Podcasts about am what

Sunday, June 27, 2021 AM - What is God Like: God is Great, God is Good - Pastor Phill Kliewer

May 9 2021 AM “What's” from a Mother

The post February 21, 2021 AM | What’s Missing? appeared first on Georgetown Christian Reformed Church.

God uses people and what they have at hand to accomplish His will. Ridge Road Church of Christ – www.ridgeroadcoc.org – Facebook: facebook.com/ridgeroadcoc – Twitter: twitter.com/ridgeroadcoc – Instagram: instagram.com/ridgeroadcoc – YouTube: http://bit.ly/rrcocyoutube #God #Jesus #church #cross #greatest #bible #sermon #heaven #christ #christian #churchofchrist #ypsi #ypsilanti #michigan #love #love #faith #worship #gospel #jesuschrist #prayer #pray #christianity ... Read more

Episode 49: THE LATE MORNING OR FIRST WATCH OF THE DAY (6:00 AM - 9:00 AM) What is your prayer watch time? Everyone has a prayer watch, even though you may not be aware of it. This is why you may find yourself compelled to pray or sense a mood shift at specific times during the morning, midday, evening, or early a.m before dawn. Have you ever struggled with understanding each of the 8 Prayer Watches?, Well that's exactly what we're going to help you with in this episode. You will learn about and be able to understand the First Watch of the Day (6 am-9 am Prayer Watch) and determine if it’s the prayer watch you are called to. Support Us: Donate: https://bit.ly/DonateToranadoNetwork Shirt Store: https://bit.ly/RuachRunnerTShirts Mugs, Masks & More: https://bit.ly/RRunnerMugsMasksMore Credit: Music: https://www.purple-planet.com

Thank you for listening. Received free ten pounds (£10) from Pay Pal. Woo hoo Thank you. YouTube listening to Master Sri Akarshana. "Do you often wake up between 3 AM and 5 AM" What to do. --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app

8 AM - What is your prediction for Sunday? See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

(Published 12:55 AM) "WHAT?! WHAT I'M DOIN'?" (In my Bernie Mac voice lol) "BEIN' GROWN AND MINDIN' MY B. I." (In Shanda's voice) 'MARIJEWANA EMOTIONS', breaks down how herb can have traverse affects on people depending on one's emotions/feelings at the time. This podcast shows how the plant can either be a hindrance or progressive feature in one's life; the latter being based on one's thought process. What I love about Mary Jane lol, is that she helps you go so deep and when in a positive state - you can come up with all kinds of content/ideas. I hope you enjoy my form of expression as I am not scripted; I like to go with the flow. Peace & Blessings, ~Shanda --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/shanda-nicole/message

30/8 AM - What's Next - The Millennial Kingdom - Colin Lituri by mccmedia

23/08 AM - What's Next - The Tribulation Part 2 - Colin Lituri by mccmedia

7 AM - What will a 60 game MLB Season even look like? Bart Winkler takes your calls 

City Church AC Pastor Dallas R. Billington 11:00 AM What to do When we See the Signs of the End Times

In today’s episode Josiah DeGraaf, Hope Ann, and Brandon Miller tackle suspense, cliffhangers, emotional tension, and all of those amazing story elements that keep readers up until 2 AM. They share their favorite examples of stories that kept them turning the page and discuss why some techniques for suspense are more effective than others. What’s one story that kept you up until 2 AM? What techniques did the author use to keep you hooked?

Thanks for joining me for our last interview of the year. This week's guest is coach, author, host of the Whole Athlete Podcast, and Functional Diagnostic Nutritionist, Debbie Potts. We are going to be talking about health and longevity and some ideas for how to prioritize your own health and longevity. This is our last show of 2019 and the 2010s decade. As we prepared the content for this week, I was going through a personal process of reflecting on the previous year, taking stock of where I am on my journey, and re-imagining how I can become the best version of myself. Taking stock of my current self includes being honest with myself about the decisions, actions and behaviors that make me who I am today, and the decisions, actions and behaviors required to take me what I want to become. I'll share some of my process, insights and commitments I'm making for 2020 and beyond. Sponsor - iKOR Labs: Today's show is sponsored by iKOR Labs. iKOR is a clean, natural source of recovery enhancing CBD that protects your body from the stresses of training, improves recovery from intense efforts and helps you maintain a positive mental state. For a limited time (until It is the most bio-available CBD product on the market, iKOR is a protective anti-oxidant and highly effective anti-inflammatory. It is used by world class professional athletes. Save 20% by using the code "MHE2020" at checkout. You need to switch to "MHE2020" and not use endurance any longer. The next time you go to use endurance, it likely won't work. Please make a note of "MHE2020" Go to www.ikorlabs.com for more details.   Announcements: Go to MileHighEndurancePodcast.com, click on the "subscribe" button, and you will get the newsletter with show notes and all the links and articles sent to you automatically every week. If you love the show, please consider making a donation of any amount by clicking the PayPal donate button at the bottom of the Podcast page.   Sponsor - Halo Neuro: Our interview is sponsored by Halo Neuroscience. The Halo Sport from Halo Neuroscience will help you learn the technique and form to get faster. 20 minutes of neural priming with the Halo Headset gives you an hour of neural plasticity to work and lock in the muscle movement that leads to strength, power and endurance. Use the code "MHE" at checkout to save an additional $20. Interview with Debbie Potts: Debbie Potts has been in the fitness industry for over twenty-five years and a competitive endurance athlete for twenty years. Along her journey, she has accomplished many goals including being nominated as one of the top one hundred best trainers in the U.S. by Men's Journal in 2004 and 2005 as well as participating in fifteen Ironman Triathlons - five of them were the Hawaii World Ironman Championship. Debbie is the host of the Whole Athlete Podcast, author of the WHOLESTIC Method and Life and Life is Not A Race. She's also a recently certified Functional Diagnostic Nutritionist.   Let's get into the interview now with Debbie Potts.   Sponsor - Riplaces: Riplaces are an elastic lace system that integrates a bungee loop with a plastic core to connect the loop in each eyelet of your running shoe. The bungees come in 5 sizes to achieve custom tension for the perfect fit. The bungees and the cores come in a variety of colors and styles to help you personalize your set. Or, you can choose the MHE logo package. Pro triathlete proven and endorsed, use the code MHE25 to get that 25% discount. Go to www.riplaces.com for more information, or go to the MHE Sponsor Discounts page by going to www.milehighendurance.com, or directly to https://www.riplaces.com/collections/mile-high-endurance   Discussion: I've been thinking about what she said and the testing that is a part of FDN services. Having some real information about what's going on the inside that only testing can provide is really appeals to me. https://debbiepotts.net/fdn-health-detective/ Imagine that you could have perfect information about your health. Imaging you know exactly what was going to be your cause of death and when. If you knew it was an accident (the third leading cause of death according to the CDC https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/deaths.htm, you would avoid the scenario (activity, location or vehicle) that will lead to your accidental demise. Similarly, imagine if you had perfect information about the future and were certain that without any changes in your lifestyle, you will get a cancer diagnosis 5 years from today. If you were guaranteed you could extend that diagnosis 10, 20 or even 30 years by making changes that lead to that longevity, wouldn't you start today? Except it's not that easy, is it? We don't have that perfect information. We don't have crystal balls. There is no certainty that the changes we make today will translate to longevity of 5 days, 5 years or 15 years. Without that direct connection and certainty, it's hard to prioritize in the near term. That said, the best time to know that there's a problem is as early as possible. Regardless of your budget, my wish for you as look to the new year is that you are thoughtful about your health and make it a priority for the new decade of the 2020s. Whether you have the budget to work with someone like Debbie and can do all of the lab testing that Debbie referred to https://debbiepotts.net/get-started-on-your-2020-new-years-resolutions-now/, which will run you about $1500 in a 3 month coaching program plus $1200 in labs. Or you want to do something a little more DIY and lower cost like the over the counter EverlyWell tests https://www.everlywell.com/, consider getting some real information about how your body is performing, and take care of yourself in the new year. Year End Process for Myself The discussion about longevity weighed heavily in my year-end reflections. I spend this time of year reflecting on the year and revisiting my long term goals and setting some short term ones. My reflections span career, finances, health and fitness. This podcast is partly the result of the process that I'm going to share here. After my last Ironman race 5 1/2 years ago, I knew I needed a break from Ironman but didn't know what I wanted to do next. I was generally ready for some self-exploration and needed to create some direction for myself. I had been reading several books on the topic of setting and achieving goals or taking on life changes. How I Program Myself To Reach My Goals I've put together a formula that works for me. It comes from a collection concepts that have common threads through a number of "how to achieve goals" programs and authors, including Tony Robbins and Mark Divine, author of The Unbeatable Mind. Defining the Mission Statement - There's too much detail to cover this today, but in essence it should be something you produce after doing some self-exploration about your real values and what is truly most important to you. Goals that align to the Mission Statement - I categorize my goals by family, work, hobbies. You may find other categories based on your priorities and values. Envisioning the Goal in the finest detail (the date, the achievement, what it looks like, see yourself) AM What did I dream last night and how does it relate to my Mission and goals? Use the nightstand notebook as a resource. This is a notebook that you keep at your bedside to write down details of dreams (if any) as soon as you wake from them. Write down as many details as you can remember in that short moment. The memory will fade fast in some cases. What Action or Actions (training, call, meeting, research note) will I complete today to move me toward my goal?   Make sure there is time blocked on your calendar to complete the task. If you think you need a fallback time, block that out as well. What is my personal Mission Statement? Note if there are any new words or ideas that occur. Listen to that voice and consider updating your Mission Statement. What decisions did I make today that moved me toward my goals and Mission? Which did not? Be honest and write it down. What Action or Actions (call, meeting, research note) will I complete tomorrow to move me toward my goal? What Challenge do I need to overcome to reach my goal? Have your notebook open to a clean page with a pen or pencil ready to write. This should be easily accessible from your bed, ideally without having to get out of bed. If you wake from a dream overnight, reach for the pad/pencil and write down as many details (people, events, colors, sizes, feelings) quickly before you forget. You will likely not remember in 5 hours, let alone 5 minutes. The nightstand notebook serves another purpose. It is a good way to handle any thoughts you have about tasks or to-dos.         If you write it down, your mind won't have to try and keep track of it or work to store it into memory, enabling the mind to slow down and prepare or resume sleep. PM Journal Daily - this is a cycle of AM and PM journaling that work together   With that backdrop, I use this time of year to revisit my personal mission statement, reflect on the last year and set goals for the new year. I thought I'd share my reflection questions with you in this episode. Am I living according to my Mission Statement? My personal mission statement is to Provide a secure future for my wife and daughters. To follow my dreams. To live a healthy life. To enjoy my endurance journey and help others to enjoy the same. I feel I am doing that for the most part. I have some career and finance goals this year. Am I reaching my full potential as a husband, father, son and brother? Am I reaching my full potential as a friend?       I feel like I don't make as much time for friends as I would like. I feel very guilty if I forget someone's birthday, or forget something that’s personally important to a friend, or a family member's name. ...in my professional career? ...as an Ambassador of our sport …as an athlete? I was fairly directionless in 2019. I didn't have a specific goal. I just signed up for a bunch of races, most of which I had already done. The two that were new for me this year were the AvonFest and Non-Draft Nationals.       I really enjoyed the out of town races, even though there's a lot of logistics that goes along with it.       I definitely miss the challenge of a full Iron-distance race and I feel the tug. It being a first year of the new decade also makes me think my year of 2020 should include a challenge as epic as what I did in 2010, which was IM CDA. …with my personal connections and concern for others …what was I most passionate about? ….what did I struggle with? …what am I passionate about? I'm still passionate about the podcast. The desire to learn. The inspiration it provides is like a drug. The personal connections we get to have and the fun places we get to go. You will hear more in 2020 about where we are taking the show and the partnership with 303Endurance and 303Triathlon with Bill Plock. …as a coach? I am very proud of what the athletes that I worked with accomplished. One had a goal of finishing his first 70.3 and did. The other set out a goal of qualifying for Team USA and Worlds in Edmonton and she did. At the end of the season, my athletes and I sat down and wrote out what worked and what didn't this season. We laid out a list of things we will change for the 2020 season and what the race schedule will be. I learned so much going through that process with them. I also had to put my ego on the shelf and really see the experience from my athlete's perspective. It also helps to be an active athlete. One of the things I will be doing differently this year is having a weekly score card that clearly communicates what areas of training are progressing as planned, ahead of plan or behind plan.   Year End Process for Athletes I've started writing the training plans for my athletes. We started in the Fall by having my athletes identify and sign up for their most important races of the 2020 season. I use an Excel spreadsheet where every column represents a week of the year. The races are identified on the on the top row of the spreadsheet on the corresponding week. Along the leftmost column I have, by discipline, the # of training sessions, the duration of the longest workout, and total volume. This serves as a roadmap for the TrainingPeaks training plan that I'm building for my athletes. This also serves as a way for me to communicate clearly with an athlete what the time commitment is for every week of the year and a benchmark to evaluate training plan adherence. Of course, as a coach I am building in target TSS and CTL scores based on the athlete. If you are curious what this looks like, I've gone ahead and posted a copy of the Athlete Weekly Training Roadmap on the Resources page of https://milehighendurancepodcast.com/resources.       Endurance News: Marathon training - a guide to getting it right So you're training for a marathon. Here, coaches, experts and marathon greats share their tips on how to train like a pro. Run easy on most days On most of your runs –especially the long ones– resist the urge to push; instead, maintain an easy pace, advises running coach Janet Hamilton. You should be running at a pace that allows you to have full-sentence conversations with your running partners. Easy running reduces the impact on your body and staves off fatigue, enabling you to log more miles with less risk of picking up an injury. What’s more, the slow pace actually prepares you better for the distance. When you run a marathon, most of your body’s fuel comes from your aerobic (using oxygen) system – your hardworking muscles need oxygen-rich blood to power each contraction. Your body adapts to easy miles by strengthening your heart, sprouting more capillaries to infuse oxygen into muscles and building more mitochondria, the factories in cells that produce energy. https://www.runnersworld.com/uk/training/marathon/a30256981/marathon-training-guide/     How to Go Beyond the Marathon Distance Lose your fear - If a race is twice the distance of a marathon, it doesn’t mean your training needs to be twice as hard. Many people complete ultras on around the same mileage as a marathon training plan. Although you’ll be on your feet for longer in an ultra, you’ll be moving slower than marathon pace. It’s significantly less intense and less taxing on joints – repetitive pounding on asphalt is brutal compared with softer, changing terrain that better spreads stress around the body. Also, hiking the uphills (and most trail ultras are lumpy) is not only legitimate but a smart strategy, to preserve muscles. You may even start looking forward to hills and the sneaky walking break they allow. Other tips include, Get out more, Get the fueling right, Shift your mindset, Speed it up, Get specific, Learn to juggle, Find your way, and Recover well. https://www.runnersworld.com/uk/training/ultra/a30280579/how-to-run-ultra-marathon/     Video of the Week: Heavy As Lead - From 300 Pounds to the Leadville 100 Heavy as Lead is the story of Jason Cohen, who went from 300lbs to just a short 7 years later found himself running the Leadville Trail 100. Jason, at the age of 27, found himself looking at the number 297 on his bathroom scale. Jason resolved to never let that number touch 300 and has since lost over 120 pounds. His incredible journey has taken him through his battle with obesity and took him to the starting line of the Leadville Trail 100 Race on August 18th, 2018. This film documents Jason's story of losing the weight, becoming an athlete, and running the Leadville 100. Jason was given the idea to tell his story by his good friend, Mark LeBlanc, who realized that Jason's story needed to be told to the world. Mark is co-creating Heavy as Lead with Jason and is the person behind the camera for much of the film. More information and contact information can be found at www.heavyaslead.com Heavy As Lead Documentary - From 300lbs to Running the Leadville 100       Upcoming Interviews: Chris Helwick, a Colorado athlete making a comeback to his professional career as a decathlete (after a 6 year retirement) to make a third and final attempt at qualifying for the 2020 Olympics. Anders Hoffman of Project Iceman will be joining us in the future to talk about the documentary of the first ever, World Record breaking Ironman triathlon in Antarctica in February 2020, the Iceman, to show that limitations are perceptions. The purpose is to inspire other people to dare pursue their biggest dreams. https://www.projecticeman.com/   Last week we had Sarah Crowley and we were talking to her about her hydration/nutrition prep for hot and cooler races. Precision Hydration is her nutrition sponsor and we reached out to them and we are going to have Andy Blow from Precision Hydration join is in a couple of weeks to help give you some tips on how to customize your plan. Closing: Please support our affiliate brands that support the show and help you get faster! See the https://milehighendurancepodcast.com/sponsors page. Be sure to follow us on social media including @303endurance and @milehighendurancepodcast. Stay tuned, train informed, and enjoy the endurance journey!

Episode 5 of 5 featuring Aditya Mehta. Aditya is the Founder of Art&Found – a curated platform for invite-only artists to sell their work. This is a 5 part series with Bharat Flooring and tiles and Audiogyan. In the coming weeks we will be talking with various artists, heritage conservationist, brand creators, illustrators and architects associated with Bharat Flooring & Tiles. Those who don’t know what is Bharat Flooring & Tiles, (btw, we will be calling it BFT throughout the series). It’s a company formed in 1922 which is leader in quality cement  flooring and has been primarily making customised, handmade cement tiles. The timeless elegance and durability of these tiles make them works of art and an invaluable part of the country’s architectural heritage. It started as part of the Swadeshi movement and with over 90 years of reputation, BFT is now the most preferred choice of interior designers and architects across India, You can find relevant links in the show notes about BFT. Aditya Mehta is the Founder of Art&Found – a curated platform for invite-only artists to sell their work. He comes from advertising background but found his passion in curating and selling artwork made by Indian artists. Today we are going to speak about ‘Virtuoso’ collection with artists like Aniruddh Mehta, Shweta Malhotra, Suzanne Dias and Pratap Chalke which emerged out of collaboration between Art&Found and Bharat Flooring tiles. We will also speak about how different types of digital artworks exploring different materials and medium. https://www.bharatfloorings.com/ Questions AM: What does Art&Found do? FV: What are different collections you have and how did Art&Found help in shaping them? What new things are born out of this collaboration? AM: What are the constraints while designing since the final output is a tile? FV: How have your artists responded to this? What is their feedback and learning from it? AM & FV: Can you share the over all process from brief to actual deliverable tiles for a client? Would like to know the actual flow of how a vector or a .AI files is given to BFT artisans etc… AM: The overall engagement seems like a win-win situation. Can you tell us who all are empowered through this and at what levels? BFT, Client & the Artist. How Art&Found enables this? FV: What have been you learnings w.r.t market for this and what is next?

Join Sharon live in London, the third stop of the world tour, and listen is as she discusses expanding our awareness and acceptance of a perceived issue in our life before we jump to action, in order to create real and lasting solutions rather than superficial ones. Get your FREE getting started as a successful life coach gift pack here: https://tci.rocks/gift-pack-2020 KEY TOPICS AND TIME STAMPS: 0.22 What we need to do for our selves and our clients is create real transformation, by helping them reclaim, reconnect and restore every emotion • There are three steps to transformation • Awareness > Acceptance > Activation • If I want to experience a different reality, what’s causing my current reality? • Thoughts, perceptions, habits, conditioning, programming • Action coaching is just giving help on steps they can take to solve their problems but that doesn’t help them expand awareness of their thoughts, perceptions… • Nothing in the mind will change • Transformational coaching is about setting them up to make the decisions themselves by expanding their understanding of themselves • Fixating on the problem ignores the source of the problem, and there will always be others to take it’s place 5.21 • I was raised to not have access to anger, anger was banned in my family, for girls, dad could get angry • What emotions were not allowed for some of you? • Audience Member: Expression • Sharon: What do you mean by expression? • AM: I loved to talk, and my mum put up a photo that said “you’re not allowed to talk too much, shut up” • S: Why do you think the sign went up? • AM: Because I talk too much, that’s what she said • S: That’s not why the sign went up • AM: Because she couldn’t handle it • S: There it is, so who was it really about? • AM: Her • S: Right, but when you’re a kid it’s hard to see that. How do you think your mother was raised • AM: Raised in a house where children were meant to be seen, not heard • S: And how do you think the people that raised her were raised? • AM: Same way • S: Isn’t that interesting. I call it a tribal cycle. When I’m coaching you, I’m coaching the tribal cycle that taught you what you see, which is “the sign went up because I talk to much” instead of “the sign went up because she couldn’t handle it” • I’m loving your mother right now. Why? • Because we’re going to now move to acceptance. We’ve got the awareness piece, now let’s move on to part two • Because she need to hear this too. As did you grandmother, and all the rest • We’re all victims of victims • If we find a perpetrator, we are putting the problem outside of ourselves • “If they had only been different” but we’re talking about changing generations of tribal cycles • Instead we have to say, this stops with me 13.30 This is one of my favourite models, we’ve got two scales, there’s the self (awareness, acceptance and more) and on the other there’s our problems • If the problem is beyond our awareness, it looks huge • If we instead raise awareness, the problem is redefined 24.10 I learned a lot of this stuff from the story The Little Soul and the Sun by Neale Donald Walsch, which goes something like this • A little soul went to heaven, and said to God I want to know myself • God says, you are everything, what more is there to know • The little soul says, I want to know love • God says okay, if you want to know love, I’m going to send you down to earth, and in the moment where you feel the most love, and you’re with someone who you feel you can trust the most, I’m going to have them strike you down. And in that moment, if you still love, you will know love • So the little soul goes down, and he finds someone, who he trusts and loves completely • And in the moment of him giving his heart over, the moment of total vulnerability, that great friend struck him down • And in the moment, he either remembered that he was love, or he was doomed to repeat the moment • I’m freeing my client from being doomed to repeat it • So that story is about acceptance of what is • And until we move to acceptance of what is, we’re not really going to change it because our thinking’s not going to change 27.36 Am: Is there a responsibility to acknowledge your part in the tribal cycle? • S: Not as a child, but as an adult yes • As a child, your responsibility is to be a child, and that’s it • Am: And what age do you have to grow up? • S: When I got to 37 I thought I should probably try • A lot of what we need to do is to get back to being a child • It’s not about lack of responsibility, it’s about being fully ourselves • I’ll come to your question about adult responsibility, here is my metaphor for that • You come to a puddle, what does a fully embodied kid do? • Jump in and make a splash • And the adults will avoid the splash, avoid the puddle, maybe bitch about it • So a child’s job or responsibility is to experience spontaneity, curiosity, warmth, love, playfulness, adventure, risk-taking, etc. • What’s an adult’s responsibility? I believe its to live our best lives 30.34 As we go higher on the awareness and acceptance scale, our emotional reactivity goes down • It’s gets us to a place where we don’t get hooked by everything our family does 31.06 AM: I have a question about acceptance, what if the client has so many things that have happened that they can’t get to acceptance because the things are unjust and unfair • S: Firstly, if your client has been so traumatized by a childhood event, you should refer them on. We don’t coach that which is beyond the realms of coaching • AM: What if the concept of unjustness, unfairness, inequality is important to your sense of self • S: Are we talking about you or your client? • AM: Me • S: Where’s the inequality? • AM: Feels like everywhere, I’m not sure. I’m thinking about the history, when I look at generation to generation, thinking about especially class inequality • S: Whoa. So I’m coaching you, and you’re bringing to your session, the planet. We’re going to need a little bit longer. Clients bring their issues to their session, the don’t come saying to me, can you solve the inequality on the planet • Clients come to me for help with them, not with others • So that’s the awareness now do you see how if you come to a coaching session and ask me to help you with people I haven’t met yet, you’re asking to set me up for failure? • AM: Yes • So that’s acceptance, and then the activation would be, “How could you do that differently so it’s impactful for you? OTHER RESOURCES: • Ultimate You Book - www.thecoachinginstitute.com.au/book • Ultimate You Quest Telecast - www.ultimateyouquest.com • Upcoming Events at The Coaching Institute - www.thecoachinginstitute.com.au/trainings • Sharon’s New Website - www.sharonpearson.com • Disruptive Leadership- https://www.disruptiveleading.com/ • Phone The Coaching Institute - 1800 094 927 • The Coaching Institute Fan Page – https://www.facebook.com/BecomeALifeCoach • Feedback/Reviews/Suggest a top to be discussed - perspectives@sharonpearson.com • Perspectives YouTube Channel – https://www.tci.rocks/youtube

City Church AC Pastor Dallas R. Billington 11:00 AM What we Gain and Receive as a Christian - Part II: We Live with Grace & Favor

City Church AC Pastor Dallas R. Billington 11:00 AM What we Gain and Receive as a Christian - Part I: Always Secure

Kristina Virro is a Psychotherapist and Holistic Nutritionist. She sat down with us in between her busy schedule to chat about the type of mental health help she offers others as well as the kind of help she gives herself. She dives into neuroplasticity, describing how we can rewire our brains through action and thought. You can find her book, ‘The Anxious Teen' via her website: fresh-insight.ca. ONE COOL THINGS: Kristina Morning & evenings texts to partner: - AM: What are you looking forward to? - PM: What are you grateful for? 
Tanya Dr. Amen & Tana Amen Cales Adobe Capture: Betty Boop (on our insta!) Flux & other apps for blue light/orange light --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/wtnok/message

Désiréby Megan Arkenberg   From Albert Magazine's interview with Egon Rowley: April 2943             Egon Rowley: It was the War that changed him. I remember the day we knew it. [A pause.] We all knew it, that morning. He came to our table in the coffee shop with a copy of Raum – do you remember that newspaper? The reviewers were deaf as blue-eyed cats, the only people in Südlichesburg who preferred Anton Fulke's operas to Désiré's – but Désiré, he had a copy of it. This was two days after Ulmerfeld, you understand. None of us had any idea how bad it was. But Raum had gotten its hands on a letter from a soldier, and Désiré read it to us, out loud, right there over coffee and pastries. [Full story after the cut.] Hello! Welcome to GlitterShip Episode 73 for June 13, 2019. This is your host, Keffy, and I’m super excited to be sharing this story with you. Our story for today is Desire by Megan Arkenberg, read by Dani Daly. Before we get to it, if you’ve been waiting to pick up your copy of the Tiptree Award Honor Listed book, GlitterShip Year Two, there’s a great deal going on for Pride over at StoryBundle. GlitterShip Year Two is part of a Pride month LGBTQ fantasy fiction bundle. StoryBundle is a pay-what-you-want bundle site. For $5 or more, you can get four great books, and for $15 or more, you’ll get an additional five books, including GlitterShip Year Two, and a story game. That comes to as little as $1.50 per book or game. The StoryBundle also offers an option to give 10% of your purchase amount to charity. The charity for this bundle is Rainbow Railroad, a charity that helps queer folks get to a safe place if their country is no longer safe for them. http://www.storybundle.com/pride And now for “Desire” by Megan Arkenberg, read by Dani Daly. Megan Arkenberg’s work has appeared in over fifty magazines and anthologies, including Lightspeed, Asimov’s, Shimmer, and Ellen Datlow’s Best Horror of the Year. She has edited the fantasy e-zine Mirror Dance since 2008 and was recently the nonfiction editor for Queers Destroy Horror!, a special issue of Nightmare Magazine. She currently lives in Northern California, where she is pursuing a Ph.D. in English literature. Visit her online at http://www.meganarkenberg.com. Dani loves to keep busy and narrating stories is just one of the things she loves to do. She’s a former assistant editor of Cast of Wonders, a retired roller derby player and current soap maker and small business owner. She rants on twitter as @danooli_dani, if that’s your thing. Or you can visit the EA forums, where she moderates the Cast of Wonders boards. You can find stories narrated by Dani on all four of the Escape Artists podcasts, at Star Ship Sofa, and on Audible.com (as Danielle Daly).   Désiréby Megan Arkenberg   From Albert Magazine's interview with Egon Rowley: April 2943             Egon Rowley: It was the War that changed him. I remember the day we knew it. [A pause.] We all knew it, that morning. He came to our table in the coffee shop with a copy of Raum – do you remember that newspaper? The reviewers were deaf as blue-eyed cats, the only people in Südlichesburg who preferred Anton Fulke's operas to Désiré's – but Désiré, he had a copy of it. This was two days after Ulmerfeld, you understand. None of us had any idea how bad it was. But Raum had gotten its hands on a letter from a soldier, and Désiré read it to us, out loud, right there over coffee and pastries.             Albert Magazine: And what did the letter say?             Rowley: The usual things. Blood and, and heads blown clean off, things like that. Horrible things. I remember…[Laughs awkwardly.] I remember Baptist Vogel covered his ears. We all felt it quite badly.             AM: I imagine. Why was this letter so important to Désiré?             Rowley: Who can say why anything mattered to him? Guilt, most likely.             AM: Guilt?             Rowley: Yes. He hadn't volunteered for the army, and that was something of an anomaly in those days. Everyone was so patriotic, so nationalist, I suppose you'd say. But he had his reasons. I mean, I don't suppose Désiré could have passed the examinations for enlistment – the psychological examinations.             AM: But it bothered him, that he hadn't volunteered?             Rowley: Yes. Very much. [A pause.] When he read that soldier's letter…it was the oddest thing. Like he was reading a love letter, you understand. But, like I said, there was nothing romantic in it, nothing at all. It was…horrible.             AM: What did Désiré say about it?             Rowley: About the letter? Nothing. He just read it and…and went back to his rooms, I suppose. That was the last we saw of him.             AM: The last you saw of him?             Rowley: Yes. [A pause.] Before Alexander.   A letter from Margaret von Banks to Beatrix Altberg: August 2892 Dearest Bea,             The scene: Leonore's drawing room, around nine o'clock last night. The moment I stepped through the door, Désiré came running up to me like a child looking for candy. "Thank goodness you're here," he said. I should add that it was supposed to be a masquerade, but of course I knew him by his long hair and those dark red lips, and I suppose I'm the only woman in Südlichesburg to wear four rings in each ear. He certainly knew me immediately. "I have a bet running with Isidor," he continued, "and Anton and I need you for the violin."             He explained, as he half-led, half-dragged me to the music room, that Anton had said something disparaging – typically – about Isidor's skills as a conductor of Désiré's music. Isidor swore to prove him wrong if Désiré would write them a new piece that very moment. Désiré did – a trio for violin, cello and pianoforte – and having passed the cello to Anton and claimed the piano for himself, he needed me to play violin in the impromptu concert.             "You're mad," I said on seeing the sheet music.             "Of course I am," he said, patting me on the shoulder. Isidor thundered into the room – they make such a delightful contrast, big blond Isidor and dark Désiré. Rumor is Désiré has native blood from the Lysterrestre colonies, which makes me wonder quite shallowly if they're all so handsome over there. Yes, Bea, I imagine you rolling your eyes, but the fact remains that Désiré is ridiculously beautiful. Even Richard admits it.             Well, Isidor assembled the audience, and my hands were so sweaty that I had to borrow a pair of gloves from Leonore later in the evening. Désiré was smooth and calm as can be. He kissed me on the forehead – and Anton on the cheek, to everyone's amusement but Anton's – and then Isidor was rapping the music stand for our attention, and Désiré played the opening notes, and we were off, hurtling like a sled down a hill. I wish I had the slightest clue what we were playing, Bea, but I haven't. The audience loved it, at any rate.             That's Désiré for you – mad as springtime, smooth as ice and clumsy as walking on it. We tease him, saying he's lucky he doesn't wear a dress, he trips over the ladies' skirts so often. But then he apologizes so wonderfully, I've half a mind to trip him on purpose. That clumsiness vanishes when he's playing, though; his fingers on a violin are quick and precise. Either that, or he fits his mistakes into the music so naturally that we don't notice them.             You really ought to meet him, Bea. He has exactly your sense of humor. A few weeks ago, Richard and I were at the Symphony, and Désiré joined us in our box, quite unexpectedly. Richard, who was blushing and awkward as it was, tried to talk music with Désiré. "This seems to tell a story, doesn't it?" he said.             "It most certainly does," Désiré said. "Like Margaret's uncle Kunibert. It starts with something fascinating, then derails itself talking about buttons and waistcoats. If we're lucky, it might work its way back to its original point. Most likely it will put us to sleep until someone rudely disturbs us by applauding."             All this said with the most perfectly straight face, and a bit of an eyebrow raise at me, inviting me to disagree with him. I never do, but it's that invitation that disarms me, and keeps the teasing from becoming cruel. Désiré always waits to be proven wrong, though he never is.             I should warn you not to fall in love with him, though. I'm sure you laugh, but half of Südlichesburg is ready to serve him its hearts on a platter, and I know he'd just smile and never take a taste. He's a man for whom Leonore's masquerades mean nothing; he's so wonderfully full of himself, he has no room to pretend to be anyone else.             That's not to say he's cruel: merely heartless. He's like a ruby, clear and dark and beautiful to look at, but hard to the core. How such a man can write such music, I'll never know.             Yours always,             Maggie   III. From a review of Désiré's Echidna in Der Sentinel: July 2894             For the life of me, I cannot say what this opera is about. Love, and courage. A tempestuous battle. I have the libretto somewhere, in a drawer with my gloves and opera glasses, but I will not spoil Désiré's score by putting a story to it. Echidna is music, pure music, so pure it breaks the heart.             First come the strings, quietly humming. Andrea Profeta enters the stage. The drums begin, loud, savage. Then the melody, swelling until you feel yourself lifted from your chair, from your body, and you are only a web of sensations; your heart straining against the music, your blood singing in your fingertips. Just remembering it, I feel my fingers go weak. How the orchestra can bear to play it, I can't imagine.             It is not Echidna but the music that is the hero. We desire, like the heroine, to be worthy of it. We desire to live in such a way that our world may deserve to hold something so pure, so strong, so achingly beautiful within it.   From the Introduction of Désiré: an Ideal by Richard Stele: 2934             Societies are defined by the men they hate. It is the revenge of an exile that he carries his country to all the world, and to the world his countrymen are merely a reflection of him. An age is defined not by the men who lived in it, but by the ones who lived ahead of it.             Hate smolders. Nightmares stay with us. But love fades, love is fickle. Désiré's tragedy is that he was loved.   From Albert Magazine's interview with Egon Rowley             AM: And what about his vices?             Rowley: Désiré's vices? He didn't have any. [Laughs.] He certainly wasn't vicious.             AM: Vicious?             Rowley: That's what the papers called it. He liked to play games, play his friends and admirers against each other.             AM: Like the ladies.             Rowley: Yes. That was all a game to him. He'd wear…favors, I suppose you'd call them, like a knight at a joust. He admired Margaret von Bank's earrings at the opening of Echidna, and she gave him one to wear through the performance. After that the ladies were always fighting to give him earrings.             AM: To your knowledge, was Désiré ever in love?             Rowley: Never. [A pause.] I remember one day – summer of 2896, it must have been – a group of us went walking in Brecht's park. Désiré, Anton Fulke, the newspaperman Richard Stele, the orchestra conductor Isidor Ursler, and myself. It was Sonntag afternoon, and all the aristocrats were riding by in their fine clothes and carriages. A sort of weekly parade, for us simple peasants. You don't see sights like that anymore.             [A long pause.] Anyway, Désiré was being himself, joking with us and flirting with the aristocrats. Or the other way around, it was never easy to tell. Isolde von Bisswurm, who was married to a Grand Duke at the time, slowed her carriage as she passed us and called… something unrepeatable down to Désiré.             AM: Unrepeatable?             Rowley: Oh, I'm sure it's no more than half the respectable women in Südlichesburg were thinking. Désiré just laughed and leapt up into her carriage. She whispered something in his ear. And then he kissed her, right there in front of everyone – her, a married woman and a Grand Duchess.             AM: [With humor.] Scandalous.             Rowley: It was, in those days. We were all – Fulke and Ursler and Stele and I – we were all horrified. But the thing I'm thinking of, when you ask me if he was ever in love with anyone, that happened afterward. When he jumped down from Isolde's carriage, he was smiling like a boy with a lax governess, and he looked so… I suppose you might say beautiful. But in a moment the look was gone. He caught sight of the man in the next carriage: von Arden, von Allen, something like that. Tall man, very dark, not entirely unlike Désiré, though it was very clear which of the two was better favored.             AM: Not von Arden.             Rowley: [Laughs.] Oh, no. Maggie von Banks used to call Désiré her angel, and he could have passed for one, but von what's-his-face was very much a man. Désiré didn't seem to notice. He stood there on the path in Brecht's park, staring like… well, like one of those girls who flocked to his operas.             AM: Staring at this man?             Rowley: Yes. And after kissing Isolde von Bisswurm, who let me tell you was quite the lovely lady in those days. [Laughs softly.] Whoever would have suspected Désiré of bad taste? But that was his way, I suppose.             AM: What was his way? [Prompting:] Did you ever suspect Désiré of unnatural desires?             Rowley: No, never. No desire in him could be unnatural.     From the pages of Der Sentinel: May 15, 2897             At dawn on May 14, the composer Désiré was joined by Royal Opera conductor Isidor Ursler and over fifty representatives of the Südlichesburg music 'scene' to break ground in Umerfeld, two miles south of the city, for Désiré's ambitious new opera house.             The plans for Galatea – which Désiré cheerfully warns the public are liable to change – show a stage the size of a race track, half a mile of lighting catwalks, and no less than four labyrinthine sub-basements for prop and scenery storage. For a first foray into architecture, Désiré's design shows several highly ambitious features, including three-storey lobby and central rotunda. The rehearsal rooms will face onto a garden, Désiré says, featuring a miniature forest and a wading pool teeming with fish. When asked why this is necessary, he replied with characteristic 'charm': "It isn't. Art isn't about what is necessary. Art decides what is necessary."   VII. From a review of Désiré's Brunhilde in Der Sentinel: February 2899             For once, the most talked-about thing at the opera was not Désiré's choice of jewel but his choice of setting. Südlichesburg's public has loved Galatea from the moment we saw her emerging from the green marble in Ulmerfeld, and, at last, she has come alive and repaid our devotion with an embrace. At last, said more than one operagoer at last night's premier of Brunhilde, Désiré's music has a setting worthy of it.             Of course Galatea is not Désiré's gift to Südlichesburg, but a gift to himself. The plush-and-velvet comfort of the auditorium is designed first and foremost to echo the swells of his music, and the marble statues in the lobby are not pandering to their aristocratic models but suggestions to the audience of what it is about to witness; beauty, dignity, power. However we grovel at the feet of Désiré the composer, we must also bow to Désiré the consummate showman.             As to the jewel in this magnificent setting, let us not pretend that anyone will be content with the word of Richard Stele, operagoer. Everyone in Südlichesburg will see Brunhilde, and all will love it. The only question is if they will love it as much as Désiré clearly loves his Galatea.             Finally, as a courtesy to the ladies and interested gentlemen, Désiré's choice of jewel for last night's performance came from the lovely Beatrix Altberg. He wore her pearl-and-garnet string around his left wrist, and it could be seen sparkling in the houselights as he stood at the end of each act and applauded wildly.   VIII. From Albert Magazine's interview with Egon Rowley             AM: They say that Désiré's real decline began with Galatea.             Rowley: Whoever "they" are. [Haltingly:] 2899, it was finished. I remember because that was the year Vande Frust opened her office in Südlichesburg. She was an odd one, Dr. Frust – but brilliant, I'll give her that.             AM: Désiré made an appointment with Dr. Frust that June.             Rowley: Yes. I don't know what they talked about, though. Désiré never said.             AM: But you can guess, yes?             Rowley: Knowing Dr. Frust, I can guess.             AM: [A long pause.] As a courtesy to our readers who haven't read Vande Frust's work, could you please explain?             Rowley: She was fascinated by origins. Of course she didn't mean that the same way everyone else does – didn't give half a pence for your parents, did Vande Frust. She had a bit of… a bit of a fixation with how you were educated. How you formed your Ideals – your passions, your values. What books you read, whose music you played, that sort of thing.             AM: And how do you suppose Désiré formed his Ideals?             Rowley: I don't know. As I said, whatever Désiré discussed with Dr. Frust, he never told me. And he never went back to her.   From Chapter Eight of Désiré: an Ideal by Richard Stele             Whether or not Désiré suffered a psychological breakdown during the building of Galatea is largely a matter of conjecture. He failed to produce any significant piece of music in 2897 or the year after. Brunhilde, which premiered at the grand opening of Galatea in 2899, is generally acknowledged to be one of his weakest works.             But any concrete evidence of psychological disturbance is nearly impossible to find. We know he met with famed Dr. Vende Frust in June 2899, but we have no records of what he said there. The details of an encounter with the law in February 2900 are equally sketchy.             Elise Koch, Dr. Frust's maid in 2899, offers an odd story about the aftermath of Désiré's appointment. She claims to have found a strange garment in Dr. Frust's office, a small and shapeless black dress of the sort women prisoners wear in Lysterre and its colonies. Unfortunately for the curious, Dr. Frust demanded that the thing be burned in her fireplace, and its significance to Désiré is still not understood.   From the report of Hans Frei, prostitute: February 12, 2900             Mr. Frei, nineteen years old, claims a man matching the description of the composer Désiré approached him near Rosen Platz late at night last Donnerstag. The man asked the price, which Mr. Frei gave him, and then offered twice that amount if Mr. Frei would accompany him to rooms "somewhere in the south" of Südlichesburg. Once in the rooms, Mr. Frei says the man sat beside him by the window and proceeded to cry into his shoulder. "He didn't hurt me none," Mr. Frei says. "Didn't touch me, as a matter of fact. I felt sorry for him, he seemed like such a mess."             No charges are being considered, as the man cannot properly be said to have contracted a prostitute for immoral purposes. The composer Désiré's housekeeper and staff could not be found to comment on the incident. One neighbor, a Miss Benjamin, whose nerves make her particularly susceptible to any irregularity, claims that on the night of last Donnerstag, her sleep was disturbed by a lamp kept burning in her neighbor’s foyer. Such a lamp, she states, is usually maintained by Désiré’s staff until the small hours, and extinguished upon his homecoming. She assumes that the persistence of this light on Donnerstag indicates that Désiré did not return home on the night in question.   From a review of Désiré's Hieronymus in Der Sentinel: December 2902             Any man who claims to have sat through Désiré's Hieronymus with a dry eye and handkerchief is either deaf or a damned liar. Personally, I hope he is the damned liar, as it would be infinitely more tragic if he missed Désiré's deep and tangled melodies. Be warned: Hieronymus bleeds, and the blood will be very hard to wash out of our consciousness.   XII. A letter from Margaret von Banks Stele to Beatrix Altberg: March 2903 Dearest Bea,             Richard says war is inevitable. His job with the newspapers lets him know these things, I suppose: he says Kaspar in the foreign relations room is trying to map Lysterrestre alliances with string and cards on the walls, and now he's run completely out of walls. That doesn't begin to include the colonies.             The way Richard talks about it, it sounds like a ball game. Bea, he jokes about placing bets on who will invade whom – as if it doesn't matter any more than a day at the races! I know he doesn't need to worry, that at worst the papers will send him out with a notepad and a pencil and set him scribbling. The Stele name still has some pull, after all – if he wants to make use of it.             I don't, Beatrix. If war breaks out with Lysterre, I want you to know that I am going to enlist.             Yours,            Margaret Stele   XIII. From Chapter Eleven of Désiré: an Ideal by Richard Stele             It was inevitable that the War should to some extent be Désiré's. It was the natural result of men like him, in a world he had helped create. Dr. Vande Frust would say it was the result of our Ideals, and that Désiré had wrought those Ideals for us. I think Désiré would agree.             We – all of us, the artists and the critics with the aristocrats and cavalrymen – might meet in a coffee shop for breakfast one morning and lay some plans for dinner. The cavalrymen would ride off, perhaps as little as ten miles from Südlichesburg, where the Lysterrestre troops were gathered. There would be a skirmish, and more often than not an empty place at the supper table. Désiré took to marking these places with a spring of courtesan's lace: that, too, was a part of his Ideal.             In this war, in our war, there was a strange sense of decorum. This was more than a battle of armies for us, the artists. Hadn't Lysterrestre audiences applauded and wept at our music as much as our own countrymen? The woman whose earring Désiré had worn one night at the opera might be the same one who set fire to his beloved Galatea. The man who wrung Anton Fulke's hand so piteously at the Lysterrestre opening of Viridian might be the same man who severed that hand with a claw of shrapnel. How could we fight these men and women, whose adulating letters we kept pressed in our desk drawers? How could we kill them, who died singing our songs?   XIV. From Albert Magazine's interview with Egon Rowley             AM: Do you think Alexander was written as a response to the War?             Rowley: I know it was. [A pause.] Well, not to the War alone. A fair number of things emerged because of that – Fulke's last symphony, which he wrote one-handed, and Richard Stele's beautiful book of poems. Who knew the man had poetry in him, that old newspaper cynic?             AM: His wife died in the War, didn't she?             Rowley: Yes, poor Maggie. It seems strange to pity her – she wouldn't have wanted my pity – but, well, I'm an old man now. It's my prerogative to pity the young and dead.             AM: But to return to Désiré –             Rowley: Yes, to Désiré and Alexander. You must have seen it. All the world saw it when it premiered in 2908, even babes in arms…How old are you?             AM: [The interviewer gives her age.]             Rowley: Well, then, you must have seen it. It was brilliant, wasn't it? Terrible and brilliant. [A pause.] Terrible, terrible and brilliant.   A letter from Infantryman Leo Kirsch, printed in Raum: September 2907 Gentlemen,             I cannot make you understand what is happening here, less than a day's ride from your parks and offices and coffee houses. I can list, as others have, the small and innumerable tragedies: a headless soldier we had to walk on to cross through the trenches, a dead nurse frozen with her arms around a dead soldier, sheltering him from bullets. I can list these things, but I cannot make you understand them.             If it were tears I wanted from you, gentlemen of Südlichesburg, I could get them easily enough. You artists, you would cry to see the flowers trampled on our marches, the butterflies withering from poisonous air. You would cry to watch your opera houses burn like scraps of kindling. Me, I was happy to see Galatea burn. Happy to know it would hurt you, if only for a day.             But I don't want your weeping. If I want anything from you, it is for you to come down here to the battlefields, to see what your pride, your stupidity, your brainless worship of brainless courage has created. It is your poetry that told that nurse to shelter her soldier with her body, knowing it was useless, knowing she would die. Your music told her courage would make it beautiful. I want you to look down at the headless soldiers in the trenches and see how beautiful dumb courage really is.             The Lysterrestre have brought native soldiers from their colonies, dark men and women with large eyes and deep, harrowing voices. They wear Lysterrestre uniforms and speak the language, but they have no love for that country, no joy in dying for it. Yesterday I saw a woman walking through the battlefield, holding the hands of soldiers – her people, our people, and Lysterrestre alike – and singing to them as they died. That courage, the courage of the living in the face of death, could never come from your art. For us, and for Lysterre, courage of that kind is lost.             I tried to join her today. But I did not know what to sing, when all our music is lies.   XVI. From a review of Désiré's Alexander in Der Sentinel: August 2908             Richard Stele has refused the task of reviewing Alexander for Der Sentinel, and it is easy to see why. Stele is a friend of Désiré, and it takes a great deal of courage – courage which Désiré brutally mocks and slanders – to take a stand against one's friends. But sometimes it must be done. In this instance, standing with Désiré is not only cowardly; it is a betrayal of what all thinking, feeling men in this country hold dear.             Nine years ago, after the premier of Brunhilde, Stele famously refused to summarize its plot, saying we would all see it and love it regardless of what he said. Well, you will all see Alexander regardless of what I say. And you, my friends, will be horrified by the change in your idol.   XVII. From Chapter Twelve of Désiré: an Ideal by Richard Stele             The War changed Désiré. Alexander changed us all.             It seems to be a piece of anti-Lysterre propaganda, at first. Alexander, a Lysterrestre commander, prepares for war against the native people of the Lysterrestre colonies. Shikoba, a native woman, rallies her people against him. The armies meet; but instead of the swelling music, the dignity and heroism Désiré's audience have come to expect, there is slaughter. The Lysterrestre fling themselves at the enemy and fall in hideous, cacophonous multitudes. At the end of the opera, Alexander is the last Lysterrestre standing. He goes to kill Shikoba; she stabs him brutally in the chest and he collapses, gasping. Shikoba kneels beside him and sings a quiet, subdued finale as he dies.             This is an opera about courage, about heroism. Its heroes turn to all the other operas that have ever been written and call them lies. When audiences leave the opera house, they do so in silence. I have heard of few people seeing it twice.             At some point during the writing of Alexander – in October 2907, I believe – Désiré announced at a dinner of some sort that he had native blood, and had been born in the Lysterrestre colonies. This did not matter much to the gathered assembly, and besides, it was something of an open secret. We took it, at the time, to be a sort of explanation, an excuse for the powerful hatred that boiled in him each time we mentioned the War. Not that we needed any explanations; my wife, Margaret von Banks Stele, had died at Elmerburg about a month before.             Now, of course, I wonder. Why did it matter to Désiré that the world he shaped so heavily was not his by blood? What exactly had the War made him realize – about himself, and about the rest of us?             It is significant, I think, that in Galatea's burning all the Lysterrestre army costumes were lost. "Fine," Désiré said. "Borrow the uniforms of our countrymen. They all look the same from where we'll be standing."   XVIII. From Albert Magazine's interview with Egon Rowley             AM: The War marked the end of an era.             Rowley: The death of an era, yes. Of Désiré's era. I suppose you could say Désiré killed it.   XIX. From the obituaries page of Raum: June 2911             The editors of Raum are saddened to report the death of the composer, architect, and respected gentleman Désiré. We realize his popularity has waned in recent years, following a number of small scandals and a disappointing opera. Nevertheless, we must acknowledge our debts to the earlier work of this great and fascinating man, whose music taught our age so much about pride, patriotism and courage.             Something of an enigma in life, Désiré seems determined to remain so hereafter. He directed his close friend Egon Rowley and famed doctor Vande Frust to burn all his papers and personal effects. He also expressed a desire to be cremated and to have his ashes spread over Umerfeld, site of both his destroyed Galatea and one of the bloodiest battles in the recent War.             No family is known, nor are Mr. Rowley and Dr. Frust releasing the cause of death. Désiré is leaving Südlichesburg, it seems, as mysteriously as he came to it.   From a report on Native Boarding Schools in the Lysterrestre Colonies: May 2937             Following almost twenty years of intense scrutiny and criticism from the outside world, Native Boarding Schools throughout the territories of the one-time Lysterrestre Empire are being terminated and their records released to the public.             Opened in the late 2870s, Native Boarding Schools professed to provide native-born children with the skills and understandings necessary to function in the colonial society. In the early years, the children learned the Lysterrestre language and farming techniques; over time, some of the schools added courses in machine operation. Criticism centers on both the wholesale repression of the students' culture and the absence of lessons in science or the fine arts.             "We went around in shapeless black dresses, like criminals in a prison," Zéphyrine Adam, born Calfunaya, says of her time in the Bonner Institute. "They say they taught us to speak their language, but they really taught us to be silent. They had rooms full of books, music sheets and phonographs, but we weren't allowed to use them. Not unless we were too clumsy to be trusted by the factory machines. They understood, as we do, that stories and music give us power. They were afraid of what we would do to them if they let us into their world."             In the face of such accusations, the majority of Native Boarding School instructors seem reluctant to speak, though some still defend the schools and their intentions.             "The goal was to construct a Lysterrestre Ideal for them, but not to hide their natural-born talents," says Madame Achille, from the Coralie Institute in what is now northern Arcadie. "We simply made sure they expressed them in the appropriate ways. I remember one girl, one of the first we processed back in 2879. An unhappy little thing most of the time, but a budding musician; she would run through the halls chanting and playing a wooden drum. Well, we set her down one day at the pianoforte, and she took to it like a fish to water. The things she played, so loud, so dignified! She had such talent, though I don't suppose anything ever came of it.             "A lot of them had such talent," she adds. "I wonder whatever became of them?" END   "Désiré” was originally published in Crossed Genres and is copyright Megan Arkenberg, 2013. This recording is a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license which means you can share it with anyone you’d like, but please don’t change or sell it. Our theme is “Aurora Borealis” by Bird Creek, available through the Google Audio Library. You can support GlitterShip by checking out our Patreon at patreon.com/keffy, subscribing to our feed, leaving reviews on iTunes, or buying your own copy of the Autumn 2018 issue at www.glittership.com/buy. You can also support us by picking up a free audiobook at  www.audibletrial.com/glittership. Thanks for listening, and we’ll be back soon with a GlitterShip original.

City Church AC Pastor Dallas R. Billington 11:00 AM What to do When You are Spiritually Empty

This week @MelOverwatch, @Blazzin_Bob and @IplaiGames are joined by our very own post match corespondent @BrickMcVictory! We cover the latest news, weigh in with our thoughts on Dafran's retirement and give our stage 2 power rankings for all the Overwatch League teams.  News: Overwatch League ABC Semi-finals and finals ratings are in Overwatch League on CBS News Professional e-sports is a viable option All-star voting is now open Vancouver Titans announce home games will be played at the Rogers Arena in 2020 Reinforce’s breaks down the patch changes  Team News:  Dafran retires from OWL FunnyAstro joins Atlanta Reign as a 2-way player  Sponsors GameStop partners with: Houston Outlaws Dallas Fuel Dallas Fuel and Team Envy partner with Acer Power Rankings You'll have to listen to find those out! Listener Questions:  WoodTierGuruLast Friday at 9:42 AM What needs to happen for LA Valiant to succeed in stage 2? They've gone from a 3rd place finish in season 1 to 0-7 in season 2. They made head coach changes recently, will this help? Is it the meta? Is it a lack of talent or teamwork? What do you think the problem is?  Shazear#1845 [PC/NA/2100ish]Today at 1:05 PM For the Korean players, I know they have some degree of mandatory civil service.  How does that affect their plans when it comes to being a pro-athlete?  YouTube: New: Fleta- Seoul Dynasty Previous: Envy- Toronto Defiant Poko- Philly Fusion Kruise- Paris Eternal Jayne- Dallas Fuel assistant coach Agilities- LA Valiant Bdosin- London Spitfire Sinatraa- SF Shock Fusions- Boston Uprising Apply- Florida Mayhem Space- LA Valiant Linkzr- Houston Outlaws ZachaREEE- Dallas Fuel EQO- Philly Fusion Surefour- LA Gladiators aKm- Dallas Fuel   Follow us on Twitter - https://twitter.com/OWLRecap Join our discord - https://discord.me/omniclab Support us on Patreon - https://www.patreon.com/owlrecap Subscribe on YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/OWLRecap Join our pick-ems - https://highnoon.gg/#/LeaguePickem/x54GzaOYvbR5t6OwVQPL

City Church AC Pastor Dallas R. Billington 11:00 AM What is Truth?

3.23.18 Hardwick and Richards 8 AM: What's going on with Kawhi Leonard and the Spurs?

2.20.18 Hardwick and Richards 7 AM: What do you expect from Hosmer right out the gate?

2.20.18 Hardwick and Richards 6 AM: What does KC think about Hosmer going to the Padres?

1.15.17 Hardwick and Richards 6 AM: What a Weekend For Football

1.12.17 Hardwick and Richards 7 AM: What will be the big story lines heading out of this divisional weekend?

Welcome to the latest episode of On the Air with Palantir, a long-form (ad-hoc) podcast by Palantir.net where we go in-depth on topics related to the business of web design and development. In this episode, Allison Manley is joined by Juan Daniel Flores of Rootstack, and Juan dives into the Drupal world of Latin and Central America. TRANSCRIPT Allison Manley: Hi, everyone. Welcome to On the Air With Palantir, a podcast by Palantir.net where we go in-depth on topics related to web design and development. I'm Allison Manley, Sales and Marketing manager. Today, my guest is Juan Daniel Flores of Rootstack. Juan spent some time with me a few months back telling me about all the exciting things happening with Drupal in Latin America. Here we are at DrupalCon Baltimore 2017-   Juan D. Flores: That's right. AM: ... in the convention center at the corner of Pratt and Charles Street. I am sitting with ... JDF: Juan Flores from Rootstack from Panama. AM: From Panama. You came all the way from Panama. JDF: Yes, sunny, tropical Panama. Yeah. The temperature is quite a good a change for me. AM: Is it? JDF: I was born in Colombia, in Bogota, actually. The temperature is more or less like this. I really miss the cool temperature, because in Panama, sometimes it gets really, really hot. AM: Well, we're welcome to give you a nice, rainy break, so ... JDF: Yeah, I appreciate it. AM: Is this your first Drupal Con? JDF: Yeah, this is my first personal, my first Drupal Con in the States, but we have been attending Drupal Con like, since five years ago. We are three partners, and they do most of the traveling. AM: Okay. Excellent. How long have you been involved in Drupal? JDF: We have been involved with Drupal like from seven years ago right after college. We graduated, and we got our degrees, and we started the company. We started with Drupal right away. We learned about Drupal, actually, by a friend in the college. It was like we saw the tool. We saw all the things that you could do, and we were like hooked up, like, "We have to do this. We have to use this." It's been quite a long time. AM: Wow. That's great. Were you self-taught or ... JDF: Totally self-taught. In the university, they teach you certain things, but to be, to thrive in this world, you really have to be very proficient in learning by yourself. You have to be active. You have to be checking what's going in the world. Thanks to our desire to know more, we picked it up and here we are seven years later. AM: And here you are. Glad to have you. You call yourselves the Drupaleros, sort of jokingly. JDF: Yeah, that's the term we use for Drupal. That's in Spanish. It's a term that we use in general. AM: Universally. JDF: Yeah. Universal. AM: So that's not just the Panamanian- JDF: Exactly. Exactly. AM: Okay. I feel like there's a presentation next year for just the Spanish-speaking Drupaleros. I feel like there's some sort of presentation you should make around that and what's happening in Latin and Central America. JDF: That will be interesting. Even though like I feel that we're a little bit late to the party, in terms of doing stuff, there has been a lot of work that has been done by Latin developers. For example, there's Jesus Olivas, which is ... Well, and the team from We Know It, that they have been working hard with the Drupal console project, which is picking up, really, a great amount of fans. He gave a talk yesterday. He's from Mexico. There's another guy. His name is Omers. He's also from Mexico. The other guys, Anso and Kenya are from Costa Rica. AM: How many would you say there are total between Latin and Central America, you know, that you keep in touch with on a regular basis working in Drupal? JDF: It's hard to tell to know a certain number because, unfortunately, the community there is like a little bit shy. But I can say that, for example, if I can measure events that we have gone to, for example, the DrupalCon in Costa Rica, or the DrupalCon Central America that we did a couple years ago, I would say we could see around 400, but it's hard to ... They show up for events. There are a lot of people that show at events. It's the the building the community that's hard. AM: How did you start out? Tell me about the beginnings of your business, then. JDF: We were in college. One of the partners approach to us. He told us like, "Hey, I think we should do this. We should make a company for our own." We are good, each one, in our own stuff. For example, one of the partners is very good at business development, organizing. The other one is very good at developing. He's a very strong skill set. I'm more like the creative one in terms of design, in terms of implementing the science. We're sort like a match in terms of our skills. We started that in 2010, and we slowly grew. We recruited guys fresh out of college from our own university. Then, we started to build the team. One of the things that I have heard here is that it's hard to find Drupal developers. Which if it's hard for you, it's harder for us. It's been years of finding good people that we think that can be a good fit and training them. I think there's a value in that, in home-growing the developers. Because if they aren't there, you have to make them. AM: Right. How big are you now? JDF: We are 25. AM: Oh, so you went from 3 to 25 in just seven years. JDF: Yeah. AM: Wow. JDF: We have 18 developers. Then marketing sales, designers, so yeah. We hope to keep growing, and yeah. Basically, the objective is to be bigger, to go for more services. Even though we started as a Drupal shop, now we're doing more stuff. We're doing automations. We're doing mobile development. We're doing interesting projects in terms of challenges. For example, last year we did a project for a company here. Basically, we did a mobile app in Ionic that you could turn on, turn off, set the temperature of your spa machine. They sell spa machines that have a wifi antennae. You could be in your office, and you say, "Oh, I'm going home." You start the spa. You set the temperature. When you get there, there it is. AM: That's excellent. JDF: Yeah. AM: That's quite a range of services that you do provide already, even if you feel like you want to add more. JDF: Yeah, yeah. It is to find projects that are challenging and interesting. That's the what we're looking for. AM: What would you say is your main client base or what vertical? JDF: Basically, companies that split in two, in terms of half the company works with agencies here in the States providing Drupal services, so back-end, front-end development, and the other half of the team works with local clients. In terms of local and regional clients, our main verticals are government, banks, certain industries, like ... You have big clients like supermarket chains, people that are looking for very complex web projects, or automations, or yeah, that kind of solutions that we can provide. Yeah, that's what we are ... The companies, like two companies in terms of what we focus on. AM: Fair enough. Your first DrupalCon, what do you think so far? JDF: It's been great. I mean, the level of the sessions have been great. I really like the fact that people are very open to talk, very friendly. I know that in our conferences that, for example, I have been, it's harder to meet people, to find a point of conversation where you can start. But here, it has been great. The parties have been great, also. They provide a good space for talking. For example, yesterday, I was with the guys at Lullabot. They were super friendly, super fun. We have a lot of fun. Yeah, I really like. It's right what they say about the Drupal community. It's very open and very ... Well, even though what has happened recently, I think the people here are very good people, you know? AM: I would agree with that. JDF: Well, I hope that you go next year to Nashville. AM: I will be there in Nashville. I would love to go to Costa Rica if I could swing it, but- JDF: Yeah, so there in August. It's super fun. There's a good vibe always. We always do some, like after the camp, we always do like a trip to an island, or a beach, or- AM: Forest. Something. JDF: Yeah, very relaxing. AM: Sounds amazing. JDF: You can add your vacations and you do a- AM: Any others to look forward to or ... JDF: That's the ones I think right now the top of my head. AM: All right. JDF: I think Mexico is organizing one, too. AM: Fantastic. JDF: Yeah. AM: Look forward to it. JDF: Yeah. AM: Thank you so much, Juan. JDF: Yeah, look forward to seeing you. Thank you. AM: Thanks for listening. Follow us on Twitter at Palantir or read our blog at palantir.net. Have a great day.

Hardwick & Richards 6 AM: What do the Padres do with pitching?

Aired: 10/29/2016 10 AM:: What is the Social Security spousal benefit? Joe and Big Al explain this as well as dive into reverse mortgages to cover how your home equity could help you in retirement.

Intro: Welcome to the latest episode of On the Air with Palantir, a long-form podcast by Palantir.net where we go in-depth on topics related to the business of web design and development. It’s July 2016 and this is episode #6. In this episode, Account Manager Allison Manley is joined by Palantir CEOs George DeMet and Tiffany Farriss. TRANSCRIPT: Allison Manley [AM]: Welcome to On the Air with Palantir, a podcast by Palantir.net where we go in-depth on topics related to the business of web design and development. It’s July 2016 and this is episode #6. This is a special edition really, since this year marks the 20th anniversary of Palantir. It’s hard to fathom considering the internet was still very new in 1996, so there are very few web shops that have been around this long. Palantir started as a development agency, then over time added services such as design and strategy, to become the full, well-rounded, end to end company that it is today. So we are celebrating our 20th anniversary later this month. I sat down with owners George DeMet and Tiffany Farriss to talk about how Palantir started, how it developed into the company it is today, and where we’re headed. AM: Hello, Tiffany and George! How are you doing today? George DeMet [GD]: We’re doing well. Tiffany Farriss [TF]: Hi, Allison! AM: Thanks for talking with me, I appreciate it. So we’re going to talk about the 20 years of Palantir. It’s hard to believe, right? GD: It’s…yeah [laughs]. I’ve never really known anything else, it’s kind of funny. AM: You’ve never had another job? GD: That’s not true. I worked for my parents when I was in high school. They ran a disposal and recycling company. So I did have experience growing up driving a garbage truck and managing a recycling center. TF: This wasn’t what I was going to do, but it is pretty much the only thing I’ve done. Other than having a NASA research grant as an undergrad, this is it. AM: What were you going to do? I’m curious. TF: I was going to go to grad school in astrophysics. That was my thing. I really wanted to do astrophysics, and I really liked cosmology in particular. I wanted to study the origins of the universe. AM: Which we’re kind of doing [laughs]. So let’s have a quick overview of Palantir’s history. How did Palantir begin? GD: So I actually started Palantir back in the summer of ’96, which was between my sophomore and junior year of college. I had discovered the Web back in the fall of ’94 when I was a freshman, and had really been kind of fascinated by it. It was very new – Netscape was still in beta at that point, and I was just really captivated by this idea of having pretty much anyone in the world being able to publish content that pretty much anyone else anywhere in the world would be able to read and access and view. I thought that was kind of revolutionary and I could see that this was the start of something kind of interesting, and I wanted to be a part of it. And so I started making some web pages, just sort of as a hobby. I made a fan page for ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ that is still around today, after 22 years. And then I discovered that folks would pay me money to build websites and web pages. So after doing this freelance for a while, I decided it was a good idea to start a company around it. TF: Because that’s what your family does [laughs]. GD: So that’s probably a little bit of helpful background. Both sides of my family are a couple of generations of people who started and ran family businesses. I mentioned that my parents have a disposal company. My mom’s father had a couple of grocery stores in Leavenworth, Kansas. My dad’s family ran the DeMet candy company, the folks that brought you the chocolate Turtle. So that was really kind of all I knew, right? Working for someone else was really not part of my DNA. So I knew I was going to do something, and when the web came along, it seemed like this was definitely something I wanted to do. TF: For me, I started on the web around the same time, in 1994. It was kind of an outgrowth of my love of Latin [laughs]. That’s the other thing about me is my love of the classics, particularly Latin, and I was involved in the Junior Classical League in Ohio. I first became the membership director and then the president of the Ohio chapter, and for them I learned how to do HTML. And the web was so new and so exciting, and I had a friend who was at MIT who could give me server space. And this was just so cool that we could be out there and be doing that. So when I met George, when I started at Northwestern, I joined up with him when we were creating a website for our dorm, for Willard Residential College. And we really wanted – our residential college was eclectic, which is probably the best way to talk about it [laughs]. GD: I think the proper way to talk about it was pan-thematic. Most of the other residential colleges had a theme, like arts or sciences or engineering. We were all the things. TF: We were all the things, we were all the interesting people interested in lots of things. And so we really wanted to do an amazing job creating that website, and that’s really how George and I started working together, in that capacity, and ultimately that’s how Palantir got its second client, or first paying client, depending on how you looked at it [laughs]. GD: That’s right. So one of the things I didn’t know how to do but Tiffany did quite well at the time was to actually go out and find clients. And that’s the skill that Tiffany brought to the table, in addition to her technical skills and managerial skills – really bringing some kind of structure to the enterprise, as it were. TF: And it all happened in the way we still sell today, in that we’re looking for that good fit. You say, OK, this is what we can do and these are our ideas and this is what we bring to the table. And that’s essentially how we got – when I was a freshman and George was a junior – how two students got the job to do Northwestern’s main university site. It was also the 90s which was a bit of a Wild West [laughs]. But that’s how it happened. We were at the awards ceremony for the residential college competition, which we won, of course [laughs], and I was talking to one of the judges who happened to be responsible for the web at Northwestern at the time. And she was talking to me about our thought process, and how we approached it, and I was talking about things that are so obvious to everyone now. The three-click rule. Thinking about how users would journey through the path and how you would organize information. And how you apply human-computer interaction theory to the web. But this being early ’97, you know, she said to me, I’m taking classes to learn what you guys already know, can I hire you for $2 an hour as a work-study? And I said, well, I already have a NASA research grant, so, no, but you can contract Palantir. My partner will be in Wisconsin but I can come in for meetings with you. And that’s how we got that contract, so that’s how it all worked out. And that first project was to redo the information technology site, and then in ’97 through ’98 we ended up doing the main Northwestern site. GD: For the folks at Northwestern, I’ve heard people complain since about the fact that it’s northwestern.edu. We share a little bit of the blame for that [laughs]. But seriously, nobody calls it NWU. It’s Northwestern. Or maybe NU, but I think that might have been taken. AM: Well, a pretty auspicious beginning, I would say. Now that you live in Evanston and the office is in Evanston. GD: Yeah. We never moved [laughs]. TF: Well, this is the thing. I met George my third day at Northwestern, and we’ve been a couple ever since, but we’ve lived within a six-block radius since 1998 [laughs]. Our first off-campus apartment was literally a block over, two blocks away. This has just been where we’ve found a home. Neither of us is from here. I’m from Akron, Ohio, and George is from Wisconsin. We met in the middle and literally stayed. GD: To be fair, I have some family connections to Chicago. My dad and his family are from Chicago, and so it’s always felt like a second home to me even though I grew up in northern Wisconsin. There’s also a lot more to do here, and it’s a place where even though we are a distributed company and have customers all over the world, it’s a really great place to be. TF: What I like about it is that irrespective of a physical office, I do consider us to be a firm that’s rooted in Midwest values. And I love that Chicago means business, but it’s business with this ethic. You work hard and you play hard, and you treat people fairly, right? That’s the way that we do things here, and it’s really important to me. And even once we don’t have a physical office or we don’t have headquarters or whatever it is, it’s about the sense of philosophy of place, of being Midwestern. Of being very authentic, being very genuine, and bringing our best selves to what we do. AM: What would you say, if you can project back 20 years, or 19 or 18 years, the focus was for Palantir the first couple of years? Was the focus just trying to stay afloat, was there a specific direction you were trying to take at the time? GD: So if you go back in time to the mid-90s and remember what the Web looked like at that point, it was the era of Geocities websites, and everyone was into, like, banners that scrolled across your pages and little animated GIF clip art and animated background patterns, and just really horribly ugly garish sites that people were creating because they could. And one of the things that I really wanted to do at Palantir was to bring more of a design aesthetic to the Web. I really felt that it shouldn’t be too difficult to create websites that were not just functional but were actually easy to use, and didn’t make you want to claw your eyes out when you looked at them. So I thought there was a real opportunity there. Not just to be able to do business, but also to help make the Web a better place. And that was very much what we wanted to do, certainly for the first couple of years, and even beyond as we started partnering with other folks. I think making the Web look better and work better for people was really key in those first couple of years. TF: And for me, I think – I agree with everything that George said, but I also felt very strongly about how the information was organized and presented. At the time it was a lot of brochure-ware. People were essentially trying to put these very linear experiences up on the Web. Now we call it ‘content strategy’ but at the time it was ‘information architecture’, and I really loved to think about the way to organize information in a way that made sense to someone who had no familiarity. It wasn’t about creating this highly linear journey for them, it was about – I saw the promise as being able to present information, to allow people to get what they wanted, but still to also come away with the message you wanted them to have. I thought that was such an interesting challenge, to be able to allow people to take control of how they gathered information, to really put the control back in their hands, but still to have it be that kind of alignment where you as the content provider were getting your message through, right? And that’s still a lot of what underpins our work today, is really this kind of ‘choose your own adventure’. And that’s where the name really comes from and why it comes into play. GD: So the name is something I came up with. It represents this idea of interconnectedness. The Palantiri are these communicators that in a fantasy realm are interconnected with each other, so you can look in one and communicate with anyone else who has a Palantir. The dominant metaphor at the time when Palantir started was the information superhighway, and I felt that metaphor was really flawed because it implied this kind of linearity, right? But the Web isn’t like that. The Web is this very decentralized interconnected place, and it really feels more and it actually is this network of interconnected communication, of nodes, really. TF: And it’s interconnected not just in terms of people, which it certainly is and always has been since its beginning, but it’s also in terms of content. What I love and what I find so fascinating and interesting is the notion that you don’t have to encapsulate all of the knowledge – you can just link to it, right? So you can tell a story and you can pull together these varied threads, and braid it together into a narrative in such an interesting way. And anybody can do that. It’s so accessible that it’s really broken down some of those traditional barriers that essentially gated who was able to define the narrative. So any person now can define that narrative and string it together. This is why a lot more of our work recently has dealt with APIs and what we can do to bring pieces of content from different systems together. And ultimately it’s why I’m so passionate about Drupal, because the ability to weave different pieces of content together but allow them to remain authoritative external sources is so exciting. AM: So it seems that, 20 years later, what you had outlined for yourselves back then still stands today. GD: Absolutely, no question. We’re still facing some of the same sorts of challenges. They’re very different in nature, but fundamentally it’s a question of enabling people to be able to access information, or to create information, or to share information in a way that’s findable, that’s usable, that’s discoverable. That’s what we started out trying to do, and that’s what we’re still trying to do today. TF: I have this very Teutonic brain, I like things to be very efficient. So for me the notion that I could weave these narratives together but allow there to be single authoritative sources of information, I don’t have to duplicate it – it’s very efficient, it’s so compelling to me. And this is where I think you see a lot of enterprises getting too narrow, with their notion of the omnichannel strategies – where you want there to be a single source but you need to kind of customize what that experience looks like. And you really get – by being so efficient with presenting that information and where you’re sourcing the information, you get to focus your efforts on how you differentiate it in different channels and different contexts, and have other people mix and potentially remix your information. That’s what’s so exciting about where we are today, but it’s not that different than in ’96. We were really trying to get authoritative sources, that was the key, to kind of have those sources be out there and have them be integrated together. AM: So you would say that Palantir’s core values and mission really haven’t changed at all, or maybe just better definition. GD: I would agree with that. What we’re trying to do, how we’re trying to do it, really hasn’t changed. What has changed is that we’ve talked about it, we’ve articulated it more publicly. It’s not just locked in our brains [laughs]. TF: Right, it’s those notions of assumptions so deep that you’re not even aware of them. For so many of the early years, we just knew. And because we were a smaller company and everybody worked with George and I on a daily basis, you just kind of felt it. You didn’t know it. I couldn’t articulate it very well, and it’s taken us several tries to be able to get it to the point where we feel confident saying, yes, this is it. Because words matter so much, and there’s such precision when I use language that I’m constantly trying to make sure, is this the right word to use, is this really capturing that feeling that’s so deep in our culture that I want other people to be able to grasp onto it. Because we do have this growing firm, and our folks here today – George and I are clearly the longest-standing employees of Palantir, but we have folks who start in a week. So how do they get a sense of the history? So it’s this notion that we have to really have those core values, as guiding principles, articulated so that, without knowing the lore and history of Palantir, they can apply it going forward. It’s really been an interesting challenge and one that George and I have been focused on for probably the last 18 months, is realizing that all that shared history has to be able to be communicated, has to be able to be transferred. And that’s been a really exciting part of the challenge. GD: And it’s not just communicated, it’s also contextualized. That’s the really fun part for me. AM: It’s very hard to define your own selves, too. It’s definitely tough work. GD: It is. But I think it’s essential. I think it’s something that has been kind of a hallmark of who we are. It’s really this constantly asking ourselves and trying to be as self-aware as possible about who we are and what we do and why we do it. TF: And also what we don’t do, right? I think that as we look at the growth over the last 10 years, it’s really easy to think that we were something we weren’t. We were never a start-up. We’re celebrating our 20th year so by definition we can’t be a start-up, and even in the past 10 years we weren’t a start-up. But it might have felt that way, or it might have looked that way. And so it’s on us, it’s our responsibility, to make sure that people understand – both our clients and our friends and our colleagues – that we are approaching this with very much a fundamental family business mentality. Really old-school principles. You don’t spend money you don’t have, you treat people fairly. This kind of notion that you’re always building, that every decision you constantly make has to be adding up to something. And I think that’s been – we certainly have friends who made other choices with their companies, whether they consider themselves a tech company or a start-up and they go after VC. We’re just not that. And we totally admire them and wish them well with what they’re doing. We’re doing something a little bit different over here. So in order for folks to understand that, we have to talk about it. We have to say, you know, we don’t spend other people’s money, we don’t spend money we don’t have. It’s been such an interesting journey, particularly for me not coming from a family business background, to understand really what that means and why that applies and to be really proud of it. I really think that’s the compelling thing here. Because at the end of the day, I’ve always believed that what you do outside of work makes you better when you are at work. And you have to have time and space in your life for that. And I believed that before I had a family, and I certainly believe it to be true now. How I live it, how I articulate it, is very different. And I think that’s right, that’s appropriate, to be able to evolve with you and to be able to change with you. And that’s the kind of company that we’ve built. AM: Well, one of the things I’ve noticed specifically about Palantir is how involved you’ve gotten in several communities. One of the reasons that I actually knew Palantir for years before working here was your commitment to design, which George mentioned was an early interest, and you did partner with design firms in Chicago when at the time you didn’t have an in-house design department, you were strictly development-only. So you were prescient and smart enough to know that you should partner with some very good design firms in the city, and there is a very strong design community here. And so you actually joined the American Institute of Graphic Arts board at one point, to become, I think, the Web liaison. TF: Electronic Media Chair, yes. I was lucky enough to be Electronic Media Chair for AIGA Chicago, and that came after several years of working with and partnering with those design firms. And that was such an invaluable time in Palantir’s history. Chicago does have such a very storied and internationally respected design community, and the opportunity to work in such an early stage in my career, and in Palantir’s lifespan, with some of the best – looking back on it, it was unbelievable. To be able to learn and work so closely with really, really smart designers as they were making that transition from being exclusively print designers to thinking about interactive design and Web design – it was such a neat time for all of us. We were bringing this very digital sensibility with us and they were bringing expectations of typography and color fidelity. And those were things that were really difficult in that early Web. It was really amazing. And that all came out of our early work at Northwestern. We originally started out partnering with the information technology department over there, and through that work we advocated that the university relations people be included in that conversation. Because we felt that there was a role for branding and photography, and just design standards as part of the work we were doing for the Northwestern home page. And through that we ended up learning how to work with traditional print designers. And our business has always been built on this word of mouth, on reputation. And so through that experience we ended up getting connected into the Chicago design community, and passed from firm to firm to firm, and I see that being appointed to the board was really the outcome from that, after the several years we’d been working with and partnering with design firms, from 2001 – I think it was 2001 when I became Electronic Media Chair, until 2008 – we had been working for six or seven years. But I still reflect on those experiences and what I learned from working with those folks, just in terms of how to relate to clients and how to really be a consultant. It was an amazing opportunity, it was really great. I’m really grateful for it. AM: And around the same time, around 2008-ish, was when you started to get involved heavily in the Drupal community as well. GD: That’s right. AM: So a pretty pivotal year there [laughs]. GD: Well, the Drupal decision we actually made in 2007. We had started working with Drupal in 2006, but to lay a little bit of background, we’ve always worked primarily with open source technologies – open source software, free software, from the very beginning. The LAMP stack, Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP, and used those technologies. And I had always been interested in getting a little more involved with open source on the content management side. We did a little bit of looking into that around 2001, when some of the first generation open source CMSs started to come on the scene, and none of them were really never mature enough at that point. And at that point we actually thought we could probably do our own, just as well if not better. So we had our own CMS for a while – it was called the Community Platform and we did four major versions of it, each of which was pretty much a complete rewrite. Was it just three? TF: We were thinking about doing a fourth. GD: Right, right. And that was a really interesting learning experience for us, because when you are responsible for creating your own product that you are then in turn using for customer projects, you have to really be careful. Because there’s a huge temptation to modify it or tweak it or change it every single time. So what we actually found was that we didn’t have one CMS, we had however many dozen CMSs, each of which was a bespoke version for that particular client, because we had had to make some sort of tweak for the business needs of that customer. Which was great in terms of the short-term customer need, right? Because we could very quickly and inexpensively roll out a site for a customer, get it up very quickly, but when it came time to expand that site or support that site or make that site do something different, it was incredibly difficult. So that was one of the big issues that we were running into. We had worked with some other proprietary platforms – there was a product that was being used by a lot of higher education institutions we were working with in the early 2000s. It definitely had its challenges, but it was something our customers were using and it worked well for a lot of our customers. And ultimately the company ended up deciding to end-of-life that product, actually without telling any of their customers [laughs]. We had a little inside knowledge on that, and Tiffany actually announced it up on stage at South by Southwest, I think this was 2007. TF: 2008. GD: 2008. And it was really kind of interesting seeing everyone flee the room when you made that announcement. TF: The 20 people. GD: The 20 people, yes [laughs]. I mean, you know, it was a pretty big session. So at that point, things were kind of – we realized we really needed to get involved with, you know, something that was going to be more widely supported by a wider community, and that also wasn’t going to be tied to the commercial whims of one particular company. And so I’m actually going to let you tell the story of how we started working with Drupal. TF: It happened over several years, really. In 2006, Robert Petrick, who’s one of those amazing Chicago designers that we were lucky enough to work with, he brought us in on a project for Washington University in St. Louis. And the project was a little unusual, because it wasn’t an implementation project. It was going to be an implementation project, but first it started with a consulting project, where they wanted us to look at the available landscape of content management solutions, but both bespoke – our Community Platform was on the table for consideration – and open source projects as well as proprietary. And I helped them make the decision, and open source was absolutely the right choice for them. Again, we narrowed it down – should it be Drupal, should it be Joomla, and there were a couple of other options they were considering at the time. And for them Drupal was the right choice. So we built out that first site for WSTL in Drupal 4.6, and it was a little bit frustrating. But 4.7 came out actually before the site launched, and we immediately upgraded it to 4.7. We had looked at 4.6 before and not used it, because we couldn’t do the things we needed to visually. We were working with a lot of the design firms, and we couldn’t tell them, oh, the technology choice we’ve made won’t allow us to present the interface visually the way you want it to be done. That was why we had our own community platform, and in 4.6 we felt that was still very much the case, we were very much limited by that theming layer. Then 4.7 ended up being the right choice for Washington University in St. Louis, and we built out the site there, and it was still a bit frustrating but we achieved the level of fidelity we wanted. And as we were wrapping up that project and getting ready to launch it, Drupal 5 came out. And without launching the 4.7 version we ended up going to Drupal 5 right away. And that was when our team said, oh, this is different, and we can do everything that is being asked of us visually, everything we want to do visually. And by the way the security team that Drupal has is larger than our entire firm. So it was really in early 2007, in February 2007, when we were faced with rewriting our community platform from version 3 to version 4, it was going to be a complete rewrite – I just looked at George and said, I think we need to deprecate our own CMS in favor of Drupal. I think we need to put our efforts in that direction. So the next month we actually sent George and one of our colleagues at the time, Larry Garfield, who’s known as Crell in the Drupal community, we sent them both out to Sunnyvale where Drupal was having a DrupalCon, to learn more about it. And George came back and said, I think this is a community you’d really like. And you could really get involved in this. Ah, I don’t know, let’s just start with where we’re at right now. And then you do fast forward, that year of 2007 was when we did a lot of our first projects. We got all of our clients off our own community platform, and any new project we’d start doing in Drupal. AM: How were they when you suggested getting them off the existing platform and getting them onto Drupal? Were they receptive to that, or were they hesitant…? TF: We did it gradually, as people needed new enhancements or new versions of their sites. At the time, none of the sites we were working on had particularly long life spans, right? And we ended up having to support the community platform for several years thereafter. So it was really when someone came to us for new work, it was, oh, here’s Drupal and we think you should move here for the following reasons. We would lay it out, but we weren’t going to do any new enhancements to it, and we told them very clearly, we’re not in active development on the community platform any more. GD: One distinction that’s important to make, I think, is that with our own product, the Community Platform, it wasn’t an open source product, but we did have our customers have the right to modify the source code themselves. They just didn’t have the right to redistribute those changes. So if customers wanted to take on that responsibility of updating or maintaining the site themselves, they were certainly able to do that, or we gave them the option of moving to Drupal. TF: Right. So really through 2007 and into 2008 – 2008 is really where we got involved in the Drupal community per se. And that’s when I went out to Boston, and I said, oh, this is a community I will love. This is something that – the ethos of it, getting to meet Dries and Angie Byron and Moshe Weitzman, all the early and very influential Drupal developers, and just how welcoming and how open they all were. And what we were able to build with Drupal was just so much more than we would be able to build if we were responsible for the whole stack. It just started to fall into place, it started to make sense that we could do more for our clients. And that’s ultimately what’s always driven us. We’re trying to add value. We’re trying to say, because the clients we work with have limited resources and are always under constraints, what’s the most we can do for them? How much can we accomplish, how much value can we give back to them? How much easier can we make their lives by the choices that we make all along the project? And Drupal was one of the ones that made a lot of sense for them. It had roughly the same implementation cost as any other proprietary or custom solution, but in terms of the long term, it was much less expensive. Because you didn’t have the long-term licensing fees, you had the community patching issues – so sometimes a client would say, oh, I’m noticing this bug on the site, and we’d say, oh, actually that’s a module that’s been patched in, we can patch that for you. It really opened it up and allowed us to focus. So all these kind of pivotal points that you’ve noted in Palantir’s history, they come around our ability to focus. Right? So in 2001 when we really started partnering in earnest with design firms, it allowed us to focus and really hone our craft, and understand how to do content strategy and how to architect solid technical solutions. And then again in 2008, when we focused in on Drupal it allowed us to realize, okay, here’s how – only build what you absolutely need to build. That really allowed us to do more with our client budgets, and again, I would say 2016 is another one of those pivotal years for us, when we realized how to focus in and how to really get to the nugget of the business problem that needs to be solved. We have the opportunity now to influence businesses and the success of those businesses, and organizations as well since we do so much work with non-profits and higher ed in particular, and really how to solve core problems that aren’t technology problems. They’re problems that reach across the organization at every level, and so the fact that we’re able to focus in on it from that perspective, with that lens, I see that as another transformational moment for Palantir. AM: It seems like you had some very pivotal choices that you made, in 2001 to 2008 in particular - partnering with design firms, choosing open source and eventually choosing Drupal – and that you were sort of on the forefront when the mid-2000s hit. That was when it seems to me, from my perspective, that you were a very big fish in a tiny pond at that time. You had this incredible design aesthetic and appreciation, you knew how to work with design firms at that point – you weren’t doing in-house design yet – and you were one of the few firms who had really embraced Drupal in particular. And that community was exploding, and I’m not sure if you could see that community was going to explode, if you were able to predict that. GD: It was pretty apparent when I went to Sunnyvale in early 2007. That was a very small conference, it was maybe a couple of hundred people, and not all of them were Drupal people. But it was really, really clear just from the conversations that were happening and the folks that were there that Drupal was on the verge of becoming a big deal. And it was really funny, because I think the first couple of years that we started working with Drupal, we would go to industry conferences like higher ed conferences or museum conferences, and people would be like, oh, what do you do, and we’d say, we work with Drupal. And people would be, Drupal, what’s that? And then a couple of years later, we would go to the same conferences, and people would literally come up to me, like, I hear you guys are experts in Drupal and I need a Drupal expert [laughs]. So there really was a huge shift, I think, between 2008 and 2011, when Drupal went from being kind of this niche open source project that very few people had heard of that powers some of the biggest and most ambitious sites on the Web. TF: And I think a lot of that has to do with the ecosystem that was built up around Drupal. Not just Acquia but especially Acquia, which is the firm that Dries Buytaert founded and is CTO of, that really brought a lot of visibility to Drupal particularly around hosting and 24/7 support. I think that was a really important moment for Drupal. But I think what was happening before then as well, not just with firms like Palantir but the work that Phase2 was doing in the government sector – there are a lot of firms both in the US and Europe that were doing this very ambitious very large-scale work. You had Examiner really pushing the development of Drupal 7, and then eventually the White House goes to Drupal, and everything that was happening with Warner Brothers and SonyBMG putting all their artists on Drupal – Drupal became this kind of de facto go-to. When you had a project that was, as George said, ambitious – it didn’t necessarily have to be large, sometimes they were technically complicated and involved a lot of integrations between different kinds of data sources. That was the kind of work that we did, both for higher ed and for museums, where we were combining, say, digital asset management systems with content management systems with active directory or LDAP-based user solutions. Any kind of complexity at that level, Drupal’s so good at tying those systems together. Or if you wanted to go headless, right now Drupal’s very good if you want to have, you know, no front end to your data source. Drupal just knows how to connect people, how to connect things, and it gives you such a good basis for what you’re trying to do, or trying to replicate. If you need a thousand sites, right, this is again what Pfizer does, and they’ve got such huge regulatory concerns that Drupal, you know, was just always there. And those of us in the, I would say, the second wave of Drupal – Palantir’s not a first wave Drupal shop, we really did start to come on line with Drupal 6, and we were essentially writing for those pieces that our clients need. So again this is that ethos that we have, where we’re going to find that win-win solution. And what we did early on, and in particular when we made our name with Drupal 7 where we created Workbench, it was because this was a need that our clients had, and multiple clients had that need at the exact same time. It was a space that Drupal just wasn’t solving, and it was something that we had the capacity, we had the expertise in-house to be able to write. So we were able to combine pooled budgets from some of the smaller non-profit clients that we had, combine them together and get that better solution than they would be able to afford on their own, and make Drupal better – those are those niches that we’re constantly looking for. Okay, where can we add the most value here, where’s that problem that we can pull the resources together to solve – whether it’s people or time or money. AM: Well, I think one of the direct results of – maybe Palantir wasn’t a first adopter, but pretty early, still, and the creation of Workbench which has proven to be very popular, and going back to the fact that those choices led Palantir to be a pretty big fish in a small pond for a long time – one of the things that I think is amazing about Palantir is that for 17 years, I think you told me, you never had to do any marketing. GD: That’s right. No outbound marketing. AM: That’s a dream, right? [laughs] To never have to look, the referrals came so naturally. But then, 17 years in, as Drupal became more ubiquitous and more people were adopting it and more people were recognizing the design abilities of it and the flexibility on the front end, marketing all of a sudden was needed [laughs] because there was more competition. So how would you say the landscape has changed? I’m going to guess that was a pivotal moment too, just how that landscape changed. GD: Well, I don’t know that it’s a pivotal moment – I think it’s been a general trend we’ve been seeing over the past few years. And fundamentally I think if you – we talked about focusing, and that’s important, but if you narrow your focus too much and you find yourself in too much of a niche and people associate you with a specific technology or a specific type of client, that’s not a great situation to be in. And I wouldn’t actually describe us so much as a Drupal shop, we’re a full service boutique firm that helps customers be successful on the Web. And fundamentally the tools we use to accomplish that – what’s important to us is helping our customers make the right choices, collaborating with our customers, being able to help them to achieve success. Drupal is and historically has been a really great way to do that for an awful lot of our customers. But at the end of the day, it’s not about being the biggest or the best or the most well-known Drupal shop. It’s about being a firm that can help achieve success for our customers, in a really smart way. And because we were so closely associated with Drupal, that’s something we didn’t talk about as much. But we have started talking about it a lot more in the last few years. So if that’s marketing, sure [laughs]. TF: Well, I think it is. Early on, in those days when we were partnering, it was, oh, you’re the people who know tech who know how to talk to designers. So we want to work with you. AM: Which is a valuable skill [laughs]. TF: Absolutely. And we keep it with us, we still have it today. But at the time, what we were doing was problem solving. We were hearing what they wanted, what their clients wanted, and how we solved it, right? But then you fast-forward to Drupal, and then we had this really great run where it was like, Palantir! You know Drupal! We want to work with you! But at the end of the day we did the same thing. You come in, you have a problem to solve. They picked us for different reasons and they were pleased with the outcomes, and that’s how we ended up getting those referrals and that engine. But as Drupal matured and as Palantir matured, and, quite honestly, as the Web matured as a channel in its own right, not kind of as ancillary to the traditional channels that businesses and organizations relied on – as it became co-equal and even dominant, the expectations of what people needed from the Web started to go up. So I think that the notion that, oh, you’re good at this tech thing was no longer going to be compelling, it was kind of a given. Oh, we’re going to bring you in as a partner, we assume that you have technical expertise, but we need to know that you have the strategic expertise to help us make those good decisions. And we need to know that you are going to work with us to help us build our internal capacity around this. Because the Web has gone beyond something that you would just give to, you know, your neighbor’s kid who knew how to do HTML, to, you know, the core of many businesses. And right now we’re in this era where even the oldest and most established businesses are going through digital transformation. It is reshaping how everyone works right now. So the expectations, and rightly so, have changed. They’ve increased, And Palantir has had the luxury of all of this time to mature and to hone our craft, and we are still excellent problem-solvers. That approach, combined with all the expertise we’ve built up over the last 20 years, makes us a really great partner. AM: So now it’s July 2016, celebrating the 20th anniversary, and we’re having a company retreat – we’re shutting down everything for a week to bring all the employees, one from as far as South Africa, to Chicago so we can all get together and celebrate and – there’s going to be some work too, internally, but there’s going to be a lot of celebrating. So my final question: what would you like to see for the next five years, moving forward, or two years, what would you say? GD: [laughs] AM: Is it overwhelming, is it too much…? GD: No, no – you know, actually a couple of years ago we set out a couple of very high-level goals for the company, and we’re kind of in the middle of the process of that, of working toward those goals. We refined them a little bit at the beginning of this year, but they’re still fundamentally the same. And it’s about helping our clients achieve success on all of our projects, that’s number one. Number two, continuously learning, sharing and applying new knowledge, and this is one I’m really interested in having us focus a lot more on in the coming years. That this learning and applying new knowledge is really not just about technical skill or expertise, but it’s really about new ways of understanding people’s problems and looking at people’s problems in new and different ways. And developing our skills internally in terms of being able to understand and address those issues and questions and concerns, and the goals that our customers have. And then of course continuing to be a sustainable well-run organization with healthy finances and a happy staff. Those are the three things we’re working on. I think when we get together here for our on-site we are going to really talk a lot about how we’re going to do those things, and figure out and talk about what we’re going to do. We’ve spent a fair amount of time over the past year talking about what we have done – you know, how we are where we are today – and I think it’s time to start looking to the future. TF: Building on what George said, I think learning really is the key. It’s about taking what we learn on every project and elevating it to the level of organizational learning, and doing the same thing for our clients. We have a long track record of collaboration and we have clients who embed with us and who we help level up and we make kind of essential parts of our projects. And that’s fabulous, and that’s a huge service for capacity building for our clients. And I think the opportunity I see is being able to take that and transform the organizations as well, so that they also have an organizational learning moment. So for me, I’m really focused on the notion of making sure that we’re getting the most out of every opportunity, out of every decision, and understanding why things worked or why things didn’t work, and how we make it better. And it’s this notion of continuous improvement, and really making that a core part of our service. I see that as kind of the biggest change. Because as the industry and the Web kind of matures, and continues to mature, I think we’re getting to this point where we’re going to see fewer and fewer exponential leaps, and I think it’s going to start to plateau off. And so the notion that you kind of create and institutionalize incremental learning is really going to be key for us and for our clients. So that’s what I want to focus on – how we help them continuously improve, not only in their website and their Web presence and their infrastructure and their digital strategy, but how they can continue to incrementally improve their teams and their organizations to be able to take advantage of and recognize opportunities when they come up. AM: And cake. There will be cake. GD: I hope there will be cake. Who’s in charge of the cake? I’m not in charge of the cake! [laughs]. AM: Well, thank you very much. Looking forward to our retreat, and looking forward to the next five. GD: Absolutely. TF: The next 20! [laughs] AM: Why stop at five? The next 20! [laughs] AM: Thank you so much for listening.  I have to say, after three years of being with Palantir myself, and after having worked with them for several years prior to that, I’m thankful that I get to go to work every day with really, really smart and thoughtful people who are creating great work and toiling every day to make the Web a better place. So - happy anniversary, Palantir! If you want to hear more episodes of On the Air with Palantir, make sure to subscribe on our website at palantir.net. There you can also read our blog and see our work! Each of these episodes is also available on iTunes. And of course you can also follow us on twitter at @palantir. Thanks for listening!

City Church AC Pastor Dallas R. Billington 11:00 AM What is Happening in the United States and What We Can Do

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