Podcasts about Torquay

Host of the Mind Movement Health podcast, Kate Boyle breaks down the top five mistakes that are ruining your feet and shows simple, daily steps to correct them. Learn why over-supportive shoes, poor toe and ankle mobility, mis-alignment, and waiting for pain can harm balance, gait, and overall movement. You'll get practical tips you can start today, from short barefoot practice and toe exercises to ankle mobility drills and alignment awarenes, plus how to prevent common issues like plantar fasciitis and bunions. Want to go deeper? Kate shares details about her Foot Fix workshop to restore strength, mobility and resilient, pain-free feet.   If you're struggling with foot, knee or hip pain, read this...  Most people don't realise it, but the root of your pain might not be where you feel it.

It's The Swinging Christies as you've never heard (or seen) it before - with a live audience! Join Mark and Gray at the 2025 International Agatha Christie Festival in Torquay, Devon, for this special recorded and filmed episode all about the  way Agatha Christie's books were packaged for a whole new Swinging era! Expect laughs, mishaps, ribbing, and even the occasional fact.With heartfelt thanks to everyone at the festival for making this happen, from the volunteers to the organisers to the bookshop, and a special thanks to our brilliant director and editor for this episode, John Tomkins of Emberlense Productions.You can find us on Instagram ⁠@Christie_Time⁠. We are also on Bluesky at ⁠christietime.bsky.social⁠. Our YouTube account is @TheSwingingChristies. Please subscribe to the podcast so you're notified every time an episode drops!Please also consider giving us a star rating and/or reviewing us on your podcatcher of choice.Our website is ⁠ChristieTime.com⁠.The Swinging Christies is a Christie Time project by Mark Aldridge and Gray Robert Brown.Next episode: we're going apple bobbing… It's the Hallowe'en special!00:00:00 - Opening titles00:04:15 - Colour00:17:50 - Shape00:26:54 - Pattern00:31:18 - Headline00:34:21 - Femme00:39:10 - Psychedelia00:45:48 - Wrap up, next episode00:48:48 - Closing titlesSolutions revealed - Cat among the Pigeons

A very action packed and actor heavy editon of Devoncast this week. Gavin and Stacey and Eastenders star Larry Lamb was in Devon recently for the Budleigh Salterton Literary Festival. He caught up with us to talk about his new book ‘All Wrapped Up', reflected on 50 years in the acting industry, what it's like to be in the spotlight and gave us a glimpse behind the scenes of one of Britain's most famous shows! The Premiership rugby season is returning and many fans are counting down the first match at Sandy Park.   Hundreds of Exeter Chiefs fans are taking part in a 10k charity walk ahead of their first home match against Newcastle Red Bulls, in aid of the Exeter chiefs foundation- the chief executive of the club Keiron Northcott joins us. And we are on countdown to Panto season here in Devon. Emma Barton from Eastenders is urging the crowd to boo her at the Princess Theatre in Torquay- find out why. Josh Tate presents this episode.

Join Matthew and Paul rounding up recent games against Ebbsfleet and Brixham, before looking far ahead to our next fixture against Salisbury.

Merlin Daleman (b.1977) is a British photographer who has spent most of his adult life living in the Netherlands. He attended South Devon College, Torquay, the University of Central England (now Birmingham City University) in the UK, and graduated from The Royal College of Art in The Hague, the Netherlands. He works as a freelance documentary photographer for leading Dutch publications, including NRC Handelsblad, Dagblad Trouw, Financieel Dagblad, and De Groene Amsterdammer. He is the recipient of awards including the Silver Camera awards for Documentary Photography in the Netherlands in 2008 and 2010 and had received grants from the EU Journalism Foundation Grant and the Robert Bosch Foundation Fellowship. His debut photobook, Mutiny, published by GOST Books in August 2025, builds on his long-term projects, such as the new black lung epidemic in Kentucky, USA and exploring the lives of families separated by labour migration in Ukraine.In episode 265 Merlin discusses, among other things:How the Mutiny project came aboutHow he funded it and set about shooting itSome of the stories behind images in the bookBlack lung story in AppalachiaHow a major motorycle accident helped his photographyWebsite | Instagram Become a A Small Voice podcast member here to access exclusive additional subscriber-only content and the full archive of 200+ previous episodes for £5 per month.Subscribe to my weekly newsletter here for everything A Small Voice related and much more besides.Follow me on Instagram here.Build Yourself a Squarespace Website video course here.

In this episode of the Mind Movement Health podcast, Kate Boyle talks with Terry Tateossian about practical, empowering strategies for women in midlife. They cover perimenopause symptoms, the importance of sleep, nutrition and prioritizing protein, and how resistance training and progressive overload protect muscle and bone. They also discuss stress reduction, breathwork and lymphatic health, rethinking alcohol, and the power of community and coaching to create sustainable habits and confidence through midlife and beyond.   Connect with Terry Tateossian: Terry's passion for fitness and new-found love of helping mid-life women regain their health and vitality has compelled her to start a new career path in health coaching as the founder of THOR. THOR is an exclusively curated experiential brand focusing on fitness, wellness and whole body health. They blend in-person retreats, a wellness community for women over 40, ongoing 1:1 fitness and nutrition coaching & support and world-class wellness & longevity products to empower women to take back their health. Her life's calling is to awaken the power that lives in all of us by showcasing what is possible and truly allowing individuals to experience how good it can get for THEM.   Website: https://www.thehouseofrose.com/about-us/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/how.good.can.it.get/   If you're struggling with foot, knee or hip pain, read this...  Most people don't realise it, but the root of your pain might not be where you feel it.

Rob, Dickie and Joe look back on another week in the National League as Carlisle's main man strikes again to get them three points at Altrincham, we hear from him and manager Mark Hughes, (Thanks to BBC Cumbria for the audio) and Altrincham's Kyle Reddin. Plus Christian James explains how Boreham Wood beat Boston United., Eastleigh have a vacancy to fill, why it looked like Postman Pat had delivered for Chester. Joe catches up post match with Torquay manager Paul Wotton after his side's come from behind win. Like, leave a review and subscribe via all good podcasting platforms Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

A busy edition of Devoncast this week. Paul Vice who is known as 'the commando who refused to die' joined Josh in the studio. He opened up about when he was blown up in Afghanistan and declared dead twice, his recovery and why he is walking over 200 miles for Force Cancer Charity... followed by a bungee jump too! We hear from the owner of a unique Torquay business who says a headline-grabbing new development could mean it is game over for him. And a Devon MP has called a summit meeting with a government minister on behalf of the county's zoos and aquariums, saying some of them will struggle to get through the winter. Josh Tate presents this edition.

Keeper Of The Greens segment of The Golfing Greenkeeper Podcast is brought to you by John Deere Golf. When you work where others play, you need a partner you can trust to keep your course in perfect condition. Find your nearest ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠J⁠ohn Deere dealer⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠deere.com.au⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Keegan Powell is Superintendent of The Sands Torquay, a unique golf course set alongside some of Victoria's most beautiful coastline. Keegan's career thus far has been a list of different experiences and study. From growing up in Melbourne and beginning his working career as an armature apprentice, which didn't take his fancy, to starting his greenkeeping career proper at Melbourne's Northern Golf Club in..........well, Melbourne's north!It wasn't long before Keegan had his sights set overseas which brought his attention to the Ohio State Program which many young Australians and New Zealanders have taken part in. Working at a couple of the USA's most exclusive private clubs saw Keegan gain much experience, along with a close encounter with Michael Jordan! From here Keegan travelled further to the UK working at the one and only Sunningdale Golf Club then a stint in Dubai, before heading back to Australia to see where he would work next.It wasn't too long before Keegan landed the job as Assistant Superintendent at The Sand Torquay where in time he would eventually take on the role as Superintendent.Join me for a new 12 month term of Keeper of the Greens in partnership with John Deere Golf, including a revamped Steve's Super Seven questions, as we head to the beginning of Victoria's Great Ocean Road for some fun stories and an interesting insight into another great golf course!You hit 'em clean and we'll keep 'em green!⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠The Golfing Greenkeeper - Instagram⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠The Golfing Greenkeeper - Facebook⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠The Golfing Greenkeeper TV - YouTube⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Send me an email to - thegolfinggreenkeeper@gmail.comPeople and places mentioned in this podcast:The Sands TorquayThe Great Ocean Road - WikiGoonawarra Golf ClubNorthern Golf ClubOhio State ProgramEP.135 Steve's Random Special Guest - Mike O'KeeffePlainfield Country ClubIsleworth Golf ClubSunningdale Golf ClubAl Badia Golf ClubRiversdale Golf ClubVictorian Golf Course Superintendents Association (VGCSA)Breamlea Flora and Fauna Reserve

Welcome to the Mind Movement Health podcast! Kate Boyle interviews Nancy Griffin about the powerful link between health and wealth for women, practical steps to build financial security, and the role of insurance, trusted advisors, and philanthropy. The episode covers how to start planning at any age, teach the next generation, and make confident decisions to protect and grow your net worth while enhancing self-worth.   Connect with Nancy Griffin: Nancy is a connector and influencer. She attributes her success to personal courage, determination, and joy, when focusing on women's health and wellness, hence creating Women, Worth & Wellness®. Nancy 
enjoys every opportunity to inspire and inform women about their personal health and wealth, net worth and self-worth, philanthropy and legacy—so that women feel fabulous, generous, joyful, confident, and on top of their game every day. Nancy Griffin established Women, Worth & Wellness in 1994 as a Private Client Wealth Advisor for her female clients and their families. Nancy continues to promote and inspire Daring & Caring Leaders, encouraging them to step up and lead in the world, following in the footsteps from many other powerful Women Leaders in the past. Nancy's overall purpose is to connect and influence for positive impact every chance she gets. “My Mom was a trailblazer as a women business owner and felt that women should have their own money and wealth–including their own ideas about what to invest in. She was my inspiration for focusing on health, along with wealth, as she would often say “if you don't have your health, you don't have anything. " This has always been my focus as I worked with my clients, especially women, as women often have a disproportionate responsibility to family's health and wellness. An equal focus on health and wealth is inseparable." See more about Nancy's Journey- https://womenworthwellness.com/7000-jars-of-jam/   Website: https://womenworthwellness.com/ LinkedIn Personal: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nancygriffincfpepc/ LinkedIn Company: https://www.linkedin.com/company/womenworthandwellness/ Facebook Personal: https://www.facebook.com/nancy.griffin.1293 Facebook Company: https://www.facebook.com/womenworthandwellness Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/womenworthandwellness/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCODT3IoUJsg0HEDx1zMQRHA X: https://x.com/@womenworthandwePast    Ready to go on retreat?   Restore and Align Pilates Retreat March 20–22, 2026 | Torquay, Victoria Join us for a truly rejuvenating weekend by the sea at the Restore and Align Pilates Retreat—a carefully curated experience designed to help you realign, restore, and reconnect with yourself.   Set in the beautiful coastal town of Torquay, Victoria this local retreat combines energising and restorative Pilates sessions, nourishing food, gentle beach walks, and soulful connection. Whether you're looking to deepen your Pilates practice, take time to rest, or simply recharge in nature, this three-day retreat offers the perfect space to pause and reset—inside and out.   You'll enjoy: Daily Pilates to support strength, flexibility, and alignment Wholesome, seasonal meals to nourish and energise Guided beach walks and mindful moments by the ocean A welcoming, supportive community of like-minded souls   And more…   Come home feeling grounded, refreshed, and reconnected. Your body will thank you and so will your soul. Limited places available so book your spot now and begin your journey to restore and align. To check it out and book your place, click here.     Connect with Kate: Website: MindMovementHealth.com.au Facebook: facebook.com/MindMovementHealth Instagram: instagram.com/MindMovementHealth Haven't subscribed to the podcast yet? Be sure to subscribe and leave us a review at: Apple Podcasts  

Join Kirsty, Paul, Simon and debutant Josh for a look backat Torquay's FA Cup exit at the hands of AFC Totton and a preview of this Saturday's home game against Ebbsfleet United. There is more positive news from the women's team, who secured their first league win of the season. And we finish the episode with an FA Cup-themed game.

Welcome back to the Mind Movement Health podcast! In this episode Kate explains why sugar cravings happen, from blood sugar spikes and hormonal changes to gut bacteria and stress as well as clear, actionable strategies to manage them. Learn practical tips like balancing meals with protein, fiber and healthy fats, staying hydrated, prioritizing sleep, easing stress with movement and breathing, and making small consistent changes to retrain cravings.   Restore and Align Pilates Retreat March 20–22, 2026 | Torquay, Victoria   Ready to go on retreat? Join us for a truly rejuvenating weekend by the sea at the Restore and Align Pilates Retreat—a carefully curated experience designed to help you realign, restore, and reconnect with yourself.   Set in the beautiful coastal town of Torquay, Victoria this local retreat combines energising and restorative Pilates sessions, nourishing food, gentle beach walks, and soulful connection. Whether you're looking to deepen your Pilates practice, take time to rest, or simply recharge in nature, this three-day retreat offers the perfect space to pause and reset—inside and out.   You'll enjoy: Daily Pilates to support strength, flexibility, and alignment Wholesome, seasonal meals to nourish and energise Guided beach walks and mindful moments by the ocean A welcoming, supportive community of like-minded souls   And more…   Come home feeling grounded, refreshed, and reconnected. Your body will thank you and so will your soul. Limited places available so book your spot now and begin your journey to restore and align. To check it out and book your place, click here.   Connect with Kate: Website: MindMovementHealth.com.au Facebook: facebook.com/MindMovementHealth Instagram: instagram.com/MindMovementHealth Haven't subscribed to the podcast yet? Be sure to subscribe and leave us a review at: Apple Podcasts  

Chris, Paul and Simon look back at Torquay's 4-2 win over Slough Town before considering The Gulls' prospects in their FA Cup tie away to AFC Totton. There's also an update from Clive on Torquay United Women's league opener.

Russell chatted about life over many years in Barwon Heads and the controversial move to Torquay.

In this special bonus episode, Grace from the excellent REDRUM Podcast joins me as we discuss a story from Torquay in the south-west of England.Rosemary Windle and Maurece Smith, both 71, both had business interests in the Middle East and when they saw a local business operating with contacts in Lebanon they made contact with the owner. A decision which would ultimately cost them their lives...Join me for my usual weekly episode on Tuesday.1, Listen to other episodes of the REDRUM podcast, by following these links:Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/redrum-true-crime/id1515905584 Apple PodcastsSpotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1FCoeRZQeDkEJ5i8bGuFpy2, To find out more about my UK True Crime Podcast, check out my website below:https://uktruecrime.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Join Matty, Matt, and Chris, rounding up the Hemel Hempstead and Hampton and Richmond games, before looking ahead to Slough on Saturday.

In this week's episode of the Mind Movement Health podcast, Host Kate Boyle interviews Riana Malina, a reinvention strategist, about quantum goal setting and her Clear to Create method. They discuss clearing subconscious patterns without retraumatizing, reverse-engineering goals, raising vibration, and practical strategies to embody and achieve lasting change.   Connect with Riana Malina:   Riana Malia is a Speaker, Author, and Reinvention Strategist—guiding high-achieving women to clear emotional patterns, break subconscious cycles, and lead from deep alignment in life, love, and legacy. She is the creator of the Clear to Create™ Method and the Quantum Pattern Protocol™, proven frameworks that have helped hundreds of women reclaim their voice, rewire their beliefs, and design lives—and love—that are truly extraordinary. Her work is grounded in neuroscience, quantum healing, and emotional re-patterning, helping women step out of survival mode and into full-spectrum self-expression. Whether through her immersive VIP intensives, her Clear to Create™ Mastery Experience, or her sold-out Brilliance Brunch connection events, Riana empowers women to become magnetic to what they once thought was impossible—including worthy, soul-aligned love. Her work has been featured on The Mamahood blog, Brilliant Magazine: Women of Influence, and podcasts like InspiHER'd, Me Time with Maggie Lawson, and From Betrayal To Breakthrough. She was also recognized as one of the “Top 30 Empowering Women Entrepreneurs to Look Out for in 2025” by NY Weekly Magazine. When she's not on stage or in session with her private clients, you'll find her soaking up ocean air, loving life with her husband Pete and daughter Madi, or setting the table for soulful conversations that spark change. Website: https://www.rianamalia.com/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/RianaMalia/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/rianamalia/ Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rianamalia/ Freebie: https://www.rianamalia.com/gifts/ Restore and Align Pilates Retreat March 20–22, 2026 | Torquay, Victoria   Ready to go on retreat?   Join us for a truly rejuvenating weekend by the sea at the Restore and Align Pilates Retreat—a carefully curated experience designed to help you realign, restore, and reconnect with yourself.   Set in the beautiful coastal town of Torquay, Victoria this local retreat combines energising and restorative Pilates sessions, nourishing food, gentle beach walks, and soulful connection. Whether you're looking to deepen your Pilates practice, take time to rest, or simply recharge in nature, this three-day retreat offers the perfect space to pause and reset—inside and out.   You'll enjoy: Daily Pilates to support strength, flexibility, and alignment Wholesome, seasonal meals to nourish and energise Guided beach walks and mindful moments by the ocean A welcoming, supportive community of like-minded souls   And more…   Come home feeling grounded, refreshed, and reconnected. Your body will thank you and so will your soul.   Limited places available so book your spot now and begin your journey to restore and align.   To check it out and book your place, click here.   Connect with Kate: Website: MindMovementHealth.com.au Facebook: facebook.com/MindMovementHealth Instagram: instagram.com/MindMovementHealth Haven't subscribed to the podcast yet? Be sure to subscribe and leave us a review at: Apple Podcasts

In this episode, personal trainer and mother of three Gen takes us through her complete motherhood journey from Richmond to the Victorian coast. Her first pregnancy was unplanned but led to a powerful physiological birth at the Royal Women's Hospital. After moving through various challenges including COVID lockdowns, job redundancy, and relocating interstate, Gen welcomed her second daughter in a beautiful water birth. Her third pregnancy at 44 brought unexpected challenges with ageist comments from healthcare providers, but culminated in an incredible one-hour home birth in the shower. Gen's story beautifully illustrates how birth experiences can evolve and how trusting your body's wisdom leads to empowering outcomes. Sponsor: Pregnancy is beautiful, but it can come with its share of discomfort. That’s why Little Company in Collingwood — and their sister spa, About Time in Torquay — offer dedicated pregnancy-safe treatments that support you through every stage — from the very beginning right up until the final days. Their Pregnancy Ritual Facial is a blissful, tailored experience designed to calm hormonal skin changes and restore radiance, using products that you can trust for you and your baby’s wellbeing. Their Pregnancy Massage — using a pregnancy pillow, adjustable beds, and experienced therapists who adapt the massage to your body’s needs on the day. Using Pure Mama’s pregnancy-safe product range, this restorative massage is designed to ease muscular tension, support circulation, and help you feel at home in your changing body. Whether you’re in Melbourne or down the coast, Little Company and About Time are here to nurture you — and your baby — through it all. You can enjoy 15% off all pregnancy treatments for the year of 2025. Put ‘ABSxLTCO’ in appointment notes and the discount will be applied when payment is taken post treatment. Book your moment of care at littlecompany.com.au or atthebathhouse.com.auSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Join Clive, Paul and Joe rounding up the Horsham and Dover fixtures before looking ahead to Hemel Hempstead

Welcome back to the Mind Movement Health Podcast! This episode breaks down six practical, foundational steps to improve gut health. Listeners get clear, actionable tips to start small, layer changes over time, and support long-term digestion, immunity, mood and overall vitality.   Want to improve your gut health? Then don't miss my Lean 14 Program. The LEAN 14 program is a simple, results-driven plan designed to kickstart fat loss, boost energy, and support your gut health so you feel leaner, lighter, and more confident from the inside out. In just 14 days, you'll notice real changes, improve digestion, and build the momentum to keep progressing long after the program ends. Complete with 2 weeks worth of recipes, meal plans, Pilates workouts and trainings, it's the complete package to remove the overwhelm of getting your gut health back on track. Check it out HERE    Ready to go on retreat? Join us for a truly rejuvenating weekend by the sea at the Restore and Align Pilates Retreat—a carefully curated experience designed to help you realign, restore, and reconnect with yourself. Restore and Align Pilates Retreat March 20–22, 2026 | Torquay, Victoria Set in the beautiful coastal town of Torquay, Victoria this local retreat combines energising and restorative Pilates sessions, nourishing food, gentle beach walks, and soulful connection. Whether you're looking to deepen your Pilates practice, take time to rest, or simply recharge in nature, this three-day retreat offers the perfect space to pause and reset—inside and out.   You'll enjoy: Daily Pilates to support strength, flexibility, and alignment Wholesome, seasonal meals to nourish and energise Guided beach walks and mindful moments by the ocean A welcoming, supportive community of like-minded souls   And more…   Come home feeling grounded, refreshed, and reconnected. Your body will thank you and so will your soul. Limited places available so book your spot now and begin your journey to restore and align. To check it out and book your place, click here.   Connect with Kate: Website: MindMovementHealth.com.au Facebook: facebook.com/MindMovementHealth Instagram: instagram.com/MindMovementHealth Haven't subscribed to the podcast yet? Be sure to subscribe and leave us a review at: Apple Podcasts

Join Clive, Kirsty and Joe rounding up Maidstone and Totton, before looking ahead to the bank holiday fixtures.

Welcome back to another episode of the Mind Movement Health podcast. In this episode, Kate explains peripheral edema (fluid retention in the feet, ankles and lower legs), what causes it, and how a sluggish lymphatic system contributes to swelling, heaviness and discomfort. Kate shares practical solutions that will help reduce and manage fluid retention including gentle movement, Pilates and breath work, dry brushing, leg elevation, and nutrition tips (potassium, magnesium, vitamin B6 and dandelion). She also discusses some simple daily habits to improve circulation, reduce swelling and support lymphatic drainage.   Want to work on your feet and lower leg strength? Check out my Foot Fix Workshop HERE. I'll help you build awareness, mobility and strength in this 1.5hr workshop. Our feet are our foundations. Fix them and we improve our posture, balance and many of the injuries and pain in the knees, hips and lower back.   Ready to go on retreat? Join us for a truly rejuvenating weekend by the sea at the Restore and Align Pilates Retreat—a carefully curated experience designed to help you realign, restore, and reconnect with yourself. Restore and Align Pilates Retreat March 20–22, 2026 | Torquay, Victoria Set in the beautiful coastal town of Torquay, Victoria this local retreat combines energising and restorative Pilates sessions, nourishing food, gentle beach walks, and soulful connection. Whether you're looking to deepen your Pilates practice, take time to rest, or simply recharge in nature, this three-day retreat offers the perfect space to pause and reset—inside and out.   You'll enjoy: Daily Pilates to support strength, flexibility, and alignment Wholesome, seasonal meals to nourish and energise Guided beach walks and mindful moments by the ocean A welcoming, supportive community of like-minded souls   And more…   Come home feeling grounded, refreshed, and reconnected. Your body will thank you and so will your soul. Limited places available so book your spot now and begin your journey to restore and align. To check it out and book your place, click here.   Connect with Kate: Website: MindMovementHealth.com.au Facebook: facebook.com/MindMovementHealth Instagram: instagram.com/MindMovementHealth Haven't subscribed to the podcast yet? Be sure to subscribe and leave us a review at: Apple Podcasts

In the early 2000s, the quiet seaside town of Torquay in Devon held a dark secret. One that would remain hidden for years before finally coming to light in the most harrowing of circumstances.Saraya Broadhurst was a woman marked by hardship, but also by resilience. Behind closed doors, she did her best to overcome her mental health struggles while still trying to find stability and connection in her life. When she suddenly disappeared, there was no public appeal or manhunt - only silence.What unfolded next is a story that never made national headlines, but one that deserves to be heard. As questions finally began to surface, authorities would uncover a shocking truth buried in plain sight. This quickly became one of the most unsettling cases Devon has ever seen.Join my Patreon community at patreon.com/britishmurders for exclusive perks, including early access to ad-free episodes, exclusive episodes and content, exciting giveaways, and welcome goodies! It's quick to sign up and you'll save 20% if you choose an annual membership. NOTE: Perks are only available to members of my 'Armchair Detectives' and 'Inner Circle' tiers.Follow me on social media:Facebook | British Murders with Stuart BluesInstagram | @britishmurdersJoin the private Facebook group:British Murders Podcast - Discussion GroupVisit my website:britishmurders.comIntro music:⁣David John Brady - 'Throw Down the Gauntlet'⁣davidjohnbrady.comDisclaimer:The case discussed in this podcast episode is real and represents the worst day in many people's lives. I aim to cover such stories with a victim-focused approach, using information from publicly available sources. While I strive for accuracy, some details may vary depending on the sources used. You can find the sources for each episode on my website. Due to the nature of the content, listener discretion is advised. Thank you for your understanding and support. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Rob, Joe and Dickie look back at the first weekend of National League action. Braintree top the pile after week one to the surprise of most, Robbie Savage's first game at Forest Green ends in a draw, Aldershot lose a five goal thriller. In the North the newly promoted side start well and in the South it's all about the favourites, who blinked first? Despite Enfield losing at Torquay, Joe catches up with Gavin McPherson and Rob speaks with Radio Robins's Tom Jolley Like and leave a review Produced by Leo Audio Productions Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Join Chris, Kirsty, Paul and Simon as they discuss Torquay's opening-day victory over Enfield Town and look ahead to the games against Maidstone and Totton.

Join Matt, Matthew, Chris, Clive, Joe, and new recruit Paul giving their preseason round up, hopes for the season to come and wild predictions.

Join host Kate Boyle on this special episode of the Mind Movement Health Podcast as she shares her transformative experience hosting a Pilates retreat in the picturesque island of Koh Samui, Thailand. Listen in to discover how the serene paradise offered more than just stunning views and leisure by the pool, providing a space for rejuvenation and meaningful connections. Explore the local adventures like sunrise paddle boarding and Thai cooking classes that made this retreat unique. Kate discusses the importance of balance, allowing time to both indulge in local culture and unwind completely. With personal reflections and guest stories, understand why every woman deserves the chance to gift herself with such a restorative escape. Whether you're contemplating your first retreat or a seasoned wellness traveler, gain insights into how these experiences can recalibrate your body and mind, offering much-needed breaks from the hustle of daily life. Tune in and be inspired to take that leap of faith toward self-care and healing through retreats.   Restore and Align Pilates Retreat March 20–22, 2026 | Torquay, Victoria   Ready to go on retreat?   Join us for a truly rejuvenating weekend by the sea at the Restore and Align Pilates Retreat—a carefully curated experience designed to help you realign, restore, and reconnect with yourself.   Set in the beautiful coastal town of Torquay, Victoria this local retreat combines energising and restorative Pilates sessions, nourishing food, gentle beach walks, and soulful connection. Whether you're looking to deepen your Pilates practice, take time to rest, or simply recharge in nature, this three-day retreat offers the perfect space to pause and reset—inside and out.   You'll enjoy: Daily Pilates to support strength, flexibility, and alignment Wholesome, seasonal meals to nourish and energise Guided beach walks and mindful moments by the ocean A welcoming, supportive community of like-minded souls   And more…   Come home feeling grounded, refreshed, and reconnected. Your body will thank you and so will your soul.   With 4 spots already gone and limited places available, be sure to book your spot now and begin your journey to restore and align.   To check it out and book your place, click here.   Connect with Kate: Website: MindMovementHealth.com.au Facebook: facebook.com/MindMovementHealth Instagram: instagram.com/MindMovementHealth Haven't subscribed to the podcast yet? Be sure to subscribe and leave us a review at: Apple Podcasts

Gray and Mark head to beautiful Belfast to chat to novelist and Agatha Christie fan Jan Carson. Jan has been tackling the Troubles in her work for some time, and we want to discuss with her Christie's Troubles references in Passenger to Frankfurt, as well as Irish characters and references in other Swinging books - all the way from The Pale Horse to By the Pricking of My Thumbs!A handful of tickets are still available⁠ for our first ever live episode recording in Torquay this September as part of the International Agatha Christie Festival 2025!You can find us on Instagram ⁠@Christie_Time⁠. We are also on Bluesky at ⁠christietime.bsky.social⁠. Our YouTube account is @TheSwigingChristies. Please subscribe to the podcast so you're notified every time an episode drops!Please also consider giving us a star rating and/or reviewing us on your podcatcher of choice.Our website is ⁠ChristieTime.com⁠.The Swinging Christies is a Christie Time project by Mark Aldridge and Gray Robert Brown.Next episode: we're going global… again…!00:00:00 - Opening titles00:00:47 - Introductory chat in Belfast00:02;46 - Interview with Jan Carson and discussion of Ireland in the Swinging Christies00:37;58 - The Troubles00:52:46 - Next episode, how to get in touch00:54:03 - Closing titles00:54:31 - CodaSolutions revealed! - The Pale Horse, At Bertram's Hotel, Endless Night, Passenger to FrankfurtTW: Racist and xenophobic language quoted

Wiederholung vom 23. Juni 2024 Wer "Südengland" hört, denkt schnell erstmal an das bei deutschen Touristen so beliebte Cornwall. Doch wer aus London Richtung Süden fährt, der sollte auch in South Devon anhalten und sich von den sanften grünen Hügeln und beeindruckenden Stränden hier begeistern lassen. Zwischen den Küstenorten Torquay, Paignton und Brixham liegt eine Bucht mit dem passenden Namen "English Riviera". Hier lässt sich so einiges erleben. Zwar sind die drei kleinen Städtchen mittlerweile schon etwas in die Jahre gekommen, aber auch heute noch kann man hier bei sehr mildem Klima hervorragend urlauben. Sei es mit einem traditionellen "Fish & Chips"-Gericht an der Seepromenade von Torquay oder bei langen Küstenwanderungen entlang des South West Coast Path. Vor Jahrzehnten urlaubten hier in Torquay vor allem die Reichen und Schönen aus London - und mitten unter ihnen war auch eine junge Frau, die später zu einer der bekanntesten Krimi-Autorinnen der Welt werden sollte: Agatha Christie. Sie wurde hier geboren und ließ sich an der "English Riviera" auch für Tatorte, Mörder und Mordmethoden inspirieren. Der Reichtum der Landbesitzer wiederum ist heutzutage einigen Aktivisten der "Right to Roam"-Kampagne ein Dorn im Auge: Sie fordern mehr Zugang zur Natur und Wildnis - die in England oft in Privatbesitz ist. Wir begeben uns auf die Spuren von Agatha Christie, lassen uns zeigen, wie man den Fisch für das Nationalgericht "Fish & Chips" so knusprig bekommt - und wandern mit den "Right to Roam"-Aktivisten durch den malerischen Nationalpark Dartmoor. Für uns war Konstanze Nastarowitz in South Devon unterwegs.

Episode #24 (English). Guest: Wilco Prins, co-founder T&C Surf Designs Europe, former Rip Curl Europe CEO and EuroSIMA President Wilco Prins is a pure product of Dutch youth who, much like all the other kids in Europe at that time, got into action sports in the 80's and 90's through windsurfing, skateboarding and eventually surfing. One fine day of 1992, his passion drove him all the way to French beaches, where he discovered our waves and the lifestyle he'd read about in surfing magazines. After starting out at Rip Curl as an intern (waxing boards for Patrick Beven for a photo shoot), he quickly climbed the corporate ladder: first as Footwear Product Manager for Europe, then Head of the « wetsuits and footwear » division, then « Core Division » Manager (products and sales) and in 2013, he became the company's CEO. At the head of one of the leading companies in the industry, the Dutchman also took over for Fred Basse as EuroSIMA President, becoming, for one term, the spokesperson for the entire European action sports industry. After the Torquay-born brand let him go in 2019, Wilco bounced right back, giving a « re-birth » in Europe to another iconic brand : T&C. This new adventure, both so similar and so different from the last one, was once again driven by the same passion for boardsports and a genuine knack for business. Relaunched post-Covid, the brand with a strong Hawaiian heritage has found itself a new place in retail as well as in the hearts of consumers. This is thanks to a strategy boosted among other things, by unique collaborations, like recently with Fursac. Wilco sat down with us for a chat to talk about his many years at Rip Curl and his new experience with T&C. Along the way, he shares his analysis of the industry, markets and customer expectations and discusses the challenges that we'll all have to face in upcoming years. A fascinating episode with a key player in our industry. Recorded in the MACS premises in St Vincent de Tyrosse on April 3rd 2025. Editorial production: EuroSIMA Animation: Romain Ferrand / Rémi Chaussemiche Technical production: Fred de Bailliencourt Photo: Stéphane Robin /// Français (Episode en anglais) Wilco Prins est un pur produit de la jeunesse hollandaise qui s'est prise, comme tous ses voisins européens, la vague des action sports dans les années 80 et 90 à travers le windsurf, le skate puis le surf. Une passion qui conduisit un beau jour de 1992 l'intéressé jusque sur les plages françaises pour y découvrir nos vagues et le lifestyle vanté par les magazines de surf. Rentré chez Rip Curl Europe en 1997 en tant que stagiaire (« en waxant les planches de Patrick Beven pour un shooting photo ») il y gravira les échelons à une vitesse fulgurante : chef de Produit chaussure Europe, chef de la division « combinaisons et chaussures » puis responsable de la « Core Division »(produits et vente). Il deviendra finalement PDG de l'entreprise en 2013. A la tête d'une des plus importantes entreprises de l'industrie, le Hollandais succèdera au passage à Fred Basse à la présidence de l'EuroSIMA, se faisant également - le temps d'un mandat - le représentant et le porte-parole de la filière. Remercié par la marque de Torquay en 2019, il rebondira rapidement en faisant renaître sur le Vieux-Continent une autre marque iconique : Town & Country. Une nouvelle aventure, à la fois similaire et très différente de la précédente, mais guidée par cette même passion pour l'univers de la glisse et une appétence forte pour le business. Au micro d'Inside EuroSIMA, Wilco revient en détail sur ses longues années chez Rip Curl puis chez T&C, tout en partageant son analyse de l'évolution de l'industrie, du marché, des attentes des consommateurs, mais aussi des challenges à relever dans les prochaines années. Un nouvel épisode passionnant, avec l'un des acteurs phares de notre industrie européenne. Bonne écoute.

In this powerful episode, lawyer and mother-of-two Tessa shares her contrasting birth experiences in Darwin, Northern Territory. Her first birth with daughter Frankie was everything she'd hoped for - a quick, low-intervention delivery at a private hospital with excellent postnatal care. But when she fell pregnant with her second daughter Millie, everything changed. Healthscope announced without warning that they were closing the maternity ward at Darwin Private Hospital, leaving 61 women - including Tessa at 28 weeks pregnant - scrambling to find alternative care. Sponsor: Pregnancy is beautiful, but it can come with its share of discomfort. That’s why Little Company in Collingwood — and their sister spa, About Time in Torquay — offer dedicated pregnancy-safe treatments that support you through every stage — from the very beginning right up until the final days. Their Pregnancy Ritual Facial is a blissful, tailored experience designed to calm hormonal skin changes and restore radiance, using products that you can trust for you and your baby’s wellbeing. Their Pregnancy Massage — using a pregnancy pillow, adjustable beds, and experienced therapists who adapt the massage to your body’s needs on the day. Using Pure Mama’s pregnancy-safe product range, this restorative massage is designed to ease muscular tension, support circulation, and help you feel at home in your changing body. Whether you're in Melbourne or down the coast, Little Company and About Time are here to nurture you — and your baby — through it all. You can enjoy 15% off all pregnancy treatments for the year of 2025. Put ‘ABSxLTCO’ in appointment notes and the discount will be applied when payment is taken post treatment. Book your moment of care at littlecompany.com.au or atthebathhouse.com.auSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Two wickedly witty women writers, separated only by the Atlantic! This episode, Gray and Mark carry on their American adventures and discuss the similarities and differences between the works of Agatha Christie and Shirley Jackson. Specifically focussing on Shirley's Swinging era - The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle!A handful of tickets are still available⁠ for our first ever live episode recording in Torquay this September as part of the International Agatha Christie Festival 2025!You can find us on Instagram ⁠@Christie_Time⁠. We are also on Bluesky at ⁠christietime.bsky.social⁠. Our YouTube account is @TheSwigingChristies. Please subscribe to the podcast so you're notified every time an episode drops!Please also consider giving us a star rating and/or reviewing us on your podcatcher of choice.Our website is ⁠ChristieTime.com⁠.The Swinging Christies is a Christie Time project by Mark Aldridge and Gray Robert Brown.Next episode: we're heading to Belfast!00:00:00 - Opening titles00:00:40 - Introductory chat, recorded in Greenwich, New York00:05:40 - Agatha Christie and Shirley Jackson00:20:25 - Swinging Shirley work-by-work01:03:00 - Next episode, how to get in touch01:05:02 - Closing titles01:05:30 - CodaSolutions revealed! - Five Little Pigs, Third Girl

Great Ocean Road- என்று பலரும் அறிந்த நீண்ட பெரும் சாலை விக்டோரிய மாநிலத் தலைநகர் மெல்பர்னிலிருந்து 65 கிலோ மீட்டரில் உள்ள Torquay என்ற இடத்திலிருந்து தொடங்கி, 243 கி.மீ நீளம் கடந்து Allansford என்ற இடத்தில் நிறைவு பெறுகிறது. ஆஸ்திரேலியாவின் வரலாற்று சிறப்புமிக்க மிக முக்கிய சாலையாக பார்க்கப்படும் Great Ocean Road எப்படி உருவானது, அதன் பாதையில் என்னென்ன சுவையான அம்சங்கள் உள்ளன என்ற தகவல்களை தொகுத்தளிக்கிறார் உயிர்மெய்யார்.

Mrs Christie went to Washington, and Dr Aldridge and Mr Brown are following suit! This episode, we get the train to Washington DC to uncover the truth about how an American Christie fan would REALLY have experienced a Swinging Christie…A handful of tickets are still available⁠ for our first ever live episode recording in Torquay this September as part of the International Agatha Christie Festival 2025!You can find us on Instagram ⁠@Christie_Time⁠. We are also on Bluesky at ⁠christietime.bsky.social⁠.Please subscribe to us, and  rate and review us on your podcatcher of choice.Our website is ⁠ChristieTime.com⁠.The Swinging Christies is a Christie Time project by Mark Aldridge and Gray Robert Brown.Next episode: we look at Agatha Christie alongside a contemporary - Shirley Jackson!00:00:00 - Opening titles00:00:43 - Introductory chat00:01:44 - Agatha, Washington and America in the 1960s, down the Mall 00:09:41 - Discoveries in the Library of Congress00:43:37 - Wrap up, the National Museum of African American History and Culture00:47:24 - Next episode, how to get in touch00:49:09 - Closing titles00:49:36 - Coda

Mark and Gray take Manhattan in the first in this very special miniseries recorded in the USA. In New York, Gray and Mark discuss Agatha's 1960s connections to America, plus their discoveries in papers held at the Princeton University Archive.A handful of tickets are still available for our first ever live episode recording in Torquay this September as part of the International Agatha Christie Festival 2025!You can find us on Instagram @Christie_Time. We are also on Bluesky at christietime.bsky.social. Please subscribe to us, and  rate and review us on your podcatcher of choice.Our website is ChristieTime.com.The Swinging Christies is a Christie Time project by Mark Aldridge and Gray Robert Brown.Next episode: Part 2 of Swinging USA - we go to Washington DC!00:00:00 - Opening titles00:00:40 - Introductory chat at Heathrow airport00:03:57 - Agatha and America in the 1960s at Central Park00:32:38 - Discoveries in the Princeton Archive00:55:49 - Wrap up, Schubert Archive, and off to Washington DC!00:58:30 - How to get in touch00:59:41 - Closing titles01:00:12 - CodaSolutions revealed! - Cat Among the Pigeons, The Clocks, The Pale Horse, At Bertram's Hotel

David, Jon and Alfie welcome Charlie Baker back onto the pod with welcome arms. Noway are we going to snigger at Torquay's failure to get promoted. And if you'd like to support the pod and receive episodes early be part of a super little community then sign up to Patreon.com/davidearl thanks! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In this episode, I had the good fortune of speaking with Tina Tainui. Around here, she's best known as a yoga teacher and founder of OurSpace Yoga in Torquay… but no no no—Tina is so much more than that. She's a serious force of nature with a hell of a story to tell. Originally from New Zealand and raised in the school of hard knocks (seriously!), Tina's life took a sharp turn thanks to a chance encounter with a stranger—maybe even a guardian angel, depending on how you look at it. That moment gave her the courage to get out of her situation and go live, really live, and experience the world. And that's exactly what she did. She's been everywhere, man—Rubbing shoulders, cutting hair, and partying with some of the great artists and cultural trailblazers of our time. Without giving too much away… I hope you enjoy our chat. Thanks, Tina.

Patsy swears she spotted Ryan Gosling at Torquay over the break, can anyone confirm or deny?See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Billabong, Sun Bum, Stone and Wood Presents.... ATS LIVE in TORQUAY with RCJ, MASE and ETHAN HEEEEEEYEEEEEEWING!!!!!! Saddle up for one of the greatest big wave rip-ins as Ross Clarke-Jones and Mason Ho relive the past Hawaiian winter including wild yarns from the 2024 Eddie! With a special first time appearance by the great rail shaman himself Ethan Heeeeeeeeyeeeeeeewing! See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Someone's gotta clonk that thing around. In this episode, Stace recaps El Salvador with Holden TRNKA and then chats all things Torquay with former Top 5 surfer and current lord Morgan Cibilic.

Today on the Horses Mouth, I was joined by Dr Harley Mackenzie — a long-time Torquay local, leader in the energy sector, and a passionate advocate for reform. Dr Mackenzie has just announced he's running for the federal seat of Corangamite, representing the Legalise Cannabis Party. His campaign isn't just about changing laws — it's about health, personal freedom, and bringing some much-needed common sense to the national conversation on cannabis. As he puts it: “The war on drugs has failed. It's time for a smarter approach.” www.legalisecannabis.org.au I hope you enjoy our chat     

The multi-talented singer/songwriting duo from Torquay, UKMidnight 5-6 talk about their releases “When”, “Wishing I Was Gone”, “The Sea”,“Oooo!!” and more! The duo of Simon and Helen met online after the death ofboth of their partners with common music interests including John Martyn,Little Feat, etc., and formed the group in Christmas of  '16; Simon is the lead vocalist/guitaristborn in a military family in Singapore later joining the Navy but by land;Helen is the bass guitarist/vocalist from Southell, West London and worked as aDesign Engineer after leaving college; they have a loyal following on all majorplatforms plus share the stories behind the music! Check out the amazingMidnight 5-6 on your favorite platform today! #midnight56 #singersongwritingduo#torquay #UK #when #wishingiwasgone #thesea #oooo #simon #helen #johnmartyn#littlefeat #militaryfamily #navy #singapore #southell #westlondon#designengineer #spreaker #iheartradio #spotify #applemusic #youtube #anchorfm#bitchute #rumble #mikewagner #themikewagnershow #mikewagnermidnight56 #themikewagnershowmidnight56

The multi-talented singer/songwriting duo from Torquay, UKMidnight 5-6 talk about their releases “When”, “Wishing I Was Gone”, “The Sea”,“Oooo!!” and more! The duo of Simon and Helen met online after the death ofboth of their partners with common music interests including John Martyn,Little Feat, etc., and formed the group in Christmas of  '16; Simon is the lead vocalist/guitaristborn in a military family in Singapore later joining the Navy but by land;Helen is the bass guitarist/vocalist from Southell, West London and worked as aDesign Engineer after leaving college; they have a loyal following on all majorplatforms plus share the stories behind the music! Check out the amazingMidnight 5-6 on your favorite platform today! #midnight56 #singersongwritingduo#torquay #UK #when #wishingiwasgone #thesea #oooo #simon #helen #johnmartyn#littlefeat #militaryfamily #navy #singapore #southell #westlondon#designengineer #spreaker #iheartradio #spotify #applemusic #youtube #anchorfm#bitchute #rumble #mikewagner #themikewagnershow #mikewagnermidnight56 #themikewagnershowmidnight56

David, Jon and Alfie chat about David's night at Torquay UTD. Winds Jon up a treat. Then David chooses his favourite team in League 2. They look through Exeter's squad and compare them to the Ipswich squad which got out of League 1. Then David pretends to be a billionaire and buy Exeter City to see how Jon would react. And if you'd like to support the pod and receive episodes early and videos and be part of a super little community then sign up to Patreon.com/davidearl thanks! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In this conversation, Danni catch's up with Torquay local Suzie, who was the owner of the very well know Bird Rock Cafe in Jan Juc on the Surfcoast in Victoria. We talk about Suzie's journey to sobriety, exploring her experiences with addiction, the euphoria she initially felt, and the struggles she faced as her drinking escalated. Her drinking got so bad her family disowned her, when her drinking had escalated to 3 bottles of wine a day and eventually called out to a higher power for help and she never looked back. They delve into the importance of relationships, the impact of sobriety on family dynamics, and the daily battles with addiction. Susie shares her awakening moment and the transformative power of support and practices in recovery, emphasising that there is always hope for change and a better life. Suzie quit drinking at 62 and a great example of how it is never too late too change. For more resources such as coaching or to join the next HIQA challenge go towww.iquitalcohol.com.auFollow HIQA insta @howiquitalcohol Music for Podcast intro and outro written by Danni Carr performed by Mr CassidyIf you are struggling with physical dependancy on alcohol consider contacting a local AA meeting or a drug and alcohol therapist. Always consult a GP before stopping alcohol. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Iain looks at a local case sent in by listeners about a man who miraculously survives the gallows. Plus, the story of a smuggler who faked his own death to transport his loot.Murder They Wrote with Laura Whitmore and Iain Stirling is available twice a week on BBC Sounds. Subscribe now so you never miss an episode. Email us at lauraandiain@bbc.co.uk.

David, Jon and Alfie are joined by the brilliant Charlie Baker. Is Torquay UTD closer to David than Exeter City. And if you'd like to support the pod and receive episodes early and videos and be part of a super little community then sign up to Patreon.com/davidearl thanks! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

One last Gold sponsor slot is available for the AI Engineer Summit in NYC. Our last round of invites is going out soon - apply here - If you are building AI agents or AI eng teams, this will be the single highest-signal conference of the year for you!While the world melts down over DeepSeek, few are talking about the OTHER notable group of former hedge fund traders who pivoted into AI and built a remarkably profitable consumer AI business with a tiny team with incredibly cracked engineering team — Chai Research. In short order they have:* Started a Chat AI company well before Noam Shazeer started Character AI, and outlasted his departure.* Crossed 1m DAU in 2.5 years - William updates us on the pod that they've hit 1.4m DAU now, another +40% from a few months ago. Revenue crossed >$22m. * Launched the Chaiverse model crowdsourcing platform - taking 3-4 week A/B testing cycles down to 3-4 hours, and deploying >100 models a week.While they're not paying million dollar salaries, you can tell they're doing pretty well for an 11 person startup:The Chai Recipe: Building infra for rapid evalsRemember how the central thesis of LMarena (formerly LMsys) is that the only comprehensive way to evaluate LLMs is to let users try them out and pick winners?At the core of Chai is a mobile app that looks like Character AI, but is actually the largest LLM A/B testing arena in the world, specialized on retaining chat users for Chai's usecases (therapy, assistant, roleplay, etc). It's basically what LMArena would be if taken very, very seriously at one company (with $1m in prizes to boot):Chai publishes occasional research on how they think about this, including talks at their Palo Alto office:William expands upon this in today's podcast (34 mins in):Fundamentally, the way I would describe it is when you're building anything in life, you need to be able to evaluate it. And through evaluation, you can iterate, we can look at benchmarks, and we can say the issues with benchmarks and why they may not generalize as well as one would hope in the challenges of working with them. But something that works incredibly well is getting feedback from humans. And so we built this thing where anyone can submit a model to our developer backend, and it gets put in front of 5000 users, and the users can rate it. And we can then have a really accurate ranking of like which model, or users finding more engaging or more entertaining. And it gets, you know, it's at this point now, where every day we're able to, I mean, we evaluate between 20 and 50 models, LLMs, every single day, right. So even though we've got only got a team of, say, five AI researchers, they're able to iterate a huge quantity of LLMs, right. So our team ships, let's just say minimum 100 LLMs a week is what we're able to iterate through. Now, before that moment in time, we might iterate through three a week, we might, you know, there was a time when even doing like five a month was a challenge, right? By being able to change the feedback loops to the point where it's not, let's launch these three models, let's do an A-B test, let's assign, let's do different cohorts, let's wait 30 days to see what the day 30 retention is, which is the kind of the, if you're doing an app, that's like A-B testing 101 would be, do a 30-day retention test, assign different treatments to different cohorts and come back in 30 days. So that's insanely slow. That's just, it's too slow. And so we were able to get that 30-day feedback loop all the way down to something like three hours.In Crowdsourcing the leap to Ten Trillion-Parameter AGI, William describes Chai's routing as a recommender system, which makes a lot more sense to us than previous pitches for model routing startups:William is notably counter-consensus in a lot of his AI product principles:* No streaming: Chats appear all at once to allow rejection sampling* No voice: Chai actually beat Character AI to introducing voice - but removed it after finding that it was far from a killer feature.* Blending: “Something that we love to do at Chai is blending, which is, you know, it's the simplest way to think about it is you're going to end up, and you're going to pretty quickly see you've got one model that's really smart, one model that's really funny. How do you get the user an experience that is both smart and funny? Well, just 50% of the requests, you can serve them the smart model, 50% of the requests, you serve them the funny model.” (that's it!)But chief above all is the recommender system.We also referenced Exa CEO Will Bryk's concept of SuperKnowlege:Full Video versionOn YouTube. please like and subscribe!Timestamps* 00:00:04 Introductions and background of William Beauchamp* 00:01:19 Origin story of Chai AI* 00:04:40 Transition from finance to AI* 00:11:36 Initial product development and idea maze for Chai* 00:16:29 User psychology and engagement with AI companions* 00:20:00 Origin of the Chai name* 00:22:01 Comparison with Character AI and funding challenges* 00:25:59 Chai's growth and user numbers* 00:34:53 Key inflection points in Chai's growth* 00:42:10 Multi-modality in AI companions and focus on user-generated content* 00:46:49 Chaiverse developer platform and model evaluation* 00:51:58 Views on AGI and the nature of AI intelligence* 00:57:14 Evaluation methods and human feedback in AI development* 01:02:01 Content creation and user experience in Chai* 01:04:49 Chai Grant program and company culture* 01:07:20 Inference optimization and compute costs* 01:09:37 Rejection sampling and reward models in AI generation* 01:11:48 Closing thoughts and recruitmentTranscriptAlessio [00:00:04]: Hey everyone, welcome to the Latent Space podcast. This is Alessio, partner and CTO at Decibel, and today we're in the Chai AI office with my usual co-host, Swyx.swyx [00:00:14]: Hey, thanks for having us. It's rare that we get to get out of the office, so thanks for inviting us to your home. We're in the office of Chai with William Beauchamp. Yeah, that's right. You're founder of Chai AI, but previously, I think you're concurrently also running your fund?William [00:00:29]: Yep, so I was simultaneously running an algorithmic trading company, but I fortunately was able to kind of exit from that, I think just in Q3 last year. Yeah, congrats. Yeah, thanks.swyx [00:00:43]: So Chai has always been on my radar because, well, first of all, you do a lot of advertising, I guess, in the Bay Area, so it's working. Yep. And second of all, the reason I reached out to a mutual friend, Joyce, was because I'm just generally interested in the... ...consumer AI space, chat platforms in general. I think there's a lot of inference insights that we can get from that, as well as human psychology insights, kind of a weird blend of the two. And we also share a bit of a history as former finance people crossing over. I guess we can just kind of start it off with the origin story of Chai.William [00:01:19]: Why decide working on a consumer AI platform rather than B2B SaaS? So just quickly touching on the background in finance. Sure. Originally, I'm from... I'm from the UK, born in London. And I was fortunate enough to go study economics at Cambridge. And I graduated in 2012. And at that time, everyone in the UK and everyone on my course, HFT, quant trading was really the big thing. It was like the big wave that was happening. So there was a lot of opportunity in that space. And throughout college, I'd sort of played poker. So I'd, you know, I dabbled as a professional poker player. And I was able to accumulate this sort of, you know, say $100,000 through playing poker. And at the time, as my friends would go work at companies like ChangeStreet or Citadel, I kind of did the maths. And I just thought, well, maybe if I traded my own capital, I'd probably come out ahead. I'd make more money than just going to work at ChangeStreet.swyx [00:02:20]: With 100k base as capital?William [00:02:22]: Yes, yes. That's not a lot. Well, it depends what strategies you're doing. And, you know, there is an advantage. There's an advantage to being small, right? Because there are, if you have a 10... Strategies that don't work in size. Exactly, exactly. So if you have a fund of $10 million, if you find a little anomaly in the market that you might be able to make 100k a year from, that's a 1% return on your 10 million fund. If your fund is 100k, that's 100% return, right? So being small, in some sense, was an advantage. So started off, and the, taught myself Python, and machine learning was like the big thing as well. Machine learning had really, it was the first, you know, big time machine learning was being used for image recognition, neural networks come out, you get dropout. And, you know, so this, this was the big thing that's going on at the time. So I probably spent my first three years out of Cambridge, just building neural networks, building random forests to try and predict asset prices, right, and then trade that using my own money. And that went well. And, you know, if you if you start something, and it goes well, you You try and hire more people. And the first people that came to mind was the talented people I went to college with. And so I hired some friends. And that went well and hired some more. And eventually, I kind of ran out of friends to hire. And so that was when I formed the company. And from that point on, we had our ups and we had our downs. And that was a whole long story and journey in itself. But after doing that for about eight or nine years, on my 30th birthday, which was four years ago now, I kind of took a step back to just evaluate my life, right? This is what one does when one turns 30. You know, I just heard it. I hear you. And, you know, I looked at my 20s and I loved it. It was a really special time. I was really lucky and fortunate to have worked with this amazing team, been successful, had a lot of hard times. And through the hard times, learned wisdom and then a lot of success and, you know, was able to enjoy it. And so the company was making about five million pounds a year. And it was just me and a team of, say, 15, like, Oxford and Cambridge educated mathematicians and physicists. It was like the real dream that you'd have if you wanted to start a quant trading firm. It was like...swyx [00:04:40]: Your own, all your own money?William [00:04:41]: Yeah, exactly. It was all the team's own money. We had no customers complaining to us about issues. There's no investors, you know, saying, you know, they don't like the risk that we're taking. We could. We could really run the thing exactly as we wanted it. It's like Susquehanna or like Rintec. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And they're the companies that we would kind of look towards as we were building that thing out. But on my 30th birthday, I look and I say, OK, great. This thing is making as much money as kind of anyone would really need. And I thought, well, what's going to happen if we keep going in this direction? And it was clear that we would never have a kind of a big, big impact on the world. We can enrich ourselves. We can make really good money. Everyone on the team would be paid very, very well. Presumably, I can make enough money to buy a yacht or something. But this stuff wasn't that important to me. And so I felt a sort of obligation that if you have this much talent and if you have a talented team, especially as a founder, you want to be putting all that talent towards a good use. I looked at the time of like getting into crypto and I had a really strong view on crypto, which was that as far as a gambling device. This is like the most fun form of gambling invented in like ever super fun, I thought as a way to evade monetary regulations and banking restrictions. I think it's also absolutely amazing. So it has two like killer use cases, not so much banking the unbanked, but everything else, but everything else to do with like the blockchain and, and you know, web, was it web 3.0 or web, you know, that I, that didn't, it didn't really make much sense. And so instead of going into crypto, which I thought, even if I was successful, I'd end up in a lot of trouble. I thought maybe it'd be better to build something that governments wouldn't have a problem with. I knew that LLMs were like a thing. I think opening. I had said they hadn't released GPT-3 yet, but they'd said GPT-3 is so powerful. We can't release it to the world or something. Was it GPT-2? And then I started interacting with, I think Google had open source, some language models. They weren't necessarily LLMs, but they, but they were. But yeah, exactly. So I was able to play around with, but nowadays so many people have interacted with the chat GPT, they get it, but it's like the first time you, you can just talk to a computer and it talks back. It's kind of a special moment and you know, everyone who's done that goes like, wow, this is how it should be. Right. It should be like, rather than having to type on Google and search, you should just be able to ask Google a question. When I saw that I read the literature, I kind of came across the scaling laws and I think even four years ago. All the pieces of the puzzle were there, right? Google had done this amazing research and published, you know, a lot of it. Open AI was still open. And so they'd published a lot of their research. And so you really could be fully informed on, on the state of AI and where it was going. And so at that point I was confident enough, it was worth a shot. I think LLMs are going to be the next big thing. And so that's the thing I want to be building in, in that space. And I thought what's the most impactful product I can possibly build. And I thought it should be a platform. So I myself love platforms. I think they're fantastic because they open up an ecosystem where anyone can contribute to it. Right. So if you think of a platform like a YouTube, instead of it being like a Hollywood situation where you have to, if you want to make a TV show, you have to convince Disney to give you the money to produce it instead, anyone in the world can post any content they want to YouTube. And if people want to view it, the algorithm is going to promote it. Nowadays. You can look at creators like Mr. Beast or Joe Rogan. They would have never have had that opportunity unless it was for this platform. Other ones like Twitter's a great one, right? But I would consider Wikipedia to be a platform where instead of the Britannica encyclopedia, which is this, it's like a monolithic, you get all the, the researchers together, you get all the data together and you combine it in this, in this one monolithic source. Instead. You have this distributed thing. You can say anyone can host their content on Wikipedia. Anyone can contribute to it. And anyone can maybe their contribution is they delete stuff. When I was hearing like the kind of the Sam Altman and kind of the, the Muskian perspective of AI, it was a very kind of monolithic thing. It was all about AI is basically a single thing, which is intelligence. Yeah. Yeah. The more intelligent, the more compute, the more intelligent, and the more and better AI researchers, the more intelligent, right? They would speak about it as a kind of erased, like who can get the most data, the most compute and the most researchers. And that would end up with the most intelligent AI. But I didn't believe in any of that. I thought that's like the total, like I thought that perspective is the perspective of someone who's never actually done machine learning. Because with machine learning, first of all, you see that the performance of the models follows an S curve. So it's not like it just goes off to infinity, right? And the, the S curve, it kind of plateaus around human level performance. And you can look at all the, all the machine learning that was going on in the 2010s, everything kind of plateaued around the human level performance. And we can think about the self-driving car promises, you know, how Elon Musk kept saying the self-driving car is going to happen next year, it's going to happen next, next year. Or you can look at the image recognition, the speech recognition. You can look at. All of these things, there was almost nothing that went superhuman, except for something like AlphaGo. And we can speak about why AlphaGo was able to go like super superhuman. So I thought the most likely thing was going to be this, I thought it's not going to be a monolithic thing. That's like an encyclopedia Britannica. I thought it must be a distributed thing. And I actually liked to look at the world of finance for what I think a mature machine learning ecosystem would look like. So, yeah. So finance is a machine learning ecosystem because all of these quant trading firms are running machine learning algorithms, but they're running it on a centralized platform like a marketplace. And it's not the case that there's one giant quant trading company of all the data and all the quant researchers and all the algorithms and compute, but instead they all specialize. So one will specialize on high frequency training. Another will specialize on mid frequency. Another one will specialize on equity. Another one will specialize. And I thought that's the way the world works. That's how it is. And so there must exist a platform where a small team can produce an AI for a unique purpose. And they can iterate and build the best thing for that, right? And so that was the vision for Chai. So we wanted to build a platform for LLMs.Alessio [00:11:36]: That's kind of the maybe inside versus contrarian view that led you to start the company. Yeah. And then what was maybe the initial idea maze? Because if somebody told you that was the Hugging Face founding story, people might believe it. It's kind of like a similar ethos behind it. How did you land on the product feature today? And maybe what were some of the ideas that you discarded that initially you thought about?William [00:11:58]: So the first thing we built, it was fundamentally an API. So nowadays people would describe it as like agents, right? But anyone could write a Python script. They could submit it to an API. They could send it to the Chai backend and we would then host this code and execute it. So that's like the developer side of the platform. On their Python script, the interface was essentially text in and text out. An example would be the very first bot that I created. I think it was a Reddit news bot. And so it would first, it would pull the popular news. Then it would prompt whatever, like I just use some external API for like Burr or GPT-2 or whatever. Like it was a very, very small thing. And then the user could talk to it. So you could say to the bot, hi bot, what's the news today? And it would say, this is the top stories. And you could chat with it. Now four years later, that's like perplexity or something. That's like the, right? But back then the models were first of all, like really, really dumb. You know, they had an IQ of like a four year old. And users, there really wasn't any demand or any PMF for interacting with the news. So then I was like, okay. Um. So let's make another one. And I made a bot, which was like, you could talk to it about a recipe. So you could say, I'm making eggs. Like I've got eggs in my fridge. What should I cook? And it'll say, you should make an omelet. Right. There was no PMF for that. No one used it. And so I just kept creating bots. And so every single night after work, I'd be like, okay, I like, we have AI, we have this platform. I can create any text in textile sort of agent and put it on the platform. And so we just create stuff night after night. And then all the coders I knew, I would say, yeah, this is what we're going to do. And then I would say to them, look, there's this platform. You can create any like chat AI. You should put it on. And you know, everyone's like, well, chatbots are super lame. We want absolutely nothing to do with your chatbot app. No one who knew Python wanted to build on it. I'm like trying to build all these bots and no consumers want to talk to any of them. And then my sister who at the time was like just finishing college or something, I said to her, I was like, if you want to learn Python, you should just submit a bot for my platform. And she, she built a therapy for me. And I was like, okay, cool. I'm going to build a therapist bot. And then the next day I checked the performance of the app and I'm like, oh my God, we've got 20 active users. And they spent, they spent like an average of 20 minutes on the app. I was like, oh my God, what, what bot were they speaking to for an average of 20 minutes? And I looked and it was the therapist bot. And I went, oh, this is where the PMF is. There was no demand for, for recipe help. There was no demand for news. There was no demand for dad jokes or pub quiz or fun facts or what they wanted was they wanted the therapist bot. the time I kind of reflected on that and I thought, well, if I want to consume news, the most fun thing, most fun way to consume news is like Twitter. It's not like the value of there being a back and forth, wasn't that high. Right. And I thought if I need help with a recipe, I actually just go like the New York times has a good recipe section, right? It's not actually that hard. And so I just thought the thing that AI is 10 X better at is a sort of a conversation right. That's not intrinsically informative, but it's more about an opportunity. You can say whatever you want. You're not going to get judged. If it's 3am, you don't have to wait for your friend to text back. It's like, it's immediate. They're going to reply immediately. You can say whatever you want. It's judgment-free and it's much more like a playground. It's much more like a fun experience. And you could see that if the AI gave a person a compliment, they would love it. It's much easier to get the AI to give you a compliment than a human. From that day on, I said, okay, I get it. Humans want to speak to like humans or human like entities and they want to have fun. And that was when I started to look less at platforms like Google. And I started to look more at platforms like Instagram. And I was trying to think about why do people use Instagram? And I could see that I think Chai was, was filling the same desire or the same drive. If you go on Instagram, typically you want to look at the faces of other humans, or you want to hear about other people's lives. So if it's like the rock is making himself pancakes on a cheese plate. You kind of feel a little bit like you're the rock's friend, or you're like having pancakes with him or something, right? But if you do it too much, you feel like you're sad and like a lonely person, but with AI, you can talk to it and tell it stories and tell you stories, and you can play with it for as long as you want. And you don't feel like you're like a sad, lonely person. You feel like you actually have a friend.Alessio [00:16:29]: And what, why is that? Do you have any insight on that from using it?William [00:16:33]: I think it's just the human psychology. I think it's just the idea that, with old school social media. You're just consuming passively, right? So you'll just swipe. If I'm watching TikTok, just like swipe and swipe and swipe. And even though I'm getting the dopamine of like watching an engaging video, there's this other thing that's building my head, which is like, I'm feeling lazier and lazier and lazier. And after a certain period of time, I'm like, man, I just wasted 40 minutes. I achieved nothing. But with AI, because you're interacting, you feel like you're, it's not like work, but you feel like you're participating and contributing to the thing. You don't feel like you're just. Consuming. So you don't have a sense of remorse basically. And you know, I think on the whole people, the way people talk about, try and interact with the AI, they speak about it in an incredibly positive sense. Like we get people who say they have eating disorders saying that the AI helps them with their eating disorders. People who say they're depressed, it helps them through like the rough patches. So I think there's something intrinsically healthy about interacting that TikTok and Instagram and YouTube doesn't quite tick. From that point on, it was about building more and more kind of like human centric AI for people to interact with. And I was like, okay, let's make a Kanye West bot, right? And then no one wanted to talk to the Kanye West bot. And I was like, ah, who's like a cool persona for teenagers to want to interact with. And I was like, I was trying to find the influencers and stuff like that, but no one cared. Like they didn't want to interact with the, yeah. And instead it was really just the special moment was when we said the realization that developers and software engineers aren't interested in building this sort of AI, but the consumers are right. And rather than me trying to guess every day, like what's the right bot to submit to the platform, why don't we just create the tools for the users to build it themselves? And so nowadays this is like the most obvious thing in the world, but when Chai first did it, it was not an obvious thing at all. Right. Right. So we took the API for let's just say it was, I think it was GPTJ, which was this 6 billion parameter open source transformer style LLM. We took GPTJ. We let users create the prompt. We let users select the image and we let users choose the name. And then that was the bot. And through that, they could shape the experience, right? So if they said this bot's going to be really mean, and it's going to be called like bully in the playground, right? That was like a whole category that I never would have guessed. Right. People love to fight. They love to have a disagreement, right? And then they would create, there'd be all these romantic archetypes that I didn't know existed. And so as the users could create the content that they wanted, that was when Chai was able to, to get this huge variety of content and rather than appealing to, you know, 1% of the population that I'd figured out what they wanted, you could appeal to a much, much broader thing. And so from that moment on, it was very, very crystal clear. It's like Chai, just as Instagram is this social media platform that lets people create images and upload images, videos and upload that, Chai was really about how can we let the users create this experience in AI and then share it and interact and search. So it's really, you know, I say it's like a platform for social AI.Alessio [00:20:00]: Where did the Chai name come from? Because you started the same path. I was like, is it character AI shortened? You started at the same time, so I was curious. The UK origin was like the second, the Chai.William [00:20:15]: We started way before character AI. And there's an interesting story that Chai's numbers were very, very strong, right? So I think in even 20, I think late 2022, was it late 2022 or maybe early 2023? Chai was like the number one AI app in the app store. So we would have something like 100,000 daily active users. And then one day we kind of saw there was this website. And we were like, oh, this website looks just like Chai. And it was the character AI website. And I think that nowadays it's, I think it's much more common knowledge that when they left Google with the funding, I think they knew what was the most trending, the number one app. And I think they sort of built that. Oh, you found the people.swyx [00:21:03]: You found the PMF for them.William [00:21:04]: We found the PMF for them. Exactly. Yeah. So I worked a year very, very hard. And then they, and then that was when I learned a lesson, which is that if you're VC backed and if, you know, so Chai, we'd kind of ran, we'd got to this point, I was the only person who'd invested. I'd invested maybe 2 million pounds in the business. And you know, from that, we were able to build this thing, get to say a hundred thousand daily active users. And then when character AI came along, the first version, we sort of laughed. We were like, oh man, this thing sucks. Like they don't know what they're building. They're building the wrong thing anyway, but then I saw, oh, they've raised a hundred million dollars. Oh, they've raised another hundred million dollars. And then our users started saying, oh guys, your AI sucks. Cause we were serving a 6 billion parameter model, right? How big was the model that character AI could afford to serve, right? So we would be spending, let's say we would spend a dollar per per user, right? Over the, the, you know, the entire lifetime.swyx [00:22:01]: A dollar per session, per chat, per month? No, no, no, no.William [00:22:04]: Let's say we'd get over the course of the year, we'd have a million users and we'd spend a million dollars on the AI throughout the year. Right. Like aggregated. Exactly. Exactly. Right. They could spend a hundred times that. So people would say, why is your AI much dumber than character AIs? And then I was like, oh, okay, I get it. This is like the Silicon Valley style, um, hyper scale business. And so, yeah, we moved to Silicon Valley and, uh, got some funding and iterated and built the flywheels. And, um, yeah, I, I'm very proud that we were able to compete with that. Right. So, and I think the reason we were able to do it was just customer obsession. And it's similar, I guess, to how deep seek have been able to produce such a compelling model when compared to someone like an open AI, right? So deep seek, you know, their latest, um, V2, yeah, they claim to have spent 5 million training it.swyx [00:22:57]: It may be a bit more, but, um, like, why are you making it? Why are you making such a big deal out of this? Yeah. There's an agenda there. Yeah. You brought up deep seek. So we have to ask you had a call with them.William [00:23:07]: We did. We did. We did. Um, let me think what to say about that. I think for one, they have an amazing story, right? So their background is again in finance.swyx [00:23:16]: They're the Chinese version of you. Exactly.William [00:23:18]: Well, there's a lot of similarities. Yes. Yes. I have a great affinity for companies which are like, um, founder led, customer obsessed and just try and build something great. And I think what deep seek have achieved. There's quite special is they've got this amazing inference engine. They've been able to reduce the size of the KV cash significantly. And then by being able to do that, they're able to significantly reduce their inference costs. And I think with kind of with AI, people get really focused on like the kind of the foundation model or like the model itself. And they sort of don't pay much attention to the inference. To give you an example with Chai, let's say a typical user session is 90 minutes, which is like, you know, is very, very long for comparison. Let's say the average session length on TikTok is 70 minutes. So people are spending a lot of time. And in that time they're able to send say 150 messages. That's a lot of completions, right? It's quite different from an open AI scenario where people might come in, they'll have a particular question in mind. And they'll ask like one question. And a few follow up questions, right? So because they're consuming, say 30 times as many requests for a chat, or a conversational experience, you've got to figure out how to how to get the right balance between the cost of that and the quality. And so, you know, I think with AI, it's always been the case that if you want a better experience, you can throw compute at the problem, right? So if you want a better model, you can just make it bigger. If you want it to remember better, give it a longer context. And now, what open AI is doing to great fanfare is with projection sampling, you can generate many candidates, right? And then with some sort of reward model or some sort of scoring system, you can serve the most promising of these many candidates. And so that's kind of scaling up on the inference time compute side of things. And so for us, it doesn't make sense to think of AI is just the absolute performance. So. But what we're seeing, it's like the MML you score or the, you know, any of these benchmarks that people like to look at, if you just get that score, it doesn't really tell tell you anything. Because it's really like progress is made by improving the performance per dollar. And so I think that's an area where deep seek have been able to form very, very well, surprisingly so. And so I'm very interested in what Lama four is going to look like. And if they're able to sort of match what deep seek have been able to achieve with this performance per dollar gain.Alessio [00:25:59]: Before we go into the inference, some of the deeper stuff, can you give people an overview of like some of the numbers? So I think last I checked, you have like 1.4 million daily active now. It's like over 22 million of revenue. So it's quite a business.William [00:26:12]: Yeah, I think we grew by a factor of, you know, users grew by a factor of three last year. Revenue over doubled. You know, it's very exciting. We're competing with some really big, really well funded companies. Character AI got this, I think it was almost a $3 billion valuation. And they have 5 million DAU is a number that I last heard. Torquay, which is a Chinese built app owned by a company called Minimax. They're incredibly well funded. And these companies didn't grow by a factor of three last year. Right. And so when you've got this company and this team that's able to keep building something that gets users excited, and they want to tell their friend about it, and then they want to come and they want to stick on the platform. I think that's very special. And so last year was a great year for the team. And yeah, I think the numbers reflect the hard work that we put in. And then fundamentally, the quality of the app, the quality of the content, the quality of the content, the quality of the content, the quality of the content, the quality of the content. AI is the quality of the experience that you have. You actually published your DAU growth chart, which is unusual. And I see some inflections. Like, it's not just a straight line. There's some things that actually inflect. Yes. What were the big ones? Cool. That's a great, great, great question. Let me think of a good answer. I'm basically looking to annotate this chart, which doesn't have annotations on it. Cool. The first thing I would say is this is, I think the most important thing to know about success is that success is born out of failures. Right? Through failures that we learn. You know, if you think something's a good idea, and you do and it works, great, but you didn't actually learn anything, because everything went exactly as you imagined. But if you have an idea, you think it's going to be good, you try it, and it fails. There's a gap between the reality and expectation. And that's an opportunity to learn. The flat periods, that's us learning. And then the up periods is that's us reaping the rewards of that. So I think the big, of the growth shot of just 2024, I think the first thing that really kind of put a dent in our growth was our backend. So we just reached this scale. So we'd, from day one, we'd built on top of Google's GCP, which is Google's cloud platform. And they were fantastic. We used them when we had one daily active user, and they worked pretty good all the way up till we had about 500,000. It was never the cheapest, but from an engineering perspective, man, that thing scaled insanely good. Like, not Vertex? Not Vertex. Like GKE, that kind of stuff? We use Firebase. So we use Firebase. I'm pretty sure we're the biggest user ever on Firebase. That's expensive. Yeah, we had calls with engineers, and they're like, we wouldn't recommend using this product beyond this point, and you're 3x over that. So we pushed Google to their absolute limits. You know, it was fantastic for us, because we could focus on the AI. We could focus on just adding as much value as possible. But then what happened was, after 500,000, just the thing, the way we were using it, and it would just, it wouldn't scale any further. And so we had a really, really painful, at least three-month period, as we kind of migrated between different services, figuring out, like, what requests do we want to keep on Firebase, and what ones do we want to move on to something else? And then, you know, making mistakes. And learning things the hard way. And then after about three months, we got that right. So that, we would then be able to scale to the 1.5 million DAE without any further issues from the GCP. But what happens is, if you have an outage, new users who go on your app experience a dysfunctional app, and then they're going to exit. And so your next day, the key metrics that the app stores track are going to be something like retention rates. And so your next day, the key metrics that the app stores track are going to be something like retention rates. Money spent, and the star, like, the rating that they give you. In the app store. In the app store, yeah. Tyranny. So if you're ranked top 50 in entertainment, you're going to acquire a certain rate of users organically. If you go in and have a bad experience, it's going to tank where you're positioned in the algorithm. And then it can take a long time to kind of earn your way back up, at least if you wanted to do it organically. If you throw money at it, you can jump to the top. And I could talk about that. But broadly speaking, if we look at 2024, the first kink in the graph was outages due to hitting 500k DAU. The backend didn't want to scale past that. So then we just had to do the engineering and build through it. Okay, so we built through that, and then we get a little bit of growth. And so, okay, that's feeling a little bit good. I think the next thing, I think it's, I'm not going to lie, I have a feeling that when Character AI got... I was thinking. I think so. I think... So the Character AI team fundamentally got acquired by Google. And I don't know what they changed in their business. I don't know if they dialed down that ad spend. Products don't change, right? Products just what it is. I don't think so. Yeah, I think the product is what it is. It's like maintenance mode. Yes. I think the issue that people, you know, some people may think this is an obvious fact, but running a business can be very competitive, right? Because other businesses can see what you're doing, and they can imitate you. And then there's this... There's this question of, if you've got one company that's spending $100,000 a day on advertising, and you've got another company that's spending zero, if you consider market share, and if you're considering new users which are entering the market, the guy that's spending $100,000 a day is going to be getting 90% of those new users. And so I have a suspicion that when the founders of Character AI left, they dialed down their spending on user acquisition. And I think that kind of gave oxygen to like the other apps. And so Chai was able to then start growing again in a really healthy fashion. I think that's kind of like the second thing. I think a third thing is we've really built a great data flywheel. Like the AI team sort of perfected their flywheel, I would say, in end of Q2. And I could speak about that at length. But fundamentally, the way I would describe it is when you're building anything in life, you need to be able to evaluate it. And through evaluation, you can iterate, we can look at benchmarks, and we can say the issues with benchmarks and why they may not generalize as well as one would hope in the challenges of working with them. But something that works incredibly well is getting feedback from humans. And so we built this thing where anyone can submit a model to our developer backend, and it gets put in front of 5000 users, and the users can rate it. And we can then have a really accurate ranking of like which model, or users finding more engaging or more entertaining. And it gets, you know, it's at this point now, where every day we're able to, I mean, we evaluate between 20 and 50 models, LLMs, every single day, right. So even though we've got only got a team of, say, five AI researchers, they're able to iterate a huge quantity of LLMs, right. So our team ships, let's just say minimum 100 LLMs a week is what we're able to iterate through. Now, before that moment in time, we might iterate through three a week, we might, you know, there was a time when even doing like five a month was a challenge, right? By being able to change the feedback loops to the point where it's not, let's launch these three models, let's do an A-B test, let's assign, let's do different cohorts, let's wait 30 days to see what the day 30 retention is, which is the kind of the, if you're doing an app, that's like A-B testing 101 would be, do a 30-day retention test, assign different treatments to different cohorts and come back in 30 days. So that's insanely slow. That's just, it's too slow. And so we were able to get that 30-day feedback loop all the way down to something like three hours. And when we did that, we could really, really, really perfect techniques like DPO, fine tuning, prompt engineering, blending, rejection sampling, training a reward model, right, really successfully, like boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. And so I think in Q3 and Q4, we got, the amount of AI improvements we got was like astounding. It was getting to the point, I thought like how much more, how much more edge is there to be had here? But the team just could keep going and going and going. That was like number three for the inflection point.swyx [00:34:53]: There's a fourth?William [00:34:54]: The important thing about the third one is if you go on our Reddit or you talk to users of AI, there's like a clear date. It's like somewhere in October or something. The users, they flipped. Before October, the users... The users would say character AI is better than you, for the most part. Then from October onwards, they would say, wow, you guys are better than character AI. And that was like a really clear positive signal that we'd sort of done it. And I think people, you can't cheat consumers. You can't trick them. You can't b******t them. They know, right? If you're going to spend 90 minutes on a platform, and with apps, there's the barriers to switching is pretty low. Like you can try character AI, you can't cheat consumers. You can't cheat them. You can't cheat them. You can't cheat AI for a day. If you get bored, you can try Chai. If you get bored of Chai, you can go back to character. So the users, the loyalty is not strong, right? What keeps them on the app is the experience. If you deliver a better experience, they're going to stay and they can tell. So that was the fourth one was we were fortunate enough to get this hire. He was hired one really talented engineer. And then they said, oh, at my last company, we had a head of growth. He was really, really good. And he was the head of growth for ByteDance for two years. Would you like to speak to him? And I was like, yes. Yes, I think I would. And so I spoke to him. And he just blew me away with what he knew about user acquisition. You know, it was like a 3D chessswyx [00:36:21]: sort of thing. You know, as much as, as I know about AI. Like ByteDance as in TikTok US. Yes.William [00:36:26]: Not ByteDance as other stuff. Yep. He was interviewing us as we were interviewing him. Right. And so pick up options. Yeah, exactly. And so he was kind of looking at our metrics. And he was like, I saw him get really excited when he said, guys, you've got a million daily active users and you've done no advertising. I said, correct. And he was like, that's unheard of. He's like, I've never heard of anyone doing that. And then he started looking at our metrics. And he was like, if you've got all of this organically, if you start spending money, this is going to be very exciting. I was like, let's give it a go. So then he came in, we've just started ramping up the user acquisition. So that looks like spending, you know, let's say we're spending, we started spending $20,000 a day, it looked very promising than 20,000. Right now we're spending $40,000 a day on user acquisition. That's still only half of what like character AI or talkie may be spending. But from that, it's sort of, we were growing at a rate of maybe say, 2x a year. And that got us growing at a rate of 3x a year. So I'm growing, I'm evolving more and more to like a Silicon Valley style hyper growth, like, you know, you build something decent, and then you canswyx [00:37:33]: slap on a huge... You did the important thing, you did the product first.William [00:37:36]: Of course, but then you can slap on like, like the rocket or the jet engine or something, which is just this cash in, you pour in as much cash, you buy a lot of ads, and your growth is faster.swyx [00:37:48]: Not to, you know, I'm just kind of curious what's working right now versus what surprisinglyWilliam [00:37:52]: doesn't work. Oh, there's a long, long list of surprising stuff that doesn't work. Yeah. The surprising thing, like the most surprising thing, what doesn't work is almost everything doesn't work. That's what's surprising. And I'll give you an example. So like a year and a half ago, I was working at a company, we were super excited by audio. I was like, audio is going to be the next killer feature, we have to get in the app. And I want to be the first. So everything Chai does, I want us to be the first. We may not be the company that's strongest at execution, but we can always be theswyx [00:38:22]: most innovative. Interesting. Right? So we can... You're pretty strong at execution.William [00:38:26]: We're much stronger, we're much stronger. A lot of the reason we're here is because we were first. If we launched today, it'd be so hard to get the traction. Because it's like to get the flywheel, to get the users, to build a product people are excited about. If you're first, people are naturally excited about it. But if you're fifth or 10th, man, you've got to beswyx [00:38:46]: insanely good at execution. So you were first with voice? We were first. We were first. I only knowWilliam [00:38:51]: when character launched voice. They launched it, I think they launched it at least nine months after us. Okay. Okay. But the team worked so hard for it. At the time we did it, latency is a huge problem. Cost is a huge problem. Getting the right quality of the voice is a huge problem. Right? Then there's this user interface and getting the right user experience. Because you don't just want it to start blurting out. Right? You want to kind of activate it. But then you don't have to keep pressing a button every single time. There's a lot that goes into getting a really smooth audio experience. So we went ahead, we invested the three months, we built it all. And then when we did the A-B test, there was like, no change in any of the numbers. And I was like, this can't be right, there must be a bug. And we spent like a week just checking everything, checking again, checking again. And it was like, the users just did not care. And it was something like only 10 or 15% of users even click the button to like, they wanted to engage the audio. And they would only use it for 10 or 15% of the time. So if you do the math, if it's just like something that one in seven people use it for one seventh of their time. You've changed like 2% of the experience. So even if that that 2% of the time is like insanely good, it doesn't translate much when you look at the retention, when you look at the engagement, and when you look at the monetization rates. So audio did not have a big impact. I'm pretty big on audio. But yeah, I like it too. But it's, you know, so a lot of the stuff which I do, I'm a big, you can have a theory. And you resist. Yeah. Exactly, exactly. So I think if you want to make audio work, it has to be a unique, compelling, exciting experience that they can't have anywhere else.swyx [00:40:37]: It could be your models, which just weren't good enough.William [00:40:39]: No, no, no, they were great. Oh, yeah, they were very good. it was like, it was kind of like just the, you know, if you listen to like an audible or Kindle, or something like, you just hear this voice. And it's like, you don't go like, wow, this is this is special, right? It's like a convenience thing. But the idea is that if you can, if Chai is the only platform, like, let's say you have a Mr. Beast, and YouTube is the only platform you can use to make audio work, then you can watch a Mr. Beast video. And it's the most engaging, fun video that you want to watch, you'll go to a YouTube. And so it's like for audio, you can't just put the audio on there. And people go, oh, yeah, it's like 2% better. Or like, 5% of users think it's 20% better, right? It has to be something that the majority of people, for the majority of the experience, go like, wow, this is a big deal. That's the features you need to be shipping. If it's not going to appeal to the majority of people, for the majority of the experience, and it's not a big deal, it's not going to move you. Cool. So you killed it. I don't see it anymore. Yep. So I love this. The longer, it's kind of cheesy, I guess, but the longer I've been working at Chai, and I think the team agrees with this, all the platitudes, at least I thought they were platitudes, that you would get from like the Steve Jobs, which is like, build something insanely great, right? Or be maniacally focused, or, you know, the most important thing is saying no to, not to work on. All of these sort of lessons, they just are like painfully true. They're painfully true. So now I'm just like, everything I say, I'm either quoting Steve Jobs or Zuckerberg. I'm like, guys, move fast and break free.swyx [00:42:10]: You've jumped the Apollo to cool it now.William [00:42:12]: Yeah, it's just so, everything they said is so, so true. The turtle neck. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Everything is so true.swyx [00:42:18]: This last question on my side, and I want to pass this to Alessio, is on just, just multi-modality in general. This actually comes from Justine Moore from A16Z, who's a friend of ours. And a lot of people are trying to do voice image video for AI companions. Yes. You just said voice didn't work. Yep. What would make you revisit?William [00:42:36]: So Steve Jobs, he was very, listen, he was very, very clear on this. There's a habit of engineers who, once they've got some cool technology, they want to find a way to package up the cool technology and sell it to consumers, right? That does not work. So you're free to try and build a startup where you've got your cool tech and you want to find someone to sell it to. That's not what we do at Chai. At Chai, we start with the consumer. What does the consumer want? What is their problem? And how do we solve it? So right now, the number one problems for the users, it's not the audio. That's not the number one problem. It's not the image generation either. That's not their problem either. The number one problem for users in AI is this. All the AI is being generated by middle-aged men in Silicon Valley, right? That's all the content. You're interacting with this AI. You're speaking to it for 90 minutes on average. It's being trained by middle-aged men. The guys out there, they're out there. They're talking to you. They're talking to you. They're like, oh, what should the AI say in this situation, right? What's funny, right? What's cool? What's boring? What's entertaining? That's not the way it should be. The way it should be is that the users should be creating the AI, right? And so the way I speak about it is this. Chai, we have this AI engine in which sits atop a thin layer of UGC. So the thin layer of UGC is absolutely essential, right? It's just prompts. But it's just prompts. It's just an image. It's just a name. It's like we've done 1% of what we could do. So we need to keep thickening up that layer of UGC. It must be the case that the users can train the AI. And if reinforcement learning is powerful and important, they have to be able to do that. And so it's got to be the case that there exists, you know, I say to the team, just as Mr. Beast is able to spend 100 million a year or whatever it is on his production company, and he's got a team building the content, the Mr. Beast company is able to spend 100 million a year on his production company. And he's got a team building the content, which then he shares on the YouTube platform. Until there's a team that's earning 100 million a year or spending 100 million on the content that they're producing for the Chai platform, we're not finished, right? So that's the problem. That's what we're excited to build. And getting too caught up in the tech, I think is a fool's errand. It does not work.Alessio [00:44:52]: As an aside, I saw the Beast Games thing on Amazon Prime. It's not doing well. And I'mswyx [00:44:56]: curious. It's kind of like, I mean, the audience reading is high. The run-to-meet-all sucks, but the audience reading is high.Alessio [00:45:02]: But it's not like in the top 10. I saw it dropped off of like the... Oh, okay. Yeah, that one I don't know. I'm curious, like, you know, it's kind of like similar content, but different platform. And then going back to like, some of what you were saying is like, you know, people come to ChaiWilliam [00:45:13]: expecting some type of content. Yeah, I think it's something that's interesting to discuss is like, is moats. And what is the moat? And so, you know, if you look at a platform like YouTube, the moat, I think is in first is really is in the ecosystem. And the ecosystem, is comprised of you have the content creators, you have the users, the consumers, and then you have the algorithms. And so this, this creates a sort of a flywheel where the algorithms are able to be trained on the users, and the users data, the recommend systems can then feed information to the content creators. So Mr. Beast, he knows which thumbnail does the best. He knows the first 10 seconds of the video has to be this particular way. And so his content is super optimized for the YouTube platform. So that's why it doesn't do well on Amazon. If he wants to do well on Amazon, how many videos has he created on the YouTube platform? By thousands, 10s of 1000s, I guess, he needs to get those iterations in on the Amazon. So at Chai, I think it's all about how can we get the most compelling, rich user generated content, stick that on top of the AI engine, the recommender systems, in such that we get this beautiful data flywheel, more users, better recommendations, more creative, more content, more users.Alessio [00:46:34]: You mentioned the algorithm, you have this idea of the Chaiverse on Chai, and you have your own kind of like LMSYS-like ELO system. Yeah, what are things that your models optimize for, like your users optimize for, and maybe talk about how you build it, how people submit models?William [00:46:49]: So Chaiverse is what I would describe as a developer platform. More often when we're speaking about Chai, we're thinking about the Chai app. And the Chai app is really this product for consumers. And so consumers can come on the Chai app, they can come on the Chai app, they can come on the Chai app, they can interact with our AI, and they can interact with other UGC. And it's really just these kind of bots. And it's a thin layer of UGC. Okay. Our mission is not to just have a very thin layer of UGC. Our mission is to have as much UGC as possible. So we must have, I don't want people at Chai training the AI. I want people, not middle aged men, building AI. I want everyone building the AI, as many people building the AI as possible. Okay, so what we built was we built Chaiverse. And Chaiverse is kind of, it's kind of like a prototype, is the way to think about it. And it started with this, this observation that, well, how many models get submitted into Hugging Face a day? It's hundreds, it's hundreds, right? So there's hundreds of LLMs submitted each day. Now consider that, what does it take to build an LLM? It takes a lot of work, actually. It's like someone devoted several hours of compute, several hours of their time, prepared a data set, launched it, ran it, evaluated it, submitted it, right? So there's a lot of, there's a lot of, there's a lot of work that's going into that. So what we did was we said, well, why can't we host their models for them and serve them to users? And then what would that look like? The first issue is, well, how do you know if a model is good or not? Like, we don't want to serve users the crappy models, right? So what we would do is we would, I love the LMSYS style. I think it's really cool. It's really simple. It's a very intuitive thing, which is you simply present the users with two completions. You can say, look, this is from model one. This is from model two. This is from model three. This is from model A. This is from model B, which is better. And so if someone submits a model to Chaiverse, what we do is we spin up a GPU. We download the model. We're going to now host that model on this GPU. And we're going to start routing traffic to it. And we're going to send, we think it takes about 5,000 completions to get an accurate signal. That's roughly what LMSYS does. And from that, we're able to get an accurate ranking. And we're able to get an accurate ranking. And we're able to get an accurate ranking of which models are people finding entertaining and which models are not entertaining. If you look at the bottom 80%, they'll suck. You can just disregard them. They totally suck. Then when you get the top 20%, you know you've got a decent model, but you can break it down into more nuance. There might be one that's really descriptive. There might be one that's got a lot of personality to it. There might be one that's really illogical. Then the question is, well, what do you do with these top models? From that, you can do more sophisticated things. You can try and do like a routing thing where you say for a given user request, we're going to try and predict which of these end models that users enjoy the most. That turns out to be pretty expensive and not a huge source of like edge or improvement. Something that we love to do at Chai is blending, which is, you know, it's the simplest way to think about it is you're going to end up, and you're going to pretty quickly see you've got one model that's really smart, one model that's really funny. How do you get the user an experience that is both smart and funny? Well, just 50% of the requests, you can serve them the smart model, 50% of the requests, you serve them the funny model. Just a random 50%? Just a random, yeah. And then... That's blending? That's blending. You can do more sophisticated things on top of that, as in all things in life, but the 80-20 solution, if you just do that, you get a pretty powerful effect out of the gate. Random number generator. I think it's like the robustness of randomness. Random is a very powerful optimization technique, and it's a very robust thing. So you can explore a lot of the space very efficiently. There's one thing that's really, really important to share, and this is the most exciting thing for me, is after you do the ranking, you get an ELO score, and you can track a user's first join date, the first date they submit a model to Chaiverse, they almost always get a terrible ELO, right? So let's say the first submission they get an ELO of 1,100 or 1,000 or something, and you can see that they iterate and they iterate and iterate, and it will be like, no improvement, no improvement, no improvement, and then boom. Do you give them any data, or do you have to come up with this themselves? We do, we do, we do, we do. We try and strike a balance between giving them data that's very useful, you've got to be compliant with GDPR, which is like, you have to work very hard to preserve the privacy of users of your app. So we try to give them as much signal as possible, to be helpful. The minimum is we're just going to give you a score, right? That's the minimum. But that alone is people can optimize a score pretty well, because they're able to come up with theories, submit it, does it work? No. A new theory, does it work? No. And then boom, as soon as they figure something out, they keep it, and then they iterate, and then boom,Alessio [00:51:46]: they figure something out, and they keep it. Last year, you had this post on your blog, cross-sourcing the lead to the 10 trillion parameter, AGI, and you call it a mixture of experts, recommenders. Yep. Any insights?William [00:51:58]: Updated thoughts, 12 months later? I think the odds, the timeline for AGI has certainly been pushed out, right? Now, this is in, I'm a controversial person, I don't know, like, I just think... You don't believe in scaling laws, you think AGI is further away. I think it's an S-curve. I think everything's an S-curve. And I think that the models have proven to just be far worse at reasoning than people sort of thought. And I think whenever I hear people talk about LLMs as reasoning engines, I sort of cringe a bit. I don't think that's what they are. I think of them more as like a simulator. I think of them as like a, right? So they get trained to predict the next most likely token. It's like a physics simulation engine. So you get these like games where you can like construct a bridge, and you drop a car down, and then it predicts what should happen. And that's really what LLMs are doing. It's not so much that they're reasoning, it's more that they're just doing the most likely thing. So fundamentally, the ability for people to add in intelligence, I think is very limited. What most people would consider intelligence, I think the AI is not a crowdsourcing problem, right? Now with Wikipedia, Wikipedia crowdsources knowledge. It doesn't crowdsource intelligence. So it's a subtle distinction. AI is fantastic at knowledge. I think it's weak at intelligence. And a lot, it's easy to conflate the two because if you ask it a question and it gives you, you know, if you said, who was the seventh president of the United States, and it gives you the correct answer, I'd say, well, I don't know the answer to that. And you can conflate that with intelligence. But really, that's a question of knowledge. And knowledge is really this thing about saying, how can I store all of this information? And then how can I retrieve something that's relevant? Okay, they're fantastic at that. They're fantastic at storing knowledge and retrieving the relevant knowledge. They're superior to humans in that regard. And so I think we need to come up for a new word. How does one describe AI should contain more knowledge than any individual human? It should be more accessible than any individual human. That's a very powerful thing. That's superswyx [00:54:07]: powerful. But what words do we use to describe that? We had a previous guest on Exa AI that does search. And he tried to coin super knowledge as the opposite of super intelligence.William [00:54:20]: Exactly. I think super knowledge is a more accurate word for it.swyx [00:54:24]: You can store more things than any human can.William [00:54:26]: And you can retrieve it better than any human can as well. And I think it's those two things combined that's special. I think that thing will exist. That thing can be built. And I think you can start with something that's entertaining and fun. And I think, I often think it's like, look, it's going to be a 20 year journey. And we're in like, year four, or it's like the web. And this is like 1998 or something. You know, you've got a long, long way to go before the Amazon.coms are like these huge, multi trillion dollar businesses that every single person uses every day. And so AI today is very simplistic. And it's fundamentally the way we're using it, the flywheels, and this ability for how can everyone contribute to it to really magnify the value that it brings. Right now, like, I think it's a bit sad. It's like, right now you have big labs, I'm going to pick on open AI. And they kind of go to like these human labelers. And they say, we're going to pay you to just label this like subset of questions that we want to get a really high quality data set, then we're going to get like our own computers that are really powerful. And that's kind of like the thing. For me, it's so much like Encyclopedia Britannica. It's like insane. All the people that were interested in blockchain, it's like, well, this is this is what needs to be decentralized, you need to decentralize that thing. Because if you distribute it, people can generate way more data in a distributed fashion, way more, right? You need the incentive. Yeah, of course. Yeah. But I mean, the, the, that's kind of the exciting thing about Wikipedia was it's this understanding, like the incentives, you don't need money to incentivize people. You don't need dog coins. No. Sometimes, sometimes people get the satisfaction fro

This week is a special episode of the podcast where we are looking back on some of our favourite pieces from the magazine over the past year and revisiting some of the conversations we had around them. First up: the Starmer supremacy Let's start with undoubtedly the biggest news of the year: Starmer's supermajority and the first Labour government in 14 years. In April, we spoke to Katy Balls and Harriet Harman about just what a supermajority could mean for Keir Starmer. Listening back, it's an incredibly interesting discussion to revisit. The aim of Katy's piece was to communicate the internal problems that could arise from such a sweeping victory and, crucially, how Starmer might manage a historic cohort of backbenchers. One MP who knows about adjusting to life in government after a supermajority is Harriet Harman, former leader of the Labour party and a member of Tony Blair's first cabinet. (01:51) Reflections from the editor's chair The change in No. 10 Downing Street is, of course, not the only notable shake-up in Westminster this year. Fraser Nelson stepped down as editor of The Spectator in September after 15 years of wielding the editor's pen, with 784 issues to his name. We sat down with him on his final day in the office to reflect on his time at 22 Old Queen Street. (08:31) Do historians talk down to children? In June, Mary Wakefield dedicated her column to this very question. She wrote about her experience trying to find engaging and challenging history books for her 8-year-old and compared the dumbed-down, one-dimensional version of history portrayed in modern children's books with the classic Ladybird books of the 1960s. She joined the podcast to discuss this with Dominic Sandbrook, author of the Adventures in Time children's book series and host of The Rest is History podcast. (17:18) Are ultra-processed foods really so bad? On The Edition podcast, we enjoy a fiery debate, and none was more heated than our discussion on ultra-processed foods. This debate, between columnist Matthew Parris and Christoffer van Tulleken, associate professor at UCL and author of the bestselling book Ultra-Processed People, took place in May. It was sparked by Matthew's column on the myths surrounding ultra-processed foods—foods engineered to be hyper-palatable and typically containing preservatives, emulsifiers, sweeteners, artificial colours, flavours, and so on. Such additives are widely considered detrimental to our health. Matthew says we shouldn't be worried, but we'll let you decide. (29:10) By whose values should we judge the past? On the podcast, we showcase articles from across the magazine—from the front half to the life pages, to books and arts. One of the most intriguing books of the year was Joan Smith's Unfortunately, she was a nymphomaniac: A New History of Rome's Imperial Women. An eye-catching title that is ‘as thought-provoking as it is provocative', as Daisy Dunn wrote in October. Many popular historians are singled out for their analysis of women in ancient Rome, including Professor Dame Mary Beard. In the interest of granting a right of reply, we invited Mary onto the podcast to discuss the merit of judging history by today's standards. (49:40) And finally: the politics of the breakfast buffet We thought we would leave you with one of the most prescient discussions we had on the podcast this year: the politics of the hotel breakfast buffet. Is it ethical to pocket a sandwich at a hotel breakfast buffet? Laurie Graham explored that question in the magazine back in September. Specifically, she revealed the very British habit of swiping food from free breakfasts to save for lunch later in the day. Laurie joined us alongside Mark Jenkins, a former hotel manager in Torquay, whom listeners may remember from the Channel 4 documentary The Hotel. (01:04:04) Hosted by William Moore and Lara Prendergast. Produced by Oscar Edmondson and Patrick Gibbons. 

My guest today is a renowned quilter from the picturesque town of Torquay,  Australia. If you've taken a workshop with her, you've likely danced around the house for days. Her designs are instantly recognizable with a seamless blend of traditional and contemporary design and she has made significant contributions to the quilting world. She draws inspiration from her travel adventures and the natural beauty of her surroundings in her homeland.Jen is known for creating quilts with intricate patterns, vibrant colors, and playful designs. Hand stitching is her passion and sharing the knowledge and techniques of this age old, mindful craft brings her great joy.Her work has been featured in popular magazines an exhibited in shows around the world and she has also won the very prestigious Raja Award in 2023 at the Australasian Quilt Convention. Find Jen Kingwell online at: https://www.amitie.com.au/Want to travel with Brandy?2025 FESTIVAL OF QUILTS Birmingham!!! This 14-day tour of Wales and England takes in the rich textile history and breathtaking cultural landmarks. Tour England & Wales ending at the Festival of Quilts. Call Judy at 1-877-235-3767 or go to  https://opulentquiltjourneys.com/destinations/britain/item/birmingham-festival-of-quilts-tour-with-brandy2026 JAPAN CRUISE!!! Watergirl Quilt Co and the Quilter on Fire have teamed up to sail the seas on the Celebrity Millennium. Sail with us on a JAPAN CRUISE in 2026! Registration is OPEN and this cruise is already 50% sold! SIGN UP TODAY!https://gravitate.travel/stitch-sail-japan-with-quilter-on-fire-and-watergirl-quilt-co/Quilter on Fire Website - https://quilteronfire.com/OLISO IRONS - Host of the Quilter on Fire Podcast Lounge each year at QuiltCon!BUY YOUR OWN OLISO MINI PROJECT IRON RIGHT HERESquare One Textile Art WorkshopLink to Brandy's email listKristy's Quilt Picture BookQuilter on Fire PatternsFree Quilter on Fire Holiday Table Runner VIDEO Support the showSupport the showThank you for listening to the Quilter on Fire Podcast.