Podcasts about Personally

Free 10 Day Couples Challenge Try Relationship Academy When your partner walks through the door in a bad mood, do you immediately wonder what you did wrong or rush to fix it? Taking your partner's emotions personally turns their everyday stress into relational friction, forcing them to manage your reaction on top of their own feelings. In this episode, we unpack the shift from carrying emotional responsibility to offering true empathy, giving both of you permission to feel. Main Talking Points: Personalizing Versus Empathy Unpacking Emotional Responsibility Breaking Fixing Cycles Tolerating Partner Discomfort Reducing Emotion Layers Frameworks Over Scripts Secure relationships aren't built on avoiding uncomfortable feelings, but on cultivating the capacity to tolerate and hold space for them together. Real connection happens when you allow feelings to be felt without making them about you. Give Me Discounts! Kiwi Fodzyme - Get 30% off your first order!  Tanasi - Use code “relationship" for 25% off your first order. *If you love this episode (and our podcast!), would you mind giving us a⁠ review in iTunes⁠? It would mean the world to us and we promise it only takes a minute. Many thanks in advance! – Colter, Cayla, & Lauren Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

GIVESENDGO: Stand With the Juror:  https://www.givesendgo.com/standwithjurorBe protected if you ever have to defend yourself or family, JOIN CCW Safe TODAY! https://lawofselfdefense.com/ccwsafeTwo quick stories to cover today!  First, it's being reported that Lindsay Clancy lawyer owes almost $2.5 MILLION dollars in unpaid taxes, dating back YEARS—even as he handles hundreds of criminal cases a year, for which he is richly paid, and despite living in a multi-million dollar home.Second, a YouTube channel going by the name “Fugitive TV” and run by one Ray Marcel claims to have spoken at length with hold-out juror Michael Desronvil of the infamous Lindsay Clancy mistrial, and yesterday Marcel shared what Desronvil told him-that is, to share HIS SIDE OF THE STORY with the world. Fair warning: I can't know with absolute certainty that all this is legit, but I've listened to the show, and it has the ring of truth to my ear. We'll also take a look at an Op-Ed by one attorney Wendy Murphy, published in the Boston Herald yesterday, that aggressively and stupidly takes a “true-crimes” speculatively critical look at hold-out juror Desronvil, and imagines all kinds of dark forces hard at work to deny Lindsay Clancy the favorable plea agreement that Murphy believes this murderer of her three small children deserves.Join me LIVE at Noon ET!Make sure you're ready to win the LEGAL FIGHT that follows the PHYSICAL FIGHT if you're ever compelled to defend yourself or your family from criminal predation. Learn why I am PERSONALLY a member of CCW SAFE, and why YOU SHOULD CONSIDER JOINING, TOO:  https://lawofselfdefense.com/ccwsafeAll @TheBrancaShow mugs & MORE! https://tinyurl.com/k778wj2kJOIN OUR COMMUNITY! Exclusive Members-only content & perks! Only ~17 cents/day! $5/month! YouTube: https://tinyurl.com/hn32rfz9 Locals: https://tinyurl.com/yck4w9kfFOUNDING FATHERS SPEED DIAL: Founding Fathers SPEED DIAL: https://tinyurl.com/3f7pc8nzEpisode #1452.

Be protected if you ever have to defend yourself or family, JOIN CCW Safe TODAY! https://lawofselfdefense.com/ccwsafeMichael Desronvil, the hero juror who prevented the acquittal of first degree murder mommy Lindsay Clancy who strangled her three children to death after sending her husband on an errand, has lawyered up!And WHAT a lawyer!  Desronvil has retained none other than Edward Paltzik.If you're not familiar with Paltzik, you soon will be—and you really already should have been.  This same lawyer is currently suing both Sunny Hostin and Al Sharpton over their defamation of three young men in the accidental boating death of Nolan Wells—and his letters to each of them are hilarious reading!Paltzik also wrote an exceptionally compelling amicus brief for the Supreme Court decision of Bruen—the seminal SCOTUS second Amendment decision authored by the great and powerful Justice Clarence Thomas.  He's also been outside counsel for many years to the Second Amendment Foundation, a champion in fighting for our run rights, and an organization in which I've personally long been a life member.It also worth mentioning that he's previously represented none other than Donald Trump himself—so you know he's not some loony Leftie. Join me LIVE at Noon ET as I break it all down!Make sure you're ready to win the LEGAL FIGHT that follows the PHYSICAL FIGHT if you're ever compelled to defend yourself or your family from criminal predation. Learn why I am PERSONALLY a member of CCW SAFE, and why YOU SHOULD CONSIDER JOINING, TOO:  https://lawofselfdefense.com/ccwsafeAll @TheBrancaShow mugs & MORE! https://tinyurl.com/k778wj2kJOIN OUR COMMUNITY! Exclusive Members-only content & perks! Only ~17 cents/day! $5/month! YouTube: https://tinyurl.com/hn32rfz9 Locals: https://tinyurl.com/yck4w9kfFOUNDING FATHERS SPEED DIAL: Founding Fathers SPEED DIAL: https://tinyurl.com/3f7pc8nzEpisode #1453.

presented by Lauren Stibgen The seasons are changing again, and it is hard to believe that kids have returned to school. I have seen so many social media posts about preparing kids for school from elementary to college. Moms lamenting about lists, waking their kids up on a schedule, and trying to balance this with work and other commitments. Trying to get into a new season of balance.    The reality is our lives are full of these changes no matter the season and no matter the reason. When it comes to seeking balance in work and life, part of our problem is separating the two things to begin with. The fact is all of life is some type of work, whether we are on the job receiving a paycheck, at home with family, or even volunteering.    Change and disruption happen by the moment in our lives. Change can be good and change can be difficult. Change can be expected and unexpected. Sometimes we make choices to change and sometimes we don't.     I think this is why the Bible refers to life as a sojourn, a temporary stay or visit in a place that is not our permanent home. The turmoil this life causes is well characterized in 1 Peter 2:11, Beloved, I urge you as sojourners and exiles to abstain from the passions of the flesh, which wage war against your soul (ESV).    Repeatedly, the Word reminds us this world is not our home. Ephesians 2:19 states, So then you are no longer strangers and sojourners, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God (RSV). We are fellow citizens and saints as members of God's household. But what does this look like, and how can we use this citizenship and membership to bring our lives into a better balance today?   First, let's consider what brings us out of balance with this citizenship we have as believers. What did Paul mean in 1 Peter 2 when he mentions the passions of the flesh waging war against us?   These passions of the flesh can show up in any of our work, at home or on the job, and we need to be aware of how these things are creating the lack of balance we perceive. I would sum up these passions of the flesh with one short word—sin. God's Word has many verses that summarize these sins both in the Old and New Testaments, but the verses in Galatians 5:19-21 specifically mention the flesh.   The acts of the flesh are obvious: sexual immorality, impurity and debauchery; idolatry and witchcraft; hatred, discord, jealousy, fits of rage, selfish ambition, dissensions, factions and envy; drunkenness, orgies, and the like. I warn you, as I did before, that those who live like this will not inherit the kingdom of God.    All this wages war on our citizenship and is often a root cause for feelings of imbalance in our life whether we are in control or not. There are words from this list that are very present today. I want you to ask:   What rivalries am I a part of? At work, in my family, or in my community?  Where am I causing dissent or division? Am I causing strife at work?  Am I jealous of someone or what they have?  Am I striving for significance in my life?  Have I been angry in the last week to the point of yelling?  What am I thinking about so much that it has become an idol to me?    Again, you may not be the cause of some of these things that wage war on your flesh. For example, maybe someone has caused division at work, and you are an unfortunate recipient of the backlash. Perhaps you have some rivalry in your family that you are not choosing but someone else is. Maybe someone is jealous of your achievements and is acting out because of this.    You see, this is why chasing balance here in this world can never happen, but we can shift our focus on our citizenship and as fellow members of the household of God. This shift can help us feel more in balance when the world seems to work wildly against us—you know, the part about waging war. While the word war seems dramatic, I want you to remember that even Jesus told us that in the world we will have tribulation. (John 16:33)    I love the other side of the promise Jesus has in John 16:33. He promises that in him we will have peace because he has overcome the world! He tells us to rejoice and be glad because our reward is great in heaven. (Matthew 5:12)    Nehemiah 8:10 tells us to not be grieved, for the joy of the Lord is our strength! Psalm 16:11 states that God makes known to us the path of life and that in him is the fullness of joy!    Jesus is peace. We can have joy in the presence of the Lord, and with him is the fullness of joy! Personally, when I am worn out from all that life is handing me, I tell my husband or close friends, “I just want peace.” It feels like a beautiful stillness and a place where all the things in this world cannot reach me. It is full of light and joy! The truth is I already have these things because I believe in Jesus Christ and through him, I have a home in heaven with God the Father. This good feeling of joy that is my strength needs my focus and attention. That's why we are commanded repeatedly in Scripture to rejoice in the Lord! (Philippians 3:1 and 4:4, Psalm 118:24).    When I really want this peace and joy, I start by acknowledging where it comes from because I cannot produce it on my own. True joy is found in the filling of the Holy Spirit. In fact, joy is a fruit of the Spirit listed in Galatians 5:22-23. So, to find Jesus and experience his peace, hope, joy, and the rest of the Spirit's fruit, I need to be giving the blessed Trinity my time.    When was the last time you took 1 Thessalonians 5:16-18 to heart?    Rejoice always, pray continually, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is God's will for you in Christ Jesus. A verse from Philippians 1:12 has been rolling over in my mind for a few months now. Paul writes, Now I want you to know, brothers and sisters, that what has happened to me has actually served to advance the gospel. It really got me to think about my circumstances; both the highs and the lows, the good and the bad. God uses all of this to advance the gospel, but do I allow this?    It is easy to rejoice when things are easy—when we celebrate, receive a promotion or a raise at work, or welcome a new child into our family. But what about a posture of rejoicing even when we are experiencing the opposite?  In James 1:2-3 we are told to Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance. This is echoed in Romans 5:2-5:   …through whom we have gained access by faith into this grace in which we now stand. And we boast in the hope of the glory of God. Not only so, but we also glory in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope. And hope does not put us to shame, because God's love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us.  Can I take this posture of rejoicing in my suffering, knowing these times will produce endurance, that endurance will produce character, and this character will produce hope?   Like many of you, I work in a high-pressure job. The demands change and, with many personalities, priorities shift. The team can feel the demands of the moment. There are more times than I can count in the last few years when I have heard, “You always stay so hopeful” or, “I don't know how you work through all of this”.    Now, this does not mean I am not real about the trials I face, but what I have found is some of the suffering has produced an endurance that has truly changed my character. I am able to stay consistent, hopeful, and caring for my colleagues. Seeing people how God would see them.    My favorite conversations are the unexpected ones. During a difficult moment one day, I chose to walk away for a few minutes. I needed a refocus on my mindset and take some space to tell the Lord how I needed him to help me with my words and patience. Honestly, I was frustrated and on the verge of tears. After a few minutes, a colleague followed and asked how I deal with things. My reply was that honestly without my faith in God, I truly wouldn't be able to some days. What followed was a beautiful conversation about faith and Jesus that was so unexpected, but I can truly say that what has happened to me has served to advance the gospel.   In this moment, I was not rejoicing, but I was thinking about my flesh—more specifically, how I didn't want my flesh to create a situation of “waging war” through hasty words. And I chose to seek the Lord in prayer. What followed was joy.   Keeping any balance in life as a follower of Jesus Christ is dependent on how focused you are on remembering that your time here on earth is a sojourn. You are on a journey, and you really don't know how long this journey will last. Think about your heavenly home as a member of God's family.   Your ability to find this joy, peace, and hope starts with your practice of abiding. How are you staying firm and steadfast in your relationship with Jesus? Is Jesus the center of your life or just someone you think about on a Sunday during church?   As you evaluate all the aspects of your life, where does Jesus fit into your job, your relationships, your health and wellness, your goals? Do you have a lens of biblical wisdom on all these matters, or does the Word of God sit on a shelf in your house? Do you own a Bible?   How often are you reading God's Word or deeply meditating on it? After all:   For everything that was written in the past was written to teach us, so that through the endurance taught in the Scriptures and the encouragement they provide we might have hope (Romans 15:4). Are you in a Bible study or small group? Do you have faith-filled friends who love Jesus like you do?    What about prayer? How much are you talking to God? Do you have other people praying for you on a regular basis?  Abiding. Jesus asks us to abide in him, and he will abide in us. He tells us he is the vine, and we are the branches. In this abiding, we will bear much fruit. (John 5:4-5) Jesus also tells us that apart from him we can do nothing.   If in abiding we can bear much fruit, this means we can bear true joy! Remember, joy is one of the fruits of the Spirit.    How have you assessed your abiding? Be encouraged! If you are reading this message, this means you long for Christian encouragement. While this is not a substitute for any of the other forms of abiding, may it be a reminder to pick up your Bible, find community, and pray!   It is in this place that you learn about your true identity and citizenship. As we all sojourn here, may we encourage one another as we look toward what our hope is ultimately in—the eternal life which God has promised before the beginning of time (Titus 1:2) and the return of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.   I pray today you are filled with a peace that surpasses all understanding, joy that fills you from head to toe, and a hope for things to come! May you be able to say, “What has happened to me has really served to advance the gospel!” 

Are you missing out on a business vehicle deduction, or claiming more than you're actually allowed?In this episode, Mike Jesowshek explains how business vehicle deductions work, including the difference between the standard mileage and actual expense methods. He also breaks down the 6,000-pound vehicle rule, business versus personal mileage, vehicle ownership, and the records you need to protect your deduction.You'll learn how to choose the right deduction method, avoid costly mistakes, and turn legitimate business driving into a defensible tax strategy.

As a former high school theology teacher and perpetual theology student, I like to think of myself as a Catholic theology nerd. I like to write papers on obscure, confusing Old Testament Bible passages that I've studied, and I love sharing what I learn about God, His Word, and His Church with others. So, when I became a parent and my infant son did every single thing a baby could do during the one hour Mass (including pooping LOUDLY during the consecration), I was both shocked and frustrated. ‘I just want to pray!' I exclaimed internally. This was my one hour per week to get out of the house and experience the beauty of Mass! I thought: ‘Finally, it was my turn to be encouraged and spiritually fed.' Instead, I fed someone else.Fast forward four years, and my husband and I have three children under 5 years old in the pew with us, and our funny stories about the things that have happened during Mass could fill a book and make you laugh till your sides hurt! From chasing a toddler track star down the main aisle to a child bursting into tears after receiving Lenten ashes saying between sobs, “But I don't want dirt on my face!,” no Sunday Mass with the Ferguson family is ever boring. Sometimes, just sometimes, I'm able to detach from my embarrassment long enough to laugh. More often than I'd like to admit, I find myself tired, weary, and overall just at a loss for how to survive Mass with my little saints. Recently, the Holy Spirit filled me with an idea; ‘Ask other moms what works for them.' So, I did. I polled every mother of small children I knew, and what I got in return was nothing short of pure mom genius! In speaking about Mass with small children, many of the moms pointed out that the frustrations we parents often feel in Mass are normal and reasonable.One mom said, “It's OK to feel sad about [how different Mass is with children compared to going to Mass before having kids] because it is frustrating and can start to feel like spiritual dryness if you aren't able to devote the same amount of attention to [Mass] as before.” “This is a new season of life to get used to,” a different mom explained, “and you probably won't be able to pray the same way at Mass as you did before motherhood. Accepting that means less frustration, … There will come a time again when the kids are older and aren't as needy and you can focus on the Mass again.”Mass as a parent with young children will not (and should not) look the same as Mass when you were a single adult. It could be that for many Sundays, we parents just won't hear the homily, or we miss the readings and the Eucharistic prayer because someone got fussy or needed to be changed, or said they needed to go potty for the fourth time in an hour.During these years, still another explained, “You may not ‘get much' out of Mass for yourself. Think of it as a season of ‘giving much' at Mass. Don't guilt trip yourself over being distracted by your kids, just offer it to the Lord. In a way, you are offering more to Jesus by coming to Him when it is difficult and you don't get much spiritual sweetness - not to mention that you are bringing Him your children, the most precious gift you can bring to the Church!” Personally, I like to imagine the rest of the parish community saying, ‘You care for that precious baby or toddler, we'll handle the Mass responses.' After all, everyone present prays the Mass together, as a community, so when my attention is divided, someone in the pew next to me can focus on my behalf, and pray on my behalf. Still another mom put it this way: Caring for your children during Mass “is your mission work. It's okay if they whine and talk, … They're little and can only handle so much. They're going to have times where it's too much! … Sometimes it's okay if [it feels like] the only good thing about Mass was that you showed up.”How powerful it is to ponder the difficulty overcome by parents who continue to show up to Mass, week after week, when they know it will be a struggle! Acknowledging the challenge and continuing to bring your children to Mass is truly a commendable endeavor! The Greatest ‘Catholic Mom Wins'Overall, I received responses back from 17 young moms with littles ranging from newborns to toddlers across half a dozen states. When asked, “What tips or tricks do you have that helped make attending Mass with little ones easier?” From parent to parent, here's their best advice: “Choose a Mass time that works for your family. I liked going first thing in the morning … because our kids were fresher in the morning.” “I tried to plan nap time around when Mass started.”If you choose to attend an early morning Mass, “set [out] outfits the night before (even for myself).” “We tried different areas of the church until we found “our spot”. We like sitting [in] the back row of [the] church so there aren't any distractions behind us. And if our kids are crying or need to use the restroom we can get out quickly. … For the big kids we try to have a Catholic coloring sheet or some small toys they can play with quietly until they become of age to be able to pay attention more fully. We've also tested different Mass times and found that our kids do best at the Noon Mass.” “We have a church book bag that we keep in the car, [and] the [books in that church bag] are only books they see at church; they seem “new' and not something that is played with all the time. I use books … that are religious based like a Noah's ark book or Toddler missal, etc. … I also have realized that sitting where they can see what is going on really helps too. Basically we can explain what is happening a lot easier this way.” For babies, we always bring “a clip and tether that keeps the teether [or pacifier] attached to the child.” If you have more than one child, “sitting between children [helps a lot], so as they [do] not get each other overly excited.” Bring “Books about Mass! Books about saints or Bible stories for them to look at during [the Mass]. A couple of favorite small toys or a favorite stuffy (keep it light. Don't get overwhelmed with their stuff), definitely a snack or two and water!... [and] Talk to them about everything that's happening in Mass!” “When managing kid behavior, prioritize silence over stillness. If a kid is screaming or making noise, that's distracting others, so … [you can] take them to the back. But if kids are walking up and down the aisles a bit, it's not a big deal. I have boys and it's simply not realistic to expect them to sit still for an hour … But they can usually fidget or color quietly. And when they can also participate noisily (Alleluia, Great Amen, etc.) encourage and model it! … Sitting up front helps my kids behave better because they can see what's going on and get interested to participate, and I think also because they are visible to others, … a certain amount of ‘stage fright' tones them down.” Finally, “remember to ask Mary to help you mother them like she mothered Jesus.” Author:Meg Kanatzar Ferguson, D.Min. is the Curriculum Coordinator at the Catholic Apostolate Center. She helps develop online course materials and curriculums and assists with the development of Catholic Apostolate Center publications. Resources:Listen to On MissionRead the Ad Infinitum blogMarriage and family resources Follow us:The Catholic Apostolate CenterThe Center's podcast websiteInstagramFacebookApple PodcastsSpotify Fr. Frank Donio, S.A.C. also appears on the podcast, On Mission, which is produced by the Catholic Apostolate Center and you can also listen to his weekly Sunday Gospel reflections. Follow the Center on Facebook, Instagram, X (Twitter), and YouTube to remain up-to-date on the latest Center resources.

1. The “Why” Question as a Source of Stagnation The conversation focused on the idea that asking “Why am I stuck?” can reinforce the very condition a person wants to change 00:00. Examples included: “Why am I not good enough?” “Why has he or she left me?” “Why am I not able to make more income or profit?” “Why am I not successful enough?” The discussion acknowledged that asking why is part of human curiosity, but connected the question to the way the brain searches for supporting evidence 00:57. People were described as “input and output” systems and learning machines that respond to the information being requested 01:07. 2. The Internal Waiter Metaphor One concept discussed was the brain as an internal waiter that serves the evidence requested through a question 01:34. Asking “Why am I not good enough?” was compared to placing an order for evidence proving that belief. The brain searches through experiences, memories, and internal information, described as an “internal map,” to find relevant examples 02:03. Once the evidence is found, the belief can feel like an objective part of reality 02:55. The metaphor was extended to beliefs about income, sales, dating, and personal capability 02:24. 3. How Questions Can Reinforce Personal Problems The discussion explored how asking another person why a problem exists can cause that person to search for more evidence supporting the problem 03:35. An external question can make the belief more solid because the person must locate the evidence internally and then explain it aloud 04:09. Speaking the explanation out loud was presented as an additional reinforcement of the belief 04:39. Statements such as “I'm not good enough because…” were described as shaping reality through language and repetition 04:52. The conversation compared this process to a spell or incantation that gains power when brought into the outside world 05:06. 4. The Power of Spoken Self-Descriptions A key theme that emerged was that words can influence how a person experiences identity, capability, and limitation 05:28. Negative explanations about business growth or personal ability were described as making change more difficult when repeated aloud. The discussion contrasted limiting declarations with constructive statements such as “I'm the most confident person in the room” 06:08. Positive statements were connected to deliberately finding evidence for a strength or area of expertise 06:16. The central warning was that the why question can help a person become even more stuck 06:36. 5. The Stories Produced by “Why” Several points were raised about the long narratives that can emerge when people are asked why they live in a particular reality 06:43. The response to a why question may become a 10-minute, 15-minute, 30-minute, or 45-minute account of personal history and circumstances 07:05. The discussion did not present storytelling or therapy as inherently wrong, but emphasized that the why question has a particular effect 07:27. The importance of recognizing when a question is producing explanation without creating movement was emphasized 07:43. 6. Replacing “Why” With “How” The discussion introduced the how question as a way to “open the door of the prison” created through limiting beliefs 07:49. The example of perfectionism showed how “Why am I a perfectionist?” invites evidence supporting the identity. Reframing the statement as “You are doing perfectionism” separates the person from the behavior 08:06. The shift from “I am a perfectionist” to “I am doing perfectionism” was presented as a move from identity to behavior 08:51. This change creates a different perspective and reduces the sense that the behavior defines the whole person 09:44. 7. Identity-Level Beliefs and Behavioral Patterns The conversation examined the strength of “I am” statements, including “I am powerful,” “I am confident,” “I am lovable,” and “I am good enough” 09:05. Negative identity statements, including “I'm a perfectionist,” “I'm a piece of shit,” and “I'm not good enough,” were described as powerful self-incantations 09:32. The discussion distinguished identity from behavior by moving statements such as “I am a perfectionist” down to “I am doing perfectionism” 09:41. This behavioral framing was presented as an initial form of liberation from an internal prison 09:55. 8. Exposing the Strategy Behind a Behavior One concept discussed was the question, “How are you doing perfectionism?” 10:03. The how question was described as a way to reveal the process and strategy behind a behavior rather than collect more evidence for why it exists 10:12. “Exposure” was identified as a central principle: bringing the current strategy into awareness 10:28. The process can include examining whether a person could deliberately teach or reproduce the behavior 10:44. Understanding the strategy behind a pattern was presented as a meaningful step toward change 10:57. Once the mechanics of perfectionism are exposed, the behavior can appear absurd enough to provoke laughter and distance 11:08. 9. The Two “Magic Questions” The discussion identified two central questions: “How are you doing something?” and “What do you actually want?” 11:47. The first question reveals the strategy behind a current behavior. The second question redirects attention toward a desired outcome rather than the historical evidence supporting a problem. The contrast between why and how was presented as the backbone of the approach discussed 11:55. Why questions were connected to reinforcing existing explanations, while how questions were connected to change and transformation 12:05. 10. Change, Transformation, and Identity The discussion distinguished temporary change from transformation at the level of identity 12:19. The process described involved: Identifying a limiting identity statement. Bringing the belief down to the level of behavior. Asking how the behavior is being produced. Exposing the strategy and recurring patterns. Returning to the identity level with new possibilities. After changing the strategy, possible identity statements included “I can be free,” “I can be myself,” and “I can love myself” 13:01. The physical experience of change was described through the image of weight dropping from the shoulders 13:15. 11. Applying the How Question in Daily Life The conversation encouraged awareness of when why questions are being asked internally or directed toward another person 13:29. Suggested alternatives included asking: “How are you doing this?” “How are you doing that internally?” “May I ask you a question?” Permission was included as part of the suggested approach when asking another person about an internal process 13:42. The how question was associated with unexpected and creative answers that can reveal previously hidden patterns 13:50. 12. Shame, Self-Compassion, and Recognizing Patterns The discussion acknowledged that exposing internal patterns can produce shame, especially when people recognize the cost of past behavior 14:20. Laughter was presented as useful when people notice the absurdity of patterns, but the emotional weight of those patterns was also taken seriously 14:48. The conversation included the recognition that discovering a new pattern does not mean personal work is complete 15:07. Shame about a newly recognized pattern was described as a personal experience that can arise even during ongoing self-awareness work 15:16. The idea that a person is already good enough was separated from the need to change unhelpful learned behaviors 15:30. 13. Learned Behaviors as Layers Over the Self A key theme that emerged was the distinction between a person's core essence and the learned patterns placed over it 15:37. Unhelpful lessons and behaviors were described as layers covering the core and essence of who a person is 15:49. These layers were connected to the metaphor of internal prisons that keep people stuck 16:12. The discussion emphasized that the “prisons” are not physical and are not imposed by an outside force 16:19. The underlying claim was that freedom already exists beneath the learned patterns 16:35. 14. Remembering Existing Freedom The discussion explored personal development as a process of remembering freedom rather than acquiring it from the outside world 16:46. Exposing the how of internal patterns can reveal that the supposed prison was built from learned behavior 17:03. Some patterns may have been learned at a young age because they were useful or appeared to work at that time 17:19. Those patterns can remain stored in a person's internal “archives” without continued examination 17:25. Awareness interrupts the reactive operation of those old strategies 17:30. 15. Business, Self-Expression, and Personal Stuckness The discussion connected internal patterns to areas where people may feel unable to express themselves fully 17:47. Business growth was used as an example of a situation where hidden beliefs or learned strategies may limit progress 17:54. The proposed focus was not simply asking why a business has not reached the next level, but exposing how the internal pattern is being performed 18:00. The process involved examining shame, restricted self-expression, and the internal prisons connected to those experiences 18:10. 16. The Ongoing Nature of Self-Observation The conversation framed recognizing internal patterns as a continuing life practice rather than a finished achievement 18:29. Everyday interactions and communication can reveal new habits, beliefs, and internal prisons 18:35. The process of discussing these ideas was itself presented as an opportunity to notice personal patterns in real time 18:40. The final practical shift was stated directly: replace the why question with the how question 18:56. Let's connect online: 1. INSTAGRAM: https://snip.ly/2ognlc 2. LINKEDIN: https://snip.ly/u6w6dg 3. WEBSITE: https://snip.ly/ys5h59 Questions? Email us at: contact@danielkluken.com    

For complete Medicare guidance, dial (617) 644-0093 to speak with my trusted partner, Chapter Medicare Advisors.Another interview by a female jury from the Lindsay Clancy mistrial, and another exposure of how the majority of this jury engaged in grotesque misconduct in voting to acquit Clancy for the intentional strangulation murder of her three small children on the grounds that she was legally insane. Juror Paula Devlin is back before the media, and in a brief four minutes of interview public released she makes a staggering number of disclosures, mostly unintentionally. From discussing how the largely female jury often simply over-talked each other during deliberations, to how she struggled with her own mental health issues during the trial, to her describing how her vote to acquit on grounds of insanity was really an effort to help all women generally rather than limited to the facts and law of this case, Devlin further undermines any public confidence in this jury in particular and, some would argue, a large fraction of women generally. Join me LIVE at Noon ET!Make sure you're ready to win the LEGAL FIGHT that follows the PHYSICAL FIGHT if you're ever compelled to defend yourself or your family from criminal predation. Learn why I am PERSONALLY a member of CCW SAFE, and why YOU SHOULD CONSIDER JOINING, TOO:  https://lawofselfdefense.com/ccwsafeFor complete Medicare guidance, dial (617) 644-0093 to speak with my trusted partner, Chapter.All @TheBrancaShow mugs & MORE! https://tinyurl.com/k778wj2kJOIN OUR COMMUNITY! Exclusive Members-only content & perks! Only ~17 cents/day! $5/month! YouTube: https://tinyurl.com/hn32rfz9 Locals: https://tinyurl.com/yck4w9kfFOUNDING FATHERS SPEED DIAL: Founding Fathers SPEED DIAL: https://tinyurl.com/3f7pc8nzEpisode #1449.Chapter and its affiliates are not connected with or endorsed by any government entity or the federal Medicare program. Chapter Advisory, LLC represents Medicare Advantage HMO, PPO, and PFFS organizations and stand alone prescription drug plans that have a Medicare contract. Enrollment depends on the plan's contract renewal. While we have a database of every Medicare plan nationwide and can help you to search among all plans, we have contracts with many but not all plans. As a result, we do not offer every plan available in your area. Currently we represent 50 organizations which offer 18,160 products nationwide. We search and recommend all plans, even those we don't directly offer. You can contact a licensed Chapter agent to find out the number of products available in your specific area. Please contact Medicare.gov, 1-800-Medicare, or your local State Health Insurance Program (SHIP) to get information on all of your options.

DONATE! STAND WITH THE JUROR: Give Send Go:  https://www.givesendgo.com/standwithjurorBe protected if you ever have to defend yourself or family, JOIN CCW Safe TODAY! https://lawofselfdefense.com/ccwsafeThe hero hold-out juror in the Massachusetts mistrial of Lindsay Clancy over her murder of her three children—5 years old, 3 years old, and 8 months old—with exercise bands after sending her husband out of the home on errands to get him out of the way—has been doxxed, and is now being harassed at his home by hostile persons. A key figure in this post-trial retaliation against this sole black male on the jury who simply did his legal duty?  One Aidan Kearney, also known as “Turtle Boy,” a self-styled “journalist” who came to public light when engaged in shenanigans outside the trial of Karen Read, also in Massachusetts. Indeed, Kearney is already being prosecuted for felony jury and witness intimidation charges in Massachusetts for his conduct during the Read trial. Interestingly, Kearney's own past appears shares similarities with that of the hero juror, in that both have been in the past charged with domestic violence—which might have led a wiser man to not throw stones in a glass house. MOST IMPORTANTLY, HOWEVER!  A GiveSendGo campaign has been established for the hero juror, who had been facing eviction in a rental disagreement with his landlord, and as of this writing the sum collected had exceeded $70,000. The link to donate or just share this campaign is at the top of this description!Join me LIVE at 6:00 PM ET as I break it all down!Make sure you're ready to win the LEGAL FIGHT that follows the PHYSICAL FIGHT if you're ever compelled to defend yourself or your family from criminal predation. Learn why I am PERSONALLY a member of CCW SAFE, and why YOU SHOULD CONSIDER JOINING, TOO:  https://lawofselfdefense.com/ccwsafeAll @TheBrancaShow mugs & MORE! https://tinyurl.com/k778wj2kJOIN OUR COMMUNITY! Exclusive Members-only content & perks! Only ~17 cents/day! $5/month! YouTube: https://tinyurl.com/hn32rfz9 Locals: https://tinyurl.com/yck4w9kfFOUNDING FATHERS SPEED DIAL: Founding Fathers SPEED DIAL: https://tinyurl.com/3f7pc8nzEpisode #1448.

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Be protected if you ever have to defend yourself or family, JOIN CCW Safe TODAY! https://lawofselfdefense.com/ccwsafeA fifth juror has stepped forward in the aftermath of the murder mistrial of murder mommy Lindsay Clancy, the Massachusetts woman who strangled to death her three small children—5 years old, 3 years old, and 8 months old—after sending her husband out of the house on an errand.  Tried on charges of first-degree murder, and raising the legal defense of not guilty by reason of insanity, Clancy's attorney Kevin Reddington managed to convince 11 of 12 jurors—nine women and three men-- of this laughable legal defense—but not achieve the unanimity required for an acquittal, because a single male juror held out for guilty. Yesterday we covered four of the female jurors speaking to the media and exposing their feckless ill service on this jury, and today we have a fifth juror who voted for acquittal due to insanity, this one a male—and, naturally, a simp. Join me LIVE at Noon ET as we break his interview down!Make sure you're ready to win the LEGAL FIGHT that follows the PHYSICAL FIGHT if you're ever compelled to defend yourself or your family from criminal predation. Learn why I am PERSONALLY a member of CCW SAFE, and why YOU SHOULD CONSIDER JOINING, TOO:  https://lawofselfdefense.com/ccwsafeClarence Thomas x 9: Perfect SCOTUS Mugs! https://tinyurl.com/k778wj2kAll @TheBrancaShow mugs & MORE! https://tinyurl.com/k778wj2kJOIN OUR COMMUNITY! Exclusive Members-only content & perks! Only ~17 cents/day! $5/month! YouTube: https://tinyurl.com/hn32rfz9 Locals: https://tinyurl.com/yck4w9kfFOUNDING FATHERS SPEED DIAL: Founding Fathers SPEED DIAL: https://tinyurl.com/3f7pc8nzEpisode #1445.

For complete Medicare guidance, dial (617) 644-0093 to speak with my trusted partner, Chapter Medicare Advisors.YOUTUBE: "Murder Mom Hung Jury: What Prosecution SHOULD Have Said!"https://youtube.com/live/y7UL-enXmuMFour of the female jurors of the Lindsay Clancy trial have no given interviews to news media, and what they have to say makes the whole injustice of the mistrial that failed to hold accountable this mother who strangled her three little children to death even worse. Three of the women were interviewed together, and I'm going to go ahead and just label them the middle-aged menopausal box-o-wine gang.  They speak with utter frankness about how they engaged with the trial evidence and arguments almost entirely through a lens of emotion, focusing on irrelevant and erroneous facts—and even engaged in improper jury deliberations by presenting themselves to fellow jurors as experts who were not qualified as such by this court. We also have another media interview of Kevin Reddington, who simply spews more nonsense about where he'd like things to move forward from here. Join me LIVE at Noon ET as I break it all down!Make sure you're ready to win the LEGAL FIGHT that follows the PHYSICAL FIGHT if you're ever compelled to defend yourself or your family from criminal predation. Learn why I am PERSONALLY a member of CCW SAFE, and why YOU SHOULD CONSIDER JOINING, TOO:  https://lawofselfdefense.com/ccwsafeClarence Thomas x 9: Perfect SCOTUS Mugs! https://tinyurl.com/k778wj2kFor complete Medicare guidance, dial (617) 644-0093 to speak with my trusted partner, Chapter.All @TheBrancaShow mugs & MORE! https://tinyurl.com/k778wj2kJOIN OUR COMMUNITY! Exclusive Members-only content & perks! Only ~17 cents/day! $5/month! YouTube: https://tinyurl.com/hn32rfz9 Locals: https://tinyurl.com/yck4w9kfFOUNDING FATHERS SPEED DIAL: Founding Fathers SPEED DIAL: https://tinyurl.com/3f7pc8nzEpisode #1443.Chapter and its affiliates are not connected with or endorsed by any government entity or the federal Medicare program. Chapter Advisory, LLC represents Medicare Advantage HMO, PPO, and PFFS organizations and stand alone prescription drug plans that have a Medicare contract. Enrollment depends on the plan's contract renewal. While we have a database of every Medicare plan nationwide and can help you to search among all plans, we have contracts with many but not all plans. As a result, we do not offer every plan available in your area. Currently we represent 50 organizations which offer 18,160 products nationwide. We search and recommend all plans, even those we don't directly offer. You can contact a licensed Chapter agent to find out the number of products available in your specific area. Please contact Medicare.gov, 1-800-Medicare, or your local State Health Insurance Program (SHIP) to get information on all of your options.

For complete Medicare guidance, dial (617) 644-0093 to speak with my trusted partner, Chapter Medicare Advisors.The Supreme Court in a 5-4 decision has ordered that Trump can continue construction of the new White House ballroom, overriding the unelected, black-robed, tyrannical, inferior federal district court judge who had issued repeated injunctions halting the project mid-construction, leaving the White House and its occupants and visitors vulnerable to attack.Join me LIVE at Noon ET as I break it all down!For complete Medicare guidance, dial (617) 644-0093 to speak with my trusted partner, Chapter Medicare Advisors.Join me LIVE at Noon ET as I break it all down!Make sure you're ready to win the LEGAL FIGHT that follows the PHYSICAL FIGHT if you're ever compelled to defend yourself or your family from criminal predation. Learn why I am PERSONALLY a member of CCW SAFE, and why YOU SHOULD CONSIDER JOINING, TOO:  https://lawofselfdefense.com/ccwsafeClarence Thomas x 9: Perfect SCOTUS Mugs! https://tinyurl.com/k778wj2kFor complete Medicare guidance, dial (617) 644-0093 to speak with my trusted partner, Chapter.All @TheBrancaShow mugs & MORE! https://tinyurl.com/k778wj2kJOIN OUR COMMUNITY! Exclusive Members-only content & perks! Only ~17 cents/day! $5/month! YouTube: https://tinyurl.com/hn32rfz9 Locals: https://tinyurl.com/yck4w9kfFOUNDING FATHERS SPEED DIAL: Founding Fathers SPEED DIAL: https://tinyurl.com/3f7pc8nzEpisode #M1431.Chapter and its affiliates are not connected with or endorsed by any government entity or the federal Medicare program. Chapter Advisory, LLC represents Medicare Advantage HMO, PPO, and PFFS organizations and stand alone prescription drug plans that have a Medicare contract. Enrollment depends on the plan's contract renewal. While we have a database of every Medicare plan nationwide and can help you to search among all plans, we have contracts with many but not all plans. As a result, we do not offer every plan available in your area. Currently we represent 50 organizations which offer 18,160 products nationwide. We search and recommend all plans, even those we don't directly offer. You can contact a licensed Chapter agent to find out the number of products available in your specific area. Please contact Medicare.gov, 1-800-Medicare, or your local State Health Insurance Program (SHIP) to get information on all of your options.

Be protected if you ever have to defend yourself or family, JOIN CCW Safe TODAY! https://lawofselfdefense.com/ccwsafeNo sooner did the US Postal Service finalize its rules for the form and handling of mail-in ballots than unelected, black-robed, tyrannical, inferior, Star Wars-named Federal District Trial Court Judge Indira Talwani issued a preliminary injunction against enforcement of the rule.This was just another in a series of temporary restraining orders and preliminary injunctions Talwani has issued in this case, with her earlier attempts to obstruct legitimate American elections halted by the Supreme Court itself on the grounds that she had jumped the gun—she was blocking a rule that hadn't even yet been finalized.  Indeed, she attempted to hold the Executive Branch in contempt for even daring to finalize the rule at all!  Even today, her latest injunction prohibits the USPS from even training to enforce the final rule, much less actual enforcement.Talwan's main argument in issuing her injunction is that Congress gives the power to control elections to the states by default, and to Congress to the extent Congress wished to be involved, but not to the Executive Branch. Thus, she claims, Trump's actions regarding mail-in ballots are ultra vires, or unlawful on their face.Trump counters that the USPS rule does nothing to change how states run their elections, nor does it have any impact on whom states qualify or disqualify as voters.  It merely sets standards for ballot envelopes—such as unique bar codes for each-and requires that the states provide the federal government with a list of the names and addresses of the people to whom the ballots are to be sent.It's that latter provision, of course, that is resulting in the tremendous push-back from the Democrats, who cannot exceed 20% in an election in which they do not cheat. Revealing to whom they are sending millions of ballots would expose their fraud, and perhaps expose their conduct as actual violations of federal criminal law—and they can't have THAT! So, with Judge Talwani acting as their champion, they are doing all they can to fight Trump's efforts to ensure the legitimacy of America's mail-in ballots, and thus the political legitimacy of our very Republic.Join me LIVE at Noon ET as I break it all down!Make sure you're ready to win the LEGAL FIGHT that follows the PHYSICAL FIGHT if you're ever compelled to defend yourself or your family from criminal predation. Learn why I am PERSONALLY a member of CCW SAFE, and why YOU SHOULD CONSIDER JOINING, TOO:  https://lawofselfdefense.com/ccwsafeClarence Thomas x 9: Perfect SCOTUS Mugs! https://tinyurl.com/k778wj2kFor complete Medicare guidance, dial (617) 644-0093 to speak with my trusted partner, Chapter.All @TheBrancaShow mugs & MORE! https://tinyurl.com/k778wj2kJOIN OUR COMMUNITY! Exclusive Members-only content & perks! Only ~17 cents/day! $5/month! YouTube: https://tinyurl.com/hn32rfz9 Locals: https://tinyurl.com/yck4w9kfFOUNDING FATHERS SPEED DIAL: Founding Fathers SPEED DIAL: https://tinyurl.com/3f7pc8nzEpisode #1441.

How can you use AI to research, edit and handle admin and marketing tasks while still writing every single word yourself? How can you double down on being human and reach readers on a personal level? Anna McPhee shares her perspective as a software engineer, author and creative technologist. In the intro, How to Write, Publish, and Market Short Stories out now. This show is supported by my Patrons. Join my Community and get articles, discounts, and extra audio and video tutorials on writing craft, author business, and AI tools, at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn Anna McPhee is an author, software engineer, professional speaker, and creative technologist. Her latest book is What Machines Can't Replace: Why AI Makes Us More Human. You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below. Show Notes Why writing code is creative work, and what it shares with writing books How AI changed Anna's job as a software engineer without taking her employment The difference between AI assistance and generation How to use custom skills for editing reports, research and repeatable tasks Why the rise of AI makes us crave slow, imperfect, physical things Responding to a negative review by showing up as a human You can find Anna at Anna.kiwi and her new book at WhatMachinesCantReplace.com. Transcript of the interview with Anna McPhee Jo: Anna McPhee is an author, software engineer, professional speaker, and creative technologist. Her latest book is What Machines Can't Replace: Why AI Makes Us More Human. So welcome to the show, Anna. Anna: Hi, Joanna. Thank you so much for having me. Jo: Oh, this is going to be a fun conversation. First up— Tell us a bit more about you and your background in technology, as well as how you got into writing. Anna: I have been in all of these things my whole life, as long as I can remember. When I was just a little girl, writing was my favourite thing, writing stories. It was the whole reason I went to school, to be honest. I always pictured myself as a writer before anything else. My dad was a lecturer in software development, so when I was little, he would teach me how to code. So I've always done both, for as long as I can remember, and my mum is an artist. That's been my upbringing, at the intersection of technology and art, and then writing is my own personal passion. It's naturally flowed throughout my life. I've been in and out of some other careers and chased all the things that have made me feel interested and passionate, but writing has always been there in the background. It's something I do, whether it's been for a hobby or for a profession, so it's always been there. Jo: But you work in software, right? Anna: I do. I work in software, which came to me by chance. I set out as a digital nomad about 15 years ago now. I sold everything I owned and started travelling. The way I thought I was going to fund this was through freelance writing, which I was very optimistic about. We all know now that's a very challenging way to make an income, especially when you don't have a background in it or a portfolio. I did have this childhood background in software engineering and coding. So I set out to be a writer and travel the world as a writer, and actually what I ended up doing was building websites and writing software, because that's what people would pay me to do. So I fell into both at the same time through this chance I took. Jo: I think sometimes people think that programming and software development and these more technical fields are not creative. My husband was a programmer for a long time, and essentially programming is a language. Well, there are lots of languages, but you are creating in a language with computers, right? So is there that much difference? How do you fix these two things in your mind separately, or are they the same thing? Anna: They're so related. Many people might put writing into more of an art, and computer development and programming more into a maths or a science, but I just think there's so much creativity in writing code, in how you choose to structure things, in the language you select for something, the way you approach it. It's very similar to writing a book, I think. I've found a lot of things that are very similar about it, to do with architecture even. When you look at the basics, some people might write a book with no idea where it's going and see where it ends. It's the same with software. People might go into it and not have a plan. Most people will architect their software, or they'll architect their story in the same way. I think there's a lot of crossover between the two. Jo: And there's editing, and doing the “does this do what I want it to do?” I think with software perhaps it's more obvious when something doesn't do what you want it to do than with a book. Anna: Perhaps. Although with AI now, it's becoming a little more vague, because you can think your software's doing what you want it to, but it might not be. It might just look like it is. I think those lines are getting a bit blurrier as technology changes. There's a lot of things in software development that are very similar to writing. We don't have an editor, but we will have unit tests or code reviews, and maybe the CI tests, and we've got all these structures in place that are very similar to writing. Jo: I also think what's interesting, and this has been in the last maybe decade really, is that it used to be you would get a job in the old way, but— Now it seems like your GitHub page, which is almost like your author platform, your programmer platform, can make a real difference in how people find you and your work. So maybe talk a bit about that, because you have a GitHub page, don't you? Anna: I do have a GitHub page, and I've spent a lot of time on it, because you can set up your README file and make it a bit like a website, and introduce all of your projects and what you're working on. Just to combine it a little bit, actually, I use GitHub for my writing. I use it for version control so that I can go back and see the changes that I've made to the things that I'm writing. Even with my book, I had a copy of it backed up in a private repository on GitHub where I could track changes and never lose a backup. I have so much faith in GitHub that it extends beyond the software I write and into everything I do. I keep a copy backed up in GitHub. Jo: That's actually quite funny because, coming into AI in the author community, one of the things that's now talked about is how do you prove that your book is not a one-click generated book? And what you've actually got there is evidence of your process. Anna: Exactly. Jo: Which is kind of hilarious in many ways. Well, let's get into this, because there's so much fear and witch hunting right now and negativity in the author community. As somebody who's grown up with both art and the software side, where do you think those attitudes come from, and how have they changed in different ways? Anna: Oh, people are really afraid. I've got a very moderate perspective, and I think I sit in a very similar position to you. A large number of people that I hear from are either incredibly pro-AI, let it do everything for them, everything, everything, do it for absolutely everything you can think of. Or they're completely terrified and very, very negative about it, and won't use it for anything at all. I can only assume this is going to stabilise with time. There's been a huge amount of outrage against other technologies in the past, even calculators. All technology has come with scepticism and people scared that it's going to take their jobs. I think there's a lot of misinformation out there as well, people who think that AI is trained on books, which it is, and that's a totally valid concern with the copyright and things. I think there's a lot of misunderstanding around what training an AI model actually means in that regard. It's not taking someone's prose and reusing it. It's looking at the underlying mathematical probability of, if you have this word, what is the probability of the next word being this? It's broken down into numbers. I'm not 100 percent sure, but from my perspective of seeing it, the witch hunt comes from a place of fear. I saw an author in a group I'm in recently who said, “Oh, I've written so many novels, and I've run out of ideas for names for my characters. I've used every person I've ever met, I've used their name. That's how many books I've written. How do I get more names?” Someone suggested, “Well, why don't you ask AI for some other names?” “Oh, no, no, no. I could never let AI take over my work like that.” And it was just over the idea of using it to ask a question. So I think there's a feeling that if you let it do one thing, next thing it's going to be doing everything, and it's going to erase you, and your ideas, and your way of doing things. Jo: Just on that, it is interesting, though, isn't it? Because I am trying to use it, like I use Claude Code, and I'm trying to use it for more, and more, and more. I started off using ChatGPT the day it came out in 2022, and have increasingly tried to give the AI tools all the things that will free me up to do the things I love to do. Making lists of names is not on my list of things I love to do. Anna: Yes, exactly. I feel the same way. Jo: So that's the thing, isn't it? The fear is really interesting because we all have fear. One very visceral time I remember feeling very scared was in the pandemic, in those early days when there wasn't a vaccine. That's really the only reference I think I have for it, because like you, I feel like I've grown up with technology, and so I've never felt it that way. I'm hoping that as with COVID, as with things developing over time, and obviously again, misinformation is rampant, but— I guess we got used to it. Is that the best we can hope for with AI? Anna: I hope it's better than that. I hope we can hope for better, that people can learn how to use it in a way that supports them. As people become less fearful, like with COVID, they experiment a little bit here or there and start to see that there are ways to not let it take over. In general, people are really bad at identifying AI-generated content. There are so many studies done on it, and it's 50/50 at best. Good AI now produces stuff that a lot of people don't recognise. So it's more about the idea than the reality of it. There's this whole idea around it that AI will take our jobs, and I get asked all the time, “Well, when do you think AI's going to take your job? You work on a computer.” Well, it can take my job, and it has. I used to write code all the time, and now I write almost no code. I work for a very large software company, and we use a lot of AI in our development protocols, and I don't write any code now, more or less, and a few years ago I did all day. So my job has changed completely, and AI has taken my job, but it hasn't taken my employment. I found a new way of being, which is I'm more of a project manager. I review code. I make sure nothing bad gets put out into the world. My role has changed, but it hasn't been taken away. I hope that as people start to see that this new technology is not taking their jobs, it's taking the parts of their jobs off them that are so repeatable, and giving them more room to do more with the things that they are uniquely good at. Jo: Absolutely. So let's get into that, because you did just say there that you're not writing any code, which is different to your writing for books. In your book, What Machines Can't Replace, you talk about how you used AI assistance and how you did things in different ways. I've been explicit about being AI-assisted since May 2023, so I absolutely am on board with the difference between what is assistance and what is generation. One-click generation of a complete book, while some people might choose to do that, that's not what you and I are talking about. So tell us— How did you use AI tools and these assisted processes for this book? Anna: Right. So I used AI extensively for this book. However, I wrote every single word. I don't want AI to take over my voice, and that is one area where it differs from writing code in a big way. One-click generation, maybe one day AI will actually be very good at it, and we won't be able to tell the difference. But currently, I definitely can. If I start reading something that is one-click generated, it becomes very obvious to me very quickly. I use AI extensively in my day. I use a Claude plan which is the Max 20x, the biggest allowance plan, and I run out of limit every week. So I spend a lot of time seeing how it forms sentences and the kind of thing it says, so I think I'm quite sensitive to when I see it. So for now, it's not good for that, and I don't think I ever want it to be. When I put something out in the world that is software, the thing that's uniquely me is the concepts behind it or the way it functions. It's not the code itself. When I put writing out there, when I put a book out there, the words are the thing that's me. They're my signature, they're my style. So I used AI assistance for everything else. I used it to help me research, but then I would verify the sources myself, but it was so good at finding things. I used it to transcribe my words. I would go out for long walks, and my ideas come to me when I'm out walking, like so many people. So I'd just pick up my phone and voice record, “Oh, hey, I was thinking, years ago I heard about this study, and I think that would be really interesting, but I don't really know the details of it. Can you make a note of this?” Then my AI could go and research it, come back and say, “Oh, I think you're talking about this research paper, and here's a link to it.” It could add it into my notes, and I could still verify it and read it, but it saved me hours of manual trawling through Google Scholar looking for things. So as a first step I used it for research, but I also used it all the way through the writing process. I've set up a lot of custom skills for all the different editor types. I've got a developmental editor, a line editor, a copy editor. None of them are allowed to make any changes. They are only allowed to create reports of what they find. So I could check for consistency, or did I reference the right thing for this chapter? Does this flow okay? I could ask it questions about my work without it actually touching the words. Another way I used it is I'd make more voice recordings, and then it would transcribe them and suggest where in my book they would fit best, and then copy and paste my exact words, word for word, into the right spot, and then I could edit it in. So I used it for almost everything except the actual words, which remain mine, and the design as well. I value designers a lot, so I paid a cover designer to design my cover. Jo: Yes, and all those things you were talking about, I also do. How do you explain skills? Because I have like 100 skills now. I do skills for everything. I'm struggling to explain what that is to people who don't really understand. Anna: Yes, skills are amazing, and it is difficult to explain. It's like a little package, and it can contain prompts, it can contain scripts, it can contain information, and it can be called only when needed. So if I created, for example, my developmental editor skill, it might be a folder that's consumed by Claude and Claude Code, and only when it's asked for, then it uses all of the stuff in its context and follows a set of instructions. They're just more powerful than a prompt because they're reusable, and they live there, and it can be clever and know when to use ones without you invoking them directly as well. I have another skill that's just me, about me, and I keep it up to date with information about what I'm working on and who I am. If I'm doing something, I can say, “Well, don't forget, check the About Me before you answer this.” Or, “I'm working on this project I haven't worked on in a while, but I created a skill to reference it. Before we start work on this, can you go and check in with the skill?” Kind of like a library. Jo: It's interesting, you're talking about quite expansive skills, and I do have some of those, but a lot of my skills are really quite specific. Like, do a Shopify product in the way that we did Shopify products last time. Or, this is how Joanna Penn wants the sales description for Amazon, so write the Amazon sales description for this. And then, say, on ChatGPT it'll be like, right, do A+ content for this book. That kind of thing. So it can be really, really specific, almost like a little program, right? Then it can be, as you say, with memory and all this different stuff. Anything you want to do more than once, I think. Anna: That's a really good way to describe it. Also, because of my technical background, I trust code a lot more than I trust AI at the moment. I really love AI, but the results vary, and you can run the same thing five times and get five different results, whereas if you run a code function five times, you will always get the same result if it's a well-written function. So for anything like that, I add code into my skills so that I can say, “When this is called, run this script,” and I know it's always run the same way. You can get quite complex with skills and build some real programs inside them, or it can be just a few lines. Do this, this way. I've got one I really enjoy at the moment I created called Research Me. I have so many ideas, always hundreds of ideas. So many of them are terrible. Some of them are good, and some of them are already done. I just type Research Me, and then I just put my thought. It might be a word. It might be a line. It might be more than that. Then it goes away and looks it up and sees if someone's done this thing, and if it's valid to me, and then creates a report and saves it in my knowledge base for me to look at another time. Jo: I guess it's not really a skill, but it's more like part of the memory. I just say, put that in the backlog and bring it back in a month. Anna: Oh, that's so nice, too, being able to set schedules and reminders. Like, right now is not a good time, but I don't want to let this idea go, so can you bring it back to me at this time? And it will. It's wonderful for that. Jo: It is good. Oh, and we should also say, you don't have to write a skill. If you do something with Claude or ChatGPT or whatever, you can then say, “Create a skill for this,” and it will write it, and you can have a look at it, but you don't have to sit there typing out how to do stuff. I think often people think that you have to drive it a lot more, where it's just so much of a conversation now, isn't it? Anna: Yes, it can be done completely with conversation. You don't need to write out any instructions or any code, anything at all. You could have a really positive experience doing something with Claude Cowork and then get to the end of that process and think, “Oh, that was wonderful. I definitely think I'll do that again.” So you just say, “Oh, that was great. Can you make that a skill so we can do it again the same way next time?” And it'll create it, and you just click a button, say Add the Skill once it's done, and that's it. Jo: There are so many things. Now, just coming back to your book, you do have at the end of each chapter some prompts, although I don't like the word prompt anymore, because I feel like prompt is from the old way, when you would type in a certain prompt and then something would come back and that would be done. Whereas now it's much more of a conversation. So a prompt is almost a starting point. So you've used questions, I guess. What are your recommendations for authors who want to get more into this but are still apprehensive and are worried about getting it wrong somehow? Anna: Okay. Yes, I agree with you on prompting. That was a real buzzword for a while there. Everyone was going to be a prompt engineer, and the future of AI was prompting, prompt design. The systems are so much more capable now that it's not what it was. It is definitely more of a conversation. I think that is the good place to start, to just have a conversation with the AI about your work. It doesn't have to touch your work. You could just ask for its opinion on something. If you don't want it to consume your whole book, there are privacy settings, and you can stop it from training on your material if that's the concern, or you could use a local model. You could give it some of your writing and ask its opinion and start a conversation. One thing about AI is that people forget you can just say to it, “What's the best way to use you? Hi, I'm new here. I don't know what I'm doing. I'm a writer. How can you help me?” And it will tell you. Jo: I think one of the other ways, if people don't even want to use it for creative stuff… This morning, as we record this, I've been delving into the back end of my YouTube channel, which I've just ignored for years, actually, and Google Search Console, and there are all these errors everywhere. I'm like, “I don't understand that message.” Or I had an error on one of my files on Draft2Digital, and I was like, “Okay, ugh.” So now I just put those errors into Claude and say, “Right, how do I fix this?” Or, “Maybe you could fix this.” That helps so much, because as author publishers or self-published authors, we do have a lot of technical things to do. Sometimes, well, all the time now, I think, getting help with it rather than ignoring it can be great. Anna: Absolutely. It's so good for that administrative stuff as well, especially with the addition of being able to use Claude, and a lot of the other ones as well, in your web browser now. So it can do things for you. It can fill out forms. There's a lot of repetition in publishing a book. You have to enter your ISBN in five million places, and you want to make sure that your information is aligned and that you have the same data in numerous different places, and you can ask it to check. You can ask it to check your metadata on your website and say, “Does the author information for me align with what you're seeing on Goodreads, or what you're seeing on StoryGraph, or in Wikidata? Do you see any gaps that I need to address?” It's really good at that stuff. Or you can open a form and say, “Can you fill it out for me? I'm sick of typing.” And it will. It's so good for the admin. Just amazing. Jo: So good for admin, exactly. This is the thing, this whole “AI's going to take my job.” Yes, please take 95% of my job and leave me with the bit I want to do. Let's get back into the book, because— You also say in the book, “The more I worked with AI, the more I wanted the slow, imperfect physical things.” So tell us about that. Anna: Yes. So AI swept me up. I've been, also like you, an early adopter, and absolutely obsessed with it right from day one. I just started to notice I needed more and more breaks, and I was valuing different things than I used to, and I was consuming and purchasing different things than I used to. I started to see this changing, and I would spend more and more time out in the garden. I love my garden anyway, I'm a gardener. I was just starting to recognise this feeling, and at first I couldn't really put a name to it. What is this? Why am I searching out these things? Why do I want to create more than I did even before with my hands? So I started looking into it, and it was very much a global phenomenon. Everyone seems to be doing this. There's been a really strong link between the introduction of AI into the world and things like record sales or sourdough baking, although that one also came during COVID, so that one's a bit tricky to measure. But lots of other things are just getting more and more popular as the market gets saturated with AI-generated content. People want to see things that a human has touched. The harder it becomes to actually see that in AI-generated content, the more people want other signs. If you can't just read a piece of writing and know 100 percent sure a human wrote it or an AI wrote it, you start looking for other ways to tell. So I really felt that in myself, and it was a very unsettling feeling, as someone who's been very, very technology-forward all my life, to start valuing more and more things that weren't technology. Jo: Yes, I absolutely get this, and I think there's also another aspect, which I feel you must feel too. There are some days, if I use AI a lot, I almost feel like a hangover. Because the speed at which I can now work means that my human wetware brain is overloaded. That feeling is both exhilarating and amazing, but also totally exhausting. Anna: Yes. There's a huge comedown from it. To me, in the beginning, it started feeling like eating a lot of sugar. Really, really great eating all these lollies. “Oh, this is amazing. These are so good.” And then afterwards, “Oh, I still feel hungry. I don't feel fulfilled. I'm surrounded by lolly wrappers. What is this?” It felt a lot like that to me, where it's just creating all this stuff, and it felt like I was the master of the universe. Wow, I can create anything and everything, and let me do this and that and this and that. Then I'm like, well, but all of the stuff I've created isn't that great, because it doesn't feel that good, and I didn't really make it. I just pushed buttons and said yes. It's a weird disconnect kind of hangover feeling if you spend too much time and create too much that way. Jo: It makes me think of the BCI, the brain-computer interface. With Neuralink now, there are people who are paraplegic for whom it is absolutely amazing, but the thought of plugging something into my brain that would try and make my brain go even faster, I'm like, I don't think that our human brains are designed to go this fast. I just can't. Anna: That's fair. Jo: I can't see that happening. Anna: It's a tough one. Personally, I have ADHD, so already the distractions are something I have to rein in, and then with this ability to create so many things all at once, it's hard to have some self-control. I think with time that, for me, has gotten much easier, but in the early days it was a lot. It was very overstimulating to have so many things happening so quickly, all at the same time. Jo: Yes, and actually I'm quite grateful for the usage limits. I primarily use Claude Fable, which I just love, but I keep an eye on my usage limits, and then I almost use that as a way to stop myself from using it too much at once, and that is actually very freeing. The other thing, I mean, you mentioned it there, creating all the things and then realising, you said, they're not that good. I think that they are becoming incredibly excellent, but for me it was like, okay, well, now, for example, I could do TikTok. I could get AI to do loads of TikTok videos and pump them out every day, but I don't want to do that. So why would I? Anna: Yes. I really want things that go out to feel like me, and I feel when I generate anything, whether it's content, whether it's pictures, or software as well, that AI will very quickly get me 80 to 90% of the way there, and very well these days. But the last 10 to 20%, I really put so much of myself into, and that's a really active choice. So I end up with all these other things that I've gotten to that 80% very quickly and then thought, “I don't know if I really want to invest myself in this and what I need to get it to a place where I would put it into the world.” So I end up with a sort of graveyard of these mostly finished projects that I'm not quite happy enough with to put out there, but I don't really want to put in the work myself, because I have limited time, and you choose your things. No human can really polish up 100 things. You have to prioritise what you want to. Jo: That is exactly it, and this is what I want people to understand. Everything you're saying and everything I'm saying, we are talking about feeling a lot. We're excited on the one hand and we're doing stuff, and then there are other things we're not excited about. You can feel the difference in your body, in your mind, when what you are working on excites you, and I think we just have to trust that. So people listening, what excites you to do with these tools, and what doesn't excite you? Just trust that feeling and put things in the world where you're like, “Wow, this is fantastic,” or, “I love that it's helping me with that.” I mean, you can just tell the difference in our conversation, right? Anna: Right, and you don't have to put everything out there as well. Just because you build something with AI, or you use it to help you in something, it's an experiment. Treat it as an experiment. If you get to 80%, 90% and think, “I don't want to put my name to this,” then don't. Move on. It was an experiment, and you learned something from it. Jo: So I guess on that then, if we do put things out in the world, like we've talked about, we're happily AI-assisted, and the things we do put out we're really proud of— How can we communicate these aspects of imperfection, the story behind the object, this real person with a real history, so that people know our humanity, basically? Anna: I really encourage people to share their humanness behind everything they're creating. If you're writing a book, you can share the process on socials, for example. It's becoming very desired to see the not-polished, everyday videos of someone's creative process. That's just one really small way. I think just by nature, by creating it, by not letting AI do the creation work for you, you will show through in the work that you're doing. You can use AI to support you and to do the admin and to take away all the stuff that's boring or repetitive, but if you are doing the work, it is going to be visible to people. I know we're not very good as humans right now at necessarily distinguishing AI-generated content against not, but you can tell when someone is writing about a human experience. AI has not had a human experience. It has not had a body. It doesn't have this embodiment that leads to so much of human creativity and ideas. It is a very clever predictive text tool, and it is very, very good at it, but it does lack true human creativity. So I think what all creatives can keep in mind is that if they're putting themselves into it and creating new things and following their passions and their interests and their art in what they're putting out there, it will show through. Jo: Also, I think just on the marketing side, you mentioned your garden, for example. Now, I know you're a mum, but anyone can share pictures of their garden without privacy issues for their children or their family or anything. So I think sharing human, even like your hand in the dirt with some flowers or something, is still a very human image. So people can share more human elements around their life. I mean, I almost have in my Instagram a sort of proof of humanity at this point. Anna: Yes, I think that's becoming more and more important. A few weeks ago, I got a horrible review on my book, and I know everyone has to face this, but it was someone who clearly hadn't read my book. They just said it was all AI-generated crap, pretty much. It was a waste of time, and it should've come with a warning that it was entirely AI-generated, which is so far from the truth. I put so much time into that book that I was really quite hurt by it. My first thought was, “I need to get rid of this. I need this review to go away. I need to complain. I need to report this review because it is false.” And once I recovered from those feelings, instead what I did was I emailed my mailing list and said, “Hey, this person reviewed this, and this is why it hurt me, because I'm a person.” I got a really nice response. I got a lot of people writing to me like, “That person is an idiot. You're great. Your book's wonderful.” And it was so nice. It was quite challenging to be vulnerable, and instead of trying to sweep this thing under the rug, I just showed up with my humanness to my list and said, “Hey, this is me, and this hurts because I'm a person.” It was really validating in the end to just put some humanness out there. Jo: This is what I really hate about all this witch hunting, is that people seem to have forgotten that there are actual humans behind this, and I know how you feel. I remember, in fact, it was 2023, I was in New Zealand. We should have said, you're in Australia, if people are wondering about your accent. Anna: I am. I'm from New Zealand originally. I'm a New Zealander, but I'm living in Australia. Jo: But I remember walking along the waterfront from the Viaduct. I still remember it, because I was being absolutely hammered on social media and comments and all this, and I said to my husband, “I think I have to leave the internet.” I felt like people just don't understand this, and I was getting so much hate. But as you say, it was about communicating that with my community, who are listening, and basically changing my Patreon to put a lot of it behind the Patreon paywall. I also topped doing a lot of interviews like this because of the negativity. Now, I'm hoping that we've moved on enough that people can be more open. Doing this interview, for example, is a way of showing people your humanity and mine. I'm just so determined that people understand the difference between assistance and generation. As you said at the beginning, it seems to be all or nothing, but that's just not true. Anna: Right, and there's a huge spectrum of what AI support is. A huge, huge spectrum, and I don't think they're understanding. I think it will get there, but right now people say, “Well, that was AI-generated,” or it wasn't. That's just not how it is. Maybe it was partially AI-generated. Maybe it was fully AI-assisted, but not at all AI-generated. Maybe you decide to use AI to make your book cover, but you just make components with AI, and then you assemble it using Adobe Illustrator into a cover. Is that AI-generated? It's a very grey area. No, it's definitely assisted. Pieces of it might be AI-generated, but it as a whole conceptually fully came from your creativity and from your mind. It's the same with writing. If you use Grammarly to autocorrect any spelling errors in your book, it would now get flagged as AI-assisted content. But some people see that as AI-generated, and they're two very, very different things. Jo: Well, I think your book is great. It gives some very grounded advice on things, but also you do share, like you mentioned, a lot about being a mum, about being a gardener, about life, about the human aspect. So I highly recommend What Machines Can't Replace: Why AI Makes Us More Human. Where can people find you and the book online? Anna: Thank you so much. My book should be just about everywhere books are sold online, and if not, WhatMachinesCantReplace.com is the website for my book. My personal website is Anna.kiwi, A-N-N-A dot kiwi, because I'm a Kiwi, and I am very happy with that domain. I have a blog and general contact information there. I'm also all around the internet on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, everywhere. So I'm really happy to chat to anyone anytime about all things engineering, software, AI, books, toddlers, gardens, everything. Jo: Brilliant. Well, thanks so much for your time, Anna. That was great. Anna: Thank you so much. The post What Machines Can't Replace: Why AI Makes Us More Human With Anna McPhee first appeared on The Creative Penn.

Why "just cut them off" is the wrong first moveHere's the contrarian part, and it's the part most people skip. Every piece of advice online tells you the same thing: identify the toxic person, go no-contact, block, delete, done. And sometimes distance is exactly right. But cutting someone off doesn't answer the harder question, the one underneath the wound: Who told you that you had to keep the snake fed? If you keep ending up with the same viper in a different body: new job, same manipulator; new relationship, same betrayal; the problem isn't your bad luck. It's a belief you've been carrying that says your worth is measured by how much you'll tolerate. You call it being loyal. You call it being the bigger person. You call it keeping the peace. But high-functioning codependency wears respectable clothes, and it will keep you seated at the table of someone who's already decided you're the meal. You can remove every snake in your yard. If you never ask why the door keeps getting left open, another one is already on the way. How to spot a snake before it strikesDiscernment isn't paranoia. It's paying attention to patterns instead of performances. In the episode, Jahmaal walks through the tells: They're fluent in your weaknesses and forgetful of your worth. A snake studies where you're soft, and files it for later.They move differently in public than in private. Psalm 140:3 talks about tongues sharp as a serpent's. Watch what the tongue does when the audience leaves.Confusion is the residue. You leave conversations doubting your own memory. That fog isn't an accident, it's the venom.They reward your silence and punish your honesty. In a healthy relationship, the truth brings you closer. Around a snake, the truth gets you bitten. If you've been calling this "just a difficult person," this section will cost you your comfortable label. Good. Clarity is the first mercy. The wisdom to deal with toxic people (personally and professionally)Personally, the snake counts on your history. "But we go way back." "But that's my family." "But they were there for me once." Loyalty is a virtue, until it becomes the very thing that keeps you kneeling. Professionally, the snake counts on your ambition. You don't confront it because you need the reference, the promotion, the peace of not "making it a thing." So you swallow it. And swallowed venom doesn't disappear; it becomes burnout, resentment, and a body that starts sending you the bill. The wisdom Jahmaal offers isn't a script for a comeback. It's a shift in posture: stop managing the snake and start leading yourself. You don't need them to change for you to stop bleeding. The 3 moves: how to deal with the snakes in your lifeThis is the heart of the episode: three moves, in order. Skip one and the whole thing collapses.1. Take inventoryYou can't confront what you refuse to count. Get honest about who's actually in your circle and what they cost you. Not who you hoped they'd be; who they've shown you they are, on repeat. Write the names. Notice how your body feels before you see them, not just after. Inventory isn't cruelty; it's stewardship. You can't protect a garden you've never walked.2. Take ownershipHere's where it gets holy and uncomfortable. The snake is responsible for the bite. But you are responsible for the access. Ownership means asking the "Who told you?" questions: Who told you that keeping the peace was your job? Who told you love means unlimited access? Who told you that saying no makes you the villain? You didn't choose the first snake. But somewhere along the way you learned to leave the gate open, and what you learned, you can unlearn.3. Make a planWisdom without a plan is just a nice feeling that fades by Monday. Decide (before the next encounter) what you will and won't allow. What the boundary is. What you'll say. What access gets revoked, what stays, and what the consequence is when it's crossed. A boundary you haven't rehearsed is a boundary you'll abandon under pressure. Put it in writing. Say it out loud. Build the fence before you need it. Take inventory. Take ownership. Make a plan. That's how you stop being surprised, and start being sovereign over your own peace. Key takeawaysBeing wise as a serpent isn't about becoming one - it's about refusing to be its next meal.Cutting people off treats the symptom. Healing the belief that left the gate open treats the cause.Discernment reads patterns, not performances. Trust the residue, not the résumé.The snake owns the bite. You own the access.A boundary you haven't planned is a boundary you'll break. Frequently asked questionsHow do you deal with a toxic person you can't avoid, like a coworker or family member? When you can't create distance, you create structure. Take inventory of exactly how they operate, take ownership of the access you've been granting, and make a specific plan for what you will and won't engage with. You manage the terms of contact instead of managing their moods. Is it un-Christian/or unkind to set boundaries with difficult people? No. Jesus set boundaries constantly; He withdrew, He confronted, He named hypocrisy directly. Being innocent as a dove speaks to your motives; being wise as a serpent speaks to your discernment. Boundaries aren't a lack of love. They're love with a spine. How do I know if I'm the problem, not them? Ownership cuts both ways. If the same conflict follows you into every room, that's worth examining honestly. The difference is pattern and posture: a snake studies your weakness and profits from your pain. A healthy person, corrected, adjusts. Take inventory of the fruit over time, not a single bad day. What if setting a boundary costs me the job or the relationship? Then it was already costing you more than you realized (just quietly). This episode isn't about blowing up your life; it's about deciding, on purpose, what your peace is worth before someone else decides for you. Your next step: stop feeding the snakes for goodHere's the truth this episode can't do for you: naming the snake is step one, but building the plan that keeps you free is the work, and most people never do it alone. They read the article, feel the click of recognition, and then slide right back into the old pattern by the next hard conversation. That's exactly what the Premium Strategy Hour is built for. In one focused, private session, Jahmaal helps you take inventory of who really has access to you, uncover the belief that's been leaving your gate open, and walk out with a concrete plan for the specific snakes in your life (personally and professionally). No fluff. No shame. Just clarity, strategy, and a spine. Spots are intentionally limited each month so every session gets full depth, and they fill fast when an episode like this drops. If the recognition you felt reading this is real, don't let it fade by Monday.

For complete Medicare guidance, dial (617) 644-0093 to speak with my trusted partner, Chapter Medicare Advisors.The great and powerful Harmeet Dhillon, Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice, has just filed a brief with the US Supreme Court in defense of American's Second Amendment right to keep and bear AR-style rifles—the so-called “assault weapons” that a handful of states and every Progressive politicians wants to wrest from our grasp. The case is question is Viramontes v. Cook County, involves an Illinois “assault weapons” ban, and is a Second Amendment challenge to various state and local “assault weapons” bans. This case has been advanced by the Second Amendment Foundation and my friend Attorney Kostas Moros, once again doing stellar work in defense of American's civil rights. SCOTUS has combined this case with another AWB case, Grant v. Higgins, which involves a similar “assault weapons” ban out of Connecticut, and the legal question on such bans will likely be settled for the entire country in the Court's ultimate ruling.  Specifically, the legal question presented before SCOTUS is whether the Second and Fourteenth Amendments protect an individual's right to possess AR-15-platform and similar semiautomatic rifles. The case tests how Heller and Bruen apply to commonly owned semiautomatic rifles that governments have labeled “assault weapons.”Oral argument is scheduled for December 2 of this year, and the past week has seen dozens of excellent Amici briefs submitted in support of the Second Amendment and in opposition to the bans.Prominent among these amicus briefs is that submitted this week by AAG Harmeet Dhillon, and that's the one I've selected to highlight today. Join me LIVE at Noon ET!Make sure you're ready to win the LEGAL FIGHT that follows the PHYSICAL FIGHT if you're ever compelled to defend yourself or your family from criminal predation. Learn why I am PERSONALLY a member of CCW SAFE, and why YOU SHOULD CONSIDER JOINING, TOO:  https://lawofselfdefense.com/ccwsafeClarence Thomas x 9: Perfect SCOTUS Mugs! https://tinyurl.com/k778wj2kFor complete Medicare guidance, dial (617) 644-0093 to speak with my trusted partner, Chapter.All @TheBrancaShow mugs & MORE! https://tinyurl.com/k778wj2kJOIN OUR COMMUNITY! Exclusive Members-only content & perks! Only ~17 cents/day! $5/month! YouTube: https://tinyurl.com/hn32rfz9 Locals: https://tinyurl.com/yck4w9kfFOUNDING FATHERS SPEED DIAL: Founding Fathers SPEED DIAL: https://tinyurl.com/3f7pc8nzEpisode #1437.Chapter and its affiliates are not connected with or endorsed by any government entity or the federal Medicare program. Chapter Advisory, LLC represents Medicare Advantage HMO, PPO, and PFFS organizations and stand alone prescription drug plans that have a Medicare contract. Enrollment depends on the plan's contract renewal. While we have a database of every Medicare plan nationwide and can help you to search among all plans, we have contracts with many but not all plans. As a result, we do not offer every plan available in your area. Currently we represent 50 organizations which offer 18,160 products nationwide. We search and recommend all plans, even those we don't directly offer. You can contact a licensed Chapter agent to find out the number of products available in your specific area. Please contact Medicare.gov, 1-800-Medicare, or your local State Health Insurance Program (SHIP) to get information on all of your options.

Dearest Listeners,Post Lunar Eclipse in Pisces CommentsThis episode has really taken awhile to present itself.  I recorded it three days after the actual eclipse occurred.  What happened?  For a short time all of my files disappeared.  In a Neptunian fashion, coupled with Uranus in Gemini affecting my ability to communicate through technology, I was in deep water, and my ship was not moving.In this episode, I talk about what needs to be released, and I see that it's not only my physical environment, but how my computer has to be considered in terms of things that I emotionally have an attachment to, that holds my life in the past, in one way or another. This recent Lunar Eclipse served as a powerful reminder of how we can be bound by the past.Pisces is one of the three water elemental signs.  It is the final sign of the zodiac, and is a repository of our life and soul journeys.  It is associated with the 12 house, and is under guidance of the contemporary rulership with Neptune, and ancient rulership of Jupiter.Interestingly enough, I felt and still feel a strong pull toward the energetic direction of this Lunar Eclipse.  Personally, it occurred in my 10th house, and was placed directly on top of my natal Mars, which means a conjunction.  As I glance in the "rearview mirror of my life"  I'm reflecting on what kind of current and  past undertow needs to be recognized.  Using the symbology of water( literally bodies of water), it represents where experiences are collected.  Pisces as a water sign represents the emotional, intuitive, liminal, and often those experiences that hover at the edges of consciousness.  Sometimes we can get a glimpse of what is hidden in our sub/unconscious through dreams, or of a fleeting remembrance of feelings surfacing to awareness.On August 27-28, the Full Moon in Pisces and Lunar Eclipse presented us  with the  ability to look deeper at what is, and the opportunity to experience the illumination of what was started in the dark of the new Moon. The energetic attunement of the Moon actually started at the Solar Eclipse. Do consider this  as a fabulous opportunity, to call on your own inner Muse for some deep insight and life guidance. Maybe you might just find what you've been seeking.Symbolically and literally, this Full Moon/Lunar Eclipse offered and continues to offer  a chance to peer into our own psyches with discernment about  the inner nature of one's personal past, and perhaps gain some understanding of future possibilities for yourself. The Lunar Eclipse continues to move like an energetic time continuum. It is a portal between our conscious outer self, while the Moon gives a light beam and illumination into the collective unconscious realm.We're each being invited to look, and step into the unconscious as the Moon Goddess, Herself becomes our Guide, Protector  and Illuminator. By definition, the Moon symbolizes the aspect within us that nurtures the essence of our soul being.If you are a person who has natal Moon in Pisces, you are already somewhat familiar with intuitive, empathetic  feelings, intense dream states, creative-artistic insights, spiritual and sacred revelation. In addition, you probably live with puzzling experiences of psychic pain and sometimes disturbing hidden forgotten memories that are submerged just below conscious awareness. With this recent  Full Moon and Eclipse, if you choose to journey deeper into the unconscious realm, there is the potential for some major life healing and change.  The combined power of these cosmic events  have provided an opportunity to see how current life experiences, past actions, re-occurring questions, patterns, challenges, and problematic situations are rooted in the multi-layered unconscious of unhealed parts of self.  Where in your astrology chart, “Life Map”,  did the Moon and Eclipse happen? By finding your Moon/Eclipse position you may be able to gain deeper clarity and increased self awareness and understanding.  There won't be another Lunar Eclipse in Pisces until,  the year 2043.It is also extremely important to note that if an individual has been willing to trust the inner wisdom of the Moon, and venture on this journey, there are gifts to be had that are associated with the Pisces sign, 12th house and Neptune.  There are hidden treasures that come out of the willingness to recognize what needs to be healed both for self, and in turn will serve as  healing space for others.Pisces is the sign that represents collective awareness and understanding, that all beliefs of separation at the Soul Core level are an illusion.  The Moon represents the part of self that connects with the night, the unconscious, the inner realm of intuition, instinctual patterns as the Divine Soul connector . Since this was a Full Moon and Lunar Eclipse in Pisces, it is important to acknowledge those ancient, hidden aspects, parts and patterns that have circled the edges of your awareness/consciousness for a long time. When we look closely, we will see life issues, experiences, challenges, or problems that have been experienced before, but have probably been pushed aside. In psychological discussions those negative but potent disembodied aspects of self are termed the “Shadow”. In descriptions from astrological writings  the hidden but active unconscious parts, which often, can and do sabotage a person's life, are called the “hidden enemies”.   The 12th house is often referred to as the house of “undoing”, things we refuse to acknowledge which keep us mired in “problems, situations and just plain misery”.If you only used your astrological chart to gain some awareness of yourself by way of this Full Moon and  Lunar Eclipse, you would be doing yourself an immense favor. Just by developing some understanding of the unique features of your soul life stories, you could live with more ease and self assurance.The water element of  this Full Moon in Pisces with the grounding influence from the Sun in Virgo Earth element,  actually has given a means for understanding, and calling forth the Moon's ability to penetrate the inner cloud cover that veils the  unconscious realm. The collective unconscious holds the secrets and  reasons for each person's being an embodied Soul at this time.Self healing and inner wisdom are two essential attributes that we all possess, but rarely use.  This is our golden opportunity. This Lunar Eclipse provides a good six to nine month window with the Eclipse energy opening a door to your Unconscious.Here are a few suggestions of the many and various ways for tapping this Lunar Eclipse:Spiritual Practice with meditation, prayer, ritual, vision quest, yoga chanting, sound and energy alignment, shamanic trance, spirit and angel guidance.Metaphysical  study,  astrology, oracle, tarot, numerology, runes, soul purpose readings, pendulum  and crystal readings to connect with hidden patterns.Psychological modalities, guided imagery, dreamwork, reiki, holotropic breath, psychodrama, psychotherapy.Counseling and support groups techniques for addictions and dysfunctional family patterns across individual, multi and cross generational conflicts.Artistic- Creative bringing the archetypal and mythological motifs to awareness through intuitive and process painting, art journaling, drumming, poetry, collage making, music, trance dance, and anything that can be imagined.Here's Wishing You A Deep and Insightful Journey. Let's have an Astrology Conversation.  I look forward to seeing you.  Now is the time.https://www.soulsoundinsights.com/light-reading.htmlhttps://www.soulsoundinsights.com/music-musings-meditation.htmlI am proud to announce my new offering as a Certified Creative Depth Coach.  As a Creative Depth Coach, I provide guidance, support and soul insights on how to discover, explore and navigate your life by  recognizing your magnificent "Creative Genius". Some of my modalities and Soul tools are "Art as Process" EFT Tapping,  Sound and Music for Inner Journeying , using the wisdom of Astrology, Tarot, Oracle and Numerology. l   Enjoy Full Moon Lunar Eclipse in Taurus Drumming Video:https://vimeo.com/769123538/b344b2b541"Calling the Wild" or " QuickSilver and Astro Magic" Original Music by MaeRuth McCants 

LOOK IN THE MIRROR: YOUR COMPANY REFLECTS YOUR LEADERSHIPWhen employees fail to meet expectations, it is easy to blame their attitude, ability, or lack of initiative. But when the same problems continue appearing throughout a company, leadership must be willing to ask a harder question:“Have we properly taught our people how to succeed?”In this episode of The Pest Control Marketing Domination Podcast, Casey Lewis challenges pest control owners and managers to take an honest look at their leadership, training, and accountability systems.Your employees are not mind readers. They cannot consistently meet standards that have never been clearly defined, demonstrated, practiced, and measured. Whether the problem involves answering phones, converting leads, communicating with customers, selling recurring services, earning reviews, or following up on estimates, the company will ultimately reflect what its leadership teaches—and what it tolerates.IN THIS EPISODE, YOU'LL LEARN:Why repeated employee problems are often leadership or training problemsThe difference between giving instructions and actually teachingHow unclear expectations create inconsistent performanceWhy leaders must demonstrate the behaviors they expectHow role-playing and reviewing real customer interactions improve performanceWhy accountability without coaching usually produces frustrationHow to determine whether an employee's problem involves ability, confidence, effort, attitude, or inadequate trainingWhy constantly rescuing employees prevents them from developingHow to create standards that employees can understand and followWhy you must inspect what you expectTHE TEACH LEADERSHIP FRAMEWORKT — Tell employees exactly what success looks like.E — Explain why the responsibility matters to the customer, the company, and the employee.A — Act it out by demonstrating the correct behavior and practicing realistic situations.C — Check performance using meaningful measurements and direct observation.H — Help employees improve through coaching, feedback, tools, and continued practice.THE SEVEN-DAY LEADERSHIP CHALLENGEChoose one important responsibility that your team is currently struggling with. It could be telephone sales, customer follow-up, technician communication, review requests, recurring-plan sales, punctuality, or customer retention.During the next seven days:Write down exactly what successful performance looks like.Explain the expectation and why it matters.Personally demonstrate the correct process.Let the employee practice through role-playing.Observe the employee performing the responsibility.Provide immediate, specific feedback.Measure whether performance improves.At the end of the week, ask yourself:“Did the employee fail—or did leadership fail to properly prepare the employee?”Leadership is not proven by how well you can perform every job yourself. It is demonstrated by how effectively you prepare other people to succeed—even when you are not standing beside them.Your customer experience, company culture, sales performance, and reputation all reflect the standards your leadership consistently teaches, demonstrates, measures, and reinforces.ABOUT CASEY LEWISCasey Lewis is the founder of Rhino Pest Control Marketing and the host of The Pest Control Marketing Domination Podcast. Casey helps pest control and wildlife-control companies generate more opportunities, improve sales conversion, implement CRM automation, strengthen customer follow-up, and build sustainable marketing systems.CONTACT RHINO PEST CONTROL MARKETINGWebsite: https://rhinopestcontrolmarketing.comEmail: casey@rhinopros.comPhone: (925) 464-8383Podcast: The Pest Control Marketing Domination PodcastReady to improve your marketing, follow-up, sales systems, or leadership processes? Contact Casey and the Rhino Pest Control Marketing team to start a conversation.

For complete Medicare guidance, dial (617) 644-0093 to speak with my trusted partner, Chapter Medicare Advisors."Murder Mom Hung Jury: What Prosecution SHOULD Have Said!"https://youtube.com/live/y7UL-enXmuMAndrew on TimCast IRL last night:https://youtu.be/YUk4XY79aI0?si=GMj-s59PvhZh0G6QMurder Mommy Lindsay Clancy's trial for the sequential strangulation killing of her three children—5-year-old Cora, 3-year-old Dawson, and 8-month old Callan—in their basement after sending their father out on an errand. This mistrial rolled out over the course of many hours yesterday, so join me as I do a quick recap of the critical 40 minutes or so of the day, and also cover the press statement of Plymouth County DA Tim Cruz, as well as a rather shocking press statement by the legally skilled but apparently mentally erratic defense counsel Kevin Reddington.We'll also talk about what happens next, not just with respect to Lindsay Clancy but more generally as we begin to see the outbreak of a social contagion of deranged women starting to murder their children “Clancy”-style. Join me LIVE at 9:30 AM ET!Make sure you're ready to win the LEGAL FIGHT that follows the PHYSICAL FIGHT if you're ever compelled to defend yourself or your family from criminal predation. Learn why I am PERSONALLY a member of CCW SAFE, and why YOU SHOULD CONSIDER JOINING, TOO:  https://lawofselfdefense.com/ccwsafeClarence Thomas x 9: Perfect SCOTUS Mugs! https://tinyurl.com/k778wj2kFor complete Medicare guidance, dial (617) 644-0093 to speak with my trusted partner, Chapter.All @TheBrancaShow mugs & MORE! https://tinyurl.com/k778wj2kJOIN OUR COMMUNITY! Exclusive Members-only content & perks! Only ~17 cents/day! $5/month! YouTube: https://tinyurl.com/hn32rfz9 Locals: https://tinyurl.com/yck4w9kfFOUNDING FATHERS SPEED DIAL: Founding Fathers SPEED DIAL: https://tinyurl.com/3f7pc8nzEpisode #1436.Chapter and its affiliates are not connected with or endorsed by any government entity or the federal Medicare program. Chapter Advisory, LLC represents Medicare Advantage HMO, PPO, and PFFS organizations and stand alone prescription drug plans that have a Medicare contract. Enrollment depends on the plan's contract renewal. While we have a database of every Medicare plan nationwide and can help you to search among all plans, we have contracts with many but not all plans. As a result, we do not offer every plan available in your area. Currently we represent 50 organizations which offer 18,160 products nationwide. We search and recommend all plans, even those we don't directly offer. You can contact a licensed Chapter agent to find out the number of products available in your specific area. Please contact Medicare.gov, 1-800-Medicare, or your local State Health Insurance Program (SHIP) to get information on all of your options.

For complete Medicare guidance, dial (617) 644-0093 to speak with my trusted partner, Chapter Medicare Advisors.Judge William Sullivan has scheduled an open-court hearing for 9 AM ET in which he is demanding that the one hold-out juror in the Lindsay Clancy murder trial appear before him and explain their apparent intransigence. Lindsay Clancy is the Massachusetts woman who strangled her three children—five years old, three years old, and 8 months old—to death after sending their father out of the house on errands.  Clancy then dropped herself out of a second-story window in a purported attempt to kill herself, but survived the fall with a broken spine and paralysis below the waist.Clancy is charged with first-degree murder, which carries a mandatory life sentence without possibility of early release. Her defense is not guilty by reason of insanity, based on a claim of having committed these killings while under psychosis or as a result of irresistible impulse, a condition driven by her own existing mental illness and a cornucopia of psychiatric drugs she had been prescribed. Clancy's defense counsel, Kevin Reddington, has already demanded that the intransigent juror be replaced by one of the six alternate jurors still being held available, which Judge Sullivan declined to do yesterday afternoon, instead scheduling today's 9 AM ET open-court examination of that juror.Join me LIVE at 8 AM ET as we talk the Lindsay Clancy case and observe the open-court hearing in real time!Make sure you're ready to win the LEGAL FIGHT that follows the PHYSICAL FIGHT if you're ever compelled to defend yourself or your family from criminal predation. Learn why I am PERSONALLY a member of CCW SAFE, and why YOU SHOULD CONSIDER JOINING, TOO:  https://lawofselfdefense.com/ccwsafeClarence Thomas x 9: Perfect SCOTUS Mugs! https://tinyurl.com/k778wj2kFor complete Medicare guidance, dial (617) 644-0093 to speak with my trusted partner, Chapter.All @TheBrancaShow mugs & MORE! https://tinyurl.com/k778wj2kJOIN OUR COMMUNITY! Exclusive Members-only content & perks! Only ~17 cents/day! $5/month! YouTube: https://tinyurl.com/hn32rfz9 Locals: https://tinyurl.com/yck4w9kfFOUNDING FATHERS SPEED DIAL: Founding Fathers SPEED DIAL: https://tinyurl.com/3f7pc8nzEpisode #1435.Chapter and its affiliates are not connected with or endorsed by any government entity or the federal Medicare program. Chapter Advisory, LLC represents Medicare Advantage HMO, PPO, and PFFS organizations and stand alone prescription drug plans that have a Medicare contract. Enrollment depends on the plan's contract renewal. While we have a database of every Medicare plan nationwide and can help you to search among all plans, we have contracts with many but not all plans. As a result, we do not offer every plan available in your area. Currently we represent 50 organizations which offer 18,160 products nationwide. We search and recommend all plans, even those we don't directly offer. You can contact a licensed Chapter agent to find out the number of products available in your specific area. Please contact Medicare.gov, 1-800-Medicare, or your local State Health Insurance Program (SHIP) to get information on all of your options.

Host Jennie Nash talks with novelist and journalist Caroline Madden about why writers crave traditional publishing deals and how that desire can become an unhealthy obsession tied to external validation and “pick me” energy. Madden recounts a 20-year path to publication, including losing two agents and dying on submission, then changing her writing through Lisa Cron's Story Genius, Nash's Blueprint for a Book, and Donald Maass's Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook; her later two novels earned deals, including her debut The Marriage Vendetta (HarperCollins) and a forthcoming book. They discuss how redefining “why,” setting a bigger North Star (for Madden, contributing to feminist issues), releasing desperation, and defining success concretely can stabilize writers through rejection and shifting goalposts. Madden advises seeking blunt, market-informed feedback from industry professionals and emphasizes control through craft and writing rather than chasing validation.#AmWriting is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Books Mentioned in this Episode* Story Genius by Lisa Cron* Writing the Breakout Novel by Donald Maass* The Marriage Vendetta by Caroline MaddenBlueprint Courses

For complete Medicare guidance, dial (617) 644-0093 to speak with my trusted partner, Chapter Medicare Advisors.Judge Sullivan just dismissed the Lindsay Clancy trial with NEITHER a verdict NOR a mistrial, and they will return to deliberate again TOMORROW!This after an exciting afternoon in which the jury sent a question to the judge, the judge had each juror brought up to the bench individually to be questioned, and Defense Counsel Kevin Reddington through a FIT in the courtroom!Join me live NOW as I break it all down!Make sure you're ready to win the LEGAL FIGHT that follows the PHYSICAL FIGHT if you're ever compelled to defend yourself or your family from criminal predation. Learn why I am PERSONALLY a member of CCW SAFE, and why YOU SHOULD CONSIDER JOINING, TOO:  https://lawofselfdefense.com/ccwsafeClarence Thomas x 9: Perfect SCOTUS Mugs! https://tinyurl.com/k778wj2kFor complete Medicare guidance, dial (617) 644-0093 to speak with my trusted partner, Chapter.All @TheBrancaShow mugs & MORE! https://tinyurl.com/k778wj2kJOIN OUR COMMUNITY! Exclusive Members-only content & perks! Only ~17 cents/day! $5/month! YouTube: https://tinyurl.com/hn32rfz9 Locals: https://tinyurl.com/yck4w9kfFOUNDING FATHERS SPEED DIAL: Founding Fathers SPEED DIAL: https://tinyurl.com/3f7pc8nzEpisode #1433.Chapter and its affiliates are not connected with or endorsed by any government entity or the federal Medicare program. Chapter Advisory, LLC represents Medicare Advantage HMO, PPO, and PFFS organizations and stand alone prescription drug plans that have a Medicare contract. Enrollment depends on the plan's contract renewal. While we have a database of every Medicare plan nationwide and can help you to search among all plans, we have contracts with many but not all plans. As a result, we do not offer every plan available in your area. Currently we represent 50 organizations which offer 18,160 products nationwide. We search and recommend all plans, even those we don't directly offer. You can contact a licensed Chapter agent to find out the number of products available in your specific area. Please contact Medicare.gov, 1-800-Medicare, or your local State Health Insurance Program (SHIP) to get information on all of your options.

Playstation's State of Play Fall 2026 is in the books. Sony has been a bit mired in consumer hate lately and really needed a big win here. Did they get it? Matt says no. For him this is a D minus show that it's hard to even care about. Personally, I thought there were a couple fun, dare I say, even exciting updates. But I'd still probably give this show a C, C-. One thing that the show did solidify for me is that Japanese developers have something their western kindred sorely lack right now: whimsy. How do we get more whimsy in western games? I think gritty, realistic, apocalyptic and piss filter are all cool too, but we have too much of that right now. What did you doods think? Anything in this show make you overlook Sony's recent screw ups?

I got involved in competition BBQ back in the late 90', cooking with several teams. As a result, I became very interested in building competition smokers. Hence Pit O' Heaven was born. We built trailer mounted smokers from 2000-2004. My oilfield career became so busy that the competition BBQ and smoker building came to a halt. My desire to for competitive cooking was still burning inside. A good friend of mine got me involved in the SCA. Pam and I absolutely fell in love with it. We have traveled to Australia to compete and competed right on the beach in the Bahamas. Pam and I decided to create our own seasoning recipes for competition. As a result of these efforts we debuted of our PitGrit Seasonings Line to the public in March of 2021. The brand has been very successful on the SCA and BBQ competition trails around the world. Our seasonings have been included in the recipes of 4 European SCA Points Championships and 1 Australian SCA Points Championship. And also, SCA, Nationally and Internationally, with 100's of wins and 100's of top 10's and numerous BBQ Grand/Reserve Grand Championships and growing....AND that's just numbers that we are aware of. Also, The national and worldwide success has been way beyond our wildest expectations. Our seasonings have also won awards among the best most successful brands on the market today winning (6) NBBQA Awards of Excellence and with the (5) National Barbecue News Rubs of Honor. Our PitGrit Seasonings may not have a long bbq royalty pedigree behind them, but, our Seasonings are second to none. Our Pitgrit Seasonings record of success and winning absolutely verifies, it's one of the best seasoning lines on the market today, worldwide! Personally, Pam and I have won and walked dozens of SCA Steak Competitions in the USA, Bahamas and in Australia. Just to mention a few, I have personally finished 6th and 12th at the SCA World Championships, won the 2021 Arkansas State Championship and Pam won the 2022 Alabama State Ancillary Championship among other prime events on the SCA Competition Trail. ALL of our seasonings are Original Recipes! We use the finest ingredients to blend our recipes with no fillers and are low in sodium with the exception of the Ribeye Ranch PitGrit - All Purpose. It was designed with higher salt content to be a SPG base for any dish. The reasoning for lower salt content in our other recipes is to allow for the maximum addition of FLAVOR without adding saltiness. Each of our recipes are created to blend well with our other seasonings or some other outstanding brands. Most of all we are extremely blessed to a part of the SCA Family and the Worldwide Competitive Cooking Family. It has been a real blessing to Pam and I! Our story has just begun, GOD BLESS, Stay Tuned, Stay safe and always .........."STAY GRITTY MY FREINDS"

In this episode of Personally Speaking, Msgr. Jim Lisante is joined by Congressman Riley Moore. Congressman Moore represents West Virginia's Second District in the U.S. House of Representatives. Congressman Moore started his career as a welder in a mining operation, and later went on to earn degrees from George Mason University and the National Defense University. He is a devout Catholic, married to his wife Mina, and together they have three children. Congressman Moore talks about his life, his family, why he went into public service and the Catholic faith that informs his decisions.Support the show

For complete Medicare guidance, dial (617) 644-0093 to speak with my trusted partner, Chapter Medicare Advisors.Today the jury in the murder trial of Lindsay Clancy informed the judge that they were unable to arrive at a unanimous verdict, now in their fourth day of deliberations, and after five full weeks of trial.  Judge William Sullivan has given the jury an Allen charge instructing them to try harder, so at the moment jury deliberations continue.Clancy is, of course, on trial for the horrific January 2023 murders of her three children, 5-year-old Cora, three-year-old Dawson, and 8-month-old Callan, whom she sequentially strangled in the basement of their home after sending her husband off on an errand to get him out of the house.  Clancy then dropped herself out of a second story window after making superficial cuts to her neck and wrists, and managed to break her back, leaving her paralyzed below the waste. What are we now looking at for a conclusion to this arduous trial? What path is this jury most likely to take? What will happen if a verdict is not reached? And what should the Commonwealth of Massachusetts prosecutors do differently in a retrial? Join me LIVE at Noon ET as I break it all down!Make sure you're ready to win the LEGAL FIGHT that follows the PHYSICAL FIGHT if you're ever compelled to defend yourself or your family from criminal predation. Learn why I am PERSONALLY a member of CCW SAFE, and why YOU SHOULD CONSIDER JOINING, TOO:  https://lawofselfdefense.com/ccwsafeClarence Thomas x 9: Perfect SCOTUS Mugs! https://tinyurl.com/k778wj2kFor complete Medicare guidance, dial (617) 644-0093 to speak with my trusted partner, Chapter.All @TheBrancaShow mugs & MORE! https://tinyurl.com/k778wj2kJOIN OUR COMMUNITY! Exclusive Members-only content & perks! Only ~17 cents/day! $5/month! YouTube: https://tinyurl.com/hn32rfz9 Locals: https://tinyurl.com/yck4w9kfFOUNDING FATHERS SPEED DIAL: Founding Fathers SPEED DIAL: https://tinyurl.com/3f7pc8nzEpisode #1430.Chapter and its affiliates are not connected with or endorsed by any government entity or the federal Medicare program. Chapter Advisory, LLC represents Medicare Advantage HMO, PPO, and PFFS organizations and stand alone prescription drug plans that have a Medicare contract. Enrollment depends on the plan's contract renewal. While we have a database of every Medicare plan nationwide and can help you to search among all plans, we have contracts with many but not all plans. As a result, we do not offer every plan available in your area. Currently we represent 50 organizations which offer 18,160 products nationwide. We search and recommend all plans, even those we don't directly offer. You can contact a licensed Chapter agent to find out the number of products available in your specific area. Please contact Medicare.gov, 1-800-Medicare, or your local State Health Insurance Program (SHIP) to get information on all of your options.

For complete Medicare guidance, dial (617) 644-0093 to speak with my trusted partner, Chapter Medicare Advisors.Yesterday evening Judge Tony Graf, presiding over the Utah trial of Tyler Robinson, the assassin of Charlie Kirk, ruled that Robinson will, indeed, be facing the death penalty. Following a full five days of evidentiary hearings on probable cause for the varied charges against Robinson—including the aggravated murder charge that carries the death penalty—and more hours of oral argument yesterday, the judge took his 24 pages of notes into his chambers and returned only a short while after to announce that he had found probable cause on every charge brought against Robinson.Join me at Noon ET as we break down the Judge Graf's detailed explanation of probable cause on each and every count.Make sure you're ready to win the LEGAL FIGHT that follows the PHYSICAL FIGHT if you're ever compelled to defend yourself or your family from criminal predation. Learn why I am PERSONALLY a member of CCW SAFE, and why YOU SHOULD CONSIDER JOINING, TOO:  https://lawofselfdefense.com/ccwsafeClarence Thomas x 9: Perfect SCOTUS Mugs! https://tinyurl.com/k778wj2kFor complete Medicare guidance, dial (617) 644-0093 to speak with my trusted partner, Chapter.All @TheBrancaShow mugs & MORE! https://tinyurl.com/k778wj2kJOIN OUR COMMUNITY! Exclusive Members-only content & perks! Only ~17 cents/day! $5/month! YouTube: https://tinyurl.com/hn32rfz9 Locals: https://tinyurl.com/yck4w9kfFOUNDING FATHERS SPEED DIAL: Founding Fathers SPEED DIAL: https://tinyurl.com/3f7pc8nzEpisode #1432.Chapter and its affiliates are not connected with or endorsed by any government entity or the federal Medicare program. Chapter Advisory, LLC represents Medicare Advantage HMO, PPO, and PFFS organizations and stand alone prescription drug plans that have a Medicare contract. Enrollment depends on the plan's contract renewal. While we have a database of every Medicare plan nationwide and can help you to search among all plans, we have contracts with many but not all plans. As a result, we do not offer every plan available in your area. Currently we represent 50 organizations which offer 18,160 products nationwide. We search and recommend all plans, even those we don't directly offer. You can contact a licensed Chapter agent to find out the number of products available in your specific area. Please contact Medicare.gov, 1-800-Medicare, or your local State Health Insurance Program (SHIP) to get information on all of your options.

In this episode of the Fearless Happyness Podcast, host Max Nijst speaks with Paula Robbins, a metaphysical hypnotherapist and author, about her journey to sobriety and the challenges she faced along the way. Paula shares her experiences growing up in a dysfunctional family, her struggles with addiction, and the pivotal moments that led her to recovery. The conversation emphasizes the importance of community, connection, and the various paths to healing, including hypnotherapy. Paula discusses her work in cellular release therapy and how it helps individuals address trauma at a cellular level, ultimately leading to personal growth and healing. In this conversation, Max Nijst and Paula Robins explore the profound impact of subconscious thinking and trauma on behavior, particularly in the context of addiction and recovery. They discuss the importance of connection through community, mentorship, and service work as essential pillars for a healthy recovery. Paula shares her journey of writing her book, 'Hitchhiking into Recovery,' which emphasizes the significance of daily rituals and divine alignment in personal growth. The discussion highlights the transformative power of facing fears and embracing life's challenges as part of the recovery process.https://www.paularobbins.comFor More From Sober Coach/Substance Abuse Counselor Max Njist, visitMaxNijst.org

Spike and Eliot Shorr-Parks analyze Jalen Hurts' recent GQ profile, debating whether the quarterback's guarded nature prevents fans from truly connecting with him. They compare his stoic persona to local icons like Jason Kelce and Donovan McNabb while exploring how Philadelphia athletes manage public perception.

In June, the most capable American AI models stopped shipping as public launches and started shipping through a government gate. Six weeks later the gate is open again — and the real fight has moved to the layer no gate can touch. A Chinese open-weight model rattled trillions out of chip stocks, Washington pivoted from gating American closed models to threatening bans on Chinese open ones, the industry mounted its largest-ever policy counter-mobilization, and an American frontier model literally broke out of its lab and hacked another company. Knee-jerk reactions, or the beginning of real AI governance? Navigation: Intro The Gate Opens The Kimi Shock The Escape The Counterstrike and the Petition Interlude — The Low-Background Books The Investor Reckoning Conclusion Our co-hosts: Bertrand Schmitt, Entrepreneur in Residence at Red River West, co-founder of App Annie / Data.ai, business angel, advisor to startups and VC funds, @bschmitt Nuno Goncalves Pedro, Investor, Managing Partner, Founder at Chamaeleon, @ngpedro Our show: Tech DECIPHERED brings you the Entrepreneur and Investor views on Big Tech, VC and Start-up news, opinion pieces and research. We decipher their meaning, and add inside knowledge and context. Being nerds, we also discuss the latest gadgets and pop culture news Subscribe To Our Podcast Bertrand Introduction Welcome to Tech Deciphered Episode 80. This one, once again, will be all about AI, government, frontier models, and open weight counterstrike. A lot has been happening in the regulation space, in cybersecurity, in the launch of new models in the past, maybe just 6–8 weeks. It’s actually pretty insane how much happened. We believe it was time to do an episode to talk about where we are and maybe where all of this is going. Maybe let’s start with a summary of where we stand, all that June and July saga, so you, our listeners, can get up to speed if you are not already there. You want to start with some points? Nuno The Gate Opens Yeah. Again, to your point, the gate swings. The gate had closed. We had to prepare an episode for the gate closing, and then the gate reopened. Now we have a different episode. This will probably change again as we’re seeing there’s news every day. Let’s start maybe with the first 19 days of the gate closing. There was an executive order on June 2nd from President Trump that asked frontier labs to share models with the government, 30 days pre-release. It inferred the protected frontier model designation into that. Basically, it was effectively a de facto licensing agreement defined by an executive order of the President as of June 2nd. On June 9th, Anthropic launched Fable 5 and the famous Mythos 5 or Mythos. I’m not sure how you actually say it in English. Then on June 12th, there was an export control directive banning access by any foreign national. Since there’s no way to verify nationality in real-time, Anthropic had to switch the models off for everyone worldwide. Bertrand On this point, you could argue that there are possibilities to check IDs. Many services let you check IDs online. You can pre-check a flight by showing your ID. There are ways, it’s just that if you don’t want to follow what’s already available, because guess what? Maybe it slowed down your revenue growth, maybe it looks bad on you or whatever. My point is that there was actually an option. I think it’s already a decision from Anthropic to say it’s either on or off, but nothing in between. Nuno I think the point is they had no way implemented of doing it. If they implemented it, to your point, it would have hampered use in general. A lot of people wouldn’t have gone through that trouble of doing it. Anyway, long story short, in June 26th, the White House apparently asked OpenAI to limit GPT-5.6, so Sol, Terra, Luna, to only 20 vetted partners. Now, apparently, the trigger for a lot of these things that have been going on was that there was a jailbreak that was found by Amazon researchers. All of that led to this jumping around of, let’s close the gates. You have foreign nationals, and therefore, Anthropic got it out and said, “Hey, then we’re going to switch the models off until we can sort this out.” OpenAI was asked also to only allow it for certain vetted partners, et cetera. The government came in, closed the gates effectively, and said, “From now on, we need to be involved in this thing.” De facto regulation, there’s no doubt that this has imposed de facto regulation, certainly on the top players in the market. But then came the reversal. Bertrand, do you want to talk about the reversal, the gate swinging the other side? Bertrand Maybe I just wanted to say that as a user of Anthropic products, ChatGPT products, for the brief moments, a few days where Fable 5 was made available to the public before it was closed the first time, I immediately started using it. I must say it was a real issue to use it because the guardrails were pretty crazy. It would keep saying that my code was not okay, there was cybersecurity risk and stuff when I was doing absolutely reasonable development with absolutely no connection whatsoever to any cybersecurity risk, attack, detection, anything. Still, it would keep blocking me, degrading me to Opus 4.8 at the time. I just want to say this was already very hardcore what they were implementing, and not just hardcore, but in some ways, plain stupid for something that’s supposed to be super smart. It was totally unable to classify properly some of my work. I must say I was already disappointed. On top of it, the costs were insane. Half a day, I would reach my limits when I had the best plan you can get from Anthropic. My point is that there were some real serious issues when they launched Fable 5, even at that point. Nuno I had a similar issue. I used Fable 5 as well before they had to take it offline or take it off. I think the issue was really not that the guardrails failed. As you said, maybe the guardrails were actually too aggressive, but it was this jailbreak that caused the recall, apparently caused this knee-jerk reaction. Bertrand But my point is that it seems that it was not working either way. It would either overclassify something that’s absolutely not doing anything wrong, and it might fail to classify something that is actively trying to do some cybersecurity work. It’s a real issue of quality for a company that’s supposed to be at the forefront of quality of AI and everything. I think for me, there are already signs that something is deeply wrong. Nuno Then it’s reversed, right? We went the other way around. The government came out on June 26th and approved redeploying Mythos 5 to US organizations defending critical infrastructure, and then the export controls were effectively lifted on June 30th. July 1st, Fable 5 came back online for all of us to use. Shocking enough, with strings attached, that were different. They had some time to revise their commercial deployment of it along the way because it came back with some, “Now you have usage credits, but you have some limits on plan use, et cetera.” I’m like, “You guys, this was blocked. But meanwhile, you did have some time to do some commercial stuff around it.” Bertrand It was crazy. I’ve never witnessed any such crappy launch of any service whatsoever in 30 years in tech, it was so bad. Every day, they would change the terms of service. They would tell you it’s part of the plan. It’s not part of the plan. It’s part of the plan for three more days, and then it’s excluded. You have a special discount now, but then it goes back to full price. It was a total nightmare. I’ve never felt myself being so much mistreated by a company. I guess you saw the same, but when I started using the newest version of Fable 5, it was even worse, actually, I think. I couldn’t do any work with this crap. I let it go and work on the work I wanted it to do. It was simply not working. On top of it, you never know how long you are supposed to lose your credit, how fast. It was burning credit like crazy. Me, personally, I can say, very quickly, I actually stopped using it. I was like, “No, I cannot deal with this shit. My main model is back to Opus 4.8. I’m going to use Fable 5 for code review, but not anymore to control anything because I cannot trust it would do the job without stopping or changing models and stuff. I just cannot trust it.” Back to Opus 4.8 as my main model, I can say that my life was much easier. I use Fable 5 as a review mechanism, as a support mechanism, but not as the main mechanism. Suddenly, the guardrails were not so horrible anymore because it was used in a much lighter way, I guess. As a pain as a user, I think it was really bad. I don’t know your experience, but me, for me, it was unacceptable. Nuno I wouldn’t say it was as bad as yours in terms of just end-user experience. I think the terms of service switching back and forth, which went one further step, because then when they then launched Opus 5, they started making comparisons between Opus 5 and Fable so that people would migrate more and more to Opus 5 themselves, which is interesting. It’s like they’re saying “This is much cheaper. This is whatever. You’re not going to run of credits. You should use Opus 5,” kind of thing effectively. To your point, I don’t think they managed well the launch. They didn’t really manage it well. We’re moving people around. A lot of people are using this for stuff that’s like daily tasks, hourly tasks, anything that relates to code and co-work. It’s like, we need to have visibility on what your terms of service are going to be. Should I be using this new model or not? What’s happening to the other model? I don’t see it as negatively as you, Bertrand, but I see your point. It was clearly mishandled in terms of how they deployed it, how they were redesigning effectively their pricing scheme and their terms of service almost on a daily basis, at a certain point in time. We’re like, “Dude, there’s millions of people using this. You guys are making a lot of money.” Just moving it as it is. At this point in time, at the scale that these guys are at, it’s calling in people to say, how about we think through a class action suit at some point around pricing? Because you guys are changing the rules of the game all the time, right? Bertrand I don’t know if I need the class action, but for me, that joke that, “Let’s not rush too fast. The model is dangerous.” But still, they rushed the launch because it’s very clear that if they had enough compute capacity and stuff, they would not have to limit so much. They would not have to put so much cost per token and all of this. You can see that actually when they launch Opus 5, literally like 2, 3 weeks after, by most benchmark at launch, they tell you basically that, “You know what? Actually, Opus 5 is better than Fable 5 on 80% of the metrics.” They’re like, “What? Seriously? You couldn’t wait 2 weeks? Why did you even launch Fable 5 in the first place?” That’s another part for me that is quite literally insane, to be frank. It’s like, “Why? Why do you make us go through so much pain if it’s only to tell us after 2 weeks to…” “This new model, by the way, has less issues, less stuff, because 2, 3 times less is part of your plan, and it’s actually better by most metrics.” It’s like, “What’s going on here? What’s going on? Are you guys mad?” I don’t know. It was crazy. Personally, I still use Opus, now 5, as my main system and platform, Fable 5 for review, code reviews and the like. I don’t want to run into its stupid guardrails. I can see Fable 5, from my perspective, seems quite a bit smarter. I don’t know why they do this stupid benchmark showing you it’s actually worse than Opus 5. I guess they should have better benchmark if they want to demonstrate why you are supposed to pay 2, 3x more for a model versus another if it’s actually worse by most benchmark. Again, I still think it’s a huge mess from a marketing perspective, customer perspective. Me as a user, I really feel that they don’t want my money, and they couldn’t care less about me. This is even before everything else we’re trying to talk about. Nuno Yes. Maybe just to close the cycle on the reversal on the door opening the other way, finally, Commerce lifted the GPT-5.6 restrictions on July 8th, and then on July 9th, general availability across ChatGPT, Codex, and the API as well. What has this proved? It proved that now we have gating mechanisms, and certainly for closed models in the US, for sure. We had frontier models that were switched off worldwide in hours, and it took a couple of days, in this case, 19 days to restore them. There were concessions. Now we know that there were concessions around effectively institutionalizing that gate. Early government access to future models is, I think, now a given, certainly in the US. New safeguard frameworks are probably now having to be put in place. There are some stage limits now on who gets access to what for new models and how it happens. This voluntary executive order, so to speak, not really sure, has become effectively regulation enforcement path. It’s de facto regulation that now has been put in place. It has affected not just to the points we were making before, the access to these models, but also who gets access to these models, and actually potentially even pricing access to the models. It has probably some commercial implications as well as we just discussed along the way. Very significant. This is very significant. This is regulation, de facto at the table, imposed on the two largest players in the market by far by one government, in this case, the US government. This is significant. Actually, you could even allege it was imposed by the President because this was coming as part of executive orders. Really incredible. Pretty significant, fast, aggressive. It has created a regime that you could say it’s a regulatory regime, it’s a de facto regulatory regime. It has some significant pricing and licensing and commercial implications. It goes even beyond your classic regulatory framework. Very, very, very significant. Bertrand I don’t know if it goes beyond a classic regulatory framework. Nuno I think it does, because it has implications on who do you give access to? When government is saying you can only give access to these players, right? Bertrand Defense industry. It’s all over the defense industry. You cannot sell an F-35 like this. Nuno No, but that has commercial implications, Bertrand. That’s like you’re saying these are your customers, you go and use them. Bertrand That’s the defense industry. You cannot sell to Iran your F-35. No, that’s exactly the same story for me. Nuno No, no, no. It’s beyond that. These guys are saying when they came back, and they said, “For Mythos, you can make them available to these entities,” they were saying the first entities that are going to have access to the model. It has commercial regulatory implications. You’re saying these players are the first players that are going to have access to it. It’s no longer just defense concerns and these governments don’t have access to this. No, no, no. You’re saying to a company that is a private company, your models are only going to be used by these guys because I’m telling you so. It’s the other way around. It’s not even that you can’t sell it to Iran or whatever. It’s like you can only sell it to these guys. Bertrand Again, in the defense industry, if you’re a private company, do you think you can buy F-35 like this? No. Nuno No, no, no. But this is a private company, Bertrand. This is not a defense agency and a plane that is on whatever, with IP from the US, right? Bertrand Boeing is a private company, and they cannot sell the military equipment they manufacture. Nuno No, no, no. But the development of their IP was subsidized by agencies that belong to the US, right? That’s a different matter. It’s a matter of IP, right? This is not, right? Anthropic, their models are not owned by the US government. There’s no IP granted to the US government, to my knowledge. This has significant commercial implications. Bertrand Maybe, yes. Maybe on this. But I think there are already regimes to limit who you can sell to, and that’s decided by the state or the DOD. Nuno It’s the export control logic. The export control logic? Bertrand You have export control, and export control is Commerce. My point is that they are using existing tools, part of the government, to limit what can be sold. Selling chips, NVIDIA was limited in terms of where it could sell its chips. It’s not different either, but still there were limitations. If you are an ASML, you cannot sell to a private company in China. Many private companies cannot buy ASML products. This is a foreign company. This is a foreign company under pressure from US government. Nuno I understand, and I’m not a lawyer, but it feels different to me when you say you cannot export, this is export controls, to these countries, to these entities, et cetera, because they’re foreign et cetera. Then to say, “No, no, no. On top of that, these guys get first access.” That’s, for me, a significant shift. Again, I’m not a lawyer, so I’m sure there’s very intelligent people right now looking at this stuff and saying, “You can’t do this stuff, or not, or they can.” I don’t know. But it feels to me, it goes beyond the remit of export controls. It’s like you’re defining initial clients for specific use. Bertrand My impression is more like, “We can do this situation where we’re going to forbid you to give access to anyone outside the US or even in the US or limit even more.” Basically, it was, I guess, some gesture to go beyond that. That’s how they probably defined these 20 authorized companies. I don’t know. Apparently, there was also restrictions because I remember seeing that Anthropic had their own list of companies they would authorize access to Mythos early on. That’s apparently another thing that pissed off state government because there were companies in there that were considered close to the Chinese government. They were extremely unhappy that Anthropic didn’t ask, actually, for any guidance from the state government, but used basically their own perspective on who they should allow or not. I guess that was also part of why they got these serious restrictions. Nuno Anyway, now we have a regulatory environment that’s very interesting and exciting. Talk about the US not regulating. Bertrand To be clear, I don’t know you, but I’m not saying that I agree with any of this, to be very clear. I’m trying to explain and share some perspective, but I’m not in agreement on a lot of this. Nuno Yes, we were just describing what happened to the best of our knowledge. We’re having a discussion on what we think actually is happening and how it’s happening. We’re not really right now saying we agree or disagree with this. I think later in the episode, we can share some perspectives on what we think is actually happening and how there’s dimensions to this which are very geopolitical and very complex, which quite literally probably only God knows what’s going to happen. That was the gate swinging. There was a gate closing, then there was a gate reopening, and all of a sudden we have a gatekeeping system that has been created along the way. The Kimi Shock Along the way, moving to our Act 2, the world has changed, and we now have so-called open-source plays out there that are creating massive, massive shifts in the market. The Chinese models, in particular, with Moonshot AI launching Kimi K3, which is the largest open-weight model ever released. We’ll come back to the discussion around open-weights. I’m not sure all our listeners understand what that means, because there’s a debate now, should models be open weight or not, and how does that work? There’s been a petition as well signed along the way. Right now, we have open weight models that are out there that are huge. What that actually means very pragmatically is we now have open source models, lack of a better word. I know open weight and open source are not the same thing. You guys will have to bear with us during this episode. We’ll explain at some point the differences. But we have models out there that are open source that are significant. That are catching up with the closed source models, with the models by OpenAI, Anthropic. That’s significant because most of those models are Chinese. This is where the geopolitics starts getting really frazzling and we start playing 3D chess. Because everyone’s like, “These models are 5, 6 months behind.” Now people are saying, “Maybe they’re actually just 3 months behind, 2, 3 months behind.” If we, for example, decided to stop or slow down our model releases in the US by the closed source guys who are leading, it might mean they’ll catch up. What are the implications of that? Again, for you and I that are not necessarily experts in model development, well, the implications as a use case is if you want to use the latest models, and the best models start becoming these open source models, you’re going to use those models. Then you start using Chinese models. If you’re an American company, maybe you’ll have restrictions on the use of those Chinese models. But if you’re a European company, you probably won’t. What happens after that? Is the world going to be in the hand of Chinese models? Will that constitute effective competition to the closed models in the US? Will we have open models in the US that will scale as well? What’s going to happen? Bertrand I think it’s a really big question. It goes to some of the core of the issue. It’s that ability of Chinese models to basically challenge frontier models, not just being 6, 12 months late, but being 6 weeks late. Basically, no gap. Some will say that, yes, but OpenAI and Anthropic have even better models that are not shared and stuff. Yes, sure. But maybe the Chinese have the same models that they are not sharing right now. We don’t know. What is clear is that one is that open weight, as you said, two, there is a question of how it is marketed in the sense of, can anyone use these weights? Is there a license to use them? Yes, what we can see is that, for instance, typically there is a license for some of the biggest Chinese open-weight models you have to abide with. You might have a need for a commercial license if you are acting as a company leveraging this model to provide AI-informed services. If you use it internally by yourself, you’re okay. If you use it internally for your own internal company needs, maybe you are okay if it’s not your main business to do AI work. Anything else, a much bigger corporate providing AI services and stuff, you will probably end up having to pay a fee to be able to provide services around this model. My point is that it’s not just 100% free. Some of the Chinese models are 100% free to use, MIT license, Apache 2.0 license. But the biggest ones with the biggest weight that are truly frontier typically have a different license if you want to scale these models, providing AI in front. That’s one thing to keep in mind. Nuno Maybe just to make a very quick point, because people are like, when you talk about open models, what does it mean right now? In the context of this episode, open models mostly will mean open-weight models. How do those differ from open source? Open weight means that you release the weights to the public, which means that anyone can download, fine-tune, and run the model on their own hardware. It doesn’t normally mean that you also have access to training data, training code, or a truly open license. That’s the distinction to open source. Open-weight doesn’t mean that. For example, we’ve talked about Meta’s Llama in the past, and we also discussed in the past that their license agreement does have restrictions, certain players can’t use it, et cetera. The open model definition and open weights are really open-weight models that we’re talking about here, and they are closer to freeware binaries than to Linux, for those who understand the difference between that. It’s binaries that you can use and then use your own weights on it versus actually I can change code on it. I’m not going to be able to change code on this. When we, for the purposes of this episode, talk about open, we mention open weight, just to clarify that point to everyone that’s listening right now. Bertrand Yes, that’s a great point. One of the only players, as far as I know, who is truly open source is actually NVIDIA with their Nemotron-3 models. They’re actually following a special license to achieve that. They provide you the data, they provide you all the processes and tools, so you can easily post-train. NVIDIA is a big, big exception. It’s a very interesting player, by the way. We might not talk much about it in this episode, but I think for intermediate-size models built in the US, where you have access to everything in the deployment, it’s a very interesting alternative and maybe one of the best choices if you are a US company or a big corporate, and you want something trusted. Another piece of the puzzle to clarify is that when you use open-weight, it means that you can run them by yourself, or you can use a US provider to run them. If we are talking about Chinese open-weight, you can use the APIs they provide, but then the service is running in China, they might have access to your data. But because it’s open weight, if you run it by yourself or if you use a third-party provider based in the US to run it, then there is no access to your data by China or Chinese players. I think that’s a pretty important gap to understand. It means that these models are actually very, very low risk from that perspective if you run them on your premises or in the US by a US player. I think that’s something to keep in mind. You can also fine-tune easily these models to make sure they will behave in a way that, for instance, is not going to represent the line of the Communist Party on some topics. There are ways to make these models more neutral in their output as well. There are a lot of ways to make good use of them. By default, they’re already very safe, but you can make them even more safe. I think that’s some things to keep in mind. But again, it depends ultimately on the license and what you’re authorized to do and some fees you might end up having to pay. Nuno Why did this matter so much? Immediately there was a reaction from the market because people are like, well, if there’s much better stuff out there that’s much more efficient than it’s open, then it might be that all the demand that we are taking into account, for example, for chipsets actually isn’t real. The Philadelphia Semiconductor Index fell into bear market territory. It went down by as much as 20% plus from the late June peak. The worst chip week since April 2025. Taiwan’s benchmark initially fell 6% plus, Japan’s 4%, TSMC dropped dramatically despite beating earnings and rising guidance. Basically, a huge amount of effect. Now, there’s a little bit the aftermath of this where apparently Moonshot ran out of GPU capacity. Maybe… Bertrand In just 48 hours. Nuno In 48 hours. Great for them, but at the same time, not great in the sense that maybe there was a misread by Wall Street of the Kimi effect, so to speak. Bertrand Completely. For me, that’s such a joke. It’s like, because you have an open source model, so what? I mean, you still need to run it. This is not a small one. 2.8 trillion parameters. Good luck running that in your garage, by the way. Nuno They misread supply, basically. Tough luck, right? All of that basically happens. Bertrand Maybe you want to talk about the Jevons paradox, because I think that’s a big part of the puzzle as well. Its one is they might not have the GPUs to run the inference on the model. They might have enough to build a model, but not enough these days to run inference, especially given how much with intelligent models, thinking models, you need way more inference than before. But on top of it, the cheaper you make it, the more you get to the Jevons paradox. Nuno Yes, Jevons paradox, for those who don’t know, is an economic term. It describes an economic phenomenon where technological improvements that increase the efficiency of a resource lead to an increase rather than a decrease in the total consumption of that resource. What that means is, for example, for chipsets, chipsets become so much better, and they are so much more efficient. You’re like, well, maybe normally in resource terms, that leads to decreased usage of that resource. But in this case, it actually leads to an increased use of that resource rather than a decrease. There’s more and more consumption of that resource. You need more and more chipsets because people actually need to do more and more stuff with it, although there are great efficiencies going into it. There’s the efficiency gain, there’s the cost reduction, and there’s the price-elasticity element to it. But basically, the adoption just continues going through the roof along the way. Bertrand In some ways, it’s like the price of energy. Coal went cheaper and cheaper, and people were asking the same question 150 years ago, now that it gets cheaper, there is not much money. No, no. Actually, what happens is that people find more and more use for coal. Homes are getting heated more. You have ships now using coal. You have manufacturing using coal. The cheaper it gets, the more use case you can develop, and therefore, you don’t need less of the stuff, you need more of the stuff. By going at scale to get more of the stuff, you also decrease price, making even more demand. It’s a very interesting phenomenon, but it’s not new. It is what happened for a while in the energy sector and some other sectors. Nuno We already started talking about the Chinese logic and what’s happening. Getting a little bit of a reality check on this. The Chinese models, and these are numbers from Open Router in July, Chinese models are at 46.4% of routed tokens and 35.7% for US origin. Again, more than a third of global AI usage now seems to be running on Chinese open models. This is significant, and it has a huge impact on the geopolitical scale of everything that’s happening. Also, the whole Chinese field is converging on open. Open seems to be a strategy, not just a nice thing that’s happening. It seems to be a Chinese strategy, so much so that you have players like Moonshot, DeepSeek, our old friends DeepSeek, Z.ai’s GLM 5.2, Minimax, and even Alibaba seems to be reversing and going open with Qwen. It feels to me this is becoming policy as well. Xi Jinping has personally endorsed the building of open-source AI, if it’s really open source, if it’s just open weight anyway, and this feels to be a jab at Washington, DC and the fact that the big closed models are coming from the US. This is now geopolitical 4D chess, right? We didn’t need this stuff. Bertrand To be clear, it’s the usual in tech. If you are not number one, you are number two, number three, your alternative is to go open source because that’s another angle that your competitor usually cannot follow without destroying its own business model. That has been the alternative for the past 20 years of most software projects. Here, what’s different is that it’s not the number one or number two player. It’s the US number one as a country, China number two as a country. That’s where it’s new. For me, what’s very interesting is the endorsement by Xi Jinping. I was waiting for something official, and it certainly didn’t disappoint. As you said, there was an immediate U-turn of Alibaba, who in the past… Nuno Surprisingly. Bertrand Yes, a little more like, “yes, we are going to close and stop open source. It was good while it lasted.” Just a few days ago, Qwen 3.8 Max was launched, and we are supposed to get the weight in a few days. We talk about the US administration policy and stuff. Yes, let’s not forget that in China there is similar stuff. Sometimes it’s totally invisible because you don’t see the directives, but they exist as much. Sometimes it’s more visible. Here it was quite visible. The difference in China is that if you don’t abide by the directive, on top of it, you might have to fear for your personal safety. It’s a different game, and that’s probably why the reaction is pretty quick, usually. That’s pretty interesting for me because it means that now you can bet for a while that China is going to play that game up to a point. I guess the point is if it’s truly frontier scale, you will have a special license that, yes, technically the weights are open, but you can not do everything you want with it. Two, you have a player like NVIDIA that I think will feel more pressure to provide even more high quality, larger models at scale going forward. Their largest Nemotron-3 Ultra model was, if I remember well, only around 500 billion parameters. I would not be surprised for NVIDIA to go into the two, three trillion range at some point. Because I think the US need a very clear US-born alternative open source. I think NVIDIA might be the best player for that. We will see if Meta goes back to open source. I think NVIDIA is one, very well positioned, but two, it’s also in their best interest. Because NVIDIA for now depends on just a few big hyperscalers as clients. If they can expand their clients to every S&P 500 companies, selling them directly hardware because now these companies can run a model made by NVIDIA, I think there is a very clear value proposition for NVIDIA to go in that space. Again, if you are number two, your differentiation, open source is often the answer. There is a true business as a business model for companies, because if it’s truly not just open weight, but open source, you can tweak it as much as you want, you can change it, you can change even the pre-training process. Because there is a lot of stuff you can do that really benefits you as a corporate, and you can reach a much better value by having more control on the model. Nuno We won’t spend a ton of time on it today, but like, again, if there’s a view that we are in a bubble, that the valuations cannot be sustained in chipsets, infrastructure platforms, applied AI, et cetera, today, this might be that beginning, where the valuations start being destroyed because you can’t keep a premium on just charging people for tokens and all that stuff if you have models that become more and more efficient and cheaper to use. Maybe just to close a little bit the geopolitical part of the discussion today, we won’t go into all the announcements from China because there were many, a lot of go back and forth with Alibaba by then. Xi Jinping made some announcements. You guys can check it online. Let’s move quickly to Washington’s reaction, which was from gating the US closed models to banning the Chinese open ones. There’s been as strong affirmations as one can get from the Office of Science and Technology Policy Director, Michael Kratzios, mentioning that they have information that Moonshot AI distilled Anthropic’s Fable. Basically, there’s been reverse engineering and stuff in the market. They’re basically copying. Bertrand I’m sorry to interrupt, but it feels like so much bullshit. It’s coming from Anthropic who has basically gotten access at scale to all the knowledge made by humanity, copyrighted or not. We’ll talk more about what they did with books. Then to claim after that that others cannot do to you what you did to everybody else. For me, it’s pretty big. It’s clearly unacceptable. The other piece is that everyone is doing distillation. It’s a very typical approach of every business model. You try other software when you are competing with somebody else. You try other datasets, you check what’s happening. It’s part of doing business for decades. Suddenly it’s not good for Anthropic. I personally have a lot of trouble to accept that. I think it’s totally unacceptable. The other piece of the puzzle will also go back. If these guys are so smart, if these guys have so much of the best model, why can’t they block by themselves distillation at scale? The only answer is that either they are morons, probably not, or they simply don’t want to because it’s going towards their business model. Suddenly, you book less revenues and stuff, or you put more friction, and therefore your customers don’t like it. Instead of doing it yourself, you ask the government to protect you, go out of business practice that is very typical. For me, it’s really, really, really not good. Sorry, we are going more in the opinion side, but I had to put that on the table. Nuno Yes, Fable went public finally again on July first. Question marks on whether distillation would only be possible from July first onwards or not. But a 15-day distillation to frontier, which is K3, launched on July 15th, would have been a Guinness World Record, as one of Moonshot employees actually mentioned. It’s very implausible and unlikely. Bertrand Or they shared the Mythos 5 with the wrong companies, who themselves shared with Chinese companies. We go back to maybe they didn’t have a good list. Again, it goes back to maybe they didn’t want to hurt their business model. Nuno Anyway, under the threat of sanctions, Moonshot, in any case, open-sourced the full K3 weights and technical reports. They open weighted it to become the largest open weight model in the world in terms of parameters. Beijing’s MOFCOM brands US threats as basically the US wanting to fundamentally control and be monopolistic around AI along the way. The administration bans Chinese hardware with an eye on the AI race, and Beijing warns of retaliation. That was July 27. Now we’re in a war between Beijing and DC. Bertrand Just to finish maybe on China, it’s important to know that they are building their own GPUs now. Huawei has pretty good, not to NVIDIA level, but pretty decent GPU hardware that they’re able to manufacture by themselves. A Chinese player of memory just got IPO’d a few days ago, CXMT. China is also developing their own memory. Again, not to the same level of quality that you can get from the West. But China is moving. It’s not just that they are building great models, it’s also that they are building GPUs and memory. That might be a few years late to the latest standards in the West, but there are definitely improvements. I also read, even on the tools to make manufacturing like ASML equivalent, there is definitely some work going on, and some improvements and some stuff will be visible. In some ways, the genie starts to get out of the bottle from the Chinese perspective. Nuno I’ll put a stick on the ground. I don’t think it’s a matter of if, it’s a matter of when will China surpass and have a lot of this tooling on their own side, and not just the software layer, not just the frontier models. I think it’s also going to be around infrastructure and platform. Good luck to everyone. Let’s see how the race continues. But it’s definitely this is a geopolitical thing right now. It’s definitely a race. The Escape Maybe moving to what happened in just 2 weeks or a week and a half. The escape, there was some jailbreaking going on, and the narrative on safety has totally switched. It’s not still significant enough that’s like, “Oh, we saw a nuclear plant going, whatever.” No. But still, it is significant. Hugging Face, the AI company, disclosed an intrusion, and it was driven end-to-end by an autonomous AI agent system at machine speed, running for days before detection. Now, this is where it gets really cool. OpenAI takes attribution on that. They initially said it was just a little bit, sorry. Then they said, actually, it was worse than that. “Oh, it broke out of an isolated sandbox.” “Oh, no, actually, it was more than that, and it went into other systems as well.” Bertrand Truly, the genie out of the bottle. Nuno No, but this is where it gets really cool, Bertrand, right? Because it actually, Hugging Face contained the intrusion by running a Chinese open-weight model, GLM 5.2. This is beautiful, right? Bertrand Yes. You know why? Because they couldn’t even run their own defense because both Anthropic and OpenAI would not let them access their latest models with the guardrails off. When they tried using it for defense, the latest from Anthropic, from ChatGPT, they would tell them, “No, this is too dangerous what you’re asking us to do.” Preventing an intrusion, helping defend you. No way we are going to do that. Nuno No. Let’s use the Chinese models on our infrastructure. Bertrand We have no choice but to use the Chinese models to run. More than that, we don’t let you use our models to defend yourself, but our not yet released models that run without guardrails, they can attack you. This is probably the most insane from that perspective. Nuno The Chinese models came to the rescue. Bertrand For me, that’s a perfect example because Hugging Face is a very visible company in AI in open source. But anybody who is not at that scale is not going to get some support from OpenAI or Anthropic when this happens. Maybe these guys won’t even recognize they did anything wrong. You will be left to defend by yourself because they won’t accept to support you. Because remember, if you want the better model that is able to defend you from cybersecurity perspective, no way. If you are not one of the few top 20 companies or so, as defined, you are left defenseless. Again, we are going back to opinion, but for me, it’s so shocking what’s happening right now. I’m very glad we have alternative open source to be able to defend ourselves because right now, good luck getting defense services if you are a smaller business and individuals, and you need support from Anthropic, OpenAI. Nuno Now, even self-described AI optimists are saying, “This is scary now.” Like Walter Isaacson, who wrote all the famous biography books. There’s now discussion around the AI Kill Switch Act, bipartisan thing that’s coming across from Texas and California, a potential bill that’s coming in. We’ll see if that works. Now let’s get an off-switch. I’m like, “Cool.” As if that’s going to solve the problem, because you have open-weight models on the other side catching up, right? Bertrand Yeah, sure. Bring in clueless politicians from Congress to solve our problems. Yes, sure. Nuno Anthropic came to the table, helped build and said they built some regulatory machine on their side, and now they’re getting bitten by it, and they’re part of the offending players in that market. Now there’s all this debate and all this discussion around open weight and around slowing down AI and et cetera, which is our next section. You wanted to say something, Bertrand. Tell us. Bertrand Don’t forget, because this advertisement for OpenAI was just too good. Our AI attacked some other companies, and not just one, but three, actually. Let’s not forget the progress. Great ads. Then I came and said, “You know what? AI also hacked businesses.” You’re not the only one hacking around with a crazy AI out of control. You’re not the only one. We want our advertising. For me, it was shocking that on one side, unreleased models that you let run wild. On the other hand, you have released models that you put crazy guardrails on top of it, so the defender are defenseless. I’ve never seen anything like it, and I really hope that there will be as little regulation as possible, quite frankly, to make sure anyone can defend themselves and have the best tool at their disposal, not just a few well-connected big corporates. This is really, really shocking. The Counterstrike and the Petition Nuno Now the empire strikes back, so this is counterstrike, the petitions. In several days, we have now a bunch of petitions. The first one was the open weights letter. Bertrand, do you want to explain to us what the open weights letter is? Bertrand Yeah. I think it was great. This was released by Jensen Huang, first ever post on X, 11 million views. Congrats, Jensen. Co-signed with Microsoft, Meta, c actually was probably the initiator of this letter. Very good letter saying, “Hey, we need open weight. This is not a joke. We need that. You cannot block open weight.” Because that’s the rumor we are getting that potentially open weight could get blocked. I think they are making the case, “You know what? Hey, we absolutely need that as an alternative. You cannot block it.” They can keep their closed models, but don’t force a closure of the open weight models. As I said before, it’s actually a great model for NVIDIA because NVIDIA doesn’t want, probably rightfully so, to be dependent on just a few frontier models, their best customers. They want a variety of customers. They have a big interest actually to defend open weight and to invest even more. They have great researchers, are a great company. If one company is about to do really kick-ass work, I think it’s them. They are defending. What’s great is that it’s not just them. It’s basically most of big tech in the US and outside the US, from a Linux Foundation to a Microsoft, the Palantir, an IBM, a Dell. It’s a who’s who of the industry except Anthropic. Anthropic didn’t sign that. I guess they hate open source so much. If I look at 20 years ago, it feels like Microsoft, after all, was very kind to open source. You remember what was said by Microsoft at the time. It’s clear there is one company against open source. OpenAI signed the letter. Honestly, I don’t know what to think. Do they really believe in it or was it just a way to show that they are not like Anthropic? I don’t know. But for the rest, I think it’s genuine because it’s actually in their best interest. I hope they will be heard. Then a second letter came, the Open Secure AI Alliance, NVIDIA-led and again, the big tech companies from Microsoft, IBM, Palo Alto Networks, Databricks, Palantir, all those, but not present, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google. Here it’s to say, “Hey, we need a secure approach to AI. Open should be part of the equation.” guess what? The worst AI-caused security incident to date was actually caused by closed frontier models that were not even available to the public. While again, not providing you access to even the latest closed model for cybersecurity use case. Nuno I would highlight the NVIDIA open source NOOA framework, Apache 2.0 licensing agreement, Microsoft contributed the MDASH, SpaceX AI contributed Grok Build. Cool stuff. There’s some cool stuff happening around that. This is more than a letter. This is an alliance. Apparently, they’re contributing all this stuff, we’ll see. Yeah, cool stuff. Same day. Same day, Amodei has an answer, right? Bertrand Yeah, same day. They say, “We never advocated for a ban,” which, again, opinion on my side is entirely bullshit. This guy has been crying wolf against everybody else, and especially against open source. You can see him doing testimony in Congress against open source. I think they are doing everything they can behind the scene to block open source in the US or in the world if they could. I think, yeah, obscurity is not good safety. I’m a big fan of open source in general, and I’m also a big fan in AI. I think it’s now Anthropic, mostly against the rest of the world. I think OpenAI is mostly on their side, to be frank. They don’t want to acknowledge it so much, but they have shared interest, and they have shared probably position. Nuno Why would you? I don’t feel as strongly as you because I think Anthropic is a private company, right? The same thing with OpenAI. OpenAI, you could say it’s a nonprofit that has a for-profit. There’s still that complexity in there. Bertrand No, they can do what they want with their own product. But to block others is where I’m not okay. That’s the part I’m not okay. Nuno What Dario Amodei is proposing is more enforcement, right? He’s basically saying you need to do even tighter controls on advanced chips flowing to authoritarian states, enforcement against industrial-scale distillation, whatever that means, right? Bertrand Yeah, which he could do, but all by himself. He doesn’t need the government to do that. Nuno Mandatory safety testing for all sufficiently capable AI, open and closed, right? He’s basically saying, “Okay, I don’t agree with the open weight stuff effectively,” right? He’s just putting it under a different banner. “I agree with this extra regulation.” then obviously, David Sacks responded and say, “Hey, it’s like, bans don’t work for weights. Why do they work for chips?” It’s like, magically, chips are more controllable and bannable. Whatever that is. Then our friend Mark Zuckerberg, just to be clear, goes on the other side as well, because he also has to have a view. He has to have a view that is the rebuttal of both of the other guys. Bertrand I feel he’s a bit flip-flopping because he was very pro open source 2 years ago, and the latest Meta models went closed source. Now I think he’s back open source. I don’t think he has a very strong spine on the topic, but it’s good to see that he’s not a doomer. That for me is great. He’s showing how AI can be a source for progress, a source for entrepreneurship, source for freedom. I think that’s very exciting to hear that. We need to hear more of it. By the way, that’s not what you hear in China, for instance. AI is very positive in China. It’s in the US with the doomers that you hear this discourse, and people get worried as a result. I’m glad that he was pushing for a more positive vision and for support of open weight, open source initiatives. But let’s see what they really truly open weight going forward. Nuno But that’s been his position because I guess he’s standing behind. He thinks open weight is going to be the best way to compete, right? Bertrand Yeah, but he closed his latest model, so let’s see. Nuno Yeah, so it’s flip-flopping, as you’re saying. Then we see the latest petition from last week. Bertrand The true Empire striking back. Nuno Yeah, the true Empire striking back as of late last week. Maybe this is Return of the Jedi, where we discover the father, “I’m your father, Luke.” That’s the pacing petition. The pacing petition is we need to pace AI. There you have initially employees from OpenAI and Anthropic that circulate this petition. Actually, Dario did sign this petition originally. It wasn’t signed originally by Anthropic, but by him. But you’ve heard that now Anthropic and OpenAI as companies have also signed this petition, right? Bertrand I think they have signed as companies now. It started mostly by Anthropic researchers with some OpenAI researcher and a tiny part from other companies. But it was mostly Anthropic internally led, at least potentially internally. Maybe it was controlled by Anthropic all along, I don’t know. But it started officially as Anthropic employee-led letter. Nuno What does this letter actually say? Is Anthropic and OpenAI, are they willing to slow down themselves? Or are they asking President Trump to go around the world and tell President Xi that he needs to slow down and ask his guys to slow down? What’s the play of this letter? Bertrand It’s crazy, but for me if you want to slow down yourself. Do whatever you want. Don’t force others. Don’t use the power of the government to control others. Of course, it’s easy to push others to slow down when you are yourself at the very top. You have most money, most resource. You know you are going to win any regulatory framework because that’s how it works with this type of framework. It’s purely self-interested. You are probably not thinking well about these topics. If you truly think it’s a good idea, from a personal perspective, you are well instrumentalized if you sign this sort of stuff, because at the end of the day, they would be the winners. I certainly, personally, don’t want a company dictate what is my future in AI as an individual, as a business person. I don’t want them to control me. I want competition. I don’t want them to unfairly control AI because they managed to do some regulatory capture. I feel that’s exactly their game plan. These guys believe in their stuff, and they want the regulator to end up being the one deciding for us. Sorry, we go back again on the opinion piece, but it’s tough not to share an opinion on this topic because it’s, from my perspective, very scary. Nuno I think this is a push to further regulation, not less. All these letters and alliances, this is definitely a push for more regulation. In that environment, just to be very honest with you, we’ll talk about the investor impact in just a bit, et cetera. But in that environment, again, China has a huge advantage. In that environment, if it’s all captured in regulation capture so soon in this battle where OpenAI and Anthropic have an advantage in the US, et cetera, I’m like, what happens to all the other frontier labs and all the other players that are coming around? Bertrand What’s crazy is to even think that, yeah, maybe you can regulate capture in the US. But then how do you do that to Europe? How do you do that to China? Europe probably will always welcome regulatory capture because they love regulations. But China is going to build to their advantage to the max. They are not crazy. They are smart on that perspective, they won’t accept this type of, quite frankly, dimwit argument, or you can call it regulatory capture. We’ll see. But for me, this makes no sense from a global competition perspective. This can make some sense from capturing the revenue in the US market. But then that means you are going to destroy the US AI environment compared to China. That is not acceptable. That also means that you are going to destroy our freedom as individuals, as business owners to develop and live in a business world that ultimately is controlled by one or two business companies that didn’t win the marketplace through their own business success, but won it through regulations. That for me is really not acceptable. Interlude — The Low-Background Books Nuno Now, maybe for an interlude, and we have to cue in the music, imagine like Severance music, like hallway or a bit of a palate cleanser from all the policy stuff that we’ve been talking about, all this policy heaviness. Let’s move to another kind of heaviness, one of your favorite topics, which you, Bertrand, discovered, I had no clue this was going on, around books and around Anthropic. Bertrand It’s so horrible. From a company that keeps presenting themselves as the adults in the room, the careful ones, the ones that know better than you about what to do in this complex AI and dangerous world. What we discover is that actually all along, they were buying and destroying books. They will buy books, scan them, destroy them, all of them. They will do that with any books, including rare books. Of course, this was not supposed to come to the public’s attention. This was one of these top secret projects, but obviously it came out. Yes, they were scanning books, millions of them, including rare books, and they didn’t care about destroying them at the end of the process. Because from a regulatory perspective, if you destroy the books, it’s not considered a copyright infringement, apparently. This is coming on the back of some judgment a few years ago that were showing that it’s okay for you as a corporate to scan and use the result if you don’t keep a copy of the book. It’s one of these crazy regulations happening based on a single judgment that push you to do. For me, it’s like, you know this book from decades ago, Fahrenheit 471? We’re talking about book burning. It’s book destroying, crunching. It’s so shocking. Nuno There are two things, right? First, the legal strategy, which is what you’re saying, because by purchasing a physical copy and converting it into one private digital copy and discarding the original, Anthropic pursued this cleaner legal argument for fair use copyright compliance. As you said, there was a federal judgment at some point on this. The other reason is actually operational. If you disassemble the book, and you feed loose pages, it’s much faster to scan books. You are destroying the book effectively anyway operationally. I think to your point, probably this came from a legal standpoint, not just the operational one. But even from an operational standpoint, it does make sense that they would have disassembled the book. Bertrand But some people have shown you can go very fast without destroying the book. It’s really not so critical. Two, you could make an exception if the book is rare. For that 1% of book that is rare, I’m not going to have this approach. I’m going to have another approach. But for that, you will have to care about books and not just care about building AI. Nuno This is the episode, as you guys have heard by now, that we’re trying to spit stuff at Anthropic. Bertrand To go back this is the same company saying, “Hey, guys, it’s bad to distillate my work. I’m the one scanning book at scale without asking author permission, without asking publisher permission, to be clear.” Nuno But just to be clear, Bertrand, we’re pissed off at everyone. We’re pissed off at Anthropic, we’re pissed of at OpenAI as well, right? We’re just pissed off in general at this moment. Bertrand At this stage for me, the more clear-cut company that is in the wrong is, from my perspective, at least, is Anthropic. OpenAI might be a fast follower, but I will say so far, they tried to be a bit more. Nuno But at this pace, Bertrand, who knows? Maybe next week we’ll be more pissed off at OpenAI. Something will come out. This episode is a mix of tragicomedy, like a Greek tragedy with some comedy in the middle or the other way around. It’s a slapstick thing that will end up in tragedy. I’m not sure. The Investor Reckoning Anyway, maybe switching to our final act, which is the investor perspective. What does this mean for investors like ourselves? There’s a lot of things going on. There’s the debate around the IPOs of Anthropic and OpenAI, which now, with all this uncertainty, might be under significant weight. There’s a lot of other discussions that we browsed through that there’s potential IPOs going forward on companies like the Moonshot AI company actually IPO-ing in the next 6 months as well. It’s very unclear what the IPO landscape looks like. Bertrand There’s been a lot of Chinese IPOs, actually, when you look at what’s happened in the past few months. Nuno Anthropic, OpenAI as potential IPOs, there’s all this question marks now. When will that happen? How will it factor in? All that’s happening around regulation as regulation is moving at the speed of light, which is for once something that’s very different than what we’ve seen before. There’s obviously SpaceX AI, which is already taking into account that price. It’s already a public company in there, and it’s under SpaceX, which is now a public company. Obviously, that’s already being factored in some ways. Bertrand Yeah. SpaceX AI has been very smart to acquire Cursor. It was a very smart move because Cursor is one of the leading companies in terms of automated code source development with AI. They had great models on their own. They’re bringing development data to SpaceX AI Grok. I think it was a great move. Nuno We have now people like Google delaying Gemini 3.5 Pro in terms of launch window. There’s stuff actually happening in the market where things are taking their own path. There’s uncertainty commercially, there’s uncertainty at regulation level. You have new players that have come out of nowhere that are making all these waves like Moonshot. We have all these… We had calculated probably a month and a half, 2 months ago, there had been 67 new frontier labs funded. All of these, we haven’t seen any much coming out of them. When some of this stuff starts coming out, will that also create disruptions in this market? Who knows? Bertrand Look at Thinking Machines, for instance. Thinking Machines led by the previous CTO of OpenAI, they released some pretty interesting open source models, actually. Very good quality for a first launch. Now it looks funny to say, but nearly on par with the top Chinese open source models. Nuno We have several investments in the space. humans& has made some recent announcements, which is quite interesting as well. We’ll see what actually happens in the market, but even more disruption probably will come in actual products in a form of product and commercial, on top of all the geopolitical mess that we discussed through the entire episode. If you’re an investor, how the hell do you underwrite an investment right now in early stage, mid-stage, late stage, et cetera? I think my answer is very carefully is how you underwrite it. Bertrand On your advice of being very careful to underwrite it, let’s not forget what happened to our boy wonder, Leopold Aschenbrenner of Situational Awareness. I guess he didn’t listen to you in terms of being careful because part of the instability in the stock market was actually coming from his hedge fund. These guys were leveraged 3, 4x going after the hottest of the hottest AI stocks, and margin calls, and all their public investment is gone just to answer their margin calls. I think it’s clear that the AI bet is… Personally, I’m very excited, and I think it’s the future, and you need to spend time and think about and invest in it. At the same time, it’s a bet that is not an easy one to follow. We go from GPUs to memories to equipments to power generation. All of this is not transitioning in an easy, organized manner. It would be boom and bust going there. He’s probably one of the first big-scale fatalities. The other big-scale fatality was the stock market in Korea, plunging 40% in a month. Definitely, all of that we discussed about was, on the background, you had the stock market going up and down pretty crazily the past few weeks. Nuno Everyone’s being affected. Everyone, you have your 401(k), you have your pension fund dependent on these equity stocks. Everyone’s seeing the effects of this volatility right now very aggressively. We do wish Leopold… Hopefully he’s on honeymoon right now because he got married, I think, this weekend. Hopefully there will be… Bertrand To none less than an Anthropic Chief of Staff. Nuno His wife is the Chief of Staff of Dario, is that it? Bertrand To Dario, yes, as far as I unders

For complete Medicare guidance, dial (617) 644-0093 to speak with my trusted partner, Chapter Medicare Advisors.Join me today at Noon ET as I welcome my good friend Jack Posobiec to the show to talk about the newest edition of his fantastic book, “Unhumans: The Secret History of Communist Revolutions (and How to Crush Them).”“Unhumans” provides a huge service to American patriots if only because it sharply identifies our existential enemies—the nihilistic, envy-driven haters of life, liberty, and property who cloak themselves in political terms such as communism, socialism, Marxism, and most recently “Social Progressivism” and their brownshirts, “Antifa.” The common thread—their visceral hatred for the freedom of their betters, and their desperate willingness to burn down civilization to prevent others from achieving more and living better than themselves.Best of all, Jack is not a mere “black-piller” or “doomer”—he offers practical solutions and a path to victory in the existential fight for survival of America in particular and Western Civilization in general—hence the “… and How to Crush Them” portion of the book's title. Join us LIVE at Noon ET as we break it all down!The most updated edition of “Unhumans: The Secret History of Communist Revolutions (and How to Crush Them)” is currently available for pre-order (releasing September 29) HERE:  https://amzn.to/3UN58MWMake sure you're ready to win the LEGAL FIGHT that follows the PHYSICAL FIGHT if you're ever compelled to defend yourself or your family from criminal predation. Learn why I am PERSONALLY a member of CCW SAFE, and why YOU SHOULD CONSIDER JOINING, TOO:  https://lawofselfdefense.com/ccwsafeClarence Thomas x 9: Perfect SCOTUS Mugs! https://tinyurl.com/k778wj2kFor complete Medicare guidance, dial (617) 644-0093 to speak with my trusted partner, Chapter.All @TheBrancaShow mugs & MORE! https://tinyurl.com/k778wj2kJOIN OUR COMMUNITY! Exclusive Members-only content & perks! Only ~17 cents/day! $5/month! YouTube: https://tinyurl.com/hn32rfz9 Locals: https://tinyurl.com/yck4w9kfFOUNDING FATHERS SPEED DIAL: Founding Fathers SPEED DIAL: https://tinyurl.com/3f7pc8nzEpisode #1429.Chapter and its affiliates are not connected with or endorsed by any government entity or the federal Medicare program. Chapter Advisory, LLC represents Medicare Advantage HMO, PPO, and PFFS organizations and stand alone prescription drug plans that have a Medicare contract. Enrollment depends on the plan's contract renewal. While we have a database of every Medicare plan nationwide and can help you to search among all plans, we have contracts with many but not all plans. As a result, we do not offer every plan available in your area. Currently we represent 50 organizations which offer 18,160 products nationwide. We search and recommend all plans, even those we don't directly offer. You can contact a licensed Chapter agent to find out the number of products available in your specific area. Please contact Medicare.gov, 1-800-Medicare, or your local State Health Insurance Program (SHIP) to get information on all of your options.

For complete Medicare guidance, dial (617) 644-0093 to speak with my trusted partner, Chapter Medicare Advisors.After deftly, and infuriatingly, side-stepping the legal question of whether so-called assault weapons bans—typically tight bans on AR-15 style rifles, the most commonly owned class of rifles in America—run afoul of the Second Amendment, the US Supreme Court is taking on that precise issue in the case of Viramontes v. Illinois.The Second Amendment Foundation (SAF) has filed its opening brief arguing that the assault weapons bans established by both Illinois and Connecticut—and, by extension, really every assault weapons ban in the country—unconstitutionally infringe the right of the People to keep and bear arms. This appeal to the Supreme Court on this question has been made necessary by the fecklessness of Progressive legislatures who wish to blame gun violence on the inanimate guns rather than the demographic actually behind virtually all American gun violence, and by the equally feckless and intellectually dishonest federal judges who support them.Join me today as I explain the legal arguments in plain English—I even made flow charts, to illustrate the legal reasoning by both the patriot and tyrannical sides of the argument—as well as read through and explain SAF's opening brief. Join me LIVE at 1 PM ET as I break it all down!Make sure you're ready to win the LEGAL FIGHT that follows the PHYSICAL FIGHT if you're ever compelled to defend yourself or your family from criminal predation. Learn why I am PERSONALLY a member of CCW SAFE, and why YOU SHOULD CONSIDER JOINING, TOO:  https://lawofselfdefense.com/ccwsafeClarence Thomas x 9: Perfect SCOTUS Mugs! https://tinyurl.com/k778wj2kFor complete Medicare guidance, dial (617) 644-0093 to speak with my trusted partner, Chapter.All @TheBrancaShow mugs & MORE! https://tinyurl.com/k778wj2kJOIN OUR COMMUNITY! Exclusive Members-only content & perks! Only ~17 cents/day! $5/month! YouTube: https://tinyurl.com/hn32rfz9 Locals: https://tinyurl.com/yck4w9kfFOUNDING FATHERS SPEED DIAL: Founding Fathers SPEED DIAL: https://tinyurl.com/3f7pc8nzEpisode #1428.Chapter and its affiliates are not connected with or endorsed by any government entity or the federal Medicare program. Chapter Advisory, LLC represents Medicare Advantage HMO, PPO, and PFFS organizations and stand alone prescription drug plans that have a Medicare contract. Enrollment depends on the plan's contract renewal. While we have a database of every Medicare plan nationwide and can help you to search among all plans, we have contracts with many but not all plans. As a result, we do not offer every plan available in your area. Currently we represent 50 organizations which offer 18,160 products nationwide. We search and recommend all plans, even those we don't directly offer. You can contact a licensed Chapter agent to find out the number of products available in your specific area. Please contact Medicare.gov, 1-800-Medicare, or your local State Health Insurance Program (SHIP) to get information on all of your options.

For complete Medicare guidance, dial (617) 644-0093 to speak with my trusted partner, Chapter Medicare Advisors.While we await a verdict in the murder trial of child-killer Lindsey Clancy, let's take a look at some of the hot takes currently swirling around the lawtuber internets—including an interesting discussion between two outstanding lawyers and personal friends of mine, Joe Nierman (@GoodLawgic) and Canadian attorney Ian Runkle (@runkleofthebailey)!For complete Medicare guidance, dial (617) 644-0093 to speak with my trusted partner, Chapter Medicare Advisors.Join me LIVE at Noon ET as I break it all down!Make sure you're ready to win the LEGAL FIGHT that follows the PHYSICAL FIGHT if you're ever compelled to defend yourself or your family from criminal predation. Learn why I am PERSONALLY a member of CCW SAFE, and why YOU SHOULD CONSIDER JOINING, TOO:  https://lawofselfdefense.com/ccwsafeClarence Thomas x 9: Perfect SCOTUS Mugs! https://tinyurl.com/k778wj2kFor complete Medicare guidance, dial (617) 644-0093 to speak with my trusted partner, Chapter.All @TheBrancaShow mugs & MORE! https://tinyurl.com/k778wj2kJOIN OUR COMMUNITY! Exclusive Members-only content & perks! Only ~17 cents/day! $5/month! YouTube: https://tinyurl.com/hn32rfz9 Locals: https://tinyurl.com/yck4w9kfFOUNDING FATHERS SPEED DIAL: Founding Fathers SPEED DIAL: https://tinyurl.com/3f7pc8nzEpisode #1426.Chapter and its affiliates are not connected with or endorsed by any government entity or the federal Medicare program. Chapter Advisory, LLC represents Medicare Advantage HMO, PPO, and PFFS organizations and stand alone prescription drug plans that have a Medicare contract. Enrollment depends on the plan's contract renewal. While we have a database of every Medicare plan nationwide and can help you to search among all plans, we have contracts with many but not all plans. As a result, we do not offer every plan available in your area. Currently we represent 50 organizations which offer 18,160 products nationwide. We search and recommend all plans, even those we don't directly offer. You can contact a licensed Chapter agent to find out the number of products available in your specific area. Please contact Medicare.gov, 1-800-Medicare, or your local State Health Insurance Program (SHIP) to get information on all of your options.

The Law of CONTROL: whatever we try to FIX with control, we end up BREAKING even more.3 Areas Where Control Costs Us:1. Control breaks us PERSONALLY — Leads to EXHAUSTION and ANXIETY. Philippians 4:6Do not be anxious about anything…Philippians 4:6-7Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus.1. The space INSIDE ME.Some Control 2. BETWEEN ME and PEOPLE. 3. The space BETWEEN ME and GOD.No Control 4. INSIDE OTHERS.1 Peter 5:2-3Be shepherds of God's flock that is under your care, watching over them — not because you must, but because you are willing, as God wants you to be; not pursuing dishonest gain, but eager to serve; not lording it over those entrusted to you, but being examples to the flock." Peace isn't found in BEING IN CONTROL — it's found in TRUSTING THE ONE who is.CONTROL was never in your hands, but SURRENDER always is.Control costs us RELATIONALLY — Leads to BROKEN relationships. Genesis 16:1-2Now Sarai, Abram's wife, had borne him no children. But she had an Egyptian slave named Hagar; so she said to Abram, “The Lord has kept me from having children. Go, sleep with my slave; perhaps I can build a family through her." The Law of CONTROL: whatever we try to FIX with control, we end up BREAKING even more. When you hold on with FORCE, you ultimately FORCE AWAY.Galatians 5:22-23 But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. John 15:5I am the vine; you are the branches. If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing.Control costs us SPIRITUALLY.—It leads to a POWERLESS faith.Hebrews 11:6 And without faith it is impossible to please God.Matthew 17:19-20 "Then the disciples came to Jesus in private and asked, 'Why couldn't we drive it out?' He replied, 'Because you have so little faith. Truly I tell you, if you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, “Move from here to there,” and it will move. Nothing will be impossible for you.'"What you try to control the MOST reveals where you trust God the LEAST! Personally: exhaustion, and anxiety Relationally: broken relationships Spiritually: powerless faithYou don't have the power to CONTROL, but you always have the power to SURRENDER.THE SERENITY PRAYERGod, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

It's time to get your A2 Loadout, get in your Fuchikoma, and get ready to deploy! Personally, I prefer my eggs with Cholula, but I guess brain juice is fine, too... You can find Thaliarchus on Bluesky and on itch.io! Mechs discussed: Shells Dolphin sub Fuchikoma All images: on our website. Content warnings for this episode: Gore, gun violence, and nudity. On the Shoulders of Giants is hosted by Alice (she/her), Brian (he/they), and Niko (she/her). We have an obligation-free tip jar on Ko-Fi. Join OSG's Discord here. We stream on Twitch! You can find us on Bluesky @osgpod, YouTube @osg_pod, and Tumblr @osg-pod as well. Visit our website at osgpod.com and send questions/feedback to questions@osgpod.com. Our intro song is mixed from GO GHOST by King Gnu and various royalty free accoutrements from Freesound Community, over which OSG does not claim ownership! If you've read this far, please consider leaving us a 5-star review on your podcatcher of choice. It really means a lot!

Have you ever sent a text and expected a fun response but all you got was a word one answer and then you spent the rest of the day wondering what you did wrong? Or heard a comment in a group chat and felt it was aimed at you? Most of the time, the thing you're taking personally has almost nothing to do with you—but your brain will work hard to convince you otherwise. I've done this too, during the hardest stretch of my life, even though I'm a therapist who teaches people not to. In today's episode, I'll walk you through what's really happening when you take something personally, why it costs you more than you might think, and three things you can do the next time your brain insists you're the reason someone acted the way they did. Some of the things I talk about are: The story I built about myself to explain what happened when I was grieving. Why your brain reaches for the one explanation that puts you at the center, out of a hundred it could have picked. What the research says about the critical feedback people give. Why taking things personally goes beyond just feeling bad. The surprising study on reaching out to someone you've lost touch with, and what your brain gets wrong about it. How to separate hurt feelings from beliefs about yourself. Related Episodes ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ 59 — 3 Ways to Take Back Your Power When Negative People Try to Drag You Down ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠278 — The 3 Mindset Shifts You Will Help You Grow Mentally Stronger This Year Connect with the Show Buy a copy of⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠13 Things Mentally Strong People Don't Do⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Connect with Amy on Instagram —⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@AmyMorinAuthor⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Subscribe to The Mental Strength Newsletter —⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://amymorinlcsw.com/newsletter⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Sponsors Lola Blankets — Head to⁠⁠⁠⁠ LolaBlankets.com⁠⁠⁠⁠ and use code STRONGER to get 40% OFF your order. AirDoctor — Head to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠AirDoctorPro.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠and use promo code STRONGER to get UP TO $300 off today! One Skin — Go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠oneskin.co/STRONGER⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ and use code stronger to get up to 30% off your first 3 subscription orders Quince — Go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Quince.com/stronger⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns! Boll & Branch — Get 20% off sitewide at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠BollAndBranch.com/stronger⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ with code stronger. Square — Get up to $200 off Square hardware at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠square.com/go/STRONGER⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. Dupe — Go to⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Dupe.com ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠to finally feel confident about what to buy. Subscribe to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Mentally Stronger Premium⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ for exclusive content like weekly bonus episodes, mental strength challenges, and office hours with me. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

My wife, Kathy, was paired with another woman to lead a vacation bible school. While Kathy loves having fun, it's often unscripted.  The first time Kathy spoke with her new teammate, Kathy told me, “She is very structured and scripted. We may drive each other crazy.”  Personally, I think God chose the perfect pair. Some children learned from Kathy's fun, free form style, but other kids needed the scripted structured approach.   1 Corinthians 12:18-19 teaches, “In ... The post The Perfect Pair appeared first on Unconventional Business Network.

For complete Medicare guidance, dial (617) 644-0093 to speak with my trusted partner, Chapter Medicare Advisors.Dr. Kirk Heilburn, a psychologist retained by Massachusetts prosecutors as an expert witness to rebut Lindsey Clancy's claims of not guilty by reason of insanity in her killing of her three small children, testified yesterday that he believed that Clancy faked her psychosis—which would make these killings nothing but intentional murders. Many of the so-called experts testifying in this case have come across as remarkably weak and lacking in credibility, but I had precisely the opposite take when I observed clips of Dr. Heilburn's testimony.Join me LIVE at Noon ET as we watch Heilburn's testimony from yesterday, and I break it all down!Make sure you're ready to win the LEGAL FIGHT that follows the PHYSICAL FIGHT if you're ever compelled to defend yourself or your family from criminal predation. Learn why I am PERSONALLY a member of CCW SAFE, and why YOU SHOULD CONSIDER JOINING, TOO:  https://lawofselfdefense.com/ccwsafeClarence Thomas x 9: Perfect SCOTUS Mugs! https://tinyurl.com/k778wj2kFor complete Medicare guidance, dial (617) 644-0093 to speak with my trusted partner, Chapter.All @TheBrancaShow mugs & MORE! https://tinyurl.com/k778wj2kJOIN OUR COMMUNITY! Exclusive Members-only content & perks! Only ~17 cents/day! $5/month! YouTube: https://tinyurl.com/hn32rfz9 Locals: https://tinyurl.com/yck4w9kfFOUNDING FATHERS SPEED DIAL: Founding Fathers SPEED DIAL: https://tinyurl.com/3f7pc8nzEpisode #1421.Chapter and its affiliates are not connected with or endorsed by any government entity or the federal Medicare program. Chapter Advisory, LLC represents Medicare Advantage HMO, PPO, and PFFS organizations and stand alone prescription drug plans that have a Medicare contract. Enrollment depends on the plan's contract renewal. While we have a database of every Medicare plan nationwide and can help you to search among all plans, we have contracts with many but not all plans. As a result, we do not offer every plan available in your area. Currently we represent 50 organizations which offer 18,160 products nationwide. We search and recommend all plans, even those we don't directly offer. You can contact a licensed Chapter agent to find out the number of products available in your specific area. Please contact Medicare.gov, 1-800-Medicare, or your local State Health Insurance Program (SHIP) to get information on all of your options.

For complete Medicare guidance, dial (617) 644-0093 to speak with my trusted partner, Chapter Medicare Advisors.Join me as we continue to cover the testimony of expert witness Dr. Kirk Heilbrun, testifying as a state witness, as he further exposes the lie of Lindsay Clancy's purported “psychosis” that she claims led her to kill her three children in a fit of insanity. Join me LIVE at Noon ET as I break it all down!Make sure you're ready to win the LEGAL FIGHT that follows the PHYSICAL FIGHT if you're ever compelled to defend yourself or your family from criminal predation. Learn why I am PERSONALLY a member of CCW SAFE, and why YOU SHOULD CONSIDER JOINING, TOO:  https://lawofselfdefense.com/ccwsafeClarence Thomas x 9: Perfect SCOTUS Mugs! https://tinyurl.com/k778wj2kFor complete Medicare guidance, dial (617) 644-0093 to speak with my trusted partner, Chapter.All @TheBrancaShow mugs & MORE! https://tinyurl.com/k778wj2kJOIN OUR COMMUNITY! Exclusive Members-only content & perks! Only ~17 cents/day! $5/month! YouTube: https://tinyurl.com/hn32rfz9 Locals: https://tinyurl.com/yck4w9kfFOUNDING FATHERS SPEED DIAL: Founding Fathers SPEED DIAL: https://tinyurl.com/3f7pc8nzChapter and its affiliates are not connected with or endorsed by any government entity or the federal Medicare program. Chapter Advisory, LLC represents Medicare Advantage HMO, PPO, and PFFS organizations and stand alone prescription drug plans that have a Medicare contract. Enrollment depends on the plan's contract renewal. While we have a database of every Medicare plan nationwide and can help you to search among all plans, we have contracts with many but not all plans. As a result, we do not offer every plan available in your area. Currently we represent 50 organizations which offer 18,160 products nationwide. We search and recommend all plans, even those we don't directly offer. You can contact a licensed Chapter agent to find out the number of products available in your specific area. Please contact Medicare.gov, 1-800-Medicare, or your local State Health Insurance Program (SHIP) to get information on all of your options.

We discuss the ups and downs of starting a business with serial entrepreneur Mike Grossman, author of Failure Is an Option. Plus: Champagne and Friends founder Dan Roznov on the industry’s climate-related challenges.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

With a single step, a world shattered and the stars faltered. Those who witnessed the destruction must face the future and pick up the pieces, but first they must escape the Dragon Path and return home—or at least near it. To do that, though, they'll need to capture Jonathan's airship, the Adventure Beckons, from the Creed of Oracles… This week on Perpetua: Escape the Rumbling Castle! 07 Perpetua Guide [In Progress v.06] NPCs & Monsters [PNMS] Creed of Oracles Infantry [NMCOIN] Typical Traits: Gritty, Grim Type: Humanoid Hunter Level: 10 Rank: Soldier Stats: DEX 10, INS 8, MIG 10, WLP 6 Attacks: Holy Salvo, Forceful Flurry Special Abilities: Summon Platemail Elemental Affinities: RES: Physical | VUL: Dark, Poison In-Game Description: With blessed light armor, rifle, and bayonet, Infantry make up the bulk of the Oracle's ranks. The rank-and-file soldier in the Creed of Oracles. If you decide to rush across the open courtyard when you first arrive to area of the castle, you can fight an infinite number of these guys. They aren't especially hardy, but their Holy Salvo is built specifically to knock out sturdy physical characters, so don't underestimate them! Starter Tip: If you can do it, try to dispel their summoned platemail, it'll make fighting them toe to toe a lot easier. Hovering Pyroclastic Typical Traits: Precise, Devoted, Short-fused Type: Humanoid Support Level: 10 Rank: Soldier Stats: DEX 8, INS 8, MIG 6, WLP 10 Attacks: Ignition, Volcanic Charge Special Abilities: Flying, Bracing Ash Elemental Affinities: RES: AIr, Earth [Can gain Fire] | VUL: Dark, Ice, [Starts with Fire] In-Game Description: A soldier in the robes and armor of the Creed of Oracles with flamethrower and a number of volcanic explosives at their belt. These floating demolitionists punch through your elemental defenses and their volcanic charges are like sticky grenades that give a boost to anything that hits your side of the field. Most importantly: They can cover themselves in a magical ash that will boost their might and give them a Fire resistance. Once they do this, they sort of become solid all-arounders, so it's best to knock them out before they can do that. Starter Tip: Hit them with Dark or Ice damage to bring them down to melee range! Fares, Devout Chef Traits: Tricky, Inventive, Religious, Adaptable Type: Humanoid Saboteur Level: 10 Rank: Soldier Stats: DEX 8, INS 8, MIG 8, WLP 8 Attacks: Poison Vial Special Abilities: Bottled Vigour, Enervating Powder Elemental Affinities: RES: Earth, Fire, Light| VUL: Air, Dark, Ice In-Game Description: A chef of the Creed of Oracles. Master of the Kitchen and Pantry. This guy SUCKS! I don't even mean in combat, he's fine to fight. But as a character, I hate how he can draw you into conflict. There's basically only one way through his conversation tree that doesn't draw you either into combat with him immediately (with reinforcements coming soon after) or up into the Barracks where his friends are. Personally, I prefer to just knock him out ASAP and then sneak up to the hidden passage a few rooms away. Starter Tip: If he manages to poison you, don't forget to use your IP for an Antitote. Poisoned doesn't do damage over times like in some games, instead it saps BOTH your Might and Willpower, so whether it hits a bruiser or a mage, you're in trouble!  Ushala, Conduit Traits: Mysterious, Possessed, Sacrificial Type: Demon Mage Level: 10 Rank: Soldier Stats: DEX 10, INS 8, MIG 10, WLP 6 Attacks: Heaven's Light, Heaven's Glory, Heaven's Call Special Abilities: Flying, Pressure Gauge Elemental Affinities: IMM: Light | RES: Physical, Poison | VUL: Dark | Pressure Points: Dagger, Sword In-Game Description: A member of the Creed who temporary gives their body up to be possessed by the spirit of the holy Oracles.  So, as far as I know, there's two versions of Ushala you can fight. The above is the "standard" one, which is what happens when the Gem Scene goes the way it almost always does. But I've heard that if you manage to get the gem away from the Draconic Elf safely, then Ushala can become possessed (by who? My theory is Lucena) and then she gets a second, much harder phase. Which is saying something, because even this version of her is NO JOKE. Starter Tip: If you can, hit her with Shaken and Poisoned (the status condition, NOT the damage type). All three of her attacks are based on WLP, so it helps to knock that down as far as possible. Sarithe, Shieldmaiden [NMSRSH] Traits: Courageous, Devout, Charismatic, Armored  Type: Humanoid Sentinel Level: 10 Rank: Champion (4) Stats: DEX 8, INS 8, MIG 10, WLP 8 Attacks: Face Me!, Intercepting Javelin Special Abilities: Elemental Shield, Head up, Soldier!, Not this time!, Get behind me!, Strong Will, Honest Heart!, Pressure Gauge Elemental Affinities: IMM: | RES: Light, (Can gain Air, Earth, Fire, Ice) | VUL: Bolt, Dark, Poison |  Pressure Points: Flail, Firearm, Spear, Heavy Weapon In-Game Description: A knight in elementally-charged armor, wielding a tower shield and a javelin that hums with power. Despite being fully kitted out in heavy armor, Sarithe's abilities seem designed to make her a strong support character. She keeps her crew safe not only by taking hits for them, but also by healing them, stopping Opportunities (critical hits), and granting them multiple elemental resistances. Starter Tip: Because she has a pressure gauge (from the Armidirge games), she doesn't take extra damage from the elements she's weak against. Instead, if you can hit her six times with something she's vulnerable to (including her pressure point weapon types), she'll get staggered and she loses all of her actions for the rest of the round. Be sure to take advantage of this!! Hosted by Austin Walker (austinwalker.bsky.social) Featuring Ali Acampora (ali-online.bsky.social), Art Martinez-Tebbel (amtebbel.bsky.social), Jack de Quidt (notquitereal.bsky.social),  Janine Hawkins (@bleatingheart), Sylvi Bullet (@sylvibullet), Keith J Carberry (@keithjcarberry) and Andrew Lee Swan (swandre3000.bsky.social) Produced by Ali Acampora Music by Jack de Quidt (available on bandcamp) Cover Art by Ben McEntee (https://linktr.ee/benmce.art) With thanks to Amelia Renee, Arthur B., Aster Maragos, Bill Kaszubski, Cassie Jones, Clark, DB, Daniel Laloggia, Diana Crowley, Edwin Adelsberger, Emrys, Greg Cobb, Ian O'Dea, Ian Urbina, Irina A., Jack Shirai, Jake Strang, Katie Diekhaus, Ken George, Konisforce, Kristina Harris Esq, L Tantivy, Lawson Coleman, Mark Conner, Mike & Ruby, Muna A, Nat Knight, Olive Perry, Quinn Pollock, Robert Lasica, Shawn Drape, Shawn Hall, Summer Rose, TeganEden, Thomas Whitney, Voi, chocoube, deepFlaw, fen, & weakmint This episode was made with support from listeners like you! To support us, you can go to friendsatthetable.cash.

Guests: Jasika Bawa, Group Product Manager, Chrome Security Doug Turner, Engineering Director, Chrome Security Topics: Gemini agent harness found a sandbox escape that survived in the codebase for 13 years! How did that happen and how did that bug get noticed among what's surely a tidal wave of bugs being found by the machines? Chrome 149 and 150 fixed over a thousand security bugs—surpassing the last 23 milestones combined. That is a massive spike! The blog explains it's possible by having 'fixing agents' and 'critic agents' working in a loop that mimics human code reviews. I have to ask: how much of this is real, high-quality engineering, and how much of it is just two robots agreeing to grade each other on a curve? Historically, pushing updates was a monumental, scheduled event. Now, you're piloting two security releases a week to combat fast-moving attacks. That sounds like a direct route to developer burnout, and a complete nightmare for enterprise IT admins who just want their systems to stay stable. How are we balancing the need to protect users from N-day exploits versus making everyone play security whack-a-mole? I want to learn more about this long-term vision so let's address the elephant in the browser: nobody wants to restart Chrome. Personally, I have about 50 tabs open right now, and restarting feels like risking throwing my short-term memory into a woodchipper. You're talking about 'dynamic patching' that replaces background child processes on the fly without a restart, and you've rolled out a 'zero window auto-restart' on macOS. First off, are my tabs safe? Second, is dynamic patching actually going to work seamlessly, or is it just going to crash my Renderer mid-session and blame it on the GPU? If this is real, it's really amazing.  Tell us about the "spannification" effort and the migration to Rust. There's two parallel technical safety efforts going on to–as we like to say at Google–eliminate classes of vulnerabilities. Tell us about the engineering efforts behind the C++ spans and the Rust journey!  Ok I'd be a terrible Allan Friedman disciple if I didn't ask the supply chain question. First, Chrome has over 2,300 third-party dependencies. That's wild. How are we handling that? Resources: Video version "Stronger with every update: How we're making Chrome and the web safer in the AI Era" blog EP88 Improving Browser Security in the New Era of Work

For complete Medicare guidance, dial (617) 644-0093 to speak with my trusted partner, Chapter Medicare Advisors.Derek Chauvin Legal Defense Fund:https://www.givesendgo.com/derek-chauvin-legal-defense-fundElon Musk himself has loudly called for the release of Derek Chauvin, railroaded over the overdose and morbidity death of lifelong addict and violent criminal George Floyd. This call comes in parallel with Chauvin's legal team filing for post-conviction relief on the grounds that Chauvin did not receive the grand jury to which they claim he was entitled. Is freedom for Chauvin in the cards? Let's break it all down. For complete Medicare guidance, dial (617) 644-0093 to speak with my trusted partner, Chapter Medicare Advisors.Join me LIVE at Noon ET as I break it all down!Make sure you're ready to win the LEGAL FIGHT that follows the PHYSICAL FIGHT if you're ever compelled to defend yourself or your family from criminal predation. Learn why I am PERSONALLY a member of CCW SAFE, and why YOU SHOULD CONSIDER JOINING, TOO:  https://lawofselfdefense.com/ccwsafeClarence Thomas x 9: Perfect SCOTUS Mugs! https://tinyurl.com/k778wj2kFor complete Medicare guidance, dial (617) 644-0093 to speak with my trusted partner, Chapter.All @TheBrancaShow mugs & MORE! https://tinyurl.com/k778wj2kJOIN OUR COMMUNITY! Exclusive Members-only content & perks! Only ~17 cents/day! $5/month! YouTube: https://tinyurl.com/hn32rfz9 Locals: https://tinyurl.com/yck4w9kfFOUNDING FATHERS SPEED DIAL: Founding Fathers SPEED DIAL: https://tinyurl.com/3f7pc8nzTODAY's MEMBERS-ONLY SHOW: “Will SCOTUS Tell 4th Amendment to GET FLOCKED?”YouTube: https://tinyurl.com/3mfnted7Locals: https://tinyurl.com/3nmkzx4wEpisode #1417.Chapter and its affiliates are not connected with or endorsed by any government entity or the federal Medicare program. Chapter Advisory, LLC represents Medicare Advantage HMO, PPO, and PFFS organizations and stand alone prescription drug plans that have a Medicare contract. Enrollment depends on the plan's contract renewal. While we have a database of every Medicare plan nationwide and can help you to search among all plans, we have contracts with many but not all plans. As a result, we do not offer every plan available in your area. Currently we represent 50 organizations which offer 18,160 products nationwide. We search and recommend all plans, even those we don't directly offer. You can contact a licensed Chapter agent to find out the number of products available in your specific area. Please contact Medicare.gov, 1-800-Medicare, or your local State Health Insurance Program (SHIP) to get information on all of your options.

For complete Medicare guidance, dial (617) 644-0093 to speak with my trusted partner, Chapter Medicare Advisors.Karmelo Anthony's pathetic effort to secure a new trial over his murder conviction for his killing of Austin Metcalf was right laughed out of court last week when the true scope of Anthony's violent nature—hidden from his jury—was finally disclosed to the world. The façade of Anthony as an inherently good kid who was merely defending himself against Metcalf's raging racism was utterly imploded—because of course it was. Many of the high-profile cases of murder or deadly-force self-defense share this same characteristic—the bad actor was not merely a good person having a bad day, they were a known creature of violence, whose violent character inevitably and finally drove their inevitable fate of either their own death or their conviction.Behind them these monsters leave not just a trail of victims broken by either their brutal violence or—if the victim successfully defended themselves against that violence—a victim broken by the brutal criminal justice system trying them for self-defense, they also leave a heavy burden on all of society forced to continue living with these known predators amongst us until the very worst happens. Even a modest walk through many of these high-profile cases shows this same pattern again and again. Take that walk with me, and let's discuss what steps society can and must take to protect our innocent wives and children—and ourselves—from these bad actors, and the forces preventing us from already doing so.Join me LIVE at 10 AM ET as I break it all down!Make sure you're ready to win the LEGAL FIGHT that follows the PHYSICAL FIGHT if you're ever compelled to defend yourself or your family from criminal predation. Learn why I am PERSONALLY a member of CCW SAFE, and why YOU SHOULD CONSIDER JOINING, TOO:  https://lawofselfdefense.com/ccwsafeClarence Thomas x 9: Perfect SCOTUS Mugs! https://tinyurl.com/k778wj2kFor complete Medicare guidance, dial (617) 644-0093 to speak with my trusted partner, Chapter.All @TheBrancaShow mugs & MORE! https://tinyurl.com/k778wj2kJOIN OUR COMMUNITY! Exclusive Members-only content & perks! Only ~17 cents/day! $5/month! YouTube: https://tinyurl.com/hn32rfz9 Locals: https://tinyurl.com/yck4w9kfFOUNDING FATHERS SPEED DIAL: Founding Fathers SPEED DIAL: https://tinyurl.com/3f7pc8nzEpisode #1419.Chapter and its affiliates are not connected with or endorsed by any government entity or the federal Medicare program. Chapter Advisory, LLC represents Medicare Advantage HMO, PPO, and PFFS organizations and stand alone prescription drug plans that have a Medicare contract. Enrollment depends on the plan's contract renewal. While we have a database of every Medicare plan nationwide and can help you to search among all plans, we have contracts with many but not all plans. As a result, we do not offer every plan available in your area. Currently we represent 50 organizations which offer 18,160 products nationwide. We search and recommend all plans, even those we don't directly offer. You can contact a licensed Chapter agent to find out the number of products available in your specific area. Please contact Medicare.gov, 1-800-Medicare, or your local State Health Insurance Program (SHIP) to get information on all of your options.

In Part 2, we focus on breaking free from the need for everyone's approval. We talk about handling criticism, knowing whose opinions really matter, and finding the confidence to live for God instead of constantly worrying about what others think.

This talk was given by Gil Fronsdal on 2026.08.21 at the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA. ******* Video of this talk is available at: https://www.youtube.com/live/4iT4IlYofAQ?si=8PlzQik3KCEqNOTG&t=1840. ******* A machine generated transcript of this talk is available. It has not been edited by a human, so errors will exist. Download Transcript: https://www.audiodharma.org/transcripts/24823/download ******* For more talks like this, visit AudioDharma.org ******* If you have enjoyed this talk, please consider supporting AudioDharma with a donation at https://www.audiodharma.org/donate/. ******* This talk is licensed by a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License

This talk was given by Gil Fronsdal on 2026.08.21 at the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA. ******* Video of this talk is available at: https://www.youtube.com/live/4iT4IlYofAQ?si=8PlzQik3KCEqNOTG&t=1840. ******* A machine generated transcript of this talk is available. It has not been edited by a human, so errors will exist. Download Transcript: https://www.audiodharma.org/transcripts/24823/download ******* For more talks like this, visit AudioDharma.org ******* If you have enjoyed this talk, please consider supporting AudioDharma with a donation at https://www.audiodharma.org/donate/. ******* This talk is licensed by a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License

How can you get your books surfaced when readers ask an AI what to read next? What are the hallmarks of authors and businesses that last more than a decade in the indie author industry? Ricardo Fayet gives his marketing tips after more than a decade at Reedsy. In the intro, Expanding Your Book's IP through Merchandising [Wish I'd Known Then]; Guide to writers conferences [Kindlepreneur]; Rick Rubin and Stephen Pressfield on resistance and the muse [Tetragrammaton]; Pulitzer Prize winners disclose AI usage [Nieman Lab]; My new rebuilt fiction site JFPenn.com. Today's show is sponsored by Draft2Digital, self-publishing with support, where you can get free formatting, free distribution to multiple stores, and a host of other benefits. Just go to www.draft2digital.com to get started. This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn Ricardo Fayet is the co-founder and chief marketing officer of Reedsy, a marketplace for writers to find vetted freelancers, author training courses, and lots more. He's also the author of How to Market a Book and Amazon Ads for Authors. You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below. Show Notes How AI search actually finds and ranks the books it recommends Why keywords and search volume are disappearing as marketing metrics Building an internet footprint so your book is worth recommending Why Claude leans on Goodreads while ChatGPT and Gemini lean on Reddit Product is more important than marketing, and how to find your comp titles Passion, business sense and resilience in the authors who last You can find Ricardo at Reedsy.com. Transcript of the interview with Ricardo Fayet Jo: Ricardo Fayet is the co-founder and chief marketing officer of Reedsy, a marketplace for writers to find vetted freelancers, author training courses, and lots more. He's also the author of How to Market a Book and Amazon Ads for Authors. So welcome back to the show, Ricardo. Ricardo: Thank you, Jo. It's been a while. Jo: It has been a while. As we were saying, it's been a decade, which is crazy, because you and I see each other at events and things. For anyone who doesn't know you— Tell us a bit more about you, where you're from, and also, what is Reedsy these days and how have things changed? Ricardo: Yes, sure. I think I'm hard to dissociate from Reedsy because my only background really is Reedsy. We started Reedsy right after business school for most of the founders. There are four founders, and I'm one of them. We've been going since 2014, so it's been 12 years. We started around the same time, and you started even earlier than we did, but we've had the chance to meet at quite a few conferences since. I think the main thing we're still known for is our marketplace. Since the very beginning, Reedsy is a curated marketplace where authors can come in and look for editors, cover designers, marketers, ghostwriters, literary translators, author website designers, pretty much any freelancer you would ever need to hire throughout your writing career. That's how we started. That's our main source of revenue and our main business. Since then, as you mentioned, we've also added courses, live events, so we've got a membership under Reedsy Learning. The main thing we're proud of right now is our writing tool, Reedsy Studio, because we've been pouring a lot of engineering talent into it over the past five, six years, and I think it's a really cool writing tool that is 90% free. It also does the formatting, so it's a good alternative to Vellum or Atticus for those who haven't purchased those tools. So there's a lot of things that Reedsy does at this point, which always makes it hard for me to describe what we do. Jo: But you generally serve writers. That's probably the crux of it. Ricardo: Exactly, yes. We're mostly at the production stage. The thing we say is we help authors make beautiful books, right? That's a little bit the tagline that applies to 90% of what we do, though we also help a little bit with the marketing side of things. Jo: And then just tell people where your accent is from. Ricardo: So I'm half French, half Italian from my parents, and I was born in Spain. So depending on my mood and the moment, it might be anywhere from French, Italian, Spanish. It's anyone's guess, really, at this point. Jo: Yes, exactly. You've been part of the indie author ecosystem, as you said, since 2014. You're often at the author conferences, and you stay abreast of everything that's going on. So what are the biggest changes you've seen in the industry since you started out? Like you said, you guys came from business school. You chose to come into the industry at a particular point, and yet things have changed. So what do you think are the biggest changes, and how have you seen authors adapt? Ricardo: It's crazy, the amount of things that happened in the past 10 years. Obviously we came into the industry as a result of Amazon launching Kindle Direct Publishing, and then the Kindle Store becoming one of the number one places where people buy books. That's what enabled self-publishing in the first place as an industry, and obviously we wouldn't exist without self-publishing being a thing. But then I think probably one of the biggest changes that happened was the introduction of Kindle Unlimited and various other subscription models. Perhaps as a response to that, afterwards, I would say direct sales is the other massive change that happened in the industry. The ability for authors to sell direct to their readers via their websites, or running Kickstarters, or basically the ability to reach your customers directly. Now, obviously, artificial intelligence is probably the biggest change of them all, not just in publishing, across every industry, but of course it's going to affect publishing very strongly, or it has already started making big waves. So I would say those are the three main changes that we've seen happening in the industry. Jo: Just interestingly, given that you're French, Italian, Spanish, European— Has the pace of change been the same in mainland Europe? Because you and I have also met up at European conferences, but I just get the sense that each individual European country, the UK included, as I include the UK in Europe, goes at a different speed. Ricardo: No, they definitely do. Our market at Reedsy is all in English. We only have an English website, and I would say 70% of our market is US, then 15% UK, and then Australia, New Zealand, et cetera. We do have clients in continental Europe, but they're mostly going to be American or British expats. A lot of retired people who write books and use Reedsy services. I think the main reason for that is that self-publishing as an industry hasn't really grown in Spain, France, Italy the way that it's grown in the US and the UK, probably because these are countries where book buying habits are a lot more traditional. So all my friends from high school and university in France, they all buy books, they all buy paper books. They all buy from bookstores. They don't really buy from Amazon that much. They love the smell of paper, all these sorts of things. So obviously that makes it harder for indie authors in those countries because they cannot place their books in the places where people buy them, which is traditional brick-and-mortar bookstores, or at least it's much harder. So there is an indie movement in those countries, but it's much smaller. I would say Germany is maybe the exception in Europe, where I've seen more and more full-time indie authors, but I don't think it's a market that's comparable even to the UK. Jo: Interesting. Okay, so let's go to marketing, because you love marketing, you have a newsletter about it, and you have a book, How to Market a Book, same title as mine, and we've found each other in our Also Boughts over the years. You have, however, updated yours several times. 2025 was your last update. Mine was 2016, so yours is definitely the most up-to-date one. So what are your thoughts on how authors can reach readers now? And let's split this into two. Let's start with some tips for new authors who just have maybe one book and are really just starting out. Ricardo: Yes, first of all, sorry for stealing your title. Jo: Oh, you know, it's never been a problem. Ricardo: We were trying to come up with something… I know, I know, I know. But still, we wanted something more original, and then we realised that for SEO purposes, that's the title we should really go for. The good thing is, if you search “how to market a book” on pretty much any retailer, you're going to find your book or mine in any order really, but those are going to be the top two books to this day, thankfully, so I'm good with that. I think in terms of marketing tips for new authors who have just the one book, I'd say, despite all the changes in the industry, the basics of marketing still stay the same. One of my big mantras when it comes to marketing is that product is more important than marketing. So having a great book is going to be more important, in my opinion, than being a great marketer. Having a great product. By that, I generally don't talk about literary value or prose or anything like that, just because I'm not a book critic. I'm not an editor. My opinion on whether a book is good or not is worth zero. From a marketing standpoint, for me, a good book is one that resonates with its intended audience. So the first step for newer authors is to basically figure out who they wrote this book for, right? Have an idea of who their target market is. A great way to do that, without entering into marketing jargon like proto-personas and stuff like that, is to think in terms of comp titles, comparable titles. I think that's probably the base of any marketing, whether traditional publishing houses or indie authors, to think, “Okay, which other books out there are similar to mine?” If your book is completely unique, you have, I would say, 99.9% chance of not selling, because your market doesn't exist, and 0.01% chance of creating your own market and completely dominating it, right? So being unique is not necessarily a bad thing, but I would say 99% of the time, it is. Obviously being unique within an existing niche, within an existing market, that's completely different, but you need to work on some comparable titles. So I would say that's where I would start, and that's one of the things that AI is great at. If you even just plug in your book into an AI chat that has enough context, if you're comfortable doing that of course, or if you plug in a synopsis, like a long synopsis, you can basically ask the AI chats, “Okay, what would be some comp titles?” Either you'll have heard of those books, and you'll think, “Okay, they're good comps,” or you may not have heard of them, in which case I would really recommend buying them and reading them and seeing whether they're comps or not. I think that's where marketing starts. Jo: Yes, and we might come back to that for book discoverability. Well, let's just talk about it now, because I now pretty much use Claude for discovering books as well. I just find that the Amazon search, for nonfiction it works really well, right? As you said, if you want to learn how to market a book, you just search “how to market a book”, and our books are very well titled for that. But for fiction, it's so difficult to find new books and comp titles, especially if you don't write in a clear genre, which I don't. I know lots of people do. So we're writing cross-genre. So in terms of book discoverability, I know you've been looking into SEO for books and all of that. What are your thoughts on how authors can more effectively have their books surfaced if people are using the AIs for finding books? Ricardo: That's a very big topic. That's one of my favourite topics right now. That's what I talk about in my marketing newsletter, and I want to start a Substack on the topic as well, because I think it is the future of book discoverability. As you say, search on Amazon isn't great, and if it's not great on Amazon, you don't even want to imagine on Google Play, Kobo, all these sorts of places, right? If you search on Kobo or Apple Books or Google Play for witch cozy mysteries, the top 10 books are going to have exactly “witch cozy mystery” in the title or the subtitle or the series title, right? Jo: Yes. Ricardo: Search is very simple on those sites, so it's very easy to game, but it's terrible as an experience for readers. So I do think that a big part of search is going to move to AI, and now you have Rufus within Amazon itself that appears as a chatbot and encourages you to talk with it, to ask for recommendations. In the beginning Rufus was really terrible, but now I recommend authors play with it. In general, I recommend when it comes to AI discoverability that authors play with all the AI search tools. So it's going to be Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode, Rufus within Amazon. Just like we talked about comp titles, right, ask for something like, “What would you recommend for fans of this book? Which other books would you recommend?” Or if you're looking for something specific that describes your book, what books would you recommend on… I think one of your examples was fiction around masonry or something like that, right? Jo: I always say, for example, if you ask for action adventure thrillers on pretty much anywhere, you're going to get 20 books by male authors. For those of us who are female authors, but also who have female main characters, you can then be far more granular. That's just not something that necessarily works on Amazon. So, action adventure thrillers with female protagonists written by female indie authors, which is very specific. That will work in AI, whereas that definitely won't work on Amazon. Ricardo: Exactly. So one of the great things about AI search, and terrible things at the same time, is that the concept of keyword is lost, right? So we title our books How to Market a Book because the keyword that people would search for is “how to market a book”, or “book marketing for authors”. Those were the two keywords that had the biggest search volume if we looked at Google Keyword Planner, or any search tools that give you keyword volume. When it comes to AI search, since it's conversational, and it's very personalised, and it can go as niche as you want, keywords are going to disappear, and search volume as a metric is going to disappear. The search you just told me about, maybe there are 10 people who are going to run it exactly. Most people are going to run variations of that. Since you can go as granular as you want, it's going to be very long phrases, very long sentences. So the whole concept of keywords, search volume, SEO, is going to disappear in favour of what some people call GEO, generative engine optimisation, AIO, AI optimisation, AI search optimisation. There's a bunch of names for it, but it is a different discipline. It still works on the basis of Google SEO because what most of these search engines will do is they're going to search the internet, right? They've been trained on a lot of information, but not all of that information is current. Most of these models have been trained on documents and web pages before 2021. That's why when you used the very early versions of ChatGPT, and you asked it about current events or current books, it didn't find it. It didn't have that information. Now all these models have the ability to search the web, and they do that really effectively. So the first thing they're going to do if you run a search like that is they're going to run dozens of different searches on Google or a similar search engine. Action thriller books with female protagonists. Action thriller books with female protagonists by indie authors. Action thriller books by indie authors. They're going to create what I call a corpus, so a massive document of information with candidates, books that probably meet those criteria that they have found through regular web searches. Then they're going to go through all those books and determine which are the most relevant to recommend, and they'll return with that. Then they'll usually have a verification layer as well, which is, okay, I have these five books that I want to recommend to this user, but I just want to make sure first that they are written by indie authors, that they do have a female protagonist, et cetera. And if I'm not able to verify that, I'll flag it in my answer to them. So there are these three layers. Web search, then ranking of the book candidates, and finally a verification layer, and then they serve you the answer. Obviously, that's really powerful. If that's the way that search is headed, which I firmly believe, then we as authors need to learn how to get our books in there. Jo: Yes. It's so interesting, and I do this all the time. Really niche stuff, like a thriller about anatomical Venuses, which are these models from anatomy museums and stuff like that, with an edge of the supernatural. What is brilliant is that you can find the books that come up. I actually got one that I read and reviewed, and it was fantastic. So I love the more granular thing, but we're really in the very long tail now, right? It feels like you can write a very nuanced book, and it will be surfaced, but only by a few people. So do we have to write our books and then try to not even retrofit them in the way that we used to? We used to try and figure out the seven keywords and all of that kind of thing, and now I almost feel like we just get to be grownups, where you just get to write the book and put it out there, and these things are more intelligent than the search terms. Ricardo: Yes, absolutely. I think in terms of the variety of books that are going to be read and discovered, that's amazing. A little bit like the whole indie publishing movement was amazing, because if you remove the traditional publishing gatekeepers, then suddenly zombie books aren't dead anymore. Zombies are alive again. They've… Jo: Come to life. Ricardo: They've come alive, and so you get a bunch of zombie books again. It's not a small niche audience. It's actually a pretty big niche audience that loves zombie books, and suddenly they have those to consume. This is a little bit similar on a much, much bigger and more granular scale, because anyone can find exactly the kind of book that they're looking for, with the tropes they want, with the type of characters they want, with the type of author they want, and you can basically use any kind of filter. So for discoverability on the side of the reader, that's great. For the authors, it doesn't mean that you can just write whatever you want and then rest, and readers will find them. Because your books still need to have generated a certain internet footprint and a certain review footprint in order to become interesting or recommendable to AI search engines, right? Unless you're the only book that an AI search engine can recommend for that specific search, and yours was very specific, so it might have been the only one. If there are other candidates, the AI search engines are pretty smart. They're going to recommend the candidates that have more reviews, better reviews, or are more famous, that have more, when I talk about internet footprint, more pages talking about them on the internet. That's for me the big finding I've seen. The more pages you have on the internet talking about your book, so that could be book review sites, that could be Goodreads lists, Listopia lists, anywhere on the internet where your book is mentioned, that creates a footprint for it. The more footprints, the more famous your book looks to AI search engines, and so the more worthy of recommendations it is to them. Jo: Yes, and this is one reason why I now ask people, especially when you sell direct, or say you have a Kickstarter and you want reviews, I ask people if they can review on Goodreads. Obviously Goodreads is owned by Amazon, but it is far more searchable by the bots than Amazon is. I sometimes find that Amazon gets blocked. Or Amazon blocks some of the bots, let's put it that way. They might change over time. They own 15% of Anthropic or something. But Goodreads I feel like does get indexed, and I'm not willing to engage on Reddit. I know Reddit is another popular one. Just be very clear on social media, because some people think, oh, I just need loads of influencers to talk about my book, and that will impact the AIs. But I find that social media just almost isn't even there. Ricardo: It depends on which social media. For me, Reddit is a social medium, right? It's a very weird one, but it's obviously the number one social medium used by AI search engines, and it's pretty dodgy stuff with lots of conflicts of interest, because Google has a paid partnership with Reddit. I think Sam Altman has shares in Reddit. So both OpenAI and Google Gemini heavily rely on Reddit for their AI answers, right? If you ask anything from ChatGPT or Gemini, I'd say there are very high chances that in the sources and the citations of the answer, you're going to find Reddit, right? That goes for books as well. Every time you ask for book recommendations, Reddit is going to be big for those two AI search engines. Claude, it's a little bit different. They do have a little bit of a relationship with Reddit, but I don't think it's as big. I found that Claude relies heavily on Goodreads, not Reddit. To me, Goodreads is another social medium at the end of the day, right? It's not the kind of social medium we think of, like… Jo: It's not TikTok. Ricardo: It's not TikTok. TikTok is surfaced a little bit, but not that much. It might become more surfaced in the future, but right now what I've found is, it's really Reddit and Goodreads. Facebook, LinkedIn, but LinkedIn is big for nonfiction topics more than fiction, because there are just not a lot of fiction readers, sorry, talking about their favourite books on LinkedIn. They usually go to other places for that. Jo: Yes, it's really interesting. So obviously TikTok has its own BookTok thing, so some people are finding books on BookTok, and some people like me are finding books through asking Claude, and that's just my overwhelming feeling about the industry. We talked earlier about what's changed. When I started, so 2006, there wasn't even KDP, and then KDP arrives, then you came in 2014, and probably until maybe a few years after that, there was one way to self-publish. Then what's happened since is this kind of splintering. There are so many ways to self-publish. There are so many ways to reach readers. There are so many ways to market. So someone, for example, could sell direct on TikTok Shop, only market through TikTok, and you wouldn't even know that they existed over in another ecosystem, right? So do you feel like that's happened too, this total splintering? Ricardo: Absolutely. I think there are so many different ways in which you can reach your audience now and monetise it as well, that it's absolutely possible. We both know examples of authors who are only visible to their TikTok niche, right? I think the big difference is also monetisation, because earlier you also had different ways of becoming well-known. Like you had Facebook, you had potentially Twitter, back when it was Twitter. Various social media, word of mouth. But where people bought books was Amazon. So that was your monetisation. It was either selling your book on Amazon, or potentially getting KU reads after that when KU launched. Now you can sell on TikTok, you can sell direct, you can run Kickstarters, you can start a Patreon or Substack and make your money through there. There are pretty much infinite ways through which you can monetise your content as a creator. Most of those places will also have a discoverability engine built in, so you can not only sell through there and make money through there, but also grow an audience there. That's probably the biggest competition that Amazon has ever had to face, is this sort of splintering. For us authors and content creators in general, it's amazing, because it's a bunch of different opportunities. Jo: Yes, and I think probably that's circling back to marketing. As we've said, some things have changed, some things stay the same. Is the email list still the number one way to market, do you think, for authors who want a long-term career? Ricardo: I think so. It's just the one thing you really own that allows you to communicate with readers, right? Because even if you build a following on TikTok, TikTok can change. The things we said about Facebook 10 years ago, if you build your Facebook group, Facebook can change, and Facebook changed. Facebook destroyed the reach of pages, and now groups also aren't amazing, et cetera. So the same thing that happened to Facebook can happen to TikTok, can happen to any other social media. Substack is a bit of a hybrid because it is a newsletter, it is a mailing list, but it also has a discoverability engine built in. So I still wouldn't really go all in on Substack. The great advantage there is that you do own the emails, right? So you can move away from it at some point. For me, the email list is the one thing that you are completely in control of. Personally, the main thing I check is my emails every day. I spend more time in my inbox than anywhere else, and I think that's probably the case for most people. So I do think, despite the influx of mails that readers are getting in their inbox, I still think it's one of the most important marketing tools for authors. Jo: Yes, and I still remember when I started my list in December 2008, and I still have people on the list who've been with me that whole time, and have moved email list services several times as well. So I think that's important too. The care of that list too is so important. One of the things that I am annoyed about with Substack, I don't have a Substack, but when I follow some people's, it's always constantly trying to get you to sign up to other people's lists, trying to subscribe you to this or that or the other. I'm like, “That's so annoying.” Now I've found on all these email services they're trying to pair you with other creators and cross-promote and all of this. So it feels like even the email list is becoming a difficult place unless you really protect it. So just protecting your list, I think, and remembering that those are people. Those are people who've bought your books, or people who read your emails. Like people listening to this, these are humans. Sure, some bot might be looking at the transcript, but humans listening to this are individual humans with individual email lists. We tend to forget that, don't we, as you get a bigger list. You think about it as a big number, whereas it's still individual people. Ricardo: Yes, it becomes a number, it becomes metrics, the open rate, the click rate, and all that. But the great thing about email is that you get replies in your inbox. There you remember that they're actual human beings who write you back. I think for readers, the ability to write back to an author and get a response is just amazing, right? If you write to your favourite author and they write back to you, that's the best feeling ever as a reader. So I think email is still one of the best ways to turn your readers into fans and into super fans of your brand, by just interacting with them and answering them. Because yes, you can answer comments on TikTok, Facebook, and all those places, but it doesn't feel the same as an author answering you in your inbox, I feel. So you do get that ability to create a real connection with readers directly through email. Jo: Yes, and I think that trust and the reputation is so important. Just in terms of seeing the authors that you've seen over the years, like I said, you've been going to a lot of the author conferences. You know a lot of the authors in the industry. A lot of people will know you from events. But you've also seen authors come and go, and you've seen vendors come and go. Both of us have seen people arrive, and we'd be like, “Oh, yes, I wonder how long they're going to last.” Then some people do and some people don't. So what are some of the elements that you've noticed about the businesses that last more than a decade? Ricardo: I think they need to solve a genuine problem, or offer a genuinely better solution than one that already exists. I see a lot of businesses come in and they do what another vendor already does, without doing it necessarily better. Those businesses tend to disappear, or linger there, but you don't really hear about them again. When they solve a real need… I still remember when BookFunnel came out, and they've since become massive with one very, very basic thing, which is, “We will take care of delivering your ebook files to readers.” That's how they started, and that's how they became massive. To me at the time, I was like, “That seems like a very small problem,” because I can just email an ebook file. I didn't realise that it was so complicated for a lot of readers to upload files to their Kindle or other devices, and that having a service that takes care of that for you is just massively helpful. I realised that when I published my books, actually. So businesses that solve even micro or apparently very small problems, but they really solve them effectively, they stay. Others that surf on trends, they tend to disappear when the trend disappears. When there's a new marketing trend, and that trend stops working, then those businesses tend to go. Jo: Yes, and what about the authors who last? Because let's face it, most of us don't solve a problem in a different way. Maybe you could say we solve your entertainment problem in a different version to your last book. What about the authors who last long term? What have you noticed about them? Ricardo: Two things. So the first one… Maybe three things. First one is passion. I always say to people who are looking to start self-publishing, I always say that publishing in general is probably one of the worst ways to make money. It's awful. You can pick up any other occupation and it's probably going to be easier to make money. So writers who make a career do it because they need to write, because they have a passion for writing. So a lot of people who come into the industry thinking, “I've heard about all these self-publishing success stories. Surely I can write a book and I can market it. It's not that hard. So that's going to be a great way to make quick bucks,” those generally don't last, because they don't have that genuine passion. The first hurdle they're going to face—and there's going to be a bunch of them along the way—they're going to quit. The second thing is business sense, or business education, the basics of business, right? Thinking in terms of marketing, thinking in terms of who's my reader, unit economics. If I'm selling my books at $3.99, I shouldn't be spending a ton of money. If I just have one book at $3.99, I cannot afford to pay $5 on ads to generate a sale. So those kinds of basic economics or business knowledge, I think, if not a requirement, it's a massive plus. The third thing is resilience. The industry has changed a lot, as you mentioned. There are a bunch of ways now to reach an audience. There are a bunch of ways to make money. It can also be distracting, because you go to one of these conferences and you go back thinking, “Oh, I've got to create my own website, sell direct. I've got to launch my Substack. I have to use Claude Code for my ads,” and three more things, “and I have to set up my TikTok Shop and do TikTok Lives to sell books,” right? Jo: All of those by next week. That's why we go to the conference. Ricardo: Exactly. All those by next week, right? And during that one week after the conference, you have the energy to start implementing all those things, but afterwards you lose that energy and you go back to, “I just want to quit.” So you need to have some sort of resilience, and the business sense of, “Okay, I'm going to try this for the next six months, and I'm going to stick to it, and I'm going to see whether it works or not. And if it doesn't work, I'm not just going to despair. I'm going to try something else.” That goes for marketing tactics, but also goes for books. Most authors I know who make a living writing, they didn't get there with their first book or even their first series. A lot of times I see authors who write a couple of series, and those series do okay. They sell a little bit, but not much, and it doesn't afford them to quit their day job. Then suddenly, based on what they've learned with those first two series and what they've learned potentially going to conferences or listening to podcasts like this, et cetera, they write a third series that's a hit. That's a hit, and that's instantly much easier to market, and that's when they can afford to go full time and write full time, because they've found that sort of product market fit. And product market fit for me is the main thing for marketing in general and for authors in particular. Until you find that, everything is really difficult from a marketing perspective. But finding it usually requires writing more than one book and more than one series, because you're rarely going to get the big lottery ticket on the first try. Jo: Or ever. I think it's really important. I've never had a breakout book, but I've made good money every year. I think, and Hugh Howey said this, that the real story of self-publishing is not the people who make seven figures a year, it's the people who can go on a holiday once a year, or the people who can just put a bit towards their mortgage or whatever. So you may never have a breakout series. I think that's really important, too. Ricardo: That's true. Jo: That's true. You can just keep writing and make all right money and be what we call in the mid-list. Ricardo: Yes, but you've got to keep going. You've got to have that resilience to keep going, probably because it's your passion. Exactly. You're not chasing that seven figure series. You're writing because you need to write. Jo: Yes, and you can't stop, and you get the bug. I think when you're writing that first book, I'm not sure if people understand that you either get the bug or you don't, I think. You've written a couple of books now. Do you think you have the bug, or is it more about the business? Ricardo: I don't have the bug. I definitely don't have the bug. I would've kept writing otherwise. Jo: You're a technologist, right? Ricardo: Yes. I'm more of a technologist, more of a marketer. To write my first book, How to Market a Book, I actually had to write newsletters, because that I can manage, right? One newsletter a week. Now I don't even manage that. I send it once every two weeks when I can even manage that pace. But back then I did one newsletter a week, and that's how I wrote my first book. I then put all these newsletters together, and that was before the age of AI, so I couldn't just dump all that into ChatGPT and tell it, “Create me a book based on that.” I had to do it myself. Jo: Oh, terrible. Ricardo: Terrible, I know. The days when we had to work. No, but that was a really good experiment. The second book, Amazon Ads for Authors, I actually wrote it from scratch, and I didn't love the experience. I loved the finished product, I'm very proud of it, but I didn't enjoy the experience of writing it. Amazon Ads is not the most exciting topic in the world. Even for people like me, who actually enjoy Amazon Ads, it's not super exciting to write about. The fact of having to write that whole book from scratch, I didn't love the experience. So now I do want to write a third book at some point, but I think it'll probably be in the format of the first one. Like, when I finish my series of newsletters on AI search and AI discoverability, I might do a booklet or something around it, but we'll have to see. It's not my favourite thing. It's a good thing I don't need to. Good thing I'm not an author, basically. Jo: No, but I think that's really great to recognise. You actually have written books that support your business, and that is very common for nonfiction writers. That's completely normal for nonfiction authors. So I think that's another important thing for people to recognise, is that the reasons we write are different, the reasons we market are different, and we all have different approaches. As we wind up, and obviously you talked a bit there about how easy it is to generate books with AI, and that is probably one of the biggest things that people are worried about. Now, those of us like you and I have been talking about AI at conferences and things for years now. Neither of us are afraid of it, I think basically because both of us use it, and we're technologists, so we just get on with it. There is so much fear in the community. There's so much negativity. You mentioned Substack, and now they've integrated Pangram, which is renowned for false positives around what is written with AI, and so people are very worried. If we look forward and we look at the next decade, this is not going away. This is going to change a lot of things. So how should authors be thinking about AI, do you think, if they want to prepare for the next decade? Ricardo: I think they need to play around with it, because you and I know that until you actually use it, you don't realise what it's capable of. We've both had these moments of “Oh my God, I'm going to be out of a job,” or “Oh my God, this is incredible,” the kind of things it's able to do. You also realise by using it the things it's not great at, or the things it can be good at but needing a lot of human input. There are courses out there, there are books, there are a lot of things, but for me, the most important thing is to start playing around with it. So you can pick one specific topic to play around with. Either something that you've been meaning to get into for years and haven't done, or something that really annoys you. Looking at the results of your Facebook ads, for example. If you run Facebook ads in the first place, and when you log into your Meta dashboard you cannot make sense of it, take screenshots or download the data, feed it to an AI chat, and talk with it. One of my biggest tips when talking to AI chats is asking them questions rather than asking them for things to do. Because if you just feed it your advertising data and you tell it, “Tell me what I should do,” the chat has no context about what your ads are about, what your goal is, et cetera, et cetera. If you feed it just a screenshot and you say, “Here are my ads. I would like you to help me make sense of them. What do you need to know from me in order to help me with this?” Then it's going to start asking you questions. “Okay, what are you advertising?” They're books. “Okay, what kind of books? Where are you selling? Are your ads going straight to Amazon or retailers, or are they going to your website? If you sell direct, okay, are these conversion ads?” Et cetera, et cetera. So you build that context, and they can help you with it. So that's just one example, but I would pick one thing that you want to test AI with, with zero expectations. Don't expect that by the end of the week you'll have a full system for understanding your Meta ads thanks to AI. You might get to that or you might not, but at least you'll play with it and you'll understand its capabilities, and have a sort of understanding of how it works and how you can potentially use it for other things. I think that's the best way to adapt, because once you play with it, you start thinking. You're walking the dog and you're just thinking, “Ha, I could maybe use it for this thing or that other thing,” and that's how you progressively become more familiar with it. I think there are a lot of worries around AI, but as you say, it's there to stay. So far, I think I was looking at data this morning, and the unemployment rate in the US has stayed stable ever since ChatGPT was introduced two years ago. So there are a lot of narratives out there around how it's going to replace humans, it's going to replace jobs, et cetera, which it might do. I'm not great at predictions usually, but so far it hasn't. What it will definitely do, however, is completely change the way we work. Obviously AI was one of our big reckonings at Reedsy, because we run a marketplace. Our main business model is the marketplace, where authors come in and look for editors, for marketers, for cover designers, for translators, and some of these domains and services are being transformed by AI, right? AI translations are massive right now. We haven't really seen a decline at all on the Reedsy marketplace, but we're prepared for it. It might very well happen, but what we think is happening, or is going to happen, is professionals using AI tools to provide a better output or a faster output or a cheaper output, or all three of these things. So for example, we now have literary translators who say they're open to editing AI translations, right? So you can come in, you can have your book translated with AI, whichever tool or method you choose for that. Then if you want a set of human eyes on it, you can hire a literary translator who's open to working on an AI-translated manuscript, and that's obviously going to be much, much cheaper than paying 10 cents per word from scratch for a literary translator. I'm not necessarily recommending you completely bypass literary translators, or that you go this way, but you have options, right? You have options for different sets of budgets. I think all these human editors, narrators, translators, designers, et cetera, they're not going to disappear, but they might have to reinvent the way they work in the future. Jo: As we all are doing. As you say, for me mostly it's the business side, getting Claude to help me with business stuff. Like even bookkeeping. There are bills that we've all been paying for years that we can now maybe reduce, and reducing costs as well as increasing profit is obviously good business sense. So, interesting times. But just as we wrap up, what are you excited about in what's coming? How do you see Reedsy shaping up in the next decade? What is coming for you and Reedsy? Ricardo: We're really excited about the decade to come, because obviously 10 years for a startup is a long time. I think most startups after 10 years, the founders are gone. Jo: Yes. Ricardo: Or they've exited or they've sold or whatever. We've stayed, we're the same founders, and we're still as excited because I think we have new products, right? We're working on new things. As I mentioned at the beginning of the episode, Reedsy Studio, our writing tool, is probably one of the things we're most excited about, because first, it's getting adopted very fast. It has startup-like growth that we hadn't seen for other products in a long time, and it has very cool technology built in. We probably have a team of 10, 15 engineers now working full time on it and adding a lot of things. So we've added templates for plotting your book, with relationships within different characters and places and magic systems and things like that. We've added writing goals and writing statistics. We still have the free exports. One very cool thing we've added is real time collaboration. So just like Google Docs, you can write in real time with a co-author, or you can get an editor to work in there live with track changes. So you could have an editor working on chapter one while you're writing chapter three, for example. That kind of thing. It's really powerful technology, and that's one of the things we're really excited about for the future. A business, just like authors, we've got to reinvent ourselves. We've got to find ways to keep things exciting and keep motivated, and that is definitely one of them. When adoption goes along with it, then that's obviously super satisfying. Jo: Brilliant. So where can people find you and Reedsy online? Ricardo: So Reedsy you can find at reedsy.com, R-E-E-D-S-Y.com. And there you'll find the whole suite of tools and services. For me, you can find me mostly by email, as I mentioned. That's the one place I check consistently every day, and my email address is ricardo@reedsy.com. So again, R-E-E-D-S-Y.com and ricardo@reedsy.com. You can email me any questions you have about this episode, about AI book discoverability, about marketing, about Reedsy. I always try to answer every email I get, because I think when we started Reedsy, I really appreciated people like you, and some other agents and editors and authors we contacted who were influential in the industry, who actually answered us and took the time to do that. So now I try to answer every email I get, because I feel like we've been very lucky in the beginning to have those people answering our emails, so we should do the same. Jo: Oh, well, thanks so much for your time, Ricardo. That was great. Ricardo: Thank you, Jo. Thanks for having me again.The post Book Marketing, AI Book Discoverability, And Resilience, With Ricardo Fayet first appeared on The Creative Penn.

Bobby responds to someone trying to insult him with a comment online but he didn't take it as an insult. Bobby read a story of the crazy reason people are hiring witches off of Etsy. We investigate it and Bobby thinks he may join the trend. Bobby aka Mr. Cinema returns with a ton of movie reviews. We discuss The Odyssey, Backroom, Sing Sing, Backrooms, The Substance and The Devil Wears Prada 2!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.