Notes From the New World

This podcast launched in 2017. For almost a decade, it's operated under "In My Non-Expert Opinion". Now, it's time to take the mask off.

This is Notes From the New World.

Connect with Chelsea:

• 🌊 Audacity Waitlist - the pitching and visibility program for creative business owners
• 🪄 Ultimate Pitch Kits - only 8 left the rest of the year!
• ☄️ SUPERNOVA waitlist
• 💻 Website
• 📜 Footnotes newsletter filled with rabbit holes, zeitgeist synthesis and more
• 📱 Instagram
• 🧵 Threads

Help run NFNTW: Your donations help cover costs of running the show; you can help fund NFTNW right HERE. 

If you're unable to donate financially, share it. It all adds up!

Want to sponsor NFTNW? Email [email protected] to discuss partnership packages!

We all have that one friend who we sprint to when we need a breakup text drafted, spruce up our vanilla cover letter, or edit a flimsy apology, because we know how much words carry weight. They're spells. Today, Lois Mac, THE word wizard who focuses on strategic communication layered with uncensored expression, comes on to help humans stop performing expression and start saying the damn thing.

Lois reminds us:

• When you lose your words, you lose yourself. Lois built her entire identity around language, then moved to a small Costa Rican town after having her first baby, surrounded by people who spoke only Spanish, and the woman who always had the right words suddenly had none... what she couldn't have known then is that was entirely the point.
• The creative elephant never forgets. When you're not saying the real thing, every piece of content, every project, every newsletter becomes a hostage to it; your creativity doesn't leave, it just sits in the corner, arms crossed, waiting.
• Trying harder is a one-way ticket to the void. The void is a compass that shows up when you've drifted so far from yourself you're basically a human LinkedIn post, arriving not to destroy you but to say: come back to your actual voice.
• Write the unsendable thing. A daily writing practice that's purely for you (no feed, algorithm, or audience) is where your public voice quietly gets built.
• Presence beats vocabulary every time. Deep, juicy, family-level friendships are built on showing up, staying in the room after saying the wrong thing, and learning to laugh at yourself, not perfect sentence structure.

This conversation is for those in the middle of identity shapeshifting, multi-lingual multi-hyphenates, who need a permission slip to say the thing you've been swallowing. She gives us a gentle but firm reminder that the most radical creative act available to you right now is NOT the next launch, the next rebrand, or the next post — it's just being the person who's already here.

Connect with Lois:

• Writing Wildly Retreats: a full writing immersion in the Costa Rican jungle where your most important writing finally gets to breathe (enrolling for June + Sept 2026, mention how you found it in the application!)
• Creative Living App: the app that turns your instinct to consume into a desire to create
• Sweet Talk: A creative business uprising disguised as 4 months of writing, copy + messaging mentorship
• Substack: The Smoking Area
• Instagram

Connect with Chelsea:

• 🌊 Audacity Waitlist - the pitching and visibility program for creative business owners
• 🪄 Ultimate Pitch Kits - only 8 left the rest of the year!
• ☄️ SUPERNOVA waitlist
• 💻 Website
• 📜 Footnotes newsletter filled with rabbit holes, zeitgeist synthesis and more
• 📱 Instagram
• 🧵 Threads

Help run NFNTW: Your donations help cover costs of running the show; you can help fund NFTNW right HERE. 

If you're unable to donate financially, share it. It all adds up!

Want to sponsor NFTNW? Email [email protected] to discuss partnership packages!

Visionaries, this one's for you. For the ones who hold the vision of the future, the ones constantly evolving in a market that rewards sameness, and the sensitive souls who feel it all, aching to scream their message from the rooftop, but end up diluting their message for palatability, listen in.

Nina Chin — Identity Mentor, Creation Consultant, and fellow 6/2 visionary — joins me to talk about the peculiar loneliness of time-traveling through your own business, why outgrowing your audience is part of evolving, and what it actually means to build wealth that redistributes rather than hoards.

Themes from the episode:

• The Visionary Gap: How to hold the vision of the future while staying present
• Identity Shapeshifting as Evolution, Not Abandonment: Outgrowing your audience might be part of the process
• The Myth of the Monthly Revenue Screenshot: We dismantle why the "consistent $50K months" narrative is a golden cage
• The Wound of the Uncredited Visionary: We wade into the tension between wanting recognition for planting seeds three years ago and trusting the butterfly effect 
• Wealth as Redistribution, Not Accumulation: We dream out loud about generous entrepreneurship — scholarships, family flights paid for, and wealth moving through hands that will do good with it
• 2027: A BIG paradigm shift is coming. Nina shares why we need sit in silence, find safety inside yourself, and trust your vision

If you're ready to align your business with your actual design instead of someone else's blueprint, connect with Nina and give yourself permission to build something unheard of — because that's where the gold lives.

CONNECT WITH NINA

• Website: Your Aligned Space
• Living Proof: a space for sixthlines to turn lived experience into wisdom you can live and lead from (enrollment closes Feb 17th, 2026)
• Private Sessions: human design / creation consultation / purpose + legacy codes
• Altitude: a 1:1 space to step out of the noise, regain perspective, and see your next move clearly
• Instagram: @its_ninachin
• Rooftop Views: the newsletter
• Soul Space Time Podcast on Spotify
• Soul Space Time Podcast on Apple
• Incomparable Podcast on Spotify
• Incomparable Podcast on Apple

Connect with Chelsea:

• 🌊 Audacity Waitlist - the pitching and visibility program for creative business owners
• 🪄 Ultimate Pitch Kits - only 8 left the rest of the year!
• ☄️ SUPERNOVA waitlist
• 💻 Website
• 📜 Footnotes newsletter filled with rabbit holes, zeitgeist synthesis and more
• 📱 Instagram
• 🧵 Threads

Help run NFNTW: Your donations help cover costs of running the show; you can help fund NFTNW right HERE. 

If you're unable to donate financially, share it. It all adds up!

Want to sponsor NFTNW? Email [email protected] to discuss partnership packages!

As social media seems to descend into a dystopia of tech overlords dominating algorithms, our attention, and our self-esteem, it's worth asking: should we really stay on these platforms... and why???

KP Pilley — the social strategist behind the popular "9-Grid" offer — joins me to talk about taking your power back on social media, building ethical content worlds, and making it stupid-easy for people to hire you without posting 30 Reels a month.

Themes from the episode:

• The 9-Grid: Your Digital Bulletin Board (Not Your Full-Time Job: Instagram's become this weird proof-of-existence thing, but the nine grid lets you treat your profile like a coffee shop bulletin board — nine strategic posts, then peace TF out. You don't need to live there 24/7 to run a successful business.
• Instagram's Chokehold on Our Worthiness: Let's be honest, Meta is making money off our insecurities. KP and I discuss how to use the platform on your terms and drive people to owned media where Zuck can't deplatform you for posting a caption with the word "sex" in it.
• Pain Point Marketing Is Dead: That girl boss panic-inducing marketing where you scare people into buying? It attracts nightmare clients who feel buyer's remorse the next morning. Real marketing talks to someone's most regulated self, not their freaked-out swipe-my-credit-card-at-midnight self.
• Your Editorial Stance Beats Any Algorithm: When you have a clear worldview, content becomes easier because you're not trying to rage-bait —you're just showing up as yourself.
• Relationship Marketing Isn't Transactional (And That's the Point): Orbit jumping and showing up in people's worlds doesn't always result in immediate sales, and that's okay — sometimes you're just planting seeds or having a good conversation.

If you’re ready to ditch performative posting and build a presence rooted in your values (not Adam Mosseri’s latest metric), connect with KP for more resources — and maybe even a social media presence that finally feels like you.

Connect with KP:

• Website
• Instagram
• Content Constellation Waitlist (aka the 9 grid!)
• + more!

Connect with Chelsea:

• 🌊 Audacity Waitlist - the pitching and visibility program for creative business owners
• 🪄 Ultimate Pitch Kits - only 8 left the rest of the year!
• ☄️ SUPERNOVA waitlist
• 💻 Website
• 📜 Footnotes newsletter filled with rabbit holes, zeitgeist synthesis and more
• 📱 Instagram
• 🧵 Threads

Help run NFNTW: Your donations help cover costs of running the show; you can help fund NFTNW right HERE. 

If you're unable to donate financially, share it. It all adds up!

Want to sponsor NFTNW? Email [email protected] to discuss partnership packages!

What happens when you let philosophy escape the ivory tower and live in your body? Today's guest is Ximena, a Mexican eco-philosopher who ditched academic elitism for something far more dangerous: thinking as a radical act of love.

We get into why rationality alone made her chronically ill (yes, really), how capitalism hijacked our concept of time, and why resistance fueled by joy might be the only kind that lasts. 

If you've tired of activism that depletes rather than sustains, this one's for you. We're philosophizing, asking the bigger questions, and as Ximena so eloquently states: making the intellectual visceral.

Key themes:

1. The Intellectual Turned Visceral

Philosophy often gets confused with being SUPER cerebral, but it’s actually something you FEEL in your entire body. When intellectual work moves through your whole system, that's when transformation actually happens!

2. Philosophy for Humans, Not Just Philosophers

Academia gatekeeps philosophy with intentional jargon, but philosophizing is just having conversations with deep curiosity. It LITERALLY means love of wisdom. You're already a philosopher ;)

3. Time, Capitalism, and the Productivity Trap

Capitalism hijacked time itself, turning it from cyclical and embodied into linear, scarce, and productive, something to optimize rather than experience. We've internalized this timeline so deeply that rest feels like rebellion, and it's legit killing us.

4. Resistance as Love

Resistance rooted only in anger mimics the systems it's trying to dismantle, but real sustained resistance grows from love and knowing what you're for. The long revolution happens when we build the spaces we want to see, making resistance an act of imagination and joy rather than just critique.

5. The Democratization of Knowledge as Radical Act

Philosophy trapped in universities serves power, but the tools of critical thinking are human capacities, not special skills reserved for people with degrees. Your questions are valid, your thinking is valuable, your philosophizing countssss!

Connect with Ximena (and join the next round of ROOTED IMPACT):

• Substack (Ximena Ximena + Tuhella)
• Instagram
• Velvet Philosophy Podcast

Connect with Chelsea:

• 🌊 Audacity Waitlist - the pitching and visibility program for creative business owners
• 🪄 Ultimate Pitch Kits - only 8 left the rest of the year!
• ☄️ SUPERNOVA waitlist
• 💻 Website
• 📜 Footnotes newsletter filled with rabbit holes, zeitgeist synthesis and more
• 📱 Instagram
• 🧵 Threads

Help run NFNTW: Your donations help cover costs of running the show; you can help fund NFTNW right HERE. 

If you're unable to donate financially, share it. It all adds up!

Want to sponsor NFTNW? Email [email protected] to discuss partnership packages!

It's time to breakup with watered-down content and instead, ask our people to rise with us.

In this episode, I announce the podcast rebrand (finally!), why I'm going all-in on 2-3 episodes per week, and what happens when you delete social apps from your phone for just ONE week. Spoiler: total clarity.

I dive deep into why Rosalía's Lux, Sinners, and Heated Rivalry are proof that audiences are STARVING for work that challenges them — and why we need to stop underestimating people's capacity to pay attention.

Plus: why "the more we are in the era of dopamine, the more I want the opposite" is my new creative north star, and how I'm building SUPERNOVA as a thinking lab where we synthesize obsessions into worldviews that actually move culture.

Snippets from this episode:

The podcast rebrand: After 8 years, I'm retiring "In My Non-Expert Opinion" because it was a shield I no longer need. I'm ready to own my voice, go full throttle, and podcast 2-3x/week.

Deleting social apps = instant brain space - I took the apps off my phone for one week and the clarity was WILD. Ideas landed, brain fog lifted, and I realized: why am I not treating online platforms like contract jobs instead of letting them scatter my attention 24/7?

Rosalía, Sinners, and Heated Rivalry are giving us credit to pay attention - These aren't light, bubblegum experiences. Rosalía dropped an album in 14 languages with the London Symphony Orchestra. Sinners demand you clock in to catch the symbolism. Heated Rivalry became a global phenomenon not because "the guys are hot," but because it shows radical intimacy and vulnerability on screen.

We connect through challenge, not just agreement - Rosalía didn't water down Lux for mass appeal; she asked us to rise with her. The most powerful connection happens when artists challenge us to expand our capacity.

"What is most personal is most universal" - Carl Rogers said it, and Heated Rivalry proves it. We're obsessed because we see ourselves in the yearning, the walls, the avoidance. When you dig into YOUR inner treasure chest and build a captivating world, people will leave their old ones behind to join you.

Question of the week: Why do we say "pay attention"?
Email me at [email protected] or DM me @chelseariffe with your thoughts.

This episode is fueled by FOOTNOTES, my newsletter filled with rabbit holes, synthesis, questions and more.

Connect with Chelsea:

• 🌊 Audacity Waitlist - the pitching and visibility program for creative business owners
• 🪄 Ultimate Pitch Kits - only 8 left the rest of the year!
• ☄️ SUPERNOVA waitlist
• 💻 Website
• 📜 Footnotes newsletter filled with rabbit holes, zeitgeist synthesis and more
• 📱 Instagram
• 🧵 Threads

Help run NFNTW: Your donations help cover costs of running the show; you can help fund NFTNW right HERE. 

If you're unable to donate financially, share it. It all adds up!

Want to sponsor NFTNW? Email [email protected] to discuss partnership packages!

One of my besties Shelly and I pick up RIGHT where we left off from last episode. We talk at 1.5x speed, giggle and kick our feet like 14 year olds at a boyband concert, say "like" 4013 times, and get even further into the series that's causing a cultural phenomenon.

Some questions explored:

• What did we think of the absolute QUEENS in the show?
• Why does this all feel so REAL?
• What's the deal with situationships?
• What are the upsides and downsides of fandom, especially one this rabid?
• How can we use this joy to fuel change?

SEE YOU AT THE COTTAGE BABES.

Connect with Chelsea:

• 🌊 Audacity Waitlist - the pitching and visibility program for creative business owners
• 🪄 Ultimate Pitch Kits - only 8 left the rest of the year!
• ☄️ SUPERNOVA waitlist
• 💻 Website
• 📜 Footnotes newsletter filled with rabbit holes, zeitgeist synthesis and more
• 📱 Instagram
• 🧵 Threads

Help run NFNTW: Your donations help cover costs of running the show; you can help fund NFTNW right HERE. 

If you're unable to donate financially, share it. It all adds up!

Want to sponsor NFTNW? Email [email protected] to discuss partnership packages!

Folks... we’ve been indoctrinated. Heated Rivalry brainwashed us. As someone who is EXTREMELY contrarian (Aquarius Sun), hatesss hype, an absolute TV/movie SNOB, and is pretty suss of fandoms… I promise you, the hype is beyond worth it.

It’s SO worth it, I had to debrief for nearly 3 hours with one of my besties, Shelly, to discuss what kind of glitch in the matrix is happening right now. What drugs were sprinkled in this script? What subliminal messaging did they use? WHAT IS GOING ON???!!!

We’re happy. Glowing. More pep in our step. This show has absolutely altered our brain chemistry.

DISCLAIMER: this is spoiler city. We discuss everything in the show.

This is a 2 parter. Buckle up, sooo much more to come in Part 2!

Connect with Chelsea:

• 🌊 Audacity Waitlist - the pitching and visibility program for creative business owners
• 🪄 Ultimate Pitch Kits - only 8 left the rest of the year!
• ☄️ SUPERNOVA waitlist
• 💻 Website
• 📜 Footnotes newsletter filled with rabbit holes, zeitgeist synthesis and more
• 📱 Instagram
• 🧵 Threads

Help run NFNTW: Your donations help cover costs of running the show; you can help fund NFTNW right HERE. 

If you're unable to donate financially, share it. It all adds up!

Want to sponsor NFTNW? Email [email protected] to discuss partnership packages!

I'm pulling back the curtain on my 2025 business insights... nosy bitches, this one's for you! 

I share the ultimate the plot twist: I made almost the exact same money as 2024, while taking a 3-month sabbatical, working essentially part-time, and living like an eccentric writer.

I break down my Pitch Perfect launches (including a surprising feeling I had with my first $20K month), why I'm retiring from being "The Podcast Queen," and the creative possession that birthed SUPERNOVA — my new thinking lab for people who want to build intellectual frameworks that shape culture instead of learning more tactical skills. 

Plus: why I'm choosing restraint as my 2026 word, and why I'm actively exploring capped business models and circular economies instead of scaling into outer space.

Themes from the episode:

1. Making the same money while living exponentially better - I generated $143K (basically what I made in 2024), but took almost 3 months off, worked Tuesdays-Thursdays, and traveled to 10+ cities, which honestly feels more successful than any revenue goal ever could.
2. From reactive hot takes to restrained discernment - I'm retiring the knee-jerk cultural commentary and choosing thoughtfulness over Threads wars, because not everything needs my opinion and frankly, discernment is sexy as hell.
3. Why SUPERNOVA exists and why I refuse to be the podcast queen forever - The sabbatical revealed I don't want my legacy to be "she taught people to pitch/podcast," I want it to be "she taught people to build worlds," which required creating a 4-month thinking lab for intellectual frameworks that transcend your current business reputation.
4. Ditching cold pitching for relational EVERYTHING - I stopped teaching extractive tactics and started focusing on nurturing your actual circle, which resulted in my most collaborative Pitch Perfect cohorts and proved that relationships always win over spray-and-pray strategies.
5. Exploring capped income and circular economies because endless growth is a scam - I engaged in 8+ swaps/trades for high-ticket programs, I'm capping SUPERNOVA at 10 people, and I'm actively researching what it means to redistribute resources instead of building a team-run empire I don't even want.

My 2026 themes: CREATE. PLAY. PHILOSOPHIZE. EXPLORE. UNEARTH. ASK BIG QUESTIONS. SIMMER. PONDER. WONDER. THINK.

What are yours?!

Connect with Chelsea:

• 🌊 Audacity Waitlist - the pitching and visibility program for creative business owners
• 🪄 Ultimate Pitch Kits - only 8 left the rest of the year!
• ☄️ SUPERNOVA waitlist
• 💻 Website
• 📜 Footnotes newsletter filled with rabbit holes, zeitgeist synthesis and more
• 📱 Instagram
• 🧵 Threads

Help run NFNTW: Your donations help cover costs of running the show; you can help fund NFTNW right HERE. 

If you're unable to donate financially, share it. It all adds up!

Want to sponsor NFTNW? Email [email protected] to discuss partnership packages!

Grab your tissues and your matcha - we're doing a full 2025 emotional autopsy.

Today I'm taking you through my personal year in review: space-cowgirl birthday parties, devastating loss, AI-induced mental glitches, and finally learning how to stop abandoning myself in relationships. 

This was one of the most plot twist-filled years I've ever had - like WTF happened?!

Themes from the episode:

1. The Cape Town summer that was pure lightning in a bottle - and why watching my entire friend group simultaneously couple up while I navigated complex relational issues sent me into an existential spiral about missing invisible boats.
2. Setting the container and having THE scary conversation - how I stopped swallowing feelings to avoid looking "too sensitive," ugly-cried through total honesty, and learned that vulnerability won't actually kill you (even when your nervous system disagrees).
3. When my friends passed in a rafting accident and grief rewired everything - and how loss demolishes your understanding of what actually matters.
4. The AI creativity binge that nearly broke my brain - what happens when you're alone with no friends, no language skills, and only ChatGPT validating your 47th brand iteration until everything you're obsessed with feels boring and nothing matters anymore (scary AF)
5. Maturity as staying put instead of booking another escape flight - why I'm extending in Lima, joining local studios, and forcing myself to deal with shit instead of using travel as emotional avoidance (growth! so sexy!).

My 2025 was an invitation to stop performing identities that don't fit me anymore, start saying what I mean, befriending my demons, and contemplating my 200 year plan. Let's spiral together :)

Connect with Chelsea:

• 🌊 Audacity Waitlist - the pitching and visibility program for creative business owners
• 🪄 Ultimate Pitch Kits - only 8 left the rest of the year!
• ☄️ SUPERNOVA waitlist
• 💻 Website
• 📜 Footnotes newsletter filled with rabbit holes, zeitgeist synthesis and more
• 📱 Instagram
• 🧵 Threads

Help run NFNTW: Your donations help cover costs of running the show; you can help fund NFTNW right HERE. 

If you're unable to donate financially, share it. It all adds up!

Want to sponsor NFTNW? Email [email protected] to discuss partnership packages!