Podcasts about Phew

Let's conclude this month's wander on the Wayback Machine with more from this introduction and analysis to one of the greats of classical Greek literature. This time, what makes a good ruler, swapping social classes, thoughts on art and health, and the connection between body and mind. And that's just halfway through Book Four! Phew.   Help us stay ad-free and 100% listener-supported! Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/boringbookspod Buy Me a Coffee: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/d5kcMsW   Read "The Republic of Plato" by Benjamin Jowett at Project Gutenberg here: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/55201   Music: "Peace" by Lee Rosevere, licensed under CC BY, https://leerosevere.bandcamp.com   If you'd like to suggest a copyright-free reading for soft-spoken relaxation to help you overcome insomnia, anxiety and other sleep issues, connect on our website, https://www.boringbookspod.com.

Our Season 9 recap covers all of these issues, more or less: Amazing Adventures#32-39, Amazing Spider-Man #147-178 and Annual #10-11, Astonishing Tales#31-36, Avengers#138-169 and Annual #6-7, Black Goliath#1-5, Black Panther#1-8, Captain America #188-219 and Annual #3-4, Captain Marvel#40-55, Champions #1-17, Daredevil #124-151 and Annual #4, Defenders #26-57 and Annual #1, Doctor Strange (vol. 2) #9-27 and Annual #1, Eternals #1-19 and Annual #1, Fantastic Four #161-192 and Annual #11-12, Howard the Duck #1-22 and Annual #1, Incredible Hulk #190-221 and Annual #5-6, Inhumans #1-26, Invaders #1-26 and Annual #1, Iron Man #77-108 and Annual #3-4, Jungle Action #17-24, Ka-Zar #11-20, Marvel Comics Super Special #1, Marvel Premiere #24-40, Marvel Presents #1-12, Marvel Preview #4 and 8-12, Marvel Spotlight #23-33, Marvel Super-Action #1, Marvel Team-Up #36-67 and Annual #1, Marvel Treasury: Captain America's Bicentennial Battles, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Howard the Duck, Marvel Two-In-One #11-37 and Annual #1-2, Ms. Marvel #1-15, Nova #1-18, , Omega the Unknown #1-10, Peter Parker, the Spectacular Spider-Man #1-16, Power Man #26-49, Strange Tales #181, Super-Villain Team-Up #1-14, Thor #238-269 and Annual #5-6, X-Men #94-109, Warlock #9-15, What If...? #1-7, Creatures on the Loose #37, Adventure Into Fear #29-31, Dead of Night #11, Ghost Rider #13-28, Man-Thing #20-22, Frankenstein #18, Tomb of Dracula #35-63, Werewolf by Night #32-43, Marvel Chillers #1-7, Son of Satan #1-8, Adventures on the Planet of the Apes #1-6, Master of Kung Fu #17-51, War Is Hell #9-15, Skull the Slayer #1-8, and Star Wars #1. All ©1975-1977 Marvel Comics. Phew! Support us on Patreon! Patreon supporters at the M.M.B.T.M.M.S. level get access to our subscriber-only feed, which contains over 200 extended versions of our regular episodes and exclusive bonus episodes that can't be heard anywhere else. Patrons at the Insider level get to choose the comics that we talk about each week and get a shout-out by name at the end of every episode. "Marvel by the Month" theme v. 3.0 by Robb Milne. All incidental music by Robb Milne. Visit us on internet at marvelbythemonth.com and follow us on Bluesky at @marvelbythemonth.com and on Instagram at @marvelbythemonth. Much of our historical context information comes from Wikipedia. Please join us in supporting them at wikimediafoundation.org. And many thanks to Mike's Amazing World of Comics, an invaluable resource for release dates and issue information. (RIP Mike.)

Phew! We made it on the air…. Barely! We have preseason football tonight- a reminder that football season is almost here and a small reprieve from our depressing baseball lives. :30- Mariners Morning After The offense stepped up early last night and the Mariners managed to put 5 runs on the board… unfortunately the pitching was M.I.A. and the Mariners lost to the Yankees 10-5. We were so hopeful early on… :45- People just can't get enough of OPQ! - Aaron Rodgers and Mike McCarthy seem to be at odds over preseason playing time- Rodgers will be a gametime decision for the Steelers QB - Jayden Daniels is angry his number is being used by another player at LSU and has sent them a cease & desist…

How can you tell where the real innovation in publishing is happening right now, and why is it emerging from the indie side first? How do you market your own book when you've spent 35 years marketing everyone else's? John Bond talks about Going Indie and what he's learned about authors who last. In the intro, my thoughts on writing with AI, Charles Dickens and encouragement for the 3-year-old dancing to K-Pop at the wedding, UK copyright law, The end of an era — Hugh Howey; Notre Dame, Paris; Today's show is sponsored by Bookfunnel, the essential tool for your author business. Whether it's delivering your reader magnet, sending out advanced copies of your book, handing out ebooks at a conference, or fulfilling your digital sales to readers, BookFunnel does it all. Check it out at bookfunnel.com/thecreativepenn This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn John Bond is the co-founder of Whitefox, a premium publishing services agency, and has over 35 years in traditional publishing, from bookselling to marketing and management. He's also the co-author of Going Indie: Publishing Your Book Your Way, with James Silver. 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 2012 was a watershed moment for publishing in the UK Whether the snobbery around self-publishing has finally gone How to co-write a book with someone, and why there's no formula The pride swallowing involved in getting endorsement quotes for your own book The shadow economy of indie sales that no industry chart measures The hallmarks of writers who build a long-term career You can find John at wearewhitefox.com. Transcript of the interview with John Bond Jo: John Bond is the co-founder of Whitefox, a premium publishing services agency, and has over 35 years in traditional publishing, from bookselling to marketing and management. He's also the co-author of Going Indie: Publishing Your Book Your Way, with James Silver. So welcome back to the show, John. John: Thank you, Jo. Thanks so much for having me. Jo: You were last on the show in 2022. You've been on a couple of times, but just set the scene. Tell people a bit more about you and your long background in publishing. John: I suppose I could say I started as a marketing manager at Penguin back in the early 1990s in London, and that role eventually evolved into running sales and marketing, as it often does. I did that at Penguin and at HarperCollins. Then I ran one of the publishing divisions at HarperCollins, including 4th Estate, and published Hilary Mantel and Jonathan Franzen and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and others. I left that in 2011 and set up Whitefox in 2012, and it's a classic startup story. It was somebody I worked with at HarperCollins. We sat around a kitchen table, came up with an idea for a business, which was Whitefox, and that's grown into the creative agency that it is today. Jo: So back then, did you think, “I can do this better”? Was that the impetus, “I can do publishing better than Penguin and HarperCollins”? John: No, I thought we would solve a problem. There's something very attractive about that whole startup mentality and beginning something from scratch. I mean, I was in my early 50s. I'd had a long career in traditional publishing. On the plus side, I knew a lot of people, and I thought I could get meetings, people would reply to my phone calls or my emails. On the downside, I didn't necessarily have the energy of a 20 to 25-year-old. I knew a lot of people and I knew quite a lot of things, and I also knew what problems something like Whitefox could solve. We set up with this idea that if we could galvanise and organise the diaspora of freelancers in the publishing space and make them available to anybody that wanted to make a book, that that would be quite a powerful thing. These incredibly creative, wonderful people who were below the radar and were not particularly valued or managed or utilised properly. I thought if we could access that and make that available not just to traditional publishing people who know about these people, but to individual authors, businesses, brands, people that wanted to make a book, and if you added a layer of our expertise from traditional publishing, that could be quite powerful, I suppose. That's what I was thinking back then. Jo: It's funny, though. You said these wonderful freelancers who were not particularly valued or managed or utilised properly. That could also apply to a lot of authors in traditional publishing. John: Totally. Totally. But if I'm honest, I don't think I was thinking about that. What's really evolved since we started, even in that 2011, 2012 period, is so much has happened to independent writers, indie authors. The whole ecosystem has become much more vibrant, and what is accessible to those writers is much greater. I'd like to think we've played a part in that. What that's done is put power back into writers' hands, and that quickly became apparent in the business as a byproduct of what we'd set up. Jo: Yes, and 2012 I do think in the UK was a pivot point, because I got into self-publishing in 2006/2007 when the Americans did with the beginning of the Kindle and the iPhone. Really the American ecosystem grew first. I happened to be in Australia, and so I think I was able to escape the negativity of the vortex in the UK, which took a number more years to embrace self-publishing as a force to be reckoned with as opposed to an embarrassing thing in the corner for vanity press. Do you see 2012 as a changing point in UK publishing? John: I think we'd just come out of the Kindle moment, hadn't we? There were all sorts of conversations going on about how that was going to change things forever. I think no one quite knew what the upshot of that was going to be, but we knew that it was incredibly disruptive. In 2012, Penguin, as it was then, before Penguin Random House, had offered to buy Author Solutions for $115 million, presumably seen as some kind of defensive measure as to what the market was going to evolve into. I think it felt like a real period of change. In the UK, James Daunt took over running Waterstones, and he was then ultimately going to run Barnes & Noble. It felt like a bit of a watershed. I think we were lucky in that sense, that maybe in the UK and in London, what we were creating coincided with an opening up of opportunity and creativity, and people wanting access to more tools to be able to do things themselves. Getting this idea that you invest in your own talent and what that could mean for your ability to do things quicker, better. Some of it was happenstance, but lucky for us. As you say, we then became aware that in a sense a lot of these things had come to fruition earlier on the US side. In London, that whole idea of setting up something that wasn't a traditional rights-owning model, but where you wanted to be working with people creatively, felt actually really exciting and timely. Jo: And when you started to work with independent authors, probably a couple of years after that, you started to work with a lot more indie authors and things really started to change in terms of the business side. Did you feel any of the snobbery from the traditional industry? Like you mentioned, you have a lot of contacts, a lot of connections. I came to your wonderful launch party and there were just people from all over the industry. I wondered if you got any kickback, or if anyone raised their eyebrows a little bit at who you were choosing to work with? John: Oh, definitely. And I would say I really think that's gone. You may think differently, Jo, but from my perspective, I think there has been such an evolution in the nearly 15 years that we've been going. So any of that residual snobbery, looking down your nose at people that were going DIY, producing multiple books, learning from every single publication. We've spoken about this before. I remember you sat on the panel of a FutureBook conference in the UK, which was run by a trade magazine, with this idea of looking at the, in quotes, “digital future of the business.” It felt like there were a lot of things being talked about, but not a lot of action on the traditional side. I suppose some sort of awe that there was some magic going on with people who were making a success of self-publishing. But then quite a lot of people looking down their noses at things that shouldn't get through the gatekeepers. I do think that's gone. Or if it's not completely gone, I can see it on the way out of the door, because there's no room for that when agents are struggling to sell books to publishers because publishers are looking at the next indie author, the next Freida McFadden, the next Sarah J. Maas, the next Rebecca Yarros. So whoever it may be, or wherever they're publishing, whatever they're doing now, wherever they may be, knowing that a lot of those people will already be publishing and be on not their first, second, third or fourth, but potentially their 10th or 11th book. It's a race to see who can help those authors, as a traditional publisher would see it, amplify what they're doing. I think the idea that there's an us and them, if it did exist then, which it certainly did in certain publishing quarters, is gone. I used to go to those conferences, like the FutureBook Conference, and certain publishers would talk about publishing, and when they meant publishing, they meant a really tiny area of quite literary, traditional imprints. That's what publishing meant. They didn't even mean publishing to mean educational publishing, or children's publishing, or academic publishing, and certainly not Kindle or POD or whatever. So I think that's had to change for very good, sound, commercial, economic reasons. Jo: Yes, you're right. I definitely have heard, as we go to similar events sometimes, and you do hear agents used to talk a lot more about finding books very occasionally in a slush pile, or doing courses so you could meet people and do pitch events and all this. Now it's often build an audience on BookTok or whatever, and sell lots of books, and traditional publishing as an amplifier, as you said. That's how I always hear them pitch it now, the question of— What can traditional publishing still do when indie authors can do so much? It does seem to be, well, we can amplify you, we can get you into traditional press, we can get you in traditional bookstores, we can help you with film and movie deals, that kind of thing. So that's really interesting, because that's actually changed quite a lot. They don't now seem to say, “Oh, well, we can make sure we pay you,” or, “We are editorial success as such.” John: I think they don't say editorial success or quality or indeed marketing, because that was what used to be said. I think there's an understanding that a lot of indie writers are better marketeers of their own books than traditional publishers, and if you go into the publishing machine, then you'll get your slot. It lasts for a certain period of time and then that moves on to another book. Whereas obviously if you're writing your own book and you're marketing your own book, you're able to do that yourself 24/7 wherever you are in the world, and you will know more about your readers and your audience and how that evolves than a traditional publisher would. What they probably mean now is, as you said, as much as anything, distribution, or even physical distribution. Because to be part of that process, I think that is still where a large conglomerate is able to wield some muscle, with this idea that if you physically want to see your book in bricks and mortar retailers in X outlets around the world, that's potentially easier to do if that is your aim, via a traditional publisher. So it is constantly evolving, because it used to be that marketing was the silver bullet, and I don't think that's the case anymore. Jo: No. We'll come back to marketing, shall we? Struggling with marketing. So let's get into your book. You recently co-wrote Going Indie with James Silver, Publishing Your Book Your Way. Obviously you already knew a lot about indie authors, so I wonder, what did you discover in the process of researching the book and the interviews you did? And I was one of your interviews. Did anything come up that surprised you, since you're already pretty embedded in the world? John: I would say some of it was reinforcing what I knew. So how everything is so intertwined, how in some ways unlinear everything is. People are doing lots of things in a different order to the way that traditionally writers would perceive this relay race of a manuscript gets passed to an editor, an editor passes on. That's just not how it is or needs to be anymore. I still think there is—not even a misconception—but I think there's a received wisdom that when you're talking about self-publishing, you're talking about fiction. The majority of books that Whitefox produces are not fiction, they're non-fiction. Some of them are quite mainstream, some of them are quite niche. That idea of connecting to your audience and your followers, and being slightly more scientific about how you find readers in your non-fiction niche, I think is still unspoken about in a way, in that genre fiction tends to be what people automatically assume the conversation is about. This probably doesn't surprise you, but I was pleasantly surprised to have it confirmed to me quite how much swapping and sharing there is of skills and knowledge in that space. I'm not saying indie writing is egoless at all, but there's quite a lot of sharing of knowledge and what works, and collaboration, which I think is great to see. Again, if you've, as I did many years ago, come out of corporate conglomerate publishing, traditional publishing, there's less of that by the very nature of the kind of organisation. And look, we just talked about marketing a little while ago. I do think this whole idea that the cutting edge of experimentation, it's not traditional publishing, it's indie writers. They are looking at not just how to find readers, but how to fulfil orders, how to make commercial sense of what they're doing from the absolute outset and get-go of what they're doing. And just how now the lines are blurring between what would be classified as traditional digital publishers and the writers who are doing their own thing, or doing their own thing on behalf of a few other writers. Those lines have completely blurred. There used to be this traditional hardback, paperback, X number of books a year, a year after hardback there's a paperback. This is the model we have been doing for centuries, and people doing things on their own. I think that's blurring massively, and the Venn diagrams of people's areas of expertise are just overlapping massively. Jo: Well, I think you're right there, and certainly the hardback special editions with sprayed edges and foil. A lot of us now are doing that first and not putting out the other, or putting out the rest of it at the same time. I dare say probably there are more indie authors with sprayed edge hardbacks than there are traditionally published authors. John: I'm sure that's right. And what's interesting is if you go to a traditional book printer, they are loving the direct communication with writers, that's not coming through traditional channels and traditional relationships. It's great business, it's interesting. I think that's something that's even developed in the last couple of years, that cutting out of some of the middle men required. Jo: Yes, and in terms of supporting freelancers and small publishing houses and printers and stuff, the other thing I've heard is that indie authors pay upfront, or they pay quickly, compared to some of these big publishers who are asking for long lead times and steep discounting. So actually a lot of these independent businesses are doing better under indie author work than they were under traditional. John: I think that's right, and that's what I mean also about the sharing of information and this collaborative idea of sharing creative knowledge. I mean, I'm making it sound like a kind of 19th century cooperative, which it isn't. I'm not suggesting that for a second. It's this idea that there's a lot of people learning a lot of things and there's a keenness to share some of that information, because if you've developed your own readership for your unique creative product, some of those learnings are very exciting. The printers I've spoken to love working on those kinds of things, because they are also being challenged to come up with new ways of developing ever more innovative physical product. Jo: Yes, I think it's a fun, creative time for sure. Things like Kickstarter, which you came on and talked about crowdfunding years ago, and I've obviously done. I think, what am I on now? Seven? I've just done my seventh. John: Wow. Jo: It's so much fun. But now what's happening is traditional publishers are arriving on Kickstarter and all that kind of thing. So we really see a blurring. Let's come back to your book, so Going Indie. You co-wrote it. Now obviously there are lots of positive sides of collaboration, but in terms of any challenges with collaboration and co-writing and the writing process of doing this? Because I've done this several times and I've found it very challenging. So tell us about the collaborative writing process. John: We thought a lot about it before we took it on. What I would say, having done it, is I am assuming there is no formula for how you do this. At Penguin I worked with a married couple who were crime writers, and they wrote books together. They merged their names so it appeared to be one name. I could not tell you, and they didn't share what that process was, whether they were writing different chapters or … I don't know. So I can only speak from my own experience. James is an established journalist. He's great with deadlines. He was very good at chivvying me along when I needed to be persuaded to hit the deadlines that I'd promised. I write blogs, I write newsletters, I write content for our website, but this is my first book. I've never written anything of this length. So in a way it started with the structure. It started with this idea that we would play to what we perceived as our respective strengths in terms of writing. We absolutely were not each writing every third word or anything like that. It was a process of trust in different parts. I thought, James had done some research and will be better at writing that. He deferred to me on areas that he took to be my areas of expertise. We did every interview for the book together. We went over the notes from those before they became part of the interviews for the book. And some of the book's elements are diagrammatic, so those are very easy to collaborate on. I think we tried to be professionally, creatively constructive with each other. So it was raising an eyebrow rather than shouting at each other if we didn't agree about something. A lot of it was down to the editing, and I don't know what your experience was like with a co-writer, but a lot of it came down to: here is something which is quite baggy. How do we, between us, make this as tight as we possibly can? I don't mean copy editing or proofreading. I mean the actual sort of, how do we get this into a pithy, usable, practical but discursive book? We didn't ever set out for this to be a pure reference book at all. We wanted to take a snapshot of what was going on. So a lot of it was genuinely trying to do some research and get people to feed into what was going on from lots of different perspectives, which is why we wanted to get mainstream traditional publishers, we wanted to get agents, we wanted to get indie writers, we wanted to get people who have all sorts of experiences and perspectives. That's what makes it what it is, which is, here's what we think are some of the interesting discussion points of what's going on now. Jo: It is a fantastic snapshot. I think it's really interesting—and obviously you also have seen my book, Successful Self-Publishing, which is on its fourth edition—this is one of the difficult things with snapshot type books. So have you already thought about that? I know this one has just come out, but have you thought, “Oh no, in five years we have to do it again”? John: Well, I think we thought we're going to have to address AI, which we do in the book, and we really tried to caveat that with saying, look, so much may change so quickly, and here we are talking about what we know now. We obviously tried to set the context for where we are now, and we tried as much as possible to make something which would last as long as we can. I think what we did think was, we have tried to make it as international a perspective as possible. But at the same time, we are a London-based agency, and a lot of the views will be from people based in the UK. So I think what I would like to explore is something that looks at potentially somewhere like the US, where I think there'll be different people that would perhaps have different perspectives on different things. So I think we thought about potentially there being future iterations of the book, but not yet. Jo: Not yet. This is the challenge with non-fiction, of course. On that, I would say what you just said around the US and stuff, the successful UK authors all use the same systems as the US. So I wouldn't say that the US … I mean, we all have the US companies we all use. I say Kobo is obviously Canadian, but I would say that we use the same ways of doing things. Obviously you might interview a different author, but … John: That was all I meant. I meant interviewing. Because we've interviewed agents and authors and publishers and they are largely UK based. So it was the idea that maybe there are some perspectives on things rather than systemic. Jo: Differences. John: Yes. Just that. Jo: So then I guess another challenge, we've kind of nodded to it so far, is marketing. So let's talk about the challenges of getting this book out in terms of publishing and marketing. Because you've been on the inner circle side, trying to do that for other people's books, but your own book, this is a whole nother thing. So tell us about that. John: Well, how do you do it, Jo? I mean, honestly, I've loved some of it. I get how you become completely obsessed with your book and trying to make sure that you can get it into the hands of the people that you want to get it into the hands of. We've got some great endorsement quotes, which was a task that, how can I say this? I would call it pride swallowing. The idea that you really try and get people to say nice things about your book and, if they don't reply, you think, “How much do I pester them? How much do I annoy them by asking them again nicely?” And the absolute sheer unadulterated joy when they come back with something positive that you can use and utilise in some way. So that whole process of waiting for feedback, I suppose, and hoping that people are going to like what you've done and help you spread the word for it. We had a launch event, we've given books away. We've published the book as ebook and POD. I think one of the great things about that is it's enabled us to be completely adaptable and make changes right up until the last minute. That drove everybody in my team completely crazy because we were making changes up until the last minute. So, is the book definitely going to be available on publication date? What's it going to do? You know, all of that kind of stuff. Also, just getting this idea that I suppose you can never stop. Is that a very obvious thing to say to a writer? It probably is. You just can't stop, because if you go, “Right, well, I've done it,” complacency is the enemy. Just as soon as you've got that quote, or someone said that they're going to give you an opportunity to talk about it on a platform, it's just another day and you've got to keep thinking about how you can spread the word and tell people that it exists. Jo: Yes, well, I think that's right, and particularly non-fiction, which unless it's very timely and you must get it out right now. But other than that— Most books you just have to keep marketing for years. Then just as you say, when do you stop? Well, you kind of never stop unless you want to, unless you want to retire and just give up, basically. Dean Wesley Smith, who's a big writer in the US and a kind of a mentor of mine in past years, he talks about it as this massive sea of books. And when a book arrives, he pictures it coming down and landing on the water. So the day you launch, it's landed on the water, and then it begins to sink. Then there are all these other books coming down. It's like this rain of books, and your book is sinking as soon as it lands. And your job is to keep it afloat somehow. John: Keep it afloat. Jo: Yes. John: I think you're right, and it's such an interesting perspective for us, who work with a lot of people who have one book. You know, they've spent 10 years writing it. It's their life story. It's their memoir. It's their self-help book. It's their book that accompanies them on their speaking journey, or whatever. Then there are the people who are writing constantly and can't stop writing because they're exercising that creative muscle all the time and wanting to get better, and wanting to improve and learn and understand why this works and why that hasn't worked. Just getting a glimpse into what it must be like for that person for whom writing is not a hobby. I kept saying to myself, “This is not something you're doing as a hobby.” I want this book to be of value to people, and if I'm investing that time and effort into something that I want to get out there, you've got to commit to whatever it is you need to do to make sure you're not sinking. Jo: Yes. John: I will now not be able to get that image out of my head. Jo: Yes. I know there's people listening who don't have a mind's eye, which I always find fascinating, but for those of us with a mind's eye, you can now picture that and you will never forget it. The other thing, I guess, is that, having done a lot, over 40 books now, the inevitable thing is you cannot keep pushing all of those books back up to the surface. So when you do get the bug as such of writing, the most interesting thing for all of us is always the next book. It's always like, ooh, the next thing I'm doing, I'm very excited about. So you do have to pick your battles on marketing. So have you got the bug, do you think? Are you thinking of other books in general? Because as you said, you must be, I guess, in your 60s. John: I am. Jo: You could retire. John: I am. You were talking about that long career. I could. I mean, I really love doing it, and I would love to do more. I think one of the things that surprised me was just how many ideas came up while we were doing the book about tangents that one could take it. I have no desire to write a novel. I don't want to do that. I wouldn't be very good at that. I do think there are some interesting spaces around where there's a kind of intersection of creativity and learning, and how you can develop books that would help people who are trying to achieve different things in different sectors of publishing. So without getting too granular about it, this book doesn't really address brands who want to become publishers, and I think that is something that our business has developed into working with, not just individuals, but businesses and brands. I think there's definitely spin-offs of this book which are not about repeating what we've done so far. And this whole idea of what you've been doing for a long time, what we've been doing since 2011, 2012, it's evolving now at such a speed. I mean, who would have known what was going to come out of TikTok? As you talk about TikTok to Shopify, that whole kind of new ways of finding readers, of taking books to market. As you said, Kickstarter, crowdfunding. There's all sorts of things that I think will emerge, because in a funny sort of way traditional publishing at the moment feels quite conservative with a small c. I mean, the bestsellers. Dan Brown is number one in the bestseller list this week in the UK as I speak, who has been a bestseller forever. And obviously new writers come along the whole time, but the market feels a little bit as if it's waiting now for innovation. I think if that innovation's going to happen, it's probably going to happen in the indie space before it happens in mainstream publishing. So people are coming to us and thinking, does that represent a trend? Does that represent something which could be a way of looking at something a little bit deeper, doing some research around and creating something which is not a long book, not a massive thesis, but something which is indicative of something which could be useful for people. Jo: Just coming back on the Dan Brown is in the bestseller list. I think this is completely to do with the way that traditional publishing measures things. For many years, more than a decade, probably since the beginning of Kindle, certainly the beginning of Kindle Unlimited, there is a shadow economy, I call it, or a parallel economy. I would say that almost zero of my own personal sales are measured by any industry standards. Anyone who makes any money from Kindle Unlimited or Kickstarter or Shopify, or selling direct in any form, or selling books at conventions, none of this is measured by any traditional things. As you know, the New York Times list, for example, does not include Amazon sales in their bestseller list. So you've got indie authors in the UK who are incredibly successful who have to decide, say, someone like LJ Ross, for example, decides, “Okay, I'm going to set up a proper imprint with Gardners or whatever so that I can get in bookstores so that I can hit a Sunday Times list or something.” So I would say that seeing things like Dan Brown on a bestseller list has almost no meaning in the shadow indie economy. John: No, you're absolutely right. We're not even able to see audiobook sales. Jo: Yes, audio. Any kind of borrows, like Spotify. John: No, you're completely right. I suppose I was making a broader cultural point, that it doesn't feel like there's an enormous amount of innovation going on or risk taking within what I would call mainstream trade publishing. And there doesn't seem to be the need to be, because there will be more consolidation. Small companies will be bought by big companies, so there's growth through acquisition. There's still a hope that something will take off that is a surprise, and there's still an enormous reliance on established brands who, even through the traditional metrics of how you measure them, are probably selling less, but still at the top of the pile. I suppose that's what I was meaning. Jo: Yes, and I agree with what the industry looks at as signals. It's just, as we said, a lot of these signals are invisible. So coming onto innovation, at London Book Fair this year there were a lot of sessions on AI, and you mentioned AI briefly, and there is a chapter in Going Indie on generative AI. And of course there's a lot of negativity and drama and lawsuits and this, that and the other. But at the same time, at London Book Fair, a lot of traditional publishers talking about using it, and of course they always say, “Oh, we use AI only in marketing and business, not with the creative or editorial.” Everyone makes this distinction. What are your thoughts on what's happening and where's it going with AI? Is a lot of this stuff not happening in public and just going on behind closed doors? John: I think so. We do have a chapter in the book on AI. We've generated summaries of every chapter using AI, which we explicitly said in the book as well. We've got our Ten Commandments of what we think are useful guidelines. I think that there has to be an enormous amount being done, whether it's experimentation or speeding up for efficiency's sake, or things that slow you down, within mainstream publishing. There has to be more than just the guardrails around the creative process. And clearly when we're talking about metadata, book description, cover copy, presumably royalty calculations, presumably if you're trying to grow your newsletters. There has to be an enormous amount of activity going on. We're driven by the market, so we do not commission. Writers come to us and they either want to work with us and we want to work with them, or that doesn't happen. So we're in a sense seeing what the market is seeing, and that is a whole range of things. As I've said before, there's a lot of sweeping generalisations out there, which if you look back to that Kindle moment, we were talking a little while ago about what was going on in 2010/2011, about the enormous broad brush strokes that were being perceived as a result of Kindle. Kindle has affected some areas of publishing, it's affected some not at all. I think it will be absolutely fascinating when the sweeping generalisations stop and there becomes, I suppose, even more transparency. The thing that people are looking for, isn't it? A little bit less opaqueness as to what is really being done. Because everybody's being so careful about what they say they're doing and what they're not doing. I suppose ElevenLabs is the one where people are openly engaging on the audio side. I mean, everyone is being so careful and cautious. Jo: Me too. John: What do you think? We spoke a bit about AI within the book, and I'm interested to know what you think. Jo: Well, I've obviously been openly talking about it since 2016. I openly talk about using it, and I've got my Patreon community where we talk about how we're using it, and tips on how to use it. But then, because I have been writing and publishing since 2007, 2008, I'm very strong in my creative voice. I'm very strong in my understanding of what I consider to be my level of output, and what I publish under my own name is what I publish under my own name. John: Totally. Jo: So the problem is for people who are less confident, I think, in what they're doing creatively perhaps. I know some people feel like they're scared it will take over or something. When you're as strong-minded as me, it's not taking over anything. John: It's not going to take over anything. And the other side of the coin is how many people are finding Whitefox using ChatGPT. Jo: Mm. John: I'm thrilled that we are emerging, through very detailed briefing of AI, as something that is worth engaging with. Jo: Positive marketing. John: Yes, exactly. As you say, I think there's a lot of negativity, and I think it will settle down eventually. I think less hysteria. Jo: Yes, hopefully sooner rather than later. So as we come to an end, you've been in the publishing industry a long time and seen a lot of people who have disappeared, but also those who've lasted. I wondered if maybe you could comment on those who last, because I definitely feel like I'm in my 50s now, and I want to keep doing this. I'm pretty obsessed with— What are the hallmarks of people who have a long-term career? So reflections on that. John: Oh, that's such a good question. I think there's some common characteristics and themes. So I think authenticity, I think this idea of being continually curious. I think there are people who can't help but create, and this idea that once you've sort of expelled once, that's enough. I think there's people that just can't stop creating, whatever you do with it. But this idea that the more you do, the better you get, the more you evolve and keep an open mind. I think there's definitely entrepreneurial writers who love this idea of keeping their readers engaged, and how that conversation is something that evolves and that collaboration evolves, is fascinating. I think if you love that, and you listen, there's always an opportunity to keep building on what you do. I love the writers who we work with. I can think of a writer who we're working on his fourth novel at the moment, and he is a bundle of positivity. No matter the trials and tribulations, the things that have gone wrong, his expectations definitely not being met with his first book. He definitely has this idea that he wants to keep writing, he wants to get better, and he is getting better. It isn't a journey that has a beginning and an end. It's something that will continue for as long as he wants to write. Every single book that he has published, he has learned and gained confidence, gained a network of connections that he's utilised himself now to not make the first half a dozen mistakes he made on the first book. Who knows where it will end up? But certainly the satisfaction he's getting, and the sales he's getting, are growing as he becomes savvier and quicker to make the right choices and decisions. So I think that's my honest answer to that. I think there are definitely people who think, “Phew, I have really wanted to do this book. Now I can rest easy. I've done my book.” Then there are people who really, whatever their objective, whatever the definition of success is from the get-go, just can't help creating. I do love that and respect that. I don't think our book falls quite into that category, because I think it's a slightly different thing. I think there are people who are still making a success of what they do and redefining that as they go on, and who are really open to ideas and input from different people and are not closed off. I love working with those people. Jo: So where can people find Going Indie and everything you do online? John: Well, Going Indie is available online at all good bookshops. It's available at Amazon and anywhere you buy books online as ebook and POD. Our website is wearewhitefox.com, and you'll find information about not just our book there, but a lot of other things that we're doing on that site. Jo: Brilliant. Well, thanks so much for your time, John. That was great. John: Thank you so much, Jo. It's been a pleasure. The post Going Indie, Publishing Innovation, And The Challenges Of Book Marketing With John Bond first appeared on The Creative Penn.

Phew, Phew! Welcome to pcmc! Your one-stop shop for non-toxic fandom and pop culture ephemera. On today's episode, host Mike Bongiorno is flying solo in the studio as he nerds all-the-way out about the 2019 documentary series Looking for Leia. A series that examines Star Wars fandom through the perspective of female, queer, and POC fans. There is a galaxy of fans out there that hold Star Wars dear to their hearts, and use fandom to find community, inspire their creativity, and make meaning in the world. Hear Mike get geeky about the history of fandom studies, and how he believes fandom can help get us through the dark times we live in. If you love Star Wars, fandom, pcmc, or anything nerdy, this episode will resonate with you. If you like this show, check out our back catalog of over 400 free episodes. follow us everywhere @PCMCpod

Welcome to Bubbles' Mushrooms - we're from the internet! Can you finally believe that we're finally back?! Phew.. that was a long hiatus for July but now since it's August we can finally be back again! Since we have been gone so long, we're talking about Father's Day this week even though it was a long time ago. Luke is trying out some really ancient drops from the days of olde, Edward has a rant about Father's Day, Katie and Jaclyn did school & Grey got a 69% in his studies. Maggie goes in for surgery to get her voice box removed, Katie has a medical corner update, Edward has a political corner update and we have a great time starting the pig for game time. Jaclyn has made a special ode to Father's Day with her superfun gametime activity. See how well you know dads this week - only on Bubbles' Mushrooms!

3,258 episodes and 3,113 days later. Phew.That first episode went out on 18 January 2018 and nobody heard it.There has been one most days since — through Christmases, a pandemic, becoming a dad and a long list of difficult days when stopping would have been the sensible choice because I was doing this in my 'spare time'. Whatever that is.Following a question I asked you recently and feedback from loads of you, publicly and privately, I've decided that EV News Daily will become ev.news on 1 August.The short version, for anyone who reads no further: the show does not change, the feed does not break, the pledge stays as it is and there is nothing to do.Why the change?The name began as a description. One short podcast, just the news, daily.In 2026 it describes less than it used to. There is now the original global news podcast, Briefly for those in a hurry, China, Specials, the written daily briefing here on Patreon and on evnewsdaily.comwhen I have time, and a YouTube channel I have restarted several times and never quite got right.But most importantly the show these days is all about explaining what the news means, rather than just repeating headlines."EV News Daily" is where this came from and in some ways it's tethering me to the past because I'm doing everything the way I used to, plus many new things bolted on.ev.news names a new thing. It is shorter, it survives being said out loud on air, it's better for search when someone looks for 'EV news' and it is easier to remember. The industry has changed beyond recognition in eight years, and this next stage feels like the moment to change with it.For those who asked - yes I have bought the ev.news domain, so the podcast will be matched by an online presence and email addresses. I also have managed to get 'evnews' as a username on Instagram and Threads. On Facebook, X, LinkedIn and more the handle/username will have to stay evnewsdaily, as evnews was taken long ago, but that's not a problem.It also sets an intention. The plan was never to stay a single creator with a microphone — though that remains an accurate description of most days since I quit my job, adopted two kids and started doing this full-time.I have a vision of a team working on this one day - perhaps someone on ev.news China, someone on a newsletter, someone who loves making video.What does it mean?Very little immediate change, and that is deliberate.- *The feed does not change.* Same Patreon, same RSS, same Apple, Spotify, etc. Nothing to re-subscribe to, nothing to fix. New artwork and a new name will turn up first.- *The ad-free feed continues.* Untouched. One of the best benefits of Patreon support and it stays.- *The pledge does not change.* Same tiers, same price, same platform. No restructuring, nothing to re-confirm.- *The show does not change.* Same format, same presenter attempting Chinese names.- *The website will be new.* evnewsdaily.com has never been a work of art but I enjoyed learning Wordpress. ev.news will be built to do the job properly: somewhere audio and video stop fighting each other, and somewhere a future newsletter could live natively.How can you help?A rebrand only makes sense when there is something worth putting a better name on.There is something here worth rebranding because you pay for it. Patreon legends covered the hosting and the kit through the years when the whole audience would have fitted in my spare bedroom, and it turned a hobby that lost money into something that could take itself seriously. There is a rebrand on 1 August because you decided a daily EV podcast was worth a few quid a month.So over the next few days I will share things as I make them: any new artwork, the site as it gets built, the bits that break and all the things I have not worked out yet. You have heard more of this show than anyone else, and you're in the best place to help me course-correct when I get it wrong.Thank you.3,258 episodes later, I don't know what comes next, but at least the first episode of ev.news won't just be me talking to myself!— Martyn

Another big episode today, what a win from Lucas Herbert, that was quite the performance - 10 under in the last round, 11 under in the first round, to finish 30 under!!!01:00We chat about Lucas' performance, and Team Ripper's win. 02:00Not a bad payday for Travis Smythe.03:00LIV's payments, are they being made, and what are the changes proposed by the LIV CEO - particularly with the teams event looking doubtful.04:00Elvis Smylie - we'll try to get him on, he's our guy and he may have some insights into LIV. Mark asks Nick should he play a few more DPWT events?05:30Mark gives Nick a new (hypothetical) job as life coach/manager for Lucas Herbert and wants Nick to outline next steps for Lucas.07:00Should the PGA allow the LIV players to play the Challenger Tour?09:00Should Lucas go to the DPWT or Challenger Tour?10.30Where should Lucas be ranked all things considered. He is 69th at the moment, but where should he be?11.30Mark and Nick talk about the emergence at the weekend of Jackson Koivun, his history, and his win at the 3M in only his 3rd professional start. We look at his performance, and his swing, which is brutal. 16:00Nick and Mark call it a 'young mans' swing, and Nick does not believe he will be able to have this swing in 10-years time.18:00Mark says that his spine is supple at the moment and can allow a swing like this, but it can't stay that way.19:00However, Jackson Koivun is our Hostplus plus for golf this week....he does appear to be a very special player.20:00Mark talks about Jackson's putting, and Nick has heard a few things about his mental strength and his confidence.23:00Mark awards his BMW Touch of Class to Mark Mark Calcavecchia, Cam Percy and Richard Green collectively and explains why.24:30Prior to the turn, Mark springs an idea on Nick and Dan without warning. He went to a fancy dinner last week, and had some feedback on his recent 'watchlist' of players he has a question mark over. He decides to have a running watchlist on the show.After the turn:30:00The first ever World Thank a PGA Pro Day is coming up this friday, we chat about it and on Friday Nick and Mark will name the PGA Pro they'd like to thank.31:00Nicks Top 5 for Betr - the young golfers who were touted as the 'next big things', however to some degree or another it didn't quite eventuate.38:00For Southern Golf Club, plenty of feedback to run through....39:00We start with Bryson, there was so much reaction to Marks comments about Bryson last week, we don't read any out, but there were a mountain of comments.40:00There was plenty on our Graham Marsh chat, and universally positive as you'd expect.43:00A question as to why we didn't discuss Scottie Scheffler's TIO relief at Royal Birkdale last week.46:00Some feedback on Marks Top latecomers to golf.48:00Nick takes us around the world in the Global Result highlights49:30This is fun...Mark has a 59 to rate. This time Michael Kim's 59 from the 3M in Minnesota.55:00And we wrap with a masterclass from Mark for the Golf Clearance Outlet, he has noticed Jackson Koivun doing something unusual with his practise swings on short putts, and talks through it.Phew...another big show !We're live from Titleist and FootJoy HQ thanks to our great partners:Hostplus, Talk Birdie To Me's official retirement partnerBMW, luxury and comfort for the 19th hole;Titleist, the #1 ball in golf;FootJoy, the #1 shoe and glove in golf;Golf Clearance Outlet, they beat everyone's prices;Betr, the fastest and easiest betting app in Australia;The Find My Player app - follow every player on every tour;And Southern Golf Club. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

• LIVE SHOW KLAXON!!! Our London round table on authoritarianism, with the Lincoln Project and Byline Times, is on Thursday – get your tickets ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠HERE!⁠⁠⁠⁠ Andy Burnham's first week in the big job has been a blur of activity. Alex Andreou and Kenny Campbell have a look at the deluge of policy announcements (and the social media flood too). Reasons for optimism? And, in India, it's Cockroaches 1 - 0 Govt Ministers, as a huge youth protest claims it's first political scalp. What's it all about - and what lessons are there for Britain? Plus, the latest instalment in the mad, bad world of AI, where a digital Great Escape has been grabbing headlines. Phew! What a bumper package! ***SPONSOR US AT ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠KO-FI.COM/QUIETRIOTPOD⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠*** • We have put together a ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠BLUESKY STARTER PACK⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ - make like Nandy and join us there! • Email us at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠quietriotpod@gmail.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ • Or visit our website ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠www.quietriotpod.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Brought to you by Naomi Smith, Alex Andreou and Kenny Campbell. Quiet Riot is a Cooler Heads production. ***SPONSOR US AT ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠KO-FI.COM/QUIETRIOTPOD⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠*** Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This week is a truly madcap sniffathon HOPEFULLY encompassing [*takes adeep breath*] wild seascapes, fragrant ghosts and a notorious rake; a spicysummer scent to set your senses tingling; a fruity treat based on a perfumer'sfavourite breakfast; a splendiferous peacock strutting its scented stuff; a stunningsueded rose; perfumes pulled straight from the vegetable patch; Harrodsexclusives to swoon over; a seriously affordable new niche house; a mesmerisingmyrrh, and Alice du Parcq's book pre-order discount code…AND if all that wasn't enough, we're also answering a #listenerprescription for ajasmine fragrance to remind her of a dance while wearing jasmine garlands.Phew!Can we possibly fit it all in without going off-topic? Listen along and find out!BeauFort London continued: Following on from last week's fascinating interviewwith founder Leo Crabtree, Nicola tries a trio of intriguing scents:Cape Wrath‘Cape Wrath Eau De Parfum. Named after the rugged area of coastline on themost North Westerly tip of Britain, Cape Wrath pulls inspiration from this wild,treacherous seascape. The remote landmark - named after the old Norse wordfor ‘turning point' has for centuries been used by sailors to safely navigate thecoast of Britain, yet its treacherous waters have claimed countless vessels.Character: Powerful; wild; windswept

 THE WEARING EXPERIENCETop Notes: Pink Pepper, Elemi, Galbanum, Angelica Root
Opens with a blast ofbracing ocean air.Heart Notes: Frankincense, Mastic, Geranium
Resinous smoke and geraniumadd both warmth and austerity.Base Notes: Ambergris, Vetiver, Ambrette, Seaweed, OakmossAbsolute
Mossy oceanic base which powerfully lingers.Perfumer: Euan McCallAbsent Presence‘‘O absent presence, Stella is not here'The fifth and final instalment of the Revenants collection draws inspiration fromthe Elizabethan poet Sir Philip Sidney. In his Sonnet sequence ‘Astrophel andStella' Sidney develops and captures the essence of a haunting… the presenceof one that is always felt but never seen.‘Now I, wit-beaten long by hardest fate,So dull am, that I cannot look intoThe ground of this fierce love and lovely hate,Then some good body tell me how I do,Whose presence absence, absent presence is;Blesst in my curse, and cursed in my bliss.'Comprising the highest level of natural ingredients of any BeauFort fragrance,Absent Presence explores its themes with typically ‘overdosed' concentrations ofviolet leaf absolute, vetiver bourbon oil, smoky leather and black pepper oil. Aswith all the Revenants family, Absent Presence is presented as 30% Eau DeParfum.Character: Dark; enveloping; waves.THE WEARING EXPERIENCETop Notes: Bergamot, Galbanum, Pepper
Fresh, green, and fleeting felt but outof reach.Heart Notes: Jasmine, Violet
 Jasmine and violet bloom with intensity.Base Notes: Leather, Sandalwood, Musk, Amber, Cedarwood 
Warm leather,woods, amber and musk linger like a ghost on the skin, the violet heart returningin waves.Perfumer: Julie Dunkley.'Rake & Ruin‘Rake & Ruin Eau De Parfum is inspired by the works of satirist William Hogarth,this fragrance summons his characters from a gin soaked 18th century London.This debauched Eau De Parfum incorporates the botanical ingredients of gin;dark woods, civet, musks and amber bringing to life 'all manner of Vice andWickedness.'

THE WEARING EXPERIENCETop Notes: Angelica, Liquorice, Juniper, Coriander, Szechuan Pepper, PinkPepper, Orange, Lemon
Opens with a sharp, gin-like freshness, spiced andeffervescent.Heart Notes: Cypress, Pine Needles, Castoreum, Labdanum, Cade Oil, Costus,Violet Orris
Bowing to a heart of smoky woods, animalic tones and powderedflorals.Base Notes: Dark Woods, Ambrarome, Sandalwood, Musk
Dark woods, muskand animalic. Ambrarome complete the seductive yet slightly sinister finish.'Alice du Parcq's book: The Philosophy of PerfumePre-order at Waterstones for £10 (25% off with code SUMMER26)https://tinyurl.com/AliceWaterstones‘The Philosophy of Perfume is a fun, warm, thoughtful and practical book allabout fragrance, which looks at its origins and how it's made, how we smell andhow best to shop for perfume. It is an adventure into the facts, folklore andfantasies surrounding perfume, delving into how it has evolved through the erasand decades as an artform, reflecting our cultural patterns through history. In thebook, you'll meet perfumers who share insights into their fascinating creativeprocess; you'll learn the science behind how we smell and the wild emotionalvoyage from smell to soul! There are tales of scented superstitions, and theliterary and historical figures who inspire perfume, plus the ways in which AI isimpacting the future of fragrance and a helpful guide on how to shop for perfumeand find The One(s!). It was so important to me that this book was not for perfume experts, but forfragrance lovers of all ages who want a moment of enchantment laced withinteresting facts, a sprinkle of science and some practical guidance when on theirnext scent shopping safari.'AKRO Heat‘HEAT is our addictive chili fragrance.Chili is not just a spice. It is a rush. A burn you think you can handle. The firsttime you smell it, it hits, it wakes you up. Then it warms you. Then you want itagain.The best chili doesn't just flavour. It ignites. It makes your skin tingle. Yourtemperature rise. Your pulse quicken. Your senses sharpen.HEAT is that moment when warmth turns into craving. When your body asks formore. A vibrant indulgence. A dopamine shot you keep coming back to.HEAT is a scent that sets you on fire and makes you love the burn.TOP: CORIANDER SEED, LEMON, RED CHILIMIDDLE: CARDAMOM, GINGER, JUNIPERBASE: CEDARWOOD, AMBROX, MUSK.'Jeroboam Oud MorningBy Vanina Muracciole‘Oud Morning from Jeroboam is the perfect balance of brightness and depth.Opening with an unexpected burst of blueberry, saffron and resins, thecomposition moves into a heart of Indian oud, softened with leather and agedwoods. Sandalwood, ambroxan and white musk anchor it into a smooth, sensualbase, finishing the creation on an intimate note.Top Notes: Blueberry, Gurjum Balsam, SaffronMiddle Notes: Indian Oudh, Leather, Dry Wood, VioletBase Notes: Sugar, Sandalwood, Cedarwood, White Musks.'Alexandre J Royal Peacock (Harrods Exclusive)‘At the turn of the 20th century, Art Nouveau reshaped the decorative arts.Mucha, Gallé, Tiffany, Lalique, all drew on nature to invent a new grammar ofcurves, stylised plants and extraordinary birds. Among them,the peacock reigned supreme: its iridescent eyes and regal bearing embodiedthe movement's core belief in beauty for beauty's sake.The opening evokes an Italian espresso served with Viennese pastry. Roastedcoffee dialogues with hazelnut in a frankly gourmand accord, before maplesyrup brings its unmistakable amber roundness, sweet without cloying, almostwoody. Caramel amplifies the indulgence, while violet casts a powdery floral veilthat keeps the composition from tipping into excess. The vanilla-almond basesettles into a lasting, addictive warmth.'Ormonde Jayne Suede Silhouette‘Bathed in crimson and violet, Suede Silhouette reflects the warmth of saffron,the richness of raspberry and the quiet confidence of suede. Exclusively atSelfridges.'Jo Malone London Veggies collection:Celine Roux says: ‘We just loved that people, even in the middle of cities likeLondon, can grow their own carrots and herbs – the fact that everyone wants tohave a grasp on nature from wherever they are. This [collection] takes that ideaof something homegrown and unmanicured but gives it a fresh take'Velvety Butternut:‘The path ahead is smooth, just like a velvety butternut playfully plucked from theveggie patch. Notes of smooth butternut, warm tonka bean and patchouli createa woody gourmand scent.Top - GingerSpicy and fresh with a zingy lemon quality, it opens the fragrance with livelybrightness.Heart - ButternutSmooth and nutty, notes of butternut imbues the fragrance with a deliciouswarmth and creaminess.Base - PatchouliGrounded in patchouli, a sensuously deep woody note that enhances thelongevity of the fragrance.'Carrot Blossom:‘Life is sweet, just like carrot blossom gloriously gathered from the veggie patch.Notes of subtly sweet carrot, orange flower and white musk create a fresh floralscent.Top - FennelHerbaceous with hints of aniseed, it adds a dewy sweetness to the top notes.Heart - Carrot BlossomLightly floral and sweet, with an earthy accent, complementing the powdery notesof orris.Base - PatchouliGrounded in patchouli, a sensuously deep woody note that enhances thelongevity of the fragrance.'Suzy's favourite: Scarlet Beetroot‘Colour is all around, just like a scarlet beetroot splendidly spied in the veggiepatch. Notes of beetroot, vibrant blackcurrant and a dash of...

In recent months, the open vs closed, and US vs China discussions on model ownership and sovereign/local AI have heated up to a fever pitch. So it is very very good news that Poolside AI are finally emerging with new models, like Laguna S 2.1, that are beating Thinking Machines' recent release nearly 10 times their size.Poolside's recent tech report got a lot of praise due to their level of detail, and Vibhu first covered Laguna's recent technical report on our paper club:From spending $12 million building language models for code before the world cared to creating a Model Factory that can take a model from pre-training to release in eight weeks, Eiso Kant has spent more than a decade betting that code is the path to AGI. In this episode, the Poolside co-founder joins swyx and Vibhu to explain why ChatGPT felt like vindication, why Poolside embraced open weights and open research, and why he would rather live in a world with 100 foundation model companies than five even if Poolside were one of the five.We go deep on Poolside's Model Factory: the engineering systems behind 10,000–20,000 experiments per month, streaming data directly into training, reproducible experimentation, low-precision compute, and agents that increasingly write code, launch jobs, evaluate results, and modify the pipelines used to train future models. Eiso also unpacks their recent launch Laguna S, why persistence, verification, and backtracking may matter more than raw intelligence, how much capability remains inside smaller models, why reinforcement learning will move earlier into pre-training, and why next-token prediction is still extracting too little from the web.We also discuss model-harness co-design, Poolside's path from coding agents to AGI, why Eiso thinks MCP and traditional tool calls are “stupid,” the real economics behind frontier-model training, Poolside's $500 million raise, open-source AI, regulation, NVIDIA and TSMC's influence, engineering productivity in the agent era, high-agency teams, and hiring at Poolside.We discuss:* How Andrej Karpathy's RNN work inspired Eiso to start building language models for code in 2015* Why Eiso spent four years and $12 million pursuing an idea before the market cared* Why ChatGPT felt like vindication and brought Poolside back to open source* Why Eiso would prefer 100 foundation model companies over an oligopoly of five* The difference between releasing open weights and publishing genuinely open research* Why Poolside deliberately built a global research organization outside the Bay Area talent war* Why model building is ultimately 90% engineering* The Model Factory: Poolside's end-to-end system for rapidly training and improving models* How fewer than 70 researchers run roughly 10,000–20,000 experiments each month* How Poolside moved from six-month model cycles to five- and eight-week launches* Why streaming data directly into training unlocked faster experimentation* How immutable data, versioned code, and reproducibility enable rigorous model research* Why Eiso wants capable researchers to leave their labs and become Poolside's competitors* Why 95% of model building can be reduced to better data or compute efficiency* Laguna S and why persistence, verification, and backtracking can outperform raw intelligence* Why smaller models may handle far more knowledge work than previously expected* Why reinforcement learning will move earlier into pre-training* Why next-token prediction is still failing to extract enough knowledge from the web* Why distillation and environments have become the AI industry's favorite “drugs”* Why mid-training is really an early form of curriculum design* Low-precision training, networking bottlenecks, and the next gains in compute efficiency* Laguna S: 118 billion total parameters, 8 billion active, and eight weeks from training to launch* Why model builders can often evaluate a new checkpoint within its first 30 minutes* Model versus harness: where agent capabilities actually come from* Why Poolside sees coding and long-horizon software tasks as a path to AGI* Why Eiso thinks MCP and traditional tool calls are “stupid”* Why future agents will write scripts instead of choosing from dozens of predefined tools* The case for minimal harnesses, containers, and model freedom* Why Poolside is prioritizing vision but does not expect to work on audio soon* Why language may be the most compute-efficient modality for encoding knowledge and reasoning* The real cost of model development and why the final training run is anticlimactic* The story behind the Poolside name and why it represents refusing to lower ambitions* How Poolside raised $500 million while investors still questioned whether AGI was real* Why intelligence could become the world's most demanded and commoditized resource* When open models may become too capable to release without restrictions* Why unilateral AI safety does not work in a globally competitive environment* How regulation could accidentally lock in an oligopoly of two or three AI companies* NVIDIA, TSMC, and the hardware systems underpinning foundation-model progress* Why reinforcement-learning wall-clock time is one of Poolside's biggest bottlenecks* Why Poolside trains models from scratch instead of simply distilling larger models* How AI changes the way companies should measure engineering productivity* Why agency may become the most important quality for employees in the AI era* How leaders align high-agency people through shared goals and clear constraints* Hiring across research, post-training, pre-training, architecture, evals, and engineering at PoolsideEiso KantLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/eisokantX: https://x.com/eisokantPoolside: https://poolside.aiTimestamps00:00:00 Introduction00:00:54 Karpathy, RNNs, and Building Code Models Before Transformers00:02:26 The $12M Failure and ChatGPT Vindication00:03:39 Open Source and the Case for 100 Foundation Model Companies00:09:22 Open Weights, Open Research, and Poolside's Global Team00:16:04 The Model Factory: Why Model Building Is 90% Engineering00:20:19 Agents, Automated Experiments, and Early Signs of RSI00:24:04 Streaming Data, Reproducibility, and Scientific Rigor00:30:35 Creating More Foundation Model Companies00:36:07 Laguna S: Persistence vs. Raw Intelligence00:43:01 Reinventing Pre-Training, RL, and Curriculum Design00:52:33 Low-Precision Training and Squeezing More From Smaller Models00:58:37 Model Harnesses, Coding Agents, and the Path to AGI01:09:26 Why MCP and Traditional Tool Calls Are “Stupid”01:13:04 Vision, Multimodality, and Why Language Still Matters01:18:15 Scaling Models and the Real Economics of Training01:20:40 Why Poolside Is Called Poolside and Raising $500M01:27:37 Open Models, AI Safety, and the Risk of an Oligopoly01:33:53 NVIDIA, TSMC, and the Reinforcement-Learning Bottleneck01:41:52 Smaller Models, Distillation, Engineering Productivity, and HiringTranscriptIntroduction: Eiso Kant, Poolside, and Open ModelsSwyx [00:00:00]: All right, we're here in the studio with Eiso Kant from Poolside, together with Vibhu. Welcome.Eiso Kant [00:00:08]: Thanks. Thanks for having me, guys. Good to be here.Swyx [00:00:10]: Yeah, fresh on the plane. You texted me, you were like, “Hey, I'm on my way to SF.” I was like, “You're on a plane right now, right?” Like, hey.Eiso Kant [00:00:16]: I know. After I texted you, I realized that probably coming in with major jet lag was gonna offer some fun experiences today, but let's do it.Swyx [00:00:23]: I mean, I think the thing I would tell guests is that they don't have to prepare that much because if you're truly working on this every single day, then even, like, what you hazily remember is going to be new for a lot of the audience that don't live in your world every day, right? so 10 years ago, you did a talk at Google Slush, talking about the democratization of AI. and, now here you are, like, open sourcing an incredible new model that we're gonna talk about. But I guess, like, what got you into democratization of AI? Like, it's not obvious from your LinkedIn or something.From Karpathy's RNN Post to SourcedEiso Kant [00:00:57]: No, it's not at all. I don't think it's obvious how I got in this space. I owe getting into this space to Andrej Karpathy.Eiso Kant [00:01:05]: In 2015, he wrote an article called “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Recurrent Neural Nets.”Swyx [00:01:10]: Neural Nets, yep.Eiso Kant [00:01:11]: And that article, I read it, and I pivoted my startup at the time overnight to working on RNNs, and later LSTMs and Transformer models to be able to write code. If you go to this article and you scroll down, you can start seeing, like, this was the precursor to what ended up becoming language models. So, at least when he was character-level language models that were starting to predict letters, he has an example out here. There's a little Paul Graham generator, and you can read it, and the text makes sense, but it doesn't. and there's a little-- There's an example of code a little bit further down. Yeah, so Shakespeare.Swyx [00:01:47]: Shakespeare.Swyx [00:01:49]: CoolEiso Kant [00:01:49]: And for some reason, I read this, and I went down the rabbit hole of learning everything I could about RNNs and LSTMs, right? This is Transformer paper. And I had built a completely unreasonable belief, that neural nets should be able to generalize to anything and everything, and that language should be able to generalize, to a lot of things that are intelligent and the ability to write code. And so I started building Sourced, which was a fully open source company trying to build, what we used to call machine learning on code, language models on code. And we spent about four or five years on this, till the end of 2019. And that sounds really cool today, but back then, no one cared.Eiso Kant [00:02:29]: Right? Like, no one cared. We were in the dark. Like, we did things along the way. We tried applying convolutional neural nets to, like, the structure of code. We were. when attention came out, we were applying it to LSTMs, and then the Transformer paper came out. And it - it wasn't obvious, and what we missed throughout that entire journey, that we were on the right track, but we should have just kept scaling up. And today, to all of us, the scaling laws and scaling up seems like the most obvious thing. But having spent four or five years of my life on working on language models on code, it wasn't obvious. So I have a lot of respect to folks at Google and OpenAI and others who took that confidence and kept going. we failed ultimately at the time, and it was, like, biggest failure of my career, right? You blew $12 million of investors' money, which was a lot back then.Swyx [00:03:18]: Yep.Eiso Kant [00:03:19]: You spent, still a lot, but, And you spent years with, like, a group of 40 people just obsessing over this problem. And life took a different turn, And it was, and family became a focus, and I kept my heads down and really, didn't really look at language models for the following two years. big mistake considering Following years are gonna be really interesting. And then ChatGPT came out And it was like a vindication. It's like people started texting me. I found, like, my old, work decks and these old talks. And throughout that whole journey, we,ChatGPT, Vindication, and Returning to Open SourceEiso Kant [00:03:56]: We really had a strong point of view at the time that, like, as you're building more capable intelligence, it should be open and open source.Eiso Kant [00:04:04]: When we started Poolside, that wasn't the case at all, and I wanna be very open about it. When we started Poolside, we were like, there was a premise of two things. One is this technology is not gonna stop compounding in capabilities. I think to most people obvious today, but three-plus years ago when we started, most people were still arguing if these were stochastic parrots or not.Eiso Kant [00:04:23]: And the second was that reinforcement learning was gonna be the biggest driver for LLM capabilities. Today, very obvious. Three years ago, was not an opinion held or direction held at either OpenAI or Google or Anthropic or others. And so people looked down on us a little bit. They were like, “ is this really gonna work?” And so we just started working the problem, and we never really thought about open source again. We just kept our heads down and we built our, like, knowledge, understanding from scratch, right? We didn't roll out of an existing lab. So we picked up the papers and started writing code and figuring things out.Eiso Kant [00:04:59]: And it wasn't until the beginning of this year that me and my founder, Jason, picked up the open source conversation again.Eiso Kant [00:05:07]: And if you go back to some of the early things on our website, it was very straightforward. It was we wanna get to AGI, we wanna support a world of abundance, and we wanna be the first company that gets there.Eiso Kant [00:05:20]: But we started talking at the beginning of this year because it became obvious that the world was going in a direction that was starting to like, pick at us a little bit. Like, it didn't, this didn't happen overnight. It was, like, a little bit we were seeing this and we're like, “Okay, The world's going down a path.” And Throughout this journey, there was something that I used as a, as an analogy or thing. So I said well, if I go back to back in those days, 2015 or 2016, we're working on this, and I picked up a fi book off the shelf, and I was reading the book about 2035. AGI is achieved, and the story would be over the following, decades. And it would have that first chapter where everyone's trying to figure things out. You'd get the chapter of ChatGPT coming out And then you would get to the chapter where the world was at a fork in the road, and the one that it picked was one where three or four or a handful of companies were going to create all of intelligence moving forward.Eiso Kant [00:06:21]: And when I thought about that story, it felt like a dystopian fi book, not a utopian fi book. And the reality is, I'm a utopian fi guy. Like, and so We took a step back and said, “Hey, can we play a role here?” Now it was easy for us to do so because we were not at the frontier.Eiso Kant [00:06:41]: If we were at the frontier, I don't think we could have changed our mind. and I don't mean this like it's when the moment there's too much capital involved, too much expectations, you've built up things, right? We're a small team, just improving and improving. And so we knew that we could make that decision now, but it would be a lot harder to make as we got closer and closer to the frontier and caught up to others. And did a lot of soul-searching and a lot of conversations, and said, “No, this makes sense,” Even if there's big unanswered questions, like how the hell do you build a business model with foundation models about open source? Big open-ended question that we do not fully have the answer to yet, right? At what point do you no longer wanna release open source models because misuse of models has, real potential risks associated with it? how is the government gonna respond to open source? but I think it all just came down to one thing, and I'll stop the monologue, is the fact that I rather live in a world that has 100 foundation model companies than a world that has five, even if I was one of the five. And the smallest and most meaningful contribution we can make for 100 to exist is to open up our research and open up, like, our weights right now and figure out along the way how we can, like, do more.Neo-Labs, Model Choice, and the Token EconomySwyx [00:08:01]: Yeah. I think if anything, over the past three years, that has become a bit more true. you are one of a cohort of Neo labsEiso Kant [00:08:10]: YeahSwyx [00:08:10]: That people are now calling that. And, we're, we're doing this on the day that Thinky launched their, new model and you are outperforming them on their, on some benchmarks that they released, right? Like, they just don't have it yet. so it goes to show that I think, like, this is one of those things where, like, there is room for multiple players, and you are seeing a little bit more of the future. Maybe more like 20, not 100, but, like, you are one of the 20.Eiso Kant [00:08:36]: I really hope so, right? I think we I'm, I'm excited about their release, and I'm excited about everyone releasing because, like, ultimately, like, choice competition is both gonna drive progress in the right direction. But the fact that like, we create models and while we all, drink out of the same well of data effectively, we do introduce very different behaviors and biases in our models. Some are intended biases, some are completely unintended biases.Swyx [00:09:03]: Yeah.Eiso Kant [00:09:03]: And if we shape up in an ecosystem in the world where open models are gonna be a part of the token economy, like, I don't think there's any question about it anymore Then we want to be able to live in a world where companies, countries, people can choose and say, “Hey, I am most aligned and I trust most this provider for these things.”Swyx [00:09:25]: Yeah.Vibhu [00:09:26]: I think more than just one of the 20 Neo labs, up until recently, most of open source innovation was coming from the Chinese labs, right? So there's the DeepSeek of the West. Is it today? Okay, maybe it's thinking machines reflection, but there aren't many, right? So, one of the things you guys started in France, Europe, but very much now you're taking that American standpoint and more than just that, the point is the Chinese models that we see, they're not super open research. the work you put out is, I think, some of the best. So every few months you get not only frontier models, but also here's a breakdown blog, paper, technical report of here's everything for state of the art to build, frontier intelligence and you're filling that gap too, right? So not just only open weight, not just Western, but also pretty open research.Open Weights vs. Open ResearchEiso Kant [00:10:20]: No, I appreciate it. Look, I think it's, I think it's the most meaningful contribution, right? Weights are a binary. Let's call them what they are. Yes, we can modify them, we can change them, but, like, giving someone the weights does not allow them ultimately to recreate what you're doing, right? And so now there's challenges around releasing data sets, challenges around like releasing certain things, but being able to share your research, like, right, how do we do it? What are the lessons we learned that we spent, tens of thousands of experiments of compute on? I think very much so. One correction though, Vibhu, and I say this because it's been haunting us for quite a few years. We from day zero were an American company.Swyx [00:10:55]: Yeah. They movedPoolside's Global Team and American Company StorySwyx [00:10:56]: To France.Eiso Kant [00:10:56]: So the story once and for all is very. We start as an American company. We have always been an American company, and early on we made a very conscious decision. We said, “We're not gonna hire any researchers in the Bay Area. We're gonna look for talent everywhere else in the world.” and that is everything from Middle Americas, Seattle to, Serbia, and to Taiwan and Singapore and other places. And it was because we took a view that this was gonna become a talent war for this, and I think it has over the years now. Three years ago, that wasn't fully obvious yet. I think today it very much is. And we also realized that, like, some of the world's most capable people with, like, the most interesting, innovative ideas were not just gonna be here. And so it led us to create like a fully remote company. and we ended up opening an office in Paris and London and different places and we have a lot of the team in the US and a lot of team outside. But we always took this view of like, we're an American company, but if we want the best of the best to work with us, we need to take a global view. Now we do also have people here in Silicon Valley, like the company's grown and others, but I think one of the things that, it slowed us down at the beginning, but it has sped us up now, and it's why you're seeing like the progress, I think, on our models and the cadence at which we release, is because we didn't roll out of an existing lab. Right? we didn't, we didn't have a lot of the information that's freely flowing around here at the time. We just took this point of view as like, “Okay, well, let's just work the problem. Let's just go and, like, read the few papers that are out there, and let's just figure this stuff out.” And we made some hilarious mistakes in model training because of that over the yearsEiso Kant [00:12:35]: Like especially in the first 12 months. there's a few that I think still haunt me and scare me. We can talk about them later. but it created a, like, a resiliency and persistency in the team, right? with extremely few people have left us over the years, that, like, told us, “Okay, we can do this.” When we first wrote our first training code base completely from scratch, it wasn't a fork of any open source. It was just like, “Okay, let's build it from scratch.” I remember we had this one moment where we spent three weeks working out an optimizer bug. Like, it was like training just couldn't get stable. We, like, obsessed over it, and we thought, like, maybe we were wrong. Maybe we should have just forked this repo, or we should have. But then when we solved it, I still remember at the time we were like five people in the company. when we solved it, we were like, “Oh, we can do things,” like if we're just willing to work hard. and I think that culture with a very strong engineering bias has helped us, like, get to where we were. And so there's this notion of open source and talent and these things. I think we, We just took different decisions from a different starting point. and I think we are lucky. I do want to definitely call it lucky. And there was a lot of hard work at the team that now, like, that's starting to show up in results.Swyx [00:13:52]: Just ‘cause we probably won't revisit this again, but, and this is a fun recruiting challenge if someone knows the answer. What was the bug? And then we won't tell the solution, but we'An Optimizer Bug and the Value of Building From ScratchEiso Kant [00:14:01]: So the - This - You're gonna test my memory here,Swyx [00:14:04]: Oh, okayEiso Kant [00:14:04]: So but I thinkSwyx [00:14:05]: DirectlyEiso Kant [00:14:05]: I think I can recall. So if you, so if you look at, So if you take like Adam as an optimizer, you have epsilonSwyx [00:14:12]: YeahEiso Kant [00:14:13]: Which is, right, like in the denominatorSwyx [00:14:14]: Momentum and weights. YeahEiso Kant [00:14:15]: Is exactly, in the denominator. And at the time, if I recall, you looked at like the early Llama papers and things like that. People were juicing epsilon, like, quite a bit. Like, they were, like, adding, I don't know if it was E minus four or whatever, like a high value for epsilon.Eiso Kant [00:14:31]: And if you think about this during training, it's like a bit weird and counterintuitive that we're adding noise to our optimizer by just adding effectively, like, a random number in the denominator, right? Like behind the decimal point. And I don't recall the exact bug, but it had - What I remember is once we solved it, we no longer had to juice epsilon as much as, like, was happening in the Llama paper and other places. and it was like one of those fundamental moments where we had trusted this paper that was out there, and we're like, “Oh, no, it has to be this way. It has to have this high value of epsilon.” But it made no sense to us intuitively. Like, why do you have to have this so high? Like, if you're just trying to avoid division by zero, why can't the value be extremely small? and that was like one of those moments where you realize like, okay, finding things out from scratch yourself builds a better intuition. Because the one thing you learn very quickly with model building is that your intuitions that you start with are gonna get beaten up so hard.Eiso Kant [00:15:33]: Right? Like - It's such an experimental science, that the things that seem obvious, you very quickly get to learn, like, you were wrong, and hopefully you figure out why, and sometimes you don't even.Swyx [00:15:45]: Yeah. yeah, so, one of the reasons that you, when you released your new models, Vibhu got really excited. I mean, everyone got really excited. But Vibhu led our paper club on it, and you guys sawEiso Kant [00:15:58]: YeahSwyx [00:15:58]: Obviously. maybe talk through some lessons learned in that, whatever you can disclose. we can focus on the model factory stuff, whatever you think is a good starting point.Model Building as EngineeringEiso Kant [00:16:08]: So I would say that our view from very early on in the company was that model building is ultimately 90% engineering.Eiso Kant [00:16:18]: And I think we all know it in the industry because if you look at where's every researcher spending their time, they're spending their time writing code, right? Looking at data and writing code. And so we said, okay, The state at the moment, like three years ago, was bash scripts and Slurm and spaghetti code bases for training and, like, data pipelines that were patched together. And we looked at this and said, “Well, ultimately, model building is a process.” You're going from raw data, right? Like training raw material, the web, et cetera. you're doing a whole bunch of filtering, cleaning up, transformations, analyzing. These days, that's, far more complex than it was three years ago. then you're training a model, which is effectively a large distributed systems problem, right? Across hardware that has still-- It's become a lot more reliable. It was extremely flaky back then. and now with every new generation, we get our new sets of challenges. And then you go into the next stages, right? There was no training back then, but, like, you got, your post-training and then your reinforcement learning. And so we looked at this and we said, “Well, this looks like an industrialized process. This looks like an end process, that every single part of it has its machinery,” right? If it's your big data pipelines, if it's your crawling ingestion of the web, if it's your, large-scale distributed training, and then you've got your reliability. And we said, “Well, why don't we take some of the world's smartest distributed systems engineers that we knew and make them part of the process of research from day zero?” Not retrofitting it later on, but, like, really from the beginning. And that became our model factory. And so our model factory started with a handful of components. Today, it's thousands of components, and I try to equate it to, if you think about, like, someone who was at the very early days of Foxconn, if they had been there for the following, decade, they would be able to rebuild Foxconn because they saw every decision that led to building that system and all the complexity. If you and I walk into Foxconn today, no chance.The Model Factory and Experiment VelocityEiso Kant [00:18:18]: Right? Because we don't have the lineage and history of decisions that led to that. And so we built early on from the beginning- with a team that really understood that, well, the metric that we are optimizing for is the speed of an idea from a researcher to an experimental result that we can trust to then being part of the next model training.Eiso Kant [00:18:42]: And in the. And because it's such an experimental science, ultimately, in the beginning when it wasn't that complex, you could patch your way around it, right? But now, at any foundation model company, you are running. I mean, we're a small team, right? We're less than 70 researchers, another 35 engineers. and we are running, I haven't checked the latest count, but far more than 10,000, maybe 10 to 20,000 experiments a month that we cut. And so if you look at that scale of every model run that is, like it's ultimately it's, it's you need to be able to trust it as an infra problem. And so what we have now done over the years is gotten really good at that, and just by working it and improving it and obsessing over those end decisions. So now what that means is that you looked up Laguna XS 2 that we launched. It was five weeks from the beginning of training to launch. The model that we're gonna talk about today was eight weeks from start of training, to launch. We started the next model literally yesterday because we now finished the post-training required for the model we're launching, next week or by the time this comes out today. and we move that compute to the much larger Laguna M model that we're now training. And so the model should be an artifact of someone's process. It shouldn't be really a thing in itself. Like, and we treat this like the way you would look at like a SpaceX factory where, yes, the first rocket, really hard to build, but the much harder challenge was building the factory. And now they're rolling off, and no one is really thinking about the next launch anymore. So it's just another launch, it's another launch, another rocket comes off. And that's what we're trying to do with model building.Eiso Kant [00:20:22]: And what has been, which was not planned from day zero, it was in the back of our mind like this will happen one day, is that when you build a really good end model factory with really good APIs and really good engineering systems, Well, what is it perfect for? It's perfect for agents.Agents Inside the Model FactoryEiso Kant [00:20:40]: Because agents are now starting to take over more and more work in our model factory.Vibhu [00:20:43]: Yeah.Eiso Kant [00:20:44]: So I look at the screens when I walk, like when we're, we come together, in our monthly, we do monthly onsites, and I walk behind people's screens and I stop by and I talk to our researchers. And the default is all of these different agents running on their screen that are writing the code. They're launching the jobs. They're evaluating the results that are coming back from the model runs. They are, making the changes. And we're still in the driver's seat. We're still coming up with the ideas. We're still helping with the debugging. But more and more, and this is right now very profound on the data side of our pipelines in both pre and post and the synthetic data pipelines, it's starting to become more on the architecture side as well. You're starting to see these twinklings of what RSI is gonna look like.Eiso Kant [00:21:27]: And that's. So when we talk about, like to your question about our models, every talk about the model factory, And my coolest example of these things is always that when we kick off a new run, doesn't matter if it's a training like big run or if it's now a post, like one of 10 post-training versions we do for like release or many experiments, is that at any given moment, the changes that somebody made that they had experimental results from the day before make it into that run.Eiso Kant [00:21:57]: So there's not like a cutoff 90 days before. Like no, it's like literally from that moment because we can now trust the machine enough. And then you also have to invest in the reliability. So one of my favorite metrics about like Laguna S is that there was no call events, Right? Like completely zero. And we haven't had a meaningful call event, like something to wake up for, as far as I recall this entire year. now there is one asterisk to that. In usually the first six hours of launching a new model run, something breaks because you set a config wrong, you made a small mistake, et cetera. So that's usually there's a little bit of intervention, but that's always within like call periods, right? Not on call. And I think that's starting to now compound. So the model we're releasing now, I love it. It's amazing, but we're already onto the next one. and I think that's the way it should be.Laguna, Five-Week Builds, and Zero On-Call EventsVibhu [00:22:50]: Hey, I also just wanna point out, so for context, this was like a month ago. we found it in the tech report, so we just came in with, “Okay, new model's dropped. Haven't heard about it.” We wereEiso Kant [00:23:02]: Yeah, we're very used to doing this every few months.Vibhu [00:23:03]: We're, we're very much like, “ okay, look, it's like, on par with Kimi, DeepSeek, whatnot, the small ones, Gemma level. Oh, it's a very cool paper on what goes into building.” And then we hit this page, right? Like literally page two of tech report is, “This process allowed us to build the small model from scratch to delivery within five weeks applying the lessons”. And then I'm like, oh, this paper is not about here's a tech report of benchmarks and here's how many tokens it was trained on. Like for people that wanna dive more from what we're not gonna discuss on the podcast, it's all laid out here, right? FromEiso Kant [00:23:38]: YeahVibhu [00:23:39]: Custom software that agents can use to interface with training code, training data.Eiso Kant [00:23:45]: Yeah. Well, link the paper correctly, so yeah.Vibhu [00:23:47]: Yeah. All that stuff. read the paper here, but,Technical Report Principles and Streaming Training DataEiso Kant [00:23:50]: But I would like to. I love principles, and I think that is a good starting off point for maybe telling some stories. Maybe we can go one by one past the principles. I'll just call out that Dagster just got bought by a Prefect.Vibhu [00:24:01]: Yeah.Eiso Kant [00:24:01]: Isn't it fun? But yes, I'm very familiar with Dagster. just anything where like they trigger some story.Vibhu [00:24:07]: So, well, I would say, well, experiments code's obvious, but I think one of my favorite things is, I don't know where it is in here, but early on, and I still think this is the case a lot of foundation model companies, people prepare their training data sets, they get packaged up, then they get copied over to a training cluster distributed across all of the nodes, and then training starts.Vibhu [00:24:30]: And we looked at this like three years ago and we were like That makes no senseEiso Kant [00:24:36]: You lose so much time because the moment you have to rematerialize the data set, you have to make a change, you have to fix something, et cetera, you've got all this time of like repackaging it, right? Toca- tokenizing it, repacking it, moving it over to a cluster, then distributing it across the nodes. The bigger your clusters are, you start using fancy like torrent-like algorithms to like distribute your data. So why aren't we streaming data into training? Right? Something that's very common and like just basicVibhu [00:25:00]: Like just in timeEiso Kant [00:25:01]: Just in time, like good computer science like principle. And that was one of the first things that I think unlocked - the model factory. Because the moment you start thinking about, well, a training job, it doesn't matter if it's a big hero run or a small like, post-training experiment, consumes a certain number of tokens per second, right? And it's not a lot, right? From a like a data, moving data perspective. So we said, well, we have our training cluster, and then we've got like our AWS kinda setup where we can build these amazing big data pipelines. We can set things up. We use Spark underneath the hood, like all these things.Vibhu [00:25:36]: But when you say AWS, it's not actual AWS, it's your internal AWS.Eiso Kant [00:25:39]: It's our internal-- No, it's our internal like just running like our infrastructureVibhu [00:25:42]: Site web servicesEiso Kant [00:25:43]: Exactly. Our stuff running on like an AWS account or on like any hardware, right?Vibhu [00:25:47]: Yeah.Eiso Kant [00:25:48]: And so once we made that shift into I can stream data into training, all of a sudden you realize a lot of things unlock. Because now you don't have to wait for the whole data set to materialize.Immutable Data, Experiments as Code, and Scientific RigorEiso Kant [00:26:00]: You now all of a sudden when you're running data experiments about mixing data, it's a config. Because you've got these data sources that are coming in, and you just - we have this service called Blender that's in the report, where we then say, “Okay, for this run, I want 20% of this source, 10% of this source. I want this much, so many epochs of repetition. I want this to be, shuffled in a certain way,” and your training job can start while the rest of the data is even still materializing. also what it does is because all of this underneath-- So for us, we treated the data layer underneath as like an immutable data layer, and that was really important. Like experiments as code, immutable data layer means that you can always go back and understand literally down to the single token at which cursor it went in on which version of the code.Vibhu [00:26:47]: Yeah.Eiso Kant [00:26:48]: And it took us a I have to admit, like the first year of Poolside, we understood that engineering had to get great, But we didn't understand yet, that this is ultimately in support of like a good rigorous scientific progress. We were quite a - We were a very small number of people, so a lot of it was YOLO ideas and YOLO runs.Vibhu [00:27:08]: Yeah.Eiso Kant [00:27:09]: And we built great infra for the YOLO runs. But once we realized that we treated data as immutable and code as always versioned, and you could always track and trace every experiment end to end perfectly, you could repeat everything perfectly, right? You have perfect reproducibility. I can still reproduce runs from two years ago if I wanted to, right? It enables the scientific progress, like the scientific process, and I think that took us probably about a year and a half into the company to figure out. We also had some great hires, like our head of applied research, Nikolai, who joined us from Yandex, who'd been working on language models since like the early 2020s, I think brought that into the company of like, “Hey, we wanna have even more rigor.” And then once we kinda had the combination of like increasingly more capable platform that allowed people to do more, but had this immutability, we were able to start “Okay, every experiment is truly an ablation. We truly need to understand it.” And I think we became much more scientifically rigorous in the last couple of years, and the infra underneath enabled it. and then there's just fun stuff like, andVibhu [00:28:16]: Yeah, a lot of it's fun, like even just the, one, you share all the ablations, two, picking the data sets, right? There's like a random small paragraph in here where it's just like, “Oh yeah, training data, we have some, we have an auto mixer.” it trains eight small models, scales them up, picks the training data set. We don't even need to look at it. I'm like, “Wow, a lot of engineering rigor there.” And there's just, there's just a lot in here.Publishing Research and Giving BackEiso Kant [00:28:40]: Yeah, and it'- and look, and we wanna put out more. Like we, We treat writing papers as something that we haven't earned the right for yet for a long time. So you earn the right to spend time, publishing research once you're at the frontier, because until then, you're catching up, and every minute and hour in this industry matters. Like I obsess over it, not just the wall clock time from idea to result, but just general like time every day that we, waste is one that doesn't allow us to catch up. But in this case, we said, “Okay, we're gonna give ourselves.” I think we gave the team like three or four days while still doing their work, like give everything in there. And to your point earlier, if your stuff, it's easy to like put it out. And so there's so many more things that we wanna talk about over time, and we will definitely start doing. And as we earn more of the right, but also now have like added to our mission that we want more foundation model companies to exist, you'll see us like be way more proactive, and just trying to keep dropping some of those like things that we've learned along the way that can help others like speed up.Vibhu [00:29:40]: Which is the other cool side of this, right? It's, it's not like, back to your point, it's not just here's the benchmarks of our training. If you want to replicate, here's experiments of optimizers, data sets, post-training. you lay out a lot of it here alongside here's your system for how to do it? So it's, it's really like promotingEiso Kant [00:29:59]: No, thank youVibhu [00:29:59]: Other people can do the same.Eiso Kant [00:30:00]: And by the way, I also wanna make clear, right, we have been incredible-- Like we've taken a lot of advantage of the fact of all the open research that others have published, Right? And you mentioned, the Chinese labs, and we I think it's important that there's, from every country and every culture and background, including like Western companies like us, there's different models that come out that people can choose to trust. But I think we do have to give credit where credit's due, right? The incredible Chinese lab have done an amazing job at sharing their research, and we have definitely like been on the receiving end of taking advantage of that. So when you're on the receiving end of something coming to you, I think it's, you also have an obligation to give back.Swyx [00:30:39]: Do you have a favorite or underrated Chinese lab that you wanna shout out? Everyone shout outs DeepSeek.Chinese Labs, Zhipu, and PersistenceEiso Kant [00:30:44]: That's a good question.Swyx [00:30:45]: Moaan obviously for Therapsi. Yeah.Eiso Kant [00:30:48]: Yeah, look, I think, I think obviously everyone's been talking about Zhipu lately, with 5.2. I think what most people don't realize is when they started.Swyx [00:30:59]: Yeah.Eiso Kant [00:30:59]: Right? They started years before ChatGPT.Swyx [00:31:02]: They just rebranded. YeahEiso Kant [00:31:03]: And so, I've like, I remember how hard it was to work on these things Before the rest of the world got excited about it. And so I have an immense amount of respect for people, who were working on improving models when it wasn't the sexy thing to do, when believing in LLMs, was gonna get you ridiculed. I remember like back in 2016 when we were doing what we'd call, machine learning on code with some of these models. we would-- people would just laugh at us, like they'd be like, “This makes no sense. Like why are you wasting all these, like, millions of dollars on trying to figure this out?” And so I would say they're probably the one that, I think deserves a shout-out, not just because their latest model is very good, but because they fought to get here. And I think, I think every foundation model company it takes time to get here, right? It took us three years to get to the model that we're, that we're now gonna be releasing. and now the time in between the models is coming, is counted in weeks. It's no longer counted in months or years. But this stuff's hard. and if we can make it a little bit easier for the next person, like we should all do so. Because if we don't do so, we're, we've got a small window before models are really impacting recursive self-improvement to a level where catching up otherwise might become unfeasible. And we should try to, in that window, encourage as many labs or however we wanna call them, like to start. And so one of my currentEiso Kant [00:32:36]: Mission, but qualm is like I wanna encourage whoever is a researcher right now who thinks they can tackle this to go and leave and become my competitor.Eiso Kant [00:32:45]: Like start another foundation model company because I think we need it. I think otherwise we're not gonna be in the world where, I don't want to just be the fifth or the sixth company that wins. I wanna look at a world where there's lots of choice.Starting a Foundation Model CompanyVibhu [00:32:57]: What else do people not see in starting a foundation model? it's, there's a lot of compute, there's a lot of capital required, a lot of compute. You lay out model factory and how to do the training, but there's a lot there, right? That's,Eiso Kant [00:33:10]: Well, look, it's, I in turn-- this is an oversimplification, and I always asterisk it with that because it can land a little bit the wrong way in people's minds. But I think you can sum down, And I saw it, 95% of model building to just doing, you're just doing two things. You're improving data or you're improving compute efficiency. And I know that feels like an oversimplification for the incredible, like, Gifted and skilled work people do. But if you really look at it, like what are we doing? We are looking at data, we're generating new data, we're improving data. and the only way to do that is to look at the data, right? That's a big part of foundation model building. And on the other hand, we come up with these incredible breakthroughs in inference, in architecture, and new attention mechanisms. But what are they really doing? They're bringing compute efficiency. Now, we have definitely had some breakthroughs over the years that allow for more model capabilities. But at the limit, if you could train a large enough model, right, like, and you had infinite compute, we probably-- if you had infinite compute, you'd be at AGI probably already tomorrow.Eiso Kant [00:34:12]: Right? Like it's not. And so, and let me say that infinite compute with infinite ability of much faster networking because networking ends up being more of the bottleneck than compute. But, so I do think that's, those are the main things. And to just realize that this is engineering. I think it's become more obvious, but I think for quite a few years, people have held foundation model companies and researchers and others on this pedestal of like you're doing incredible magic or rocket science, or only like, Nobel laureate physicists can do this. And don't get me wrong, there are some really hard problems that need to be solved, but a lot of the work that all of us are doing on a day Is not sitting down trying to solve a math theorem. A lot of the work that we're doing is just really doing the basics right, writing good code, looking at data, improving it, running experiments, looking at plots, trying to see like, hey, trying to shape our intuitions. And a lot more people could be highly capable researchers. and I think that's, it feels far for people to do so. But I've seen in our own company, we've seen engineers become researchers because the model factory allowed them to be, have a much lower hurdle of running experiments and trying things. And one of the guys on our team who started as an engineer building our agents is a legit reinforcement learning researcher now, making real progress. and that happened in the span of like six months. that would've not been what I think most people assumed was possible, a couple of years ago.Swyx [00:35:46]: Yeah. I think one of the interesting moments is when you can self-host, like, if in a programming language, like if you can compile the language in the language, the equivalent is can you use your own tools, right? You have the pool CLI, you have your own models. presumably you're not only using your own models. There's no way. But like, what's that percentage over time?Laguna S, Persistence, and Behavioral GainsEiso Kant [00:36:10]: This is the first model that we're releasing that is starting to meaningfully contribute to our own work. It's not a it's not state-art model yet. Fable and other, they're, they're very capable models, but Laguna S Is really interesting. I'm gonna pull up the quote. Peng Ming, one of our heads of applied research, said something, last week as the model came out about 10 days ago, much better than we had hoped for or expected. And he said, I have the feeling that a lot of the gains in Laguna S come not from more intelligence, but more from different behavior, more verification, less taking things for granted, not declaring victory early, and being way more persistent. And to be honest, those are more predictive than raw intelligence for success in human also to some degree. And this was, he wrote me this on 5th of July on a Sunday, and it's been burned in my brain ever since because the Laguna S model, as you'll see it and why it does so well on benchmarks and why it does so well in using it on a day basis, is that it's just incredibly persistent. It reasons a lot. I do call that out. We have work to do on making it more efficient. We have to work to do on offering different reasoning modes. But this is the model that has been able to do things that I never thought it could do. A hundred eighteen billion 8B active model, which is not that large. It fits on a DGX Spark and still runs at, thirty, forty tokens a second on a Spark, is able to solve Erdős 397 independently. It's able to do complex programming tasks. It's able to. I asked it this morning to make me a Fi scanner without using any external libraries on my Mac, and it's, like, figuring out, like, the core WLAN API by really persistently trying to understand it without access to the internet. And more, I love vibe checking. I've probably spent eight to ten hours a day with this model for the last ten days.Eiso Kant [00:38:05]: I'm not exaggerating. I was on my eleven-hour flight yesterday. I spent ten hours reading trajectories and traces and, like, of the model.Eiso Kant [00:38:12]: And what I take away from it is exactly what Peng Ming said. We are gonna be able to squeeze so much more out of smaller models than I think we had imagined in the industry because, yes, there's intelligence and larger models are more intelligent. Like, no doubt about it. We should continue to scale up. but the behaviors of being really persistent, of being able to backtrack when you're wrong, of, like, understanding how to interact with your environment show us that we can get a lot more out of it. And this, for me, has created a bit of a Question in my mind the last couple of days. If you think about where we're using models today, right? We are using models, say, for knowledge work. Represents twenty-five percent of the global economy, twenty-five trillion dollars of work.Eiso Kant [00:39:00]: As we scale up models and they become more intelligent, we are excited about using them more and more for pushing the frontier of science.Small Models, Knowledge Work, and CommoditizationEiso Kant [00:39:08]: And if you look at the frontier of science, like true breakthroughs in science, they have been linked, they are linked to more intelligence in many places. Einstein figuring out general relativity is able to bring ideas together that other people would have not brought together. And I think one of the many dimensions of intelligence is the ability to do that, and it's something we clearly see that as models get larger and more capable, they're able to pull more ideas and threads together that a smaller model wouldn't be able to.Eiso Kant [00:39:36]: And we're starting to see examples of that in medicine and, like, in bio and other things. But if you think about the majority of knowledge work that we do, and it includes building software. I'm a software developer at heart first and foremost probably, although I probably can't say it that much anymore as I don't write production code in years, is that what makes us good is our persistence. It's our ability to encounter a problem and backtrack and say, “I need to go figure out this bug. I need to go research this. I need to go look at the documentation. I need to, like, try different, five different ways to see, like, if I can solve it.” But it is not necessarily bringing three ideas together from radically different fields. And so if we are now seeing, and I think Laguna S is an example, that we are able to make a relatively small model much more capable than I had definitely predicted or any previous, like, benchmarks had shown for any model remotely this size or even larger, At least on coding tasks, that it's because of the behaviors. And so now the question I have, and I don't have an answer, it is I know at the limit, so infinite model size, right, extremely large model, and the cost of that model is gonna be very expensive to run. We know this, right? So larger model ROI.Eiso Kant [00:40:52]: So I know that at the very limit, I'm not gonna use the world's largest model one day, quadrillion parameter, whatever crazy, like, scale we scale up, to do a basic coding task. Already today, I'm starting to size down for certain tasks.Eiso Kant [00:41:07]: So it means that there is an optimal. It means there's some curve that goes as we go up to model size for knowledge work, at some point we're at the peak, and after that, the return on investment of using a bigger model, just doesn't make sense.Eiso Kant [00:41:22]: Now, I think the question is, before I would have thought that peak was extremely very far away.Eiso Kant [00:41:30]: This model for me is the first sign that Maybe that peak is At a trillion, five trillion, ten trillion. Maybe we can just squeeze way more out of these models. I'm no longer thinking that we need two or three orders of magnitude on the largest models to be able to, solve knowledge work, the accounting, the legal, the code that we write. And so if that holds true, It is an argument for the commoditization of models. It's an argument that open source can win and, like, succeed in this world. And now it's of course a self-serving argument and it's a hopeful argument, but theoretically at the limit it works. We just have to go discover in the next couple of years of how much more we can squeeze out. Now, I do want to put a big asterisk. This does not mean I'm against scaling models. I think we ultimately only succeed if we scale our models as large as our competition. I do not like. I think we should not put our head in the sand and say we're gonna be king of open source small models. I think that's, It's a out. It's trying to be king of your own kingdom, but not realizing what the rest of the world's doing. All of us rather use a smarter, faster, more model. It's a sign of hope. And so I don't wanna overly state this is a good model. We have a long way to go to get to the state-art. But what hopefully people take away when they use this model is that the behaviors inside of it are what push it to be far more capable, less than necessarily the number of parameters.Pre-Training, Mid-Training, and RL Moving EarlierVibhu [00:43:03]: Is that mostly post-training? LikeEiso Kant [00:43:05]: YesVibhu [00:43:05]: Right.Eiso Kant [00:43:06]: It's entirely post-training.Vibhu [00:43:08]: Are we done improving anything on training? Is, like, training done?Eiso Kant [00:43:12]: No.Vibhu [00:43:12]: Okay.Eiso Kant [00:43:13]: SoVibhu [00:43:13]: I just wanted to cover training, and then we go post-trainingEiso Kant [00:43:15]: Training is not done. I mean, look, there's a part of training of just dealing with skill, right? Every new order of magnitude of model skill, you are going to get new things you gotta solve for. That'- but those are ultimately, engineering challenges.Eiso Kant [00:43:31]: I have a, I would say, a not commonly held opinion that reinforcement learning Will move earlier and earlier into training.Vibhu [00:43:42]: Yeah, training.Eiso Kant [00:43:44]: Not even training. Like training today, right, is, like if you look at - So we've been working on this for years already. and I think the best-- I think the first time we saw it out in public was the DeepSeek Zero paper. this is a year and a half ago, I think, if I recall correctly. where, you can Very early on in a model as it starts capable of being able to use language, et cetera, induce reasoning. and so the question that I have is like, we have this- we have the dataset that's the web. and the web, I think we could arguably say probably has The totality of humanity's knowledge somewhere encoded in different places. It's a huge variance degree of quality, from garbage data, and like once you look at training data, you really get humbled of like what the web is, to like, the most greatest scientific papers and best blog posts and like, best transcripts and whatnot.Eiso Kant [00:44:39]: And so now What we are trying to figure out, and have been doing a lot of work on, and it's a place where maybe not as open as we're on other things, but we will become more over time. we've been spending a couple of years really doing research on how can we turn the web into not just next token prediction, but into a way to teach the model to think earlier in its training. and I think there's a huge amount of gold to be found there. I think we are right now in, we've got some drugs in the industry. One of the drugs is distillation. Another drug is, more environments. Like, and they're great, and they make us feel good, and they make the models better, and like we're all addicted to them, and we'll use them, right? in various different ways. and but ultimately, I think we are still barely squeezing out of the web what we should be getting out of the web.Eiso Kant [00:45:33]: I think just next token prediction during training is not enough.Eiso Kant [00:45:36]: AndVibhu [00:45:38]: YeahEiso Kant [00:45:38]: I think we'll see some very interesting things still happen. and that RL in post-training to induce behaviors, to improve things, like I think - the whole world knows how to do this now. I think we're, we're scaling it up. Everyone is. But I wonder if we need to go as far as we're going today with environments. I'm not sure yetVibhu [00:46:01]: You mean we're going too far?Eiso Kant [00:46:02]: I'm, I'm not sure if the path to AGI is justVibhu [00:46:06]: Is more environmentEiso Kant [00:46:07]: More environments.Vibhu [00:46:08]: It seems like a never-ending, “Okay, I want instruction manual for this table, right? Am I gonna environment out building furniture? Or are we just gonna tail end like we need some general solution?”Eiso Kant [00:46:19]: I think there is, I think there's an ability to generalize more from the web. but I also am very encouraged, like when I look at Laguna S and, which is post-training is, well, is the big impact there. and I see like, oh, wait a second, just by making some of these behaviors much better, we're able to get so much more out of it. It just changes a little bit the way you think about intelligence.Vibhu [00:46:40]: Yeah. The analogy people draw often is the RL phase is where you don't learn as much new knowledge. You shiftEiso Kant [00:46:46]: Yeah.Vibhu [00:46:46]: Yeah. So, you shift distribution, and you can have it reason towards what you want. on your point about training, a lot of training is still just continue training in a domain, say medicine, then you do RL. So still justEiso Kant [00:47:00]: It's just better data, right? Like, I mean, training, ooh, I like how we invented this word. Like it's effectively just like,Vibhu [00:47:06]: Second phaseEiso Kant [00:47:07]: It's the second phase of training With like a really dumb way to do a curriculum. But like ultimately, what you'd want is a curriculum from token zero to token 30 whatever or 40 trillion tokens that really truly is the optimal curriculum for the model to learn. But training is essentially a stage curriculum on the web because we do not have to compute, And, effectively to try to ablate the perfect curriculum, right? And so I'm pretty sure that you'll start to see people talking soon about some other term, and there's two or - ‘cause now we do this, right? We talk stage two and stage three and stage four training and like. But ultimately, all we're doing is we're trying to assign a curriculum to the web data that we have to allow the model to learn better. I think at some point, as things get compute, as models get cheaper to run, as the next generations of compute, this will become more of a continuous spectrum. I also think the reason, by the way, you have training and like stage two and stage three is organizational, Right? It'- this is, I think, a thing where-- that we really try to avoid with the model factory is like Training exists because there's a training team now, right? There's people, or like people in training decide to focus on like a training effort. but what you really want is engineering and scale of experiments that allows for a much more continuous spectrum that you don't, you have infinite stages. Now, we're not there. Compute's not there. Organization design is not there for it yet. but I think we'll get there. we'll look back on a couple of years and be like, “Oh my God, it was so cute that we did our training data like this in such a like naïve way. Like we barely ordered it. We didn't really do a good job at likeCurriculum, Auto Research, and New ObjectivesVibhu [00:48:48]: The building that curriculum will get you that in the industry.Eiso Kant [00:48:51]: And I'll confirm that, when I talk to some researchers that this is a lot of the focus now is like how does training change and what is the next objective other than, next token prediction. I assume you don't have the answers, but you have some ideas.Vibhu [00:49:02]: We have some ideas. We're not ready to talk about it yet.Eiso Kant [00:49:05]: Yeah.Vibhu [00:49:05]: We've been working on them for years, and I think that's the one thing that's also like you asked earlier about, like what's not obvious about building a foundation model company is that you are constantly balancing the table stakes work, the recipe worksEiso Kant [00:49:19]: Yeah.Vibhu [00:49:19]: Versus like your, my crazyEiso Kant [00:49:22]: Pure researchVibhu [00:49:22]: Breakthrough.Eiso Kant [00:49:22]: Yeah.Vibhu [00:49:22]: Pure research and finding that balance and adjusting the percentage to it based on where you are in the race is really important.Eiso Kant [00:49:31]: I mean, so like, this is a nice way. I was gonna bring up auto research at some pointVibhu [00:49:35]: YesEiso Kant [00:49:35]: As another Andrej invention, or coinage, which is like, I honestly, like how many objective functions can there be, right? Like just try 1,000 of them, set it running, whatever.Vibhu [00:49:47]: Man, it's alsoEiso Kant [00:49:48]: Like what you're looking for. You're looking for loss curves like that, likeVibhu [00:49:51]: It's also a thing people take bets on, right? When you say more Neo labs, you're doing a version of we'll do foundation models, scale them up, next token predictors. A lot of other Neo labs that we see want to take a completely different approach, right? At some level, you're right. It's all, compute efficiency, and that's the net objective. But some are okay, different architecture, like vastly different amounts of compute spend. So some are different. They're not justEiso Kant [00:50:19]: YeahVibhu [00:50:19]: They're like, 99% not balancing, here's the vanilla and scale up. They're 99% on, here's novel research that'll change everything.Eiso Kant [00:50:27]: And I think, Luke, I think you. It depends when you started as well, right?Pure Research vs. Table StakesVibhu [00:50:30]: Yeah.Eiso Kant [00:50:30]: When we started, like the novel thing we did was reinforcement learning on code. No long- that's no longer novel by far, but we were like, - that's where we obsessed over when no one believed in RL. So you have to when you start the company, you have to have your own idea. You have to have something that's different that allows you to speed up, right? For us, it was RL to LLMs that later became common, like, Knowledge. But in the beginning, it wasn'tVibhu [00:50:53]: It's cool. this was like your original 2023 blogEiso Kant [00:50:57]: YeahVibhu [00:50:57]: Of purpose.Eiso Kant [00:50:58]: Yeah.Vibhu [00:50:59]: And like you do lay it all out here.Eiso Kant [00:51:01]: We laidVibhu [00:51:01]: The blog is pretty underrated, right? The whole RL on code was very early on.Eiso Kant [00:51:06]: Very early. And even we had to argue with people, like we say here things like to push beyond current capability, to train your own foundation model. We had to argue with people that it mattered that you had your own like, base model. you can fine-tune your way to success, right? major capabilities emerge from training a base model made accurate and useful during fine-tuning.Vibhu [00:51:23]: Which like, for perspective at the time, we knew closed models, OpenAI, Anthropic were huge. The open models we had were like Mistral 7B, a 30B, a 70B.Eiso Kant [00:51:35]: When weVibhu [00:51:35]: YeahEiso Kant [00:51:36]: The date on this thing is wrong. When we published this, it was April 2023. I think this was justVibhu [00:51:42]: YeahEiso Kant [00:51:42]: Happened on a migration, probably found it on archive.org.Vibhu [00:51:45]: Mistral.Eiso Kant [00:51:46]: Mistral had started, we started on the same month, right?Vibhu [00:51:49]: Yeah.Eiso Kant [00:51:49]: So this wasn't even, there was only, I think, Llama out at the timeVibhu [00:51:52]: SnellEiso Kant [00:51:52]: And that's it, right? And so, but I agree. I think we wan

This week on the Pure Nintendo Podcast, we discuss the end of one of the longest-running Nintendo mobile outings, Mario Kart Tour, which is officially ending in September. Before we get into that, we dive into Brisbane-based indie dev Prideful Sloth and the team's upcoming release, Go-Go Town. You may have heard of their previous games Yonder and Grow. We had some hands-on time with the latest title and give our thoughts. Meanwhile, Rhythm Paradise has been dancing up a storm on the Japan sales charts, and Yosh and the Mysterious Book gets its very own demo. Are sales not doing well? We also bring back the Demo Direct for a couple of other demos, Moonlight Peaks and Digimon Story. Plus Kirk relives the good ol' arcade days in Kirk's Corner and we discuss the many games we're playing this week. Phew! Enjoy!

It's time for episode 487 of the Mobile Tech Podcast with guest Nirave Gondhia of House of Tech -- brought to you by Mint Mobile. In today's show, we unbox and check out Nothing's Ear (3a) and Phone (4b), share our predictions for Samsung's Galaxy Unpacked event, review Apple's MacBook Neo, and lament the slow demise of OnePlus. We then discuss new phones from OnePlus and Redmi, and cover news, leaks and rumors from Samsung, Google, Apple, Qualcomm, Moto, and Huawei... Phew!Episode Links- Support the podcast on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/tnkgrl- Donate / buy me a coffee (PayPal): https://tnkgrl.com/tnkgrl/- Support the podcast with Mint Mobile: https://mintmobile.com/mobiletech- Nirave Gondhia: https://www.threads.net/@niraveg- Nothing Phone (4b): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUgPFNRmsCQ- Nothing Ear (3a): https://gizmodo.com/nothing-ear-3a-review-still-nothings-value-king-2000782330- Samsung's Galaxy Unpacked event is July 22: https://www.gsmarena.com/samsung_confirms_galaxy_unpacked_event_for_july_22_wide_foldable_expected-news-73621.php- Samsung's Galaxy Z Flip8 might be its last: https://www.gsmarena.com/samsung_might_discontinue_its_galaxy_z_flip_lineup_after_the_flip8-news-73647.php- Made by Google's Pixel event is Aug 12: https://www.gsmarena.com/google_officially_reveals_when_its_launching_the_pixel_11_series-news-73620.php- Apple's iPhone event likely on Sep 8: https://www.gsmarena.com/iphone_18_pro_series_foldable_iphone_likely_to_debut_on_september_8-news-73483.php- My Apple MacBook Neo review: https://hothardware.com/reviews/apple-macbook-neo-review- Apple's MacBook Neo now available refurbished: https://www.gsmarena.com/apple_starts_selling_refurbished_macbook_neo_bringing_the_price_down_to_its_prehike_level-news-73474.php- Qualcomm's Snapdragon Summit is Sep 22-24: https://www.gsmarena.com/qualcomm_snapdragon_summit_2026_date-news-73500.php- OnePlus now pushing Oppo devices :https://www.gsmarena.com/oneplus_is_now_selling_oppo_smartphones_tablets_watches_and_earbuds-news-73532.php- OxygenOS and Realme UI to be merged into ColorOS: https://www.gsmarena.com/insider_claims_that_oxygenos_and_realme_ui_will_be_merged_into_coloros-news-73568.php- OnePlus N6: https://www.gsmarena.com/oneplus_n6_arrives_with_8000mah_battery_and_dimensity_6360_max-news-73502.php- Redmi K90 Ultra: https://www.gsmarena.com/redmi_k90_ultra_is_here_with_the_snapdragon_8_elite_and_a_massive_builtin_active_cooling_fan-news-73509.php- Moto teases Edge 70 Max with Qi2 magnets: https://www.gsmarena.com/motorola_starts_teasing_the_edge_70_max_with_magnetic_wireless_charging-news-73607.php- Huawei teases Pura 90 with gradient colors, coming Jul 14: https://www.gsmarena.com/huawei_pura_90_pro_max_unveiled_with_200mp_4x_telephoto_pura_90_pro_tags_along-news-72452.phpAffiliate Links (If you use these links to buy something, we might earn a commission)- Nothing Ear (3a): https://amzn.to/4vpo4Om- Nothing Phone (4a) Pro: https://amzn.to/41MdvZx- Nothing Heaphone (a): https://amzn.to/4fhzXjH- Moto Razr Ultra 2025: https://amzn.to/4wz2iJ6- Google Pixel 10a: https://amzn.to/4bkei98

Phew! It's hot in the desert, even for a scorpion! Written especially for this podcast by Alice.  If you enjoyed this story, please do leave us a review.  And, if you'd like to suggest an animal for a future Animal Tales story, you can do so by emailing podcast@animaltales.uk. We would love to hear from you.  Animal Tales Books!Collections of Animal Tales children's stories are available to buy exclusively at Amazon. Simply search for Animal Tales Short Stories or follow this link: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0CLJQZ9C9?binding=paperback&ref=dbs_dp_sirpi Become a PREMIUM SubscriberYou can now enjoy Animal Tales by becoming a Premium Subscriber. This gets you:All episodes in our catalogue advert-freeBonus Premium-only episodes (one per week) which will never be used on the main podcastWe guarantee to use one of your animal suggestions in a storyYou can sign up through Apple Podcasts or through Supercast and there are both monthly and yearly plans available.   Discover a brand new story every Monday, Wednesday and Friday – just for you!  You can find more Animal Tales at www.animaltales.ukA Note About The AdvertsIn order to allow us to make these stories we offer a premium subscription and run adverts. The adverts are not chosen by us, but played automatically depending on the platform you listen through (Apple Podcasts, Spotify, etc) and the country you live in. The adverts may even be different if you listen to the story twice.We have had a handful of instances where an advert has played that is not suitable for a family audience, despite the podcast clearly being labelled for children. If you're concerned about an advert you hear, please contact the platform you are listening to directly. Spotify, in particular, has proven problematic in the past, for both inappropriate adverts and the volume at which the adverts play. If you find this happening, please let Spotify know via their Facebook customer care page. As creators, we want your child's experience to be a pleasurable one. Running adverts is necessary to allow us to operate, but please do consider the premium subscription service as an alternative – it's advert free.

Phew, it's warm out, innit? Thankfully, the hilarious Amy Matthews has brought us a cask-chilled bevy of terrifying taverns and pub poltergeists. From Scotland to Cornwall (via the Midlands), prepare for a legendary lock-in with the lorelads. Amy Matthews is at the Edinburgh Fringe and on tour with her new show ‘Definitions of Toast'. Dates and tickets info here. Watch Amy's special ‘I Feel Like I'm Made of Spiders' on ITVX. Buy Amy's vinyl ‘Commute With The Foxes' on Monkey Barrel Records. Follow Amy on Instagram @amyfmatthews Edited by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Laurence Hisee⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Join the LoreFolk at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠patreon.com/loremenpod⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ko-fi.com/loremen⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Check the sweet, sweet merch here... ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.teepublic.com/stores/loremen-podcast?ref_id=24631⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ @loremenpod ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠youtube.com/loremenpodcast⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠www.instagram.com/loremenpod⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠www.facebook.com/loremenpod⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Starbuck, Helo and their new/old Cylon buddy Sharon return to the fleet! And Katee and Robin think they maayyybe should have planned their entrance a little better. Meanwhile, Adama struggles to keep his part of the fleet afloat, Tom Zarek plots some villainy, and President/Prophet Laura Roslin plans a trip to Kobol that is GUARANTEED to cause some bloodshed. Phew....we may be due for a lighthearted romp like "Tigh Me Up, Tigh Me Down" soon.I have never watched my performance in Battlestar Galactica.. until now. Listen along for my real, unfiltered first reactions. It's like a DVD commentary, remember those? There will definitely be some behind the scenes stories ;) and if you're a visual person, check out the reaction videos over on YouTube.BSG Reaction Videos - https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLiHvVvKZ9lt4-IZiosUjdxqB7IEQJJ6RUSeason 2 Episode 6 Home Pt. 1Directed by Sergio Mimica-GezzanWritten by David EickFull UNEDITED WATCH-ALONG available on Patreon with 2% Tier subscription.Join us on Patreon - https://www.patreon.com/cw/TheSackhoffShowShop Merch - https://shopstands.com/collections/the-katee-sackhoff-collectionFollow me and subscribe to keep updated on The Sackhoff Show, my film and television work, and my many other adventures!INSTAGRAM - instagram.com/therealkateesackhoff/FACEBOOK - facebook.com/officialkateesackhoff/TWITTER - x.com/kateesackhoffYOUTUBE - youtube.com/kateesackhoffofficialTIKTOK - tiktok.com/@sackhoffshowTo advertise on our show - please contact - podcastads@global.com

Herby, you're great… at football, but what the heck are you talking about when it comes to baseball? Team USA plays Bosnia-Herzegovina tonight, how much of a disappointment would it be if they lost? American soccer fans seem to be all in on the US bandwagon- can they deliver? :30- Mariners Morning After The Mariners got their 2nd win in a row, beating the Angels 8-3 and they're back over .500 again. Phew! :45- Hockey stars are recognizing the power they have and dictating where they will and won't play, so don't take it personally Seattle.

Herby, you're great… at football, but what the heck are you talking about when it comes to baseball? Team USA plays Bosnia-Herzegovina tonight, how much of a disappointment would it be if they lost? American soccer fans seem to be all in on the US bandwagon- can they deliver? :30- Mariners Morning After The Mariners got their 2nd win in a row, beating the Angels 8-3 and they're back over .500 again. Phew! :45- Hockey stars are recognizing the power they have and dictating where they will and won't play, so don't take it personally Seattle. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Phew! this year is galloping away lovely listeners and in this episode, as we've passed the crest of midsummer, we're thinking ahead a few weeks to the summer break. Both Fi and I traditionally take around six weeks off over the summer and today we enjoy a wide ranging conversation about why we feel the need and how we plan for it. We explore the difference for us between rest and restoration, the differing types of rest we plan to make space for and how we are trying to avoid skidding into the summer break in a hot mess! It's a pretty personal episode and we hope you enjoy the conversation. A reminder from our lovely sponsors Squarespace of their free live circle event happening today (as this comes out) Wednesday 24th, 3pm uk time with Fiona talking about Design on your terms and taking questions. You can register your place here https://luma.com/circle-live-040 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Visuals: https://getbehindthebillboard.com/episode-111-btb-x-woo-conference-part-2 Recorded live at the WOO Congress 2026 in London just a fortnight ago, this is the second of our special Behind the Billboard episodes - and this time we're on the Global OOH, Innovation & Creativity track. Hugh and Dan….. Well…. Mainly Dan as Hugh had run away to catch a train…. grab short, sharp conversations with a stellar line-up of out-of-home leaders from around the world: Elizabeth McIntyre, CEO of OMA Australia; Ben Milne, CEO APAC at Billups; Nick Bell, UK MD at Billups; Jaime Byrdak, CEO North America at Billups; Jay Young, MD of Grand Visual; Sarah Parkes, Managing Partner, International at Talon; Danielle Austin of Evolve OOH; James Harrison from MPN part of Dubai Holdings; and Simon Wall, CEO of Glynt Group in South Africa. Phew… what a list… what a monster session. Across the episode we explore where OOH is heading now: smarter creative, better data, creative mapping, AI, sustainable infrastructure, mobile media, and the enduring power of a brilliantly simple poster in the right place. There are stories behind work for Google Maps, RNLI's Float To Live, Nike Running and the NYC Marathon, Selleys, Jolt, Out There, Ad Free Zones, IFS.ai and Tractor Media's school-powering billboards. It's a fast-moving global tour of the medium we love: from Australia to Dubai, South Africa to North America, and back to the streets of London. Along the way, our guests pick their favourite billboards, share what excites them about the future, and remind us that when out-of-home is at its best, it's public, useful, unmissable and impossible to ignore. In true Behind the Billboard style, there are a few rabbit holes, plenty of billboard nerdery, and a healthy amount of love for the people pushing the medium forward. Thanks to WOO for having us, to all our brilliant guests for giving up their time in the middle of congress chaos, and to everyone who still believes the humble billboard has plenty of magic left in it. Thanks again to our usual suspects and supporters, and for this one especially the team at WOO.

I think you reach a certain age, where you start to become very reflective on your life – where you've been and where you're headed. For me, this weekend provides the opportunity to take time out of my busy schedule and reinforce what I already know… my Dad is truly a role model and mentor. There are always actions and traits that dads pass down to their sons – how to shave, how to carry oneself, and… how to tie a necktie. But where did that last fashion statement originate. The formality of knotting a piece of material around one's neck in a Windsor, half-Windsor, four-in-hand, Prince Albert, simple, Kelvin, Pratt, Eldredge, Van Wijk, Trinity, Murrell, Balthus and… the classic bow-tie. Phew! That's a knot to try and digest, but, as is the case on every episode of The Missing Chapter, we'll dissect all of the history behind the origins on this Father's Day tribute and, if you're watching us, you'll see us demonstrate our own preference on how to tie our ties. It's a Missing Chapter, Father's Day Special, and it wouldn't be complete without the coffee. Thanks for joining us!Want some Missing Chapter merchandise? Click ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠HERE⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠!

This month we read Downbelow Station by CJ Cherryh, which won the Hugo for best novel in 1982. Phew! DM: Haley Music by Pets of Belonging Transcript library  Join us on Discord! If you can't get in, please send us an email at hugogirlpodcast at gmail dot com. LINKAPALOOZA Haley's review of Mandalorian and Grogu Lori on Narrated Articles we discussed: https://reactormag.com/warfare-and-survival-downbelow-station-by-c-j-cherryh/ https://www.andyjohnson.xyz/home/book-review-downbelow-station-1981-by-cj-cherryh https://blogendorff.com/2018/04/21/book-review-downbelow-staton/ https://reactormag.com/norway-has-her-standards-cj-cherryhs-downbelow-station/  Further CJ Cherryh Listening: A Meal of Thorns (with Arkady Martine) Hugos There    

Keep your phone out of the bathroom! Hemorrhoids are so much more common when we sit and scroll while doing our business. Considering that next time. Maybe make a TikTok limit. AI vs organic speeches. After graduation, speakers have been using AI and taking the stage sounding like robots, Anna needed to bring back her speech as a refresher. Raven reads his AI speech.  The Knicks are the talk of the town. And the... wallet. Fans are paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to watch the NBA final championship games, with not a regret to be found!  Anna recently found out the bigger your thighs, the longer you have to live, supposedly. Today, Anna, Raven, producer Sophia and producer Justin all measured their thighs and Anna decided what age they'd die at. Phew.  Raven opened his pool and found a WHOLE lot of frogs. Could be worse, though, some of these findings are horror stories! What did you find in your pool?   This week, Raven goes head-to-head against the top of the class! It's Cant Beat Raven: Valedictorian version! Congrats Emma! 90 celebrities showed up to the knicks game last night. Plus, a controversial appearance. Ben stiller and Timothy Chalamet, per usual. But some surprising other attendees. Is there a right or wrong way to do laundry? Laundry expert, Richard Handel joins Anna and Raven to discuss laundry and the art of it. Are you doing yours correctly? What's your protocol?  Beth and Brian's son is asking for a Jeep for graduation. She thinks it's a ridiculous waste of money, he can't take it to college with him, and it'll just sit in the driveway. He says that he'll use it when he's home, and part of graduation is getting a rite of passage, and he's never had his own car, this is it! She says they'll be paying insurance on a car that's never getting used. What would you do? Steve has a chance to win $2,200! All he has to do is answer more pop culture questions than Raven in Can't Beat Raven!   

My guest today is Toni Smith – we all know her as Quiltoni! Pixelated quilts that make you smile and fabric for everyone especially if you like video games, comics, pop culture and more.…if you want to enter a world full of smiles, geekiness, some crazy antics as well as be inspired by some massive action with heartwarming charity work then it's time for you to meet QUILTONI! Phew! Today we will have an action packed episode talking about all the wonderful, weird and geeky things Toni brings to the sewing and quilting world. Her smiles and laughter are contagious, and her heart explodes all over everyone she meets in her charity work. Listen in to hear her story. Find Toni's website here: https://quiltoni.com/Link to donate to Starlight here: https://quiltoni.com/collections/50k-for-50qQuilter on Fire Website - https://quilteronfire.com/Square One Textile Art WorkshopJoin Brandy's email listFree Quilter on Fire Holiday Table Runner VIDEOSUPPORT THE PODCAST by becoming a Quilter on Fire Podcast Angel for as little as $3 per week.Support the showThank you for listening to the Quilter on Fire Podcast. 

On this week's episode, Sarah is asking why a judge thought it was a good idea to let three rapists walk free. And Peter would like to know what the deal is with ridiculous centigrade temperatures. And the pair marvel over Peter's rakish black eye and pore over our latest mailbag to answer listener questions on whether devolution really can work and is the blueprint for politics on a national scale. The merits of the free bus pass, compulsory voting works for Australia, so why not us? And, perhaps more importantly, why parenting used to be akin to NATO and that was a good thing.On our reading and watch list this week: · A Clockwork Orange – Dir: Stanley Kubrick· Book Of Common Prayer· Unconventional Wisdom – Peter Hitchens Please do get in touch, email: Alas@dailymail.co.uk you can leave a comment on Spotify or even send us a voice note on Whatsapp – on 07796 657512, start your message with the word ‘alas'. Presenters: Sarah Vine & Peter HitchensProducer: Philip WildingEditor: Chelsey MooreProduction Manager: Vittoria CecchiniExecutive Producer: Jamie East A Daily Mail production. Seriously PopularTo get in touch email alas@mailonline.co.uk, you can leave a comment on Spotify or even send us a voice note on WhatsApp - on 07796 657512 start your message with the word 'alas'Presenters: Sarah Vine & Peter HitchensProducer: Phillip WildingEditor: Chelsey MooreProduction Manager: Vittoria CecchiniExecutive Producer: Jamie EastA Daily Mail production. Seriously Popular Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

St Mirren remain a Premiership side and Jamie & Sam discuss the ugly way we managed to do it. https://miseryhunters.co.uk https://patreon.com/miseryhunters Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Phew, what a scorcher! Live on tape, from sweltering London Town, here’s your first chance...

This week on the Pure Nintendo Podcast, Jemma, Kirk, and Trev delve into Yoshi's latest outing, Yoshi and the Mysterious Book. This delightful platformer is full of charm. Nintendo also surprised us all by announcing a new mobile game called Pictonico, which is out at the end of May. Will we be playing? Upcoming RPG Adventures of Elliot has a lovely new demo that we've tried, plus the A Link Between Worlds soundtrack has been added to Nintendo Music - simply a classic. In visual-media news Pac-Man has a new cartoon and there's a Broken Sword movie in the works. Cool! Kirk's Corner brings us a look at Anomalith, a survival-action horror title coming to Switch 2. Plus we're playing the likes of Dungeon Clawler, Zen Pinball - Williams vol. 10, and Kabuto Park. Phew! Enjoy the show!

Talk to you in the am.

Our heroes meet a strange child in a basement. Good news: he's facing them-not a Blair Witch situation. Phew. Bad News? He's still a creepy little freak! Afterwards, the gang gets hungry, but what's still open this late? Follow us on bluesky for goodness sake, it's fun! And it's probably the best way to contact us, all things considered.Special Thanks as always to Sydney and Benjamin Paul and Tyler Button, and our Big Freak Spacejamfan!This episode features additional sound design by Michaël Ghelfi. Michaël creates brilliantly crafted soundscapes and ambient tracks for all sort of productions and they make perfect accompaniment to your ttrpg home games. Find his work on YouTube, and support that good stuff on Patreon.Subscribe and Rate Rude Tales of Magic on Apple Podcasts and Spotify and leave us a review!Advertise on Rude Tales of Magic via Gumball.fm.Support the show: https://www.rudetalesofmagic.com/See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

On this episode of the Plug N Play Podcast, Henry discusses the nothing burger that was Playstation's DRM scare, GameStop offering to buy Ebay for $56 billion, the new Star Fox reveal, Xbox axing Copilot Companion, GTA needing to cost more money, and more! Phew! That's allota news...Impressions this week are focusing on Sonic Superstars and Metal Gear Solid Delta. Can not doing enough make a game that was already good worse? Tune in to find out!Feel free to send us a question at plugnplaypodcast1@gmail.com for a chance to have it read out on the show!X/Twitter: https://x.com/PlugNPlayPod1Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/plugnplaypod1/TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@plugnplay397Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/7dE5501VjBjk9XbQdxvIG3Apple Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/kh/podcast/plug-n-play-podcast-video-game-news-and-reviews/id1725685950YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC0kfqx6YQ5xqXRfaKRO8wJwLinktree: https://linktr.ee/plugnplaypodcastTimestamps:0:00 - Intro4:30 - Super Mario Galaxy Movie impressions19:30 - Comment Corner35:16 - PS5 DRM Scare45:35 - GameStop offers to buy Ebay for $56 billion1:05:06 - 56% of gamers don't buy at full price anymore1:19:55 - Xbox removes Copilot Companion and changes start up sound1:29:54 - GTA being more expensive is a good thing1:37:15 - New Star Fox game revealImpressions:1:45:42 - Sonic Superstars2:04:36 - Metal Gear Solid Delta

Huge Talk Birdie today, we start with the great win from Lucas Herbert on the LIV Tour, and how his record just gets better. Mark talks about when he played with him in the Vic Open, and Nick shares a story about playing with Lucas on the Gold Coast. Nick describes him as 'streaky' and says consistency is the next goal for Lucas. Unfortunately not in the PGA Championship this weekend which is a shame, and we talk about where he may end up, and have status, should LIV fold.The Korean cheating incident continues, with more coming out about what happened when Inhoi Hur cheated in the tournament and the rules officials completely screwed it up. Nick has received an email from one of the broadcasters at the tournament who listens to the pod, and says that whilst our comments last week were on the mark, there were some more things that happened that he witnessed which we didn't discuss.....he fills in the gaps....holy hell, could this wild story get wilder? You bet it can.He reveals that all four rules officials who erred were Korean Golf Association officials, none from the Asian Tour were involved. He says 'no sane golfer would ever accept a ruling that gave them a mulligan', and confirmed that the Asian and Korean players were all furious with both the officials and Inhoi Hur. He also describes the mayhem at the clubhouse which he witnessed, and that he was there when Inhoi Hur's wife was screaming at officials, so much so that Inhoi took her out of the clubhouse - the only honourable thing he did all weekend to be honest.Nick plays a grab from Sean Connery on golf, which Inhoi Hur could do well to consider in future.Onto the Australian Open. Following our chat with James Sutherland last week with the news of the AO move to North Adelaide, we've had some time to process it, and Nick and Mark aren't entirely convinced. Nick says he has some concerns and worries the course will not have the cache for the big international names to make the trip. Mark is worried that the course has bee committed when it's not even built yet, however he understands from someone who is in the know, that the offer made by South Australia was one that was impossible to say no to. Plenty of feedback on this from you, which we won't do today - given the volume of cheating feedback - but we'll do a bonus feedback pod tomorrow just on the AO.For Hostplus, Nick says that his 'That's a Plus' for golf this week is the career of caddy Mick Doran who has retired this week. One of the great guys on the tour.A reminder of our Talk Birdie To Me annual survey, great prizes up for grabs, it takes about 6 minutes the link to do it is here.For Betr, Marks Top 5 this week is people, some golfers, who were given names by their parents that are very golf inspired, perhaps with an intention in mind. Has he missed any? Let us know.The PING Globals from Nick, plenty of results to run through including a strong performance from Ryan Ruffels who played at the weekend, Mark tells a story about playing with him when he (Ryan) was 14 and being blown away by how good he was. Nick also mentions Boo Weekley who won at the weekend, and we remember the orangutan story....if you missed it, you really need to see it. Here's the link.Feedback today for Southern Golf Club is all focused on the Inhoi Hur cheating saga. We start with a voicemail and then work through just a fraction of the huge amount of feedback we received from you.And a ripping Masterclass for the Golf Clearance Outlet from Nick on rhythm and tempo and why 'matching' the two is important, inspired by Brandt Snedeker.Phew....a big pod today, back tomorrow with an Australian Open bonus feedback pod!We're live from Titleist and FootJoy HQ thanks to our great partners:Hostplus, Talk Birdie To Me's official retirement partnerBMW, luxury and comfort for the 19th hole;Titleist, the #1 ball in golf;FootJoy, the #1 shoe and glove in golf;PING will help you play your best;Golf Clearance Outlet, they beat everyone's prices;Betr, the fastest and easiest betting app in Australia;And Southern Golf Club. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week on the Pure Nintendo Podcast, Jemma, Kirk, and Trev delve into the latest Star Fox news, dissecting the announcement of a new Star Fox game for the Switch 2. What do we think about the look, the voices, the new modes, and the fact that it's not really a "new" game? Plus, we look at Nintendo's latest financial data - and there's a price hike coming soon, too. Mina the Hollower has a release date at last, plus one of the greats from the Big N is retiring this month. We also discuss the gaming hall of fame in Kirk's Corner, plus we're playing the likes of Quartet, Tomodachi Life, and Starbites, along with a special mention of Star Wars games to celebrate last week's Star Wars day. Phew! Enjoy the show!

Strap in, this is a big pod - albeit a day late as Nick has been in Queensland - but we got there!Also, before we start a reminder of our annual survey (there are prizes!), here's the link: https://access.itsmystation.com/s3/talk-birdie-to-me-2Onto the show....Mark Allen in particular has come in hot over what happened on the Asian Tour event at the weekend, and we launch into it from the top. Cheating in professional golf. There are at least three instances we know of in recent times, Inhoi Hur's behaviour and actions at the weekend at the Namseoul Country Club were disgraceful. Mark Allen says the facts in this story have shocked him, saying what happened at the weekend has blown him away.Nick and Mark explain what happened, and give their view on why it was a disgrace to professional golf, saying it can only be described as cheating. Essentially, he was given a mulligan on a professional tournament.We compare Inhoi Hur's actions to those of Cam Young at the weekend, who called a penalty on himself incurring a one-shot penalty. Mark says what the penalty for cheating should be for a first offence, and a second offence...Nick agrees entirely. Nick spoke to a Tour Pro who played in the tournament and said that all the players were 'headless' with anger over what happened.Is cheating in professional golf endemic? Well Nick says there was always rumours about the Asian Tour, and both Nick and Mark have experienced it. But there are other recent examples, and Mark names one player who was recently banned in Australia, and simply moved to another tour. And we discuss another Australian pro who was recently caught dropping a ball out of his pocket in a tournament.Phew. Onto LIV. We talk about the Jon Rahm news, and Scott O'Neil's comments about the search for investment for LIV to continue beyond 2026. Does it survive? Nick and Mark give their view.That's a plus for Hostplus this week is an unusual one - the plus for golf is that Inhoi Hur did not win the tournament, that's good for golf, he didn't deserve to and thankfully he didn't.And into the turn, we chat about the Australian Golf Digest's Top 100 golf course rankings list which has come out over the last few days. Do Nick and Mark rate it? We discuss.In the turn - speaking of cheating, Nick and Mark discover that the Tour Pro whose card they refused to sign was the same person! They don't name him, but they give a few clues if you feel like sleuthing....For Betr, Nicks Top 5 is - if you are going to cheat in pro golf (which you should not) these are the 5 most common ways to do it.Feedback for Southern Golf Club - we start with a few on our John Senden interview, could have read 100 out, there were heaps. Question about Adam Scott hitting the wrong ball at the weekend in a tournament, comment about Carlotta Ciganda's slow play, and a couple of LIV comments - there's been heaps, but we touch on a couple.Nick takes us around the world in the PING globals, lots going on, and some great performances. Mark sidetracks the PING globals with a discussion about chocolate bars....which requires your input if you can help.For the Golf Clearance Outlet, Mark's masterclass today is inspired by Cameron Young's wedges, and why he feels high bounce wedges are worth a shot.We're live from Titleist and FootJoy HQ thanks to our great partners:Hostplus, Talk Birdie To Me's official retirement partnerBMW, luxury and comfort for the 19th hole;Titleist, the #1 ball in golf;FootJoy, the #1 shoe and glove in golf;PING will help you play your best;Golf Clearance Outlet, they beat everyone's prices;Betr, the fastest and easiest betting app in Australia;And Southern Golf Club. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Mariners crawled back from the dead to pull off a 5-4 win over the Braves. It seemed all hope was lost after Logan Gilbert gave up 3 solo home runs in the 6th inning, but Luke Raley and JP Crawford came through with two home runs of their own and suddenly the M's had a 5-4 lead to end the 6th and the bullpen got the job done. :30- Mariners Morning After Phew, the Mariners pulled off one heck of a 6th inning to end the losing skid and steal one from the Braves. :45- The Met Gala was last night and in the world of fashion, it's the biggest night there is. There were even some athletes there, but one athlete is getting credit for an appearance he didn't make.

The Mariners crawled back from the dead to pull off a 5-4 win over the Braves. It seemed all hope was lost after Logan Gilbert gave up 3 solo home runs in the 6th inning, but Luke Raley and JP Crawford came through with two home runs of their own and suddenly the M's had a 5-4 lead to end the 6th and the bullpen got the job done. :30- Mariners Morning After Phew, the Mariners pulled off one heck of a 6th inning to end the losing skid and steal one from the Braves. :45- The Met Gala was last night and in the world of fashion, it's the biggest night there is. There were even some athletes there, but one athlete is getting credit for an appearance he didn't make. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The Lakers blew out the Rockets to close out the series and avoid the wrong kind of history. Anthony and Raj break down the game zoomed out and in. Really though, this was about celebrating and riding the wave that we can, while it's rolling. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I was abducted by aliens and transported back to March 7th. When I pleaded with them that I had no desire to relive the past few weeks since Dementia Donny attacked Iran they relented and brought me back. So The Saturday Edge On Folk ran half an hour late and ran half an hour late to 12:30pm today. Phew, what a trip! Thanks to Ciara and Jasper (their earthly names) for bringing me back! This allowed me to pay tribute to English guitarist / songwriter and founder member of Traffic, Dave Mason, who died this week. Until his obituary came out I did not realize he played the acoustic guitar which drove Jimi Hendrix' great cover of Dylan's All Along The Watchtower all those years ago. Also featured lots of new music and an extended sample of Irish trad from the great Dervish, who play in town tomorrow.

Glenn emerges from under the infamous dumpster in this otherwise (we thought) not-super-exciting episode. Thankfully though, the church tower fell at the end and crushed part of the wall. Phew! Show support and get ad-free episodes and a bunch of other cool stuff: patreon.com/jasoncabassi  Or go to buymeacoffee.com/cabassi for a one-time donation. Next up: TWD S6E8 “Start to Finish”. Let us know your thoughts! You can email or send a voice message to talk@podcastica.com.  Or join our Discord where you can leave comments and chat with hosts and other listeners: https://discord.gg/6WUMt3m3qe  Or check out our Walking Dead Facebook group, where we put up comment posts for each episode, at facebook.com/groups/deadcast. Check out my (Jason's) other podcast, Wax Episodic, where friends and I cover our favorite current shows, like: Severance, the mysterious, mind-bending, amusingly strange Apple TV workplace thriller about identity, memory, and corporate control. Covered by me and Karen. (!) Fallout, the crazy, funny, retro-futuristic post-apocalyptic series on Amazon Prime Video. Covered by me, Kara, and Kasi. Pluribus, the Twilight-Zoney Apple TV show from Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan, covered by me and Karen. It: Welcome to Derry, the horrific HBO series, prequel to the recent It movies based on the Stephen King book. Covered by me and Shawn of Strange Indeed. Alien: Earth, the heady, gross-out FX/Hulu sci-fi series based on the Alien movies. Covered by me, Randy, and Kara. Available wherever you get podcasts, or at waxepisodic.com   Thank you! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Reposted from Walking Dead ‘Cast, which you can find at: https://podcastica.com/podcast/the-cast-of-us — Glenn emerges from under the infamous dumpster in this otherwise (we thought) not-super-exciting episode. Thankfully though, the church tower fell at the end and crushed part of the wall. Phew! Show support and get ad-free episodes and a bunch of other cool stuff: patreon.com/jasoncabassi  Or go to buymeacoffee.com/cabassi for a one-time donation. Next up: TWD S6E8 “Start to Finish”. Let us know your thoughts! You can email or send a voice message to talk@podcastica.com.  Or join our Discord where you can leave comments and chat with hosts and other listeners: https://discord.gg/6WUMt3m3qe  Or check out our Walking Dead Facebook group, where we put up comment posts for each episode, at facebook.com/groups/deadcast. Check out my (Jason's) other podcast, Wax Episodic, where friends and I cover our favorite current shows, like: Severance, the mysterious, mind-bending, amusingly strange Apple TV workplace thriller about identity, memory, and corporate control. Covered by me and Karen. (!) Fallout, the crazy, funny, retro-futuristic post-apocalyptic series on Amazon Prime Video. Covered by me, Kara, and Kasi. Pluribus, the Twilight-Zoney Apple TV show from Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan, covered by me and Karen. It: Welcome to Derry, the horrific HBO series, prequel to the recent It movies based on the Stephen King book. Covered by me and Shawn of Strange Indeed. Alien: Earth, the heady, gross-out FX/Hulu sci-fi series based on the Alien movies. Covered by me, Randy, and Kara. Available wherever you get podcasts, or at waxepisodic.com   Thank you! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Alexei and Talal Karkouti also yam on about cars, Peter Crouch and Radio 4.Here come some links:Pre-order Alexei's book here.Get tickets to see Alexei interview Slavoj Žižek on 6th May here.Tickets to see The Alexei Sayle Podcast LIVE in Shoreham on 30th July here and at The Wellingborough Diggers Festival on 2nd May here!And, finally, get tickets to see Alexei in conversation at the Rik Mayall Festival in Droitwich Spa, 5th June here!Phew!Be a comrade and support the show! Become a Patron and get access to the video version of the podcast, live episodes and more - patreon.com/AlexeiSaylePodcastSend your fan art, thoughts and questions to alexeisaylepodcast@gmail.comPlease consider leaving us a review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.Subscribe to Alexei's YouTube channel here and join him for his Bike Rides.The Alexei Sayle Podcast is produced and edited by Talal KarkoutiMusic by Tarboosh RecordsPhotograph from the Andy Hollingworth Archive  

Another Trip To The Emergency Room #514   Ever been terrified walking into the ER?

Alexei Sayle and Talal Karkouti also discuss Israel's ongoing onslaught in Lebanon, late-stage capitalism, whether the moon matters and if running a red light is a moral issue. Here come the links:Pre-order Alexei's book here.Get tickets to see Alexei interview Slavoj Žižek on 6th May here.Tickets to see The Alexei Sayle Podcast LIVE in Shoreham on 30th July here and at The Wellingborough Diggers Festival on 2nd May here!And, finally, get tickets to see Alexei in conversation at the Rik Mayall Festival in Droitwich Spa, 5th June here!Phew!Be a comrade and support the show! Become a Patron and get access to the video version of the podcast, live episodes and more - patreon.com/AlexeiSaylePodcastSend your fan art, thoughts and questions to alexeisaylepodcast@gmail.comPlease consider leaving us a review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.Subscribe to Alexei's YouTube channel here and join him for his Bike Rides.The Alexei Sayle Podcast is produced and edited by Talal KarkoutiMusic by Tarboosh RecordsPhotograph from the Andy Hollingworth Archive  

Kayla, had a small problem this am, but she's here.

It was one of those nights where going to bed felt… uncertain.After a late-night post from Donald Trump sent the internet into meltdown, the world briefly found itself holding its breath, doom-scrolling, spiralling, and wondering what might come next. From rumours of escalation to very real geopolitical tension, the Trawl ladies try to make sense of a news cycle that felt anything but normal.Marina and Jemma dig into the reaction online (from panic to full-blown denial), the politics behind the brinkmanship, and how quickly narratives can shift from “unthinkable” to “just another headline.” Plus: media moments that raised eyebrows, commentary that missed the mark, and the internet doing what it does best...coping in real time.It's messy, it's surreal, and at times it was genuinely frightening. And yet Jemma and Marina still find time for underrateds and a palate cleanser at the end.Thank you for sharing and please do follow us @MarinaPurkiss @jemmaforte @TheTrawlPodcast Patreonhttps://patreon.com/TheTrawlPodcast Youtubehttps://www.youtube.com/@TheTrawl Twitterhttps://twitter.com/TheTrawlPodcastIf you've even mildly enjoyed The Trawl, you'll love the unfiltered, no-holds-barred extras from Jemma & Marina over on Patreon, including:• Exclusive episodes of The Trawl Goss – where Jemma and Marina spill backstage gossip, dive into their personal lives, and often forget the mic is on• Early access to The Trawl Meets…• Glorious ad-free episodesPlus, there's a bell-free community of over 3,300 legends sparking brilliant chat.And it's your way to support the pod which the ladies pour their hearts, souls (and occasional anxiety) into. All for your listening pleasure and reassurance that through this geopolitical s**tstorm… you're not alone.Come join the fun:https://www.patreon.com/TheTrawlPodcast?utm_campaign=creatorshare_creator Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

There is a hill outside the city of Jerusalem called Golgotha or also called Calvary. Both words for this hill mean the same thing – “Place of the Skull”. This hill was given its name because of it s shape of a skull. Do you think that was an accident? It was here on top of this skull shaped hill that Jesus was crucified on the cross. Have you ever thought about the meaning behind this? Why there? Nothing was by accident. God was in every detail as he sacrificed his one and only son so that whoever would believe in him would have eternal life. I believe this place was strategic. The cross was on top of the skull because Jesus wants to give you victory over your mind! Did you know it's not only your soul that has been saved, but your MIND has been saved as well. The victory was won over your mind by Jesus on the skull! How absolutely strategic. The evil one fights to take back what Jesus has claimed and most often what he gets is our mind. How successful has he been in your life lately? Have your thoughts been victorious or have they been fear filled, anxious, negative, defeated thoughts? Jesus paid a high price for your victory, why would you ever allow the defeated one to defeat you in your head? Your greatest asset is your mind. Your mind paints a vivid picture and your body responds with every emotion and energy to create the picture. Every choice you make, good or bad, was first a thought in your mind. So, of course your mind is under attack. A relentless, violent, brutal attack, and it's happening every minute of the day. Whatever gets your mind, gets you. Your thoughts are the guide, so the important question is, who is the author of your thoughts? Scripture warns us of strongholds on our mind. 2 Corinthians 10: 4-5, “We use God's mighty weapons, not worldly weapons, to knock down the strongholds of human reasoning and to destroy false arguments. We take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ.” The word “stronghold” comes from the Greek word ochuroma. This is a Greek word used to describe a prison. The “strongholds” scripture refers to are lies that the devil has ingrained so deeply in your mind and in your belief system that they now hold power over certain areas of your life. These lies create a spiritual fortress of wrong thoughts which becomes your prison. As a prisoner to these thoughts, you begin to view life through the illusion of bondage Satan has put on your mind. Thoughts of worry. Thoughts of fear. Thoughts of anxiety. Thoughts of lack. And eventually, these tangled and twisted thoughts begin to take control of your life. Now, you can't seem to dismiss those thoughts. You can't just shake it off. This stronghold on your mind has overwhelmed you. And if we allow this stronghold to continue, dismissing it as who we are and what we naturally struggle with, it becomes a trap where Satan mentally seduces you and imprisons you with your own thinking. My sister, does this sound familiar? Have your thoughts become twisted and knotted with worry, fear, anxiety, or negativity? This is a strong hold and it is holding you back. Holding you back, you say … from what? Holding you back from the freedom of being who you were created to be and living the life God created you to live. Holding you back from the joy of the Lord. Holding you back from your purpose and your destiny. But remember, your mind is saved! Just like your soul has been redeemed, so has your mind. You are no longer a captive here. Any strongholds the enemy has established in your mind can and must be destroyed. You have been equipped for this battle! The weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh but have divine power to destroy strongholds.” Ephesians 6:17 gives us a list of battle gear, and the first is the helmet of salvation. Now how totally ironic is that … where was your salvation bought and secured? On a hill called Golgotha which means “skull”. And it is the helmet of salvation that protects your mind, your greatest asset. Girl, you have supernatural protection wrapped around your head to safeguard your mind from every assault of the enemy. You are covered. Those thoughts of fear, overwhelm and anxiety bounce right off. Phew, phew, phew. Nope, they're not getting in. But, they do get in when we take off our helmet. What is the helmet again? It is the helmet of SALVATION. When we forget it's not just our soul that has been saved, our thoughts are left vulnerable. When we start buying into the lie that says this is just who I am and how I think, we forfeit the saving grace Jesus offers over our minds. Here's a simple step to remember when you know your mind is being assaulted: Tap your helmet. Yip, just give that sweet head of yours a little tap and say “you've been saved and you are protected.” Exodus 14:14 says “The Lord will fight for you, you need only to be still.” This is exactly what we're talking about. The battle over your mind is real and it is vicious, but the Lord will fight for you. Stand there in your helmet of salvation and know you are protected. Any stronghold the enemy tries to use against you has been demolished! His attacks will not be successful. Your mind has been saved and it is protected. If you've taken your helmet off and you've been dancing with worries, fears and regrets, new strongholds have been established. Demolish them now. You have been given that power through Christ Jesus. Declare your mind is precious territory claimed by Jesus. Satan has no right to come marching in here! He has been banished. You've been saved, you don't have to think the thoughts you once thought. You are protected, the attacks will no longer be successful on your mind. Now, keep your helmet on! The evil one is on the prowl like a hungry lion for someone to devour. He goes right for the head. But yours has been saved! Follow Pamela on Instagram – https://instagram.com/headmamapamela Or Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/pamela.crim Find out more about BIG Life – http://biglifehq.com

You’ve seen the headlines, the public outings and the easter eggs in season 10… “Scamanda” is everywhere. What do Teddi and Tamra think of West and Amanda’s joint (and likely ChatGPT) statement?! Meanwhile, West is allegedly dating other girls on top of Amanda?! Is the internet taking things too far, or is this worse than Scandoval? Plus, Jen Shah has finally spoken out, Carl & Bailey’s hard launch is being overshadowed, Dara’s getting caught in a lie and Ben’s getting his ex back… PHEW! See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Phew, brake week is finally over, but we decided to take a deeper dive into the testing and the results.

False teaching is real. Some people will intentionally try to rile you up or pick you off when you are away from the body. Others tie their teaching to their own glory and financial gain. They may be proclaiming Christ, but their aim is bereft of truth. Are we serving Christ for status and a wealthy, easy life — or because He is enough? Phew… this episode steps into some uncomfortable truth territory. Are you always studying but never applying? What are the motivations of your heart? Are you living in truth, or wearing it like a mask? 

Learn French by Watching TV with Lingopie: https://learn.lingopie.com/dailyfrenchpodVoici ce qu'il faut retenir de l'incendie qui a frappé l'hôtel de luxe des Grandes Alpes à Courchevel.Here is what to remember about the fire that struck the luxury hotel Les Grandes Alpes in Courchevel.Alors, pour vous donner le contexte, un énorme incendie s'est déclaré mardi soir dans cet hôtel cinq étoiles en plein cœur de la célèbre station de ski.So, to give you some context, a massive fire broke out Tuesday evening in this five-star hotel in the heart of the famous ski resort.Ça a bien sûr déclenché une évacuation massive et une intervention super complexe pour les pompiers.This of course triggered a massive evacuation and a very complex intervention for the firefighters.Premièrement, parlons de la situation humaine et là franchement, c'est la bonne nouvelle de l'histoire.First, let's talk about the human situation and frankly, that is the good news of the story.Le feu a pris au niveau de la toiture.The fire started at the roof level.Très, très vite, les 83 personnes, que ce soit les clients ou le personnel, ont été évacuées.Very, very quickly, the 83 people, whether they were guests or staff, were evacuated.Le plus important, c'est que pour l'instant, il n'y a aucune victime. Ouf !The most important thing is that for now, there are no victims. Phew!Et tout le monde a pu être relogé. And everyone was able to be rehoused.Deuxièmement, l'intervention des secours. Secondly, the emergency services' intervention.Et là, c'est vraiment un casse-tête.And there, it is truly a headache.Imaginez : une soixantaine de pompiers sont mobilisés et ils font face à deux gros problèmes.Imagine: about sixty firefighters are mobilized and they are facing two major problems.D'un côté, la forme du toit est super complexe.On one hand, the shape of the roof is super complex.De l'autre, il y a une épaisse couche de neige dessus ce qui les empêche de faire des ouvertures pour évacuer la fumée.On the other, there is a thick layer of snow on top which prevents them from making openings to vent the smoke.Et finalement, le risque que ça se propage.And finally, the risk that it spreads.Parce que oui, pour l'instant, le feu est confiné au toit mais il y a un risque.Because yes, for now, the fire is confined to the roof, but there is a risk.Le lieutenant-colonel des pompiers de Savoie l'a confirmé : le risque que l'incendie s'étende aux bâtiments juste à côté et bien, il est bien réel.The lieutenant-colonel of the Savoie firefighters confirmed it: the risk of the fire spreading to the buildings right next door is, well, very real.Donc vous l'aurez compris, la situation reste très, très tendue.So as you will have understood, the situation remains very, very tense.En bref, c'est une véritable course contre la montre qui est engagée pour maîtriser cet incendie dangereux dans un lieu emblématique où la priorité absolue a été de mettre tout le monde en sécurité.In short, it is a true race against time that has been undertaken to control this dangerous fire in an iconic location where the absolute priority was to get everyone to safety. Hébergé par Acast. Visitez acast.com/privacy pour plus d'informations.