Podcast appearances and mentions of Wilbur Smith

Is AI really the end of creativity, or the biggest emancipation of creative energy we've ever seen? How can authors thrive in a time of super abundance, when anyone can make anything? What happens when publishers become technology providers, and agents start shopping for books on our behalf? With Nadim Sadek. In the intro, my AI-Assisted Artisan Author webinars. This show is supported by my Patrons. Join my Community and get articles, discounts, and extra audio and video tutorials on writing craft, author business, and AI tools, at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn Nadim Sadek is a serial entrepreneur and the founder and CEO of Shimmr AI, an AI-powered book marketing company, as well as the bestselling author of children's books and non-fiction books, including Quiver, don't Quake: How Creativity Can Embrace AI. You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below. Show Notes Using AI as a research partner, editor, and constructive critic when writing a book The ratio of dreaming to execution Why publishers still draw red lines at AI-written words, and why that may change Inside Shimmr's three-engine advertising system: Strategizer, Generator, and Deployer Multimodal interactivity, agentic purchasing, and the idea of the Panthropic You can find Nadim on LinkedIn or at NadimSadek.com. Transcript of Interview with Nadim Sadek Jo: Nadim Sadek is a serial entrepreneur and the founder and CEO of Shimmr AI, an AI-powered book marketing company, as well as the bestselling author of children's books and non-fiction books, including Quiver, don't Quake: How Creativity Can Embrace AI. So welcome to the show, Nadim. Nadim: It is lovely to be here. I feel very privileged to be invited onto this. Thank you. Jo: Oh, I'm excited to talk to you today, and we're really talking about AI. I wanted to start with the fact that you do seem to have a sort of relentless optimism. How do you remain so optimistic about AI when the publishing industry that we both work in seems so overwhelmingly negative? Lift our eyes to the horizon—what is the bigger picture? Nadim: Oh my goodness. That is a big one. I think my optimism is quite confined actually in the area of publishing. If you were to ask me to speak about AI more broadly—which you're not, but I'm going to give you a little bit of it—I've got lots of concerns. That includes the advent of autonomous weapons and economic singularity, where the wealth from AI as an industry is going into just a few hands, and energy usage, and cultural homogenisation, I suppose, and the potential for brain rot. There's a whole pile of stuff which is really not very good about AI, and all the normal things about fraud and theft and so on. However, if you recognise that and then you say what's going on in publishing, then the obvious thing that you first have to deal with is what did happen with copyright. Is it appropriate to say that things have been stolen and taken without permission and so on? It is. It's going through the American courts at one pace. I saw that Penguin Random House have started a case against OpenAI in Germany, where there will be a much faster legal conclusion—a judge's conclusion, I think. This will begin to put parameters on how copyrighted materials can be used, and possibly also some retrospective judgment about what has happened to this point and what can be done about it. So it's good that you've asked questions so early in our conversation, because I think —  It's important to contextualise my optimism. It is whilst noting with regret the behaviour of the AI industry—the models themselves—in not dealing with copyright in the most generous or appropriate fashion. I think we should also recognise that copyright probably wasn't designed for machine learning in the way that it is. Probably the industry wasn't terribly well prepared to note, negotiate with, and navigate the very fast-moving technological culture of AI companies. So I think lots of mistakes have been made on both sides. When you put all that to one side, what's left for me is an amazing emancipation of creative energy and also a huge efficiency being brought to the publishing industry. We can talk about both those things further, but for me that is what's going on. The efficiency of bookmaking and publishing generally—the whole workflow of getting a book out of somebody's head and into a reader's hands—I think is immensely streamlined and improved by AI. Actually, if you talk about it carefully, which I'm sure we will do, the ability of creators to share and let others experience their creative endeavours becomes so much better, so much fuller, so much richer. So that's why I'm excited about it. Jo: Well, let's get into those two things then. You mentioned the emancipation of creative energy, and you've worked with various AI tools as part of your creative and business processes. You've said that AI can be a creative companion. So specifically when it comes to Quiver, don't Quake, for example— How are you using the various tools in such an emancipated way? Nadim: Well, just to put a bit of a broader context on it, we're an AI-native company at Shimmr, and separately I wear a hat as an author. You mentioned the AI books and the children's books. I'm also writing a book about the psychology of motorcycling. So it's a very odd authorial footprint, but it means that I kind of tramp around the place and learn different things. What I've noticed, even within Shimmr, is that the whole team has been using AI tools very differently. Lots of people are very bright in the company. They're all brighter than me, and I salute them and love them. But they've all used AI to become more creative in their own ways. For example, our Chief Commercial Officer is very numerate and logical, and not loquacious. She prefers to say things straight and simply. She has become an unbelievably creative financial modeller and analyst because she uses AI in lots of different ways. So she has flourished and grown so much, and is creative in a way that she never could be before—not only around numeracy and financial matters, but in thinking through new concepts for sales and marketing and for our commercial development. I've just noticed all around me this going on. When it comes to me, I prefer to express myself through writing. I talk a bit as well, as you can tell, but my favourite means of communication is just writing. When I was writing Quiver, don't Quake, I would use AI in a number of different fashions. One would be for research. One of the chapters is about the psychology of creativity. I'm a psychologist, so I tend to come at things from a psychological perspective. What is the psychology of creativity? Well, here comes a million-word answer from an AI—this person said this, this person said that. Then I kind of focused my research in particular areas and assembled them by drawing from the outputs of several AIs about what has been said about AI, what the science says about it, what sociology says about it, what particular creatives that we're all aware of say about it, whether they're in the advertising industry or musicians or artists or whatever. So that was a very rich way of researching things. I would often put a chapter in—this is a slightly different use—a manuscript that I'd written and say, “Read this as if you're somebody just coming across my book, and tell me where the reader might struggle between one paragraph and another, or where there's a logical fallout, or where the concept isn't really very fully excavated and developed.” It would occasionally prompt me to say, “You could probably do with a line that brings the reader from this point to that point.” And usually I listened to that and then wrote something new. In another use case, I eventually gave it the whole book and said, “I think I've done an okay job here and I quite like the flow and I'm sort of satisfied enough, but before I send it to the publisher and say, ‘there you go,' what do you think? Are there any ways in which this book could become a better and more interesting read?” It came back fairly promptly and said, “Well, what you haven't really done is considered what all the naysayers would say. You've done your dark moments of militarism and all that stuff, but what about some of the other stuff closer to publishing or creativity?” So off I went on a new round of research, and did some myself and used the AI for other bits. The funny thing, really the ironic thing here, is that the book is much better, and most people salute the book for the eighth to ninth chapter that talks about the constructive critics. I assemble them all and articulate all their arguments and say how hideous AI is and how terrible it is for the world and all of us. And then I try to repudiate some of them, not in a defensive way, but just to say, actually, yes, that's one perspective and here's another one. That chapter, ironically, about how AI is terrible was prompted by AI. It said, “You should really have a go at me.” And so I did. So that was another use case. Then finally—perhaps I'll say this—I have a friend who is, I think, the Editor-in-Chief of Penguin in India. I got to know her at a book fair or something. We started chatting, and I told her about my kids' books. I said, “I could really do with an editor on these ten books that are due to be published.” She very generously, amiably, and very constructively gave me feedback on each individual book and then on the whole set. I was really happy with it. I said to her, “That was a delight.” She said, “You'd be much better off working with Editrix.” I said, “What's Editrix?” She said, “Well, it's an AI platform I've created where you can go and self-edit.” I said, “You must be kidding. I'd much prefer chatting to you and our interactions.” She said, “Yes, well, go and try it.” So I got an account for the Editrix AI. Off I went, gave it my books, and lo and behold, it came up with some incredibly sophisticated and subtle observations on the books that neither Meru nor I had seen. For example, there's a story where a boy who lives in a house on a hill meets another boy on a bridge, and they end up in a silly confrontation. They're young and foolish, and it sort of transpires that the other boy lived in a local village. Now, I suppose in retrospect, it's pretty obvious that this could be seen to be colonialist, imperialist, and a sense of entitlement from the boy at the top of the hill crossing the bridge first and so on. Hadn't crossed my mind. The AI said, “I can tell from the rest of your writing that you don't really have a sort of racist or imperialist or superior attitude to things, but in this story, there could be a misapprehension that you do.” I thought, wow, what a great warning. So I changed it. There are almost endless ways—and I can tell you others, because I'm writing a book about clouds at the moment—in which AI can help you as an author. I've just shared some of those with you. Jo: Yes, well, I love that. I also use it for research. I definitely use the “give me feedback as a reader avatar, as a reader of this type of genre” or whatever. Nadim: Yes. Jo: I use different tools as well, so I agree with you. All of that is, I think, what a lot of people are doing. You also said you did a lot of the writing and rewriting, so the human was very much there. This was not an AI-generated work in any way. It was using an AI as a sort of collaborator—a creative companion, to use your words—which I think is great. One of the things that AI-positive people like us are finding is that there's so much negativity around the traditional publishers, around other authors, around supposedly negative backlash from readers. I think there's a lot of very noisy people who are probably making this sound worse than it is. Since you are so embedded in traditional publishing in so many ways, how are publishing people thinking about this? Do you think it's just different in terms of the creative side versus say the marketing side? What is happening there, and what do you recommend for authors? Nadim: What I'm observing is that there is increasingly confident adoption of AI for corporate efficiency, which is a polite way of saying where one can see profitability being improved. Could you streamline legal contracting? Yes. Can you manage royalty payments better? Yes. Are there better sustainability prospects with managing a warehouse and distribution and so on with AI? Yes. Could you improve your marketing by looking at competitive titles and trends, and optimising your metadata and your SEO and now your GEO, all using AI? Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. All of these things can be assisted. Can you manage much more of your backlist, where you don't have the human or financial capital to manage all of those titles in a truly respectful and invested way? Yes, yes, yes. So wherever there's corporate efficiency, I see publishers being increasingly bold about saying they have integrated AI into their workstreams. What's much more tentative and hesitant is where there's discussion of authors—and I do hesitate to use the right words here—being assisted by, employing, working with AI. I kind of shorthand it as creative emancipation. It really means very many different things. Let me give you the example that I referred to briefly a second ago of Cloud Land, which is probably my first real novel. I'm very lucky. I sit working every day at a desk that's got three windows, and I look at the sky, and every day it's different, and I'm fascinated by it. I've been flying around the world since I was very young—my father worked for the World Health Organization, we moved between many countries—so I've also seen clouds from the sky a lot. I've noticed that in different parts of the world there are different cloud formations. It came to me one day that it would be very interesting if the clouds were somehow sentient, and that there is a cloud society, and that Cloud Land lived above human land and absorbed and observed us. Actually, the more I started thinking about it, the more I thought, well, we kind of evaporate. We give off vapour all the time and it rises up to clouds and maybe we're sending DNA signals to it, and it condensates and sends rain and storms and winds and lightning and thunder and all. There's a huge amount of interaction between Cloud Land and human land if you think about it. So I went into an AI. I said, “Hey, I've been thinking about this, blah, blah, blah. Any observations on what I've been saying so far?” I think one of the first things it said to me was, “You are actually playing with quantum physics.” I had no idea what quantum physics were really. I thought, well, this is interesting. I went and researched quantum physics, and actually there is some of that in it. If you count Cloud Land as a creative notion— The original idea, the creativity, came wholly from me, and then the development of it has been assisted by working with AI. I as a creator have spent much more time originating ideas about a story than would historically have been true. I probably would have gone to a library, tried to find the right geography textbook, read up about clouds, discovered what the nomenclature is, thought about whether I could put characters to cumulonimbus versus stratus something or other, and kind of worked my way gradually through it. There is something that I refer to in Quiver, don't Quake, which is what I call the ratio of dreaming to execution. I think previously, without AI, creators would probably spend 80% of their time researching and trying to get information and assembling things and editing documents and spell-checking and doing a whole pile of different tasks None of which I actually dismiss, because I think sometimes those difficult and “menial” tasks give you time to let ideas percolate and flourish and grow. It's just part of the process. But whereas before, I think we probably spent 20% of our time originating and 80% of our time assembling, I think it's inverted now. You can probably do 80% of the time you want creating and 20% of the time fiddling about getting your act together. So I feel that that's a huge emancipation of individual creativity. There's also—and we can talk about this if you wish—I think a much broader sociological phenomenon going on, which is really about every person in the world, all 8 billion of us, being creatives. That's the way I see the world. I think that only a minority of that 8 billion have the gift of craft that we recognise—of writing or drawing or making music or being an architect or a biomedical scientist or something that's creative and assembling things. And AI gives you courage and helps you to identify what you wish to make. I really don't mean creating the artefacts. I don't mean painting or making a song or writing a book. I just mean helping one to express and articulate oneself so that one's creative idea is shareable and experienceable by others. Jo: Well, it's interesting. I mean, everything that we've discussed, you're really saying that the main line is the actual writing of the words, because none of us can articulate how ideas come. Especially with Claude, we might have a creative spark, but I'm sure you've found the same: if I go to Claude, which is my favourite, with my creative spark, by the time we've discussed it, possibly over days, I've lost track of who said what. The idea definitely started with me, because the AI at the moment doesn't have its own creative spark in terms of its own drive to write a book, for example. So it starts with me, but then it goes back and forth, back and forth—sparks new ideas, something it wrote makes me think about something else. I think the difficulty with how publishing seems to be doing this at the moment is that it is just the written words on the page that is their red line around “have you used AI to generate a book?” But even that, I just think, surely that will change. For example, in the publishing industry, ghost writing—or writing dead authors, like Wilbur Smith—I was going to say Wilbur Smith is a good one. I mean, we've seen them, just different dead authors essentially writing in the voice of those people. So I just see that there are many possible places where publishers might want this kind of tool. I don't know— Do you see any openness to the actual words themselves? Nadim: I think you're right to identify that that is the place that it gets stickiest. What you kind of do in your private time—imagining and dreaming things up and interacting—it's a facsimile for talking to your friends or another author or something. It's just an AI companion. So I think that that is, you're right, less scrutinised. It is when one examines the words on the page. It's funny—it's almost as if it's a measure of how hard did you work to do this? Or did you just splatter it down on the page by pressing a button somewhere? It's almost as if, as creatives, we have to evidence that we have suffered, you know? I think there's a different form of suffering when you write with AI. It's true that if you command AI in some way to write for you, the default writing will be pretty anodyne, pretty bland, pretty mundane. It is deliberately so. AI is created and it is tuned to be inoffensive, to please most people, to be accessible to most readers and consumers of it. So it's another thing that I encourage people to do: don't approach AI with a kind of Google mindset where you just do a question and answer—”what time is it in New York now?” “Well, it's five hours behind” or whatever. Instead you say, “Hey, listen, I'm thinking about clouds, but I want a bit of spittle going up and down between the two, and I'd quite like a crazy cloud that harasses us.” Well, now I'm putting in some of my idiosyncrasy and my eccentricity and my personal perspective. The more you do that, the more that even if you did press a button and say, “Command, I want you to write this book,” that will no longer be a bland and mundane bit of output. It'll be very tuned by your interactions, and it'll exhibit some of your nature. So I think there probably are factories—there's always factories. They're probably—and actually I know this—writing a lot of romance, writing a lot of porn, things which are fairly well parametered. You know what happens in both of those genres more or less, so it's pretty easy for a machine to emulate what an author might write there and go and do it. But if you get into something like, “a sand dune was my cousin”—like, okay, well that's a bit different. What do you mean? And there it becomes a much more interesting bit of writing. So I think we're going to see a spectrum. To come back to your question about where publishers draw red lines, I think it's where they just see straight away mundane output that doesn't feel like it had a lot of craft or ingenuity or hard work to it. But I believe that as we go on, that's going to become harder and harder to establish. As we become more sophisticated users of AI, and AI's capabilities to understand us and to work with us become better, then I don't think it'll be such a big question where the words came from. What we'll feast on with each other is our creative ideas and how they're expressed, but not how they were produced. Jo: I mean, I always say to people, I'm not a word generator. That's not what makes me or my books worthy. It is what I do with it. It's the stories I tell, or it's the personal things behind it. So generating millions and millions of words, whether you generate them by typing or handwriting or AI or whatever, it isn't the word generation that is the point. It's all of the things that make that finished thing what it is. So anyway, let's come back to the other thing, because you mentioned that publishers seem very happy around corporate efficiency, anything that drives profitability. You also mentioned that Shimmr is an AI-native company. Now, I, and many people listening—we are a one-person company. So I run my own company. It's a publishing company. I do all my publishing, I do all my marketing, I do all my business as just me. So I also use AI for a lot of this stuff. I wondered— How do you see publishers changing to become more AI-native? How can we as individual author-publishers do that too? Because it feels like a massive mindset shift, not just plug in Opus 4.7 here. Nadim: I have been found saying at various publishing events—and it is deliberately a little bit provocative—that I believe that publishers have always been technology providers to creatives. It's not only what they do, but it is a part that they don't seem to embrace very hard. Even if you just go back to Gutenberg—I mean, here's a printing press, it's a bit of technology. “I'll make your book, I'll make your words into books.” It started there, and it's always been. That applies to distribution and e-commerce and audiobook manufacture and all sorts of other things along the way. So I encourage publishers to accept the notion that what they should do to attract authors in the future is partly—only partly—develop their own house AIs. It can be as ethically trained as that house wishes to deal with the copyright furore. It can be tuned to do editing in a particular way. It can have a specific way of copy editing. It can have a collaborative notion. It can have an assistant that helps you understand genres and hotspots and competitive titles. It can help you to think about, as Americans might say, what's hot and what's not in the world at the moment. So you might be more attuned to what the market demands, if that affects you at all. Some writers don't care, and that's fine. It can certainly help with all the marketing then. How can you produce social media content that's appropriate to your book, and all the rest of it. So I think there's a way in which publishers could massively enable authors. I talk to tons and tons of authors clearly about Shimmr, and what they all resent, I would say, is finding their time stolen by trying to flog their work rather than make it. Jo: Yes. Nadim: So the marketing process is just theft of creative time for most authors, and they hate doing it, and they're often not very good at it, because it's a completely different skillset from creating great stories or writing non-fiction books about particular subjects. So I believe that authors should be embracing the notion that publishers will create their own house AIs. And goodness me, we might even decide which publisher we prefer to go to on the strength of their AI position. Wouldn't that be interesting? But that is what I see the future being. Jo: Yes. I mean, definitely there's some quite significant authors—Dean Koontz, probably one of the biggest—who went to Amazon because of their technical ability around publishing and marketing. He was like, “Yes, I want this because of this.” Not that he'd be in bookshops or whatever—of course Dean Koontz is—but yes, so I think you're right there. For individuals also, as you know, we can use AI to help us market. I upload my books to Claude when they're finished, and I've just been marketing today. I'll say, “create 10 Midjourney images based on this book and give me all the marketing copy.” So I think we can use it now to help us be more efficient. On the other side of that, I think the bigger thing that's starting to happen is marketing is now much easier in one way. Nadim: Yes. Mm-hmm. Jo: So it's getting fuller, or even more. Nadim: Yes. Jo: So how do we deal with this? Because Shimmr is an AI marketing company. How are you thinking about the predominance of very, very good AI marketing now? Nadim: Yes, and it gets better all the time. It's a great question. Obviously, strategically, as an enterprise, we've really had to think about this one. If I go back one step, I always believe that innovation succeeds when it starts in a narrow space. So when Shimmr launched, we put ourselves forward and were quickly embraced, I have to say, as automated advertising that sells books. Nothing particularly more complicated than that. “Okay, you do ads, you automate it for me, and it'll help flog my books. Yes, that's it.” We had a rush. We've worked with about 250 publishers. As you might anticipate, it started with smaller ones, then got bigger. We now work with the biggest as well. That notion of automated advertising selling books was successful. Actually, that was about three years ago—a bit shorter than three years ago. What's happened in that time is that we have now collected a ton of data, and meanwhile the AI models have become more sophisticated and competent. Maybe I should just pause briefly and say what Shimmr actually does. We've got three main engines that are all chained together, to use pretty old language. The first one is what we call the Strategizer. It reads the book, it understands what we call its book DNA. So it's the structural elements of what the narrative is, who the protagonists are, and all the rest of it. It's also a psychological study of it—what's going on, what are the emotions or the values, what are the interests, how they intersect, where are the tensions, all those sorts of things. The Strategizer decides, “Well, reading everything between the covers of this book and understanding the author's intent, this is the best way to put this book forward because here are its strong points.” It hands that off to the second machine, which we call the Generator, which says, “Thanks for the creative brief. I'll make you the ads now.” It does videos and music and captions and all the rest of it. Then it presents its newly baked campaign to the third machine, which is the Deployer, that says, “Okay, well, I know where to find the audiences for this. If that's the DNA of the book and this is the campaign that manifests it, then I know where to find these people.” It goes and autonomously deploys it in various media channels to specific audiences who might be interested in that content. So that's what we started doing, and that generated a huge amount of data. Where we've got to recently—really in the last six months—is understanding that, as you've just said, most people can generate their own stuff. So in some ways they can look just like a mini Shimmr. The thing that differentiates the content is always the strategy. What we have learned to do now—and it's because of an agentic framework—is we've moved beyond what's between the covers of the book to look at life. We look at culture, what's going on, what are the trends, what's in and what's out. Even if you take a particular trend—let's say, fascism—what's the language associated with it that's being treated positively and respectfully, and what's the stuff that leads to it being dismissed straight away? All those sorts of nuances around everything. But equally, as well as going deep with a set of agents on what fascism might be in today's culture, we also go wide and say, “Well, how does that sit next to loyalty or hedonism or ambition or something else?” So we get this very, very circumspect analysis of the market. Then, indeed, if you do write a book about—I'm really going off-piste here, but you know, the hedonism of fascism, like, God, that would be a weird book—you discover that actually you're not really competing with another book, but you are competing with that specific podcast and this movie that came out, and another movement that's born in Italy but it's moving across Europe now or something. So we were able to produce strategies which now lead to a much broader offer, one which is much more sophisticated and much more likely to drive success in a book or in a creative enterprise. It informs product listings, metadata, author communications, PR, SEO, GEO, and of course the thing that we started with, advertising. So things that you see made by Shimmr should be much more resonant and much more attuned to the world, and commercially much more likely to drive success, than simply saying, “Here's a book, make ten Midjourney images out of it.” Jo: Mm-hmm. Nadim: It's really about the quality of the briefing and the quality of the assets that you're able to produce by having a much more sophisticated Strategizer. So we've gone back into the intellectual property and the human analysis, in a way, of the world. To understand where a specific piece of creative work sits in culture and society has become a much bigger proposition. Jo: Right. So you did mention podcasts there. So as in, you might present to a publisher “these are the podcasts that they should pitch” for example? Nadim: There's that, of course, but it's also, don't think that this book is competing with these three titles which your team put together. It's more that, if people want to listen to hedonistic fascism, they can listen to that podcast before they read this book. Jo: Okay, that's interesting. Interesting times. So we don't have much time left, but I think one of the biggest questions that people have—even if they're AI-positive, as I am and many people listening are—it's not that we're worried about AI replacing us, because we know we're individuals and all that, but we are slightly concerned about the volume of books in the market. And not just books, but TV shows and YouTube and TikTok. It's very hard to stand out. You do say in the book: “When anyone can make, maybe creativity lies not in the making, but in making others care.” How can I move up the value chain? So for many of us who make an income this way, what are your recommendations? Nadim: Great question. And actually I think it's really central. My latest catchphrase is that in a time of super abundance, we need super discoverability. So it's exactly as you just said—tons of work, tons of movies, tons of podcasts, and tons of everything. If you believe in what I've been saying, which is that we're emancipating the creative spark of 8 billion people, there's going to be even more. So I believe that the solution is what I call multimodal interactivity. That doesn't mean multimedia—it means multimodal. Multimodal means you can engage with an experience in different modalities—the same idea. So my conviction is that if you write a book or make a painting or have a piece of music that you've come up with—or anything really, creatively—and you wish it to both survive the first six weeks of its birth and then thrive in a more perpetual way in society and culture, then people have to be able to experience and engage with your idea in multiple modalities. I would always write a book, because that's what I do. Others produce a podcast or write a piece of music—whatever the same sort of things. Any one of us needs to make sure that that reappears and is experienceable and interactable with in different modalities. So my book should have some Instagram reels. There might be YouTube shorts, there might be a podcast, there might be a piece of music associated with it, it could be a movie. It could be a game, it could be an app. You really have to think about allowing your creative idea—more than your creative artefact—to live in culture. Sure, you want to make an income from the artefact that you are good at producing. As many of your listeners, and I, would be writers of books, we want that to persist as a revenue stream, and it should do. I would simply argue that making sure that whatever you've produced in your book is manifest, and people can interact with it in other modalities, is the surest way to get it seen and discovered. Jo: Yes, it's interesting. I've actually started looking at making my non-fiction books into skills. Nadim: Yes. Jo: And also making markdown MD files—books as markdown files for agents to buy. Nadim: Very good. You are way ahead of the curve. Jo: Well, I sell on Shopify, as do many listeners, and Shopify, as I'm sure you know, is now enabled for agentic purchasing. We are in ChatGPT. So it's really interesting to think, well, if the agents go shopping for people now and in the future, what you want is to be able to find it. Also, I haven't actually put an explicit licence, but people email me and say, “Can I upload your books into an LLM?” And I'm like, “If you buy a copy from me, then yes, you can.” Nadim: Yes. Jo: So I think it's changing. And as you say, I do think that people are more and more going to want to say “buy the PDF and put it in NotebookLM” or use it as a skill. Nadim: That's right. Jo: That kind of thing. Nadim: Yes, and then they go on a walk with their dog and they listen to the podcast about your book, which they've created on NotebookLM. It's exactly that. I think my worst fear for publishers is that they lose so much of the value chain—distribution, creative collaboration, all sorts of things along the way—that the worst position they could end up in is simply as book manufacturers, which would be just one small manifestation of a creative idea. Jo: Well, I'm excited about the future. I hope you are too. I think you are. What are you particularly excited about in terms of the changes coming? Nadim: Well, if I can be my most extravagant now, my greatest excitement about AI and the changes that are coming are that it'll produce what I describe as the Panthropic. The Panthropic is a way of seeing AI not as a companion or some anthropomorphic being, but instead the repository of everything that humans have ever thought or felt or created or shared, accessible to us all in an anonymised way. It's just a repository of interactable information. My excitement about it is that the liberation that that gives to information—which becomes knowledge, which of course we all know leads to some power—should result in truly new thinking, new philosophy, new spiritualism, possibly new questions about what it is to be a human being and what life on Earth is all about. New economics, new employment, new education. I think one can too easily underestimate the massive liberation of intellectual consideration and creativity that's about to surf across the globe, and I'm so excited by it. Jo: Mm-hmm. Yes, me too. Very interesting times ahead. So where can people find you and your books and everything you do online? Nadim: I think the easiest thing is just to go to LinkedIn and find me there as Nadim Sadek. You can also go to my personal website, which is NadimSadek.com, and that'll take you wherever you want on different journeys and different parts of my career. It'll also give you links to books. Of course, they're available in all formats—audio, paperback, ebook—and in many different languages, all through Amazon and other platforms, and Spotify and Audible and all the usual things. Jo: All the usual things. Well, thanks so much for your time, Nadim. That was great. Nadim: It's a pleasure. Thank you so much for having me.The post AI, Creativity, And The Future of Publishing with Nadim Sadek first appeared on The Creative Penn.

In this episode of Gangland Wire, retired Kansas City Police Intelligence detective Gary Jenkins sits down with former drug trafficker Carlos Perez for a direct, unfiltered discussion about the evolution of the drug trade in America. Carlos has a new book out titled Pedro Pan: The Product of a Revolution Gone Bad The conversation opens with recent controversy surrounding the reported death of  the Jalisco New Generation Cartel leader El Mencho, and what that development signals for the balance of power among modern Mexican cartels. From there, Gary and Carlos trace the arc of the drug trade from the Caribbean smuggling routes of the 1970s and 1980s to the dominance of today's cartel-controlled corridors. Carlos reflects on the era of Ronald Reagan and the early “War on Drugs,” describing a time when enforcement was uneven and smugglers routinely exploited weak regulatory environments in places like the Bahamas. He explains how traffickers adapted faster than policymakers, using maritime routes, small aircraft, and coordinated pickup operations to move multi-ton quantities of narcotics. Gary and Carlos contrast those earlier days with modern interdiction efforts—advanced Coast Guard surveillance, satellite tracking, military-grade radar, and cross-border intelligence sharing. What was once opportunistic smuggling has evolved into highly structured cartel logistics supported by corrupt officials and narco-state dynamics. Carlos provides a candid account of his own rise in the trade. Starting as a construction laborer, he moved into pickup crews retrieving floating bales of drugs in open water. Over time, he became involved in larger-scale operations involving aircraft and organized distribution networks. He details the operational mechanics, the risks, and the constant calculation between profit and prison—or worse. The discussion also explores the blurred lines between political authority and cartel influence. Carlos explains how governments in certain regions became intertwined with trafficking operations, illustrating how power, money, and violence intersect across borders. In the second half of the episode, Carlos shifts to a personal reckoning. He discusses the moral compromises required in the drug trade and the toll it takes on family and identity. Ultimately, he chose to step away, prioritizing stability and long-term survival over fast money. Now living a legitimate life, Carlos has documented his journey in his book Pedro Pan: The Product of a Revolution Gone Bad, offering readers a firsthand account of smuggling culture, Cuban heritage, revolution-era influences, and the psychological weight of that world. His story reflects both personal accountability and a broader commentary on the human side of organized crime. This episode blends law enforcement perspective with insider testimony, giving listeners a rare dual lens: the cop who chased traffickers and the man who once outran them. Hit me up on Venmo for a cup of coffee or a shot and a beer @ganglandwire Click here to “buy me a cup of coffee” Subscribe to the website for weekly notifications about updates and other Mob information. To go to the store or make a donation or rent Ballot Theft: Burglary, Murder, Coverup, click here To rent ‘Brothers against Brothers’ or ‘Gangland Wire,’ the documentaries click here.  To purchase one of my books, click here. Transcript [0:00] Hey, all you wiretappers, Gary Jenkins, retired Kansas City Police Intelligence [0:03] Unit detective. It’s great to be back here in the studio. It’s a cold day in Kansas City, Missouri, but we’re going to talk to a warm state and with a man that lives in that warm state, Carlos Perez. Welcome, Carlos. How are you doing, Gary? Doing good? Yeah, I’m doing good. A little cold, and I know it’s much warmer down there. We talked about that. Carlos was involved in the drug business, which is quite topical right now, especially today. Now, this won’t come out today, but as of over the weekend, the Mexican government arrested the El Mencho, the head of that, I can’t remember the name of that cartel. It was a Western Mexico, the state of Jalisco cartel. And somehow he got killed on the way to Mexico City as they’re transporting him. And his guys, the cartel members, are going crazy. Carlos, let’s talk about that a little bit, about this new war on drugs. When I was in Ronnie Reagan’s war on drugs, it was different than it is now. Now we have this new war on drugs with blowing drug boats out of the water. And this guy dies on the way to the bigger jail. Well, let’s talk about that a little bit. Carlos, how would you, as a former drug trafficker, how do you react to that? [1:18] The laws change. And the more that the smugglers change, the more that the system to catch them changes also. In fact, when you’re talking about Ronald Reagan’s war on drugs, there was quite a few things that allowed the smugglers to succeed. One was, most of it, and I’m talking Caribbean now, most of it was going through the Bahamas. The Bahamas had laws at that time where anything governmental was not allowed to land nor dock a boat anywhere in the Bahamas without the permission of the Bahamian government. Which, by the time they got to wherever, if they reacted, if they were advised of some drugs coming in, it would take them a long time to react. I think they had two boats for all the islands that had to travel back and forth. You never, you couldn’t, they couldn’t, the DEA, the Coast Guard, they couldn’t catch you. [2:12] And when you fly a plane in, you just land anywhere and say hello to the DEA as they’re flying by because they can’t land. And therefore, you score the load that you have. Nowadays, Jesus God Almighty, now you’ve got the Coast Guard out there. You’ve got the Coast Guard citation constantly flying, plus Navy. But you couldn’t get it done. And back in those days, that’s the way it was done. It was the Bahamas played a huge part. The prime minister of the Bahamas was so heavily, even though he never. [2:42] Did any time or anything he was heavily involved he took payoffs to left left and right the whole the situation is completely different now you got AWACS flying overhead that can hear you when you’re in the bathroom anybody here’s my opinion on that I want to know who in the hell was in charge of sending those boats out of Venezuela that after the first one got blown up who was telling them to keep sending boats over now if maduro this is my theory if maduro was smart he would have stopped that if he was really the one in charge he would have gone god you got to make me look better you can’t keep doing it that tells me he was not in charge of the shit okay so there’s someone behind that kept going send them we got to see if we can score keep the score, i don’t know how he kept doing that that was to me that was such a stupid move especially when you You see that you’ve got half of America’s Navy sitting on your doorstep, and you keep trying to send drugs. What are you, nuts? The Pacific, they should have gone over to the Pacific, where there’s less surveillance, and maybe run it up the Pacific coast by land. [3:53] Okay. Try to get it into Mexico by land. Because back in the day, Mexico was not really involved at all in that. It was the Caribbean. And then when the Colombian cartel, which was Medellin cartel, when they stopped losing so many loads, they started to go to Mexico. And through Mexico, they just flew small planes, landed in the woods somewhere in Mexico, and then they moved it up. That was not – you weren’t doing that in the Caribbean by that time. And talking about Reagan’s war on drugs, I had two – this is the sideline. I had two little boats coming in from the Bahamas that had marijuana on them. [4:35] I still got to laugh at this freaking idiot. One of them, they were coming in from – Bimney’s only 47 miles away. You can almost do it on the fumes of a gas tank. This guy forgot to gas up. Coming over, he gets stopped by the Marine Patrol, right? As they’re searching him, the other boat had gone through but was wondering where his partner was, and he goes back to see where the guy is. [5:01] How’s that for – anyway, they get them both. It was a total of about 1,200 pounds. That had come from Jamaica, that’s about –, And the vice president, who was Bush, was at the Coast Guard dock when they were unloading the boats. And I was sitting there watching, going, damn, they look like my boats. And when I investigated, it was a—but that was one little incident that had happened. But the difference between yesterday, yesteryear, and now is chronologically things change. They trump the other everybody that was a president or that that had something to do with stopping the trade with drugs never really stuck their foot in deep to stop it it makes me feel like yeah you’re not really you’re talking a lot but you’re not really doing much because if i was a cop my god i usually i’d have had all kinds of medals from stopping these people because it’s an easy thing but no one really had the interest who was involved economically up the top god and only In the Bahamas, I knew who it was. It was the prime minister. Knew his people real well. In the States, everything changes every couple of years. And you don’t know what they’re thinking, what their process of thought is to try to stop this. You know what it was? None. They didn’t try. Okay, they did not try. [6:22] There used to be, oh God, probably about two or three DC-3s a night landing in Bimini, 47 miles away. Okay? Each one of them had 10,000 pounds on it. The boats were running up the river, the Miami River. Once you get inside on a river, inside land, you pretty much already scored. That changed. Then it went to freighters, fast boats going out, picking up, coming in. Then when the United States stopped that, when they declared, we’re going to be able to stop any boat anywhere in international waters. You couldn’t do it back then. [7:02] When that ended then you began with the airplanes the airplanes would take it this is still back when you when the US or any governmental agency could not, set foot in the Bahamian territory, Bahamian waters, without the prime minister’s knowledge. The prime minister’s involved. You’re not going to get it. It’s not going to happen. So that change, and it went to small airplanes. Fly it in anywhere you want in the Bahamas, and then get your boats, and from there on in, try to see what you’re thinking, your process of thought is going to be to get it from the Bahamas, some of the shorter points to the States and to Miami at that point. One of them for me was easy. And that was because I had information on the Miami tower and where in the hell everything was at any point in time. So I would sit and wait for my messenger to get back to me, to tell me where the smoker was, which was the big Coast Guard boat and where the citation was. Once I knew that, I knew I could come across. And the only thing I was going to run into was fishermen. [8:10] So things changed. And then they allowed things change after that. And obviously they were allowed to go into the Bahamas and do whatever they wanted. But that was when Pinland was finally out. I don’t know who the prime minister became after that, but it changed. And now it became, this is why I think that the cartels were stupid. They, instead of doing as much as you could without getting noticed, they started bringing in loads of 10,000 and 20,000 kilos. I was like, God, what the hell do they get all that? I know where they get it, but since I know how the situation goes, I want to know how they amass it and get it onto one boat or one container or whatever and not have it noticed. That’s just way too much to not notice at one point or another. People get edgy around shit like that. In other words, I could take two people and put them in front of a container and separate them and tell one of them, that’s full of drugs, and then tell the other one, no, that’s full of furniture. And then stand both of them there and see who gets nervous. [9:16] It’s human nature. It’s human nature. If you know something bad is going on, to feel it and to react. Why they did that, I don’t know. I was one of the ones, if not the only one, that was sent to Mexico to teach them how to put airstrips in the middle of the jungle, how to protect them, what to do with them, where to put potholes with certain rocks, get them out when they play in the stomach, put them back in when he’s done so if anyone else tries to land, they’re gone. But how it got so deep, I’ll never understand that. And I was pretty much in the beginning of smuggling as to notice chronologically how everything’s seen because I stayed for quite a while. Yeah. Now, Carlos, you’ve written a book about this. What’s the name of that book? The book is called Heisting the Beard. I just need the beard. The beard with a D, meaning Fidel Castro. Ah, interesting. Yeah, he’s just in Cubans when they go like this to their chin or they mention him and they mention him as the beard. He was heavily involved in the decision-making of Cuba running drones. [10:27] That book is about, oh, I ran into a guy. This is how this happens, which is really fun. I ran into a guy who I used to call him by the name of Banco. And he came and told me that he knew where there was a big load of drugs, jewels that they had pilfered from the ocean where they knew that shipwrecks have gone down. Because no one can dive around Cuba. And Cuba is a country that held all the gold before it went to Spain. Everything stopped there and went on. So he told me he knew where there was a warehouse that was holding that plus a lot of coke. And I had ways to get in. I have a friend who’s Bahamian, who was actually one of my partners, who’s from Ragged Island in the Bahamas. Ragged Island is maybe… [11:17] 20 miles off the Cuban coast, down on the eastern end of Cuba. So it was easy for me to sneak in. Everyone thinks of Cuba as this military power, Russia’s buddy. They didn’t have shit. They couldn’t put a plane in the air. They didn’t have patrol boats. They had patrol boats, but I swear I could out-swim them. It was ridiculous to see at what point they were developed as far as a country. And it was like, everything is going downhill as today, and it keeps going downhill. So I would sneak in on a Zodiac. [11:53] And I’d hit the coast, middle of the night. No one would see me. I speak perfect Spanish. I speak a Cuban dialect. So I wasn’t going to get caught by it because I looked like a black bean in a pot of white rice. It wasn’t going to be like that. So we figured out where everything was, and we went in and took a little look. And got awake after a lot of headaches, but we were able to do that. There’s other instances where there’s an airport right next to Havana called the Varadero Airport, and it’s a military airport. And I know that they were holding a lot of cocaine that was going in there. The reason I know that is because hearsay in the streets in Miami, you go drink a little Cuban coffee somewhere, you hear assholes talking garbage, and they would say that they were getting boats ready to go to Cuba to bring in whatever they had. So it’s not really why they make it a mystery as to why they were involved. If you think logically, let’s say you leave Colombia and you’re doing business with Cuba. Wouldn’t it be safe to just, oh, you’re chasing me, let me land in Cuba and I got no problem, not because they don’t want you here, but they want me here. That’s logically speaking. So why that… [13:11] That mystery among people that they weren’t involved. What are you, crazy? Not only that, recently, you might have seen it, they’ve had a Carlos Leder Riva. Okay. [13:27] Carlos, can you say that over again? It just zeroed out to say that over again. After you said Carlos Leder. Leder Rivas. Yeah. Now, whatever you said after that, say that over again. [13:45] Carlos Lerder Rivas recently has done some interviews on the drug trade. He did a lot of time in the States over the Norman’s Key transporting point where all the coke would go there. And then, like I told you before, they fly it into the Bahamas and then over into the States. He recently has been on saying how he was personally involved with Raul Castro. I have no doubt about that. I knew him personally. i flew a couple times into that island where it was transported out so i know what he was told the reason i also know that is everybody has this pablo escobar myth in their head he was neither the boss and he was neither the money man the money people were the ochoas the military his might and his force did not come from him and his mouth that he could do this and that it comes from rodriguez gacha who had a 2 000 man private army and he was one of the members of the cartel and they never tell you who started it all and it was carlos letter rivas he was the one that started the cartel he’s the one that wanted to be on in the colombian parliament and was looking for votes escobar is he was a he was a late comer into all that stuff the only reason they put him out there that I can understand is because they just wanted to figure out that they could knock the hell out of later on. [15:09] Okay? Because when he started fighting against Los Pepes, which was that organization that got together to try to kill Pablo, Pablo reversed it on those guys. He got rid of almost all of them, but it wasn’t him. It was Rodriguez. [15:24] Rodriguez gotcha. He’s the one. And he was involved in the Emerald business before he got into the coke business. He was the guy, let me tell you what, when Pablo was around, and I only saw that once, when Pablo was around Gacha, okay, this was down in La Guajira, in the high desert in Colombia. When he was around Gacha, you could tell that he was subordinate. He was scared. He was like, damn, if I mess up with this guy, he’ll take my head off. [15:53] So people really have the whole story, Pablo, Pablo, my, you know what, Pablo, my ass. There’s a lot of people who you had to have money to do those things yeah and in those days they were strong enough because of the ochoas well they could gather big loads a thousand two thousand keys and put it all together but as time went on chronologically that shit changed okay i can remember once getting a load where it had it damn you they labeled it they labeled everyone One had one name, one had the other So what they were doing at that time Was it got so tough on them Because of Pablo’s big mouth And because of his, I’m going to take over Blowing up a plane Doing a few other attacking parliament All those things You couldn’t put those loads together To me there’s no cartels anymore To me they’re government Narco systems You. [16:55] The Mexican government is definitely involved with the cartels. And as you saw, we went after a cartel in Venezuela, but the head of the cartel was the Venezuelan government. So what they are is narco states now. And you know how hard it is to attack or to deal with a narco state? Now you’re dealing with a government entity that has a lot of power. It’s a completely different ballgame. And Venezuela themselves, including Cuba, had a diplomatic immunity flying into different countries with the drugs. And they could put a load of cocaine on and fly into Spain, and they had no problem with it. And they were doing those kind of things, I would say, recently, like within the last 10 or 15 years. Maybe even since Maduro has been there, which is about 20 years, that they’ve been doing that. Really, the United States can get information on anything they want. They had this information but couldn’t do anything about it. [17:57] So chronologically, everything changes. Back in the beginning, let me tell you, the first time I made a little money was hauling some marijuana with old Touch Brown from the Everglades. And I worked like a Hebrew slave for four days in the swamp hauling bails from marijuana and into the into the everglades and then over into miami and it was completely different game and you know what they didn’t cheat me for one penny they didn’t cheat me for one penny and how much came in 40 tons on one of the boats yeah it was 80 000 pounds on a freighter and we worked like little like slaves and they paid me like two weeks later, they paid me $2. I’ll tell you that story in a minute. You asked me a while ago how I got started. Should I answer that, or you got another question you want for me? No, go ahead. How’d you get started in that? You started out as a grunt, as we say in the military. You started out as a low-end worker, a guy that transports bales. What did you do? You started saving your money up, and you knew where the connections were, and finally you You bought your own load and just kept getting bigger and bigger. [19:11] In a sense, yeah, it wasn’t drastic. When I came in, here’s the story. I’m in Texas. My mom calls me up and tells me I have an uncle who’s in Texas. He wants to see me. I get together with him, and he’s driving a brand-new Cadillac. This is a guy who, two and two to him is 22. I know he’s my uncle, but he’s a dumb son of a bitch. [19:35] He’s telling me that he’s got a, you know what a roach coach is? Yeah. with those construction things with food. He tells me he has a red smoke in Miami and that he bought a house, got a house, he’s doing really good. And I looked at him and I said, bro, you’re the one that’s crushed. You’re the wetback. I came on a plane a long time ago. He’s telling me stories. What’s going on here? So anyway, he tells me and I say to him, get me a job. I was working as a carpenter in Houston. Straight out of college, I’m banging nails. I said, God damn, I’m banging nails. but I got an education here. What’s going on? So anyway, I loaded up in Houston. I head and I end up in Coconut Grove working for one of the bosses. My job was $500 a week and I had to go and sleep on his yacht about 7 p.m. And by 6 in the morning when the workers started coming in, just go. That went on for about four or five months and I finally said, let me make some real money because I saw he was still moving and doing things economically economically moving forward, and I was sleeping on a boat. So he finally gets me an interview with two of the bosses. And this is a building in Miami that was called the DuPont Plaza building. [20:52] And so we go to the meeting, and I’m talking to the two guys. One of them, they called him El Coronel, and the other one, El Colorado. The Colonel and Red. They were the ones that were handling it. And this was, by the way, this was marijuana, coming from Colombia at that time. So we go in there, and he tells me, no problem. I’ll pay you $2 a pound. Now, understand that at that time, at that point in time, my mind is in Jersey and New York. And if you’re moving 20 pounds from one place to the other, it’s a lot. You’re not dealing with loads at that time. We’re talking, what, 1977 in New York? And I looked at him, I said, you’re fucking crazy. You think I’m going to risk my ass for $2 a pound? Even if it’s 300 pounds, that’s $600. Are you fucking nuts? [21:45] My uncle grabbed me by the shirt, stood me up and said, excuse me. Walked me outside and said, listen, there’s 40 tons coming in. You want the job or not? I went back in. I apologized to you guys. I said, no problem. I will go to work. From that point on, there wasn’t, that’s just, was right about at the end of the big freighters. And so now my uncle invites me to go to Bimini because he had a friend there and they were going to do some job. I don’t know. When we go, I end up running into a younger guy, Bahamian, and I became partners with him. We call him Dreamer. And I said, look, if you can set things up over here and gather up whatever materials you can gather up, I’ll come and get it and we’ll be partners. At that time, a lot of freighters and a lot of boats were being chased by the Coast Guard and what they would do is they would drop, they would dump it overboard. Oh yeah. Ergo the, what they call it, the square grouper. [22:44] Yeah, I’ve heard that before. Bales were floating everywhere. You could go out. So what he would do is he would go on a boat, find bales that were floating. He would call me up, and he would tell me, hey, I salvaged a 300-horsepower engine. Come and get it. I knew what the weight was, so I knew what kind of boat I had to take. So I bought an 18-foot formula. I dug out the hole in the bottom. I made a secret hole. What the what cubans call a clavo a clavo which is you’re hiding it underboard he called me up one day tells me there’s three he can get 300 pounds i left at eight in the morning was back in miami by 11 30 left at about 12 30 went back and picked up another load so in that first job we ended up making a couple hundred thousand dollars from there we bought a bigger boat, Now he started patrolling, All the area where the boats were coming in Because everything flows from the Gulf Down in this area, flows north The Gulf Stream goes north So everything’s going to float this way somehow. [23:54] We did that for probably a year Until one time, I was over there. We were going fishing, and we ran into a duffel bag. The duffel bag had 65 kilos in it that was just floating. At that time, it cost probably around $40,000 a kilo in Miami, let alone New York. We didn’t bother to take it up north. Sold it all in Miami. I used to say to myself, where in the hell does all this cash come from? Because they would pay. We made a lot of money that time. And then we had seen… Carlos, let me interject here. No, no. [24:38] You were making hundreds of thousands of dollars just by picking up cocaine and marijuana that had been thrown off other boats. So you didn’t even have to go buy it, really. You guys were just picking it up, the square groupers, and then putting it together and then bringing it to money. That’s crazy. You are an entrepreneur. You’re a guy that sees an opportunity and seizes it. Tell you what. And that’s exactly how it went, Gary. When we made that big chunk of money, we had seen how things were going because we knew that planes were coming in and landing. And they had whatever it is that they were hauling, either coke or marijuana. So with that amount of money, we bought a plane and I decided to become a pilot. I said, hell, we’re going to cut this down. I’ll fly. We’ll save money that way. And now we can talk to the people down in Jamaica or Columbia and say, hey, we’re coming together. We’re taking a responsibility. We’re not going to middle it. We’re not going to find it. We’re going to do the job. And it took off from there. [25:43] Took off real good from there. Eventually, I see that you are going to build in to have a legitimate life, become a horse breeder and a ranch owner and rub elbows with all the kind of the muckety mucks, if you will, down there in Florida. So tell us about that transition and how did your life change during that time? [26:04] I had a family. I had four kids by then. And I knew that I was in a business where the chances were threefold. I either score or I die or I go to jail. And I didn’t like any of those odds at that time. I was like, you know what? I’ve made enough money. I got a small little ranch out here. I don’t need to do anything. And I decided that was it. I don’t need to be doing this anymore. I’m set. And I’m the kind of person, I’m set with what I mathematically calculate. I’m not like I need almost $20 million. I calculated it to where I knew I could be comfortable. And talking about the mucks and the big famous guys, I had lunch with Sam Walton one time. How did you do that? [26:59] I was at his, his daughter, Nancy Walton, Laurie was heavily into the horse. And by that time I was into horses also. So we used to, I used to show them all over the country and we were in, in Illinois at a horse show. And the setup that his daughter used to put out there was unbelievable. It was like, whew, she really put out a spread. And he happened to be there one time. And it wasn’t like I went and had lunch with him, but a few people sat around, ate a couple of grilled burgers. And that’s my story of Sam Wolfe, the richest man in the world at that time. And look who he’s having lunch with. how really i’ve noticed going to horse races that a lot of the support staff are all hispanic i think because hispanic people know how to deal with horses have an affinity affinity for horses, you’re absolutely right the barn work even me and who as far as the horses went i was a nobody i just had my own little stretch even my workers were mexican they just are good at it they’re very good at that. Interesting. They understand country life, too. Yeah. [28:10] So, what happened? You’re like, you’re going straight. You haven’t really done any time. Surely DEA, I know enough about them that they keep files, and they may not do anything about you now, but they know a lot about you, and they don’t forget. So, what happened here? You can’t feed the government. It’s an entity, not an individual. You know, one guy prosecutes you and he retires. That doesn’t mean your case is over. He hands it over to somebody else and it goes on and on. They didn’t get, I didn’t get caught doing anything. I had too many ways to outmaneuver them and not because I was smarter than anybody else. It’s because I had contact. I had a contact, like I told you, at the Miami Tower where I would call him and say, hey, I need to know where this was. He would call me back and let me know exactly when I could cross. [29:06] So it was a matter of, in my case, I didn’t play Russian roulette. I tried to put things on more of the positive end of it on my side but i’m so they arrested me for money because they thought i had too much first the irs came in and they started checking out the next thing i know is i’m being visited by by the fbi but it was alphabet soup when they showed up at their hotel yeah not the farm i was like what the hell are these guys doing here anyway they grabbed me took me in and i’ll give you a funny story and you used to be a policeman yes all They pick me up, and I say to the guy, the old James Cagney state, I’ll be home before you tonight. Yeah, I’ll be home. You’ll be still writing your report when I’m back home. You’ll still be filling out the paperwork, but I’ll be sitting at home. [29:58] So I played that act. And actually, I did get home pretty quick. I was able to call my lawyer. He actually called up the mayor of Fort Myers. His name was Wilbur Smith. And he was a lawyer also. And Wilbur is the one that got me. It happened to have been on a Friday, which meant if they didn’t work something out, I was going to sit my ass in the jail until Monday. When the judge comes up. But Wilbur got me out of it. Wait a minute. Wait till the dogs get, okay. Can you start that with Wilbur? Wilbur got me out of that when the dogs quit. Let’s see. [30:38] Anyway, Wilbur gets me out of it. I’m walking down the hall with Wilbur to go see the judge real quick. And he says to me, he goes, do you do drugs? Do you have any drugs on you? And I’m like, oh, Jesus. I don’t know. I smoke weed, but I don’t touch anything else. I never have. And he goes, so, okay, we’re okay with that. And in my pocket. I had a joint in my pocket. I pull it out and I go, here. Oh, Jesus Christ, put that back. Oh, Wilbur. Oh, Wilbur’s shit when he saw that. But anyway, I was home. I was home that night. Now, here’s another funny story. I had a, along with this story, I had a maid at the house at the farm. And she was Brazilian. And she was not a resident or anything. That girl took, when they came, went to pick me up. And they took me into, it was a U.S. Marshall. She took off running into the woods. and I’m talking deep Florida woods and when I got back home about an hour later she ends up showing up and I said what are you doing why did you take off like that I was scared they were going to deport me, if you were scared what do you think I was. [31:46] And when they showed up that one time when they showed up you could have sworn that they were picking up Pablo Escobar it was alphabet soup long guns long freaking guns not just People holding their little long guns. Yeah. And I’m like, all this for me? Really? And you know what it is? It’s not long before that happened. They had called me in to do a polygraph. [32:14] The FBI did. I had no problem because they were trying to associate me with the head of the Indian cartel in America, the guy that handled everything, including the money. You might have, did you see Cocaine Cowboys Kings of Miami? Yeah, I did. Okay. The one guy, George Valdez, that was pretty much testifying against the other guys that he said he helped. Like how can you you’re snitching right in front of everybody bro anyway he i had a farm next to his, and the next thing i know because i guess they tried to associate me with him i had nothing to do with him next thing i know the fbi is calling me out they do a polygraph even my lawyer said don’t do the polygraph it’s not mandatory said i got nothing to hide now they told me they were going to ask me about horses they ended up asking me everything except horses until i finally yeah took those things off my fingers i pulled them off and i said this is done and i left not long after that is when they swatted in i was like jesus god who do they think they’re picking up here i’m just a in in uh in sense i’m still even if they know everything i’m still a grunt, I’m working for you. It’s not like I’m Mr. Put-it-together shit. You call me up, hey, we got a job. You want it? Yes or no? But it was unbelievable. [33:41] I went to jail. I did some time in jail. When I got out, I never once again really, even though I got 100 phone calls about you want to go to work, you want to listen to that, I never really thought about it again. My kids were growing up. The youngest one was six or seven by then. And they had suffered because I was gone. Yeah. And I didn’t like that. That made me feel like shit. [34:10] It just, it got to the point where when I was working, I looked at everything economically. Hey, this is what I’ll be able to have. Once you have what you want, economics is bullshit if that’s what you’re working for, because you already have it. Yeah. And when I got out, my thoughts were completely different. My thoughts were that the money is not going to solve any issues I may have. Physically, maybe. Mentally, no. mentally, I’ve got to learn how to deal with a little bit of reality here and figure out who is affected by my actions. And the people that were affected by my actions were people that were close to me. And I didn’t enjoy that. I didn’t enjoy that at all. It made me double take. It made me go inside and do a lot of things. [35:04] So from that point on, I really didn’t know what to do. And so I have a friend who is a big-time producer in Hollywood. We grew up together in Jersey, who told me, wow, you’ve got a lot of stories. You should start writing. I never thought about writing. So I started putting down ideas. I wrote a book. I wrote a bunch of political essays on what was going on in Cuba. See, I grew up in a revolutionary family. My father was in intelligence, and my uncle trained the troops that were going to go to the Bay of Pigs, among other incursions into Cuba. So I came over, I’m six years old. I’m a Peter Pan kid. I don’t know if you know what that is. Now, what is that? You’ve mentioned that before. What is that? Tell the guys. Peter Pan is, it’s not a good translation because it has nothing to do with Peter Pan. In Spanish, it’s Pedro Pan and had to do with a little kid eating some bread or whatever. But in 1960, the Catholic Church got together and decided to send the children out of Cuba so they wouldn’t suffer the wraths of the revolution. In essence, 14,000 kids were put on planes and sent into the States. I was one of them. Wow. I ended up in Miami. [36:27] I was one of them, and I was actually one of the lucky ones because I had family in Miami at that time, so I was able to stay with them. My parents were still back in Cuba applying to leave. Back then, they called the freedom flights. So a lot of those kids though they were sent some of them were sent to alaska montana wyoming really they were dispersed all over through families that were willing to help and and keep them until their parents came so i was one of them that grew up because of my father and my uncle the conversation most of the time if not all the time was around cuba and his freedom so the revolution at that time is going really strong in New Jersey. There’s a family in New Jersey by the name, the last name is Cook. [37:17] And they owned a big factory called Cook, Color, and Chemical. They were very wealthy people, but evidently they lost a lot of land or investments in Cuba. So they were willing to help the revolution and the revolutionaries. They had a big farm in this small little town called Hope. And that little town, you had all the Cuban revolutionaries up there getting ready. I’m talking about going into the woods with every kind of equipment you could think of. And they were training to go to Cuba. Now, here I am, six, seven years old. And I’m running around the woods with these maniacs. They would dress me in camouflage and tell me I was the next generation of Cuban revolutionaries. And I’m like, what the fuck is this guy talking? I didn’t. I was having a good time with all these guys. [38:06] And it ended up being that the new york times caught wind that there were these crazy cubans. [38:12] In the woods in jersey and they had to move their operations down to florida but about what happened in jersey in jersey the mafia at that time they were all involved with the kennedy and the prior to the assassination and everything that was going on they thought that the cubans did it they thought to the mafia. They didn’t know who did it. But there was a get-together one time. I was probably about seven or eight years old, and it was a dove shoot where they had a thousand doves, and they would all line them up and let some of them go, and then they would do a big dove fricassee. But that meeting, I just remember the names because I was being introduced, the son of, and this is Mr. Spud. The names never left me. One of them was Santos Traficante, who was the head of the mafia in in in tampa the other one was fat tony salerno who was the head of the mafia in new york there was my mom’s cousin who was an fbi uh agent and a bunch of other guys that looked exactly like him they dressed exactly like him well i could pick you out of a barrel boy and a lot of these other i grew up in the jersey new york area so i know what tough guys act especially of the Italian guys. So there was a bunch of them walking around like they could take on the world. And this is part of my life. I’m a young person doing it. I really don’t know what’s going on, but I’m picking up on all this stuff. [39:40] They moved to Florida. I’m away from all that stuff for a while. But my parents regularly go to Florida for a visit, for vacation. So every year, I’m running into my uncle and the things that he’s doing, what’s going on. [39:57] And so the life never mentally never leaves me. I’m always, I’m always hearing next year in Havana, we’re going to get them, all this nonsense. So the years go on and on and the situation, you wonder how the smuggling game got started. The smuggling games basically, and I saw a report on this not long ago, some lady reporting on it. You had a lot of educated men that were involved in the revolution that wanted to get their country done. The U.S. government, Secret Service at the ICIA, whoever they may be, cut off the funds when all the bullshit with Cuba was done. You’re not allowed to leave from U.S. soil if we cut you with any arms headed down. And they caught a lot of these Cubans trying to go to Cuba on little boats with all kinds of armament. They didn’t do shit to them. Okay, they just slapped them on the head and don’t do that. But it got to the point where the government was not funding that part of the Cuban Revolution anymore. What do a bunch of college-educated, university-educated men do? [41:06] They’re going to go work at the Fountain Blue? My father worked at the Fountain Blue when he first got to Miami. And there was water fountains that said whites, blacks, and Cubans. He was still trying to drink. It’s like my mother used to tell me. I didn’t know I was white until I got to this country. And now all of a sudden we have white Spanish, white this, white this. It’s ridiculous. So these men were not going to go to work with a little bacon with a little Cuban coffee. They have all these contacts all through Central and South America because of the revolution. So who becomes the primary smugglers? [41:44] Yes, the Cuban revolutionaries. And that’s how smuggling was started in the Caribbean. I’m involved with all these people because of my father and my uncle. My legacy is I can get right in. I don’t have to prove anything to anybody. And that’s how I got to my uncle and him giving me the job with the guy. No, that nonsense. So it’s like the grateful dad said, what a long, strange trip it’s been. It’s been. [42:13] So where are you at now with your life? [42:17] Right now, we’re putting together hopefully a TV show on basically my life, but my life in a novel way, not in a very direct memoir way. And I continue to write. I am married to a wonderful woman who actually led me down this path. I was sitting on my farm doing quite well. My wife at that time had passed away from pancreatic cancer. That’s a death sentence. Yeah, I’ve heard that. [42:52] I didn’t have a will, and everything was in her name because I wanted to protect the family. Yeah. So when she dies, everything’s gone. I’m not knowing which way to turn here. I was 50, 70 years old. I thought I was going to be relaxing and fishing every day, and it didn’t work out that way. I was going downhill like a sled in a snowstorm, boy. I was going to hit eventually. I don’t know what bottom would have been, but I knew there wouldn’t be good. And I ran into a wonderful woman who led me down the road of, we’ve got to write, we’ve got to do this. And she is my manager, and we eventually got married. And sometimes things are tough, but they’re a whole lot better than getting that bottom. Yeah, really. Better than you’re out of jail. You’re not in jail. Not there anymore. What a long, strange trip it’s been for Carlos J.C. Perez. [43:57] I want to know how strange it gets to the point where the DEA comes to me to get information. And I’m like, you guys got to be kidding me. I always knew that when you’re in law enforcement, you depend on information. You go wherever you think the source is, that’s for sure. You think you can get something out of them. Exactly. They ended up being great, by the way. Great guys. Super nice guys. Okay? And if I said any different, I’d be lying. [44:28] But it doesn’t sound like you ever particularly worked for them. You didn’t go back in undercover for them either. No, no, I didn’t do that. Luckily, when I was doing the stuff that I was doing, it wasn’t out. It wasn’t a guns and roses type deal. I don’t ever remember collecting any money or doing anything where I had to have a gun on it. I’ll give you a little tidbit of something that just happened recently. I had to go into a government and reinstate my license or something like that. The lady’s going through it. She comes up with a ticket that I got in 19—now, I’m talking in the year 2000 and probably 14. She comes up with a ticket that I got in 82. It was a ticket. Yeah. The ticket was for $52. Two different tickets, 26 each. Okay. Yeah. You know what that ticket was for? I had come in from the Bahamas in the hull of the boat. I had 800 pounds. The Marine Patrol pulls me over and says, let me see what you got. They go through the whole thing. He finds two lobsters that I had in the live $26 per lobster. I got the ticket. The guy never checked the boat, never did anything. And I got in with 800 pounds, which at that time was like a quarter million bucks. [45:50] Oh my God. Life is funny, man. Life is funny. Life is funny. That’s for sure. All right. Carlos Perez. Now the name of the book and guys, I will, I will have a link in the show notes to it. Remind me of the name of the book, Carlos. Pedro Pan. Pedro Pan, as in Peter Pan. And Ron is bred in Spanish. So there’s something to think about the little magical character, Peter Pan. Not a thing. Not a thing. And it’s a product of a revolution gone bad, which basically is me. I’m an unfortunate product of that. Revolution. You’re back around now. You’re contributing to society. That’s the only thing that’s important in the end. Hey, I have a quick question. Did you ever hear of a book called The Corporation written by a guy named T.J. English? Oh, hell yeah. Read it from cover to cover. As a matter of fact, I know the guy. [46:46] What’s his name? Batista? Was it Jorge Batista? No, Battle. Battle, yeah. As a matter of fact, I know the guys that own the manuscript. Okay tj what’s his name what’s his last name tj english english the only thing he did was write the book off of the notes that they had gotten from a guy that i know his name is tony gonzalez tony gonzalez has another partner by the last name of freitas and what they did was they investigated battle over the years and years and and then somehow ran into english because he had written a couple of books on Cuba. And then T.J. English ended up writing that. And by the way, Battle took the New York mafia and put it on its knees. Yeah, I did a story on the book. And that’s true. He had to get permission. Actually, he had to get permission from back in the 60s from Fat Tony Salerno, and they couldn’t get an approval until Traficante stepped in and said, work with him. And what the hell were they doing then? They were killing each other. They were blowing up their little bolita houses and all that. Oh, that was crazy. But you know what? He was never any kind of a Cuban mafia boss. [48:05] He liked to fight chickens and play the numbers. The Cubans don’t really have a mafia per se. They’re too splintered. And in the mafia, you’ve got to go ask permission to do this and that. These crazy guys, they don’t ask anybody permission for anything. [48:19] Interesting that’s a that’s an interesting world that’s a whole different world that cuban, You’ve got the revolution on one side, the Castro revolution, and then you’ve got the anti-revolution against Castro that’s been going on all these years. And in the middle of it, you’ve got some of these people that were kicked out of Cuba that can’t get jobs and they only want you to work as a waiter or something. And so you go into business and the best business going with your connections is the drug business. And so it’s just a really interesting millage, if you will, or mix of people and situations down in the southwest part or southeast part of the United States. Oh, yeah, you’re right. It is a millage of like, how does this work? [49:04] There’s no sense to it sometimes. No, that’s for sure. I guess I’m glad they weren’t blowing boats out of the water. They might have got you back then. I can’t tell you what. They wouldn’t have dared because I would have said, I said, why don’t you do that? Oh, you get somebody else to do it. Yeah, probably what would have saved my ass anyway is that I have never, ever been money hungry. My family in Cuba, my great-grandfather was a sugar baron. And I’ve heard all the stories about all the money, but I’ve yet to see a penny. [49:36] I don’t work that way. I grew up with a bunch of humble people. And it wasn’t, damn sure, it wasn’t about money. And when I’m young, I’m not thinking like that. But now at my age, I go, wow, man, if I knew then, what do I know now? Yeah, really. All right, Carlos. Thanks a lot for coming on the show. I really appreciate it. No, no problem, Gary. Thanks for having me on. Okay.

Marco Buticchi"La più bella del mondo"Longanesi Editorewww.longanesi.itGallia, I secolo a.C. Un villaggio viene distrutto per stanare la druida Artio, ma la donna riesce a fuggire insieme a Lugh, suo apprendista. Quando Giulio Cesare invade la Gallia, Lugh viene catturato e, al seguito di Cesare, finisce in Egitto, alla corte di Cleopatra. Qui, tra i misteri dell'antica terra dei faraoni, perfeziona le arti magiche tramandategli dalla druida, immergendosi nel fascino occulto di una civiltà leggendaria…Europa, anni Venti. Sin da piccola, Hedwig Kiesler mostra una spiccata propensione per la recitazione e intraprende una promettente carriera come attrice. Hedwig conquista l'amore di Fritz Mandl, ricco mercante d'armi, e impara presto a memorizzare le informazioni raccolte nelle cene di lavoro del marito, alla presenza dei leader di un'Europa sull'orlo di un nuovo conflitto mondiale. Il destino però la conduce a Hollywood: è lì che cambia nome e diventa Hedy Lamarr, l'attrice «più bella del mondo». I servizi segreti statunitensi la mettono alle strette: è stata testimone di conversazioni riservate, conosce molte persone nella cerchia di Hitler e Mussolini, e può diventare la chiave per disinnescare la minaccia nazista.Hollywood, 2026. Oswald Breil e Sara Terracini sono ospiti alla notte degli Oscar. L'Academy conferisce un premio a Daniel Berg, anziano produttore di origini ebraiche. Quando l'uomo si alza per ricevere la statuetta viene ucciso con un colpo sparato da un'arma di precisione. Breil ha notato qualcosa e collabora con gli inquirenti. Da quel momento riceve una serie di minacce affinché abbandoni Hollywood e le indagini, ma questo non lo fermerà nella ricerca di una verità che può costargli la vita.Ancora una volta Marco Buticchi scava nella Storia portando alla luce i segreti che costellano la straordinaria carriera di Hedy Lamarr e i misteri che affondano le radici nell'epoca di Cesare e Cleopatra, dando vita a un romanzo carico di tensione e fascino.Marco Buticchi, il maestro italiano dell'avventura, è nato alla Spezia nel 1957 e ha viaggiato moltissimo per lavoro, nutrendo così anche la sua curiosità, il suo gusto per l'avventura e la sua attenzione per la storia e il particolare fascino dei tanti luoghi che ha visitato. È il primo autore italiano pubblicato da Longanesi nella collana «I maestri dell'avventura» (accanto a Wilbur Smith, Clive Cussler e Patrick O'Brian), in cui sono apparsi con grande successo di pubblico e di critica Le Pietre della Luna (1997), Menorah (1998), Profezia (2000), La nave d'oro (2003), L'anello dei re (2005), Il vento dei demoni (2007), Il respiro del deserto (2009), La voce del destino (2011), La stella di pietra (2013), Il segno dell'aquila (2015), La luce dell'impero (2017), Il segreto del faraone nero (2018), Stirpe di navigatori (2019), L'ombra di Iside (2020), Il mare dei fuochi (2021), Il serpente e il faraone (2022), L'oro degli dei (2023) e Il figlio della tempesta (2024), disponibili anche in edizione TEA, oltre a Scusi bagnino, l'ombrellone non funziona (2006) e a Casa di mare (2016), un appassionato ritratto del padre, Albino Buticchi. Nel dicembre 2008 Marco Buticchi è stato nominato Commendatore dal Presidente della Repubblica per aver contribuito alla diffusione della lingua e della letteratura italiana anche all'estero. www.marcobuticchi.itDiventa un supporter di questo podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/il-posto-delle-parole--1487855/support.IL POSTO DELLE PAROLEascoltare fa pensarehttps://ilpostodelleparole.it/

https://dangerouswisdom.org/Manda Scott's novel ANY HUMAN POWER is a Thrutopian Political Thriller aimed to craft a path through from exactly where we are to a flourishing future that we'd be proud to leave behind to the generations that come after us and for those who will inherit the planet after we die.The novel helps us explore the question: How do you help the people you love create a future you're proud to leave behind?Manda is a bestselling storyteller who brings together myths and speculative futures with a radical compassion, comes the story of a family at the heart of a political crisis and the ensuing uprising of a disenfranchised generation. A family that harnesses the skills and stories needed for real change, if they can choose the right path, before it is too late.Manda Scott is an award-winning novelist and host of the acclaimed Accidental Gods podcast. Best known for the Boudica: Dreaming series, her previous novels have been short-listed for the Orange Prize, the Edgar, Wilbur Smith and Saltire Awards and won the McIllvanney Prize.Her latest novel ANY HUMAN POWER is a Mytho-Political thriller which lays out a Thrutopian road map to a Dlourishing future we'd be proud to leave to the generations that come after us. With degrees in veterinary medicine and a Masters in Regenerative Economics, Manda's life is oriented towards creating radical new narratives that will pave the way to the total systemic change our culture – and our world – needs. Any Human Power is available for sale on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Any-Human-Power-Manda-Scott/dp/1914613562Readers can connect with Manda Scott on Facebook, Bluesky, Goodreads, Instagram,and LinkedIn.To learn more, visit https://mandascott.co.uk/ and https://accidentalgods.life

In the first of three special episodes Georgina talks to two of the authors short-listed for the much coveted 2025 Wilbur Smith Adventure Writing Prize, Nussaibah Younis for Fundamentally and Costanza Casati for Babylonia. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this special episode Georgina talks to two more authors short-listed for the 2025 Wilbur Smith Adventure Writing Prize, Diana McCaulay for A House for Miss Pauline and Jack Jordan for Redemption. (Jack Jordan Image (c) Phil Sharp, Diana McCaulay Image (c) Jeremy Francis) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In the final of three special episodes Georgina talks to two more of the authors short-listed for the much coveted 2025 Wilbur Smith Adventure Writing Prize, Nydia Hetherington for Sycorax and Samantha Sotto Yambao for Water Moon (Samantha Sotto Yambao image (c) Charm Cataag) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

He learnt his craft from Shyam Benegal, became a pioneer & a legend of advertising filmmaking, learnt & taught scuba diving, started the Prithvi Cafe, and lived every moment to the full in a million different ways. Prahlad Kakar joins Amit Varma in episode 414 of The Seen and the Unseen to talk about his long and wondrous life. (FOR FULL LINKED SHOW NOTES, GO TO SEENUNSEEN.IN.) Also check out: 1. Prahlad Kakar on Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, IMDb and his own website. 2. Adman Madman: Unapologetically Prahlad -- Prahlad Kakar. 3. Genesis Film Production. 4. Probal DasGupta Goes to the Himalayas With Books in His Bag -- Episode 412 of The Seen and the Unseen. 5. Watershed 1967: India's Forgotten Victory Over China — Probal DasGupta. 6. Sahil Bloom's tweet on preparation vs planning. 7. Big City Blues -- Mervyn LeRoy. 8. Does India take its national symbols too seriously? — Jan 2008 episode of We the People. 9. Au Hasard Balthazar -- Robert Bresson. 10. The Bicycle Thief -- Vittorio De Sica. 11. Blade Runner -- Ridley Scott. 12. 2001: A Space Odyssey -- Stanley Kubrick 13. Straw Dogs -- Sam Peckinpah. 14. Prahlad Kakar's Bombay Dyeing commercial from 1983. 15. Ankur -- Shyam Benegal. 16. Bhumika -- Shyam Benegal. 17. Manthan -- Shyam Benegal. 18. Dekho Dekho, Duniya Dekho -- Prahlad Kakar's commercial for Air India. 19. Modesty Blaise, The Saint, Harry Potter and the work of Tom Clancy, Wilbur Smith and Louis L'Amour. This episode is sponsored by CTQ Compounds. Check out The Daily Reader and FutureStack. Use the code UNSEEN for Rs 2500 off. Amit Varma and Ajay Shah have launched a new course called Life Lessons, which aims to be a launchpad towards learning essential life skills all of you need. For more details, and to sign up, click here. Amit and Ajay also bring out a weekly YouTube show, Everything is Everything. Have you watched it yet? You must! And have you read Amit's newsletter? Subscribe right away to The India Uncut Newsletter! It's free! Also check out Amit's online course, The Art of Clear Writing. Episode art: ‘Shoot' by Simahina.

Thank you for listening to Write On! Audio, the podcast for writers everywhere brought to you by Pen to Print.  Our Listener Contribution for January is from poet, novelist and presenter Mab Jones. Described by The Times as a 'unique talent,' Mab is the winner of many accolades for her writing, including a Royal Society of Literature 'Literature Matters' Award, a Creative Wales Award, the Neil Gaiman Word Factory Short Story Competition, the Geoff Stevens Memorial Poetry Prize, the Aurora Poetry Prize, the Wolverhampton Literature Festival Poetry Prize and more. She has written for the New York Times, and has presented three poetry programmes on BBC Radio 4. A previous co-ordinator of  International Dylan Thomas Day, she has also  run the social media for world famous writer Wilbur Smith and the Wilbur & Niso Smith Foundation. Mab also offers mentoring, critique and feedback for writers, most notably through the Poetry Society.   Mab's latest book “Bog Witch” encompasses nature writing, life writing, poetry and magical memoir from a working-class woman's perspective whilst drawing from history, science, mythology and folklore. It is a lyrical, semi-mystical immersion into wild wetland areas.  You can find out more about Mab and her work by following the links below: Website https://mabjones.com/  Social Media https://www.facebook.com/mabjones/ https://twitter.com/mabjones https://www.instagram.com/mabjones/   We're always delighted to read your contributions so if you'd like to see your words in Write on! or hear them on this podcast please get in touch. Please submit to: https://pentoprint.org/get-involved/submit-to-write-on/ Thank you for listening to Write On! Audio. This edition has been presented by Tiffany Clare and produced by Chris Gregory.  Write On! Audio is an Alternative Stories production for Pen to Print.  This podcast is produced using public funding from Arts Council England

Marco Buticchi"Il figlio della tempesta"Longanesi Editorewww.longanesi.it  Fine XIX secolo. Nikola Tesla sbarca negli Stati Uniti per dedicarsi alla carriera di inventore. Le sue scoperte rivoluzionarie nel campo dell'elettromagnetismo attirano presto gli interessi tanto dei servizi governativi quanto della criminalità e, in una New York flagellata dalle guerre tra gang, Tesla dovrà compiere una drastica scelta: portare a termine la sua ultima, potentissima invenzione o fermarsi prima che i risvolti militari dei suoi esperimenti creino tensioni irreversibili tra le grandi potenze? Quando Tesla muore nel 1943 i suoi segreti sembrano destinati a morire con lui. Ma il male non dimentica e non si ferma. La scomparsa dell'inventore getta un velo di silenzio sulla sua scoperta, ma basta sollevarlo per scoprire una terribile minaccia...2023. Le tensioni tra Palestina e Israele precipitano e sfociano nei violenti attacchi del 7 ottobre. Tra gli ostaggi di Hamas vi è anche l'intera famiglia di Roxie Oshman, sorella di Toba, storica collaboratrice di Oswald Breil. Il vero bersaglio dell'azione militare è in realtà il marito di Roxie, l'ebreo statunitense Richard Goldberg, un ingegnere elettronico che stava lavorando a un progetto segretissimo…Incaricati di far luce sull'intera vicenda, Oswald e Sara Terracini si mettono al lavoro per scoprire che cosa nasconda Goldberg. In una corsa contro il tempo, Oswald e Sara dovranno impedire che l'arma più pericolosa mai creata finisca nelle mani sbagliate…Marco Buticchi torna con un romanzo che ripercorre le tappe più misteriose della carriera dell'inventore serbo, fino a incrociarle con i drammatici eventi più attuali della questione israelo-palestinese, in un crescendo di tensione e adrenalina. Marco Buticchi, il maestro italiano dell'avventura, è nato alla Spezia nel 1957 e ha viaggiato moltissimo per lavoro, nutrendo così anche la sua curiosità, il suo gusto per l'avventura e la sua attenzione per la storia e il particolare fascino dei tanti luoghi che ha visitato. È il primo autore italiano pubblicato da Longanesi nella collana «I maestri dell'avventura» (accanto a Wilbur Smith, Clive Cussler e Patrick O'Brian), in cui sono apparsi con grande successo di pubblico e di critica Le Pietre della Luna (1997), Menorah (1998), Profezia (2000), La nave d'oro (2003), L'anello dei re (2005), Il vento dei demoni (2007), Il respiro del deserto (2009), La voce del destino (2011), La stella di pietra (2013), Il segno dell'aquila (2015), La luce dell'impero (2017), Il segreto del faraone nero (2018), Stirpe di navigatori (2019), L'ombra di Iside (2020), Il mare dei fuochi (2021), Il serpente e il faraone (2022) e L'oro degli dei (2023), disponibili anche in edizione TEA, oltre a Scusi bagnino, l'ombrellone non funziona (2006) e a Casa di mare (2016), un appassionator itratto del padre, Albino Buticchi. Nel dicembre 2008 Marco Buticchi è stato nominato Commendatore dal Presidente della Repubblica per aver contribuito alla diffusione della lingua e della letteratura italiana anche all'estero. www.marcobuticchi.itIL POSTO DELLE PAROLEascoltare fa pensarewww.ilpostodelleparole.itDiventa un supporter di questo podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/il-posto-delle-parole--1487855/support.

Award-winning novelist, teacher, and podcaster Manda Scott talks with Tess Callahan about her shamanic spiritual practice, her new Thrutopian novel ANY HUMAN POWER, and her highly acclaimed podcast Accidental Gods. Tess and Manda discuss dreams, visions, and the liminal states between waking, sleeping, life, and death. Manda encourages writers to create new narratives that will pave the way to the systematic changes our world needs.Best known for the Boudica: Dreaming series, Manda's previous novels have been short-listed for the Orange Prize, the Edgar, Wilbur Smith and Saltire Awards, and won the McIllvanney Prize. Her latest novel, Any Human Power, is a mytho-political thriller which lays out a Thrutopian roadmap to a flourishing future we'd be proud to leave to forthcoming generations. With degrees in veterinary medicine and a Masters in Regenerative Economics, Manda Scott hails from Scotland and now lives in England with her wife and podcast co-creator, Faith Tilleray. Explore these links to learn more about Manda's writing, her podcast, and her Thrutopian Master Class for writers.Manda Scott's Website: https://mandascott.co.uk/Accidental Gods Podcast: https://accidentalgods.life/. Thrutopian Master Class: https://thrutopia.life/Support the showHost: Tess CallahanSubstack: Writers at the WellInterview Podcast: Writers at the WellMeditations on Insight TimerMeditations on YouTubeTess's novels: https://tesscallahan.com/Music: Christopher Lloyd Clarke.Audio Editing: Eric Fischer of Audi-Refined.com By tapping "like" and "follow" you help others find the show. Thank you for listening!DISCLAIMER: Meditation is not a substitute for professional psychological or medical healthcare or therapy. We do not accept any liability for any loss or damage incurred by you acting or not acting as a result of listening to this recording. Use the material provided at your own risk. Do not drive or operate dangerous equipment while listening. The views expressed in this podcast may not be those of the host or the management.

Manda Scott is an award-winning novelist and host of the acclaimed Accidental Gods podcast. Best known for the Boudica: Dreaming series, her previous novels have been short-listed for the Orange Prize, the Edgar, Wilbur Smith and Saltire Awards and won the McIllvanney Prize. Her latest novel ANY HUMAN POWER is a Mytho-Political thriller which lays out a Thrutopian road map to a flourishing future we'd be proud to leave to the generations that come after us. With degrees in veterinary medicine and a Masters in Regenerative Economics, Manda's life is oriented towards creating radical new narratives that will pave the way to the total systemic change our culture – and our world – needs. ANY HUMAN POWER is available for sale on Amazon. Connect with Manda Scott on Facebook, Bluesky, Goodreads, Instagram, and LinkedIn. Topics 00:00 – Introduction and Support Request 01:00 – Guest Introduction: Manda Scott 02:04 – Discussion on Thrutopian Novels 02:45 – Manda Scott's Literary Influences 07:01 – Spiritual Practices and Shamanic Path 12:25 – The Concept of Thrutopian Fiction 17:29 – The Power of Fiction in Inspiring Change 21:22 – Genesis of ‘Any Human Power' 27:45 – The Role of Dreaming in Spiritual Practice 27:52 – Shamanic Dreaming and Its Significance 29:08 – Connecting with Loved Ones Through Dreams 30:36 – Trauma Culture and Initiation Cultures 32:11 – The Four Stages of Evolution 36:40 – Dopamine vs. Serotonin Reward Systems 40:01 – The Importance of Community and Connection 45:11 – The Future of Spiritual Practice and Writing 46:29 – Integrating Dreaming into Daily Life 48:36 – Concluding Thoughts on Modernity and Community Resources The Weirdstone of Brisingamen by Alan Garner Eagle of the Ninth by Rosemary Sutcliff The Last of the Mohicans (1971 TV Series) Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer Riding the Horse Backwards by Arnold and Amy Mindell Regenesis by George Monbiot Sounds of SAND #85 In Our Bones: Osprey Orielle Lake Sounds of SAND #65 Emptiness & Grief: Francis Weller Sounds of SAND #98 Glissando of Consciousness: Andrew Holecek Sounds of SAND #11 Quantum Listening: IONE Support the mission of SAND and the production of this podcast by becoming a SAND Member.

In this fascinating conversation Manda & I discuss the important role creatives have, at this time of emergence, to help society envision an alternative future, something we simply can't expect our current governments or systems of power to do for us. Manda has had a truly fascinating journey & beautifully weaves all the threads of these diverse influences; growing up in a raptor rescue, becoming a veterinarian, working in the computer games industry, studying for a masters in economics alongside her deep involvement in shamanism. This is a conversation that draws on lived experience & deep considered thought & offers many resources for further exploration. Through her latest Thrutopian novel Manda manages to gently introduce us to alternative ways of existing that place us firmly back into the interconnected web of existence, avoiding the trained reflex ingrained in our trauma cultures that might trigger us to reject the possibilities. This conversation is a balm to the soul of anyone who feels cast a drift from the exploitive hierarchal society that we find ourselves in, that in Manda's own words commodifies grief, destruction & death. Whilst she also reminds us to realise that Any Human Power that exists can by human agency be changed, it simply needs enough of us to to stop believing in the current paradigm. Manda and I invite you to join us as people that choose to stop believing there isn't a viable alternative, that whilst the future is unknowable it also has the capacity to be incredibly exciting.  Stepping out of line is a radical act, but what might surprise you is that you wouldn't be alone, all the ideas from Manda's book, like global guardian governance, alternative structures of accountability & economics are already in existence, they are closer to us then we realise.Learn more about MandaManda Scott is an award-winning novelist and host of the acclaimed Accidental Gods podcast. Best known for the Boudica: Dreaming series, her previous novels have been short-listed for the Orange Prize, the Edgar, Wilbur Smith and Saltire Awards and won the McIllvanney Prize. Her latest novel ANY HUMAN POWER is a Mytho-Political thriller which lays out a Thrutopian road map to a Dlourishing future we'd be proud to leave to the generations that come after us. With degrees in veterinary medicine and a Masters in Regenerative Economics, Manda's life is oriented towards creating radical new narratives that will pave the way to the total systemic change our culture – and our world – needs. Website: www.mandascott.co.uk/Facebook: www.facebook.com/MandaScottAuthorLinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/mandascottauthor/Accidental God's podcast: www.accidentalgods.life Instagram: www.instagram.com/accidental_gods/More Resources: https://bit.ly/NBNPEpisode51Support the showThank you for being part of this journey with me, please Subscribe so you don't miss our future episodes, leave a review & share with friends to help these messages ripple out across the world. More information about the Podcast & our host Fiona MacKay: Fiona Mackay Photography WebsiteConnect with us & join the conversation on social media:Instagram @FionaMacKayPhotographyFacebook @FionaMacKayPhotographyTwitter @FiMacKay

Here are my sources and resources for my trip a few weeks ago to Namibia and South Africa. I am also including a link to an organization dedicated to conserving and protecting the white rhino in Namibia. The Rhino Momma Project saves rhinos by trimming their horns to avoid poaching. The horns grow back in five years, and the animals are never hurt, but it takes a team of specialists to do this. Please feel free to donate to this organization.And, the most grateful thanks to my friends Suzette and Ben Bussey, who invited me to share their love of Africa with them, and planned a wonderful trip filled with unique experiences. CollectSuzette founded Norton & Hodges, a super elegant and luxurious accessories and clothing line. Her first boutique has just opened at Charleston Place. Please visit her website to see the sensational accessories she has made with exotic skins. We visited some artisans, and I have to attest firsthand that everything is sourced from certified makers who care deeply for the animals and do a tremendous job with sustainability. I was also very impressed with: Patrick Mavros's line of silver accessories. Beautiful tabletop objects, silver jewelry, and the best-looking belt buckles. ReadI was inspired by Out of Africa, the collection of Wilbur Smith's books, and James Michener's The Covenant. They are all great reads with deep knowledge of Africa. It is a fun way to remember the trip and prepare for the next one! WatchI didn't get to watch a lot of TV, but this is what I did see:There were beautiful animals in Etosha National Park and impressive sunsets from the lodges and watering holes. At the end of the day, sundowners (aka gin & tonics) became the reward for a day well spent! The most extraordinary gardens and vineries are in Babylonstoren in South Africa. The sunsets and the colors of the landscape are hard to explain. It is one of those things that “you have to be there!” EatBesides the excellent “tasting” restaurants (of course, I love to try all sorts of things, street food was a highlight. I had fish and chips by the docks, a worker's lunch in Cape Town, emu meatballs, zebra steaks, and the most delicious eland tenderloin—oh, and homemade samosas on the streets. Part of the fun of traveling is exploring food halls and tasting spices and combinations that are not my everyday fare. I loved it! I tried a worker's lunch made with half a loaf of bread, hollowed out, and filled with spicy chicken curry and rice. Can you imagine this at my next dinner party? And with this, I leave you. Sincerely,The Serial Hostess Thank you for subscribing. Leave a comment or share this episode.

Here are my sources and resources for my trip a few weeks ago to Namibia and South Africa. I am also including a link to an organization dedicated to conserving and protecting the white rhino in Namibia. The Rhino Momma Project saves rhinos by trimming their horns to avoid poaching. The horns grow back in five years, and the animals are never hurt, but it takes a team of specialists to do this. Please feel free to donate to this organization.And, the most grateful thanks to my friends Suzette and Ben Bussey, who invited me to share their love of Africa with them, and planned a wonderful trip filled with unique experiences. CollectSuzette founded Norton & Hodges, a super elegant and luxurious accessories and clothing line. Her first boutique has just opened at Charleston Place. Please visit her website to see the sensational accessories she has made with exotic skins. We visited some artisans, and I have to attest firsthand that everything is sourced from certified makers who care deeply for the animals and do a tremendous job with sustainability. I was also very impressed with: Patrick Mavros's line of silver accessories. Beautiful tabletop objects, silver jewelry, and the best-looking belt buckles. ReadI was inspired by Out of Africa, the collection of Wilbur Smith's books, and James Michener's The Covenant. They are all great reads with deep knowledge of Africa. It is a fun way to remember the trip and prepare for the next one! WatchI didn't get to watch a lot of TV, but this is what I did see:There were beautiful animals in Etosha National Park and impressive sunsets from the lodges and watering holes. At the end of the day, sundowners (aka gin & tonics) became the reward for a day well spent! The most extraordinary gardens and vineries are in Babylonstoren in South Africa. The sunsets and the colors of the landscape are hard to explain. It is one of those things that “you have to be there!” EatBesides the excellent “tasting” restaurants (of course, I love to try all sorts of things, street food was a highlight. I had fish and chips by the docks, a worker's lunch in Cape Town, emu meatballs, zebra steaks, and the most delicious eland tenderloin—oh, and homemade samosas on the streets. Part of the fun of traveling is exploring food halls and tasting spices and combinations that are not my everyday fare. I loved it! I tried a worker's lunch made with half a loaf of bread, hollowed out, and filled with spicy chicken curry and rice. Can you imagine this at my next dinner party? And with this, I leave you. Sincerely,The Serial Hostess Thank you for subscribing. Leave a comment or share this episode.

Here are my sources and resources for my trip a few weeks ago to Namibia and South Africa. I am also including a link to an organization dedicated to conserving and protecting the white rhino in Namibia. The Rhino Momma Project saves rhinos by trimming their horns to avoid poaching. The horns grow back in five years, and the animals are never hurt, but it takes a team of specialists to do this. Please feel free to donate to this organization.And, the most grateful thanks to my friends Suzette and Ben Bussey, who invited me to share their love of Africa with them, and planned a wonderful trip filled with unique experiences. CollectSuzette founded Norton & Hodges, a super elegant and luxurious accessories and clothing line. Her first boutique has just opened at Charleston Place. Please visit her website to see the sensational accessories she has made with exotic skins. We visited some artisans, and I have to attest firsthand that everything is sourced from certified makers who care deeply for the animals and do a tremendous job with sustainability. I was also very impressed with: Patrick Mavros's line of silver accessories. Beautiful tabletop objects, silver jewelry, and the best-looking belt buckles. ReadI was inspired by Out of Africa, the collection of Wilbur Smith's books, and James Michener's The Covenant. They are all great reads with deep knowledge of Africa. It is a fun way to remember the trip and prepare for the next one! WatchI didn't get to watch a lot of TV, but this is what I did see:There were beautiful animals in Etosha National Park and impressive sunsets from the lodges and watering holes. At the end of the day, sundowners (aka gin & tonics) became the reward for a day well spent! The most extraordinary gardens and vineries are in Babylonstoren in South Africa. The sunsets and the colors of the landscape are hard to explain. It is one of those things that “you have to be there!” EatBesides the excellent “tasting” restaurants (of course, I love to try all sorts of things, street food was a highlight. I had fish and chips by the docks, a worker's lunch in Cape Town, emu meatballs, zebra steaks, and the most delicious eland tenderloin—oh, and homemade samosas on the streets. Part of the fun of traveling is exploring food halls and tasting spices and combinations that are not my everyday fare. I loved it! I tried a worker's lunch made with half a loaf of bread, hollowed out, and filled with spicy chicken curry and rice. Can you imagine this at my next dinner party? And with this, I leave you. Sincerely,The Serial Hostess Thank you for subscribing. Leave a comment or share this episode.

Thank you for listening to Write On! Audio, the podcast for writers everywhere brought to you by Pen to Print  Our August writing tips are from writers nominated for the Wilbur Smith Adventure Writing Prize and are introduced by the Prize manager at the Wilbur and Niso Smith Foundation, Charlotte Maddox  The Wilbur & Niso Smith Foundation is a charitable organisation established in 2015 by the late bestselling author Wilbur Smith and his wife, Niso. The Foundation empowers writers, promotes literacy and advances adventure writing as a genre, working to uplift, inspire and educate writers and readers of all ages across the world. The Wilbur Smith Adventure Writing Prize is their flagship programme, and is a global prize that supports and celebrates the best adventure writing today.  You can find out more about the Prize here: https://www.wilbur-niso-smithfoundation.org/awards/intro and can follow them on Instagram here: https://www.instagram.com/adventurewritingprize/   C.E. McGill was born in Scotland and raised in North Carolina. Their fiction has appeared in Fantasy Magazine and Strange Constellations, and they are a two-time finalist for the Dell Magazines Award for Undergraduate Excellence in Science Fiction and Fantasy Writing. Visit Charlie's website here: https://cemcgill.com/  Leo Vardiashvili came to London with his family as a refugee from Georgia when he was twelve years old. He studied English Literature at Queen Mary, University of London. Hard By A Great Forest is his first novel. Follow Leo https://twitter.com/L_Vardiashvili  Francesca de Tores is a novelist, poet and academic. She grew up in Lutruwita/Tasmania and, after fifteen years in England, now lives in Naarm/Melbourne. Francesca is the author of four previous novels and a collection of poems. Saltblood is her first historical novel. Visit Francesca's website here: https://francescahaig.com/    We're always delighted to read your contributions so if you'd like to see your words in Write on! or hear them on this podcast please get in touch. Please submit to: https://pentoprint.org/get-involved/submit-to-write-on/  Thank you for listening to Write On! Audio. This edition has been presented by Tiffany Clare and produced by Chris Gregory.  Write On! Audio is an Alternative Stories production for Pen to Print.  This podcast is produced using public funding from Arts Council England

In the third and final episode of our three part series celebrating the Wilbur Smith Adventure Prize 2024, Georgina and Tom meet two more of the shortlisted authors, Leo Vardiashvili and Chukwuebuka Ibeh to discuss their riveting new adventure novels, Hard by a Great Forest and Blessings. (Leo Vardiashvili: Image © Kiera Fyles, Palmer Photography - Chukwuebuka Ibeh: Image © Erin Lewis) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

It's Story Time, our walk through cricket history via your listener quiz challenges. This week, most people do not seem to relish being clobbered in the scone, but one man did. One brave, strange man who kept going back for more. Also this week, navigate through some dusty old bastards, find out why Garfield Sobers was cricket's Wilbur Smith, and marvel via the medium of off-spin at the confounding fact that this game has survived at all. Daniel Norcross joins Geoff Lemon for a very fun episode. Your Nerd Pledge numbers this week: 54.32 - Phoebe Haylen 4.04 - Robran Cock 4.80 - Henry Branson 2.26 - Erin Kane Support the show with a Nerd Pledge at patreon.com/thefinalword Check out Westfield London and Westfield Stratford City By downloading the app: westfield.com/united-kingdom/app Find previous episodes at finalwordcricket.com Title track by Urthboy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In the first of three special episodes Tom and Georgina talk to two of the authors short-listed for the much coveted 2024 Wilbur Smith Adventure Writing Prize, Charlie McGill (Our Hideous Progeny) and Francesca de Tores (Saltblood). Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode Tom and Chris talk to Australian author Peter Watt about his incredibly adventurous life, his life-changing encounters with Wilbur and how Wilbur inspired him to become a best selling author - the Australian Wilbur Smith Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this special episode Tom and author Conn Iggulden discuss the power of historical fiction and the influence Wilbur Smith has had on Conn himself and generations of adventure and historical fiction writers Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Kevin Conroy Scott, a co-founder at Tibor Jones & Associates and esteemed literary agent celebrated for his representation of iconic authors such as Wilbur Smith. Bruce Whitfield and Kevin Conroy Scott explore the captivating domain of estate planning, intellectual property rights, and innovative strategies for perpetuating wealth even beyond one's lifetime. Whether you're an artist, entrepreneur, or simply intrigued by the financial considerations of mortality, Bruce and Ken reveal the clandestine pathways to achieving prosperity after death.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Tom and Christopher look back on memorable moments from the first series, recalling some of the illuminating facts and insights they elicited from their special guests, including Egyptologist Joanne Fletcher, historian Saul David, writer of both fiction and nonfiction about the Zulu wars, Zambezi expert Marlyn Newitt, who sounds the alarm about the Victoria Falls drying up, Joost Fonteyn on the mysteries of the Great Zimbabwe, Civil Rights campaigner Adam Hochschild on the Abolition of Slavery and our remarkable adventurer, polar explorer Felicity Aston Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

For the first episode of a new series of That Wilbur Smith Show, and in honour of International Women's Day, Tom and Christopher talk to a real life hero who might have stepped out of the pages of a Wilbur Smith book, Felicity Aston, polar explorer and the first woman to ski across Antarctica alone!Felicity's website : http://www.felicityaston.co.uk/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Historian Tom Harper and author Christopher Winn explore the exhilarating world of legendary adventure writer Wilbur Smith with special guest and real life hero Felicity Aston, polar explorer and the first woman to ski across Antarctica alone. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In That Wilbur Smith Show Wilbur co-writer historian Tom Harper and author and Wilbur fan Christopher Winn explore the exhilarating world of adventure writer Wilbur Smith, one of the greatest story tellers of all time, by talking to a star-studded array of special guests, adventurers, historians, authors, academics and fans about the exotic places and thrilling historical events that feature in Wilbur's books. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

For the first episode of season two, returning hosts Theo and Julia are joined by bestselling author of Lancelot, Camelot and the Raven and Sigurd trilogies, Giles Kristian.    Although best known for writing bloodthirsty but heartfelt, lyrical tales set in the Dark Ages, the former pop star is a renaissance man. His many talents have seen him collaborate with Wilbur Smith, release the captivating contemporary thriller Where Blood Runs Cold, and put the expertise forged while working on novels into use on video game scripting.   In this rousing and thought provoking episode, Giles discusses writing historical epics, how his style and focus has changed over time, and how to deal with loneliness while writing. He also explains his hopes and fears for the future of the novel, with discussion on how writers might diversify and tell stories through different media.   Go to https://thehistoryquill.com/bonus to get access to our special bonus episode on how to succeed in historical fiction, available exclusively to our email subscribers. The episode features accomplished historical fiction authors Gill Paul and David Penny exploring how they've achieved success during their very different writing and publishing journeys and how you can achieve success on your own journey.   To get the transcript for this episode, visit https://thehistoryquill.com/7 for the episode page on our website.

Marco Buticchi"L'oro degli dei"Longanesi Editorewww.longanesi.itGrecia, 400 a.C. Pericle, tiranno di Atene, incarica il celebre scultore Fidia di concepire un'opera monumentale per onorare Atena. Nasce così il Partenone, nel quale Fidia colloca un'enorme statua della dea creata utilizzando ben 1137 chili d'oro. In realtà Fidia, d'accordo con Pericle, nasconde l'oro in un luogo segreto, come riserva per i tempi difficili che attendono la città. Ma presto gli ateniesi iniziano a sospettare e il destino dello scultore e del tiranno è segnato. E tutto quell'oro rimane nascosto per secoli…Gran Bretagna, 1802. I collaboratori del diplomatico britannico Lord Elgin incappano in una scoperta sconvolgente: sulla scorta di enigmatici indizi, riescono a individuare l'oro perduto degli dei e spogliano l'Acropoli delle sculture di Fidia. Sulla via del ritorno in Inghilterra, la nave che trasporta i reperti si inabissa nei pressi di una piccola isola, che diventa teatro della più imponente impresa di ripescaggio subacqueo dell'epoca. Ma anche scenario di trame e intrighi letali che vedono gli inglesi scontrarsi con le spie di Napoleone e i temibili servizi segreti del Papato.Oggi. Saranno Oswald Breil e Sara Terracini a provare a risolvere l'enigma della scomparsa e a ricercare l'oro modellato da Fidia, così da riportarlo a casa prima che l'avidità umana lo celi di nuovo al mondo intero.Attraverso un lungo viaggio nella Storia, Marco Buticchi ripercorre un mistero che unisce epoche lontanissime, dall'Antica Grecia agli anni di Napoleone. Sulle tracce di un tesoro di inestimabile valore, verranno svelate verità sepolte da millenni.Marco Buticchi, il maestro italiano dell'avventura, è nato alla Spezia nel 1957 e ha viaggiato moltissimo per lavoro, nutrendo così anche la sua curiosità, il suo gusto per l'avventura e la sua attenzione per la storia e il particolare fascino dei tanti luoghi che ha visitato. È il primo autore italiano pubblicato da Longanesi nella collana «I maestri dell'avventura» (accanto a Wilbur Smith, Clive Cussler e Patrick O'Brian), in cui sono apparsi con grande successo di pubblico e di critica Le Pietre della Luna (1997), Menorah (1998), Profezia (2000), La nave d'oro (2003), L'anello dei re (2005), Il vento dei demoni (2007), Il respiro del deserto (2009), La voce del destino (2011), La stella di pietra (2013), Il segno dell'aquila (2015), La luce dell'impero (2017), Il segreto del faraone nero (2018), Stirpe di navigatori (2019), L'ombra di Iside (2020), Il mare dei fuochi (2021) e Il serpente e il faraone (2022), disponibili anche in edizione TEA, oltre a Scusi bagnino, l'ombrellone non funziona (2006) e a Casa di mare (2016), un appassionato ritratto del padre, Albino Buticchi. Nel dicembre 2008 Marco Buticchi è stato nominato Commendatore dal Presidente della Repubblica per aver contribuito alla diffusione della lingua e della letteratura italiana anche all'estero.www.marcobuticchi.itIL POSTO DELLE PAROLEascoltare fa pensarewww.ilpostodelleparole.itQuesto show fa parte del network Spreaker Prime. Se sei interessato a fare pubblicità in questo podcast, contattaci su https://www.spreaker.com/show/1487855/advertisement

Roger Moore and Lee Marvin team up in this boys own adventure epic adapted from the Wilbur Smith novel of the same name. It's 1913, Flynn (Marvin) a notorious ivory poacher convinces Sebastian Oldsmith (Moore) to join him on a hunt. From there the movie becomes a sprawling epic which then twists into a revenge picture and even manages to find the time to see the start of the Great War. It's all going on in this week's episode!Remember to follow us on Twitter @FightingOnFilm and on Facebook. Check out our website at www.fightingonfilm.com. If you enjoy the podcast then please consider supporting us and out our Patreon here. Become a member at https://plus.acast.com/s/fighting-on-film. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The great rivers of Africa were a constant feature in Wilbur Smith's adventures and in this episode Tom and Diana explore the Zambezi and the majestic Victoria Falls with the expert help of Professor Malyn Newitt author of 'The Zambezi - a History', learning about the peoples who have lived alongside, traded on and depended upon the river and how the nature and shape of the river is changing due to modern development. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this special episode Tom and Diana look back over the Wilbur Smith Adventure Writing Prize Award ceremony at the Royal Geographical Society in London with prize winner Emma Styles and Wilbur and Niso Smith Foundation director Georgina Brown Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Sunbird introduces one of Wilbur Smith's most intriguing heroes, charting his search for the mysterious lost city of Ophir in deepest Africa and the extraordinary and unexpected consequences that flow from its discovery. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In episode 16 Tom and Diana take a look at Testament, coming up with plenty of tantalising teasers and good reasons why this, the latest Wilbur Smith book, is an exhilarating must read! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this special episode Tom and Diana discuss the making of the documentary Wilbur Smith Inspiring Adventures with the film's director Aidan Woodward. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Con un ritmo atronador como la embestida de un elefante, los primeros 45 minutos del Último tren a Katanga (Dark of the Sun) nos adentran en el corazón del continente negro, esquilmado por las grandes potencias desde el periodo colonial. Bajamos del avión con los dos mercenarios (Rod Taylor y Jim Brown), en un aeropuerto con olor a muerte y miedo, todos quieren huir de allí menos ellos, traspasando los controles de las naciones unidas, armados, así se lo hará saber Curry a los cascos azules que les quieren retener. Tienen órdenes firmadas directamente por el nuevo presidente del país, trasunto del joven dictador Mobutu. En la reunión con el mandatario y un orondo empresario occidental les dejan clara su misión; rescatar un cargamento de diamantes en medio de las revueltas simbas es el objetivo prioritario, de paso también salvar todas las vidas posibles. Jack Cardiff adaptó con solvencia la novela del africano Wilbur Smith, “El lado oscuro del sol”, en pleno siglo XX tras la independencia del Congo Belga en 1960. El peso del film cae en la relación entre los dos colegas, con un personaje femenino bastante plano (Yvenne Mimieux), cuyo marido ha sido asesinado por los simbas. Los insulsos diálogos entre la chica y el capitán sugieren que algunas partes del film han sido suprimidas en el montaje. Los rebeldes nativos en contra del gobierno apoyado por la CIA, son retratados poco menos que como caníbales sádicos, similares a los zombies de los films de Romero o Lucio Fulci. La matanza no solo la perpetran ellos, todos tienen las manos manchadas de sangre. Las fuerzas de las naciones unidas. Aparte de para “pacificar”, están ahí para facilitar el saqueo de los recursos naturales de la zona. Como dice Curry tras reconocer el rifle del médico entre los masacrados del poblado donde decidió quedarse. Al médico -Kenneth More-, alcoholizado. le da igual quedarse a merced de los rebeldes, quizá ha visto ya demasiado. Entre los reclutas de Curry para su complicada misión también destaca un nazi infanticida -Peter Carsten-, inspirado en el militar Siegfried Müller, que se desempeñó como oficial del Comando 5 durante la Crisis del Congo, y portaba con orgullo su cruz de hierro. Toda la película se conduce con un paso trepidante, y rezuma una violencia poco usual para la época, con un final desfasado y apocalíptico con violaciones y asesinatos en una orgía de sangre. Cardiff contestó a las críticas afirmando que lo que mostró era muy liviano comparado con los documentos que había leído sobre las revueltas reales. Esta noche asistimos atónitos al infierno de Katanga… Zacarías Cotán. Salvador Limón y Raúl Gallego

In this podcast episode,our guest today, Mathew Burns of WTI discussed the company's unique approach to product reviews with videos and how powerful POV videos can help increase consumer engagement and trust with content created through video reviews and livestream shows.    Mathew also emphasized the importance of having high quality contents that are authentic and unbiased that produces sales on and off Amazon. Overall, this episode highlights the value of WTI's approach to product reviews through POV videos. So tune in and learn more.   In This Episode: [00:40] Introducing Mathew Burns. [02:20] How WTI started? [07:00] Content creators. [10:05] Unboxing. [12:50] How many products/videos are done for Amazon? [14:10] 150 trained content creators. [22:20] Step by step.   Guest Links and References: Website: www.wtihub.com https://www.wtihub.com/contact https://www.amazon.com/shop/whattoolsinside https://www.wti.shopping/main   Book References: Monsoon by Wilbur Smith   Links and References: Wizards of Amazon: https://www.wizardsofecom.com/ Wizards of Amazon Courses: https://wizardsofamazon.mykajabi.com/a/27566/x6Kwkz6p Wizards of Amazon Meetup: https://www.meetup.com/South-Florida-FBA/ Wizards of Amazon on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/WizardsofAmazon/ Wizards of Amazon on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/wizardsofecom/  

This is the first book in the Ballantyne Series, where Robyn and Zouga are going to Africa for the first time, in 1860. It's classic Wilbur Smith. Listen and find out why I say this. Title Music : Sooraj Santhosh Pls do drop a rating on my profile if you like what you hear. Send me your feedback on: Instagram : @thegreedyreader YouTube : The Greedy Reader Website : www.thegreedyreader.com

Skip the Queue is brought to you by Rubber Cheese, a digital agency that builds remarkable systems and websites for attractions that helps them increase their visitor numbers. Your host is  Kelly Molson, Founder of Rubber Cheese.Download the Rubber Cheese 2022 Visitor Attraction Website Report - the first digital benchmark statistics for the attractions sector.If you like what you hear, you can subscribe on iTunes, Spotify, and all the usual channels by searching Skip the Queue or visit our website rubbercheese.com/podcast.If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave us a five star review, it really helps others find us. And remember to follow us on Twitter for your chance to win the books that have been mentioned in this podcastCompetition ends July 31st 2023. The winner will be contacted via Twitter. Show references: Playbook page: https://navigate.agency/blog/attraction-marketing-visitor-growth-playbook/Homepage: https://navigate.agency/Work: https://navigate.agency/work/Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/navigate-agency/Ant's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/anthonyrawlins/Anthony Rawlins | CEO Navigate Agency - founded Navigate to help tourism businesses enhance their digital marketing and attract wider audiences locally and internationally. For over 20 years, he has worked across all travel and tourism industry segments for leading global brands worldwide.At Navigate, Anthony ensures the company is at the leading edge of industry insights and trends and drives innovation and business strategy to continue delivering best-in-class growth for their clients. Transcriptions: Kelly Molson: Welcome to Skip The Queue, a podcast for people working in or working with visitor attractions. In today's episode I speak with Ant Rawlins, CEO of Navigate Agency - the marketing agency for the tourism and conservation sectors.We discuss how to position your attraction as essential, the number 1 thing all attraction marketers need to focus on this year and, a podcast exclusive. Ant shares an exciting new initiative with us, listen out for Wildling.If you like what you hear, you can subscribe on all the usual channels by searching Skip the Queue. Kelly Molson: Ant it is so nice to have you on the podcast today. I have to say, I'm so delighted that you're on because you are genuinely one of my favourite speakers to listen to. So I'm thrilled that you're on today, and I know this is gonna be a really exciting conversation. Ant Rawlins: No pressure then. Kelly Molson: Absolutely not. I always like to start with a little bit of pressure on. And that takes us very nicely to our icebreaker questions. So when you were 6, what did you want to be when you grew up? Ant Rawlins: When I was 6, it was probably pretty cliche. An archaeologist or a fighter pilot. I probably say a fighter pilot more. Kelly Molson: Is this Top Gun? Ant Rawlins: It is tTop Gun. And I'm pretty sure top gun was released when I was 6, and my brother then went into the REF. So I kinda wanted to be my brother and a fire pilot. But, you know, there you go.Kelly Molson: He got there first, basically. Ant Rawlins: He did. He did. Kelly Molson: Actually, archaeology, so that's really interesting because it does kind of fit with some of the that you've done, doesn't it? In a holistic kind of way. We'll talk about that a little bit more later. Okay. If you could be in the Guinness World of Records, what record breaking feet would you attempt? Ant Rawlins: That's really mean. I have no idea what that would be. I don't think that I'm gonna be in the Guinness book record. I've never allowed myself to entertain that. Kelly Molson: Do you have, like, a weird talent? Ant Rawlins: Not really that we can broadcast. So this is gonna sound really silly. It would be best dad. Kelly Molson: Oh. Ant Rawlins: I'm not necessarily convinced by that, but there you go. We'll see.  Kelly Molson: Tough critics around, I'm gonna say. Okay. Interesting. Thank you. And if you could have 1 extra hour of free time every day, what would you use it for? Ant Rawlins: Reading. It would be reading because I really do not enjoy reading at all. I can't stand it. So I would force myself to do that. Kelly Molson: That was unexpected. I thought you were gonna tell me that you're a bit of a bookworm, but you do consume knowledge. I know that you consume knowledge because you're incredibly knowledgeable, especially at the top that we talk about today. How do you consume it? Are you more of a podcast? Do you want more audio? Ant Rawlins: Very much audio. Again, I don't enjoy reading, but I read a lot. I just find it really challenging medium through which to get information. It's very one dimensional. Whereas, actually, if you can show me documentary, I'll get a lot more info from that, but that's a huge debate. Right? So. Kelly Molson: Yeah. That's really interesting. So it's a really good answer to the question, and it would be my answer as well because I don't get time to read. Reading for me is a way of going off into a different world. Whether that's reading something historical or reading something fictional, it just takes me away to a different place for a while, and I've kinda lost that. My time has been sucked up with toddler, so I've kind of lost that a little bit. So that would be a nice time to go on in a bit.Ant Rawlins: Do you know honestly, as I said, I don't like reading, and I absolutely never read fiction. It's always non fiction. It's always work, it's always research papers or documents or business books or how to be a CEO and not throw yourself off a bridge, that kind of stuff. I rather than a lovely story.  I mean, I hit previously, but Wilbur Smith and Barry, stuff like that, but I'd start at the time. So that's what I would do with my hour, Kelly. Kelly Molson: Good answer. Good answer. Thank you for sharing. Right, unpopular opinion, what have you prepared for us? Ant Rawlins: Email, either test email as well. This is not going to be a negative as it sounds. We're getting it out of the way now.  We will be super positive going forward but I hate email. And I was thinking about this, obviously, running a strategic digital marketing agency. That's professional suicide saying you hate email to a certain degree. But I do hate it because it's a terrible thing. It delivers great results. But imagine your email be a letter box.   And through this letter box, you get information from the government, information from healthcare providers, tax information, essential business correspondence. But also, those t shirts that you don't want, these pair of shoes. I've inherited a lot of different pots of money from foreign countries where I just need to provide my account details. And they will release 10 percent of the £45,000,000 to me. Your email, as the collater of all of this, how do you escape today? Crazy. We need a better system. Kelly Molson: You're right. You are right. I don't think this is gong to be a massively unpopular opinion. If I'm honest. I think you've hit the nail on the head there. I actually know an agency owner. Sorry, he's an agency founder and now runs an agency kind of collective support network. He just doesn't use email at all anymore. He's posted it down it. Just not it just doesn't communicate by it. He'd rather use WhatsApp or Slack or those kind of channels for it. And I think it's so hard, isn't it? Because it's like a necessary evil. Yeah. But the time that it saps away from you is just. Ant Rawlins: I know. And there's loads of productivity hats. You can activate around it, but, you know, goodness me. It's best not to do that. Yeah. And and I do apologise for being pretty tame. But, I had about a 1000 things for you, and I wasn't allowed to say any of them. One of them has my wife. Yeah. You can't say that. You can't say that. So there we go. Kelly Molson: We'll discussed those ones off air. Ant Rawlins: Definitely. Kelly Molson: Okay. Right. Founder of Navigate, Tourism And Conservation Marketing Agency, fabulous agency. Lots of wonderful things that you do for your clients. What brought you to the world of attractions, tourism, and conservation? How did you end up here? Ant Rawlins: So I studied biology at Bristol. And fairly quickly, during my degree, I realised there was no way in the planet I wanted to be a biologist. Because fundamentally, my life would be spent staring down a microscope looking at, I don't know, either sperm or stool samples, which is where a lot of biology originates or comes to at the end. So I kind of thought, “Yeah. I'm not gonna do that with my time”. So I kind of I've always been interested in in, generally, in science, I've got quite a strong science background at all my levels of science than, obviously, a science degree of Bristol. The master's in science at Bristol as well. But I kind of thought I wanted to do something on my own and and see how I could do. Ant Rawlins: And I just decided to set up a business straight out of university. I'll add a disclaimer here because I often get labeled with this being a very brave decision. It wasn't a brave decision. It was purely a logical decision. I had no money. So I have nothing to lose. Sucks. So you just go for it. What's the worst that could happen to me? Add a little bit more debt to the burgeoning student debt I had anyway. So, yeah, set up the company and off you go. It started in a different iteration. But, fortunately, as I've learned more about business and people, I've been able to direct that to the things that matter to me. And here we are now, tourism and conservation. Kelly Molson: The things that matter. It's really interesting that you set up. I didn't realise that you'd set up so early on in your career, actually. And I just come from a conversation about a very similar topic. We set up our agency when we were about 24. I've worked in various different places prior to that. I never really found anywhere that I settled. But it's exactly the same thing. There was no risk then. It was “Okay. Well, I need to earn enough money to pay my phone, put some petrol in my car, pay my monthly rent”. That's it. It's not a brave decision. It's like, I don't have any there's just nothing to lose here, so I may as well just give it a go. It's a really empowering place to because now if I was thinking about doing it again. There's a lot more risk. A lot more overhead. Ant Rawlins: It's terrifying. It's terrifying now. Those are the brave people. The ones that have responsibilities and financial commitments and go, “Do you know what? I've known this way of life for this amount of time. I'm gonna stop that. I'm gonna give it a go”. I predicted I would not have the courage to do that 10 years down the line. So I thought, “Oh, I'm just gonna do it now”. Kelly Molson: I love that. Well, I'm glad that you did because it's brought you to where we are today. And I wanna talk a little bit about where we are today. So just from the attractions perspective, it's been a bit of a weird year, hasn't it? 2023, I think. The last few years, a bit weird. Let's face it. They have kind of, a massive whammy throughout the pandemic. Can be open one minute, can't be open the next minute, restrictions, all kinds of stuff going on. And then come through all of that and are smashed in the face with economic chaos, cost of living crisis, war in Ukraine, not really understanding whether visitors are gonna be able to afford to come to them this year. Kelly Molson: And so it feels a little bit like everyone's been steering headlights and going, “We just we really don't know what to do. We're absolutely exhausted from the last 2 years. We don't know what to do”, and we know that visits are about 80 or 90 percent of pre pandemic levels. What's your take on where we're at the moment of where things are going? Ant Rawlins: I think your analysis is spot on. That is where we are. It's challenging times. We are finding organisations are taking longer to make decisions because they're cautious naturally. I'm also finding that there's a bit of a reticence to invest in kind of marketing and revenue generation. From the point of view of almost thinking, “Well, it's not gonna be great this year. So let us not spend budget on not having a great year”. It's quite upside down thinking, in my opinion. But that is what's happening. And I know this because I I speak with clients very openly and honestly. We work with quite a few businesses that we feel the responsibility to turn their fortunes around. The the organisations I love working more than anything or where they've got a big problem, a seriously big problem. Ant Rawlins: So a number of our clients last year or the year before might have had to make redundancies. Serious stuff, reduction in headcount, reduction in visitor numbers as we know it's been happening. And they just wanna get back to the levels they were or even just ride the ship so we get involved and we help them do that. And I'm proud feel a very profound sense of pride when we do that. And we do it. We're serious about doing that, and I love it. Kelly Molson: You do it really well as well. So, some of your attraction plants are really bucking this trend, and that's kind of what we're gonna focus on today along with something very exciting, which is coming later. But I wanna kinda talk about strategies and methodologies that attractions can implement right now to increase their marketing success. I think this is what they want to hear about. But can you kinda set the scene for us? So what are some of your clients achieving in terms of visitor numbers and revenue? Because you've got some really impressive stats around that. Ant Rawlins: Yeah. So I'd like to think that, our clients are kind of booking a trend looking at some of them are 10 to 15% above pre pandemic levels. Some of them are at pre pandemic levels. But then, again, some of them are below because we've just got them on board, and our job is to convert them and increase them back to where they were or beyond. And our aim is always, let's take them beyond where they were. So yeah, whenever I sit down with a client, I always look at what their targets are, then I set my own internal target of usually 10 to 15% above that. And say and Navigate, we craft the strategy to overdeliver so that, classic aim for the moon at least you'll land amongst the star strategy.Ant Rawlins: If we aim big, do a good work there, then it massively mitigates the risk that you're not gonna hit the target. But invariably, we go beyond it and it works. And what I do find fascinating at the moment is we're kind of feeling that because of the lack of impetus behind rolling out big marketing campaigns and investing in marketing because people are being very conservative with budgets. That does mean the people that we're working for, they're flying. So they're growing well because, actually, if people are holding back and we're going all in, then they're not constantly getting the visitor numbers and of revenue. It's just, stats, isn't it? It's just gonna be the case. We make more noise people see our clients more, they visit them more. Kelly Molson: That sounds really simple. When you say it and budgeted for. Ant Rawlins: I know. I know. Kelly Molson: The listeners that listen to this podcast are at all different sizes. So attractions of all sizes. And Some of them may be at those lower levels right now and starting to be, slightly concerned about what summer may bring or may not bring. What would be your advice to attraction marketers that is kind of struggling to focus on what the priority should be right now? Ant Rawlins: Yeah. That's a good question. So this isn't rocket science at all. It's quite straightforward. The very first thing attraction marketers could should do is ultimately just deliver really good digital advertising. It's the most straight line method for visitors. It really is. When I say digital marketing, yeah it's digital advertising activity. That needs to be good. It should be the best. It is the creme de la creme marketing activities that can be done with immediate impact. That's completely measurable and transparent for me. It doesn't really make sense to invest budget anywhere else. Even projects that I work on independently at Navigate my own initiatives or innovations as, we might talk about it later, we would only do digital on that. Why would we ever think of anything else? There's just simply no requirement, and we can't track it. We can't measure it. We can't optimise. Ant Rawlins: So the very first thing any attraction should do is what are they doing on digital and just do that more and do it better. And yet, despite the pandemic, believe or not, I still speak to some attractions that direct 80% of their marketing budget towards traditional marketing print leaflet, bus shelters, this and the other. Kelly Molson: Wow. Ant Rawlins: And I just I can't rationalise it in my head. I don't understand. It does not compute. Kelly Molson: That's a huge percentage. That's really surprising. I mean, I can understand some of their budget going towards it, but, you know, 20%, not 80%. Ant Rawlins: Yeah. And so when you were talking about, the growth in visitor numbers that we're delivering for a lot of clients, it's because we charge into executing a digital advertising and marketing strategy immediately and it has immediate effects. Literally month long. It's so, yeah, that's what I would do. And it doesn't matter what size you are. Because I would say if you're above 50,000, then you can implement what I'm talking about to the scale that it's required. If you are a 100,000, then 100,000 business plan and then it's viable. Anything above that, you have got the visitor numbers and the marketing investment and resource to deliver a highly effective activity that will give you the visitor numbers you want. Kelly Molson: There's something else that you've been talking about quite a lot recently, which I am a big fan of. I've quoted elements of this blog piece in numerous talks and numerous pieces online. It's about positioning and attraction as essential. Ant Rawlins: Right. Yeah. Kelly Molson: You spoke about it brilliantly at the ALVA heads of marketing meeting back prior to December. And it was perfectly timed because at that point, attraction marketeers, we knew we're looking at maybe a 15 to 20% cut in their budgets this year because of the cost of living crisis and having to look at kind of smarter ways to use their budget and smarter ways to talk about why their attraction is somewhere that people should, people need to visit, not just want to visit. Can you talk us through a couple of those pointers from that blog piece because I just think it's so invaluable to our listeners to hear about this. Ant Rawlins: Sure. So yeah, this came about actually and credit where credit's due, Richard Huntington, who's a strategy director -- Sachi and Sachi, the first put this forward when I was presenting at an event with him. And we spoke about this, and he suggested that attractions need to position themselves as essential. So all I did was, write on his coattails and say, “Alright. Well, this is how attractions do position themselves as essential”. So we come up with a various ways of saying, “This is how you should communicate in order to position yourself as essential”. And if you permit me to rewind for a moment, the reason we need to position an attraction as essential is because when reviewing the likely economic impact of the cost of living crisis on visitors, individuals, pockets. Ant Rawlins: They're ultimately gonna be putting everything apart from essential activities. This was the theory 6 months ago when we were talking about this. And, to a certain degree, we have seen this. So that's why we need to be essential because it's almost the only ring fence budget in a consumer's pocket where they go, “Okay, that's essential. I'm not giving that up.” How does an attraction do this? How does it position itself as essential? And there's a number of different ways of doing it. As you've said, you can look at the blog that we created for it. And it's really interesting. Ant Rawlins: I think one of the nice ways of maybe picking one good strategy of this apart is making memories. Because our friend Bernard Donoghue at ALVA regularly highlights that attractions are so important because they are these places that create memories. They create moments with people. And I absolutely agree with Bernard, of course. But what I think converts a memory to something essential is time. As a grandparent, it's not about you as a grandparent, not being there forever. It's about as a grandparent, those kids aren't gonna be little kids forever. They're gonna be, horrible moody grumpy smelly teenagers before you know it. Apologies to any teenagers listening to me. I'm sure you are not all like that. I certainly wasn't when I was a teenager. You've gotta just look at it a slightly different way. Ant Rawlins: And it's essential, therefore, for the grandparent to spend time with that little four year old, because she's not gonna be four next year. She's not gonna be 4 in a few years' time. Don't worry about where you are. So, surely, a day out and a memory with a grandkid at the age of four. That's such a different experience at a kid age seven because I've got both, which is so different again from a kid age nine because I've got one of them too. And, it's kinda like memories are memories at different times as well. And at this timing that you're happy, you know, you really need to try and leverage that. And if you can do that, then, yeah, it's essential, isn't it? You wanna spend time with them young.Kelly Molson: That's the one that really hit home for me, actually. So I have a young daughter, she's just coming up for 2. My parents, we've had her a lot later in life. Her grandparents are a little bit older, so they're 71 this year. And they feel this. So they feel that they have got a set amount of time to make and form those memories with that little girl. They're already planning. She's not even 2 yet. They've already said to me, “By the time she's 5, we're going to Disney. This is what's happening, we're going here. We're gonna make this big memory because we need to do that”. My dad needs to do that before he's 80. So I can't do it any later than that. Kelly Molson: So, they've got this time limit on these things. The other thing that really struck me about that blog was how you position what things cost. So there was an element in there about making comparisons between everyday things and what you'd actually spend on an attraction. So I made a comparison between paying I think it was something like £7 to park all day. This absolutely incredible attraction has the most fantastic kids play area and family area to make all of these wonderful memories. Take your kids' bike there, teach them to ride. 7 quid is 2 flat whites. Save yourself 2 flat whites a week, and you can go and do this amazing thing. And I thought that was a really strong message to push out for attractions. Ant Rawlins: Yeah. I think that we've gotta get across a value message. Again, as everybody's talking about this, I think that the marketing speak that you'll hear me say, it's not new stuff for anybody I imagine that listens to this because everybody that listens to this is good at, it is good at marketing. They've got a sense of the understanding of the principles and the concept here. So showing demonstrating value for an attraction visit is essential, and a lot of attractions. Not all, by the way, but a lot of attractions do deliver fantastic value. And so you really need to kinda leverage that because, yeah, we spend a lot more money on a lot less stuff than memories than these moments and these shared experiences. Kelly Molson: We do. And we need we need a good reminder of where our money's being spent and where it's important. Ant Rawlins: Yeah. And, again, I think there was a really good output around this. It's like, buy memory is not stuff kind of thing. It was really good. Yeah. Kelly Molson: Okay. Number one thing that all attraction marketers need to focus on for 2023. Ant Rawlins: Yes. So I've been thinking about how to kind of, distill this into one thing for you. And I believe it is to generate revenue digitally. Three words. Bear with me on this whilst I unpick it a little bit. We gotta generate revenue digitally. Now that actually covers a lot of different things. First of all, it covers digital marketing. Investing in digital to drive visitors, donations, memberships, whatever you want. That will help you generate revenue digitally. But more than that, your online shop and ecommerce growing revenue from that, which many people became pretty good at during the pandemic. That's generating revenue digitally. You can sell digital products. Many membership programs from organisations, might be a magazine which will probably immediately go into the recycling. What about digital product, so you can develop these digital products that will be essential. Ant Rawlins: That is, again, generating revenue digitally. Coupled with this, generating revenue is also kinda growing profits. Because you can actually deliver a lot of your functions now with technology in a really good way. We know how stretched attractions marketing departments are, how much work attractions marketers actually do on a daily basis, creating content here, coming up with a strategy there, firefight in this, solving that problem over there. It's crazy. When I look at the volume of work that attractions marketers do, it is massive. That there aren't any coasters in this industry that'll be working really hard. And they need to use technology to make their jobs easier or not even make their jobs easier so they can elevate the work they do rather than scrambling around doing a little bit here or a little bit there. Ant Rawlins: We should be using ChatGPT to create attractions marketing content continually for our attraction. We should be using really good email automation to solve that. And there's so much good tech out there that this will save you money and, again, grow profits, which is generating revenue for you. Finally, as part of all of this, all these bits because they're all digital, and it's all tech. They should all connect. You should be able to track. You should be able to look at this digital ecosystem you created and understand how it into links and then how you can optimise that conversion. And, again, some of the bigger conversations we're having with, the some leading kind of attractions in the UK are very much about. “Right, we've got this area that's doing this digitally. We've got this digital activity pulling this in here. We've got an opportunity to increase efficiency by implementing some tech here. How does this all work together?” Ant Rawlins: And and that's exciting. That's what we should do. And that is probably very daunting for smaller attractions, and that doesn't matter. It's daunting. Yeah. And you have to face it head on because it is only going in that direction. I guarantee it. And you will not be here in 5 or 10 years if you do not do this. It's that simple. It's inevitable to quote Agent Smith. Kelly Molson: However, however scary it might seem. It's okay because Navigate just launched something that is actually gonna help the attraction marketers perfectly with this, which is your attraction marketing playbook. Ant Rawlins: I was not expecting your segue way there. And the thing that's quite interesting about that, I wasn't expecting it. So I thought you're gonna disagree with me, which I was getting well excited about. Okay. Let's do it out em up, Kelly. Kelly Molson: Let's do this. No, I absolutely agree with this. I think you've nailed that advice there, but I think what you said about it being a really daunting task. I think it can actually be daunting for larger attractions as well, actually, because let's face it, marketing teams are small. Regardless of the size of agencies, they are really small, and they wear lots of hats, and they juggle a lot of different things. Ant Rawlins: Yeah. They're small and also the industry well, not the industry. Our society doesn't have the digital skills and capabilities that are required to capitalise on the technology we currently have. They're they're not available. We've not trained these people yet. And those people that do have those skills are incredibly short supplied comparatively. I was at the app to travel marketing conference last week and there's this company that specialises in travel recruitment called Gail Kenny. And I've kind of known him a bit there. They're good, and they gave a really decent analysis of this digital skills gap. And I just say, yeah. There's a huge issue. Anybody in digital marketing, digital advertising, CRO, CRM. All of these skills are just in desperate need across the industry. We just don't have the candidates. Ant Rawlins: We don't have people doing this because they're all taken. So it's a skills issue as well, which makes it really daunting because there are other people with that knowledge. But you're right. That's I suppose that's why we kind of created the Visitor Attraction Growth playbook in that, it's a decent sized document, you know, 50 or 60 page is that really just breaks down the kind of 5 or 6 core activities you should be looking at to grow your visitors and revenue this year. And, yeah, we've literally just said all the things we think you need to do. Kelly Molson: It's a lovely playbook, actually. And it's a really good thing just kinda take you away for an hour or so. Just kinda work your way through, work on it, put your plan together, but then come back and revisit as well. We're gonna put a link to this in show notes. So anyone listening, don't worry. You don't need to go and find it. Literally, just go to the show notes, and you'll be able to download it for there. Because, actually, it's free to download for anyone for a period of time, isn't it?  Which is lovely. Very generous. Ant Rawlins: Oh, well, it is very generous. I had a battle with my marketing manager about this. And he's like, “No, Ant. We're not even gonna email gate. And I'm like, “What do you mean we're not even gonna email gate?” “Well, no. We're not. We're just we're not on a website. Click download done. I might well, hi, mate, your call.” So there we go. Kelly Molson: Lovely, lovely good people, you. Ant Rawlins: Don't thank me. Thanks Olly, the Head of marketing. It's him. It's not me. Kelly Molson: Thanks, Olly. You are a lovely person, actually. Ant Rawlins: He is. It's very easy. Kelly Molson: But talking about lovelyness, let's talk a little bit about Navigate as an agency because you have got a really good ethos in the way that you grow your agency, the way that you hire, the way that you just the way that you run your organisation. And that kinda comes through really beautifully in the fact that you've recently gained B Corp status. Ant Rawlins: Yeah. Kelly Molson: Just give us a little bit of a snippet of what B Corp means for our listeners that aren't aware of what this is. Ant Rawlins: B Corp is ultimately a movement of businesses that have kind of agreed that the nature of doing business needs to better. And, therefore, we assign certain standards on ourselves in doing that business. So, for example, we have to have specific environmental policies. We have to show improvement in that. We have to have certain culture. We have to have a certain mentality towards our team and treat our team in a certain way. It's governance, it's environmental impact, it's social impact, and it's rigorous. It takes 2 years to become a B Corp. And we literally got it a few weeks ago. And, yeah, it's great to be one. I mean, if you look at some of the, I wouldn't say, coolest, but I think they're cool. Ant Rawlins: Because that's what I think cool is being successful and being good for me. That's cool. So if you look at them serious brands, people like Patagonia and what have you. The kind of, the darlings of a good business, invariably, you'll find that a lot of them are B corps or on that journey. And I I'm very proud of of being a B corp, and at the same time, it's not an external thing for me. I think quite a few people use it as a “Oh, we're the B corp, so buy something from us”. That I mean, that's a bit ridiculous in my opinion. I think that it's about saying, “Well, listen. Going forwards, business needs to do better. It needs to better. It needs to hold itself the highest standards”. Ant Rawlins: There are multiple ways businesses can be profitable and make money. And all I'm saying is on top of that, you need to apply being good with it. And I think it's one of the fundamental requirements we have to impose on ourselves because we won't have a planet in about 200 years time if we don't. I mean, we will have a planet. We just probably won't be very happy on it, and it won't be very happy. Kelly Molson: I know this is, I mean, you've talked about it from a business perspective, but I know that this is a bit of a passion area as well, especially around kind of sustainability and being outdoors in nature. And, actually, I mean, I'll put this on the in the show notes, but Ant sent me, he emailed me a picture. He emailed it to me. So he doesn't hate email, really. He emailed me this wonderful picture of himself this week out on a walk whilst listening to the podcast. Ant Rawlins: Don't share that.Kelly Molson: It was such a great photo. Okay. I might share this photo. I'll put it Twitter. It was a fabulous photo where it's outside in nature. But, look, this is you. Like, you are what you talk about. It's you personified. Everything that you love is all around nature and being outside and being connected to the environment and being sustainable, and that really does across in the way that you run Navigate, also the personal projects that you have. Now you mentioned earlier that you have your own kind of innovative projects on the go. You've got something quite exciting to talk to us about today, which is a podcast exclusive, people. He's not talked about this anywhere, and Ant talks a lot. He really does. This is a new thing. He's not discussed this with anyone. So I wanna hear about it. Ant Rawlins: Well, I have discussed it with a few people. It's not been broadcast, Kelly. Just actually, some of the people listening to this podcast, I know who they are, and I know them. And you know them, and we know them. And, actually, they're gonna be like, “Wait a minute. He spoke to me about that.” So I've got the caveat. Some people know. Okay. But, no, it's not been announced on the industry yet. It's not been broadcast. We've not launched it yet. Yeah, it's exciting. As you can tell, it already started increasing the speed of my conversation. So, yeah, do you what did you want to just dive in? Kelly Molson: I wanted to dive in because I say that I didn't know about this prior to this conversation, and I'm really excited about it. This is something that I am gonna use. And I'll tell you what, I'm gonna use it daily. So I'm really excited about it. I need you to share it with the podcast. Ant Rawlins: Alright. You're so kind. Okay. So, yeah, we've created what we think is quite a disruptive business for the industry. And when I say disruptive, well, yeah, in a really, really positive way. I consider it a conservation technology business is how I see in my head is what it is. And in its simplest form, it's a mobile app. What we've done with our app Wildling is we've created an app that collates all of the UK's great nature places in one format, in one place. And we geolocated that information so that you, Kelly, can go to this app on a Saturday morning when it's a lovely day or not a lovely day, whatever because nature's ready, whatever the weather. You can go to the app. You go, “What am I gonna do today?”Ant Rawlins: And you can look at it and it'll geolocate all the nature places that you can go and visit near you. It gives you the facility's information, the visitor information that you'd need, the opening times, gives you directions, and then there's more. So in the first instance, It's a free to download app. We want everybody in the UK using this. We want it downloaded everywhere. We've got a pretty mega network of people are already gonna broadcast this when we launch. I think that the total email they size is about fifty million people so far. I'm gonna get emailed this by our part. Place. Yeah. It's a bit mad. Kelly Molson: But email's okay, folks. Not rubbish. Ant Rawlins: Yeah. It's a bit mad. Oh, and, also, I came up with this idea with Tim Smith. So Tim, who created Eden Project, it won't be here without him. You know, me and him have talked about this for 2 years. We've been working on it together. We've been speaking about it 2 years, and he's guided me a lot on where we can go with this. So, yeah, he's a legend, and he's my kind of my industry hero, really. But Yeah. So myself and team just thought it is. It's collectivising nature. It's all these great nature places you can go. And it's solving a problem that I had, Kelly. Ant Rawlins: 6 years ago, I moved to Dartmouth from Bristol, and I wanted to find out all these great places near me. And I had to go to about 20 different websites, and the information then was, a bit rubbish on some of them. Some of the mad images, some of them didn't, some of other visitor information. I couldn't tell. So this way, I've got my app. Wherever I am in the country, I can find nature reserves from the RSPB, English Heritage, National Trust, Forestry, England, all these great nature organisations with nature places and 20 seconds more. Our aim here is to put £1,000,000,000 into nature over the next 15 to 20 years. £1,000,000,000 into protecting native nature in this country. Ant Rawlins: And the way we're gonna do this is the way that it should be done because people won't care. They won't protect what they have an experience. That's Adam Brewer's line, and it's true. So we want to get them into nature. And when they're there, because they've used our app to get there. We're gonna be able to actually communicate with them given the information of that specific place that they are. But also suggest they might want to donate to help protect that place. And we can do it when they're actually in the environment or just shortly after they return. It's not, a random email on a Wednesday evening when you've not been to a forest for 3 weeks. Ant Rawlins: It's when you're there, when you're having that time, we're gonna be able to prompt you to tap to love nature and then send those funds out to the fantastic nature organisations that we'd be having this country to help them continue their good work. So, yeah, £1,000,000,000 15 to 20 years. That's what we wanna do. Kelly Molson: It's such a good idea. That's a good idea. I love it. I'm genuinely buzzing about this. So this is all of the lovely things that I like to do. And I think like, you kind of you know what's on your doorstep. But you don't know enough of what's on your doorstep. We are really lucky. We live just outside Cambridge. We've got 3 or 4 National Trust places around us that we spend a lot of time. But, also, we spend a lot of time there. Right? You're looking for new things, and you don't always know the first place to go. You might kinda know some of the bigger things that are around. We've got Bedford Forest 45 minutes that way and, I don't know, Brooksbourne Woods another 40 minutes that way. But what really is here? Kelly Molson: What can I do to support these brilliant things and keep them moving and keep them conserving the natural environments that were that are around us. It would be something that I genuinely would use. And I can't believe no one's done it. It's one of those ideas that you go, “Does this not exist? Wow.”Ant Rawlins: There's a reason nobody's done it. It's because it's been a pain in the ass, if I'm honest.Kelly Molson: A labour of love?Ant Rawlins: Getting all the content, getting it all done. There's a reason it's not been done, and it's because it's a hell of a lot of leg work. But, you know, yeah, there's just so many beneficiaries of this that I'm really happy about, first of all, and everyday people thinking, “What can I do today, Joe?” “Alright. We'll go there. Get outside”. We know it's better for them. We know we know it makes us healthy. We know it gives us perspective. We know that, what's going on in various different parts of the world doesn't need to affect our day right now today. Ant Rawlins: We know we can go away and escape from it all, and it's not always Netflix and bills and this and the other, there's more to the world than it gives us perspective everyday people. But the challenge people have is always it just seems really difficult for them. When I speak with one of the organisations that we do through Wildling, it's really the interesting the number of people that will go on a day out to nature, go to a Forestry England place or a National Trust location or somewhere like that, park up in a car park, and then sometimes just stay in the car park. Or have their picnic, like, 10 meters from their car. The distance people go from the from the point that they actually get into these nature places is very small. Whereas me, I park in and just zoom out. I'm like, right, how far come from this car park point can I get and go and explore? But there's a fear it doesn't feel easy. It feels unnatural. This is what how ironic that being in nature feels unnatural to us. And so our app needs to do one thing. It just needs to make nature easy for people, and that's what it's doing. Yeah, as well, of course, protecting it because we'll want people to donate afterwards. Kelly Molson: I see. Ant Rawlins: But, yeah, in the final point I'll make on it, Kelly, because you know talks. I know you've got me on this one. I'm sorry. I think it's also gonna be pretty big for domestic tourism in general because you're right. On your doorstep, you can find out what it is. But do you know what, Kelly? Maybe you've always wanted to visit Norwich. Maybe you've always wanted to visit there, and you like --Kelly Molson: One of my favourite places. Ant Rawlins: There you go. Yeah. I'll get an Airbnb, and then I'll use it. I cannot find all these great places around me. The fact is wherever you are in the country. You're gonna find these places are with the volume of places we have on here, you're never gonna be more than a few miles away from a really great nature place that you can go and visit. So, again, it's free. It's for everybody. Final point, I was speaking with Josh Croft, who's their CEO of UK Inbound the other week, and Josh is a great guy. And he said from an inbound tourism point of view, he thinks it's gonna be really big as well. He thinks that people coming into the UK using this app to it explore our natural environments, it would be fantastic. Ant Rawlins: And one of our clients actually does bring about two million people into the UK per annum. And we know from the analysis and research that we've done that some of the primary reasons, particularly when entering the northern part of the UK, is for nature. And a lot of them, heading then they head up to Scotland and around Yorkshire. But, one of the draws which I was a little bit surprised about. One of the draws of Europe near European visitors into the UK is nature and natural environments and wildlife. So, yeah, it's great for inbound tourism as well. As domestic tourism, not to mention it's making us all healthier. Kelly Molson: That's really interesting, isn't it? Like, having everything in one place, I hadn't thought about how useful that would be to tourists to the UK. They haven't got to slightly like you were doing, spending hours on 20 different websites trying to find all the different things around you. They literally go to one app, and it's all there. It's genius.Ant Rawlins: We're not we're not stopping in the UK, Kelly. I'll tell you that. Kelly Molson: I mean, I know this was coming.Ant Rawlins: Yeah. Yeah. We're not stopping it because I want to use this app for me when I don't really know much about France. So I wanna get over to France. I don't wanna be able to use my app to find all the fantastic nature places that I can go and, experience there. I'm in Germany, I'm in Spain, and so on and so forth. Kelly Molson: What I really love about this is it's a wonderful example of you're you know, it's the combination of the passions that you have and the skill set that you have in the agency as well. And it's just it's an absolutely perfect design or what you can do to support nature, but, you know, what you can also do to help the attractions from the tourism organisations that you work with as well. So it's just brilliant. How can we find out more about it? So it's not launched yet. How do we find out more about it? How can our listeners get involved? Ant Rawlins: Well, I'm pretty confident that when it's launched, any people are connected to Skip the Queue podcast will probably get a lovely email from Kelly. It's here to download. So that solves our audience here. Yeah. It will be ready soon. I mean, it'll just be available on the App Store. It's called Wildling, and we're gonna be there in a few weeks. Okay. Well. Kelly Molson: What we'll do, we'll put a link to as soon as it's launched, we'll put a link in the show notes again. And, yeah, look, listeners, you will definitely hear from me about this. I'll be all over social media with it. Maybe email because I don't mind a bit of email, but definitely Twitter. Maybe some LinkedIn. This is brilliant. So this might be an interesting question for you because we normally end the podcast by asking our guests to recommend a book, but you don't read that much. So do you have something that you would like to share with us? Whether it's a book, a podcast, an audio book, what would you like to share with that listeners? Ant Rawlins: Do you know what? I will recommend a book and to end and probably just, correct the blemish on my character, Kelly. I do read a lot, but I hate it. So that's the difference. And I'm happy I'm missing it. There you go. It's it feels slightly sadistic in the end, really, reading, but there you go. The book I would recommend is called The Almanack of Naval Ravikant, and I think it's amazing. It's pulling my favourite book. Kelly Molson: Reason why? Ant Rawlins: I mean, Naval Ravikant, a bit of a legend. I mean, he is incredibly successful, but his book is really succinct short advices. It's a collection and expansion of tweets that he've created over time. And he splits the book into 50, 50, 50 percent is kind of wealth creation and all that kind of stuff. And the other 50% is happiness. And it just expands these points, but it's just so digestible. Each little nugget is “Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. We should do that. I should do that.” So so I love it. Just I don't I do not need fifty pages to tell me something when five words will do. And so I love it for that reason. The Almanack of Naval Ravikant, I it's pretty good. Kelly Molson: This is a book absolutely for me. And has not been recommended on this podcast as well. We're building up such a great list of recommendations from our guests. That's a good one. Okay. I'm gonna put that on my list. Listeners, if you wanna win a copy of that book, you know what to do. Head over to our picture account, retweet this episode announcement with the words if I want answered, and you might be in with a chance of winning it. This has been such a great chat. Thank you. You've given such good advice to our listeners. We will put all of your contact details in the show notes. So if any of our listeners wanna get in touch and talk about some of the things we've discussed today. I know that you're always super help happy to talk to people. Kelly Molson: We've put the marketing playbook download in the show notes too. So, honestly, go and get a copy of that. I'm sure that Olly's not gonna let you have it for free for much longer, so grab it while you can. Before you have to give him an email. Ant Rawlins: And if you don't mind, Kelly, I'll be invoicing point about always happy to speak to people, but particularly have to speak to people of in a bit of a fix. I'm more than happy with the half hour count saying to you guys, do you know what? We'd be doing this, this is where I would go by the you just if it helps.Kelly Molson: There you go. Look. They're such good guys. Look at them. Ant Rawlins: I've learned this from my business partner, Simon. He's the nicest guy. Simon Jones is the nicest guy. I'm not very nice compared to him, but he just super nice. Kelly Molson: Yes. He is very nice. Ant Rawlins: There's a lovely industry. You know, there's a lot of nice people, isn't there, which is great. Is why a lot of us here probably know each other. We've spoken to each other, and we like each other. Kelly Molson: It's a lovely place to be. As is as you Skip the Queue and now, you'll Skip the Queue of them tonight. So well, welcome to the even lovely, a little segment within it. So thank you. It's been lovely to chat. You're a superstar. Kelly Molson: Thanks for listening to Skip the Queue. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave us a five star review. It really helps others find us. And remember to follow us on Twitter for your chance to win the books that have been mentioned. Skip The Queue is brought to you by Rubber Cheese, a digital agency that builds remarkable systems and websites for attractions that helps them increase their visitor numbers. You can find show notes and transcriptions from this episode and more over on our website, rubbercheese.com/podcast.

In That Wilbur Smith Show two of Wilbur's co-writers, Tom Harper and Diana Thomas, explore the exhilarating world of adventure writer Wilbur Smith, one of the greatest story tellers of all time. They discuss his books, meet his extraordinary cast of characters, talk with special guests about the historical events that form the background to the books, visit the places that Wilbur brings so vividly to life and learn about the incredible real life exploits and adventures that inspired Wilbur and his writing. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Moses was a hundred and twenty years old when he died, yet his eyes were not weak nor his strength gone. Deuteronomy 34:7   "Dear Dr. Sala," wrote a friend, "Would you have any suggestions to help people who have reached their eighties and feel they have nothing to live for? I admit feeling very useless at times. I am 82, in a wheelchair, and have little energy."   In recent days, there has been a graying of society as more and more of us are living longer and longer; and with the years come new challenges. Frankly, every year I hear from more and more people who are struggling with the challenges of ageing. I've done two things, thinking about this issue. First, I've asked again, "What does God say in His Word about this?" Then, I've talked with a number of seniors who are there and asked them what they have found that is helpful, which I can share with you.   The fact is that the number of men and women in their eighties has increased dramatically in the last two decades. Better medicines, better nourishment, and better health care in general have combined to give a lot of seniors more years. Whereas many would have succumbed to illnesses a few years ago, they now often fight back and have years to enjoy, provided they can enjoy them.   Far sooner than we would like to admit, the years turn into decades and we find ourselves doing fewer and fewer things for the first time and more and more things for the last time. How can seniors handle the changes of life? May I suggest the following:   Guideline #1: Come to grips with the fact that you are here by the will of God, not fate or chance. God makes no mistakes and suffers no surprises. Paul wrote, "In him we were also chosen, having been predestined according to the plan of him who works out everything in conformity with the purpose of his will..." Never forget, until He calls you, you've got work to do.   Guideline #2: Realize that your true value as a person is dependent on your character and not your productivity. One of the flaws of our thinking, especially as we age, is that we are not worth much unless we are producing. This, of course, runs contrary to everything that the Bible says. It tells us that you are of value and worth, not because of what you do, but because of what you are. Paintings and fine books only become more valuable with age, and so it is with people.   Guideline #3: Accept your lessening strength with grace. "I greet each day as a gift," says Beatrice Cole, at age 90. She says that the last decade, from age 80 to 90, has been the best gift of her life, though she has been alone most of that time except for the company of her pet poodle.      Guideline #4: Force yourself to get out and mix with people. "After I lost Ethel," said Frank Emery, "I forced myself to get out, to travel, to play golf, to be with people. Sitting at home, refusing to reach out to others, only compounds your loneliness."        Guideline #5: Refuse to accept defeat at the hand of yourself. Theologian Dr. Wilbur Smith once wrote, "It's no sin growing old, but it's mighty inconvenient." My wife of 60 years and I recently co-authored a book entitled, Age is Just a Number. Now that we are both in our 80s, it's nice to write about something we have experienced firsthand. As the horses of time gallop down the lessening hills, share your life experiences with those who follow in your footsteps. Your memories will be with them long after you are gone. Indeed. Never forget that age is a matter of the mind. If you don't mind, it doesn't matter. Resource Reading: Isaiah 40:1-11                   

During the 90s Giles Kristian was lead singer of pop group Upside Down, achieving four top twenty hit records! As a singer-songwriter he lived and toured for two years in Europe and has made music videos all over the world. Giles is half-Norwegian and his family history inspired him to write his first historical novels: the acclaimed and bestselling RAVEN Viking trilogy. For his next series, he drew on a long-held fascination with the English Civil War to chart the fortunes of a family divided by this brutal conflict in The Bleeding Land and Brothers' Fury. Giles also co-wrote Wilbur Smith's No.1 bestseller, Golden Lion. In The Rise of Sigurd novels he returned to the world of the Vikings. His Sunday Times bestseller, Lancelot, is currently in development for TV. He followed Lancelot with Camelot, and now, Where Blood Runs Cold is his debut contemporary thriller. Welcome to Rock, Paper, Swords, Giles Kristian!

Thank you for listening to Write On! Audio, the podcast for writers everywhere brought to you by Pen To Print Today's showcase is selected by historical novelist, Dan Cross. Dan's first novel "Caesar of Mercenaries" was shortlisted for the 2018 Wilbur Smith adventure Writing Award and his second, "The Lioness of the Flame" was shortlisted for the same award in 2020. You can find out more about Dan by visiting his website https://www.dan-cross.com/ where you'll find more about his writing, his author coaching work as The Open Book Editor and find links to his social media accounts. The pieces you heard were · "Weeds Unwilled" by Patsy Middleton read by Sally Walker-Taylor · “The Circle of Grief” by Thomas Nixon read by Chris Gregory · “Aberfan Angels” by Tammy Griffiths Palmer read by Sally Walker-Taylor · “The Homecoming” by Raymond Miles read by Chris Gregory · "Sonnet Number 1 of the year 2022" by Mary Walsh read by Sally Walker-Taylor If you have been affected by any of the issues Dan discussed in this podcast the link below has links to organisations in the UK that can help with cost of living support along with other support organisations: https://pentoprint.org/about/advice-support/ Join us next week for an interview with novelist Jessica Andrews We're always delighted to read your contributions so if you'd like to see your words in Write on! or hear them on this podcast please get in touch. Please submit to: https://pentoprint.org/get-involved/submit-to-write-on/ Thank you for listening to Write On! Audio. This edition has been presented by Tiffany Clare and produced by Chris Gregory. Write On! Audio is an Alternative Stories production for Pen To Print.

Marco Buticchi"Il serpente e il faraone"Longanesi Editorehttps://www.longanesi.it/Dalle sabbie dell'Egitto del faraone eretico Akhenaton sino ai tragici eventi del Novecento, una storia il cui filo rosso ha inizio nella tomba di un re bambino vissuto quasi tremila e cinquecento anni fa. 4 novembre 1922: nella Valle dei Re, viene scoperta la tomba di Tutankhamon. La febbre dell'antico Egitto infiamma il mondo intero. L'egittologo Howard Carter e il suo finanziatore, il conte di Carnarvon, si trovano d'improvviso al centro dell'attenzione e, accanto alla curiosità di scoprire i segreti di una civiltà così lontana e misteriosa, si scatenano ben presto invidie, voci malevole e leggende di maledizioni.In Europa, intanto, nonostante il primo conflitto mondiale sia da poco terminato, sembra si corra incontro a una nuova, terribile guerra. A ravvivare le braci è, in particolare, il crescente antisemitismo, alimentato anche dal servizio segreto zarista, l'Ochrana, che fa redigere un falso documento – i Protocolli dei Savi anziani di Sion – per gettare di­scredito sulla finanza ebraica. Ma quando le manovre occulte di queste forze eversive sembrano a un punto morto, la scoperta del sepolcro del faraone bambino giunge come una provvidenziale soluzione. Non soltanto per via dei favolosi tesori che contiene, ma anche per i papiri perduti, quei papiri che – a detta dei responsabili della spedizione archeologica, Carnarvon e Carter – «sarebbero stati in grado di stravolgere i fondamenti delle religioni».1341 a.C.: Nasce Tutankhamon, figlio di Akhenaton, il faraone eretico. Crescere a corte per il piccolo erede al trono è un continuo districarsi tra insidie e congiure, ma il peggio accade quando suo padre è costretto a scomparire. Nei pochi anni che gli restano, Tut custodirà gelosamente i papiri segreti che narrano il vero destino del faraone Akhenaton e del fratellastro, l'ebreo Mosè. Una verità preziosa, ma scomoda per il giovanissimo sovrano, suo malgrado al centro di spietate manovre e cospirazioni. Una cavalcata inarrestabile dalle sabbie dei deserti degli antichi egizi alle colline del Mediterraneo alla ricerca del più prezioso tesoro di ogni tempo. Un fiume tumultuoso che corre senza sosta dai fasti dei faraoni alle radici del male del secolo scorso.Marco Buticchi, il maestro italiano dell'avventura, è nato alla Spezia nel 1957 e ha viaggiato moltissimo per lavoro, nutrendo così anche la sua curiosità, il suo gusto per l'avventura e la sua attenzione per la storia e il particolare fascino dei tanti luoghi che ha visitato. È il primo autore italiano pubblicato da Longanesi nella collana «I maestri dell'avventura» (accanto a Wilbur Smith, Clive Cussler e Patrick O'Brian), in cui sono apparsi con grande successo di pubblico e di critica Le Pietre della Luna (1997), Menorah (1998), Profezia (2000), La nave d'oro (2003), L'anello dei re (2005), Il vento dei demoni (2007), Il respiro del deserto (2009), La voce del destino (2011), La stella di pietra (2013), Il segno dell'aquila (2015), La luce dell'impero (2017), Il segreto del faraone nero (2018), Stirpe di navigatori (2019) e L'ombra di Iside (2020), disponibili anche in edizione TEA, oltre a Scusi bagnino, l'ombrellone non funziona (2006) e a Casa di mare (2016), un appassionato ritratto del padre, Albino Buticchi. Nel dicembre 2008 Marco Buticchi è stato nominato Commendatore dal Presidente della Repubblica per aver contribuito alla diffusione della lingua e della letteratura italiana anche all'estero.IL POSTO DELLE PAROLEAscoltare fa Pensarehttps://ilpostodelleparole.it/

On today's episode, Aaron Alaniz interviews Wilbur Smith on his story dealing with treating others with addiction, recovery & personal transformation. Wilbur served others for over 10 years in his industry & he's one of the top experts in his field to go to if you're struggling. He's a father, son & entrepreneur who dove deep with Aaron Alaniz on this episode. Notes: Transformation as a whole is about making sacrifices in the present moment in order to find real fulfillment in the future. · · · · · · · · · · Struggling with addiction? If you're ready to learn more about Calusa Recovery & how they can help you radically improve your life, Visit: https://calusarecovery.com/ Follow Wilbur Smith: https://basix.live/instagram-wilbur Calusa Recovery's YouTube Channel: https://basix.live/youtube-calusa · · · · · · · · · · Ready to change your life? Speak with one of our enrollment specialists and discover whether or not you qualify to become a student by: Booking your FREE call here: https://basixbrigade.com/booking-page For more information about BASIX, our countless success stories and how we could potentially help you build your best body ever within 16 weeks or less: Watch our FREE training here: https://basixbrigade.com/greetings · · · · · · · · · · YouTube: https://basix.live/youtube-aaron TikTok: https://basix.live/tiktok-aaron Instagram: https://basix.live/instagram-aaron Twitter: https://basix.live/twitter-aaron Join our FREE Facebook Group: https://basix.live/free-fb-group

Zat you, Santa claus?! Happy New Year! Recorded in Chelsham. This episode has chat about recommending stuff, abandoned recordings, Optimus prime's bellend, The Armstrongs, proof of Aliens, Danny Dyer, Ebeneezer "The dynamite geezer" Scrooge, spilling tea,The Blindboy podcast and a little bit of Wilbur Smith. It also includes a few of the Tidbits time capsule messages.  ::::::::::::::::::::::: Support the show: https://www.paypal.me/tidbitspod To get in touch, send a message to tidbitspod@protonmail.com Follow on Twitter: @jacktidball  Follow on Instagram: @tidbitspo  Weekly playlists here:  https://open.spotify.com/user/tidball1 Don't forget to rate, review, share and subscribe...especially if the brown noise was effective.

Marco Buticchi"Il mare dei fuochi"Longanesi Editorehttps://www.longanesi.it/Estate 1980. Un aereo decolla con un leggero ritardo dall'aeroporto di Bologna. A bordo ottantuno persone tra passeggeri e membri dell'equipaggio. Quel volo non completerà mai la sua tratta, finendo per inabissarsi nel Mediterraneo e dando vita a uno dei più intricati misteri della già tortuosa storia della Repubblica Italiana. Trentacinque giorni più tardi, nella stazione ferroviaria della stessa città, una mano assassina colloca un ordigno che uccide ottantacinque innocenti e ferisce gravemente oltre duecento persone. Le autorità indagano sui due eventi ma, anche a distanza di decenni, sembra impossibile approdare alla verità.Estate 2022. Più di quarant'anni dopo quei tragici giorni, Sara Terracini e Oswald Breil si imbattono in Michela Di Romeo, vedova di un servitore dello Stato deceduto nel 1995 mentre investigava su un traffico di rifiuti tossici scomparsi dopo essere stati caricati su carrette del mare. L'uomo aveva scoperto l'esistenza di una vera e propria flotta di navi che tra il 1985 e il 1992 fu deliberatamente affondata nel cuore del Mediterraneo con il suo carico di morte, generando interessi illeciti da capogiro.Quando si tratta di fare giustizia e risolvere un mistero, si sa, i Breil non possono tirarsi indietro. Sara e Oswald decidono così di aiutare la donna a fare luce sulla morte del marito… Ma quello che scopriranno supererà ogni loro previsione e riscriverà il passato. Tra inquietanti sparizioni e pericolosi legami che coinvolgono la malavita organizzata, apparati deviati dello Stato, terrorismo internazionale e finanzieri dai pochi scrupoli, Marco Buticchi offre una versione alternativa e incredibilmente verosimile di quarant'anni di storia italiana in un'avventura ad alto rischio per l'intero equipaggio del Williamsburg.Marco Buticchi, il maestro italiano dell'avventura, è nato alla Spezia nel 1957 e ha viaggiato moltissimo per lavoro, nutrendo così anche la sua curiosità, il suo gusto per l'avventura e la sua attenzione per la storia e il particolare fascino dei tanti luoghi che ha visitato. È il primo autore italiano pubblicato da Longanesi nella collana «I maestri dell'avventura» (accanto a Wilbur Smith, Clive Cussler e Patrick O'Brian), in cui sono apparsi con grande successo di pubblico e di critica Le Pietre della Luna (1997), Menorah (1998), Profezia (2000), La nave d'oro (2003), L'anello dei re (2005), Il vento dei demoni (2007), Il respiro del deserto (2009), La voce del destino (2011), La stella di pietra (2013), Il segno dell'aquila (2015), La luce dell'impero (2017), Il segreto del faraone nero (2018), Stirpe di navigatori (2019) e L'ombra di Iside (2020), disponibili anche in edizione TEA, oltre a Scusi bagnino, l'ombrellone non funziona (2006) e a Casa di mare (2016), un appassionato ritratto del padre, Albino Buticchi. Nel dicembre 2008 Marco Buticchi è stato nominato Commendatore dal Presidente della Repubblica per aver contribuito alla diffusione della lingua e della letteratura italiana anche all'estero. www.marcobuticchi.itIL POSTO DELLE PAROLEascoltare fa pensarehttps://ilpostodelleparole.it/

I'd say it's a healthy bet that most people are ready to move on to the new year. Mine wasn't exactly easy if I'm honest. That said, a lot has come out of it and I actually appreciate the events I was witness to in the course of reaching the proverbial finish line of December. No email responses in today's podcast. You and I, we haven't spoken in some time so I wanted to lean hard into pure conversation and some thoughts that have bounced around the plentiful free space in my head. I've read about three major books since last I uploaded and that has led to the ideal situation, I could not shut up about them even if I tried. From Caesar, to Wilbur Smith, to Charlie Chaplin's autobiography recently. I am so inspired by all these people. Titans of their world's each in their own right. But that's not all. What would a discussion be without speaking on the dangers of social media algorithms and the like. We go deep on the cast and I hope you enjoy getting lost there with me. Thanks for tuning in.

Peter Watt's big canvas Australian historicals have garnered a popular following far beyond the shores of his homeland. And that's how Peter - a man of action who's been described as “the Australian Wilbur Smith” - likes it, because he's always had a primary aim of entertaining readers and elevating Aussie stories to international notice. Hi there, I'm your host Jenny Wheeler and today Peter talks about living his dream life – volunteer fire fighting for six months of the year and writing his new historical series in the other six . Six things you'll learn from this Joys of Binge Reading episode: Why he's got the ideal lifeHow Wallarie became a star in GermanyThe little known history that excites himHow his passion for Aussie history has inspired othersThe writers he admires the mostWhat he'd do differently next time: (you'll be surprised!) Website: http://www.peterwatt.com Facebook:  (Fans of Peter Watt books - Public group) https://www.facebook.com/groups/60777773968/  What follows is a "near as" transcript of our conversation, not word for word but pretty close to it, with links to important mentions. Jenny: But now, here's Peter. .  Hello there Peter and welcome to the show, it's great to have you with us. How Peter got started as an author Peter:  Hello Jenny and 'Kia Ora' to all my New Zealand readers. (Ed note: Kia Ora is a Maori greeting of welcome.) Peter Watt: Author and volunteer fire fighter Jenny:  That's fantastic, and you do have a lot of New Zealand readers.  We'll get on to that.  But beginning at the beginning, I always like to ask this question although it's maybe a little clichéd – was there a “Once Upon a Time” moment when you decided that you wanted to write fiction?  And if so, what was the catalyst for it? Peter:  Yes, well I've looked at this question many times and I think I was aged 7 sitting on a tractor …. driving round and round in circles, and of course in those days there were no cabins, you just sucked in the diesel and sucked up the dust, and I thought to myself, I'm going to start creating stories in my head so I don't go mad.  It started there, Jenny. Jenny:  But it took you a long time then to get round to doing it. Peter:  Yes, you know, we make the mistake of letting life get in the way and not devoting ourselves to what we really want to do.  I was about 50 when I commenced writing “Cry of the Curlew” (Book One in the Frontier series) and from there it's been history, with all the other books following. Cry of the Curlew: #1 in the Frontier series Jenny:  Did you always know it would be historical fiction that you would want to write? Peter:  Yes, most definitely.  I was influenced by James A. Michener, Leon Uris and many of those other American writers who tended to write with the historical background. I always thought that our part of the world, Australia and New Zealand, had got very little exposure in literature, so I devoted myself to that.  Jenny:  I know you've said that actually you probably have been responsible for a little bit of a tourist boom drawing people to Australia, having become interested in the Australian stories, so you've been successful at that. Peter:  Yes, it's nice when I receive emails from American readers who say, you know we never thought about coming to Australia until we read one of your books.  And I would sometimes meet them at the airport and give them a bit of a guided tour. Peter's 12-book Aussie family saga  Jenny:  Fantastic!  What a lovely thing.  You've led a remarkably adventurous life and we'll get onto that, but your series – you've got a 12 books Frontier series which is a very big family drama, in fact it follows the rivalry between two families and now you've started a new series, The Queen's Colonial.  There have been a few stand alones and I think a Papua New Guinea trilogy in the middle there somewhere, but let's talk about the latest book,