The content that shaped our year.
The audiobooks, podcasts and TV series that led to personal growth and a feeling of delight. As the clock ticks towards a fresh year, it's reflection time on the best content I consumed in 2023.
Takeaways:
Celebrating another year of growth.
Support the show:
☕️buymeacoffee.com/whatsyourfree
About the show:
Sam Laliberte - entrepreneur, digital nomad and freedom seeker, hosts the Freedom Lifestyle Podcast to expose people to the many ways you can design your dream life and unlock your own version of the freedom lifestyle. Her guests have empowered themselves through flexible work as a way to “have it all” - financial, location AND schedule freedom.
The content that shaped our year.
The audiobooks, podcasts and TV series that led to personal growth and a feeling of delight. As the clock ticks towards a fresh year, it's reflection time on the best content I consumed in 2023.
Takeaways:
Celebrating another year of growth.
Support the show:
☕️buymeacoffee.com/whatsyourfree
About the show:
Sam Laliberte - entrepreneur, digital nomad and freedom seeker, hosts the Freedom Lifestyle Podcast to expose people to the many ways you can design your dream life and unlock your own version of the freedom lifestyle. Her guests have empowered themselves through flexible work as a way to “have it all” - financial, location AND schedule freedom.
You're listening to the Freedom Lifestyle podcast series. I'm sharing relatable stories of freedom seekers who ditched conventional office life and courageously asked for more. The energy just completely shifted. My entire being just felt so free. My business was still generating income while I was on the beach. I decided to quit and just stay at home. I really can't work for anyone but me. It's literally just doing whatever the hell you want to do. As for me, I'm your host, sam, and I've spent the last four years creating a business that allows me to work from anywhere. The Freedom Lifestyle looks different for everyone. What's your free? You're listening to the Freedom Lifestyle podcast series and this is going to be another solo episode from me yours truly, sam and this is going to be my final solo episode of the year. It's been such an amazing year for the podcast. I had been on a bit of a hiatus for the first half of the year and then really closed the year strong with so many interviews and now dabbling in with these solo episodes.
Speaker 1:If you enjoyed listening to the podcast this year, if you got some value from it, if you received a dose of inspiration or empowerment and how you could take your next step in your own freedom journey. It would mean so much to me if you took two seconds to leave a review for this podcast. In your podcast app, apple, you can write a little something. Spotify you can give a few stars ideally five and it just not only helps other people find the podcast, but it also really confirms that people are listening. If you're a podcaster, you know that in your analytics you literally just see a number of how many people have downloaded the episode, but you don't really get much feedback other than that, and so to actually read your reviews and the impact the show has had for you or what you liked about it, or things that maybe even you'd like me to think about in the future, I read every single one of them and it means a lot. So, on that note, this is going to be the final solo episode of the year.
Speaker 1:I am recording this right now in Whistler. I'm in a cozy sweater, I've got a glass of white wine beside me, and it's the end of November, and this is the time of the year where I really start reflecting on how this calendar year has gone, and I have a number of exercises I do to wrap up the year and really soak up as many of the memories, learnings, insights and special moments from the year, and something I really like to do is reflect on the content that I've consumed. If you're like me, you are listening to a ton of different podcasts, audiobooks, you're reading books, you're watching TV shows. You're consuming more content than ever, and it's one thing to consume the content and move forward, but if you really want to reap the benefits of the time you've invested in consuming that content, I really challenge you to do something like this. Reflect back on some of the books you read this year. What were the top books? What's the reason? What were the podcasts that really made a difference? Not only will it help you further ingrain those insights and lessons and allow you to relive what you enjoyed about them. If you then take it one step further and share it with other people, well, you could really kick off their year and make an impact for them, and so that's what I hope this episode will do. It's been really pleasant reflecting on how this year has gone from a content perspective, and one app that I use that I highly, highly recommend it used to be called I'm just going to call it Scribd. I have no idea if that's how you pronounce it S-C-R-I-B-D. They recently rebranded to Everend E-V-E-R-A-N-D. That is my place for consuming audiobooks, e-books, anything digital content, because the way their business model works is it's one monthly fee and then you can consume unlimited content, which I'm so down for, like audiobooks $15 a book, actual books $25 a book. On my Kindle I'm adding them. Just, it's harder for me to justify investing in learning when it's that price point, but when I know I can have unlimited access, I found I've been consuming way more content and I really appreciate that. So definitely check out that app if you haven't heard of it before.
Speaker 1:In terms of my process, I read at night, before bed, instead of watching TV or scrolling on my phone. I really try to have a good bedtime routine where, at like 10pm for me, all my screens are off my blue light screens and then I use my Kindle and I'll read before bed. And this is when I'll read fiction content. I can't read nonfiction. I can't be learning before bed. It stimulates my mind so much, and so I love some good storytelling, maybe some historical fiction and maybe even some romance, a little bit of a thriller, although those can really keep me up.
Speaker 1:And then during the day is when I'll consume nonfiction, and for me, when it comes to nonfiction, my favorite way to consume it is audiobooks. I love going for a walk and listening to an audiobook, listening to a podcast, going for a long run like when I go on my hour long runs, which we're going to talk about in this podcast, but how I became an hour long runner this year based on one book I listened to. That's my favorite time to consume nonfiction, and I kind of just discover things pretty organically. I really appreciate when someone in my network or an influencer or creator I follow recommend something and says why that piece of content really made an impact for them, and so I'm definitely going to give you the why behind my picks today, but for the most part it's pretty organic. Like I love going into the Everend app and seeing the top charts, seeing what's trending. I also have an account on Goodreads and that's another great way to see what my friends are reading or looking at the top charts that way.
Speaker 1:And then, in order to really get the most out of each book, taking notes is so helpful, and so when I am going to read a nonfiction book, I'll try to always have my notebook with me If I'm out for a run or a long walk. I'll take notes in the notepad of my phone Anytime I hear something or read something. That is an insight for me that I either want to take action on or that I want to make sure I really remember. Writing it down is huge. One really cute thing that we did with Jared's family this year, which is maybe something to consider if you're somebody who is traveling a lot, maybe you're not around your friends and family as much is. We started a book club, so it's me and Jared, his mom and his dad, and once a month we will all read the same book together, obviously on our own devices, but that's been a really nice way for us to stay in touch in the family group, chat, share insights, share what we're loving. All kind of know that we're having this togetherness, bonding experience while being separated. That's been a really really beautiful new tradition that we started this year.
Speaker 1:Okay, here we go. I'm going to start with my best books of the year and then my best podcast, and then I even have a TV show or two that I'm going to mention at the end. So the number one book I read this year was called Super Attractor and it's from Gabby Bernstein. This is a nonfiction book. She describes it as a journey of remembering where your true power lies. You'll learn how to co-create the life you want. You'll accept that life can flow, that attracting is fun and that you don't have to work so hard to get what you want.
Speaker 1:What I really appreciated about this book is I've always been attracted to manifesting and the law of attraction. I would say I've been manifesting from a pretty young age. I'll never forget when my mom was listening to the CDs remember CDs in the car of the secret. She would drive around and she would listen to this and it completely worked on my mom. If you haven't listened to the podcast episode I did maybe three or four years ago was when I first started the show, maybe my first or second season.
Speaker 1:I interviewed my mom about how she completely reinvented her life in her 40s. She had had a nine to five office job that she absolutely hated and felt so constricted by and then in her mid 40s she quit her job and started her own business and it was so badass for me to watch and very inspiring for me, and I think she attributes a lot of that empowerment and what she was able to dream up and make happen for herself from discovering the law of attraction and consuming those CD tapes of the secret, and so of course, I was listening to the secret too. That was probably my first touch point of manifesting and the law of attraction work and all of that. And my mom still to this day will call me out if I'm saying a negative thought. She'll be like you're a witch. You're a witch, you're gonna manifest something negative what you think. What you say comes true like be careful, careful what you say. So she's super into it. And of course, we always look up to our parents, and so I've always been into that.
Speaker 1:I've read a number of books on these topics, but what I loved about Gabby Bernstein's approach is that there are very specific and very tangible strategies for manifesting. So it wasn't just high level ways to think about things, it was what you can actually do. Jared and I read this book together again, each on our own kindles, when we were in Costa Rica at the start of this year, and if you listen to my last solo episode from two weeks ago, I shared how I used one of the techniques from her book to manifest my first really big speaking gig. It was called the choose again method, definitely one of my favorites. I'm not going to tell you what it is, because I want you to go listen to the book or read the book and understand for yourself.
Speaker 1:There's another one called the ladder of emotions, and it's this idea where there's I think there was 12 different types of emotions and, of course, the top one being the most positive, the lowest one being the most negative, and how you can't really jump ahead. So if you're wanting to get to level two but you're starting at level seven, you actually have to work your way up the ladder. And she talked about ways you can not only work yourself up the ladder to start having more positive emotions, but also how you can support people around you who might not be feeling great in a particular moment, and how you can feel more confident in how you support them and respond to them and show up for them in those moments. So love, love, love. Those were just two examples from the book, but there's tons. And she says to you I'm going to give you a bunch of different tactics and ways that you can try manifesting and changing your vibration, and then it's up to you to pick and choose which ones resonate with you and that you think you can do sustainably.
Speaker 1:My second favorite nonfiction book that I read this year is Outlive by Peter Atia, and this is described as the science and art of longevity, and essentially it's about rethinking medicine in order for us to live better, longer. Peter the author. He was previously a cancer surgeon and often when he would get his quote unquote clients, they already had cancer and he felt like it was almost like too late to really treat them in the first place, and he was more just, reactive and now trying to manage their cancer and manage their pain, and so he wanted to think about it differently, and so the way he defines longevity is how can we live longer while also feeling good and not getting what he calls the four horsemen of diseases, but then also being able to live to, let's say, a hundred and still get to do the things that you want to do that make your life of feeling and exciting and a blessing. Before I read this book, I felt pretty confident in my health. I've been eating a plant based diet now since I was 17.
Speaker 1:In the last year, I really improved my sleep. I had insomnia for such a long time and I have had a lot of trouble falling asleep and I cured that through custom earplugs. If you are in my immediate circle and you're my friend, you will know that I talk about these all the time. They completely changed my life. I didn't even know that custom earplugs were a thing. You can go to a hearing aid place and they have earplugs and they'll basically create a mold for your ear. So next level often when I would have earplugs in my ear I would only be able to keep one in and then I would rotate from side to side in the middle of the night and I'd be taking that one earplug with me because I could never sleep on both sides. With earplugs. You can sleep both sides with earplugs. They're way more effective. They literally can't hear anything. My cat Bagheera. She loves to meow in the morning if we don't feed her as soon as her eyes are plucked open in the wee hours of the morning. And now I don't even hear her meowing, so huge fan of those.
Speaker 1:On top of that, I had always been consistently exercising, probably like five days a week. I've been exercising now for years and I'm not bragging here, I'm just letting you know I was feeling pretty good about my health, but I had a couple of friends who had mentioned this book and would talk about maybe more about me, maybe more of like a scientific and quantitative approach to their health, and when they would ask me about certain measurements of my own, I wouldn't really have an answer for them in terms of, well, what is your VO2 max and what is your resting heart rate? I wasn't really tracking these things. I was just mostly tracking how I felt, and I still think that's such a good measure of it. But if we really want to take a science backed approach and use research to essentially play the odds that we can live longer and disease free, I'm open to hearing some different ways I can level up, and so this book definitely didn't make me feel like shit.
Speaker 1:I felt like I was on the right track, but I still learned so much and ended up making a number of meaningful changes to my routines. A big one was my workouts. If I'm being honest, yes, I was working out five days a week, but I really never exerted myself. You know like I never really worked so hard that I was spent and my heart rate was so high and I was sweating. Loved a good yoga, loved a good Pilates, loved a good long walk, loved a long bike ride on a cruiser bike in Costa Rica, by the beach. That was my vibe, and now I'm doing these hour long runs once a week. I also joined F45, which is like a circuit based hit workout, but it focused on functional strength, and I've never felt better. I didn't think I could feel better than I did, but I actually do. Now. I enjoy cardio. Now I enjoy raising my heart rate. I have an Apple watch. I don't even bother working out if I don't have it on. That's my latest joke. If it's dead, I'm just like oh, forget it, I'm not going to the class.
Speaker 1:But the idea is that he teaches you about exercises that you want to do now so that you're always in the top 10 percentile for your age group. So as you go up the decades and you inevitably lose muscle, you lose cardiovascular health, you have overflow because you were already above average for your age and you ideally want to keep staying that way. And so he talks about doing exercises that are essentially just routine movements that you would want to do when you're older. Examples being able to carry groceries. You know, a bag of groceries in each of your hands, being able to go up a flight of stairs or down a flight of stairs when you're close to 100. Yeah, that's something that would make sense I would want to be able to do. Being able to lift a carry on suitcase in the overhead department of a plane yeah, that seems like something I would want to do as I age. Being able to carry a grandchild, lift them up, put them on your back yeah, I'd love to be able to throw a kid on my back when I'm older, whether it's a niece or a nephew or whoever that ends up being in my life, just a random child on the street. I'm cool with that if they want to piggyback, but being able to do those things and so, yeah, reading it was really convincing and it definitely got me to make just a few small subtle changes and I'm now way more confident in my own longevity. A randomly weird fact about me is I have very flexible toes. Jared gets super freaked out when I basically I can spread them out like claws. Ask me to do this, I will do it for you. Maybe you can do it too, but he thinks it's rare, and it seems rare when I show some people, but that apparently is a really good thing for preventing injuries, and so there's even some exercises in his book to increase the flexibility of your toes.
Speaker 1:Okay, that was book number two, my third favorite book of the year. This one is also non-fiction. It is Believe it by Jamie Kern Lima, who is the founder of it Cosmetics. In this book it's essentially her story, so it's part memoir, part business advice and personal development and growth strategies, but it's all about how she built her company from scratch and eventually sold it for over a billion dollars to L'Oreal and became the first female CEO of a brand for L'Oreal in their over 100 year history.
Speaker 1:So super powerful, impressive woman, but very genuine, very just a relatable everyday person who saw a problem in the world that she thought, hey, I'm going to take it on to fix and do something different in the industry. And what's unique about her story is she got so much rejection. I had read her book, I listened to it, actually on Scribd, which is now Everend, and then a couple weeks ago when I was speaking at the uplift conference, she was the keynote speaker and she told a lot of these stories. Again, it just reminded me of just her wild story of resilience. It's such an incredible reminder of the long journey to success.
Speaker 1:She was told no so many times and when we are starting businesses, sometimes you hear this advice of the ones who are successful or the ones who just stay in the game long enough to become successful. And that's something I think about a lot, because you also don't want to be that ignorant entrepreneur who's just forcing something that the product doesn't want. But then there's also something to be said about taking advice that makes sense but ignoring advice that your intuition is telling you. This person's wrong, pivoting when you're up against a roadblock versus quitting altogether. And she changed the industry quite a bit. She was even told several times by high-up people at companies like Sephora and QVC, which is the shopping channel in the US, that people won't buy makeup from people who look like you. Ouch. Her whole vision is she wanted to show real women with real skin issues and show how her makeup actually helped their skin problems, versus having a perfect looking, aspirational, unattainably aspirational model on the show who already had perfect skin wearing her products. Her story ends and I'm not going to give too too much away because I really think you should go listen or read the book but she got a 10-minute spot on QVC television shopping channel and she ends up ignoring a lot of the advice she had been given from quote-unquote experts and consultants in the space and the rest is history. So super inspiring book. It was so cool to then actually get to meet her and hear her speak in person and see what she was like in person and what her energy was like on stage and in a room, and she was just as genuine and relatable and amazing as she was in the book which she narrates.
Speaker 1:The audiobook herself. Okay, my favorite fiction book of the year. So it's first three. We're really about learning, growing, acting on that, getting inspiration.
Speaker 1:Fiction books for me, okay, how can I fall asleep without a screen? Have something to look forward to before bed, so that going to bed is exciting. I don't know about you, but I don't know. I love life and I would always say, if we didn't have to sleep, that would be my ideal, if I could have those extra eight hours every day to just enjoy more of life. I'm here for it. There's always a million things I want to do. I'm usually waking up pretty excited about the day ahead and I have to, like force myself to go to sleep because I'm just so excited about everything and having a book that you're excited to read makes it so much easier to go to bed. At the time you said you're going to so my favorite fiction book of the year Lessons in Chemistry.
Speaker 1:I'm sure I'm not the first person telling you about this book. I saw that book cover so many places People reading in airports, people reading it on beaches, in hostels, in Airbnbs, while traveling on trains. I feel like it was the book of the year. The cover is vibrant. It's a hot pink, a character on it with big glasses. So it definitely was bold and the cover really got my eye. It's one of those things where I just, when you just see enough times that you figure okay, well, this has got to be good, and I loved it.
Speaker 1:It's now a TV series on Apple TV, which I've only watched the first episode of that. I kind of hate when books become movies. They're never as good and that's kind of what I'm expecting from the TV show. So I watched the first episode to see what it's about, but loved reading the book. It was one of the books that we had in our book club with Jared's mom and dad and Jared, and they all love the book as well. Super fun read, but it also touches on some big issues around feminism and women being taken seriously at work. It tells the story of Elizabeth Zott, who became a beloved cooking show host in 1960s, southern California, after being fired as a chemist a decade earlier. So I won't give any more away other than that. But super fun read, but not so fluffy where like, okay, that was entertaining, but I didn't get anything out of it. It sparked some important dialogue and was thought provoking in many other ways.
Speaker 1:Okay, podcasts, of course. Freedom, lifestyle. It means so much to me that I have been in your roster of podcasts this year. Seriously, every download matters. My show is not so big where I'm like, oh no, another hundred, another thousand doesn't even really matter to me. Like literally every single digit, every single one of you who've tuned in and listened to an episode. It means so much to me. I cannot articulate this enough. If you keep listening, I will keep talking. If you have ideas for how I can make this show better, feedback for me. I'm a one woman show over here. You know I'm listening to my own podcast, coming up with ideas myself. I don't have a traditional mentor in the space, so feel free to be my mentor. What would you like to see? What can happen?
Speaker 1:Next Podcast that I discovered this year, though, that I loved, definitely call her daddy. I became a super fan of Alex this year and Father Cooper. If you listen, you know who she is. What she has built with this brand is so impressive. If you don't know, call Her Daddy is the largest podcast for females ever and it's only on Spotify. She got a $60 million deal from Spotify I think 2021, a couple of years ago to bring her show over on Spotify, and it's exclusively available on their platform. She's also one of the first people who are really doubling down on a video podcast. I think we're going to see a lot more of that next year. Right now, spotify is the only player where you can watch a video on a podcast player. Of course, you can watch on YouTube, but she's done a really great job with that. I really enjoy watching her podcast. I really enjoy her.
Speaker 1:If you're trying to get started with an episode of hers, I recently watched the interview she did with Lucy Hale. Any Pretty Little Liars fans who listen to my show, aria, anyone A. I loved Pretty Little Liars. I've watched every single episode. I got really into it. Lucy Hale is one of the girls in Pretty Little Liars and I had no idea that during that whole phase of her life I mean, how would I, she's not my friend, but she had been struggling with eating disorders and alcohol and she talks about all of this on the show. It's a really great interview. I was super engaged. There wasn't even a second of the episode where I wanted to look away. I watched it on a plane ride to Lisbon and was just completely glued in and focused.
Speaker 1:Alex does such a great job at having celebrities come on the show and open up. Apparently, she doesn't even give them the questions ahead of time, which is pretty unheard of and wild, considering she's having A-list celebrities on the show. She just manages to get them to open up and talk about things that you've never heard them talk about anywhere else. She opened this latest season with Hailey Bieber. Of course, hailey Bieber, justin Bieber's wife, and actually asks Hailey Bieber and there's a video of it, it's a video interview whether she prefers getting fingered or eating out more from Justin. Lol, hailey answers it. You can watch the whole reaction on Spotify. So I'm loving Call Her Daddy. I find it entertaining, but I just find Alex such a badass and I'm so, so, so, so inspired with what she's done for the platform and I just really want to support her.
Speaker 1:There's a podcast that I discovered this year that I can't say. I'm just listening to the show. I don't know anymore than this one episode, but this one particular episode had such a big impact on me and Jared. It features the author of the book the Baby Decision, which I hadn't heard of this book before. But you know, you can imagine newlyweds early to mid-30s. We are struggling with the decision should we procreate or not? And I distinctly remember Jared and I both were listening to this podcast episode. So that's something that we'll do, is we'll even we're losers. I know we'll download the same podcast episode and we'll both start listening to it at the same time in our own headphones when we're doing a big hike, for example.
Speaker 1:We were in Italy earlier this year, in Lake Como, and we were on a long hike, and so we did what we did we downloaded this episode. I think we were just must have been talking on the trip about this heavy decision to have children or not, and we organically found it in the podcast app and I remember us honestly, every five to 10 minutes just pausing and just being like, oh my God, this is so good, so, so, so good. We have been struggling to make the decision of whether we want to be child-free or adopt or have children of our own. We've literally weighed all of the option and talked at length. These conversations between us are not gentle. They're very fiery. Things get aggressive very quickly and heated and it's just such an emotional decision and we're having a hard time answering how we feel about it. And eventually I do want to talk about my own feelings, but I feel like I can't, not yet. This is such a triggering topic for even our friends and our family who have pushed so many of their opinions on whether we should have kids or not from their view to us and I, just because of that, I do not feel comfortable sharing my truth about how I feel about this, but eventually I will.
Speaker 1:If you're listening to this and any of this relates and you're also challenged by this decision and it's become a difficult situation in you and your relationship, I want you to know you are not alone. I have a close group of girlfriends that we talk regularly about this and how they're really struggling to make this decision. It's so complicated. Women, more and more, and couples more and more, are really being thoughtful and intentional about whether they're going to have children or not, and it's changed quite a bit and I think that's great. But when you're not just doing what everybody else does or what society has kind of put you on a path to do, or what literally your parents did right we really look up to our parents' role models Then you have the burden of making a really big, permanent decision yourself, and that comes with a lot of fear and emotions and really deep beliefs, and so I highly recommend this episode.
Speaker 1:The show is called, it's Fine, and it features the author of the Baby Decision. I'm going to find these links and I'm going to put them in the show notes for us. But this episode was great because the woman just took a very neutral approach which I just thought was so refreshing. She talked about the pros and cons of each decision, what she's learned. She's an expert in helping couples literally make the decision to have children or not. She even helps couples decide whether they should have one child or more, because that is a whole decision as well as whether you're going to have your child's going to be an only child or not. So super interesting. I learned a ton.
Speaker 1:I do want to throw in some TV series here that I really loved this year. I would say I am not a huge documentary type person. Tv for me is my entertainment. Tv for me is I'm shutting my brain off. I'm probably having a weed gummy and sitting on the couch having dinner. It's usually on the weekend and I love consuming a really great piece of content that I'm just super into and I don't have to think about work. I don't have to think about anything else. I usually have Jared right there next to me. I've got Bagheera sitting on my lap. She's become really a lap cat lately. Fun fact we have this cozy blanket that whenever we lay it on us, she just immediately comes and sits on you, which is amazing. But then you better not have to pee or get a snack or get a drink for the next several hours because you can't disturb Bagheera. So TV time, love. I just finished the series we Crashed and this is the story of the founders of WeWork and how they built it to what it was so quickly and some of the outcomes on the founders and how their team and the board ended up feeling about them and, ultimately, what their fate was in terms of their role within the company. I still can't tell if I love or hate Adam Newman and Rebecca, the co-founders, but I did love the show. You don't have to be into startups or tech because they consider themselves a tech company or venture capital or business to enjoy the show.
Speaker 1:Wework has been so part of our culture, especially this rise of the gig economy and self-employment and digital nomadism and freelance. If you're at all in these spaces, you know WeWork and for me, I built so much my freedom at WeWork. I have a very close connection to the brand. When I was creating my launch of podcasts on a budget workshops, they would give me free space and I hosted probably 10 in a year sold out workshops in their space and it was amazing to not have to pay for it. Of course, they hooked me up a ton. I had free co-working there a lot of the times, which all this free, free, free is probably one of the reasons they went wrong, but I am so appreciative of everything that WeWork has done for the movement towards helping people be more free. So I loved learning about WeCrasht. A couple of months ago we had Flavia on the podcast who was working at WeWork and ended up leaving and starting her own business and she gave us a bit of an inside peek about what it was like to work there during COVID and when things really started to go downhill. So you can also listen to that and get an insider's perspective there.
Speaker 1:Huge fan of Apple TV, I would say. Netflix came in so strong, but I've really left Netflix and Apple TV is my favorite streaming platform right now. That's where I watched WeCrasht. It's also where the morning show is. I am such a fan of the morning show. What an incredible cast Jennifer Aniston, reese Witherspoon, steve Carell and more amazing cast. Really good show. All about behind the scenes of a morning television series, which, again, I don't think you have to be interested in morning television and even watch the news to like this. I think it's just very interesting the operations and the drama behind the scenes and, again, just a great cast. So they've had three seasons now I've watched all three and then this one got so much ridicule but the sex in the city rerun or return with and just like that.
Speaker 1:I loved every time. I would watch it week by week. You know how they'll have an episode to slowly drip out every Thursday when it's coming out live. I would always be part of that and I would really look forward to the newest episode coming out. There was just something so nostalgic about those characters and just really brought me back to my early 20s even high school, when I was watching Sex in the City, and these characters are just developed so well and I really enjoyed it. I don't care how cheesy some of the acting was and a little bit cringe, how they just really played on every cultural controversial topic and change that's happening in the world and played up all of these mainstream topics for complete relevance. I see that, I definitely see that perspective, but I loved it, totally enjoyed it, and so those are my best of 2023.
Speaker 1:I'm curious what are your favorite podcasts that you listened to this year? Books you've read or books you've heard or shows you've watched. I'm always looking for new content. When you travel a ton, I love to have stuff downloaded for long flights or long travel days, and so if there's something that you think I should consume, please let me know. You can either leave a review in the podcast app or on my Instagram. Right now, I have a bit of a carousel post about some of these top pieces of content I consume this year. Leave a comment there. I'd love to know what you're consuming other than the freedom lifestyle, of course and so a whole new year is ahead of us. Happy consuming, consume responsibly and, until next time, enjoy your freedom.