go. Often that's the case in coding or when you're trying to generate newer ideas. One eval that we added to artificial analysis is, is, is critical point and it's really hard, uh, physics problems. Okay.swyx [00:33:32]: And is it sort of like a human eval type or something different or like a frontier math type?George [00:33:37]: It's not dissimilar to frontier frontier math. So these are kind of research questions that kind of academics in the physics physics world would be able to answer, but models really struggled to answer. So the top score here is not 9%.swyx [00:33:51]: And when the people that, that created this like Minway and, and, and actually off via who was kind of behind sweep and what organization is this? Oh, is this, it's Princeton.George [00:34:01]: Kind of range of academics from, from, uh, different academic institutions, really smart people. They talked about how they turn the models up in terms of the temperature as high temperature as they can, where they're trying to explore kind of new ideas in physics as a, as a thought partner, just because they, they want the models to hallucinate. Um, yeah, sometimes it's something new. Yeah, exactly.swyx [00:34:21]: Um, so not right in every situation, but, um, I think it makes sense, you know, to test hallucination in scenarios where it makes sense. Also, the obvious question is, uh, this is one of. Many that there is there, every lab has a system card that shows some kind of hallucination number, and you've chosen to not, uh, endorse that and you've made your own. And I think that's a, that's a choice. Um, totally in some sense, the rest of artificial analysis is public benchmarks that other people can independently rerun. You provide it as a service here. You have to fight the, well, who are we to, to like do this? And your, your answer is that we have a lot of customers and, you know, but like, I guess, how do you converge the individual?Micah [00:35:08]: I mean, I think, I think for hallucinations specifically, there are a bunch of different things that you might care about reasonably, and that you'd measure quite differently, like we've called this a amnesty and solutionation rate, not trying to declare the, like, it's humanity's last hallucination. You could, uh, you could have some interesting naming conventions and all this stuff. Um, the biggest picture answer to that. It's something that I actually wanted to mention. Just as George was explaining, critical point as well is, so as we go forward, we are building evals internally. We're partnering with academia and partnering with AI companies to build great evals. We have pretty strong views on, in various ways for different parts of the AI stack, where there are things that are not being measured well, or things that developers care about that should be measured more and better. And we intend to be doing that. We're not obsessed necessarily with that. Everything we do, we have to do entirely within our own team. Critical point. As a cool example of where we were a launch partner for it, working with academia, we've got some partnerships coming up with a couple of leading companies. Those ones, obviously we have to be careful with on some of the independent stuff, but with the right disclosure, like we're completely comfortable with that. A lot of the labs have released great data sets in the past that we've used to great success independently. And so it's between all of those techniques, we're going to be releasing more stuff in the future. Cool.swyx [00:36:26]: Let's cover the last couple. And then we'll, I want to talk about your trends analysis stuff, you know? Totally.Micah [00:36:31]: So that actually, I have one like little factoid on omniscience. If you go back up to accuracy on omniscience, an interesting thing about this accuracy metric is that it tracks more closely than anything else that we measure. The total parameter count of models makes a lot of sense intuitively, right? Because this is a knowledge eval. This is the pure knowledge metric. We're not looking at the index and the hallucination rate stuff that we think is much more about how the models are trained. This is just what facts did they recall? And yeah, it tracks parameter count extremely closely. Okay.swyx [00:37:05]: What's the rumored size of GPT-3 Pro? And to be clear, not confirmed for any official source, just rumors. But rumors do fly around. Rumors. I get, I hear all sorts of numbers. I don't know what to trust.Micah [00:37:17]: So if you, if you draw the line on omniscience accuracy versus total parameters, we've got all the open ways models, you can squint and see that likely the leading frontier models right now are quite a lot bigger than the ones that we're seeing right now. And the one trillion parameters that the open weights models cap out at, and the ones that we're looking at here, there's an interesting extra data point that Elon Musk revealed recently about XAI that for three trillion parameters for GROK 3 and 4, 6 trillion for GROK 5, but that's not out yet. Take those together, have a look. You might reasonably form a view that there's a pretty good chance that Gemini 3 Pro is bigger than that, that it could be in the 5 to 10 trillion parameters. To be clear, I have absolutely no idea, but just based on this chart, like that's where you would, you would land if you have a look at it. Yeah.swyx [00:38:07]: And to some extent, I actually kind of discourage people from guessing too much because what does it really matter? Like as long as they can serve it as a sustainable cost, that's about it. Like, yeah, totally.George [00:38:17]: They've also got different incentives in play compared to like open weights models who are thinking to supporting others in self-deployment for the labs who are doing inference at scale. It's I think less about total parameters in many cases. When thinking about inference costs and more around number of active parameters. And so there's a bit of an incentive towards larger sparser models. Agreed.Micah [00:38:38]: Understood. Yeah. Great. I mean, obviously if you're a developer or company using these things, not exactly as you say, it doesn't matter. You should be looking at all the different ways that we measure intelligence. You should be looking at cost to run index number and the different ways of thinking about token efficiency and cost efficiency based on the list prices, because that's all it matters.swyx [00:38:56]: It's not as good for the content creator rumor mill where I can say. Oh, GPT-4 is this small circle. Look at GPT-5 is this big circle. And then there used to be a thing for a while. Yeah.Micah [00:39:07]: But that is like on its own, actually a very interesting one, right? That is it just purely that chances are the last couple of years haven't seen a dramatic scaling up in the total size of these models. And so there's a lot of room to go up properly in total size of the models, especially with the upcoming hardware generations. Yes.swyx [00:39:29]: So, you know. Taking off my shitposting face for a minute. Yes. Yes. At the same time, I do feel like, you know, especially coming back from Europe, people do feel like Ilya is probably right that the paradigm is doesn't have many more orders of magnitude to scale out more. And therefore we need to start exploring at least a different path. GDPVal, I think it's like only like a month or so old. I was also very positive when it first came out. I actually talked to Tejo, who was the lead researcher on that. Oh, cool. And you have your own version.George [00:39:59]: It's a fantastic. It's a fantastic data set. Yeah.swyx [00:40:01]: And maybe it will recap for people who are still out of it. It's like 44 tasks based on some kind of GDP cutoff that's like meant to represent broad white collar work that is not just coding. Yeah.Micah [00:40:12]: Each of the tasks have a whole bunch of detailed instructions, some input files for a lot of them. It's within the 44 is divided into like two hundred and twenty two to five, maybe subtasks that are the level of that we run through the agenda. And yeah, they're really interesting. I will say that it doesn't. It doesn't necessarily capture like all the stuff that people do at work. No avail is perfect is always going to be more things to look at, largely because in order to make the tasks well enough to find that you can run them, they need to only have a handful of input files and very specific instructions for that task. And so I think the easiest way to think about them are that they're like quite hard take home exam tasks that you might do in an interview process.swyx [00:40:56]: Yeah, for listeners, it is not no longer like a long prompt. It is like, well, here's a zip file with like a spreadsheet or a PowerPoint deck or a PDF and go nuts and answer this question.George [00:41:06]: OpenAI released a great data set and they released a good paper which looks at performance across the different web chat bots on the data set. It's a great paper, encourage people to read it. What we've done is taken that data set and turned it into an eval that can be run on any model. So we created a reference agentic harness that can run. Run the models on the data set, and then we developed evaluator approach to compare outputs. That's kind of AI enabled, so it uses Gemini 3 Pro Preview to compare results, which we tested pretty comprehensively to ensure that it's aligned to human preferences. One data point there is that even as an evaluator, Gemini 3 Pro, interestingly, doesn't do actually that well. So that's kind of a good example of what we've done in GDPVal AA.swyx [00:42:01]: Yeah, the thing that you have to watch out for with LLM judge is self-preference that models usually prefer their own output, and in this case, it was not. Totally.Micah [00:42:08]: I think the way that we're thinking about the places where it makes sense to use an LLM as judge approach now, like quite different to some of the early LLM as judge stuff a couple of years ago, because some of that and MTV was a great project that was a good example of some of this a while ago was about judging conversations and like a lot of style type stuff. Here, we've got the task that the grader and grading model is doing is quite different to the task of taking the test. When you're taking the test, you've got all of the agentic tools you're working with, the code interpreter and web search, the file system to go through many, many turns to try to create the documents. Then on the other side, when we're grading it, we're running it through a pipeline to extract visual and text versions of the files and be able to provide that to Gemini, and we're providing the criteria for the task and getting it to pick which one more effectively meets the criteria of the task. Yeah. So we've got the task out of two potential outcomes. It turns out that we proved that it's just very, very good at getting that right, matched with human preference a lot of the time, because I think it's got the raw intelligence, but it's combined with the correct representation of the outputs, the fact that the outputs were created with an agentic task that is quite different to the way the grading model works, and we're comparing it against criteria, not just kind of zero shot trying to ask the model to pick which one is better.swyx [00:43:26]: Got it. Why is this an ELO? And not a percentage, like GDP-VAL?George [00:43:31]: So the outputs look like documents, and there's video outputs or audio outputs from some of the tasks. It has to make a video? Yeah, for some of the tasks. Some of the tasks.swyx [00:43:43]: What task is that?George [00:43:45]: I mean, it's in the data set. Like be a YouTuber? It's a marketing video.Micah [00:43:49]: Oh, wow. What? Like model has to go find clips on the internet and try to put it together. The models are not that good at doing that one, for now, to be clear. It's pretty hard to do that with a code editor. I mean, the computer stuff doesn't work quite well enough and so on and so on, but yeah.George [00:44:02]: And so there's no kind of ground truth, necessarily, to compare against, to work out percentage correct. It's hard to come up with correct or incorrect there. And so it's on a relative basis. And so we use an ELO approach to compare outputs from each of the models between the task.swyx [00:44:23]: You know what you should do? You should pay a contractor, a human, to do the same task. And then give it an ELO and then so you have, you have human there. It's just, I think what's helpful about GDPVal, the OpenAI one, is that 50% is meant to be normal human and maybe Domain Expert is higher than that, but 50% was the bar for like, well, if you've crossed 50, you are superhuman. Yeah.Micah [00:44:47]: So we like, haven't grounded this score in that exactly. I agree that it can be helpful, but we wanted to generalize this to a very large number. It's one of the reasons that presenting it as ELO is quite helpful and allows us to add models and it'll stay relevant for quite a long time. I also think it, it can be tricky looking at these exact tasks compared to the human performance, because the way that you would go about it as a human is quite different to how the models would go about it. Yeah.swyx [00:45:15]: I also liked that you included Lama 4 Maverick in there. Is that like just one last, like...Micah [00:45:20]: Well, no, no, no, no, no, no, it is the, it is the best model released by Meta. And... So it makes it into the homepage default set, still for now.George [00:45:31]: Other inclusion that's quite interesting is we also ran it across the latest versions of the web chatbots. And so we have...swyx [00:45:39]: Oh, that's right.George [00:45:40]: Oh, sorry.swyx [00:45:41]: I, yeah, I completely missed that. Okay.George [00:45:43]: No, not at all. So that, which has a checkered pattern. So that is their harness, not yours, is what you're saying. Exactly. And what's really interesting is that if you compare, for instance, Claude 4.5 Opus using the Claude web chatbot, it performs worse than the model in our agentic harness. And so in every case, the model performs better in our agentic harness than its web chatbot counterpart, the harness that they created.swyx [00:46:13]: Oh, my backwards explanation for that would be that, well, it's meant for consumer use cases and here you're pushing it for something.Micah [00:46:19]: The constraints are different and the amount of freedom that you can give the model is different. Also, you like have a cost goal. We let the models work as long as they want, basically. Yeah. Do you copy paste manually into the chatbot? Yeah. Yeah. That's, that was how we got the chatbot reference. We're not going to be keeping those updated at like quite the same scale as hundreds of models.swyx [00:46:38]: Well, so I don't know, talk to a browser base. They'll, they'll automate it for you. You know, like I have thought about like, well, we should turn these chatbot versions into an API because they are legitimately different agents in themselves. Yes. Right. Yeah.Micah [00:46:53]: And that's grown a huge amount of the last year, right? Like the tools. The tools that are available have actually diverged in my opinion, a fair bit across the major chatbot apps and the amount of data sources that you can connect them to have gone up a lot, meaning that your experience and the way you're using the model is more different than ever.swyx [00:47:10]: What tools and what data connections come to mind when you say what's interesting, what's notable work that people have done?Micah [00:47:15]: Oh, okay. So my favorite example on this is that until very recently, I would argue that it was basically impossible to get an LLM to draft an email for me in any useful way. Because most times that you're sending an email, you're not just writing something for the sake of writing it. Chances are context required is a whole bunch of historical emails. Maybe it's notes that you've made, maybe it's meeting notes, maybe it's, um, pulling something from your, um, any of like wherever you at work store stuff. So for me, like Google drive, one drive, um, in our super base databases, if we need to do some analysis or some data or something, preferably model can be plugged into all of those things and can go do some useful work based on it. The things that like I find most impressive currently that I am somewhat surprised work really well in late 2025, uh, that I can have models use super base MCP to query read only, of course, run a whole bunch of SQL queries to do pretty significant data analysis. And. And make charts and stuff and can read my Gmail and my notion. And okay. You actually use that. That's good. That's, that's, that's good. Is that a cloud thing? To various degrees of order, but chat GPD and Claude right now, I would say that this stuff like barely works in fairness right now. Like.George [00:48:33]: Because people are actually going to try this after they hear it. If you get an email from Micah, odds are it wasn't written by a chatbot.Micah [00:48:38]: So, yeah, I think it is true that I have never actually sent anyone an email drafted by a chatbot. Yet.swyx [00:48:46]: Um, and so you can, you can feel it right. And yeah, this time, this time next year, we'll come back and see where it's going. Totally. Um, super base shout out another famous Kiwi. Uh, I don't know if you've, you've any conversations with him about anything in particular on AI building and AI infra.George [00:49:03]: We have had, uh, Twitter DMS, um, with, with him because we're quite big, uh, super base users and power users. And we probably do some things more manually than we should in. In, in super base support line because you're, you're a little bit being super friendly. One extra, um, point regarding, um, GDP Val AA is that on the basis of the overperformance of the models compared to the chatbots turns out, we realized that, oh, like our reference harness that we built actually white works quite well on like gen generalist agentic tasks. This proves it in a sense. And so the agent harness is very. Minimalist. I think it follows some of the ideas that are in Claude code and we, all that we give it is context management capabilities, a web search, web browsing, uh, tool, uh, code execution, uh, environment. Anything else?Micah [00:50:02]: I mean, we can equip it with more tools, but like by default, yeah, that's it. We, we, we give it for GDP, a tool to, uh, view an image specifically, um, because the models, you know, can just use a terminal to pull stuff in text form into context. But to pull visual stuff into context, we had to give them a custom tool, but yeah, exactly. Um, you, you can explain an expert. No.George [00:50:21]: So it's, it, we turned out that we created a good generalist agentic harness. And so we, um, released that on, on GitHub yesterday. It's called stirrup. So if people want to check it out and, and it's a great, um, you know, base for, you know, generalist, uh, building a generalist agent for more specific tasks.Micah [00:50:39]: I'd say the best way to use it is get clone and then have your favorite coding. Agent make changes to it, to do whatever you want, because it's not that many lines of code and the coding agents can work with it. Super well.swyx [00:50:51]: Well, that's nice for the community to explore and share and hack on it. I think maybe in, in, in other similar environments, the terminal bench guys have done, uh, sort of the Harbor. Uh, and so it's, it's a, it's a bundle of, well, we need our minimal harness, which for them is terminus and we also need the RL environments or Docker deployment thing to, to run independently. So I don't know if you've looked at it. I don't know if you've looked at the harbor at all, is that, is that like a, a standard that people want to adopt?George [00:51:19]: Yeah, we've looked at it from a evals perspective and we love terminal bench and, and host benchmarks of, of, of terminal mention on artificial analysis. Um, we've looked at it from a, from a coding agent perspective, but could see it being a great, um, basis for any kind of agents. I think where we're getting to is that these models have gotten smart enough. They've gotten better, better tools that they can perform better when just given a minimalist. Set of tools and, and let them run, let the model control the, the agentic workflow rather than using another framework that's a bit more built out that tries to dictate the, dictate the flow. Awesome.swyx [00:51:56]: Let's cover the openness index and then let's go into the report stuff. Uh, so that's the, that's the last of the proprietary art numbers, I guess. I don't know how you sort of classify all these. Yeah.Micah [00:52:07]: Or call it, call it, let's call it the last of like the, the three new things that we're talking about from like the last few weeks. Um, cause I mean, there's a, we do a mix of stuff that. Where we're using open source, where we open source and what we do and, um, proprietary stuff that we don't always open source, like long context reasoning data set last year, we did open source. Um, and then all of the work on performance benchmarks across the site, some of them, we looking to open source, but some of them, like we're constantly iterating on and so on and so on and so on. So there's a huge mix, I would say, just of like stuff that is open source and not across the side. So that's a LCR for people. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.swyx [00:52:41]: Uh, but let's, let's, let's talk about open.Micah [00:52:42]: Let's talk about openness index. This. Here is call it like a new way to think about how open models are. We, for a long time, have tracked where the models are open weights and what the licenses on them are. And that's like pretty useful. That tells you what you're allowed to do with the weights of a model, but there is this whole other dimension to how open models are. That is pretty important that we haven't tracked until now. And that's how much is disclosed about how it was made. So transparency about data, pre-training data and post-training data. And whether you're allowed to use that data and transparency about methodology and training code. So basically, those are the components. We bring them together to score an openness index for models so that you can in one place get this full picture of how open models are.swyx [00:53:32]: I feel like I've seen a couple other people try to do this, but they're not maintained. I do think this does matter. I don't know what the numbers mean apart from is there a max number? Is this out of 20?George [00:53:44]: It's out of 18 currently, and so we've got an openness index page, but essentially these are points, you get points for being more open across these different categories and the maximum you can achieve is 18. So AI2 with their extremely open OMO3 32B think model is the leader in a sense.swyx [00:54:04]: It's hooking face.George [00:54:05]: Oh, with their smaller model. It's coming soon. I think we need to run, we need to get the intelligence benchmarks right to get it on the site.swyx [00:54:12]: You can't have it open in the next. We can not include hooking face. We love hooking face. We'll have that, we'll have that up very soon. I mean, you know, the refined web and all that stuff. It's, it's amazing. Or is it called fine web? Fine web. Fine web.Micah [00:54:23]: Yeah, yeah, no, totally. Yep. One of the reasons this is cool, right, is that if you're trying to understand the holistic picture of the models and what you can do with all the stuff the company's contributing, this gives you that picture. And so we are going to keep it up to date alongside all the models that we do intelligence index on, on the site. And it's just an extra view to understand.swyx [00:54:43]: Can you scroll down to this? The, the, the, the trade-offs chart. Yeah, yeah. That one. Yeah. This, this really matters, right? Obviously, because you can b

This week on The Price for Paradise Podcast, I brought back my race buddy Imran “Fiji” Kahn for another conversation — and this time we got it on video. We break down our experience racing the Mogollon Monster 42K, and also talk about how we prepared for the McDowell Mountain Frenzy 50K, which we recorded before I released that race recap episode. It's a real look at endurance training, race strategy, and learning through experience. Outside of racing, we talk about Fiji's work as a firefighter, the demands of the job, and how that's shaped him. We also dive into his faith journey, how he found God, and what that process has looked like alongside training, work, and life. It was a great conversation and always a pleasure having Fiji back on the podcast

It's a brand-new year on Hallmark, and we're kicking off 2026 with a tropical twist. Today, we're diving into Lost in Paradise.ABOUT LOST IN PARADISEWhen the founder of a high-end fashion company gets marooned on a “deserted” island with a chef, romance blossoms as they work together to survive.AIR DATE & NETWORK FOR LOST IN PARADISEJanuary 3 2026 | Hallmark ChannelCAST & CREW OF LOST IN PARADISELacey Chabert as SophiaIan Harding as MaxBRAN'S LOST IN PARADISE SYNOPSISSophia runs a high-end fashion company and, surprisingly, doesn't suck as a person. Unfortunately, her ex-husband — who is also an investor — wants out. He's ready to cash in while the company is still hot.Max is a talented chef who can't seem to break out, despite being incredible at his job. He tried opening his own restaurant a few years ago, but it failed, and now he works for another chef who takes credit for everything Max creates.There's one ultra-wealthy person in all of Fiji that both Sophia and Max want to pitch for funding.Max's buddy happens to be a private jet pilot, so he offers to get Max to Fiji. What he doesn't mention is that Max will have to work the flight as a flight attendant. The passenger? Sophia.They actually hit it off on the flight — until they fly into a massive storm and crash-land. Honestly, they both handle it shockingly well. With nothing to do but survive, they start opening up about their lives. Things are going fine… until they wake up the next morning and realize all their belongings — including the snacks — have been washed out to sea.The pilot and co-pilot head out to find civilization. They succeed, but can't figure out how to get back to the original island.Max catches a fish and cooks a delicious meal, because of course he does. Stranded life turns out to be kind of amazing. They grow even closer, and when Sophia injures her foot, Max gets the perfect excuse to carry her and take care of her.While exploring more of the island, they spot smoke in the distance. Fire! Civilization! They investigate and discover a campsite — they're saved! Except Max is convinced they're pirates, so they panic and run.There's swinging. There's heroic escaping. There's a celebratory kiss.Except… they didn't actually escape. The “pirates” catch up to them and reveal they're not pirates at all — they work for a resort. Yes. There is a fully operational resort on the island.They're taken to the resort, where Sophia's team is waiting for her. She immediately dives back into work but promises Max they'll stay in touch. Soon, she realizes she doesn't want to live that way anymore. She takes a step back from work, tells Max how she feels, and they kiss. Big ones.Cut to one year later: Max has opened his own restaurant, Sophia has found balance, and they're happily together. Watch the show on Youtube - www.deckthehallmark.com/youtubeInterested in advertising on the show? Email bran@deckthehallmark.com Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Happy New Year 2026! I love January and the opportunity to start afresh. I know it's arbitrary in some ways, but I measure my life by what I create, and I also measure it in years. At the beginning of each year, I publish an article (and podcast episode) here, which helps keep me accountable. If you'd like to share your goals, please add them in the comments below. 2026 is a transitional year as I will finish my Masters degree and continue the slow pivot that I started in December 2023 after 15 years as an author entrepreneur. Just to recap that, it was: From digitally-focused to creating beautiful physical books; From high-volume, low cost to premium products with higher Average Order Value; From retailer-centric to direct first; and From distance to presence, and From creating alone to the AI-Assisted Artisan Author. I've definitely stepped partially into all of those, and 2026 will continue in that same direction, but I also have an additional angle for Joanna Penn and The Creative Penn that I am excited about. If you'd like to join my community and support the show every month, you'll get access to my growing list of Patron videos and audio on all aspects of the author business — for the price of a black coffee (or two) a month. Join us at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn. Joanna Penn writes non-fiction for authors and is an award-winning, New York Times and USA Today bestselling thriller author as J.F. Penn. She's also an award-winning podcaster, creative entrepreneur, and international professional speaker. 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. Leaning into the Transformation Economy The Creative Penn Podcast and my Patreon Community Webinars and live events Finish my Masters in Death, Religion, and Culture Bones of the Deep — J.F. Penn Add merch to CreativePennBooks.com and JFPennBooks.com How to Write, Publish, and Market Short Stories and Short Story Collections — Joanna Penn Other possible books Experiment more with AI translation Ideally outsource more marketing to AI, but do more marketing anyway Double down on being human, health and travel You can find all my books as J.F. Penn and Joanna Penn on your favourite online store in all the usual formats, or order from your local library or bookstore. You can also buy direct from me at CreativePennBooks.com and JFPennBooks.com. I'm not really active on social media, but you can always see my photos at Instagram @jfpennauthor. Leaning into the Transformation Economy I've struggled with my identity as Joanna Penn and my Creative Penn brand for a few years now. When I started TheCreativePenn.com in 2008, the term ‘indie author' was new and self-publishing was considered ‘vanity press' and a sure way to damage your author career, rather than a conscious creative and business choice. It was the early days of the Kindle and iPhone (both launched in 2007), and podcasting and social media were also relatively new. While US authors could publish on KDP, the only option for international authors was Smashwords and the market for ebooks was tiny. Print-on-demand and digital audio were also just emerging as viable options. While it was the early era of blogging, there were very few blogs and barely any podcasts talking about self-publishing, so when I started TheCreativePenn.com in late 2008 and the podcast in March 2009, it was a new area. For several years, it was like howling into the wind. Barely any audience. Barely any traffic, and certainly very little income.  But I loved the freedom and the speed at which I could learn things and put them into practice. Consume and produce. That has always been my focus. I met people on Twitter and interviewed them for my show, and over those early years I met many of the people I consider dear friends even now. Since self-publishing was a relatively unexplored niche in those early years, I slowly found an audience and built up a reputation. I also started to make more money both as an author, and as a creative entrepreneur. Over the years since, pretty much everything has changed for indie authors and we have had more and more opportunity every year. I've shared everything I've learned along the way, and it's been a wonderful time.  But as self-publishing became more popular and more authors saw more success (which is FANTASTIC!), other voices joined the chorus and now, there are many thousands of authors of all different levels with all kinds of different experiences sharing their tips through articles, books, podcasting, and social media. I started to wonder whether my perspective was useful anymore. On top of the human competition, in November 2022, ChatGPT launched, and it became clear that prescriptive non-fiction and ‘how to' information could very easily be delivered by the AI tools, with the added benefit of personalisation. You can ask Chat or Claude or Gemini how you can self-publish your particular book and they will help you step by step through the process of any site. You can share your screen or upload screenshots and it can help with what fields to fill in (very useful with translations!), as well as writing sales descriptions, researching keywords, and offering marketing help targeted to your book and your niche, and tailored to your voice. Once again, I questioned what value I could offer the indie author community, and I've pulled back over the last few years as I've been noodling around this. But over the last few weeks, a penny has dropped. Here's my thinking in case it also helps you. Firstly, I want to be useful to people. I want to help. In my early days of speaking professionally, from 2005-ish, I wanted to be the British (introvert) Tony Robbins, someone who inspired people to change, to achieve things they didn't think they could. Writing a book is one of those things. Making a living from your writing is another. So I leaned into the self-help and how-to niche. But now that is now clearly commoditised. But recently, I realised that my message has always been one of transformation, and in the following four areas.  From someone who doesn't think they are creative but who desperately wants to write a book, to someone who holds their first book in their hand and proudly says, ‘I made this.' The New Author. From someone who has no confidence in their author voice, who wonders if they have anything to say, to someone who writes their story and transforms their own life, as well as other people's. The Confident Author. From an author with one or a handful of books who doesn't know much about business, to a successful author with a growing business heading towards their first six figure year. The Author-Entrepreneur. And finally, from a tech-phobic, fearful author who worries that AI makes it pointless to create anything and will steal all the jobs, to a confident AI-assisted creative who uses AI tools to enhance and amplify their message and their income. The AI-Assisted Artisan Author. These are four transformations I have been through myself, and with my work as Joanna Penn/The Creative Penn, I want to help you through them as well. So in 2026, I am repositioning myself as part of The Transformation Economy. What does this mean? There is a book out in February, The Transformation Economy by B. Joseph Pine II, who is also the author of The Experience Economy, which drove a lot of the last decade's shift in business models. I have the book on pre-order, but in the meantime, I am doing the following. I will revamp TheCreativePenn.com with ‘transformation' as the key frame and add pathways through my extensive material, rather than just categories of how to do things. I've already added navigation pages for The New Author, The Confident Author, The Author-Entrepreneur, and The AI-Assisted Artisan Author, and I will be adding to those over time. My content is basically the same, as I have always covered these topics, but the framing is now different. The intent is different. The Creative Penn Podcast will lean more heavily into transformation, rather than just information — And will focus on the first three of the categories above, the more creative, mindset and business things.  My Patreon will continue to cover all those things, and that's also where I post most of my AI-specific content, so if you're interested in The AI-Assisted Artisan Author transformation path, come on over to patreon.com/thecreativepenn I have more non-fiction books for authors coming, and lots more ideas now I am leaning into this angle. I'll also continue to do webinars on specific topics in 2026, and also add speaking back in 2027. It's harder to think about transformation when it comes to fiction, but it's also really important since fiction books in particular are highly commodified, and will become even more so with the high production speeds. Yes, all readers have a few favourite authors but most will also read a ton of other books without knowing or caring who the author is. Fiction can be transformational. Reader's aren't buying a ‘book.' They're buying a way to escape, to feel deeply, to experience things they never could in real life. A book can transform a day from ‘meh' into ‘fantastic!' My J.F. Penn fiction is mostly inspired by places, so my stories transport you into an adventure somewhere wonderful, and they all offer a deeper side of transformative contemplation of ‘memento mori' if you choose to read them in that way.  They also have elements of gothic and death culture that I am going to lean into with some merch in 2026, so more of an identity thing than just book sales. I'm not quite sure what this means yet, but no doubt it will emerge. I'll also shape my JFPennBooks.com site into more transformative paths, rather than just genre lists, as part of this shift. My memoir Pilgrimage always reflected a transformation, both reflecting my own midlife shift but I've also heard from many who it has inspired to walk alone, or to travel on pilgrimage themselves. Of course, transformation is not just for our readers or the people we serve as part of our businesses. It's also for us. One of the reasons why we are writers is because this is how we think. This is how we figure out our lives. This is how we get the stories and ideas out of our heads and into the world. Writing and creating are transformative for us, too. That is part of the point, and a great element of why we do this, and why we love this. Which is why I don't really understand the attraction of purely AI-generated books. There's no fun in that for me, and there's no transformation, either. Of course, I LOVE using Chat and Claude and Gemini Thinking models as my brainstorming partners, my research buddies, my marketing assistants, and as daily tools to keep me sparkly. I smiled as I wrote that (and yes, I human-wrote this!) because sparkly is how I feel when I work with these tools. Programmers use the term ‘vibe coding' which is going back and forth and collaborating together, sparking off each other. Perhaps that I am doing is ‘vibe creation.' I feel it as almost an effervescence, a fun experience that has me laughing out loud sometimes. I am more creative, I am more in flow. I am more ‘me' now I can create and think at a speed way faster than ever before. My mind has always worked at speed and my fingers are fast on the keys but working in this way makes me feel like I create in the high performance zone far more often. I intend to lean more into that in 2026 as part of my own transformation (and of course, I share my experiences mainly in the Community at patreon.com/thecreativepenn ). [Note, I pay for access to all models, and currently use ChatGPT 5.2 Thinking, Claude Opus 4.5, and Gemini 3 Pro). So that's the big shift this year, and the idea of the Transformation Economy will underpin everything else in terms of my content. The Creative Penn Podcast and my Patreon Community The Creative Penn Podcast continues in 2026, although I am intending to reduce my interviews to once every two weeks, with my intro and other content in between. We'll see how that goes as I am already finding some fascinating people to talk to!  Thank you for your comments, your pictures, and also for sharing the episodes that resonate with you with the wider community. Your reviews are also super useful wherever you are listening to this, so please leave a review wherever you're listening this as it helps with discovery.  Thanks also to everyone in my Patreon Community, which I really enjoy, especially as we have doubled down on being human through more live office hours. I will do more of those in 2026 and the first one of the year will blearily UK time so Aussies and Kiwis can come. I also share new content almost every week, either an article, a video or an audio episode around writing craft, author business, and lots on different use cases for AI tools.  If you join the Patreon, start on the Collections tab where you will find all the backlist content to explore. It's less than the price of a coffee a month so if you get value from the show, and you want more, come on over and join us at patreon.com/thecreativepenn My Books and Travel Podcast is on hiatus for interviews, since the Masters is taking up the time I would have had for that. However I plan to post some solo episodes in 2026, and I also post travel articles there, like my visits to Gothic cathedrals and city breaks and things like that. Check it out at https://www.booksandtravel.page/blog/  Webinars and live events Along with my Patreon office hours, I'm enjoying the immediacy and energy of live webinars and they work with my focus on transformation, as well as on ‘doubling down on being human' in an age of AI, so I will be doing more this year. The first is on Business for Authors, coming on 10 and 24 January, which is aimed at helping you transform your author business in 2026, or if you're just getting started, then transform into someone who has even a small clue about business in general!Details at TheCreativePenn.com/live and Patrons get 25% off. In terms of live in-person events, it looks like I will be speaking at the Alliance of Independent Authors event at the London Book Fair in March, and I'll attend the Self-Publishing Show Live in June, although I won't be speaking. There might be other things that emerge, but in general, I'm not doing much speaking in 2026 because I need to … Finish my Masters in Death, Religion, and Culture This represents a lot of work as I am doing the course full-time. I should be finished in September, and much of the middle of the year will be focused on a dissertation. I'm planning on doing something around AI and death, so that will no doubt lead into some fiction at a later stage! Talking of fiction … Bones of the Deep — J.F. Penn The Masters is pretty serious, as is academic research and writing in general, and I found myself desperate to write a rollicking fun story over the holiday break between terms. I've talked about this ‘tall-ship' story for a while and now I'm committing to it. Back in 1999, I sailed on the tall-ship Soren Larsen from Fiji to Vanuatu, one of the three trips that shaped my life. It was the first time I'd been to the South Pacific, the first time I sailed blue water (with no land in sight), and I kept a journal and drew maps of the trip. It also helped me a make a decision to leave the UK and I headed for Australia nine months later in early 2000, and ended up being away 11 years in Australia and New Zealand. I came home to visit of course, but only moved back to the UK in 2011, so that trip was memorable and pivotal in many ways and has stuck in my mind. The story is based on that crossing, but of course, as J.F. Penn my imagination turns it into essentially a ‘locked room,' there is no escape out there, especially if the danger comes from the sea. Another strand of the story comes from a recent academic essay for my Masters, when I wrote about the changes in museum ethics around human remains and medical specimens i.e. body parts in jars, and how some remains have been repatriated to the indigenous peoples they were stolen from. I've also talked before about how I love ‘merfolk' horror like Into the Drowning Deep by Mira Grant, All the Murmuring Bones by A.G. Slatter, and Merfolk by Jeremy Bates. These are no smiling fantasy mermaids and mermen. They are predators. What might happen if the remains of a mer-saint were stolen from the deep, and what might happen to the ship that the remains are being transported in, and the people on board?  I'm about a third in, and I am having great fun! It will actually be a thriller, with a supernatural edge, rather than horror, and it is called Bones of the Deep, and it will be out on Kickstarter in April, and everywhere by the summer.  You can check out the Kickstarter pre-launch page with photos from my 1999 trip, the cover for the book, and the sales description at JFPenn.com/bones Add merch to CreativePennBooks.com and JFPennBooks.com I've dipped my toe into merch a number of times and then removed the products, but now I'm clear on my message of transformation, I want to revisit this. My books remain core for both sites, but for CreativePennBooks, I also want to add other products with what are essentially affirmations — ‘Creative,' ‘I am creative, I am an author,' and variants of the poster I have had on my wall for years, ‘Measure your life by what you create.' This is the affirmation I had in my wallet for years! For JFPennBooks, the items will be gothic/memento mori/skull-related. Everything will be print-on-demand. I will not be shipping anything myself, so I'm working with my designer Jane on this and then need to order test samples, and then get them added to the store. Likely mid-year at this rate! How to Write, Publish, and Market Short Stories and Short Story Collections — Joanna Penn I have a draft of this already which I expanded from the transcript of a webinar I did on this topic as part of The Buried and the Drowned campaign. It turns out I've learned a lot about this over the years, and also on how to make a collection, so I will get that out at some point this year. I won't do a Kickstarter for it, but I will do direct sales for at least a month and include a special edition, workbook, and bundles on my store first before putting it wide. I will also human-narrate that audiobook. Other possible books I'm an intuitive creative and discovery writer, so I don't plan out what I will write in a year. The books tend to emerge and then I pick the next one that feels the most important. After the ones above, there are a few candidates. Crown of Thorns, ARKANE thriller #14. Regular readers and listeners will know how much I love religious relics, and it's about time for a big one! I have a trip to Paris planned in the spring, as the Crown of Thorns is at Notre Dame, and I have some other locations to visit. My ARKANE thrillers always emerge from in-person travels, so I am looking forward to that. Maybe late 2026, maybe 2027. AI + religion technothriller/short stories. I already have some ideas sketched out for this and my Masters thesis will be something around AI, religion, and death, so I expect something will emerge from all that study and academic writing. Not sure what, but it will be interesting! The Gothic Cathedral Book. I have tens of thousands of words written, and lots of research and photos and thoughts. But it is still in the creative chaos phase (which I love!) and as yet has not emerged into anything coherent. Perhaps it will in 2026, and the plan is to re-focus on it after my Masters dissertation.  I feel like the Masters study and the academic research process will make this an even better book, But I am holding my plans for this lightly, as it feels like another ‘big' book for me, like my ‘shadow book' (which became Writing the Shadow) and took more than a decade to write! How to be Creative. I have also written bits and bobs on this over many years, but it feels like it is re-emerging as part of my focus on transformation. Probably unlikely for 2026 but now back on the list … Experiment more with AI translation AI-assisted translation has been around for years now in various forms, and I have experimented with some of the services, as well as working with human narrators and editors in different languages, as well as licensing books in translation. But when Amazon launched Kindle Translate in November 2025, it made me think that AI-assisted translation will become a lot more popular in 2026. AI audiobook narration became good enough for many audiobooks in 2025, and it seems like AI-translation will be the same in 2026. Yes, of course, human translation is still the gold standard, as is human narration, and that would be the primary choice for all of us — if it was affordable. But frankly, it's not affordable for most indie authors, and indeed many small publishers. Many books don't get an audiobook edition and most books don't get translated into every language. It costs thousands per book for a human translator, and so it is a premium option. I have only ever made a small profit on the books that I paid for with human translators and it took years, and while I have a few nice translation deals on some books, I'm planning to experiment more with AI translation in 2026. More languages, more markets, more opportunities to reach readers. More on this in the next episode when I'll cover trends for 2026. Ideally outsource more marketing to AI, but do more marketing anyway You have to reach readers somehow, and you have to pay for book marketing with your time and/or your money. Those authors killing it on TikTok pay with their time, and those leaning heavily on ads are paying with money. Most of us do a bit of both. There is no passive income from books, and even a backlist has to be marketed if you want to see any return. But I, like most authors, am not excited about book marketing. I'd rather be working on new books, or thinking about the ramifications of the changes ahead and writing or talking about that in my Patreon Community or here on the podcast. However, my book sales income remains about the same even as I (slowly) produce more books, so I need to do more book marketing in 2026. I said that last year of course, and didn't do much more than I did in 2024, so here I am again promising to do a better job! Every year, I hope to have my “AI book marketing assistant” up and running, and maybe this will be the year it happens. My measure is to be able to upload a book and specify a budget and say, ‘Go market this,' and then the AI will action the marketing, without me having to cobble together workflows between systems. Of course, it will present plans for me to approve but it will do the work itself on the various platforms and monitor and optimize things for me. We have something like that already with Amazon auto-ads, but that is specific to Amazon Advertising and only works with certain books in certain genres. I have auto-ads running for a couple of non-fiction books, but not for any fiction. I'd also ideally like more sales on my direct stores, JFPennBooks.com and CreativePennBooks.com which means a different kind of marketing. Perhaps this will happen through ChatGPT shopping or other AI-assisted e-commerce, which should be increasing in 2026. More on that in trends for the year to come in the next show. Double down on being human, health and travel I have a lot of plans for travel both for book research and also holidays with Jonathan but he has to finish his MBA and then we have some family things that take priority, so I am not sure where or when yet, but it will happen! Paris will definitely happen as part of the research for Crown of Thorns, hopefully in the spring. I've been to Paris many times as it's just across the Channel and we can go by train but it's always wonderful to visit again. Health-wise, I'll continue with powerlifting and weight training twice a week as well as walking every day. It's my happy place! What about you? If you'd like to share your goals for 2026, please add them in the comments below — and remember, I'm a full-time author entrepreneur so my goals are substantial. Don't worry if yours are as simple as ‘Finish the first draft of my book,' as that still takes a lot of work and commitment! All the best for 2026 — let's get into it! The post My 2026 Creative And Business Goals With Joanna Penn first appeared on The Creative Penn.

Thanks to Holly for suggesting this week’s topic! Further reading: Mermaids: Myth, Kith and Kin [this article is not for children] Feejee Mermaid A manatee: A female grey seal, looking winsome: A drawing of the “original” Fiji (or Feejee) mermaid: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I'm your host, Kate Shaw. Let's close out the year 2025 with a mystery episode! Holly suggested we talk about mermaids! Mermaids are creatures of folklore who are supposed to look like humans, but instead of legs they have fish tails. These days mermaids are usually depicted with a single tail, but it was common in older artwork for a mermaid to be shown with two tails, which replaced both legs. Not all mermaids were girls, either. Mermen were just as common. Cultures from around the world have stories about mermaid-like individuals. Sometimes they're gods or goddesses, like the Syrian story of a goddess so beautiful that when she transformed into a fish, only her legs changed, because her upper half was too beautiful to alter, or the Greek god Triton, who is usually depicted as a man with two fish tails for legs. Sometimes they're monsters who cause storms, curse ships, or lure sailors to their doom. Sometimes they can transform into humans, like the story from Madagascar about a fisherman who catches a mermaid in his net. She transforms into a human woman and they get married, but when he breaks a promise to her, she turns back into a mermaid and swims away. In 2012, a TV special aired on Animal Planet that claimed that mermaids were real, and a lot of people believed it. It imitated the kind of real documentaries that Animal Planet often ran, and the only disclaimer was in the credits. I remember how upset a lot of people were about it, especially teachers and scientists. So just to be clear, mermaids aren't real. Many researchers think at least some mermaid stories might be based on real animals. The explorer Christopher Columbus reported seeing three mermaids in 1493, but said they weren't as beautiful as he'd heard. Most researchers think he actually saw manatees. A few centuries later, a mermaid was captured and killed off the coast of Brazil by European scientists, and the careful drawings we still have of the mermaid's hand bones correspond exactly to the bones of a manatee's flipper. Female manatees are larger than males on average, and a really big female can grow over 15 feet long, or 4.6 meters. Most manatees are between 9 and 10 feet long, or a little less than 3 meters. Its body is elongated like a whale's, but unlike a whale it's slow, usually only swimming about as fast as a human can swim. Its skin is gray or brown although often it has algae growing on it that helps camouflage it. The end of the manatee's tail looks like a rounded paddle, and it has front flippers but no rear limbs. Its face is rounded with a prehensile upper lip covered with bristly whiskers, which it uses to find and gather water plants. The manatee doesn't look a lot like a person, but it looks more like a person than most water animals. It has a neck and can turn its head like a person, its flippers are fairly long and resemble arms, and females have a pair of teats that are near their armpits, if a manatee had armpits, which it does not. But that's close enough for Christopher Columbus to decide he was seeing a mermaid. Seals may have also contributed to mermaid stories. In Scottish folklore, the selkie is a seal that can transform into human shape, usually by taking off its skin. There are lots of stories of people who steal the selkie's skin and hide it so that the selkie will marry the person—because selkies are beautiful in their human form. Eventually the selkie finds the hidden skin and returns to the sea. Similar seal-folk legends are found in other parts of northern Europe, including Sweden, Iceland, Norway, and Ireland. Many of the stories overlap with mermaid stories. Seals do have appealing human-like faces, have clawed front flippers that sort of resemble arms, and have rear flippers that are fused to act like a tail, even if it doesn't look much like a fish tail. The grey seal is a common animal off the coast of northern Europe, and a big male can grow almost 11 feet long, or 3.3 meters, although 9 feet is more common, or 2.7 meters. It has a large snout and no external ear flaps. Males are dark grey or brown, females are more silvery in color. It mainly eats fish, but will also eat other animals, including crustaceans, octopuses, other seals, and even porpoises. While I don't think it has anything to do with the mermaid or selkie legends, it is interesting to note that seals are good at imitating human voices. We learned about this in episode 225, about talking mammals. For instance, Hoover the talking seal, a harbor seal from Maine who was raised by a human after his mother died. Imagine if you were walking along the shore and a seal said this to you: [Hoover the talking seal saying “Hey get over here!”] Let's finish with the Japanese legend of the ningyo and a weird taxidermy creature called the Feejee mermaid. The ningyo is a being of folklore that dates back to at least the 7th century. It was a fish with a head like a person, usually found in the ocean but sometimes in freshwater. If someone found a ningyo washed up on shore, it was supposed to be a bad omen, foretelling war and other disasters. If you remember the big fish episode a few weeks ago, if an oarfish is found near the surface of the ocean around Japan, it's supposed to foretell an earthquake. The oarfish has a red fin that runs from its head down its spine, like a mane or a comb, and the ningyo was also supposed to have a red comb on its head, like a rooster's comb, or sometimes red hair. Some people think the ningyo is based on the oarfish. The oarfish is a deep-sea fish so it's rare, usually only seen near the surface when it's dying, and it has a flat face that looks more like a human face than most fish, if you squint and really want to believe you're seeing a mythical creature. These days, artwork of the ningyo usually looks a lot more like mermaids of European legend, but the earliest paintings don't usually have arms, just a human head on a fish body. But by the late 18th century, a weird type of artwork had become popular among Japanese fishermen, a type of crude but inventive taxidermy that created what looked like small, creepy mermaids. They looked like dried-out monkeys from the waist up, with a dried-out fish tail instead of legs. That's because that's exactly what they were. Japanese fishermen made these mermaids along with lots of other monsters, and sold them to travelers for high prices. The fishermen told tall tales about how they'd found the monster, killed it, and preserved it, and pretended to be reluctant to sell it, and of course that meant the traveler would offer even more money for it. The most famous of these fake monsters was called the Fiji Mermaid, and it got famous because P.T. Barnum displayed it in his museum in 1842 and said it had been caught near the Fiji Islands, in the South Pacific. It was about three feet along, or 91 cm, and was probably made from a young monkey and a salmon. The original Fiji mermaid was probably destroyed in a fire at some point, but it was such a popular exhibit that other wannabe showmen either bought or made replicas, some of which are still around today. People still sometimes make similar monsters, but they use craft materials instead of dead animals. They're still creepy-looking, though, which is part of the fun. You can find Strange Animals Podcast at strangeanimalspodcast.blubrry.net. That's blueberry without any E's. If you have questions, comments, corrections, or suggestions, email us at strangeanimalspodcast@gmail.com. Thanks for listening!

After looking back at the most (and least) popular episodes from the past year or so, I share the story of almost dying when I lost my brakes (with five South African friends in tow) going down a 14,700 ft. mountain pass in Tibet. Then, we run through a few China stories that have been sitting on the backburner for awhile, followed by the final Pray for China of the year (Dec 29-Jan 4). Check out all the links/details below! Welcome to China Compass on the Fight Laugh Feast network (Christian Podcast Community)! I'm your China travel guide, Missionary Ben. Follow me on X (@chinaadventures) where I share a new Chinese city or county to pray for every day. Send any questions or comments to chinacompass@privacyport.com. Everything else can be easily found at PrayGiveGo.us! Also, I’m now on Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/c/chinacompass), which not only allows for donations, but also lets me sort podcast episodes into various collections, making it easier to find all the episodes on a certain topic or region, like Tibet, North Korea, or Hong Kong. Check out this past week’s bonus Christmas episode with my wife and daughter… Speaking of old episodes, I want to do a sort of Year-End Round Up of the episodes which received the most downloads (and which ones were listened to the least). And since I didn’t do this at the end of last year, I’ll also give the top and bottom three from 2024 (my first year): Top 3 Episodes from 2025: Dec 5: Doug Wilson Joins China Compass (2286) Sept 13: Charlie Kirk: “America Must Shape Up, or China Wins” (1745) Virtual Tie- Apr 20: Easter in a Chinese Church │"Ignorant Hillbilly" Vance Insults China's Peasants (1551) Virtual Tie- Aug 30: Are All Chinese Students Commies and Spies? (Deace Says Yea, I Say Nay) (1548) Bottom 3 Episodes from 2025: Jan 1: More Prostitutes or Pastors in China? / Near Death on New Year's (Prison Pulpit)(967) Feb 7: In the Face of a Secret Trial, What Will I Do? (Prison Pulpit)(952) July 24: Syrian Pastor/Family Massacred (They Shot Patients In Bed) (Prison Pulpit) (903) Top 3 Episodes from 2024: Aug 24: Tim Walz: China Asset? + Black Dragon River & Double Duck Mountain (1864) Aug 17: From Chinese Reality TV to NSA, Chatting with Brent in Moscow (ID) (1743) Sep 14: Millions of Unadoptable Babies + China's 3 Forbidden "Ts" (& Martyrs of Tianjin) (1680) Bottom 3 Episodes from 2024: 11-21: Wang Yi on God's Use of China's "Unrighteous Politics" (Prison Pulpit #5) (1077) 11-15: Wang Yi on God Raising Up and Deposing Dictators (Prison Pulpit #4) (1006) 12-5: Wang Yi's Pre-Arrest Family Newsletter (Prison Pulpit #7) (1005) Bonus: Top 3 States (TX, CA, VA + WA) & Nations (CA, UK, AU) (+ Bottom States (WY, RI, DE) (Obscure stats: Fiji, Vanuatu, Georgia, 100+ total, 16 in Africa, China=WY, Romania vs Bulgaria) 15 Years Ago This Week (Dec 29): Runaway Van in Tibet @ 14,000 Feet https://chinacall.substack.com/p/runaway-van-14700-feet Now Available on Amazon (+ free PDF): The Millionaire Missionary (BordenofYale.com) Borden’s Missed Opportunity? Borden had a very fruitful ministry both at Yale and Princeton during his tenure as a student, and it strikes me that student ministry in China may have been a better use of his talents than what had been planned for him among the unreached Muslims of NW China. But hindsight is 20/20, and Borden never made it back to China at all (besides his first tour as a teenager). Campus ministry in China has been very fruitful for the past 40+ years, but has become much more difficult recently. Here’s a new article from within China that explains the current situation: Chinese Campus Ministry Troubles https://chinapartnership.org/blog/2025/12/changchun-reaching-campus/ No Tibetan in Chinese Schools https://www.rfa.org/english/tibet/2025/01/02/tibet-china-enforces-restrictions-students/ Chinese Refugee Church Planters? https://chinapartnership.org/blog/2024/12/immigrant-church-in-southeast-asia/ Is China Still a Developing Country? https://www.voanews.com/a/is-china-still-a-developing-country/7244652.html Taiwan Survives Another New Year Celebration https://asiatimes.com/2025/01/note-from-taiwan-the-players-on-the-eve-of-destruction/ Finally, let's take a look at this coming week's Pray for China (PrayforChina.us) cities… Dec 29-Jan 4: https://chinacall.substack.com/p/pray-for-china-dec-29-jan-4-2025 Thank you for listening! Subscribe and leave a review on your favorite podcast platform! Don’t forget to follow me on X (@chinaadventures) and email chinacompass@privacyport.com with any questions or comments. Also, I've finally set up Patreon, but my favorite thing isn't the (potential) support, but the ability to create Collections of podcasts by topic, location, etc… There’s also a Paypal link at PrayforChina.us if you’d like to give to our China ministry. Last but not least, for (almost) everything else we’re doing visit PrayGiveGo.us. Luke 10, vs 2: the harvest is plentiful but the workers are few, therefore ask the Lord for more. Talk again soon!

I'm back from a Trip to Fiji but still on island time so let's spin some tiki tunes as I get back into city life. www.cocktailnation.net Ixtahuele- Black Sand James  Spencer- The Mysterious Jade Temple of Dahkla Eden Ahbez- Island Girl Gene Rains-Lotus Land Warren Barker- Deep Night The OutI lslandersReturn to Paradise The Hawiians-Tea for Two Waitiki 7- Flower Humming Rex Kona-Wild Orchids Phil Moore-Trade Winds Stolen idols- Invitation Martini Kings- Return To Moorea Ixtahuele-Scene 1-3 Martin Denny- The Enchanted Sea Robert Drasnin-Moorean Moonbeams

After looking back at the most (and least) popular episodes from the past year or so, I share the story of almost dying when I lost my brakes (with five South African friends in tow) going down a 14,700 ft. mountain pass in Tibet. Then, we run through a few China stories that have been sitting on the backburner for awhile, followed by the final Pray for China of the year (Dec 29-Jan 4). Check out all the links/details below! Welcome to China Compass on the Fight Laugh Feast network (Christian Podcast Community)! I'm your China travel guide, Missionary Ben. Follow me on X (@chinaadventures) where I share a new Chinese city or county to pray for every day. Send any questions or comments to chinacompass@privacyport.com. Everything else can be easily found at PrayGiveGo.us! Also, I’m now on Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/c/chinacompass), which not only allows for donations, but also lets me sort podcast episodes into various collections, making it easier to find all the episodes on a certain topic or region, like Tibet, North Korea, or Hong Kong. Check out this past week’s bonus Christmas episode with my wife and daughter… Speaking of old episodes, I want to do a sort of Year-End Round Up of the episodes which received the most downloads (and which ones were listened to the least). And since I didn’t do this at the end of last year, I’ll also give the top and bottom three from 2024 (my first year): Top 3 Episodes from 2025: Dec 5: Doug Wilson Joins China Compass (2286) Sept 13: Charlie Kirk: “America Must Shape Up, or China Wins” (1745) Virtual Tie- Apr 20: Easter in a Chinese Church │"Ignorant Hillbilly" Vance Insults China's Peasants (1551) Virtual Tie- Aug 30: Are All Chinese Students Commies and Spies? (Deace Says Yea, I Say Nay) (1548) Bottom 3 Episodes from 2025: Jan 1: More Prostitutes or Pastors in China? / Near Death on New Year's (Prison Pulpit)(967) Feb 7: In the Face of a Secret Trial, What Will I Do? (Prison Pulpit)(952) July 24: Syrian Pastor/Family Massacred (They Shot Patients In Bed) (Prison Pulpit) (903) Top 3 Episodes from 2024: Aug 24: Tim Walz: China Asset? + Black Dragon River & Double Duck Mountain (1864) Aug 17: From Chinese Reality TV to NSA, Chatting with Brent in Moscow (ID) (1743) Sep 14: Millions of Unadoptable Babies + China's 3 Forbidden "Ts" (& Martyrs of Tianjin) (1680) Bottom 3 Episodes from 2024: 11-21: Wang Yi on God's Use of China's "Unrighteous Politics" (Prison Pulpit #5) (1077) 11-15: Wang Yi on God Raising Up and Deposing Dictators (Prison Pulpit #4) (1006) 12-5: Wang Yi's Pre-Arrest Family Newsletter (Prison Pulpit #7) (1005) Bonus: Top 3 States (TX, CA, VA + WA) & Nations (CA, UK, AU) (+ Bottom States (WY, RI, DE) (Obscure stats: Fiji, Vanuatu, Georgia, 100+ total, 16 in Africa, China=WY, Romania vs Bulgaria) 15 Years Ago This Week (Dec 29): Runaway Van in Tibet @ 14,000 Feet https://chinacall.substack.com/p/runaway-van-14700-feet Now Available on Amazon (+ free PDF): The Millionaire Missionary (BordenofYale.com) Borden’s Missed Opportunity? Borden had a very fruitful ministry both at Yale and Princeton during his tenure as a student, and it strikes me that student ministry in China may have been a better use of his talents than what had been planned for him among the unreached Muslims of NW China. But hindsight is 20/20, and Borden never made it back to China at all (besides his first tour as a teenager). Campus ministry in China has been very fruitful for the past 40+ years, but has become much more difficult recently. Here’s a new article from within China that explains the current situation: Chinese Campus Ministry Troubles https://chinapartnership.org/blog/2025/12/changchun-reaching-campus/ No Tibetan in Chinese Schools https://www.rfa.org/english/tibet/2025/01/02/tibet-china-enforces-restrictions-students/ Chinese Refugee Church Planters? https://chinapartnership.org/blog/2024/12/immigrant-church-in-southeast-asia/ Is China Still a Developing Country? https://www.voanews.com/a/is-china-still-a-developing-country/7244652.html Taiwan Survives Another New Year Celebration https://asiatimes.com/2025/01/note-from-taiwan-the-players-on-the-eve-of-destruction/ Finally, let's take a look at this coming week's Pray for China (PrayforChina.us) cities… Dec 29-Jan 4: https://chinacall.substack.com/p/pray-for-china-dec-29-jan-4-2025 Thank you for listening! Subscribe and leave a review on your favorite podcast platform! Don’t forget to follow me on X (@chinaadventures) and email chinacompass@privacyport.com with any questions or comments. Also, I've finally set up Patreon, but my favorite thing isn't the (potential) support, but the ability to create Collections of podcasts by topic, location, etc… There’s also a Paypal link at PrayforChina.us if you’d like to give to our China ministry. Last but not least, for (almost) everything else we’re doing visit PrayGiveGo.us. Luke 10, vs 2: the harvest is plentiful but the workers are few, therefore ask the Lord for more. Talk again soon!

In this shortened honeymoon edition of Quick Hits, DeAndre shares a major update impacting Chase Sapphire Reserve cardholders alongside highlights from the first half of his and Taryn's month-long honeymoon through Hong Kong and Fiji.On the points-and-miles front, the most significant development is Chase quietly rolling back what many travelers believed was a guaranteed 2¢ per point redemption on The Edit hotel bookings. Chase now states that all Point Boost hotel redemptions are dynamically priced, introducing uncertainty for travelers who had been planning high-value stays through the program.The episode also recaps standout moments from the honeymoon so far, including a four-night stay at the Grand Hyatt Hong Kong with Globalist upgrades, seamless concierge-arranged medical care, and the transition to Fiji's Nanuku Resort, an SLH property booked with Hilton points. DeAndre reflects on the cultural warmth of Fiji, the value of elite hotel status, and the importance of travel insurance when unexpected delays or medical issues arise.Key takeaways: Chase Edit rollback: Point Boost redemptions are now dynamically priced, removing the implied 2¢ per point floor.Impact on planners: Travelers relying on Edit redemptions may need to reassess future bookings.Hyatt Globalist value: Club lounge access, room upgrades, and concierge support proved invaluable in Hong Kong.Fiji on points: Nanuku Resort delivered a high-end, culturally immersive experience using Hilton points.Elite status matters: Hilton Diamond status enhanced the SLH stay experience.Travel insurance pays off: Separate travel insurance adds protection beyond credit card coverage.Cultural immersion: Fiji's hospitality and traditions stood out from other luxury destinations.Honeymoon Quick Hits format: Episodes remain brief, focusing on major updates and real-world travel insights.Interested in Financial Planning?Truicity Wealth ManagementResources:Mesa Workaround for Missing Points Transfer OptionsBook a Free 30-minute points & miles consultationStart here to learn how to unlock nearly free travel

During a month-long honeymoon through Hong Kong, Fiji, and New Zealand, DeAndre and Taryn share a special re-release from their appearance on the Wonderland on Points. The conversation revisits how points and miles became part of their lives, blending DeAndre's background as a financial advisor with Taryn's career in management consulting to build a travel strategy rooted in discipline, planning, and long-term thinking.They walk through standout redemptions, including a multi-stop journey to the Maldives booked with points, a stay at the Park Hyatt Maldives, and the behind-the-scenes planning of DeAndre's sandbank proposal. Along the way, they emphasize using credit cards responsibly, avoiding debt, and leveraging tools like TripIt to manage complex itineraries while creating meaningful, experience-driven travel.Key Highlights:DeAndre's entry into points and miles: His journey began through client questions as a financial advisor, leading to deep research into credit cards and transfer partners.Taryn's role in the strategy: She embraced points early and became instrumental in portals, trip planning, and organization.Responsible use of credit cards: Points strategies only work when spending mirrors cash and interest is avoided.Resetting financial habits: Stepping away from credit cards can be necessary to rebuild discipline before optimizing rewards.Transfer partners matter: Flexible points unlock significantly more value than simple cash-back redemptions.Maldives redemption breakdown: Strategic routing and patience made a high-end trip possible on points.Park Hyatt Maldives value: 35,000 points per night delivered outsized luxury compared to typical cash rates.Imperfect itineraries are normal: Award travel often requires creative routing and flexibility.Eco-focused experiences add depth: Local tours in Tulum created more meaningful travel than resort excursions.Trip organization is critical: Tools like TripIt simplify complex, multi-country travel planning.Resources:Book a Free 30 minute points & miles consultationStart here to learn how to unlock nearly free travelSign up for our newsletter!

Watch The X22 Report On Video No videos found (function(w,d,s,i){w.ldAdInit=w.ldAdInit||[];w.ldAdInit.push({slot:17532056201798502,size:[0, 0],id:"ld-9437-3289"});if(!d.getElementById(i)){var j=d.createElement(s),p=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];j.async=true;j.src="https://cdn2.decide.dev/_js/ajs.js";j.id=i;p.parentNode.insertBefore(j,p);}})(window,document,"script","ld-ajs");pt> Click On Picture To See Larger PictureThe [CB][WEF] is struggling, Trump and team has designated the offshore wind projects as a national security risk. They have been paused. The people are still struggling with the [CB] system, soon the people will get their buying power back. The [CB] will try to stop Trump’s new economic system, it will fail. The [DS] is feeling the pain every step of the way. The criminal syndicate money laundering system is being exposed is the blue states. The people are waking up to the real system that has been hidden from them. The [DS] continues to tax the people for the money laundering system. Trump is continually countering the [DS], he is using Emissaries to negotiate the peace deals. The [DS] is blind to the conversation. Economy Trump Administration Announces Change to Offshore Wind Construction  President Donald Trump's Department of the Interior is pausing offshore wind project construction due to “national security risks.” “Due to national security concerns identified by the Department of War, Interior is PAUSING leases for 5 expensive, unreliable, heavily subsidized offshore wind farms!” Interior Secretary Doug Burgum wrote on X. “ONE natural gas pipeline supplies as much energy as these 5 projects COMBINED,” Burgum added. “POTUS is bringing common sense back to energy policy & putting security FIRST!” Leases with Vineyard Wind1, Revolution Wind, CVOW, Sunrise Wind, and Empire Wind will be paused. Source: dailysignal.com https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/2002605302932517339?s=20 Gas is About to Get Expensive . . . A gallon of gas costs about twice as much in California as it does pretty much anywhere else in the United States. The reason why, of course, is that California makes it cost about twice as much – by reducing supply and by adding costs, chiefly for “environmental” reasons. This includes a new requirement – going into effect very soon (Dec. 31) that all gas stations must either replace single-walled underground storage tanks or permanently close them – no matter whether the tanks are actually leaking and no matter how much it costs to replace them. It is estimated that about 473 gas stations in California are going to close – because the owners cannot afford the mandatory underground storage tank upgrade costs or the $5,000 per day fines for non-compliance. At the same time, the state's regulatory bureaucracy has essentially shut down supply by denying 97 percent of permits for new refineries to supply the extra-special (and extra-expensive) gasoline formulations that all gas stations in California are required to sell. If this hypothetical scenario ends up becoming the actual scenario it could result in the collapse of California as a state. Source:  ericpetersautos.com  https://twitter.com/KobeissiLetter/status/2003104230945464505?s=20  As a % of total employment, multiple jobholders rose to 5.8%, nearly matching the 2 previous highs seen over the last 25 years. At the same time, Americans working primary full-time and secondary part-time jobs jumped to 5.3 million, the 2nd-highest in history. As a % of employment, this metric now stands at 3.4%, the 2nd-highest since 2000. The cost of living crisis is real.   (function(w,d,s,i){w.ldAdInit=w.ldAdInit||[];w.ldAdInit.push({slot:18510697282300316,size:[0, 0],id:"ld-8599-9832"});if(!d.getElementById(i)){var j=d.createElement(s),p=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];j.async=true;j.src="https://cdn2.decide.dev/_js/ajs.js";j.id=i;p.parentNode.insertBefore(j,p);}})(window,document,"script","ld-ajs"); https://twitter.com/KobeissiLetter/status/2003109247232655382?s=20 Political/Rights Teary-Eyed Bus Driver Speaks Out After Getting FIRED for Posting a ‘Racially Insensitive' Sign on School Bus Window In Response to Unruly Spanish-Speaking Kid – DOJ to Launch Investigation (VIDEO) An elderly bus driver terminated earlier this year for posting a so-called ‘racially insensitive' sign toward a Spanish-speaking kid has broken her silence and the DOJ is launching an investigation. The note on the window read, “Out of respect to English-only students, there will be no speaking Spanish on this bus.” Crawford, who had served the school district as a bus driver for more than 30 years, was promptly suspended and later lost her job posting the note.  https://twitter.com/_johnnymaga/status/2002937980013650119?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E2002937980013650119%7Ctwgr%5E9387ff3c86f279c9837393510bf08034917fc6bd%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.thegatewaypundit.com%2F2025%2F12%2Fteary-eyed-bus-driver-speaks-after-getting-fired%2F https://twitter.com/AAGDhillon/status/2002952621032677759?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E2002952621032677759%7Ctwgr%5E9387ff3c86f279c9837393510bf08034917fc6bd%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.thegatewaypundit.com%2F2025%2F12%2Fteary-eyed-bus-driver-speaks-after-getting-fired%2F Source: thegatewaypundit.com https://twitter.com/EndWokeness/status/2002782448191693130?s=20 https://twitter.com/C_3C_3/status/2002906389560414648?s=20 SEATTLE https://twitter.com/KeenanPeachy/status/2002902633439445012?s=20 https://twitter.com/PressSec/status/2003099681778499980?s=20 https://twitter.com/FBIDirectorKash/status/2002822669507379549?s=20   This is part of a year long effort FBI has undertaken with state and local law enforcement all across the country to crack down on child abusers and take them off the street. That work has seen historic results. -6,000 children located or reduced – up 22% from 2024 -Nearly 2,000 child predators arrested – up 10% -300+ human traffickers arrested – up 15% Lives being saved. We're not letting up. DOGE Geopolitical https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/2002602838149697684?s=20 https://twitter.com/AlboMP/status/2002974532475490578?s=20 https://twitter.com/visegrad24/status/2003101218076545039?s=20 Cyberattack disrupts France’s postal service, banking during Christmas rush A suspected cyberattack has knocked France's national postal service and its banking arm offline during the busy Christmas season The postal service, called La Poste, said in a statement that a distributed denial of service incident, or DDoS, “rendered its online services inaccessible.” It said the incident had no impact on customer data, but disrupted package and mail delivery. There was no immediate claim of responsibility.   France and other European allies of Ukraine allege that Russia is waging “hybrid warfare” against them, using sabotage, assassinations, cyberattacks, disinformation and other hostile acts that are often hard to quickly trace back to Moscow. Source:  tribdem.com  War/Peace Kushner and Witkoff Reportedly Draft $112B Plan to Turn Gaza Into ‘Smart City' With Beach Resorts, High-Speed Rail, and AI Grids — U.S. Pushes Back on Claims It Would Foot $60B    Project Sunrise,” envisions a decade-long, $112.1 billion redevelopment effort featuring beachside luxury resorts, high-speed rail, and AI-optimized infrastructure. The draft proposal was developed by a team led by Jared Kushner, President Trump's son-in-law, and U.S. special envoy Steve Witkoff, along with senior White House aide Josh Gruenbaum and other administration officials. The plan is being presented to prospective donor governments via a 32-slide PowerPoint labeled “sensitive but unclassified,” U.S. officials told the Journal. According to the presentation, Project Sunrise would convert Gaza's devastated landscape into a modern coastal metropolis. New Rafah (Credit: Wall Street Journal) Smart City (Credit: Wall Street Journal) However, the proposal does not specify which governments or private entities would ultimately finance the project, nor does it detail where Gaza's roughly two million displaced residents would live during reconstruction, according to WSJ. The draft estimates total costs at $112.1 billion over 10 years, including humanitarian relief, infrastructure rebuilding, and public-sector payrolls. https://twitter.com/StateDept_NEA/status/2002545412729942278?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E2002545412729942278%7Ctwgr%5Ef3310cb42b34b4ad502fd5957962a1d8fbe38397%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.thegatewaypundit.com%2F2025%2F12%2Fkushner-witkoff-reportedly-draft-112b-plan-turn-gaza%2F The proposal also assumes that Gaza could begin to self-fund portions of the development in later years, eventually paying down debt as economic activity expands. Source: thegatewaypundit.com https://twitter.com/disclosetv/status/2003088356876677484?s=20 Macron Seeks New Talks With Putin, Forcing ‘Alternative’ Path To Stalled US Negotiations Suddenly French President Emmanuel Macron is deciding to revive his diplomacy with Moscow and is     Macron wants to step in to force France’s say in any future outcome or settlement, rather than wait on the diplomatic sidelines. Arming Kiev to the teeth has done nothing but prolong the needless killing, and perhaps at least some European capitals are beginning to realize this. Source: zerohedge.com https://twitter.com/BRICSinfo/status/2003114957060137421?s=20   to be killed in a bombing this year.” Russian General Killed By Car Bomb In Moscow, Marks 3rd Top Officer Assassinated In A Year This adds to a growing list of high profile assassinations related to the Ukraine war. To review: —Darya Dugina was killed in a car bombing in 2022 which was likely meant for her father, prominent political thinker and often dubbed “Putin ally” Aleksandr Dugin. —Gen Igor Kirillov died in December 2024 outside of his residence when a bomb planted in a nearby scooter detonated. —Gen Yaroslav Moskalik, who served as deputy head of the Main Operations Directorate of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces, was killed in a car bomb attack last April. A “homemade” explosive device detonated under his Volkswagen Golf in a residential neighborhood. Throughout the course of the war there’s been a string of these high profile assassinations on Russian soil involving car and even cafe bombs. America’s CIA or Britain’s MI6 has long been suspected of being involved in these targeted killings, or at least assisting in such brazen Ukrainian-linked operations, but ultimately little has been uncovered or proven in terms of a potential Western hidden hand in this ongoing ‘dirty war’. Source: zerohedge.com https://twitter.com/LeadingReport/status/2002809124674035943?s=20  Medical/False Flags [DS] Agenda DOJ Charges California Food Stamp Official for Sending Benefits to Dead People – Then Spending Them Federal prosecutors have charged a longtime California welfare worker with carrying out a multi-year fraud scheme involving food assistance benefits and dead people. The U.S. Department of Justice announced the arrest of former Madera County benefits eligibility worker Leticia Mariscal, 55, of Madera. Prosecutors alleged that Mariscal stole tens of thousands of dollars in CalFresh benefits by exploiting her access to county databases. CalFresh is California's version of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. According to the Justice Department, the alleged scheme took place between December 2020 and April 2025. https://twitter.com/FBISacramento/status/1999625371268886611?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1999625371268886611%7Ctwgr%5Ee26f93739a10984d47aeb35b0088270daeb01aef%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.thegatewaypundit.com%2F2025%2F12%2Fdoj-charges-california-food-stamp-official-sending-benefits%2F Source: thegatewaypundit.com https://twitter.com/KevinKileyCA/status/2002791344566411594?s=20   “high-risk.” This means they exhibit serious “waste, fraud, abuse, or mismanagement,” costing taxpayers billions. The number has doubled during Newsom’s tenure. I bet you California fraud is 10 times worse than Minnesota. https://twitter.com/EricLDaugh/status/2002457150904238280?s=20   taxpayer dollars, per NYP. A HUD audit found that at least 221 deceased people received grants. MORE FRAUD! Expose it all! (VIDEO) Thomas Massie and Ro Khanna Announce Plans to Bring Inherent Contempt Charges Against Attorney General Pam Bondi Over Epstein Files – “We're Building a Bipartisan Coalition”  Reps. Thomas Massie (R-KY) and Ro Khanna (D-CA), the authors of the Epstein Files Transparency Act, signed into law by President Trump last month, announced their intention to bring charges for inherent contempt against Attorney General Pam Bondi.  Under the rarely used congressional power, “the House or Senate has its Sergeant-At-Arms, or deputy, take a person into custody for proceedings to be held in Congress,” according to the National Constitution Center. However, it is unclear how effective this would be in the face of legal challenges and the executive branch's power. This is the latest in an escalating saga of threats, with Massie and Khanna claiming the DOJ has not complied fully with the law due to redactions in the files and not releasing every document available. Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche appeared on NBC's Meet the Press this morning, where he dared Massie and Khanna to “bring it on,” maintaining that the DOJ is simply following the law and taking the necessary time to make redactions before releasing all of the files. Blanche told NBC's Kristen Welker that ensuring victim information is redacted “very much Trumps some deadline in the statute,” and he dared Khanna and Massie to file Articles of Impeachment. “We are complying with the statute, we will continue to comply with the statute, and if by complying with the statute, we don't produce everything on Friday, we produce things next week, and the week after, that's still compliance with the statute,” Blanche added. Source: thegatewaypundit.com Trump is ‘bored, tired and running on fumes’ — and he’s given up the fight: analyst A year into his second term, Donald Trump has undergone a major change in “tactics” as he deflects questions about his policies — and it’s an indication that he is now “just running on fumes,” an analyst wrote Monday. Salon's Amanda Marcotte pointed out that the president has developed an over-reliance on deflecting questions while claiming he is not up to speed on the topic or person he is being asked about, and that often begins with, “I don't know…” That is a change from his previous deflections, where he promised everything would sort itself out in “two weeks.”  Source: rawstory.com President Trump's Plan https://twitter.com/amuse/status/2002836773236306381?s=20   polygraph which they claim he failed to justify keeping their activities secret from Trump’s team. Scott isn’t blocking Plankey because he’s unqualified, he’s blocking him until Trump restores a Coast Guard shipbuilding contract for one of his major political donors Brian D'Isernia – he’s the CEO of Eastern Shipbuilding Group. Scott's hold has blocked Plankey from being included in the bipartisan nominations package the Senate GOP leadership is advancing before year-end. Because the Senate is winding down for the session, that procedural blockage likely means Plankey's nomination will expire unless resubmitted in the next Congress. Career staff at CISA repeatedly denied Acting Director Madhu Gottumukkala access to intelligence programs and urged him not to ask questions. After arranging an illegal polygraph, they used a claimed failure to freeze him out and leak to reporters. DHS acting security chief Michael Boyajian suspended at least six officials for misleading leadership and blocking classified access needed to run the agency. Trump to replace nearly 30 career diplomats in ambassadorial positions with ‘America First' allies The U.S. chiefs of mission in at least 29 countries were informed last week that their tenures would end in January 2026; all of them had taken up their posts in the Biden administration The Trump administration is recalling nearly 30 career diplomats from ambassadorial and other senior embassy posts as it moves to reshape the U.S. diplomatic posture abroad with personnel deemed fully supportive of President Donald Trump's “America First” priorities. All of them had taken up their posts in the Joe Biden administration but had survived an initial purge in the early months of Mr. Trump's second term that targeted mainly political appointees. That changed on Wednesday (December 17, 2025) when they began to receive notices from officials in Washington about their imminent departures.  How Trump shifted America's policy in a week Ambassadors serve at the pleasure of the President, although they typically remain at their posts for three to four years. Those affected by the shake-up are not losing their foreign service jobs but will be returning to Washington for other assignments should they wish to take them, the officials said. Africa is the continent most affected by the removals, with ambassadors from 13 countries being removed: Burundi, Cameroon, Cape Verde, Gabon, Ivory Coast, Madagascar, Mauritius, Niger, Nigeria, Rwanda, Senegal, Somalia and Uganda. Second is Asia, with ambassadorial changes coming to six countries: Fiji, Laos, the Marshall Islands, Papua New Guinea, the Philippines and Vietnam affected. Four countries in Europe (Armenia, Macedonia, Montenegro and Slovakia) are affected; as are two each in the Middle East (Algeria and Egypt); South and Central Asia (Nepal and Sri Lanka); and the Western Hemisphere (Guatemala and Suriname). Source: thehindu.com  Denmark Furious After Trump Names Special Envoy To Greenland Following Landry’s appointment, Rasmussen told Reuters in an emailed statement, “The appointment confirms the continued American interest in Greenland. However, we insist that everyone—including the U.S.—must show respect for the territorial integrity of the Kingdom of Denmark.” This prompted Denmark to summon the U.S. ambassador. Danish officials also summoned the U.S. ambassador in August after a report that at least three people with connections to Trump carried out covert influence operations in Greenland. Source: zerohedge.com Deep State Apoplectic with Trump's Use of Emissaries to Deliver Results President Trump is ducking and weaving through some of the deepest Machiavellian constructs, while maintaining forward progress. To put context to it, these creeps have had four years to strategize how to control Trump and manipulate policy with their retention of all sorts of government agencies in alignment with the status quo.  Yet, remarkably President Trump is dancing through their deep state minefield while keeping dozens of plates spinning on sticks.  The use of non-traditional emissaries is really making them angry.  , the use of emissaries outside the govt framework of traditional policy was going to be a key facet in any America-First agenda. The Deep State does not like President Trump's use of emissaries to conduct foreign policy.  In fact, they oppose it strongly; they hate it. The “emissary” is the person who carries the word of President Trump to any person identified by President Trump.  The emissary is very much like a tape recording of President Trump in human form.  The emissary travels to a location, meets a particular person or group, and then recites the opinion of the President.  The words spoken by the emissary, are the words of President Trump. The IC cannot inject themselves into this dynamic; that is why it is so valuable. The emissary then hears the response from the intended person or group, repeats it back to them to ensure he/she will return with clarity of intent as expressed, and then returns to the office of the presidency and repeats the reply for the President.  The emissary recites back exactly what he was /is told. This process is critical when you understand how thoroughly compromised the full Executive Branch is.  More importantly, this process becomes even more critical when you accept the Intelligence Community will lie to the office of the President to retain their power and position. (read more) Source: theconservativetreehouse.com https://twitter.com/TheStormRedux/status/2002736237996646560?s=20   signature on the absentee ballot he didn't even ask for. It was clearly forged. @GaSecofState please explain how this is a “clerical error.” https://twitter.com/CynicalPublius/status/2002795573490143432?s=20   3. The Congress of the United States shall determine the type and nature of documents that qualify as valid proof of citizenship for purposes of voting in federal elections. 4. Any federal, state or local official who knowingly allows any person to vote in federal elections without such proof of citizenship being validly presented shall be subject to such criminal penalties as the Congress of the United States may prescribe. 5. In the event of any conflict between this Amendment and Article 1, Section 4, the terms of this Amendment shall control. (function(w,d,s,i){w.ldAdInit=w.ldAdInit||[];w.ldAdInit.push({slot:13499335648425062,size:[0, 0],id:"ld-7164-1323"});if(!d.getElementById(i)){var j=d.createElement(s),p=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];j.async=true;j.src="//cdn2.customads.co/_js/ajs.js";j.id=i;p.parentNode.insertBefore(j,p);}})(window,document,"script","ld-ajs");

This special honeymoon edition of Quick Hits comes to you from 40,000 feet in the air, as DeAndre records mid-flight on the world's longest route from JFK to Singapore. With travel in full swing, this episode focuses only on the most critical updates in points and miles, along with a brief look at the honeymoon itinerary.The biggest news of the week is the sudden and unexpected shutdown of the Mesa Homeowners Card. Once considered a breakthrough option for earning transferable points on mortgage payments, Mesa abruptly closed all cardholder accounts, deactivating cards and freezing new earning overnight. While the closure is not related to cardholder behavior, it has triggered a scramble to move or redeem remaining points. A workaround discovered by the community allows some transfers to partners, and DeAndre shares where listeners can find that information.The episode wraps with a quick travel update, including upcoming stops in Singapore, Hong Kong, and Fiji, before settling into the heart of the honeymoon. For the next few weeks, Quick Hits will remain shorter and focus only on significant news.Key takeaways: Mesa card shutdown: Mesa abruptly closed all Homeowners Card accounts without prior notice.Earning halted immediately: Cards were deactivated, and new purchases or point earning are no longer possible.No wrongdoing involved: Mesa confirmed closures were not due to customer behavior or account issues.Transfer workaround: A community-discovered method may allow transfers to Mesa partners.Statement credit fallback: Redeeming at ~0.6¢ per point remains an option, though not ideal.Trust concerns: The shutdown raises questions about Mesa's future and customer confidence.Honeymoon mode: Quick Hits episodes will be shorter and focus on only major updates.Interested in Financial Planning?Truicity Wealth ManagementResources:Mesa Workaround for Missing Points Transfer OptionsBook a Free 30-minute points & miles consultationStart here to learn how to unlock nearly free travelSign up for our newsletter!

Survivor 49 winner Savannah Louie joins Sharon Tharp for a post-finale interview, breaking down her Final Tribal Council performance, how she interpreted the jury's tough questions, and why she wasn't fully sure she had the win locked up heading into the vote. Savannah also opens up about her aggressive gameplay, the jury votes that surprised her most, her tight bond with Sophi and Rizo, what viewers didn't see in the edit, and the surreal moment Jeff Probst asked her to return to Fiji just days after winning the million-dollar prize.

I try not to do shows when I am taking a break at the end of the year but today I felt inspired to bring you sights and sounds of Fiji and some exotica. www.cocktailnation.net Clyde Derby - Lost Island Gene Rains - Off Shore Kava Kon - The Killing River Kenny Sasaki - China Girl Martin Denny - Beautiful Kahana Tiki Delights - Cosmopolitan Combustible Edison- Theme From The Tiki Wonder Hour Danny And Dena - Night Reverie Eden Ahbez - Island Girl Ixtahuele - Call Of The Islands James Spencer- The Mysterious Jade Temple of Dahkla Jerry Sun - Tiki John Zorn - Tiki For Blue Les Baxter - Banana Boy Mark Riddle - White Lotus Roland Remington - Bahia Tiki Joes Ocean - Moonlight Moods

Ryan Emmons entered one of the most competitive and criticized industries on the planet—bottled water—with little more than a U-Haul and a vision. Going up against billion-dollar giants like Fiji and Smartwater, Ryan didn't just build another beverage brand; he built a mission. By betting everything on a "triple bottom line" philosophy—People, Planet, Profit—he proved that a purpose-driven company could disrupt a saturated market and command consumer loyalty in a way the big corporations couldn't.In this interview, Ryan Emmons sits down with Ryan Atkinson to reveal how he scaled Waiakea from a local hustle into one of the fastest-growing premium water brands in the world. You'll learn his scrappy "consignment" strategy for getting onto shelves without paying massive slotting fees, how to turn environmental sustainability into an economic advantage that lowers overhead, and why he believes naivety is an entrepreneur's greatest asset.Whether you are launching a CPG product or trying to differentiate your service in a crowded industry, this episode offers a masterclass in resilience and branding. Ryan breaks down exactly how to build a business that stands for something, keeps employees loyal, and generates massive growth without sacrificing your values. Tune in to discover why playing the long game is the ultimate competitive advantageTakeaways:- Build your business on a "triple bottom line" philosophy—People, Planet, Profit—from day one, as it is nearly impossible to authentically integrate deep purpose into a company's DNA after investors are involved.- Leverage a purpose-driven mission to increase employee retention, as high-performing talent is more likely to stay and work harder when they can see the tangible impact of the company's social initiatives.- Prove your product's sales velocity by starting with "mom and pop" shops on a consignment model before attempting to pitch major distributors or large retail chains.- Avoid direct competition with billion-dollar CPG conglomerates by targeting specific retailers where you can secure equal shelf space without paying exorbitant slotting fees.- Embrace manual self-distribution in the early stages—even if it requires renting U-Hauls and working overnight shifts—to maintain control over logistics and keep overhead low.- Reframe environmental initiatives as efficiency strategies rather than just expenses, as reducing material usage, water waste, and energy often leads to significant margin gains.- Justify a slight price premium by positioning your product as an "affordable luxury" that allows consumers to support a cause they believe in without breaking the bank.- Protect your company's mission during scaling by legally incorporating as a Public Benefit Corporation (PBC), which enshrines your social and environmental standards into the corporate bylaws.- Use your lack of industry experience as a strategic asset, as naivety allows you to be fearless and attempt innovations that industry veterans might deem impossible.- Focus on resilience and building a legacy business you want to lead for decades, rather than chasing a quick "exit" or overnight success in the volatile CPG market.Tags: Product Development, Retail Goods, Bottled Water, Business Scaling, Startup, Business Growth Resources:Grow your business today:  https://links.upflip.com/the-business-startup-and-growth-blueprint-podcast Connect with Ryan: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryan-emmons-8709871b

That moment when belief and doubt finally collide. In this episode, Sarah traces the fallout after IntSAR's internal mutiny. With trust eroded and questions mounting, key members begin to step away, revealing just how far-reaching the promises of Admiral Peter Cowell had become. From Thailand to Fiji, and across encrypted messages and recorded calls, The BADmiral follows the final unraveling of a story that started with hope, purpose, and uniforms — and ended in silence, debt, and disillusionment. Peter Cowell was contacted for comment during the production of this series. At the time of publication, no response has been received. All accounts and opinions in this series are those of the participants, based on their own experiences. Allegations are always attributed to their sources. The story is told in the public interest to examine how trust, belief, and ambition can intertwine.

On today's episode, Dr. Mark Costes reconnects with longtime friend and Dental Success Institute Black Belt coach Dr. Aaron Nicholas for an open, no-agenda conversation covering everything from mission trips and scuba diving in Fiji to launching new hands-on CE programs in Alabama. Aaron shares how recent legislative changes in Florida forced a pivot for his popular extraction and root canal courses—and how a stroke of good fortune led him to partner with a free clinic in Huntsville.   They also dive into the power of purposeful travel, the simplicity of surf-town life, and the challenges of balancing growth with authenticity in rapidly changing communities like Sayulita and San Pancho. Toward the end of the episode, Mark and Aaron tease an upcoming discussion around patient communication and case acceptance—highlighting the blind spots that can kill productivity and trust. It's a casual, insightful episode packed with takeaways for any dentist looking to sharpen their skills and find more meaning in the profession. Be sure to check out the full episode from the Dentalpreneur Podcast! EPISODE RESOURCES https://www.mondaymorningdentistry.com https://www.truedentalsuccess.com Dental Success Network Subscribe to The Dentalpreneur Podcast

Get My Brand Masterlist⁠ https://drchristiangonzalez.com/best-brands-form-2-2/ Get Water Guide https://drchristiangonzalez.com/water-pdf-request-form// Episode Description You trust the water bottle label that says "pure" and "natural spring." But a shocking new investigation reveals most brands can't prove it. Dr. Christian Gonzalez reached out to 19 of the biggest bottled water companies with one simple request: show proof your water is tested for PFAS, heavy metals, microplastics, and industrial solvents. The results? Fourteen brands disappeared or flat-out refused to respond. Only FOUR companies could stand behind their claims with real data. This isn't about being picky, it's about protecting your hormones, liver, and nervous system from daily toxic exposure. When you drink contaminated water multiple times a day, you're compounding exposure to chemicals that disrupt your entire system. The hidden toxins lurking in "clean" bottled water: • PFAS (Forever Chemicals) linked to hormonal imbalance, reduced sperm quality, and thyroid disruption • Microplastics found in up to 93% of bottled water globally, leaching endocrine-disrupting phthalates and BPA • Heavy metals like arsenic and lead from contaminated sources or outdated bottling systems • VOCs (Volatile Organic Compounds) including dry cleaning solvents and gasoline additives from industrial runoff • Toxic packaging that makes the bottle itself part of the problem In this episode, Dr. Christian Gonzalez exposes the 2025 Bottled Water Audit and reveals: • The full list of 19 brands tested—and which ones refused to respond • The ONLY 4 bottled water brands that passed with transparency and clean testing • Why major names like Evian, Fiji, Spindrift, and Liquid Death couldn't (or wouldn't) provide proof • The marketing manipulation behind "pure" and "spring" water labels • How to identify truly clean water and protect yourself from daily contamination • The endocrine disruption, liver burden, and nervous system damage caused by chronic water toxin exposure This episode goes beyond hydration. It's about taking back control of what you put in your body every single day, and demanding transparency from an industry built on marketing mystique, notreal science. Timestamps: 0:00 - The Bottled Water Investigation: Who's Really Clean? 1:17 - What Actually Matters When Choosing Water 2:10 - The Hidden Contaminants in Your Water 4:14 - How to Identify Quality Water Brands 5:43 - Investigation Results: 19 Brands Tested 7:41 - Brands to Avoid Due to Lack of Transparency 8:01 - Full Testing Breakdown 9:24 - Complete Lab Analysis 10:22 - Industry-Leading Results 11:19 - The Final Recommendation

Survivor 49 takes center stage on the RHAP Survivor Post-Game Show as Rob Cesternino and Evvie Jagoda break down the biggest moves and toughest decisions from this week's episode. Rob and Evvie highlight how the so-called “new era” is put to the test, as unpredictable votes and shifting alliances define the chaos in Fiji. The hosts discuss how Juwan and Sage's swing vote strategy comes to a head, and whether their pendulum gameplay can hold up under pressure.