Podcast appearances and mentions of andrew well

Let’s talk about death, baby From breaking the stigma to understanding the conversations we need to have before we die, beloved broadcaster and advocate Andrew Denton and clinical psychologist Dr Kerrie Noonan dissect everything we should and shouldn’t say about death. About the episode – brought to you by Australian Seniors. Join James Valentine for the sixth season of Life’s Booming: Dying to Know, our most unflinching yet. We’ll have the conversations that are hardest to have, ask the questions that are easy to ignore, and hear stories that will make you think differently about the one thing we’re all guaranteed to experience: Death. Featuring interviews with famous faces as well as experts in the space, we uncover what they know about what we can expect. There are hard truths, surprising discoveries, tears and even laughs. Nothing about death is off the table. Andrew Denton is renowned as a producer, comedian and Gold Logie-nominated TV presenter, but for the past decade he has been devoted to a very personal cause. He is the founder of Go Gentle Australia, a charity advocating for better end of life choices that was instrumental in passing voluntary assisted dying (VAD) laws across Australia. Senior clinical psychologist Dr Kerrie Noonan is director of the Death Literacy Institute; director of research, Western NSW Local Health District; and adjunct Associate Professor, Public Health Palliative Care Unit, La Trobe University. For the past 25 years she has been working to create a more death literate society, one where people and communities have the practical know-how needed to plan well and respond to dying, death and grief. If you have any thoughts or questions and want to share your story to Life’s Booming, send us a voice note – lifesbooming@seniors.com.au Watch Life’s Booming on YouTube Listen to Life's Booming on Apple Podcasts Listen to Life's Booming on Spotify For more information visit seniors.com.au/podcast Produced by Medium Rare Content Agency, in conjunction with Ampel -- Disclaimer: Please be advised that this episode contains discussions about death, which may be triggering or upsetting for some listeners. Listener discretion is advised. If you are struggling with the loss of a loved one, please know that you are not alone and there are resources available. For additional support please contact Lifeline on 131 114 or Beyond Blue on 1300 224 636. TRANSCRIPT: James: Hello, and welcome to Life's Booming. I'm James Valentine, and this season, we're talking about death. Or, on this episode, why we don't talk about it enough. Death is really easy to talk about, but avoiding the subject just makes things even harder. From breaking the stigma to understanding the conversations we must have before we die, I'll be dissecting everything we should and shouldn't say about death with two fascinating minds. Andrew Denton is the founder of Go Gentle Australia. A charity advocating for better end of life choices, but you probably know him better from so many shows on our TV. And Dr Kerrie Noonan is a senior clinical psychologist and social researcher, determined to increase our death literacy. Kerrie, Andrew, thanks so much for joining us. Do you know one another? Andrew: Yes we do. Yeah. Kerrie: Yeah, along the way. Andrew: We've had a few conversations about death, dying, literacy, all those things. Yeah. James: How did you learn about death? Like when did you, and who did you go to talk to? When did you start thinking about it? Andrew: Well, I think you learn about death the way everybody does, which is you experience it. And the first time it happened to me, I made a documentary about teenagers with cancer, Canteen, the support group, and one of those young men died. And his parents very generously invited me to visit him as he was dying. And that was the first time I actually saw what death can be. And it was, it was very hard to see and then watching my own father die obviously was a profound moment for me because that was an unhappy death. But how I've learned about it since is, I imagine a bit like Kerrie. I've had thousands of hours of conversations with people who are dying and their families and their carers. And, I've learned so much about death I feel I've mastered it and can move on. James: Yeah, true. That's right. Is that, is this what you mean by death literacy, that, that in some ways we just need to be talking about it more? Kerrie: It's, it's talking about it. That, that's one aspect. But it's, it's kind of developing your know-how and being able to put that know-how into practice. So, you can maybe talk about, maybe have some competency in terms of talking or maybe doing one element, related to death and dying. But, when you put it into practice, that's when death literacy kind of really comes to life. It kind of sits, some of the research we've done recently, it's evident that death literacy sits in networks, in-between people, within people, in communities, so it's not just about individuals. James: I suppose I'm wondering about at what point we might have this, or there'd be a difference in death literacy with 20-year-olds than there would be with 80-year-olds, right? Kerrie: Yes, experience changes your death literacy. That's probably the strongest predictor. So we started this research looking at networks of care and how people kind of come together. And so where we're at now is we're looking at what are the predictors and what are the things that we understand so that we can understand more about how to make more death literacy, I guess. So an example, that's your question, well I can give a real example. When my mum was in hospital, we were, we needed someone to help us to move mum from the hospital to home because we wanted to take her home. And we couldn't get the health system or the medical system to do that. So I put an email out, a text message out to my friends who happened to work in the death space. And within an hour we had someone, within two hours, mum was home. And so. That took, you know, that set off a little chain of conversations, emails, texts. And while I was doing that, my brother was getting the medication sorted and other things sorted for my mum. So we really, we utilised, to bring my mum home, we utilised like every bit of knowledge and our networks to do that. James: But you were at the centre of, you know, you, you study this, you're a, you know, an advocate for it, and so you're at the centre of it. You would have a network. I mean, I don't know that I've got the same network. I'd, I could put it out to my friends and they'd go, we could bring wine. Oh, you know, like, I don't know that they'd, I don't know that they'd be that practical. Kerrie: But that's actually helpful too. You need your friends to turn up with wine and, and bread and whatever comforts. So we found that younger people, for example, so we've done two kind of national studies just to kind of demonstrate your point about younger people. Between, 2019, pre COVID, and 2023, we looked at the population and we looked at death literacy and how it changed. And we found that voluntary assisted dying and COVID had an impact on people's death literacy, particularly for the younger people, anyone who's experienced a death, anyone who's been through loss, has higher death literacy than people who haven't. And so, there's lots of things that contribute to that, but, COVID, I think, we're still kind of looking at the data, but certainly voluntary assisted dying because of the way that you need to kind of have conversations, you need to actually reach out to your networks, you need to talk to doctors, you know, there are actually lots of interactions in that that really stretch your skills and, your understanding. James: It's only a few generations back when death was very present in our life. The conversation about voluntary assisted dying has perhaps allowed us to have that conversation again. Have you seen that? Andrew: Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, there's, there's a lovely, witty observation that in Victorian times they talked about death all the time and never about sex. And today it's the other way around. It's not that many generations ago where the body would lie in the house and there'd be a viewing in the house. And so it was, it was a more human thing, the way Kerrie's describing her friends helping her mother come home, that's a communal and human thing. And when I talk about voluntary assisted dying, I must and I want to bracket it with palliative care, because really, despite the fact politically they were oppositional during the legislative debate, they're very much on the same end of the spectrum, which is we're all going to die, and the concept of palliative care, which is also the same idea of voluntary assisted dying, is not, ‘Let's get you to the dying bit, but how do you live as well as you can while you are dying?’ And that dying process could be very short or it could be very long, it could be several years. You, usually you can't be really clear. So the whole point as Kerrie said about voluntary assisted dying and palliative care is you talk about these things. And interestingly, I think there's a paralysis around death, and you know, you said, well, my friends wouldn't know what to do, they'd bring wine, as Kerrie said, that's no bad thing. But if you put out a call to your friends to say, I need to move my fridge, somebody's going to say, I've got a ute. James: Yes. Andrew: …your need, perhaps, to leave hospital and go home, that's the same question… James: They might have a ute. Andrew: …It's just, it's just a human question, which is, I need help. And not only do we get paralysed in the face of death and assume that the experts have the answers, but the experts often get paralysed in the face of death. They don't know how to have those conversations either. So one of the things that voluntary assisted dying absolutely has done, and there was a, a geriatrician in Victoria who said to me. He was ashamed to admit that voluntary assisted dying had made him understand how limited his practice had been, in that he had subconsciously only been asking questions of patients that he had an answer to: How's your pain? James: Right. Andrew: I can treat your pain. What are your symptoms? I might be able to treat your symptoms. Whereas what he asks now is, how do you feel? What is life like for you? That's a much more holistic question. What is it that you need? If we can't help you with it, maybe someone else can help you with it. So I think it's about transcending that paralysis in the face of death. Which is natural, but the greater group that you can talk with it about, the better. I still remember a woman I met several years ago. And she said to me from the moment her husband was diagnosed with cancer to the moment he died, he refused to talk about it. And the, it was like a sliver of ice stuck in her heart because she was frozen in that too. James: Yeah, yeah. Kerrie: Yeah, and I think what we, what we found in a lot of our research too, Andrew, was that, carers were often, had massive networks that the person who was dying didn't know about… Andrew: Right… Kerrie: …as well. So I think that's, that's the other thing, about some of these conversations is that, once you know that you've got community who's up for the conversation or up for whatever around you that a lot of carers are, can have that access to other people. James: And you mean the person dying doesn't know because they don't ask, unless they're talking about it, then no-one thinks to bring it forward? Is that what you mean? Kerrie: Yeah. I think what happens in that situation is a carer can become quite isolated like the dying person. If they don't want to talk about it, there actually are still practical things to organise. There are still things, where are the passwords? How do you get into the bank account? What bills need paying? Andrew: I'm trying that with my wife all the time and she's not even dying! Kerrie: That's right. They continue but you don't get to have the conversation with the person. Andrew: Actually, Geraldine Brooks, a beautiful author, her husband Tony, who is a friend, he died very suddenly, dropped dead in the street, and he was young, in his early 60s. And she's just written a book about this called Memorial Days, about that whole experience. And that's the strongest piece of practical advice she gives, which is, prepare for your death by helping others. James: Yes. Andrew: Like, leave the passwords, explain how these things work. The best things I've learnt about the idea of preparing for death and thinking about death, actually I'm pretty sure came from some of your literature, Kerrie, which was the idea of an emotional will. And an emotional will is not about, to you James, I'll leave my ute. It's actually about, to you James, I'm going to leave, my favourite city in the world. Limerick in Ireland, and here's some money for you to go there, or to you James, I'm going to leave these five songs, which mean something to me. It's actually about, well this poem, it's about gifting something of spiritual life value as opposed to an object. James: Yeah. Following the, the, the legislation in New South Wales, now pretty much in every state, Andrew, where, what do you see now? What do you see in our society now? What do you see happening? Andrew: Look, there's still the same paralysis and fear about death. I think that's, that's kind of natural. You know, one of the people on our board of Go Gentle is the former federal president of the AMA, who's a neurosurgeon, and he said when his dad was dying in hospital, he was afraid to ask for, you know, more help because he didn't want to be annoying. So, you know, I mean, this is the head of the AMA. To me the big question is not so much, how individual families or individuals respond even though it's very important. To me the big conversation is within the medical professions. And I don't actually say that critically. Because we're all equally struggling with the concept of the abyss. And I think, it is an acknowledged problem in healthcare, of futile care at the end of life. It's giving a 90-year-old a hip replacement, for example, just over-treating. Because of the, I've heard it described as ‘doctor as hero’. You know, we give, we give doctors, quite reasonably, a special place in our society. Because we ask special things of them. But part of that training is, we must win. We must treat. When I was first told this by a doctor in Oregon, when I went there. When they said, oh, we see death as a defeat, I actually laughed. I thought they were joking. I said, it's… James: You know you can't win. He turns up with that scythe at some point. Andrew: So I think there's a much broader conversation about what is dying, and how do we have that conversation with people who are dying. And I think… James: I suppose I just thought, I have had a couple of conversations recently with people who have a relative or parent who has gone through voluntary assisted dying… Andrew: Yes… James: …And what I noticed was the way they talked about it, in a sense, wasn't much different to, oh, we went to Europe. You know, we had a nice trip. Like, it was very normal, the way they said it. They went, I was at my uncle's death yesterday. Andrew: It can be. It can be. You know, dying affects different people differently. There are people who have gone through the voluntary assisted dying process who totally support it and are very glad it's there, but still found the experience traumatic. It's not a silver bullet. James: Right. Andrew: It doesn't, it, it's merciful, and it's peaceful, but it doesn't, it certainly doesn't remove grief, and it doesn't remove, for many people, the unreality of dying. We hear many, many testimonies of families deeply grateful for the way in which they are able to say farewell. And I think that's a very important part of voluntary assisted dying. A genuine ability to say farewell. But people are different. There's one man that insisted, who used voluntary assisted dying, and insisted that he be only with his doctor. And the reason he gave, which I find both beautiful and heartbreaking, he said, ‘I don't want the love of my family holding me back’. So, you know, I always maintain when I talk about this. James: [sigh] I felt the same thing. I did the same thing. I know. You know, huge. Andrew: Whenever I've talked about this, I've always maintained, none of us know how our dying will be. All we know is that it will be hours and hours alone. And I think that's why I struggle with, that philosophy that somehow or other, that, our dying is about society at large or about some universal rule that we might be breaking if we don't do it the right way. James: Kerrie, you know, I sort of want to acknowledge that you've been through death quite recently, that your mother died only a few weeks ago as we're having this conversation. As someone who's then spent their life studying this area and thinking about this area, what have you learned from the death of your mother? Kerrie: It looks similar to what Andrew said before about his colleague, the doctor. Like, well, I went straight to the practical things, didn't I? Like, it's a kick, grief's a kick in the guts, let's face it. Knocks you on your butt. James: And we are very practical in those first weeks, aren't we? At the moment of death and afterwards. Kerrie: Just the other day, when we dropped my daughter off to uni, I went to text my mum, as I would usually do. And text her the photo of her in her dorm. And I think this is, you know, I was really glad of my experience because I just sat there and cried for about five minutes, actually. I just needed to blubber and cry. I could have sucked it up. We could have just, you know, driven on. But actually it was really helpful just to really deeply acknowledge that moment. That was the first time. That I'd experienced that real sense of wanting to, to, communicate with her. Andrew: I hope it won't be the last time you hear her cry about your mum. Kerrie: No, it won't be. It won't be. But when she died, because of the work that we had done, I didn't cry initially. Andrew: Yeah. Kerrie: And this is this individual kind of experience of going through this. I didn't, immediately cry. I felt intense relief for my mum. And so I was just reflecting on that. I was like, ‘Whoa, I'm not crying’. The other thing that is, is on my mind is that it took an ICU doctor on the day that mum… So mum had three MET calls. And if you don't know what a MET call is, and you're listening to this, this is where every registrar, every emergency person on call, runs to the bed of the person who is, who's crashing. James: Right. Kerrie: …and she had three of those. And by the end, I'm glad I wasn't there because I hear that mum was very distressed. James: Right. Kerrie: And it took an ICU doctor to sit down with her and go, what do you want Maureen? James: Yeah. Andrew: Yeah. Kerrie: And mum said, I'm done. And so it didn't matter that I'd done that with the doctors, multiple times, or that she had an advanced care directive, clearly stating, do not give me, treatment that will prolong my life. It didn't matter that all of those things were in place. What mattered, was that ICU doctor who absolutely, compassionately just stopped everything and talked to my mum. And it's a pretty brave thing when your heart is failing and other things are happening in your body to say, no more, I'm done. Because that does, that's a decision about you only have a certain amount of time left in your life then. So, that doctor changed the course of my mum's dying. And, yeah, I'll never forget that. And then the compassion at which she called me to talk with me about what mum had decided. And the checking. The difference – one of the other things that I found – the difference between a doctor with really, like, person-centered communication skills and someone who's focused on getting the job done. They ring and say, ‘Hey, I'm caring for your mum. I'm caring for your person. What do you understand about what's happening?’ James: Right. Right. Kerrie: And every time, they did that… James: …they want to listen to you first, yeah. Kerrie: …Yeah. Every time they did that, it just gave me an opportunity, even though I know this gig, I've talked a hundred times on the other side of that conversation with people, but it just made me realise the just incredible, that empathy, you feel it in your bones on a whole other level when someone is truly going, ‘Tell me, tell me your story, tell me your bit.’ And, that was, that was a big learning and a big reflection as a health professional, as someone who's been there. The other thing, sorry, you cracked that open, didn't you? The other, the other part was, no one asked, me or my brother, about, about our experience, our previous experiences, and who we were, and what we did, and who were these children taking their mum home. My brother's a nurse. I've worked in palliative care for a million years, and it was a really interesting thing having to, like, I just wanted someone to go, Hey, have you done this before? And maybe I'm being a bit biased there because that's something that, because I've got a death literacy lens over things. And I'm always interested in, Hey, what have you done before? Hey, what experiences do you want to bring to this one? What do you know about what you're facing? What do you want to know about next? They were all the questions that I would be asking if I was working with someone. I really wanted someone to ask me those questions. Andrew: In a palliative care setting, you would probably have been asked those questions, you would hope. Kerrie: I hope so. Andrew: In a general hospital, maybe not. I think that speaks to two things, what we're talking about, which is paralysis in the face of death and, a sense of we just treat, we treat, we treat. This is what we do. Everybody's terrified of being accused somehow of not having done enough. So I think there's that. And, the doctor, the ICU doctor you described, that strikes me as a perfect piece of medicine. And it, it absolutely accords with what a beautiful nurse said to me in South Australia some years ago. She was very emotional. She was, she was recording a piece for us about why there should be voluntary assisted dying. It was always instructive to me that the ones that really advocated for it were the nurses, because they're the ones that see the suffering. And she just said, ‘Why can't we do the right thing, human to human?’ And that's why I see this as a multi-generational discussion within the health profession. It's not that people in the health profession aren't humans or don't get that, but it's not how they're trained. And, but I also think it speaks to the pressures on the health system too. Kerrie: Yeah. Andrew: In the same way as we're talking about aged care, even though we have a much healthier health system than, say, America, it's still pressured. And we know, we hear stories from hospitals all the time of, resources that are built but not used or resources that are used but are stretched beyond reason, and so I think it's a reflection of all those things. But there was at times, and I think sometimes we don't talk about this enough, is paternalism in healthcare. Andrew: Can I explain that?! James: Yeah, that's right. Andrew: Sorry. James: Oh yeah, we covered that Kerrie, us blokes know all… Andrew: Please, do go on. Kerrie: Oh, there's a lived experience. [laughter]. Oh, yes, that. Andrew: No, I'm sorry, please do explain. James: …which you ably demonstrated… Kerrie: So, that, yeah, like paternalism, we just don't have a critical kind of conversation about paternalism in healthcare. And there's, you know, there's that difference between really great care. And then, but if you just kind of tip it a little further into ‘Hmm, do you really want to do that? Oh, don't you want to be the daughter, not the carer?’ You know, like there are, there are kind of, there are particular things that happen in healthcare that, that we don't, we aren't critical enough, is what I'm saying. I don't know what the answer is, but I would like the system to be more critical about, about some of those things that perhaps they take for granted a little. And, look, sometimes it would be maybe permission for a family to kind of, yeah, be the daughter. James: Well, even in my experience, my cancer experience in the last year or so, I've now done several talks at doctors conferences and things like that. And what, what sort of strikes me as funny about it is I go, ‘We’re thinking of taking an interest in the patient's perspective, perhaps you'd like to come talk about that?’ Patient's perspective. Is this new? Andrew: You know, I, I went on Q&A, about VAD quite early in my advocacy, which was a terrifying experience, by the way, and, and there was a, another fairly prominent doctor who was strongly in opposition, and I, I completed what I had to say by basically saying, you know, doctors, it's, it's time to listen to your patients. And this doctor, who's a very good writer, wrote this excoriating piece in a magazine afterwards, just accusing me of being patronising towards doctors. And I'm thinking, that's patronising? I mean, the worst example I know of this, there was a, a former AMA official and, they held a debate on this internally in 2016, that I had a link to and I, so I watched it. And he was a, a geriatrician, and a senior doctor. And somebody on the other side of the debate, because he was opposed, had put to him that there's a great public support for this. And he said, and I'm, I'm quoting pretty close to verbatim, he said, ‘That's why we're paid $200,000 a year. We make these decisions.’ And that's, so I think there is significant paternalism. There was another, a female oncologist who wrote a piece in The Australian against these laws, and even though it wasn't her headline, it was what she meant. The headline was, ‘Autonomy, it's not about you’. And you know, going back to what I was saying, there cannot be a more, you-focused experience than your dying. I don't care what your religion tells you, in the end, only you are going there when it happens. James: You've given, is it a decade now, to this? Andrew: More, I think. James: More, you know. Again, I suppose, what's your reflection on that? I sort of feel like I'm framing the question almost, are you glad you did that? You know, is that… Andrew: There are times, and I'm sure Kerrie would agree with this, there are times I think, you know, I've had enough death, thank you very much. Andrew: But I would have to say it's been the most brilliant second act for me after showbusiness, far more meaningful to me. The correspondence I've had and the conversations I've had, have been so privileged, and the gratitude that we as an organisation, Go Gentle, receive from people whose families had the option of voluntary assisted dying is immense. And, so yes, I am glad. And certainly I view this as the real work that I've done, not whatever I may have done in television. Perhaps if I'd won a Logie, I'd feel differently about that. James: I think you peaked at [1980s show] Blah, Blah, Blah, quite frankly! Andrew: Yeah, I think so, and it was all downhill after that first year, exactly! James: Yeah, well, I almost feel like I need to go and have a good cry. It's been, a beautiful discussion. Thank you so much for, uh, sharing it with us here on Life's Booming. Andrew: Can I ask you a question? Before you just wound up, you're getting teary. James: Yeah, yeah. Andrew: What are you feeling? James: I'm taking a deep breath to calm, so I can't talk, not necessarily to squash it. I'm always surprised when it comes up. I, I never quite know when I'm going to get teary. And sometimes it's, it can happen on air, like sometimes if someone starts talking about death or a relative, and I'll be listening to it and I'll suddenly go to speak and go, oh, the emotion's right there, you know. So, I'm not entirely clear. I think I'm moved by Kerrie, and sort of wanting to experience your grief in some ways, deal with that. Or I feel like, I think I'm feeling that you, you holding it in, sort of that, you know, we need to sort of let that, let that go a bit. So, it's interesting. I think I'm moved by your work as well. Look, we have a funny connection over many decades, and to observe you go through, deal with, deal with, you know, to see you transform into doing that work has been quite extraordinary. And I'm probably just contemplating my own death. [laughter] Andrew: And, exactly right, James. And during the height of COVID, quite unexpectedly, a very good, friend of mine, he rang me from Victoria and we knew his wife had pancreatic cancer, which is obviously a very tough diagnosis. And then he said she's chosen VAD and she's going to die in this state. And despite all the thousands of hours spent in that debate to get that law passed in Victoria, which was the first one in Australia, and it was an absolute brutal knife fight of a battle to get that law passed. For some reason, it had never occurred to me that somebody who I knew and loved was going to use this law. James: Yeah, right. Andrew: And I remember, despite everything I knew about it, on the day, Jennifer and I, we got our whisky glasses. We poured a whisky. We lit a candle. But I remember thinking as the clock ticked down to the moment, it felt very unreal to me. But the strong emotion that I felt at the moment, knowledge in the moment of her dying was not that she had died. It was actually about just the richness of life. Oh my god, life is so rich. And that's what I felt. I just felt, wow, life. Kerrie: I think that is what you say there is so deeply important because one of the reluctances around talking about death and dying is not being able to maybe lean into some of that feeling around that richness of life. When we were going through photo albums, there were photos there that, you know, that we'd never really taken notice of before. Damn, we wanted to know about them now. Who were they? Who are these people? Where are they now? It does connect you to life in a very profound way. And all of the messiness of that. And that's, I think, only a great thing. Watching my children, 22 and 17, be with their grandma. We did a very, a simple thing. Put a comb, a brush on the end of her bed. And mum used to love having her hair brushed. And we just said to the kids, just brush her hair, if you want. Andrew: That’s gorgeous… Kerrie: And so that just very simple action just then gave them something to be with her while she was dying. Andrew: Human to human. James: Yeah. Kerrie: Yeah. And my children did that many times, while she was dying. And, and that's when we would sit and talk about what we did with Nanny and things. And we, you know… So it's worth leaning into. I guess that's the other thing. It's worth getting the whisky out and having a think about, about, about these things and reflecting in on it, and how, and what it means to you and what you want to do. James: Thank you. Kerrie: Thanks. Andrew: Thanks, James. James: I'm gonna cry. Andrew: Come on. Let's hug it out. Come here. James: Exactly. It was very good. That was a beautiful moment. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks to our guests, Andrew Denton and Dr Kerrie Noonan. You've been listening to Season 6 of Life's Booming: Dying to Know, brought to you by Australian Seniors. Please leave a review or tell someone about it. Head to seniors.com.au/podcast for more episodes. May your life be booming. I'm James Valentine.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In this interview with Andrew Thomson, a Scottish seasoned professional in the energy sector, we delve into the multifaceted landscape of oil, renewable energy, and their global implications through a personal lens. Andrew shares his journey from working in the oil industry over 20 years to recently transitioning into nuclear and wind energy sectors. Through his experiences, he provides insights into the socioeconomic impact of oil, the challenges of transitioning to renewable energy, and the complexities of global politics that intertwine with the energy sector.Exploring Andrew's experiences working offshore in locations like Nigeria and Azerbaijan, the discussion uncovers the substantial influence of hydrocarbons and the cultural, socio-economic, and safety developments within the oil sector. The discussion delves into the critical role of energy across modern life, impacting everything from education to communication, while critiquing governmental actions on energy policies and advocating for a balanced energy strategy, similar to Japan's where currently works in setting up Wind Turbine Platforms (using much of the same technology as oil rigs). Furthermore, the dialogue highlights the philosophical and challenging practical shifts toward renewables, exploring political and economic challenges in this transition. Through Andrew's perspective, one can try to better attempt to begin to understand the global energy politics, the necessity of interdisciplinary approaches in energy careers, and the shifting dynamics in the energy sector.Time Stamps * 00:00 The Importance of Energy in Modern Life* 01:00 Introducing Andrew: From Oil to Climate-Friendly Energy* 01:46 Andrew's Background and Career Journey* 02:38 Life and Work in the Oil Industry* 07:34 Challenges and Dangers of Offshore Drilling* 10:54 The Culture and Lifestyle of Oil Workers* 20:58 Global Perspectives: Working in Africa and Beyond* 23:58 Corruption and Local Interactions in the Oil Industry* 38:09 A Costly Mistake and Cultural Reflections* 38:54 Corruption and Anti-Corruption Measures* 40:09 Cultural Differences and Acceptance* 41:13 Colonial Legacy and Historical Perspectives* 43:41 Nationalized vs. Private Oil Companies* 45:46 Transition to Renewable Energy in Japan* 46:12 Challenges in the Oil Industry* 48:22 Geopolitics and Energy Policies* 56:43 Experiences with Government Agencies* 01:03:56 Future Prospects and Peak Oil Debate* 01:08:06 Final Thoughts on Energy and PolicyHighlights and Quotes of Interest On Energy Source MixesJapan has a long term vision.It has a vision of a percentage mix of nuclear fossil fuels, renewables, whereas I feel like I'm fairly against it in my home country, in the UK, because we don't have a long term plan. We've had four prime ministers in the last two years. One of them wanted to build eight nuclear power stations, the next one to start fracking. I believe in an energy mix. I think there's a lot of irresponsibility talked about these days in terms of the energy transition. I do think there should be an energy mix.And then the one now wants to quadruple our offshore wind capacity in eight years, which is impossible. It's quite nonsensical. It's quite short term thinking. I'm not anti wind, I'm not pro oil, I'm not anti or pro any, anything. What I'm pro is a science based, long term, non subsidy, non corruption based market solution.On Incentives in Oil Vs “Renewables”So right now, it seems like oil is completely negative and then offshore wind is completely positive. You look at the motivations behind companies putting in offshore wind turbines or the service companies exactly the same as motivations behind all companies.Neither one is doing them. For anything other than to make money. And I think it's simplistic and a little bit silly to think that the boss of an oil company is some sort of J. R. Ewing, person that likes to run over puppies on the way home and the boss of an electricity company or a turbine installation company or whatever is some sort of, sandal wearing saint that doesn't care about money. Everyone in pretty much, I would say any corporation, that statistic about men are CEOs, they're psychopaths. All they care about is money. And I think there are a lot of like there's a lot of talk about subsidies in [renewables] On Oil's Beastly NatureIt only takes, one ignition source and then you're on top of a fireball…potential that the entire thing can blow up underneath your feet. On Life without Oil It's the world we have is impossible to have without oil. Sure. You can reduce it. It's going to run out eventually one day anyway.So reducing it is not a bad thing, but to pretend that you can just press stop and then you can put in a wind turbine is nonsensical. And the politicians know it's nonsensical as well.  The sheer scale of, Hydrocarbon involvement in our modern industrial life is so incredibly difficult to untangle. There's literally nothing more important than our energy because it ties into the availability of education and medicine and travel and communication. Right, without. some form of mass energy production. We're right back to the medieval ages.On The British State I speak from a very UK point of view because it's my country, it's my home. I feel As ever, the British state works against the British people, not for the British people, which is a contrast to some of the countries that we may look down our noses on a little bit more as not developed, where, and Japan is a great example of this, where Japan seems to do things for the benefit of Japanese people, which seems to be a controversial idea back home. Learning from Travel This is part of, traveling. You see so many countries where people are so proud of their country. Nigerians were some of the most proud people I think I've ever met, and it's the same in Japan. And I worry the direction our country's going, both the UK and the US, when we were raising a generation of children who are being taught to be embarrassed by where they come from. Though I really feel like in the West we've made a mistake over the years in trying to impose our way of looking at the world on other cultures.Post Interview Notes / Links from AndrewHere are some relevant links that might be of interest:"Empire of Dust", a fascinating documentary widely referenced online, but with no major release I don't think, that shows interaction between a Chinese contractor and locals in the DRC. It's a perfect example of culture clash, the strength in the documentary being there is no western-style narrative, it's simply two very different cultures interacting honestly with each other. The film-maker is Belgian which is particularly interesting given their colonial history in the DRC.Watch @ https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x5gdfm4I can particularly recommend Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness if you're interested in the dark side of colonialism, or any history of DRC or Zaire as it was. One of my favourite films is Apocalypse Now, which along with the book perfectly makes the point I was trying to, which is how these cultures are manifestly different from ours, and any attempt to convert or run these societies in a western way will ultimately end up in failure, unless it's done by complete dominance, which of course, is wrong. It's a subject I find really interesting, and my experiences in Africa really changed how I view the world.On Energy Prices “Strike Prices” and Renewables Some links explaining the Strike Price for electricity set through the CfD (Contract for Difference) mechanism that guarantees a specific rate for electricity to renewables companies.https://www.iea.org/policies/5731-contract-for-difference-cfdhttps://www.eurelectric.org/in-detail/cfds_explainer/ It's quite hard to find a non-biased article explaining this, but the basic mechanism is:What isn't always mentioned is the "top-up" when the price falls is paid to the generators by the consumer, in the UK at least, in the form of a levy on the electricity price. Which is fine in theory to have a set electricity price, but currently the UK has the 3rd highest electricity costs in the world:https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/cost-of-electricity-by-countryOn British Embassy Support (Weapons:Yes / Hydrocarbons: No)UK government ending support for oil and gas sector abroad:https://www.gov.uk/government/news/pm-announces-the-uk-will-end-support-for-fossil-fuel-sector-overseasBut no issue promoting UK weapons manufacturers:https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/3/15/uk-spent-1-3m-on-security-for-worlds-biggest-weapons-fairSubsidies provided to the oil and gas industry in the US: (this can be complicated to assess because the IMF considers environmental and health costs after production as an effective subsidy, whereas the OECD and the IEA do not)https://www.eesi.org/papers/view/fact-sheet-fossil-fuel-subsidies-a-closer-look-at-tax-breaks-and-societal-costsCorrection on Refinery Capacity in NigeriaI was slightly mistaken, there is some refinery capacity in Nigeria, in fact it's the highest in all of Africa, however it is still around half of what Houston alone produces per day.https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13203-018-0211-zOn Oil Piracy / Theft (Discussed During Interview as Another Source for Danger / Volatility / Environmental Damage) Oil pipeline theft still seems to be a problem in Nigeria sadly:https://www.pipeline-journal.net/news/explosion-nigeria-oil-pipeline-kills-12-shell-blames-crude-oil-theft-tragedyOn Working in the Pubic SectorI was thinking about one of your last questions afterwards, whether I'd ever work for the government. You know, I would actually love it, to be able to make some type of positive impact, I'd really enjoy that much more than my current job, it's just that what I would advocate is so far in the opposite direction of the UK foreign office and civil service's ethos (non-judgmental promotion of UK interest and people without imposing change on other countries) that I wouldn't get the opportunity. The British sitcom "Yes Minister" captures perfectly how the UK establishment works, it's from the 80s but still very relevant. It works to ensure the continued existence of the establishment, not the general population.AI Machine Transcription - Enjoy the Glitches!Andrew: The sheer scale of, Hydrocarbon involvement in our modern industrial life is so incredibly difficult to untangle.There's literally nothing more important than our energy because it ties into the availability of education and medicine and travel and communication. Right, without. some form of mass energy production. We're right back to the medieval ages.Leafbox: Andrew, thanks so much for making time for me. I know you're a busy guy. Yeah, I really appreciate it. Actually, when I first met you, I was actually fascinated with your work because you're one of the few people I know who has jumped from the oil sector to a climate friendly energy sector, I call it, so I was very curious about your perspectives on both. Having, your wife told me that you lived in Baku and that alone, it is probably a book's worth of questions. Andrew, why don't we just start tell us who you are, where you are, what's the weather like in Fukuoka? And where are you from?Andrew: Well, the most important thing the seasons in Japan seem to follow rules like the rest of Japan. So it's got the memo recently that it's not summer anymore, which is great because summers here are pretty brutal. And it's cloudy and rainy, which from someone from Scotland is nice and familiar.Yeah, I guess be brief biography. I'm Scottish from the North of Scotland. This is usually the point where someone says, well, you don't sound Scottish, but that's because I was born down in England. But moved up Scott, two parents from very remote rural part of Scotland. And we moved up when I was about six.So I went to the local university Aberdeen which at the time was the oil capital of Europe. So with a passion for engineering and a desire to Just have adventure really as a young guy wanting to see the world. Also oil is always historically been very well paid. Probably along the lines of, I don't know, market wise, your career options, lawyer, doctor, that sort of thing, which was never really my interest in an oil worker.So anyway financial motivations, adventure motivations, just an interest in big, heavy engineering pushed me in that direction. I joined, graduated, I took a master's in offshore engineering graduated and joined Halliburton about six weeks before 9 11. So this was in the year of of Dick Cheney, of course then I eventually ended up working offshore.For a company that worked on drilling rigs, doing directional surveys, so you would run drilling tools down the well and that was quite life changing, really very exciting. A lot of. Pressure. This is all gonna make me sound very old, but pre smartphone days. So you were a lot more on your own in those days.I did that for four years. Then I ended up running operations in Lagos, Nigeria. Did that for three years, joined a Norwegian company, worked for them in Aberdeen, and then again, oil service. And ended up running their operations in Baku and Azerbaijan. Then COVID came along and like for a lot of people turned the world upside down.So with the low oil price ended up being made redundant and Really struggled for about a year or so to find work and then it wasn't ideological either one way or another in terms of the energy transition, it's quite heavily marketed these days but I'm not overly convinced that it's as easy as politicians seem to say it is but I took a job for a company drilling offshore foundations.And I was working on a nuclear power station, the cooling shafts for a nuclear power station. And then I simply got a job offer one day an online recruiter to come to Japan to work on offshore wind which has some, Close. It's basically the same things I was doing, except it was in nuclear.So yeah, none of it's been a straight line or a plan, but just the opportunity came up. We really wanted to have another period abroad. So we took the move and then I find myself on a beach speaking to yourself after about a year or so. Leafbox: So Andrew, going back to university time, exactly what did you study? Was this petroleum engineering? Or Andrew: It was no, it was mechanical engineering. But being in it was Robert Gordon university in Aberdeen, but being in Aberdeen, it was very heavily oil influenced at the time. I was actually. obsessed with cars and motorbikes, anything with an engine. So I really wanted to do automotive, but I didn't have the grades to go to a lot of the bigger universities down South.And I was 16 when I went to university and didn't really want to go too far. So I did mechanical. And then that led on to a degree in offshore engineering at the same university, which was completely oil focused. Leafbox: And then Andrew, can you tell me a little bit about the makeup of, the demographics of when you entered the oil industry and especially in Scotland and what were these offshore platforms like, you have engineers with high degrees and then what about the workers themselves?Andrew: Yeah. Yeah. So, your average rig is made up of a lot of different job functions. At the top or guess with the most responsibility. So you've got your company that own the rig. They're the drilling contractor and they have their personnel the guy that manages the rig, and then they have all different personnel, including all the deck crew and all the roughnecks raised about, but then you have the oil company that contracts them.And they have someone offshore running it, but they have a lot of engineers. And then you have all these like service companies, which is what I've worked for that come in and do things. So you typically have on the oil company sides. You'd have someone with, degrees, you'd have like their graduate programs, you'd have young people coming offshore, their first time offshore, but they'd be quite high up relatively.And then you would have your deck crew, mechanics, electricians, which typically weren't university educated. And the guys right at the very top who'd be like, Oh, I am like the rig manager generally, especially in the old days, wouldn't be university educated, but they would just have worked offshore for a very long time.So that they'd be very knowledgeable and skilled in what we're doing. A lot of them took degrees as, technology increased. And it became, more important to have a degree, but especially in the old days, although I think at that level in that job, people wouldn't have had degrees, but you do have, it is a big mix between like I said, your deck crew and the people that are more like the, engineers, geologists, et cetera.And I can't speak for every region, but you do find that you've got, so say the comparative salary or career prospects of a welder, or a mechanic or somewhere you've suddenly got someone who could earn, I don't know, in the U S but in the UK, maybe Twenty five twenty twenty five thousand pounds a year.Maybe, like three years ago in their offshore making like 60, and it's I think it's the same thing in the U. S. you have people from very poor areas that can go offshore and just, quadruple more there their salaries and it's a, But there's a reason why they're, there's a reason why they're getting paid that is because it's a lot more difficult and dangerous when you're away from home and stuff. It's a strange old mix in a lot of ways. Leafbox: And then can you describe for people just what the actual dangers are? Give people an image of what these platforms are like to be on them and how to build them and the complexity of these devices.Andrew: There's so you have there's a lot of different forms, but basically you have a drilling rig. which can be like a semi submersible which floats or a jack up which legs are like sitting on the ground or you could even have a ship that comes like, it all depends on the the depth of the water depth usually.So you'll have this vessel that drills a well and then eventually, so they'll drill a number of wells and then you'll have a platform which is fixed to the seabed usually and then that can that has like a. A wellhead that connects all the wells and then takes the hydrocarbons on board and then it might pump it to another bigger platform or it pumps it to some like somewhere where it's processed and then it's pumped on shore.There's different. There's common dangers. Everything from there've been a number of helicopter incidents over the years. Generally, a lot of these rigs are so far away that you'll take a, you'll take a chopper backwards and forwards. And it's been well documented of things like gearbox failures and stuff.You're probably one of the biggest, I don't have the HSC statistics in front of me, but one of the biggest injuries are probably slips, trips and falls. Because, your average drilling rig has maybe four or five levels to it, and you're up and down stairs all day with big boots on and a hard hat and glasses and stuff, and people tripping on themselves.Obviously drilling, you've got well you've got a lot of overhead lifts, a lot of people get injured with the fingers getting caught between loads roughnecks, raced abouts on the drill floor when they're handling drilling pipe. I've met a lot of people over the years that have got one or more fingers missing, because it's very easy to get your finger nipped between two things are being lifted, especially when people put their hands on to try and direct them.And then obviously the pressure of the hydrocarbons look at deep water horizon, for example the oil and the gas, It's funny listening to your podcast with Jed about oil being sentient that the pressure that the oil is under.So when you tap into, obviously it wants to go, it wants to go up and out. And then that could literally rip a rig apart if it's not if it's not controlled. And then obviously you've got the ignition risk, which, you've got Piper Alpha in the UK and you've got, like I say, Deepwater Horizon, there's been a number of rig explosions and then going back to what I said about platforms.So Piper Alpha was a platform and that was processing gas. So you have 100 and 170, 200 odd people working and living. on a structure offshore where there are like an enormous amount of gas that's being pumped. extracted and pumped like underneath their feet and it only takes, one ignition source and then you're on top of a fireball.And I remember being offshore when they're flaring, which is a process whereby they burn off excess gas and just being stunned by the ferocity of the noise, nevermind the heat of the, that it's just like a primal hour, you, you can stand a couple of hundred. Yards away from it and you can feel it on your face, it's just, it's very different.I've been offshore on a wind turbine installation vessel, which has the same offshore industrial risks in terms of lifted injuries, slips, trips, and falls and suspended loads. But you don't have that. You don't have that like potential that the entire thing can blow up underneath your feet.Leafbox: So with this danger and this kind of. wild beast underneath you. How did the men and women respond? You had in your email, a little bit of this kind of cowboy culture. I'm curious what the culture of these workers are like, and maybe in Scotland and what you've seen around the world. If these people aren't usually they're more working class or what's the relationship with them and the engineers and yeah, tell me about that.Andrew: It's it's a very, it's a very masculine environment. That's not to say that there aren't women offshore in the industry. There, there absolutely are. And there, there are more and more these days especially in certain countries, like in Scandinavia, for instance But it's a very, especially when you get down to the deck crew, it's a very, the recruits are very masculine, very like macho environment.It's quite a tough environment. It's a very hard working environment. The it's not that people I wouldn't say a matter of fact to say the opposite in terms of people having a cavalier attitude to safety. There have been a number of incidents over the years in the industry and each incident spurred along quite a lot of improvements in health and safety.So I'd say probably in terms of. Industry, it's probably one of the safest industries, well, it's probably one of the industries with the best safety attitude. I'm sure maybe nuclear is probably up there as well, but people are aware offshore of the risks. There's a huge QHSE industry.There's a, most companies have some form of a HSE system, which allows anyone from someone who works for the camp boss, like someone who changes the sheets, the cleaners, the cooks to like the driller can stop operations if they think that something is dangerous and there can't be any comeback, and stopping operations offshore is a big deal.Because the average. Rigorate is, it fluctuates, but the average is, I don't know, a few hundred thousand, I don't know what it is at the moment, but let's say up to maybe a half a million more for the biggest rates, biggest rigs per day. That's what, 20, 000 an hour. So if you see something that's dangerous and you stop it for a couple of hours that's a lot of money.So it takes a lot of nerve to do that, but the industry has been pretty good. They have these systems called stop cards. Like I say, Different companies have different names for it, but it gives the ability to It gives you authority for someone not to be forced into doing something that they think is dangerous.So overall, I actually think the health and safety culture is quite good. But if you look at Deepwater Horizon, that was a classic example of even at the corporate level, people being frightened to say no and frightened to halt operations. So that does still persist due to the sheer amount of money involved.Leafbox: And then tell me about in your email, you had a quote line about, these workers spending their money, maybe not as wisely. I'm curious to describe and understand the cowboy. I have this image, my father worked for Exxon for a long time. And his biggest problem was piracy. They had so much issues with piracy, but this was in the Caribbean. So it's just constantly people stealing oil from them. So maybe yeah, tell me how it is now after I guess 2000s, how it's changed. You're describing this very safe sounding MBA driven culture, but I have trouble.Yeah. Tell me what it's like around the world. Andrew: So that's the sort of the day to day attitude offshore, which is pushed very heavily by the oil companies. It's a lot of recording. They record lost time statistics which also not to get sidetracked, but that has a slightly negative effect as well in terms of if a rig has, say.That they'll, quite often rigs will have a big display when you arrive and it says this amount of days from the last accident and if they go like a year without any LTIs, everyone on the rig could get like an iPad or some sort of bonus or something and it's a big deal not to have incidents that cause a loss of time and that, by that if someone has to go to hospital, someone has to leave the rig, but that also does encourage it can encourage hiding of things, someone maybe, they've smashed their finger, but can they just maybe report it, but maybe just go on like light duties or something rather than go to the hospital before, before their shift change sort of thing which does happen and it's not healthy.But anyway, to get back to your point I think it comes from, as I say it's, a way for someone who would have no other avenue to earn the amount of money that they would get offshore by taking on the additional risk and being away from home. So say an electrician, your average construction electrician wages are probably pretty good these days, but if you take someone working in, some rural place in, in the States who is like a car mechanic or something, and then they go offshore And they're multiplying their salary, but they're multiplying their salary, perhaps coming from an environment where no one's ever had that type of money.They're coming home with maybe try to think of some people I've known, hundreds of thousands of dollars a year when their salary may have been I don't know, sub six figures, but they don't come from an environment where that sort of money is common. So you then have a situation whereby they are the one person in their family or town or their local bar.who has loads of money, who's been away from home for four weeks, but he doesn't have the most stable relationship precisely because they're not at home, but yet they've got loads of money and loads of time. You can see how that can encourage perhaps resentment. Or just a feeling of alienation from that community.That sort of person, say they have a lot more money than their friends, maybe they want to buy them drinks, but then do they want to have to do that all the time? I've known people that have been divorced multiple times, that have bought boats and all sorts of things that they never use and they end up with, paying for There are families that they never see, the families that get remarried, the kids that they never see.I've worked with directional drillers that I've got a wife in one country, an ex wife in another country, kids that don't like them, and they just pay for all these families. They get onshore and then they spend the next couple of weeks with some, teenage prostitute blowing all the money on that drink for the rest of the month and then they're back offshore.the shakes and then they decompress over the month and then the cycle repeats itself. So in the one sense, it's a fantastic opportunity for social mobility, but it also can leave a lot of chaos behind it. And I'm certainly not at all. And having come from a work class background myself, I'm not certainly saying that.It shouldn't be there. I think it's a positive thing and it's up to these people what they want to do with their money. I'm just saying it's an interest in social observance that it's, you don't get that many working class people that can leave school and have a manual trade and can go and be a lawyer or a doctor or a CEO but you are all of a sudden getting these people in situations who are making the same amount of money, but without the family structure.Or the societal structure that can prepare them for that.Leafbox: Jumping to the next topic, I'm curious, you first mentioned Dick Cheney, what was your relationship, you're in Scotland, and how does that fiddle in with the Middle East? oil wars and just the general kind of, I feel like when my father worked in oil, there wasn't that much of a hostility in the general environment.It was just people drove cars and you worked in the oil industry and it wasn't that. So in post 2000, I would say things change both from the climate perspective and then from the kind of American imperialist association with oil. Andrew: It's changed massively in terms of hostility. Just, it's just like night and day. So when I graduated, I remember being at school in the early nineties and there was, I don't think it was climate, no, no global warming. It was called then. So there was discussion of it.But the greenhouse the ozone layer was the big deal. And there was environmentalism, Greenpeace was quite big at that time. But. The, there was no stigma like whatsoever into going into the oil industry. And you could see that in terms of the courses at the time they were called there was like drilling engineering courses, offshore engineering courses petroleum engineering.You go back to the same universities now and it's like energy transition. I think you'll struggle to find that many courses that have got the words petroleum or drilling in it. And also it was very easy to get a job in those days in the industry. The, yeah the Gulf War, so the second Gulf War at the time working for Halliburton, I was very conscious of, it was very interesting to me how the company was structured.So you had Halliburton Energy Services and you had KBR, Kellogg, Brennan, Root, and they were the company that won the uncontested contract to rebuild in Iraq. But the way the company was structured. Was that they were that they were split up basically. So if one of them had gone down the toilet for any of these issues, they were separated.I was very happy to join Haliburton. It was a big career wise. I thought it was very good. I look back now, it's funny how I look back, like inside, I look back on that whole Iraq war with absolute horror now, but I had grown up with Free internet with, what at the time were considered authoritative news sources with the BBC and British newspapers.It might sound naive, but you believe that people are doing the right thing. And I just thought at the time that, that, we were going into Iraq because it was a very bad person there. And I look back now, with I look at Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld and all the things that have happened with absolute horror.But at the time it just seemed quite straightforward. My, my view on the oil industry hasn't changed in terms of, I, I believe in an energy mix. I think there's a lot of irresponsibility talked about these days in terms of the energy transition. I do think there should be an energy mix.I don't think it should be any one source of energy. But I feel like we're in the same position that we're in before except instead of it being everyone's desperate to make money out of oil. I think everyone's desperate to make money out of renewables these days. Leafbox: Well, before we jump to that point, I want to I think that's a big topic we'll go to, but tell me about your jump to Nigeria.You're still naive then, or eager help, Nigerian oil industry or what you get assigned to Nigeria. What's that like? Andrew: Well, so I so that four years of us, so the three years I worked for that company originally was on it was on an ad hoc basis. So basically I would be at home. I'd get a phone call.And I could, I had to live within 45 minutes of the airport but I usually got at least a day. Sometimes it wasn't, it will, it was literally a day. Sometimes it was like a week, but I would get a call and then I could go anywhere in a region was Europe, Africa, Caspian. So I could go anywhere.Most of it was in West Africa. So I would go and work offshore in the Congo. Not the DRC, but the Republic of Congo Gabon, Nigeria, but all over Europe and occasionally like the Far East. So I had a lot of experience of Africa at that point. My very first, one thing I did want to, I was thinking the other day, one thing I did want to mention was when I first went, in terms of naivety, when I first time I ever went to Africa was in the Congo.And I'd grown up in the eighties where we had Live Aid was basically anyone's kind of opinion of Africa. And I remember at school we used to be forced to sing Do They Know It's Christmas, like every Christmas. So that was everyone's opinion of Africa was like just basically starving children. And I arrived in the Congo.They've got quite a decent airport now in Point Noir, but when I arrived it was literally a concrete shed with arrivals on one side and departures on the other and just like sand on the ground. And I can't remember coming out of that totally by myself just with my Nokia phone with the local contacts phone number and all these little kids appeared like Tugging it, tugging at my trousers asking for money and I was absolutely horrified I'd never seen like poverty like that and I felt horrible that I couldn't help them.But it's funny how You not that I don't care about children, but you harden yourself to what the reality of life is like in places like that. And I did that for three years. I was in Angola rotating for a year. In Cabinda, which is a chevron camp. And then I I got the job in Nigeria.And actually my father passed away just before I got that job. So I was a bit rudderless at that point. I really enjoyed it got to me in the end, I was there for three years and I started to get very frustrated when I was at home, that's when I thought I need to make a change.But there's a sort of happy level of chaos, I found. It's. in Nigeria, where things are, they don't work in the sense that they would do in, in, in what you'd call, developed countries. You can't rely on things to work. You can't really rely on people in a certain sense, but there's a sort of happy, it's difficult to explain.Like it's just, It's a very chaotic place, a very noisy, chaotic place. But once you accept that it's quite a good laugh actually. I have some quite happy memories from working there. Leafbox: So Andrew, when you enter in these places you first described your kind of exposure to Congo, but how do you conceptualize the interaction between the Western oil companies and I guess the local developing country?Do you think about that? Or are all the workers local? Or is everyone imported from all over the world? And Andrew: There's a big move towards localization in pretty much any location I've been which is, which has changed over the years. So when I first started working say in Africa, as an example.Pretty much all of the deck crew, all of the roughnecks were all Africans or locals from whichever ever country you're in. But once you got to the upper levels, like the Western oil companies, you would have, so you'd have like drill engineers, which weren't. You might describe them as like project managers of the drilling operations.So there you would have kind of a mix of locals and expats, but you pretty much always find once you went above that to like drilling managers. You'd find all what they call company men, which are the company's representative offshore, pretty much always expats. That has changed over the years, which I think is a very positive thing.A lot of countries, Azerbaijan's like this, a lot of countries in Africa, Nigeria is like this. They put within the contracts, like a local content. So for a company to win the license and which is then cascaded down to the subcontractors, you have to have a percentage of local employees and you have to have a system for replacing your senior people, training up locals and replacing them over time, which I think is very positive because after all, it's there.Oil is their resources. There are in certain locations with certain companies, a pretty bad history. Shell Nigeria, for example. You can your listeners can look all this up, but there have been, various controversies over the years on the whole, I think on the whole, I think.that it's a positive for these countries because I look at it in terms of a capitalist sort of capitalist approach that, you know and it's almost like the thing that I was saying where you have like someone who comes from a family or a class where they are not exposed to money and all of a sudden they have a huge amount of money where you could say the same thing with some tiny country where by a that they've had a level of civilization and a level of like income over the years and all of a sudden someone discovers oil and there's no way you can reasonably expect a society to just, you can't take somewhere that goes from like tribal pre industrial revolution conditions and make it New York City overnight.It's just, it's not going to happen. And just expanding that slightly, I was in Papua New Guinea in the eastern part And up in the highlands on a well site a while ago. And that was fascinating because Papua New Guinea is still, it's a country, but it's still very tribal. So once you leave Port Moresby you're really, it's not like you're going to call the police if someone tries to assault you or call an ambulance or something.It's very much like I say, pre industrial revolution, tribal. societies, but they're sitting on billions of dollars of gas. So you get these little pockets of on the shore drilling rigs. And they're just pumping millions and billions of dollars worth of gas out from under your feet, but they pay the locals.And the site that I was on right at the top of the hill overlooking it was a big mansion owned by the who, as soon as he started drilling, he would get 10 million. And then, as I was informed, would probably disappear down to Australia and, enrich the local casinos and stuff. But, who is to say that is, would it be great if he built a hospital and built a school and improved the lives of everyone around him?Oh, of course it would. But who's to say morally that we Chevron should be, I understand the point that maybe Chevron should be building these things, but who is to say that the condition should be attached to what that chief spends his money on. I guess what I'm trying to say is that I I think I place a lot of responsibility on hydrocarbons are located.I do think there have been a lot of very negative practices by By all companies over the years, and they absolutely have a duty to maintain the environment. But I think it's a bit hypocritical. I see a lot of rich Western countries, especially now saying to a lot of poorer, undeveloped countries that they shouldn't be drilling or they shouldn't be, should be using the money differently.And I think, well, it's their resource. I look at it more from a capitalist point of view, rather than, like I said in my email, I'm quite anti interventionist in that sense. So historically I'm going to, this continues now, but there have been issues with literally, so they put these big pipelines through people's villages and the way that a lot of these things are organized is like I said, about Papua New Guinea they'll contact, the tribal chief and we'll pay a rent or some sort of fee to, to put these big pipelines through, through these small places.But there are some times when, I haven't, I, the right tribal chief or they've not paid enough or there's some sort of dispute and you will get villagers literally drilling into these oil pipelines with drills and buckets to steal the oil. And of course someone's doing it and they're smoking or there's some sort of ignition source and the whole thing erupts and, the village is burnt and it's a horrible, tragedy but it's just it's a funny, again, it goes back to the theory of what I was saying, the juxtaposition of that very valuable resource with a very, with a civilization, with a community, probably better way of putting it, who has never had access to that amount of money.So you're literally pumping these, this thing through their village that is worth more money than they'll ever see in their lifetime. And obviously the temptation to try to take some of that. is there, almost like understandably, but then again it quite often results in a lot of death and destruction.So that's yeah, it's just it's part of the whole industry in a lot of ways. And other industries, when you look at things like lithium mining and diamonds and stuff, you have a very high value resource That has been, by pure chance, located in a very poor part of the world and it results in these tragedies sometimes.Leafbox: I was going to ask you about the processing of oil. So when export the raw crude. Mostly the oils and process somewhere else. You were, you're taking the oil from Nigeria. Like Venezuela, they have to ship it all to Houston or whatnot to get turned into different solvents and gasoline. And, Andrew: This is probably when I'll need some fact checking, but my recollection of the time in Nigeria was that they weren't processing the oil on shore.I stand corrected if that's wrong, but my understanding was that they weren't, or at least there wasn't very many refineries, so it was basically all, like you said, extracted and then sent abroad. To be refined. That's certainly the situation in in Papua New Guinea. A lot of it is turned an LPG there and then shipped abroad.I guess I would guess, I would assume that would be the situation in a lot of West African countries for a lot of reasons, you have an established. Supply chain, you have established skill set in other places, then it comes down to cost and then you have the security of, you can imagine the enormous amount of investment you would need in a refinery.And would you rather do that in a place that's had a history of civil war, or would you take the cost to ship it abroad and do it somewhere else, Leafbox: no, it's understandable. I think that's important for listeners to understand that. The refinery in Louisiana or whatnot, or, it's so massive, it's billions of dollars and it's such a dangerous place to work also. Right. Those are just like literally atomic bomb sized potential energy. Andrew: The one thing that, there's always been, say in Scotland, there's been a little bit of resentment towards, Aberdeen and they're all like rich up there from other places in Scotland, but I think that there is, people are aware of Deepwater Horizon and Piper Alpha, et cetera, but I do think that there has been an underappreciation of the, just the Crazy risks that are involved when you're working offshore and handling hydrocarbons.Like I said, you take a helicopter to work with all the risks that I had in, in tails, and then you spend a month or so working on top of something that is effectively, a bomb if if things aren't handled properly. And you're, how far away are you from like emergency services?There are supply vessels and stuff, but. It's very much an environment where you have to just be very careful and very aware of dangers, which I think the industry now has got very good at. But yeah, the wages are high, but they're high for a reason. It's not it's not an easy, it's not an easy job in terms of that.And like I alluded to before, in terms of family stability, working away and coming back is not really conducive quite often to, to a healthy home life.Leafbox: Going back to Angola for a second I read an account of the Chinese are very heavily in Luanda and Angola, and they had the terrible civil war.But one of the things that really stood out to me is that all the Chinese use Chinese labor. So their oil boats are all Chinese workers and they often use ex felons, which I thought was interesting. But there's, I guess they, all these ex felons in Angola, I don't know if you saw this, I wanted to confirm it, but there's a lot of half Chinese, half Angolan children now because all the Chinese roughnecks.They're all men. So there's a booming Angolan prostitution and it just was so wild. Angola think Luanda is the most expensive city in the world. But then the most violent too, so yeah, just what's your general impressionAndrew: I I've been in Luanda in total, probably just a couple of days.Most of my time was spent in a, so Chevron Texco have this place called Cabinda. Which is actually, technically speaking, if you look at the map, it's not actually connected to Angola, you've got Angola, then you've got a little gap, and then you've got Cabinda, which is the little gap is part of the DRC, I think but Cabinda is where all the onshore processing of the oil is.It's part of Angola and it's like a prisoner of war camp and you go up there and you can't leave pretty much until you've finished your work. But my impression of Lulanda wasn't great at all. I remember driving into it and there's these massive shanty towns on the edge of the city with just like literal rubbish tipped down the side of these hills.And then you get into the city and it's just a. massive continual traffic jam with Porsche Cayennes and Range Rovers and G Wagons. And it just felt in the way that I was describing Lagos and even Port Harcourt, which has a pretty bad reputation as a sort of, chaotic, but fun sort of chaos.I felt and this is just my personal impression, I felt Lwanda was chaos, but dangerous chaos. Not you wouldn't stay in a staff house there and you wouldn't go out for a drink anyway. You wouldn't even really go out for lunch much. You just stayed in. It looked to me like as if you'd taken a European city, which I guess it, that's how it was built.And then you just start maintaining it from like 1960s onwards, but then you'd add it in a civil war and I appreciate the civil war was like a proxy civil war and then just didn't repair any infrastructure and just peppered the whole place with like bullet holes.It wasn't, it was not particularly, it's not a place that I would recommend to be quite honest with you. In terms of the Middle East, the comparison with the Middle East I've not really worked that much in the Middle East, to be quite honest with you. I guess my closest is the Caspian, which is more Central Asia, but that was way more structured.Yes, there's massive amounts of corruption, massive amounts of poverty. But yeah, absolutely more structured and less chaotic in that sense. Leafbox: Andrew, what's the relationship in Nigeria, there's famous activists who, like the Shell, they polluted so heavily, but then I guess the military tribunals would erase or disappear people.Maybe this is before you worked there, but what, as, what was the relationship of the company men with the government? Was there open kind of corruption or? What was your general vibe of is the manager's job and kind of getting these contracts. Talk to me about that. Like Deanna, how did the, you know, Exxon versus Armco or whatever it is, whoever's ever getting these contracts, there's obviously backdoor dealings.Andrew: Yeah, in terms of, actual drilling licenses I was never near or even remotely near the people that will be making those sort of decisions. And I'm certainly not going to allege corruption at that level. And I don't have any evidence, but what I would say, and again, all of this is just my personal opinion.It's, I'm not disparaging any one particular place in general, but the level of corruption. that I would see was so endemic that I just came to feel it was cultural which again, it's not really don't want to make that sound like it's a slight, to me it was an understanding of I really feel, and just briefly going back to the whole Bob Geldof Live Aid thing, I really feel like in the West we've made a mistake over the years in trying to impose our way of looking at the world on other cultures.And what I would see in most West African countries was it was just an accepted way Of living, accepted way of dealing. So you would go to the airport. We used to have these boxes that would have electronic equipment in them. And we had to hand carry them cause they were quite fragile.And then you would go to the check in desk and they would be like okay, well we have to get some stairs to lift this into the plane. So that's an extra 50. I'm not sure you actually own this equipment. It's got another company written on it. You give me a hundred dollars.Sometimes it's not quite said, you'll just get so much hassle and you'd see other, you'd see some people there that would freak out in case thinking that they were gonna, arrested or something. They just open their wallet and hand over loads of money. The, but it's not it's not like some under the table nefarious plot it's just like the checking guy is getting paid next to nothing He sees someone who's obviously got all my money and he has How can I get that money off him and it's at every single level my I mean I suppose I would say I was wise to it, but even I would make naive mistakes.I remember on a leaving day when I left Nigeria I had this driver who I'd still consider a friend. I messaged him on Facebook sometimes, and he was a really nice young guy who would go out of his, literally out of his way to help me. And I made the silly mistake of handing in my bank card on my like, leaving due.I'd had a little bit to drink and I just thought, surely it'll be fine. And of course I get back to the UK, I check my statement and there's a couple of hundred dollars missing or a hundred pounds missing. At the time I was like, that must be a bank error, surely not. But I look back in it now and I just think, again, this isn't, this honestly isn't even a criticism, it's just the culture is to try and hustle.And if you, if it doesn't work, well, I tried. It's just, it's endemic in that sense. I don't doubt that there most likely have been over the years some very shady practices on the behalf of Western oil companies and Western governments. You only have to look at the history of, BP and the UK government and Americans in Iran and coups to get oil and all these sorts of things.But I'm just talking about like the corruption that I've seen, it seemed, Cultural in that sense. It's just everywhere. The one thing that I would say is that companies I've worked for within the contracts is very heavy anti corruption. So the FCPA, if I'm remembering that right, in the US. The anti corruption laws are very strong to the point where if a company official from a country, say like Scotland, is a manager and he signs off on a bribery expense, he can actually, if I'm right in recalling this, he can end up going to jail himself for that.So a hundred percent, I'm sure it's happening by at the same time legally, there are some very strict laws against it. Leafbox: When they just outsource to local sub providers, that's what I would imagine they do to get around that. Andrew: I think it's a case of well, just don't tell me sort of thing.Leafbox: Yeah. Andrew: I'm pretty sure that, that's why. Well, Leafbox: I think people don't understand if you haven't been to these countries, it's just it's just not Norway. It's not. Yeah. It's a very different. Yeah. Andrew: And. I, sorry to interrupt you, but I've done quite a bit of work in Norway and I have found that some countries and some cultures seem to have a difficulty accepting that the world isn't the way that they are.And I think that that, not to, not to boast or to my trumpet here, but I think that one thing that I've learned over the years is that some places they just are the way they are. And it's, of course you don't want to encourage. Corruption, you don't want to encourage mistreatment, but I don't believe it's your right.Like I'm like, I live in Japan now and some things, a lot of things about Japan I absolutely love, but there are also some things about Japan that just don't seem right to me. But it's not my place to come in and say, right, you're doing this wrong. You should be doing this the other way. It just isn't, it's not my country.And I felt the same way in Africa. There's loads of things about Nigeria that I was like, this is absolute madness. But it's their madness, it's not my madness, and I'm a guest in their country. Leafbox: What do you think the difference, in your email to me, you wrote about the colonial being British, how's that relationship been for you?You've, non interventionist now, but you wrote about, your forefathers or previous generations having quote, good intentions. Maybe tell me about that. Andrew: I think that I know that there's a lot in the UK as with America now that's quite, there's a lot of attempt to be revisionist within history and question history, which I'm a big fan of people questioning history.I just think once again, that we are tending to look at things from a very Western point of view without taking into account like global history. I know believe, through my experience of traveling, I now think, well, exactly like what I just said, I don't think it's our place to change countries to mold them in our ways, but I do have a more charitable view of a lot of our maybe not every one of them, certainly not every country's colonial adventures, but I do think that some of them were more motivated by, as I said, a Christian desire to end certain barbaric practices.If you look at, the I forget what the practice is called, but the practice of people burning their their wives on the husband's funeral pyre in India and the whole slavery, which, yes, Britain was a part of but it's quite clear that, the British Navy was very important, effective in, in, in ending the global slave trade.So I'm very proud of where I come from and I'm proud of my ancestors. I don't deny that They were put that they, there weren't some, as I said, some negative aspects and atrocities, but I just think that again, when it comes to, and I think about this more because I have kids now.So I think about how I want them to feel about the country going forward. This is part of, traveling. You see so many countries where people are so proud of their country. Nigerians were some of the most proud people I think I've ever met, and it's the same in Japan. And I worry the direction our country's going, both the UK and the US, when we were raising a generation of children who are being taught to be embarrassed by where they come from.Leafbox: Going back to oil for a second, Andrew, the colonial legacy is impossible to digest in a short interview, but do you have, what's the general like Pemex or the Venezuelan oil companies or the Russian oil companies? What's your general impression of nationalized oil companies versus the private?Andrew: Yeah. I so I guess my biggest experience is in Azerbaijan, there's a company called Soka which is the national oil company. And of course all these national oil companies, a lot of them have shares in international like private oil companies.So it's not always a clear divide of either one or the other, but I guess I, as someone who really. believes in capitalism. I think that in terms of efficiency and certainly in terms of safety, in terms of environmental compliance, I think that the private oil companies are much more answerable to activism, to just a sense of corporate responsibility than private oil companies.And if you're in somewhere like Russia, like you say, Venezuela and the national oil companies is polluting the water. Well, What are you going to do about compared to a private oil company who has, a much more, it has shareholders and I guess more of a global footprint. But I also come back to the point, as I was saying about localization that these resources are the country's resources and I think it's quite right that companies pay.I wouldn't say prohibitive amounts of tax, but I think it's quite right that companies pay a lot of money in tax when they extract the hydrocarbons, and they have local content. I guess the ideal for me is private, but with a level of public ownership. But not actually running the operations because I think as soon as you take away, as soon as you take away that meritocracy, you end up with health and safety risks, you end up with just waste, and when it comes to something like with the large amounts of money involved That just ends up taking money away from the actual people.I don't think it's, I don't think it's generally a great idea, but I think a sort of public, a bit like you see a lot here in Japan actually, a public private mix, if done properly, is probably the way to go for a lot of utilities. Leafbox: Great. So Andrew, maybe it's time to jump to the oil and energy diverse mix.Tell me about what brings you to Japan. First, you work on nuclear and now wind. Andrew: Yeah. For me, I can't claim any sort of high minded high minded drive to change from one industry to the other. It was purely, I had a mortgage and a new baby and I desperately needed a job. So that was how I made that jump.The one thing I have experienced over the years, it's certainly the place I've worked. It's very, Unless you're in a region that has like a national oil company, it's even then I guess depends who you are. It's very meritocratic, but it's quite cutthroat. So oil companies, service companies, as soon as oil price drops, it's very cyclical.People just get made redundant. People, I saw people at Halliburton had been there for literally 40, 50 years being made redundant just because the share price dropped a few points. I've been made redundant twice myself. And yeah, it's just horrible. And there's nothing you can do about it because it's an economic decision.It's nothing to do with your performance. And that happens to, it's probably very few people on the street that hasn't happened to It's the downside of the high salary really. So coming into wind it was really an opportunity to, as I say, we wanted to live abroad again for a little while.And opportunities to live in Japan don't come by very often. And it's interesting. It's interesting. It's very different. It's interesting from an engineering point of view. It's a lot of heavy lifts. And Japan, I think Japan has a good attitude towards offshore wind, because everything else, Japan has a long term vision.It has a vision of a percentage mix of nuclear fossil fuels, renewables, whereas I feel like I'm fairly against it in my home country, in the UK, because we don't have a long term plan. We've had four prime ministers in the last two years. One of them wanted to build eight nuclear power stations, the next one to start fracking.And then the one now wants to quadruple our offshore wind capacity in eight years, which is impossible. It's quite nonsensical. It's quite short term thinking. I'm not anti wind, I'm not pro oil, I'm not anti or pro any, anything. What I'm pro is a science based, long term, non subsidy, non corruption based market solution.Obviously you've got environmental aspect of climate change, et cetera, which needs to be taken into account. But I found, I find a lot of the attitude towards renewables and towards the energy mix quite histrionic and not really based on facts. Leafbox: Do you ever think about, geopolitics as an engineer in terms of, where these pressures are coming from.Europe particularly seems so against oil and hydrocarbons, but if you do any scientific research, you just, there's the capacity of hydrocarbons to produce energy is just unparalleled in terms of the input to output. And wind is just not a realistic option. Andrew: I think that, I think there's a general I would say it's a mistake, but I think it's done on purpose, but there's a general attitude that seems to be portrayed in the media that you can have one company or one industry is virtuous and everything they do is virtuous and there are no negative connotations or motivations behind what they're doing.And then the other is just all negative. So right now, it seems like oil is completely negative and then offshore wind is completely positive. You look at the motivations behind companies putting in offshore wind turbines or the service companies exactly the same as motivations behind all companies.Neither one is doing them. For anything other than to make money. And I think it's simplistic and a little bit silly to think that the boss of an oil company is some sort of J. R. Ewing, person that likes to run over puppies on the way home and the boss of an electricity company or a turbine installation company or whatever.is some sort of, sandal wearing saint that doesn't care about money. Everyone in pretty much, I would say any corporation, that statistic about men are CEOs, they're psychopaths. All they care about is money. And I think there are a lot of like there's a lot of talk about subsidies.You just touched on it, I think. And people talk about subsidies and oil when they're talking about subsidies and oil, what they're talking about is the The fact that when you drill an oil well, which can be anything between, I don't know, 30 and like upwards of 100 million, you basically get to claim that back off the tax.Now the tax in the UK is, it was about 75 percent on the oil that they extract and profit from the oil they extract. But if you have that say 100 million cost, how many companies can drill three or four wells at 100 That you're going to get anything out of that. Very few companies can afford to take that risk.I don't think it's a bit rich to call that a subsidy when you've got the whole CFD process for offshore wind, which effectively guarantees the strike price of electricity. So you imagine if you had that for oil, you would have, You would have countries buying oil off the oil companies when the price dropped, and they don't have that, they don't have that, that, that mechanism, but you simply wouldn't get offshore winds without a decent strike price, which you've seen recently in the auctions when no one bid on the licenses in the UK, and I think it was the US as well.Leafbox: So in essence you prefer just like a free market, totally. Not a totally free market, but in the sense that a clear transparent market. So if that really incentivized the right incentives, like you're saying in Japan, they have that mix of nuclear and hydrocarbon and wind and solar. And in Japan, I always feel like they're just burning trash.That's their real power generation. Andrew: It's funny that it's such a funny place in so many ways, but you've got this island, which has, a lot of geothermal resources. But in terms of mineral resources, it's not in a great position yet. It manages to be so incredibly self sufficient in terms of industry, in terms of fuel price.Like they, they said to me when I arrived here, Oh God, it's so expensive electricity. It's like about 60 to, to a month for the electricity in your house. And it's a four bed house with five air cons on 24 seven. I'm like, geez, you just see the price UK. You'd be like, 10 times almost. So they managed to make it work, but like everything else here, like I said, it's a long term, long thought process.And Obviously, I guess we haven't really talked about it, and I'm not, I don't feel qualified even to talk about it at all, to be honest with you, but in terms of climate change, I am very much meritocratic and capitalist in that sense that I think the market will identify the most efficient.way of providing energy, but I completely accept that there needs to be a level of environmental regulation because going back to what I said, CEOs, I think of any company would do anything if it made them money. And I've seen, I saw this in Azerbaijan. You go out, you're back, he's an absolutely beautiful city, but if you look back through its history of being part of the Soviet Union, the level of just pollution was unreal and it still suffers from a lot of that, especially out with the main city. So I 100 percent agree with environmental regulations. I think that, I think there's a lot of politics behind climate change. I'm quite skeptical of international NGO organizations, especially with the last few years that we've had.But I think that the yeah, I think that Japan's got it right. I think we need a mix and we need to not. Pretend like we are doing in the UK at the moment that for instance, the electricity price in the UK is doubled since 2019. And it hasn't here in Japan, and there, there tends to be a thought of, well, we just need to do all this because climate change is going to happen.It doesn't matter that, that people are suffering now, I don't think, I think people tend to. tend to maybe forget the, it's like the, the just stop oil extinction rebellion types. It's the world we have is impossible to have without oil. Sure. You can reduce it. It's going to run out eventually one day anyway.So reducing it is not a bad thing, but to pretend that you can just press stop and then you can put in a wind

Dive into the latest episode of the Class E Podcast with Andrew Predmore, the executive director of Furman University's Shi Institute, as he shares insights into their innovative initiatives. From on-campus climate action planning to a closed-loop food system, the episode delves into sustainability challenges and solutions. Join the conversation as they discuss composting, student engagement, and outward-facing programs, including the Sustainability Leadership Initiative. Andrew sheds light on working with businesses for sustainability and fostering leadership in South Carolina. Discover how Furman is making strides in sustainability, from reducing carbon emissions to unique partnerships. Don't miss the innovative steps they're taking in waste reduction at athletic events, creating a blueprint for sustainable practices. Gain valuable perspectives on sustainability and be inspired by Furman's commitment to a greener future! Guest: Andrew Predmore, Director of the Shi Institute at Furman University Host: Mary Sturgill Producer: Isabella Martinez '24   Transcript:  Mary: Today, our guest is Andrew Predmore, who is the Executive Director of the Shi Institute for Sustainable Communities here at Furman University. Andrew, welcome to the show. Andrew: Oh, thank you. I'm excited to be here and excited to talk about innovation and entrepreneurship. Mary: Absolutely. Because you guys have some innovative programs, which we're going to talk about but you've only been here a year right?  Andrew: Not even a year. Getting close. So I started October 5th or 6th of last year so getting close to a year, yeah. Mary: How are you finding it?  Andrew: Oh, I love it. Mary: Not to put you on the spot.  Andrew: Well yeah I can't exactly answer like, oh, no good at all. But no, I truly am enjoying the position. And you know, I tell people that I really have one of the most fun jobs there is out there because we do a lot of good. And really, you know, my biggest challenge is trying to figure out what in the world to say no to because all the sustainability work that comes our way is good work. And work that's needed in the world. So lots of opportunity and lots of good things to do. Mary: So let's talk about that because you have some innovative programs that you guys are working on. Can you kind of… I don't want to say just list them all but kind of talk about them, list them and then I want to jump in…there's some that I want to dive into  Andrew: Well it would depend on how you define innovative right? But we have a lot of programming. I couldn't possibly list them all for you. Yeah, I would say like just in a broad sense, like the Shi Institute is working on and off campus on sustainability issues and we're looking to make a difference in both places. Andrew: And along the way, we engage students and faculty in that work. So you know, I'll mention just a couple of things going on on-campus and a couple of things off campus and then we can see where that takes us. But on campus our biggest push right now is climate action planning for the university. So Furman University has a carbon neutrality commitment for 2026. It's going to be really difficult to meet that commitment. And so we're really intentionally working on how we are going to pursue that commitment or we need to reset sort of when we're going to be carbon neutral and what is a pragmatic pathway to reduce carbon emissions because we're in here right now and the lights are on and we're using energy right now. And so that's, that's a real challenge for any university in any large organization. So you got to be innovative, you got to think outside the box. And we want to do it also in a way that supports the broader Greenville community. So that's a big thing that we do on campus and anything that we do on campus, we're always engaging students in that so we have a really vibrant student fellowship program. We also have a farm as you know, and that's an important thing on campus for students to get their hands dirty, and see what a closed loop food system looks like. So we'll probably get to that as an innovation but like, you know, we pick up the food waste that comes out of the back of the dining hall, we take it to a compost facility, we compost it, the compost comes back to the garden. The garden grows produce that is then sold to Bon Appetit. So we really have been working on that this summer, and over the next year to scale that up and see how much we can produce and have students learn along the way. So those are two things on campus. Mary: So quick question about that - Is the goal then to produce so much that then we can sell it to local farmers and stuff?  Andrew: No, I mean, not yet. I mean, the goal right now is to produce as much as we can that will then be served in the dining hall. So I'm gonna go to the dining hall in a few minutes when we're done with this, and you're gonna and I'm gonna see like all those heirloom tomatoes that we grow, I mean, hundreds of pounds and tomatoes this summer. We're getting close to $15,000 over the produce that's gone to Bon Appetit over the summer. So that really is healthy local food going to our students, our faculty, our staff right now, in the future, we might do CSA or do some other things where we sell that in other places, but for now, it's just going to the dining hall. Mary: What about the compost? What's the goal for that?  Andrew: The compost as you might imagine it… we've produced quite a bit of organic material, right and like so students out there and everybody listening, you know, be conscious of what you know, sometimes our stomachs are bigger than… what's the saying?  Mary: Our eyes are bigger than our stomachs. Andrew: Yeah, that's right. But then that translates into food waste. So be aware of that, but there's a lot of that and then there's a lot of leaf litter and organic material that comes on campus. So we blend that right? You have to get the carbon to nitrogen correct and compost that so we have quite a bit of it. We're going to start to sell that as a way to raise funds for the Shi Institute.  Mary: Yeah, that's kind of what I meant when I said for the farmers like local farmers, who are we selling that to? Andrew: Right now… we're not, we haven't even until now this podcast. I'm not even marketing that we're selling. And we've sold you know, several $1,000, but we're looking to scale that up because we have a lot of organic material and a lot of finished compost. The one little bottleneck we have though is filtering the compost. So we can't have plastic and forks and things that sometimes end up… so we have students out there sometimes filtering that so… Mary: I've seen some of the pictures that students have posted about people accidentally throwing away their forks and stuff in the DH.  Andrew: Yeah, the DH has a tough job right? Like anybody that's been there knows things are moving quick. And sometimes, you know, a fork or things just end up in the wrong place. But we'll solve that, we're going to filter it. Mary: So I want to turn now and talk about some of the outward facing programs.  So you have the sustainability leadership initiative.Tell us about that. Andrew: Yeah, so um, you know, think about it this way, like, like, for the world for society for South Carolina to become a more sustainable place. We've got to work for large organizations, right? And so and large organizations have to change just like Furman has to adapt…other organizations, businesses across the state need to adapt and so Furman and the Shi Institute partners with a nonprofit called sustain SC and each year we do a training that lasts five different sessions throughout the year across the state of South Carolina with around 25 business, nonprofit and public sector professionals that sign up to be in that and we're teaching them about the core aspects of sustainability. We take them out into the field and show them some of the challenges. And what we want to do is create a network of sustainability leaders across the state that are going to move us forward. So that's that program. This will be its third year. We have a really great class of people involved with that, real leaders across the state, and it's been fun putting together that program like we're taking them out to Waitis Island, which is a big conservation win. It's an under conservation easement. It's a barrier island off the coast near Myrtle Beach. So we will take them out there and show them like this is an amazing thing. This is amazing that it's protected in perpetuity, but they will also have to grapple with the fact that, like you all might have heard on the news this week that Myrtle Beach is one of the fastest growing cities in the US. Right? So there's all that urban development and around that area. And so those students that are in this program, those professionals, we're going to grapple with that like and hopefully that's going to help create better leadership and sustainability. Yeah, Mary: Yeah, because those people are the people who will then go back to their companies and it has to come from the top down, right? So that's a great way to network. I like that. That's very innovative thinking there and I like that because a lot of people in the industrial side of things don't think like that, right? Unnecessarily.  Andrew: Yeah, I mean I think that is changing. You're right and I think that the innovative thing about that is getting leaders embedded in organizations that then construct and flip systems to more sustainable ones.  Mary: Exactly. Getting them to flip the systems. That's exactly what I was talking about. You have one with manufacturers, a program with manufacturers, talk about that one  Andrew: Yeah, so this really was you know…I don't always love the word pilot but how about demonstration project? This summer where we worked with the South Carolina manufacturers extension program, and they know that there's like 7000 or so small to medium sized manufacturers across the state of South Carolina. And a lot of what they do is supply the really big manufacturing businesses in South Carolina. So think of the you know, the big name industries or companies that you all know like BMW or Michelin or Volvo or, or Milliken across the upstate, right? So they have many, many small suppliers. And then those small suppliers are under some pressure now to understand their carbon footprint. You know, because they supply these bigger businesses that have commitments to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. So I'm like okay, knowing this I'm like, alright, there's a there's a niche here for the Shi Institute right to step in and roll our sleeves up and see if we can help some of these small to medium sized businesses understand their carbon footprint, and it helps their business because then they can say to their customer, their large customer, hey, we're working on it. It helps us because we got students who need to learn carbon accounting as a skill. So there's a really nice win-win. And so we did a couple of those this summer. They were fantastic. We work with a French company, which is located mostly in Anderson County, and they make advanced textiles. And then we work with a company that's really right down the road here called Mosaic Color and Additives. So we had two students do their greenhouse gas inventories, which is the first step like you cannot reduce your impact on climate without first understanding where your emissions come from, that are driving that impact. And so that's what the students do is, you know, we worked it was very much like a client consulting type experience for our students, which is super valuable for them. Mary: That's the Furman advantage right there. Andrew: It is. We handed the company like a report. Here are your emissions, here's where they come from. And they can start thinking about okay, what can we do to lower emissions? How can we market ourselves as a more sustainable company as a result of taking this first step? So that was a great project and we're looking forward to potentially scaling that up next summer and I think yeah.  Mary: I love the fact that you because when we think of people who need to really work on sustainability, we do think of the large companies right because they probably have the most greenhouse gas emissions, etc. But I love the reaching down to the smaller companies or supplying the bigger companies because that really, I think, will make their partnership stronger.  Andrew: It should and it should create an advantage for those first movers in a small to medium sized manufacturing...because they can say to their larger customers, hey, we're serious about it. We're taking this first step. So we, we, you know, sometimes people think sustainability, shouldn't or can't work with the business sector and I think instead we need to be innovative and think about how we can support the change that needs to happen. And so that's what we've tried to do.  Mary: Because we're part of that community. So why not? Right?  Andrew: We're wearing clothes and we consume things and so we're all a part of this economic system and, and the challenge of sustainability is how are we going to meet human needs within the boundaries of what our ecosystems can provide?  Mary: What kind of obstacles are you facing with some of these things that some of these initiatives that you're started? Andrew: My own ability to keep up with all this. Like I mentioned, sometimes there's more opportunity than then I can capitalize on it. I mean, we're also involved with some really substantial grant work, research work on climate and climate resilience in South Carolina. Luckily, I have staff they're helping with that. We're also involved with athletics and athletics at Furman and starting to think about, you know, how can we make those events… move them towards zero waste or zero landfill events and so we have to really, I don't know if you want to get into that.  Mary: I actually do.  Andrew: I have some, I think some really exciting things that we're just starting this year. So I'm not going to say we're going to finish the thing, but my biggest challenge is keeping up keeping all these things going. And luckily, I have a great group of people that I work with.  Mary: Because if you think about all of the ways from the concession stands, and even when people are tailgating and all that kind of stuff. That is a huge area that could be fixed. Right? So how are you… what kinds of things are you talking about?  Andrew: Yeah, I'm, like I said, we're gonna take incremental steps just because of our own bandwidth. But I think students, we have an eco-rep program, and those are students that work in the residence halls here at Furman to encourage sustainable behavior among their peers. They're going to help us with this athletic thing, because we need some, we need some person power behind this because there's some education but you know, you think about like, just think of yourself at a football game or a basketball game and what's served there, you know, and you start to go through sort of the inventory of what you could consume there, and then you start to understand the challenge, right? So you get a hot dog. What is the hot dog served to you in? Maybe some sort of cardboard type of thing? Well, could that become a compostable? I guess cardboard is compostable. Making sure that everything that the food is served is compostable. And then you got to figure out how to compost and collect it and you got to train people to not put what's compostable into the landfill bin. So one of the cool things we're doing and it is with that company Mosaic Color and Additives…they have a compostable fork, that they're working on and it's sourced from US materials, so it's not made in China. And we're gonna pilot using that in men's basketball games this winter, and we'll collect it and compost at Furman compost.  Mary: So that's the innovation right there. With the company.  Andrew: You know, so we'll start with basketball. Our students are also going to be doing… our Greenbelt students that live in the cabins along the lake are going to do some waste audits. So they're going to help us this year understand the waste stream that I didn't describe perfectly there for each of the athletic events. So that next year, we really understand well, like what needs to happen to move towards nothing is going to landfills, either recyclable or compostable. That'll be… that's the ultimate goal with us. So cool, really cool stuff happening there and just thankful to have athletics just super supportive and excited about it and to have Mosaic Color and Additives also, like here use our product.  Mary: Yeah, I heard their CEO talking about that fork.  Andrew: Yeah, and test it in our compost like they're very open, transparent about working together on that. And that is probably, you know, I'm not in innovation and entrepreneurship, but that's a hallmark of good thinking. Right? Mary: Right. That is innovative thinking.  Andrew: Think about systems, think about being open and transparent and creating partnerships.  Mary: Exactly.  One of the things that I find troubling is that we do have people in this country who don't believe that we need to do these things, right, that, that we don't necessarily need to be sustainable. How do you change the minds of people who aren't taking those actions that all of us can take? Or who don't have that same philosophy? Andrew: Well, I would say a couple of things to that. And you're right, you're right. That's a challenge. If you watch the Republican primary debate the other night, you saw someone say that climate change is a hoax. Well, you know, 99.99% of scientists do not agree with that. Right? It's established fact as much as science can be fact at this point that climate change is real and it's driven by humans. Okay. But to your question, which is like, how do we start to convince people? I think one thing to do is kind of what I mentioned earlier, which is…all people are embedded in an economic system that currently is not terribly sustainable, right? It's based on a take from the earth, make something wasted model, and we have to change that. That is a big systems change. So I don't think the way to do it is to place a lot of guilt on other people, because a lot of times we're embedded in a system where it can be very challenging to live sustainably. That's not to say you shouldn't do what you can do. I really think you shouldn't but don't put all the blame on individuals. Instead, you know, let's look at systems change. Let's look like I talked about let's look at training leaders to work in organizations that can flip larger systems so that it's easier for you and I to go to a football game which I think is a you know, I like sports, but I don't want to create a bunch of waste when I'm there. So create a system when I get there, so I'm not generating so much waste. Right. So there's systems work to do. The other thing I would say is, you know, you got to start talking to people about these issues in ways that matter to them. Yes, absolutely. So like, you know, we talked about climate change, you know, if you're a sports fan, I don't want to go to a football game at 12 o'clock in South Carolina, in September. And I think that is going to be a more and more difficult, unpleasant experience if you look at the climate models. So that's something that a lot of people care about. It's part of our culture in the South is to go to college football games. We need to do something. Youth sports are a big thing. Like is it safe to practice in some of the heat and humidity that we're going to encounter? So talk to people about things that matter to them as a starting point, instead of hitting them over the head with you got to change your… and guilt and all that and I think people will start to see that. So… Mary: That's audience, right? You got to know your audience, right? I tell my students that all the time. Whatever story you're telling. Start with the audience. You got to know how to tell it based on who your audience is. Right? Andrew: Yeah. I mean, I'm no communications scholar, but I've been in sustainability long enough to know that trick.  Mary: Yeah. So I was looking at some of your history Andrew and I'm going way back a little bit. In undergrad, you were a politics major.  Andrew: Yeah. Mary: Trying to pull that out of my memory correctly. How has that helped you in what you do now? I mean, obviously, your PhD and your masters and everything is on sustainability. But… Andrew: That's an interesting question that you know, I think probably some of the answer that I just gave, you know, politics is about speaking to audiences and convincing audiences so I don't know that without you asking me that question I've attributed the ability to answer that question to that experience, but maybe I think my undergrad at UVA was really more about like, critical thinking and, you know, a liberal arts education. I was a person that did not know what I wanted to do.I knew I was interested in political science and things like that, but I was also interested in the environment at that time, but I hadn't figured out environment… Sustainability wasn't really a thing. I hadn't figured out what my avenue would be there. And I think I know at Furman, we're better at that now, helping young people see the array of professions out there, but for me, it had to be like a winding path.  Mary: Yeah, I was the same way. Was there something that you came across or some event or something that kind of spurred you into saying, okay, this is the direction I want to go in, and I want to get my higher education, get my Master's in that and and go on to be where you are today?  Andrew: Oh, for sure. Yeah. I mean, it wasn't like I didn't read something, although there are certain things that I read that were impactful. I think if you haven't read Aldo Leopold, a Sand County Almanac, you should read that it's both beautiful and was really forward thinking and still applies today. But it didn't really come from reading or studying. It came from like when I was a kid growing up in Spartanburg, South Carolina. My dad would take my brother and I up into Pisgah National Forest, and we would go backpacking. He took us out west, we went out to Yosemite, we went to Yellowstone and Grand Teton. When I was 10 years old, I was backpacking in the Tetons. Mary: That's amazing. I love the Tetons.  Andrew: So you start with like that just and I found interviewing students over the years both at Indiana University where I was before and at Furman, you ask him like, where's your passion for sustainability come from? Usually there's some sort of connection with nature. And for me, that's what it was. And then ever since then, I've been trying to figure out how to make an impact. How do we create a safe space for humanity to thrive without messing up what we got.  Mary: So what has been the most rewarding thing in your career path that you've… because you were in sustainability at Indiana and now of course at Furman. Andrew: That's a good one. You know, I can talk about like, different sort of things that were accomplished either at Indiana University or even at Milliken. I was there for a year. They were one of the first 50 companies to have science based targets for reducing their greenhouse gas emissions, prove targets… and that was really cool because not to say I did that but I was a part of that. That was awesome. We did some cool things at IU around waste and recycling like that system was really not functioning well. And we set that on a path to do much, much better. And that was a big, you know, that's a big campus. So we're proud of some of those accomplishments, but I mean, it may sound a little bit cheesy but truly like when a student that worked with me like as a kind of like here we have student fellows, at IU we had sustainability interns, when they come back and I can see on LinkedIn that they're working on these things or they asked for a recommendation and I'm blown away by like, what job they're about to get. Man that's awesome. And to know I have a little bit of piece of that, particularly ones that I worked really, really closely with, that's really super rewarding. So it's a mixed bag, you know, lots of things. Mary: I totally get that because I feel that way with my students. You know when I see them succeed. So I like to kind of leave our listeners with a blueprint that they can take into their lives no matter what the conversation is about. There's always some advice or just some nuggets of information that they can use. What would you give to our listeners as something that they could take and do right now today? If they so chose to help in sustainability. Andrew: Oh, gosh, I cannot give you just one. I think we kind of covered you know it a little bit but if you're passionate about… I have students, students more at IU and increasingly I think will happen at Furman will come ask me that kind of question like What should I do? I care… what should I do? And there's all those like, personal things that you can do, right? And for college students that can be hard because you're not in control of your living space necessarily. So like you and I, we might ought to look at the energy consumption in our household and there's the inflation Reduction Act, right? So there's a lot of incentives out there for solar or battery and I'm looking at that in my house right now. So those are things but college students, you don't really have a lot of control over where you live, so do what you can. But I think the other thing is think about this as a system. If you want to make a difference, some of the things that you need to do are learn to talk to people about these issues and be willing to do it. And we talked about some tips there like approach the audience with what they might care about. But also don't be afraid to be politically engaged. Because that's probably the highest level systems change that you, that students and any of us can get involved with. So if you have a voice on this, use it.  Mary: That's a good point. I didn't even think about that. Andrew: It's not all technical stuff. It's about driving social and collective collective action. Mary: I want to circle back around to Furman again. What are we doing well, and what do we need to do better? Andrew: What are you talking… on campus or… Mary: As you know, our goal and our sustainability plan is to reduce our carbon footprint. How are we doing basically?  Andrew: Well, so you know, I mentioned one thing that we do exceptionally well, which is that closed loop circular system with food and food waste, and that's fantastic. And we'll be looking to scale out those issues. So as I've talked about compost and athletics and catering and so those are things we do well and we're going to do even better. We have nice greenhouse gas reductions relative to our 2008, 2007, 2008 baseline. Our greenhouse gas emissions have dropped like 37, 38%... Mary: Which is great.  Andrew: … which is very good. We have geothermal on different parts of campus. We have a good size solar installation across Poinsett Highway, so Furman has done a lot of things and so the facilities folks, Jeff Redderson and his team deserve a ton of credit for that.  Mary: We have five buildings that are LEED certified… Am I right in that number?  Andrew: I don't know.  Mary: Okay, well I'll look it up and if you want to know, just email me.  Andrew: Well, I know we had the first LEED building in the state of South Carolina.  Mary: Yeah, Isabella did a story on it. Yeah our podcast producer did a story on it.  Andrew: But what can we do better? Right. I talked about the climate action planning like we need to get to a point where we're looking at our greenhouse gas emissions year over year. And we're transparent about that. And we have a strategy to reduce those emissions year over year. So that's where we're headed. It's as I mentioned to you, it's it's it's challenging. We're not going to make those changes without careful planning, which has already started. So if you think about every one of or maybe not every one, but most of our buildings, this one included, has a natural gas boiler that heats the building. Well, their emissions are associated with natural gas consumption, so we need to move away from that but you can't just snap your fingers because Furman has money in that infrastructure, or that wouldn't make financial sense. So instead, you got to look at well, what's the lifecycle of the natural gas boilers at each building and which ones are coming to the end of there? And then what are we going to do then? We're going to electrify that building, the heating, and what's that going to cost? And so that's the kind of really the hard work that's ahead. And I don't know, I'm just really excited that facilities and other parts of administration are up for that work and yeah, and we're gonna, we're gonna do it. Mary: Andrew, anything else you want to tell our listeners about what the Shi Institute's doing and has in the pipeline?  Andrew: Well, I would say like this, this podcast is about innovation. And I want to thank former President David Shi who just committed a million dollar gift to us and that kind of support you know, whether it's $5, or a million dollars helps us do the things that matter most. So looking at issues around biodiversity loss and climate change and climate resilience. Instead of having to chase grants or other ways to support our work, we're able to… with that kind of support, we're able to do the things that matter most and so that would be a thing that were like, first, thank you and for other folks out there that want to support a group doing great work in the upstate in South Carolina, come talk to us. Mary: Absolutely. Andrew, thank you so much.  Andrew: Thanks, Mary.   Mary: I appreciate it.   Mary: That does it for this episode of the Class E Podcast. Remember this podcast is brought to you through a partnership between the Hill Institute for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, and the Communication Studies Department here at Furman University. It is produced by student producer Isabella Martinez.  But until next time, I'm your host Mary Sturgill. Dream big everybody.  

How do you decide to differentiate yourself and your business from your competitors? There's only so much you can offer to owners and tenants before you completely burn yourself out. What if there was a way to benefit you, your client, and the tenants all at the same time while increasing your profit margin? Join property management growth experts Jason and Sarah Hull as they chat with Andrew Smallwood from Second Nature. Learn how a resident benefits package can create a win-win-win scenario for you and your clients. You'll Learn [04:56] Is it Possible to Double Profit Per Door? [07:13] What is a Resident Benefits Package? [21:37] Ways to Protect Your Investors/Owners [25:19] The Pitfalls of DIYing Resident Benefits Packages [32:07] Increasing Profitability with Resident Benefits Packages [39:31] At What Stage Should You Implement a RBP Tweetables “Property managers don't just have one problem. They have a thousand.” “If we can move the needle just slightly to increase revenue, but also just slightly to decrease operational cost, right, it's very easy to double profit margin in a business.” “It doesn't matter how many doors you have if you're not taking anything home.” “It's important for property managers to keep the main thing, otherwise it's so easy to get distracted as an entrepreneur.”   Resources DoorGrow and Scale Mastermind DoorGrow Academy DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrowClub DoorGrowLive TalkRoute Referral Link Transcript [00:00:00] [00:00:00] Jason: If we can move the needle just slightly to increase revenue, but also just slightly to decrease operational cost, right, it's very easy to double profit margin in a business.  [00:00:15] Welcome DoorGrow Hackers to the DoorGrowShow. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors, make a difference, increase revenue, help others, Impact lives, and you're interested in growing in business and in life, and you're open to doing things a bit differently, then you are a DoorGrow Hacker. DoorGrow Hackers love the opportunities, daily variety, unique challenges, and freedom that property management brings. Many in real estate think you're crazy for doing it. You think they're crazy for not because you realize that property management is the ultimate high trust gateway to real estate deals, relationships, and residual income. [00:00:52] At DoorGrow, we are on a mission to transform property management business owners and their businesses. We want to transform the industry, eliminate the BS, build awareness, change perception, expand the market, and help the best property management entrepreneurs win. I'm your host, property management growth expert Jason Hull, the founder and CEO of DoorGrow along with Sarah Hull, co owner and COO of DoorGrow. Now let's get into the show.  [00:01:18] All right. So our guest today is Andrew Smallwood of Second Nature. Andrew, welcome to the show.  [00:01:25] Andrew: Hey, thanks for having me excited to be here.  [00:01:28] Jason: So we were talking beforehand and I was expressing how jealous I am of his amazing digital SLR camera. That's so zoomed in on his face. So you look really good today.  [00:01:37] Andrew: Well, we'll keep it on the face because I've still got some like summer workout to do the summer bods. We'll keep it the neck up here.  [00:01:44] Jason: Got it. All right. Yeah, I'm working out too. All right. Cool. So our topic today is doubling profit per door with a resident benefits package. You guys, your name has come up— Second Nature— over and over again related to this topic. So I'm excited to get into this before we get in though. Why don't you share a little bit about yourself? How did you get connected to property management? I doubt you woke up when you were a little kid and said, "property management" Second Nature... this is my dream future. This is what I want to be doing." So there's always a story of how people get into this industry, so.  [00:02:19] Andrew: You know, that's true, Jason, although if I think about every five to 10 year period of my life and where I may have predicted I would be five to 10 years from now, I don't think I've ever gotten that answer right, to date. So, I think I'll probably just stop trying, but really have enjoyed— you know, since 2017, actually is when I found the company at the time. It was called FilterEasy. A couple of years later, we rebranded to Second Nature as we saw our customers were looking at, you know, they had more than just one problem to solve. I think you guys know probably better than anybody property managers don't just have one problem. [00:02:52] They have a thousand. [00:02:53] You know, customer said, "Hey, we love the way you're working with us on this. Like, is there more that we could do there?" You know, rebranded to Second Nature, but I'll be quick with my personal story because I think probably other things would be more relevant to the audience wants to hear, but my background came up and coming up in sales was in sales and sales management for 10 plus years, also got into the nonprofit space involved with the Front Row Foundation, which is a cause I'm still passionate about. They put people battling life threatening illnesses in the front row of their dream live event. And so I'm the board chair for the Front Row Foundation today. I've been involved with them in various roles before finding my way to property management. And yeah the CEO and founder of Second Nature, Thad Tarkington, and I actually worked in the same company, although we didn't know each other super well. We were acquaintances in our previous company. And and I was looking to get into B2B from where I was. And that's what attracted me into the cool business. I saw it was a really great product. The customers really loved it. And that's what attracted me to the industry and I've loved it ever since. [00:03:57] Jason: So what do you think the major difference you see between B2C and B2B? What like really was driving that decision?  [00:04:06] Andrew: Yeah, I think, you know, in B2C, it was very transactional, like, have one meeting. And it was, you know, this was like a luxury house where items just to put that in perspective. And so it was like, you know, an order might be a few hundred dollars or a few thousand dollars, and it was like, if you didn't have an order form in 20 minutes, then you didn't have an order, right? Yeah, there wasn't a decision at that point. And, you know, I got a lot of like professional foundational skills that I really appreciate from those experiences. But, you know, what I appreciated was developing relationships and continually, you know, working to drive success right over a longer period of time with customers. But that was more interesting and more fulfilling and also would involve developing new skills and learning new things. And so that, that's what attracted me to B2B.  [00:04:56] Jason: Awesome. All right. Cool. So let's get into the topic at hand. So doubling profit per door with the residence benefits package. So is it possible to double their profit per door? [00:05:10] Andrew: Yeah, it better be, right? If that's the title of our episode. So, yeah, I mean, fortunately, Second Nature works with a little over 1500, just shy of 2000 management companies across the United States. And if you believe the, you know, studies that have been done out there and benchmarking a lot of property management companies can see their profit per door, you know, somewhere in the 10 to 15, you know, per unit range, obviously some less than that, right. And it's sort of some more than that, but a lot of companies we encounter, that's the range, you know, oftentimes when we encounter them, and the cool thing about a resident benefits package is in 30 days or less, they can be adding, you know, oftentimes $17 in profit per door, sometimes more, sometimes less. We can get into the details of why that can vary, but it can be a really dramatic move. And if it's a fully managed resident benefit package, it can actually be a very easy one to get going. So a powerful step to take.  [00:06:08] Jason: Yeah. I think a lot of property managers maybe don't see this. They don't realize this. We get so focused as business owners in the beginning of just trying to get revenue up, trying to get in revenue, and the challenge is: if we can move the needle just slightly to increase revenue, but also just slightly to decrease operational cost, right, it's very easy to double profit margin in a business. And Sarah had ridiculous profit margin in her business because she's ridiculously efficient. What was your profit margin?  [00:06:41] Sarah: On a bad month, it'd be like 60%.  [00:06:43] Jason: Yeah, so. Wow. And the big secret was she just wouldn't talk to people on the phone. Like that's a big part of it. And still had to talk to people. Yeah. So she's been able to do some amazing things with our clients in increasing profit and profit really per door is the thing that property managers should be taking a look at because it doesn't matter how many doors you have if you're not taking anything home. So let's talk about how they can increase this using a resident benefits packages. Let's define a resident's benefit package for those that have never heard of this idea. Let's start there.  [00:07:17] Andrew: Yeah. So the way we think about the resident benefits package, and I'd say, this is a generally accepted definition in the industry— is this is a suite of products and services that elevate and professionalize the resident experience, right? And so that's the 1st thing that it does, and it's creating an experience that residents will pay for, and that they'll stay for a recurring monthly charge, right? Alongside rent, there's the costs, right, of all these ancillary service. We can get it into examples of what those different products and services are in a minute. But that's what the property manager is doing. They're saying, "we're going to bring a different level of service. There's value in that service." and if there's a cost associated with that service as well, that's how they drive that as a profit center, but 1. That is bringing value to the resident, also protecting the investor from risk, and then the property manager benefiting as well. We call that a triple win. And that's what we focus on.  [00:08:13] Jason: Nice. Yeah. Value to the resident, protecting the investor and what was the third one?  [00:08:19] Andrew: Yeah. And the property manager should be reducing costs and adding a profit center as well.  [00:08:25] Jason: Love it. Okay, cool. So those are three awesome benefits. Now maybe we'll get into some specific examples, but let's go to this first one, the value to the resident. And does this work only in— because I know some property managers right now are listening and "this won't work in my market. My residents are cheap or my residents don't want extra value  [00:08:48] Sarah: or they don't care." [00:08:49] Jason: Yeah, you just want the lowest price possible maybe. So let's tackle the value to the resident. [00:08:55] Andrew: Yeah. Well, I mean, I think first i'd like to acknowledge some of the truth in that, which is that if I look at different asset classes, right, and you look at like multifamily, which has really done a lot of investment, like you think about class A multifamily major MSAs and like there's golf simulators and bark parks and like, you know, three water fountains and like all kinds of investment. [00:09:19] Right. And then generally the way you see them monetized is both as a part of the rent— they've figured out how to, you know, classify their property to place where they can actually monetize that in the rent itself. It's amenitized and then also their services like valet, trash and other things like that, right, that are going to be charged as a separate ledger line item there. And so when we think about single family and smaller boutique, multifamily and scattered site properties and third party managers, you know, and I think about the resident profile of who's running the class A, you know, golf simulators place we were just talking about is probably that's probably different value for that person than, like, you know, your typical couple in their 40s with a couple of kids and a dog right in the suburbs, like they're not looking for the same things, right? And what would be valuable and important to them? [00:10:09] So, I think it's okay to acknowledge that different resident profiles may value different things, right? Where we started. Where we started with this was, okay, we see a future where there's actually a really and truly incredible resident experience. I mean, dozens of dozens and dozens of products and services and bucketing them into what's already required in the lease. Right and so we started with that before going to "hey, what's like standard, but could be opt out or what might be really cool for some residents?" like, you imagine lawn care as an example. That's probably not something that every resident would pay for. And some would choose to do it themselves and. You know, but there's probably a small percentage of residents that really would appreciate having that kind of service done and coordinated for them. And there could be a great revenue opportunity there. So we're working towards that, but starting with the mandatory stuff, that's things like renter's insurance is generally a requirement of the lease, right? That they have it. When you think about paying rent on time, like that's an essential responsibility. [00:11:10] So how can we make things easier by creating a reward system by every time someone pays their rent on time, it actually boosts their credit score, right? Automatically this is happening. It's almost crazy to think that somebody's largest monthly expense is the only one that they aren't getting rewards points for and that they aren't getting credit, you know, benefits of their credit score for. We obviously started with filter delivery service. [00:11:32] Like, they got to change the filters on time, but how do we make that so easy to do? It's going to happen the vast majority of times versus all the friction that gets in the way but otherwise, and on down the list. So, hey, we've kind of tackled these things that are core least responsibilities first, and what we've seen is: yeah, occasionally a resident might say 'Hey, I'm not sure about the value of this," and they need some additional explanation. But when it's properly priced, when it's properly positioned and you've got the right product mix, right, with those things all done together... extremely effective, right, for property managers that hasn't gotten in the way of being able to perform, you know, and drive their core leasing KPIs and things that would create a trade off or a compromise for investors or the managers. So that it keeps that triple win intact.  [00:12:19] Jason: Got it. So what are some of the things that might be included in a residence benefits package?  [00:12:28] Andrew: Yeah. So we just alluded to rent reporting. Every time someone pays their rent on time, what we do is we actually help take that information. Get it to the credit bureaus so that it's building the resident's score and to give an idea of the impact of that, you know, it's common to see 20 30 40 point bumps. There's some incredible you know individual kind of outlier cases where we've seen 70, 80 point increases, right, in individual profiles. People who did not have a credit score before actually establishing the credit score, right? Which is a big deal and when you think about You know, especially today where interest rates and everything has gone like— the cost of credit has just. Like, if you look at the interest rates on auto loans, they've doubled in just the last few years. Obviously, everyone knows what's happening, probably, you know, with mortgages, right? And what's happening the rate on the home loan and credit card, right? Credit cards. Those are really the big three. And you look at the savings. Over somebody's lifetime of having a 40 point higher credit score, they were at some point to purchase a home, purchase one or two cars, right? And, you know, carrying the average credit card debt that American family has. It's 6 figures, right? It's 6 figures in savings of their lifetime. So it's a really big deal. So that's exciting. The rewards points that we mentioned every time someone's paying on time, they're getting cash value, which they can go then redeem in a marketplace where there's hundreds of brands, right? That they can go redeem that everything from practical stuff of Starbucks, gift cards do like, I actually redeemed for some like bamboo pajamas. I don't know if you guys have seen this or any listeners have seen it, but this bamboo— I'm a sucker for like soft material, like tactile stuff. So anyway, I got the bamboo pajamas. That was my thing, but there's wine, there's dog food, like all kinds of stuff from really practical every day to kind of fun and luxury spend, right, that people can leverage that for, and they can use it right away or they can save it up and bank it. They don't lose it over time. You know, the other things we were talking about was on time filter delivery. So as opposed to "Hey," putting it in the lease and saying, "this is your responsibility." but then residents don't know what their size is. They don't know what quality to buy. They don't really know how often to do it, or they're not going back to page 18 at least to remember that. There's all these things that get in the way. And typically it's your residents who have been homeowners previously. That would be like probably the best at doing this. They felt the pain, you know, themselves, or they've replaced or paid for HVAC, you know, bills or oil cleanings or what might you you know, those are generally your best change, but that's, it's a small percentage. Most property managers report 5, 10, 15, maybe 20 percent of residents are changing exactly on time with the exact right filter, exactly the way the property manager would want them to. [00:15:06] So what we did, it's not perfect. You know, Jason and Sarah, it's not like, okay, a hundred percent of the time it works every time. But we actually did a study with the national rental home council across 8, 000 single family rentals, 18 months. And we looked at four operators. And it was A B test, right? So some it's hey, you're relying on the resident to do it in some cases, even leaving some in the closet for them to change. Right? Most of the time they're right at move out right where you left them versus a delivery program where they're being delivered every 2 to 3 months. Exactly when they need to change, and what we saw was a 38 percent reduction in HVAC work order volume, right? Between those getting delivered and those not. And the reason that happens is because you go from, you know, 10 or 15 percent changing them to all, but 10 or 15%, right, change them. That's what drives different resident benefits because they're saving on their energy bill and they're breathing clean air and it's as easy as opening their front door now to take care of that lease responsibility. [00:16:07] So, that's a great one. I'll pause here for a second, but we could talk about renters insurance, which is a big one, ID protection, on demand pest controls, actually the newest feature that we've rolled out most recently, so that's a newer one. A fresher one. Yeah. Happy to dive in more if you guys feel that's appropriate. [00:16:23] Jason: Yeah. Yeah. I think, you know, people understand the list of all the things their brain starts to go, Oh, I could see how this would be beneficial. This would add value to the resident for sure.  [00:16:33] Sarah: So if you if you had a property management company that does not have a resident benefit package currently, and they're looking to implement one, but they're like, "I just don't know, like what I should put in there. Should I put everything? Should I put like just one thing?" Like what is some advice that you have on like what to include and why?  [00:16:52] Andrew: Excellent question. So we can provide a link, I think to you guys the other show, but rbp.secondnature.com, right, is a place that people can go. And we've actually built a contact form there where people put in the state that they're in, sarah. It'll actually pull up the calendar of the person on our team who works with property managers in that area. And so what we generally do in a call is talk about what are their company goals, like what are they trying to optimize for, right? That's the first thing we'll consider. But then really define what you want your resident benefits package to do for you and your residents, investors. Map out that triple win. Once that's clear, the next thing we will do is kind of share, like, Hey, in your market, like your resident profile, your property type, right, your area, here's the product mix, right. And pricing and presentation, right, that we are saying that's a. Compliant, right. Compliant with your local laws and regulations. And then B. You know, is getting the best business results, you know, for that. And so we provide that kind of consultative approach and it can vary. [00:17:55] I mean, the fact of the matter is filter delivery in Orlando, Florida, right, is a different problem than in San Diego, California. Right. So we're not going to recommend the same thing in two different places. We take a kind of like value based approach. Once we help work with the operator to figure out, you know, what that's going to be and what the right fit for them is. [00:18:17] Sarah: That's awesome. Super helpful. And I like that it's like, very customizable because I think this is something that people just, they hesitate on a little bit because there's so many options. And especially when we take clients through pricing. Like, what do I include in my high plan? What do I not include? Like, what are the things that I should— and these are always where we see people get stuck is like, what are the benefits that we should include? And if there's something that really helps them figure out, like, am I compliant? What am I actually looking to do and like what in my area seems to be working well already? I think that would be huge for people. So I'm really glad you brought that up. Thank you.  [00:18:54] Andrew: You know, I'll jump in with 1 thing, and then I think Jason was going to go maybe towards the investor side. If that's where we're going next, but something we saw included in benefits packages early. That we've started to see phase out. Like maybe that could be interesting for people if they've heard about the past, you know, keeping up with this is originally before we had a lot of what Second Nature and other point solutions have been able to do and really productizing and scaling some of these services is. You know, problem is we're figuring out, well, what can I do on my own? And I think some of that is still relevant of communicating anything that differentiates you from a for rent by owner, right, versus a professional management company that you have multiple payment options, right? Maybe you have 24/7, you know, maintenance coordination that somebody can file a maintenance request at any time versus I remember one of my first early renting experiences, you know, I rented from a dentist who had four rental properties and it was like two weeks to get ahold of him to let him know that it was freezing cold in DC. Yeah, I was a college kid that like wore flip flops when it was 10 degrees outside. I didn't complain too much, but you know, thinking about those kind of experiences being a professional, like probably the people listening to this, I would never have that experience, right, working with their company. And so, hey, we do think it's important to communicate those things. Even if you don't monetize them or necessarily charge them in your RBP, it's a good place in the RBP to communicate those differences between a professional property manager and the FERBO. But the one that I've seen phased out were these kind of like early on before there were things like filters and insurance and credit and stuff that felt like really tangible to bring in. We often saw things like, hey, here's a get out of jail free card on late rent, right, or an NSF fee. And the reason we saw that early on is because it was so easy for a property manager to say, hey, this is worth $50, right? Or worth 40. It's like this tangible value of what you're giving, right? As a part of that and communicating it. Because they felt like they didn't have a lot of substance up front. But as more substances come in, we've seen that phase out because people started to realize, well, if I'm incentivizing, you know, on time rent, is that really a triple win for like my team that has to deal with that? Is that a win for the investor? That's not getting their rent on time. And so it's really about how do we incentivize the right behaviors, right? That's good outcomes for everybody. And so that's, that is something that we've seen change over the last couple of years, some of that stuff kind of phase. [00:21:26] Out and focusing on a more proactive and incentivizing what you want to have happen type of approach.  [00:21:32] Jason: Yeah. Incentives matter a lot, especially with tenants. Okay, cool. So let's get into then protecting the investor. So, I mean, I can see how some of these things, just if the tenants are behaving better, it's going to protect the property better, like getting filters changed, things like this. [00:21:51] But maybe you can provide some more detail on that.  [00:21:54] Andrew: Yeah, I mean, I think you know, a huge one is if you think about in single family rental and that investor profile, you know, in particular, I think about how important it is to keep the property occupied. Right? And you know, if you can keep a resident happy and renewing, right, renewing their lease, then yeah, that's a big win for the investor versus all that. It's not just the vacancy cost, right? It's also all the maintenance and repairs and everything that has to happen during that time. And so we, I mean, we have a client. They've got a scaled single family rental organization, over 7,000 units that they manage in a few markets, right? And their average their average tenancy is just under seven years. Wow, which is like really incredible, right? And that's not just because they have a resident benefits package. It's more than that. But it's really interesting to see a lot of the property managers really pushing for "how can I drive a great resident experience?" That people will pay for and that they'll stay for right and extending you know, attracting great residents and then keeping them longer. How that drives investor value. And then while they're there in the property, they're taking better care of it. The filters are getting changed on time. There's less HVAC expense, right? 38 percent less HVAC bills eliminates 38 percent of those bills that it makes an investor question, you know, "I got into this for predictable and like risk adjusted returns and then boom, I have this 7,000 expense." [00:23:23] Maybe I'm thinking about selling or do I really want to stick through this or I just ate up the rest of my year's returns, right? You can eliminate those kind of moments. That's really what we're after, right? How do we attack those kinds of moments that you know, create those emotional kind of negative experiences for investors that would make them say "you know, I want to, maybe I want to put my money somewhere else, or maybe I'm not up for continuing this." so we think about how do we create a resident experience so good. Residents don't want to leave. How do we create an investor experience so good, they don't want to sell? They want to buy more. How do we create a team experience so good, the talent wants to be in this industry and wants to grow in this industry forever. And that's that kind of flywheel of what a triple win experience creates.  [00:24:07] Jason: Yeah, I like it. They're increasing the lease renewals. They're lowering their operational costs by not having those happen as often and because they're taking better care of things, there's going to be less maintenance challenges, et cetera, better property care, lower HVAC expenses. [00:24:23] I mean, this sounds like an investor benefits package.  [00:24:26] Andrew: Yeah. I mean, if you look at, if you were to Google resident benefits package, You'll see Second Nature's content, but you'll also see a lot of property managers. And of course, property managers, their website and their content is often generally pointed at property owners, right? And you'll see a lot of the results are like, "Hey, our resident benefits package, how it benefits investors". And you'll just hear it from their mouths, right? It's the things I mentioned and more, like if all of your residents have renters insurance. Guess what? You can get a lower cost on your property insurance as a property owner and investor, right? If that's the case because you're protected from liabilities, especially if there's a master policy in place that has special coverages that protect the investors. Like our insurance products and others that offer great insurance products in the industry. So, whether you're working with Second Nature or not, you know, bringing these kinds of programs and designing things to be a triple win is something we'd, we really encourage people to pursue.  [00:25:19] Jason: Now, if somebody were trying to design this on their own, then they're probably going to have to source several different tools and services, which I'm guessing you guys like have aggregated and some of this stuff is in house, like the filters and some of this you've partnered, I'm guessing, but you've already brought all of this together. So, one of the challenges or one of the concerns is in those situations is the business owners thinking, "well, I'm going to be cheap. I can do this for less if I go and source all these components myself. Is that accurate?" [00:25:51] Andrew: Yeah. Yeah. Great question. You know, it's funny. I think I was telling you, we had our whole team in Nashville this past week. And we actually brought a couple of our customers in, three customers to have just like a customer panel. It was great for people not in sales and account management roles, like people in finance, people in technology, IT, to really hear directly what it's like to be a property manager and everything else. And Kevin Patterson was with us. He's a property manager, manages about a thousand units out of California. And Kevin was talking about it. He's like, yeah, "I saw what you guys were doing. I'm like, 'I can do this.'" And he is like, "so I bought pallets of filters, right? And had them shipped to my office. And then we realized, oh my God, like now we have to store all these filters and inventory. What a mess. Yeah. I still have some too, you know, two years later." [00:26:33] So, I mean, here's the thing. I would say there's probably a percentage or two, like my observation is there's a couple percentage, you know, of companies out there who are wired in such a way and just so passionately logistically detailed that if they wanted to do, you know, a couple of these things really on their own, they probably could do it. [00:26:53] But I think most property managers recognize. That, "Hey, if I can make $17 in profit per door, I don't have to add to my head count. I can have this whole thing up and running in 30 days and bring that impact to my business." Right. You know, fortunately Second Nature hasn't lost. I can probably count them on a hand or two, customers out of 2000, right? That we've signed over the years. And that's our job, right? It's to continually provide a competitive rate that's attractive, that would make people want to pick us, but I will say this: we've advised a couple of companies who just say, "I want to try it and go on my own." And sometimes with Kevin, like we give them some advice, they end up working with us later. A couple of them have been able to make it successful on their own. We're happy to help, you know, in either case you know, and provide some insight and help avoid some heartburn. I think some things are harder than others, like insurance. Like if you're going to build your own insurance products, you've got to get certain licenses. [00:27:47] And I want to set up a whole different entity and everything else, you know, for that, but you know, some things are easier than others. Some things are harder than others. So it kind of can just depend what we decided to put together.  [00:27:59] Jason: Yeah. I think it's important for property managers to keep the main thing, otherwise it's so easy to get distracted as an entrepreneur. We're like, "let's add this and let's do this," and then suddenly the main thing starts to slip. So you're like, "cool. I'm going to beat that $17 that Andrew Smallwood's going to get me per door. I'm going to get it to $20 or to $30," or whatever. And then they're losing out on hundreds of dollars because they're not getting more clients. They're not focused on the main things in the business and retaining clients. And they're like, "Oh, now we have to do this," because you know, in order to do all of this, it's building another business. Building another business in the business. And one of the biggest problems I see with entrepreneurs, especially in early stages of their development is this idea that they need to just keep doing more stuff themselves and they start like expanding, doing other businesses. They have 20- 30 things. The most efficient model for an entrepreneur is one business. That's the most efficient. Generally, all these billionaires scaled one business, right? They cause they have so much focus. And I think focus is the most important of all five currencies of time, energy, focus, cash, and effort in relation to scaling or growing a business it's focus. That laser focus. And so keeping the main thing I've made that mistake, you know, doing my first conference, what I call my $2 million mistake, because we were growing at a healthy pace and then 300 percent a year, and then it was like, let's do this crazy, big, expensive conference and then sales marketing, like everything had to go towards this conference and it distracted the business because we were on the hook. You're on the hook with hotel. You're on the hook with the vendors, like everything that's going on. And that was really difficult. And that was a big lesson to me that the main thing has to stay the main thing. [00:29:51] It's super important.  [00:29:52] Andrew: Yeah. I mean, you said it so well, like when I think of Second Nature's own outsourcing decisions, right? Like I look at it through three lenses: so one is scale, right? Do I have scale or does the partner of scale? Who's going to deliver value through scale? Right? Second is skill, right? You know, do I have a certain skill or competency? Do they have a skill or competency, right? Who's going to drive more value that way? And then the third is time, which we were just talking about of like your opportunity cost and your focus on what you do and you know, I suppose there's a probably a fourth dimension there of just control of like ultimately the customer experience that you're trying to create can't be created reliably by an outsourced partner. And they're not dedicated and committed to that, or you're not aligned on that. Yeah. That would be another reason to do it yourself. But but yeah, it's, man, I take your point, Jason, of just, it's so easy to be ambitious and want to take a lot on and not stay focused on here's my core competency that I can continually leverage, to drive a lot of value. And here's how I can bring in complimentary pieces around it to create something bigger than that.  [00:30:58] Jason: Yeah. I mean, a big part of what we do at DoorGrow is just getting entrepreneurs to focus and then they start to scale really rapidly. So, I mean, in this industry, it could be diluted focus on different types of properties they're managing because each different type is almost like a different business. They're like, "I'm going to do commercial, I'm going to do associations," and then they're like trying to run multiple businesses with team members that are trying to jump into multiple businesses. And then it's a mess. And they're just not going as fast. And so this I view as, this is like adding on another business, and if you can strap on these tools from vendors, other companies, and get these resources, you can go a lot faster and keep the main thing. So, yeah, love it. So the third thing we talked and we've touched on this in a few instances of how this can help, but the third thing was increasing profit. So, I mean, there's the obvious bump that you're charging a fee for this and you're get convincing the residents. And for the residents, I think a lot of this would sound like a no brainer. They're getting more value in their mind than what they're going to be charged, and then it becomes a no brainer for them to do this. [00:32:03] And it protects them and it helps them get better credit. But let's talk specifically about profitability, like increasing profit.  [00:32:11] Andrew: So, yeah. So I think, you know, at Second Nature, like we do care about the experience and providing convenience to people, but it's also really important to us that there's a strong economic case for all parties. And so the way we often design and the recommendations we make on pricing. I mean, listen, it's a property manager's business. So Sarah, we're going to let them choose, right? Here's it's their pricing that they're charging their customer. We're not going to get in the way of that. That's in their control. But when we make recommendations, which I'll say nine times out of 10, right? If not more. It's set up in such a way where a resident is saving over $100 per year compared to what they're already spending right on the same expenses if they were to go with the status quo, right? Versus being enrolled in the benefits package. And then we make that as easy as signing their lease. There's a clear economic benefit, right? For the resident for the investors with HVAC savings. Everything else we're talking about earlier. Well over a hundred dollars per year in annualized savings for the investor. And then for the property manager, as we were talking about, well over a hundred dollars per year. Right. And so that's when you create new value. The way we think about it is you have a bigger pie that can be shared right across all parties, as opposed to taking the same pie and saying, "how do I shave off a little more for me?" but then you're cutting into the very relationship that you kind of depend on to support the business. And so how can we find new ways to add on and expand the value and share in that value because that makes it really sustainable and that builds trust while also building your balance sheet and so that's the focus and approach. You know we recommend that property managers take when they approach pricing and the other thing I'd probably give advice on here is that some property managers will go about this and then recognize very quickly, "oh, this is the thinking. I can't—" it's so frustrating, right? When I see an owner do this, you know, like, cost based pricing or a cost based approach as opposed to a market based approach. And what I mean by that is, "hey, here's all my costs. I want to make $17 per door. So here's what I'm going to charge, right?" [00:34:21] It's kind of like a investor saying, "well, here's my mortgage and all of my expenses, and I'd love to cashflow $800 a month. So I'm just going to charge this for rent." At which point Sarah tells them, regardless of what the market dictates, "yeah, your property is going to sit vacant for six months or it's only going to be vacant for two days and you way underpriced." [00:34:39] Right? And so the point is, "Hey, here's actually a market based approach to pricing that drives fair value and a good value proposition to everybody." Is the main encouragement we take. And again, if somebody wants to talk to Second Nature, whether they work with us or not, we're happy to advise on what we observe and see is happening in that market as it relates to pricing. [00:35:00] Jason: Yeah, ultimately the market's King. However, there are different segments of the market. So if people are targeting people at the end of the sales cycle that are searching on Google for property management, for example, the market is going to pay less there, because now you're a commodity. Whereas if you capture people in the blue ocean that are not searching on the internet, which there's a lot more of those, then you can charge more, have more fees, et cetera. And they're easier to close, right? And so the other factor lever that we've noticed with our clients at DoorGrow, increasing their profitability is increasing their ability to sell. So their ability to sell services and to sell the value and to create the pain gap between where people are and where they want to be, what value they want. [00:35:46] That ability as well as another lever in which they're able to charge more than their competition and close deals more easily. And there's some other levers as well. And so there's the market's one of the factors, but there are some levers that can be leveraged as well. And depending on who you're targeting in your audience, then you also can charge more money. [00:36:08] So that's something to keep in mind. So, yeah, this is super interesting. So everybody wants to increase profit if they're smart, those of you listening, if you're smart, you want to increase profit, you want to protect your investors, that's like your business, what you do, and you want to provide value to the residents. [00:36:24] So why would people just not do this? Why? Like have they just not heard of a resident benefits package or why would they not be doing this?  [00:36:32] Andrew: Yeah, I mean, there are definitely people that fall into that camp, and I'm sure there's probably going to be at least a couple people listening to this who haven't heard of a residence package. I also think over the last few years, this has been a really hot topic that's been talked about a lot, and people are seeing it more and more. As more companies adopt it, they just see it. Like they see our flyers in the Zillow listings, you know, the second photo, you know, beyond the thumbnail, it's like, here's a list of all these benefits, right, that people are putting in the marketing language or listing language or on their competitor's websites. And so I do think awareness is rapidly growing here. I mean, 101% empathy is property managers are often so busy, right? like just to do the kind of like table stakes of property management. It can take a lot of investment into their systems, into their process. I know that's something that you guys offer to folks and help them with. It can really feel like it's hard to implement a change in my business, let alone, you know, I think this is where Second Nature saw a real problem to solve. Like, how am I going to go through seven different sales processes, right, which is really like 21 to 30, if I want to look at more than just one vendor for a service, right? Go through all those processes, line up all my agreements, get those executed, and get my onboarding and implementation set up at the same time. [00:37:53] And align everybody the same, like consistent experience on going throughout it. That feels like going to Mars, you know, it's like a real big thing to tackle. So that's where we really just wanted to be like the easy button for that and drive, you know, "Hey, we've got a million plus residents on our platform, you know, thousands of property managers that we're working with. And, you know, can we drive some efficiency and pass that benefit alone to the customer," you know, is core to our value proposition. And so that's, I think what has brought, you know, a lot of people to us while we're growing very fast, have earned the reputation that we have, and at the same time we don't take it lightly. There's a lot more work to do. There's still still more change that needs to happen here, but I think the big thing is just the anticipation of all the effort and just the hard work of making any change in your business, right? Is a lot of times what people come up against.  [00:38:43] Jason: Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of property managers, people have heard me talk about the Cycle of Suck on the show before. There's a lot of overwhelm. There's a lot of stress, a lot of property managers struggling. They're in a race to the bottom in terms of pricing. They're focused on internet marketing, SEO, pay per click, content marketing, social media marketing, which is the bottom of the barrel owners that are the ones left over, the crappy scraps that fell off the word of mouth table. Like there's a lot of challenge there, by the way, we can help you with that. Reach out to us at DoorGrow. So that may be a big reason why they're just not doing these things that are in their mind, ancillary, auxiliary, and they're not adding this additional value and they're leaving money on the table because they're just too focused on trying to just get their business to eke out a little bit of dollars and, you know, they're stressed.  [00:39:31] Sarah: So I've got a question that Andrew if you have a recommendation on, at what stage would this be easiest for a property manager to implement? Is it easiest right off the bat when they're starting and they have no doors or a few doors? Is it easiest when they have maybe 100? Is it easiest when they get to the 500 plus mark? Or is there a stage at which it's like, maybe it's just in their mind, it feels too hard, and you're like, "Oh, actually, it's really easy, and here's why."  [00:39:59] Andrew: Yeah, great question, Sarah. I mean, here's the thing. Second Nature works with customers who have as little as their first one to two doors and are just getting started, right? A lot of our customers have hundreds or a couple thousand doors, and we work with a few clients that have 80,000 plus units in their portfolio. So we've worked with people at all sizes who have come and started all sizes. I will say this though. I think if somebody has under 20 to 30 doors, even as simple and easy as Second Nature makes it, you know, probably that person would be better served as they're getting their first couple of dozen doors on in focusing on their core operations, their core systems, their accounting platform getting set up. I would recommend probably holding on the— I'm sure my S and B reps are going to be listening to this and being like, "what are you saying, man?"— [00:40:47] And jokes aside, like I have talked to a few people where I've like pushed them on it a little bit. Like, "Hey, they've got eight doors," and I'm like, "okay, so here, this handful of hours, right, that you could spend doing this. Let's add $17 per door times your eight doors. Like, here's the business impact to this, and then what are you going to do with that amount," so to speak, right? And "how are you going to reinvest that in your business? Like, how do you see that as the best use of your time versus spending that going and doing, you know, business development or, you know, generating realtor referrals or whatever your strategy is for growing?" Okay. Your business to kind of that you know, initial point of profitability to support yourself. Like, how are you seeing that? And in one case, he said, "this is my differentiator. This is what I get to talk about in my market that I do that others don't. So it's actually going to help me attract more owners. I really want to do this now." Cool. Like I wouldn't stop that person from working with us, but I'd say generally, probably somebody in their first couple dozen doors is better focused on growing that and getting their core processes in a really stable place.  [00:41:47] Jason: Sure. They can add like one door and make what they would make if I had $17 times eight, right? So if they're focusing on that, but yeah, I get that. So I would imagine then maybe right around that 50 door stage is a really good place. This is where a lot of people start to stack and add vendors and get sort like. Then it starts to make sense to get some leverage because this is a lot of times I call the first sand trap where they start to get stuck between 50 to a hundred, because they're doing everything themselves. And this is probably where they can start to get some additional leverage and add some additional services. [00:42:18] Andrew: So if I can compliment you guys real quick, I saw like the DoorGrow code thing, and I think part of it may have been blurred out, but I think I got like the gist of it, I remember seeing, you know, how you guys had kind of stages. I'm like, wow, that is so cool. And if I was a new property manager, I would love having and seeing a resource like that of just, "man, here's like what I can focus on at this time that's right for me. It's going to get me to the next phase and then what to focus on here to get to the next one." Like what a helpful and useful tool. [00:42:47] So I just wanted to say kudos to you guys for putting that out there.  [00:42:50] Jason: Yeah, thanks. If anybody wants that for free, like they can go to DoorGrow.Com. Click the big pink button on the homepage. 'I want to grow.' And on that page, there's three steps. The third one is a YouTube video, 95 minute training called the DoorGrow Code. It's all about it. So it'll show you how to scale. And we're confident we're doing this with clients that we could take any business from zero doors to a thousand doors in five years or less. If they just listen to us and do what we say at each stage. Yeah. Very cool. So thanks for plugging us. Appreciate it. [00:43:25] Andrew: So I'm solicited. Yeah. Yeah. But it felt right in that moment.  [00:43:29] Jason: Yeah. There's very specific things that happen at different stages. And I think if you are at least at that 50 door stage or beyond, like you'll be crazy not to do this. And I love the idea of getting your resident benefits package as a unique differentiator just to stand out, which will give you more confidence in sales. And when people need confidence, the most is when they have the least doors. This is where confidence is a huge factor for them. Like when we take them through our process of cleaning up their brand, their website, all of this, we're really just helping them with their confidence level to go out and sell. [00:44:04] And they can go out and sell without all that stuff. They don't even need a website. They just need clients. Right. But doing these things helps them. And this is something else I think they can boost their confidence a little bit. And that's worth it. That's worth it for sure. So, well, cool, Andrew, anything else we're missing about this? And if not, then how can people get in touch with you or with Second Nature?  [00:44:25] Andrew: The only other thing I'd say is anybody who's made it right to this point, 45- 50 minutes in, like, I feel like you deserve a medal or something like that with attention spans, considerations fans. So thanks for sticking with us. I hope you got some value today. Sarah and Jason, I really appreciate the opportunity to be here with you guys. I really enjoyed our conversation. I love you guys' energy and vibe you know, excited to get to know you guys better. And and I'd say this if people are looking for you know, more resources and things like that, we've got at rbp.secondnature.Com, there's a bunch of things, we've got articles, we've got the triple win podcasts that we record a bunch of episodes there that people can check out. If that's of interest to them, we've occasionally got events, digital events and things like that, that we're putting on, if they're just looking to learn more, we've got some of those kinds of resources, or if they're looking to talk to someone specifically about what we talked about here today they can find a contact form to do that as well. [00:45:16] And just want to express appreciation to you guys. Again, really appreciate you inviting me on and having a chance to do this.  [00:45:21] Jason: Cool. Thanks for coming on the show.  [00:45:23] Sarah: Yeah. Thanks for being here. I think this is something that if you don't have it, just look into it. I feel like there's not a downside in this anywhere. So just look into it. If this was something that I had known about when I owned my business, man, would have done that in a heartbeat, but, I really think it's something that can like benefit all parties. It can like help set you apart from other people that maybe don't know about this or just aren't doing it yet. [00:45:50] And it sounds like they make it easy for you. I think that you're probably right, Andrew. Like you hit that right on the nose. Like they're busy and they're like, "Oh, this is hard." It sounds like they understand that and they'll work with you to make it easy.  [00:46:04] Jason: Yeah. Yeah I love that you guys are helping people through this process and making it easy. So We'll definitely be pushing our clients to take a look at this episode so that they can start getting the stuff implemented Thanks for coming on the show. Appreciate you. Awesome.  [00:46:17] Andrew: Thanks guys.  [00:46:18] Jason: Thanks. All right So if you are a property management entrepreneur that's wanting to add more doors grow your business reach out to us at DoorGrow We would love to help you out anything else we should say All right, then until next time to our mutual growth. [00:46:31] Bye everyone. [00:46:31] You just listened to the #DoorGrowShow. We are building a community of the savviest property management entrepreneurs on the planet in the DoorGrowClub. Join your fellow DoorGrow Hackers at doorgrowclub.com. Listen, everyone is doing the same stuff. SEO, PPC, pay-per-lead content, social direct mail, and they still struggle to grow!  [00:46:58] At DoorGrow, we solve your biggest challenge: getting deals and growing your business. Find out more at doorgrow.com. Find any show notes or links from today's episode on our blog doorgrow.com, and to get notified of future events and news subscribe to our newsletter at doorgrow.com/subscribe. Until next time, take what you learn and start DoorGrow Hacking your business and your life.

Augmented reveals the stories behind the new era of industrial operations, where technology will restore the agility of frontline workers. In this episode of the podcast, the topic is "Augmenting Workers With Wearables." And our guest is Andrew Chrostowski, Chairman and CEO of RealWear (https://www.realwear.com/). In this conversation, we talk about the brief history of industrial wearables, the state of play, the functionality, current approaches and deployments, use cases, the timelines, and the future. If you like this show, subscribe at augmentedpodcast.co (https://www.augmentedpodcast.co/). If you liked this episode, you might also like Episode 92: Emerging Interfaces for Human Augmentation (https://www.augmentedpodcast.co/92). Augmented is a podcast for industry leaders, process engineers, and shop floor operators, hosted by futurist Trond Arne Undheim (https://trondundheim.com/) and presented by Tulip (https://tulip.co/). Follow the podcast on Twitter (https://twitter.com/AugmentedPod) or LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/75424477/). Trond's Takeaway: Industrial wearables have come a long way. There is a big need for assisted reality in many workforce scenarios across industry. There are now companies taking good products to market that are rugged enough, simple enough, and advanced enough to make work simpler for industrial workers. On the other hand, we are far away from the kind of untethered multiverse that many imagine in the future, one step at a time. Transcript: TROND: Welcome to another episode of the Augmented Podcast. Augmented reveals the stories behind the new era of industrial operations where technology will restore the agility of frontline workers. In this episode of the podcast, the topic is Augmenting Workers With Wearables. And our guest is Andrew Chrostowski, Chairman and CEO of RealWear. In this conversation, we talk about the brief history of industrial wearables, the state of play, the functionality, current approaches and deployments, use cases, the timelines, and the future. Augmented is a podcast for industrial leaders, for process engineers, and for shop floor operators hosted by futurist Trond Arne Undheim and presented by Tulip. Andrew, welcome to the show. How are you? ANDREW: Hi, Trond. Great to be here. I'm doing great. TROND: You know, you are a poster child entrepreneur engineer, Oregon State, University of Southern California. You are actually an expert on the future of work. There are so many people that say they talk about the future of work. You are implementing and, selling, and evangelizing a true future of work product, not just a story. We're going to be talking about augmented, assisted all kinds of reality and collaboration, Andrew, because that's, I guess, what it's all about. And you lead the industrial wearable company RealWear. But first, I want to get to the fact that you're a certified firefighter. Now, how does that fit into this? ANDREW: That's really a great question. And one of the things that's been passionate for me from the beginning is being close to the customer. It was true when I was an Air Force officer designing for systems that would support our warfighters and putting myself in their situations in life and death. Certainly, I think about it in terms of customers, and we were dealing with other lines of business and trying to understand the customers' perspective, and especially the frontline workers that create those products. And when I took over the Scott Safety business when I was part of Tyco, their particular market was firefighters. They were the leading provider of air tanks, cylinders, respirators, what we call SCBAs, self-contained breathing apparatus for firefighters. Now, I know a lot of things about a lot of areas of technology. But I didn't know anything about firefighting. And so when I took over that business, the first thing I did was go to Texas A&M and actually get trained and certified as an interior firefighter. So I actually put on all the bunker gear, timed donning just like you do when you're in the fire station, fought real fires that were built, and to understand really the challenges they faced. And I came out of that training really having a greater appreciation for just how challenging that work is. And I know it's shocking to your listeners, but everything we ever see on TV and movies about firefighting is wrong. Basically, firefighting, besides being terrifying, and difficult, and dangerous, is basically blind. You're in the smoke. You're in the dark. And my background in the Air Force thermal imaging systems and multispectral systems came back to me. And I said, "You know what we need to do is give predator vision to firefighters and give them the chance to see the unseen in the dark." And so, coming out of that training, I initiated an in-mass thermal imaging system for firefighters that went to the market about 14 months later at Scott site. TROND: Wow, that's some real background there. I'd like to start with that story because it reminds me that what we're about to talk about here, you know, wearables, it's not a joke. These are, you know, in industrial environments, these are not optional technologies once they really, really start working. And you can sort of say that they're first-line technologies. They better work every time. So this is not a case where you could kind of, well, you know, let's install another version and restart and whatnot. These are eventually going to be hopefully systems that the modern industrial worker really starts to trust to perform their job efficiently. Before we get into the nitty-gritty of all of the different things that RealWear is trying to do, I wanted to just ask you a basic question, what is assisted reality? It's a curious phrase. It's like, why does reality need assistance? [laughs] You know, where does that even come from? ANDREW: You can deny reality, but you can't deny the effects of denying reality. When we talk about assisted reality, it's a point on the spectrum what we call XR, the extended reality. It starts with reality and ends when that virtual reality, the fully immersive digital environment that we experience and what we talk about a lot in the metaverse. Then coming from reality forward, you have assisted reality, which is a reality-first, digital-second environment, which is what we focus on. It is the idea that this is the technology available now that allows a worker to be productive and work safely in a real-world environment. When you get into augmented reality, which is something that we think of when we think of products like HoloLens and other similar types of products, that's where this digital environment begins to overlay the actual environment. It imposes a cognitive load on the brain so that you're now having to focus on things that aren't really there while there are things that are really around you that could hurt you. This is great when you're in a safe environment, in a classroom, in a design area, when you're collaborating in the office to be able to immerse yourselves in these three-dimensional digital objects. It's much different when you're walking on the deck of an oil rig or you're potentially working around a cobot that can hurt you when your attention is distracted. And then we have sort of that virtual reality game that we started with in the metaverse where people are now kind of transposing themselves into a fully digital atmosphere. We at RealWear have focused on making a difference for the future of work and focusing on those 2 billion frontline workers who could work more safely and more productively if they were connected. And it makes perfect sense to us. If we learned anything from the COVID lockdowns, we learned that this idea of working from anywhere, the idea of the office worker working from home, working from the coffee shop, all of this now has become just a given. We know that we need these digital tools to collaborate remotely. What we only have begun to just crack the code on is that there are, again, 2 billion people working with their hands on the front line who could work more productively and more safely if they were connected workers, if they had access to information, if they had access to collaborating in a hands-free way with their counterparts across the world. And so RealWear, our focus is this mission of engaging, empowering, and elevating the performance of those frontline workers by giving them an assisted reality solution that is extremely low friction and easy to use. TROND: I like the distinction there. Even though this podcast is called augmented, I like the distinction between AR and assisted reality. Because there's really, I guess, you can see it more clearly in the consumer space where it sounds so fascinating to enter these virtual worlds. But in industry, the virtual is really subservient and needs to be subservient to the very reality. So I guess assisting reality is the point here. It's not the endpoint that is necessarily the virtual. You're using the technologies, if I understand it, to strengthen the ability to survive and be very, very efficient in reality as opposed to entering some sort of virtual space where you are simulating more. You're talking about critical applications in the physical industrial reality, so that's now clear to me. Having said that, this is not easy to do, is it, Andrew? ANDREW: No. I mean, there's a lot that comes into this idea of making technology that's human-centric. And all the things you were just talking about really bring us back to this idea that this kind of assisted reality solution is about helping the human being at that nexus of control operate more safely and effectively in a variety of environmental conditions. It is really important that we think about the technology serving the person and not so much technology that is imposing itself on people, which is oftentimes what we see as we try to roll out different kinds of technical solutions. The folks who are doing work with their hands who are daily exposing themselves to risk have a very low tolerance for things that waste their time, are difficult to use, or distract them from reality. And so all of those things are factors we took into account as we developed this first head-mounted tablet computer that now is in the market as the Navigator 500. TROND: Andrew, can you tell me a little bit about the history and evolution of these kinds of technologies? Because there is so much hype out there. And you did a pristine job as to making these concepts fairly distinct. But how long has there even been an industrial product? I guess a lot of us remember the first Google Glass, but partly what we remember is the hype in the consumer market, which then kind of fell flat. And then they reemerged, I guess, as sort of a light competitor to you guys and then has since somewhat disappeared. But, anyway, there are a lot of attempts in the near history of technology to do this kind of thing. I mean, it corresponds pretty neatly to various sci-fi paradigms as well. But what are the real prototypes that go into the inspiration for the technology as you have it today? ANDREW: Well, I'm glad you mentioned science fiction because really the way I would start this, otherwise, is, say, a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, we had Star Wars. And if you think back to that show, science fiction has been part of how people work in modeling, how people work for decades and more, from Jules Verne all the way through to Star Trek and the like. And so when you think about these technologies, you go back to processes and technologies that support humans collaborating. And back in Star Wars, we had a character called Boba Fett who famously has, and now you see it in the Mandalorian, a little device that comes down from his helmet in front of his eyes and acts as a rangefinder and computer screen. Actually, one of the founding engineers that were part of the design of the first RealWear device came out of designing Boba Fett's helmet. And so there is really a connection there about how people have imagined people work and how people actually work. And the actual part really started with Dr. Chris Parkinson and spending over ten years working on what is the right ergonomics. What's the right way to shift the balance, the weight, the size, and manner of the display? How do you control the windows and amount of information displayed? And how do you suppress the outside noise so that you can have a voice control system that makes it truly hands-free? So it began with this idea of all great things start with a spark of imagination. And then bringing that to a very practical point of view of solving the problem of being able to give someone information and collaboration tools hands-free in an environment where they can work safely but connect to all the value and information that's out there that we enjoy every day working as office knowledge workers with the internet. TROND: Andrew, what are some of the technical challenges you had to overcome? I can imagine; first, you have to design something that is probably bulkier than you wanted, and then eventually reducing its size is one thing. But I can imagine the algorithms apply to, I mean, there's imaging here, and there's a bunch of design techniques to make this work. And then you said ruggedized, right? I mean, this stuff cannot break. ANDREW: That's right. TROND: What are the kinds of things that went into and is going into your next-generation products? ANDREW: Well, I think that's a great question. And, of course, as new products evolve and we build on the learnings we've had from having one of the largest install base of wearable computers in the world, we can sit there and say, look, it starts with ruggedization. Because, frankly, these frontline workers, when they're wearing these devices on their hard hat, at the end of the day, that hard hat gets tossed into the back of the truck. It gets tossed in the van. It gets dropped on the ground, or in the mud, or out in the rain. So we knew right away that we had to build a device that was able to hold up to that, things that a lot of similar kinds of products that are out there just can't hold up to. So we started with this idea that it had to be extremely rugged. It had to be lightweight enough to wear all day. And our first version did that very well. The Navigator 500 has come now just as rugged but now 30% lighter. So we've learned how to make that ruggedness, even in a lighter form factor. You have to trade-off on how you see that display in bright sunlight, in dim settings. You have to think about how you operate in a noisy environment. So you can imagine if you're trying to use a voice-driven assistant, whether it's on your phone or a little microphone device in your home, you use a wake-up word, and then you have to try to talk clearly. And if you don't talk clearly, you end up having it not do what you want. That's very frustrating for a frontline worker, and it's just downright distracting and dangerous at times. So we chose to have a system and voice control that does not require a wake-up word. It's always listening. And it listens in context to what's on the screen. Literally, what we say is you say what you see. And that's about all the training you need to learn how to use the Navigator 500 effectively. And because it's so easy and intuitive, people get used to it quickly. And they go gravitate towards how it's making their work easier to get to, how it's easy to launch a collaborative meeting in any number of key applications, whether it's Microsoft Teams, Cisco, Webex on demand, whether it's Zoom, whether it's TeamViewer, any number of other partners that we have in terms of the types of collaborations. TROND: Well, I want to get into some of the use cases in a second, but just briefly, so you were founded as a company in 2016. And you're now, I guess, 140-some employees. I mean, it's fairly recent. This is not something that you've been doing since the '70s here. But on the other hand, this is also very challenging. It's not like you produce something, and all of industry immediately buys into it. So I just wanted to address that, that this particular market, even though it's always been there as this potential, there doesn't seem to have been kind of a killer application like there is in some other hardware markets. And maybe you're thinking you will be one. But I just wanted you to address this issue. Recently, the IBC the analysts came out with this prediction that they're forecasting a decline actually year over year in units sold. And they're also saying a lot of new vendors are going to come into this market, but the market is not very mature right now. What do you say to that kind of an argument? ANDREW: There's a lot to unpack there, so forgive me if I miss some of the things you brought up there. But I'd start really with RealWear and how we develop this. The Navigator 500, the product we have on the market today, is highly modular, lightweight, does all these types of things, and that's really the eighth generation. Even though we only have been around since 2016, the thinking behind this form factor has gone on for eight generations. So we've got a lot more maturity than some of the other folks who might be thinking about entering this market. We've also focused entirely from the beginning on that industrial frontline worker. It's a niche of over 2 billion people but very different from the consumer aspect and what people have gotten used to in terms of dealing with a piece of glass that they might carry in their pocket all day long. We think that A, we've kind of created this assisted reality space. We've won in so many of these industrial cases because of the way we make work safer and more productive. We've now passed applications where we've had installations over 3,500 units with a single use. We've got, in multiple cases, over 1,000 deployments. We've got 75-80 deployments of over 100 units. So we really have broken through. And what we see is whenever we talk about the assisted reality market, or we can talk more broadly, we usually only see data on augmented reality. They put all these smart glasses in sort of a category. And we're really only a portion of what they count as smart glasses. So when they start saying there's downward pressure on that market or it's not growing as fast, it goes back to something I just read in a book about builders in terms of how innovation happens. And the author described augmented reality as a solution looking for a problem. We came at it with a particular problem we were solving, and that's I think the big difference between us and a lot of how people have come into this space. We knew exactly the problem we're trying to solve. We knew that we wanted to make the human the central part of that control Nexus. And we knew that we wanted to be in a space where others would find it difficult to succeed. And so, as we've been successful here and as we continue to grow and expand these deployments and getting into larger and larger deployments, we know that others will kind of begin to look into this space and try to compete. But most of them are bridging over from that consumer side where a lot of the fundamental design trade-offs they've made do not well-support all shift use in a ruggedized environment and with the ease of use that we've designed into our products. TROND: Andrew, that makes a lot of sense to me. MID-ROLL AD: In the new book from Wiley, Augmented Lean: A Human-Centric Framework for Managing Frontline Operations, serial startup founder Dr. Natan Linder and futurist podcaster Dr. Trond Arne Undheim deliver an urgent and incisive exploration of when, how, and why to augment your workforce with technology, and how to do it in a way that scales, maintains innovation, and allows the organization to thrive. The key thing is to prioritize humans over machines. Here's what Klaus Schwab, Executive Chairman of the World Economic Forum, says about the book: "Augmented Lean is an important puzzle piece in the fourth industrial revolution." Find out more on www.augmentedlean.com, and pick up the book in a bookstore near you. TROND: Let's talk about some of these bigger deployments. So I don't know if you can mention names, but the biggest one, I'm assuming, is in the automotive industry because they are at the forefront of a lot of automation technology. So I'm just going to make that assumption. Tell me a little bit about that deployment. What is it all about? What are they using it for? What can you tell me about what they're using it for? ANDREW: Thank you, Trond. And I'm super excited about our success in the automotive sector, not only just because of what it represents but because, as an industry, it's so central to economies across the globe. And when we think about the transformation of that industry going to electrification, that change creates opportunity for us as well. So today, with our partner TeamViewer we're in over 3,500 dealerships. Virtually every dealership in America now has a RealWear product in it. For those technicians, when they're dealing with a particularly tough problem, they're able to put on our device as simple as what I'm doing here, just putting on their Navigator, their HMT-1. And they can call and connect with a technical assistance center in Detroit and have a first-person conversation with an expert who can help walk them through that repair, whether it's pushing diagrams to them to, illustrating over the video that they're getting but helping them solve that problem faster. And why is this so significant? Well, because from the customer point of view, you're happy that your problem is being solved quicker. You've got your car back. The dealer is happy because now they've been able to invoice the customer or invoice for it in this particular case to get their warranty repair dollars back. And Ford is happy because now they've got a happy customer, and they've got a better reputation and user experience. So it's a very positively reinforced system. And so when you think about that application alone of just being able to solve problems of existing cars, now think about the introduction of all of these electric vehicles to dealers, not only with Ford but anybody else you can think of is moving into electrification. There are a lot of technicians who know how to work on a gasoline engine, but very few who maybe know how to really solve those electricals. So this is a way that these dealers can bridge the skills gap that exists between what they have and what they need to be able to do in the near future. And that skills gap, by the way, is recognized not just in the automotive industry, but you and I experience it every day when we deal with restaurant industry, service industries, trucking. You think about any kind of skilled labor situation; we know demographically we've got a big gap. And that's going to be persistent for decades. And so a tool, a knowledge transfer platform that lets people move up that learning curve more rapidly to do more meaningful work, to be more self-actualized as they do that not only helps people but it helps industry serve their customers. And so we see ourselves really at the forefront of transforming work as we know it. TROND: I'm so glad you went to the skills, and it's so exciting that that's the main application right now because I think there's a lot of discussion, obviously, in the industry across sectors about the skills gap; they say, right? That the gap...we have to train people, or they have to go to school. They have to learn. It's an endless complexity. But, I mean, you're sort of saying the opposite. You're sort of saying cancel the training, put the headset on. Some of these things, very advanced training, very advanced advice, real-time support, can happen without going aside, looking at a computer, calling someone up, talking to you, you know, see you next week with your car. And then, meanwhile, what you're doing is scratching your head for a while, trying to figure out what's wrong. But you're saying this creates a much more dynamic scenario both for delivering the service and actually for the human worker who's trying to deliver some sort of service here and is plugged into an information ecosystem. I'm just wondering, is that a very, very typical use case? And do you foresee that that is the use case for assisted reality? Or are there wildly different use cases just depending on, I mean, pick another industry. I was just imagining the medical industry, famously remote surgery, or whatever it is. Some sort of assistance during surgery is obviously the big use case. I could imagine that there's something to be done here also with RealWear. ANDREW: Yeah, I mean, this is such an exciting area and topic to talk about, education, how people are educated, how that education plays to their employment and their employability, and how they add value and have careers. And we all have talked about whether university work is preparing people for the kinds of careers there are today or whether or not we need to be considering other kinds of applications, going direct to coding or whatever else. So when you talk about frontline workers, it's absolutely a matter of specific knowledge. It's not just general knowledge that matters. It's very specific things that can happen. And so by connecting people to experts, you do two things: you get the job done right away, but you also mature that worker because they learn from those experiences. And they can use our device to actually, while they're doing the work, film it. It can be curated and then used as training videos for the next generation of work that goes with it. So I think that alone is really exciting. There are so many use cases, though, beyond this, remote experts see what I see that we've been talking about. That's really...I'd say the predominant deployment today that people think about is how do I collaborate remotely on the front line? And that's super valuable. But what becomes even more interesting is when that device becomes a solution for how you do your daily work. As an example, if you're a heavy engine manufacturer and you have an end-of-line inspection, and that inspector is using a clipboard and a checklist to look at how the engine is functioning, imagine replacing that. For one of our particular customers, that takes about 30 minutes. When they implemented workflow using hands-free Navigator, they were able to reduce that time to about 12 minutes because now the person is not wasting time going back and forth to a clipboard, or to a table, or writing things down. They're absolutely hands-free, immersed in the work, being presented the next inspection point in their display, being able to photograph it, work through it, look at a comparison, document it. And the important thing is not just that they're doing it faster; they're finding three times as many defects because they're not distracted. We know there's no such thing as actually dual processing as human beings. If we think that we can listen to a Zoom call and do emails, we're doing neither very well. We know that we're just quickly switching. And that's the same thing that a lot of frontline workers experience. When you make it immersive and hands-free with workflow, now you begin to expand the value that this technology begins to support so much greater. As we move along, the implementations and the deployments are going to move from sort of this collaboration centric to workflow centric to then being able to be with our partner, IBM. IBM has actually created something they call Inspector Wearable, where they're giving a superpower inspection to an operator who might be standing at the end of an assembly line watching a car roll by. It stops in front of them. The camera knows, because of machine learning with Watson up in the cloud, that, hey, this is what a good wheel should look like and immediately highlights the operator with a telestration that's the wrong nut. There's a scratch on this rim or whatever defect we might be talking about. So then you start actually using these technologies that are inherent with the system to be able to augment the capabilities of these workers. And that starts to get really exciting. I'll add one of the points to that is in Q4, we're going to be introducing a thermal imaging camera that can easily be just snapped on on the part of our modular solution for Navigator to be able to then snap on a thermal imaging camera and give that person predator vision to be able to see if they're walking around their plant. They can see that an electrical panel is overheating or that a motor is hot, or they can use it in any of the hundreds of thermography industrial programs that people use today. So I think part of that transition goes from just being collaboration to how we work and do workflows to actually augmenting the capabilities of the folks who are wearing these wearable computers. TROND: Yeah, and that's so interesting. And, I guess, correct me if I'm wrong, but that's where it ties into not only IBM but a bunch of your other software partners too where Tulip being one of them, where now that you're providing a device, it actually is the end client that can put that device to use in their own scenarios. And they can build, I guess, apps around it and find their own use cases that may not be the ones that are super apparent to any of those who deliver it, whether it is you delivering the hardware, IBM, you know, delivering perhaps the machine learning capabilities or some other knowledge, or it is Tulip delivering kind of a frontline software platform that's adaptable. It is actually the end client that sits there and knows exactly how they want to explore it, and then in a second iteration, change that around. Or am I getting this ecosystem wrong here? ANDREW: No, I think you're onto something there very powerful, Trond. And there are three specific dots we have to connect when we think about a sustainable solution that can be deployed broad-spread across an industrial base, and the first one is the device. The device has to be right. It has to work for the user. It has to meet the requirements of the environmental conditions they're operating in. And so the device is critical. And that's really where RealWear started our journey with that focus on the user and the user experience with our device. But the next step is really the data that comes with it. That's that part where it's both accessing data and creating data through applications that they use to feed the data lakes above and to feed back into this IoT world where there's information coming up from our equipment and being fed back to us that we can take action on. And then, ultimately, we have to connect to systems of record. And this is where Tulip, for instance, one of our partners, plays such an important role. It's that connection between all of these things that talk together, the device, the data, and these decision-making systems of record, that now when they talk and connect, it's a very sticky situation. Now you've created more than just a point solution. You've created a system solution where you've changed the way people work, and you reduce friction in interacting with those systems. And I think that that's a real clear case. I'll give an example that RealWear did in a very simple way. We recently acquired a small company called Genba AI. Their whole purpose in life was to be able to take a CMMS system, which is done for maintenance purposes, and working with eMaint, which is a division of Fortive, and be able to then say, "We can take that currently operating device that requires a worker to print out a work order, go do something, and then put it back into a computer, we can now do that with voice only." So, again, you take friction out of that interaction and allow them to do things easier but with the systems of record. And so that's why I get so excited about partners like Tulip that are making and connecting the dots between all of these disparate systems that we find in fourth-generation industrial complexes and making them work together seamlessly to give information to make better decisions by the folks who manage that work. TROND: This makes me think of something that I promise we'll get back to in a second talking about the industrial metaverse, which I think is far more interesting than the consumer metaverse. And we'll get to that because you were starting with this whole ecosystem that starts to develop now. But before we get there, I just wanted you to comment a little bit on COVID, COVID-19. Massive experience; no one is untouched by this. And there clearly was a future of work dimension to it. And people have made a lot out of that and prognosticate that we will never show up in the office again, or hybrid is here forever. What did COVID do to RealWear? ANDREW: Well, you know, it's an interesting perspective. I've been with RealWear in one capacity or another since almost the beginning, starting off as a Strategic Advisor and Chairman of the Advisory Board to, stepping in as the COO during the series A, and ultimately becoming the CEO and Chairman of the board in 2020 just as COVID was happening. So a lot of that immediate experience of RealWear was at a time when the whole world was starting to shut down and realize that we had to work differently. So I literally had one meeting with my direct staff as the new CEO before Washington State was shut down. And all the rest of the year was done via remote work. So it's not a dissimilar story to what a lot of people went through in recognizing that, hey, what used to be done in the office and was deemed important to be done in the office had to now be done elsewhere. And we came quickly with this adoption of digital tools that supported this digital transformation. And what it really did was act as a catalyst because before, you could have a conversation about the value of remote collaboration software, laptop to laptop, and that sort of thing, but nobody was thinking about the front line as much. That was a really tall connection for RealWear to make. We'd go in and talk about the value of a hands-free remote connected worker. But when you suddenly had millions of displaced workers all contributing, in some cases with productivity increasing, it now said, hey, by the way, do you want to take this great hybrid environment you just created, and do you want to extend it to those important people who don't get to stay home, who don't get to dodge the risk of being exposed to COVID, who have to go out and serve the public or serve your customers? And now, if we talk about giving those people connectivity and extending that with technology that exists today using familiar platforms...RealWear runs on an Android 11 platform. That means imaginations are limitation, not technology. All those solutions we're talking about can be done in an Android environment, can be imported very quickly, and provide a solution for those users. And so it acted as a catalyst to say that remote experts at smart glasses, as it were, were here, and it was now, and this technology was ready. And the deployments took off. It probably shortened our deployment cycle. Our sales cycle probably contracted by 70% during COVID as people began to realize this is how we can get work done. This is how we can continue to serve our customers. And so it was a huge change, not only in terms of the demands that we were able to meet thanks to the great teamwork of our whole RealWear ecosystem and supply chain partners, but it also made a difference because it changed the thought processes of leaders who now realized that creating a connected worker not only was feasible, that it had a real, recognizable ROI to it. TROND: Andrew, you're really speaking to me here because eons ago, in my Ph.D., I was working on this very visionary idea back in 1999, the early internet heydays. Again, the future of work people and tech companies were saying, "We are soon unleashing the situation where no one has to come into the office. We will sit all separately on these islands and work together." So I would say I guess what has happened now is there's a greater awareness of the need for hybrid solutions meaning some people are physically there, others are not. But the powerful thing that you are enabling and demonstrating visually and physically is that remote is one thing and that it remains challenging, but it can now, in greater extent, be done. Physical presence is still really, really powerful. But what's truly powerful is the combination of which. It is the combination of physically being there and being amplified or assisted, or eventually perhaps in a fruitful way augmented but without losing touch with reality if it can be done safely. That's really the power. So there's something really interesting about that because you can talk about it all you want. You can say, well, with all the technology in the world, you know, maybe we don't want to meet each other anymore. Yeah, fine. But there's a powerful argument there that says, well if you combine the world's biggest computer, the human being, with some secondary computers, you know, AIs and RealWears and other things that have other comparative advantages, the combination of that in a factory floor setting or perhaps in other types of knowledge work is really, really hard to beat, especially if you can get it working in a team setting. I guess as you were thinking more about this as a futuristic solution, Andrew, what kind of changes does this type of technology do to teamwork? Because we've been speaking about the simple, remote expert assistance, which is sort of like one expert calling up another expert at headquarters. And then, you move into workflow, which is powerful product workflow in industry. But what about the group collaboration possible with this kind of thing? Have you seen any scenarios where multiple of these headsets are being used contemporaneously? ANDREW: Yeah, I mean, I think there's the application of not only people using them broadly in doing their work but also then being connected to a broad number of users. There's a great video that Microsoft put out when they built Microsoft Teams to run specifically on our RealWear platform. And in it, we talk about a plant where, you know, Honeywell was certifying a very large deployment technology in a plant that normally would take 40 workers to go to this facility and physically sign off all the things that need to be done for this large automation system. But using Microsoft Teams and RealWear devices, Honeywell was able to do that completely remotely. They were able to have the folks who were on site wearing the devices going through. And all of these people who would travel to it are now wherever they happen to be, in the office, at home, somewhere else, being able to see what was happening in the factory and sign off and validate the work remotely. So it's like this world where we've taken away the borders, these artificial borders between the office, not the office, and then the front line. And I think that the biggest thing that we can take away from this conversation today, Trond, is that we all probably accept that some form of hybrid work is here to stay with office workers. We've just proven over the last two years that you can work extremely productively as a remote team. And we've also validated there are times when we just got to come together from a human point of view to accomplish even more in terms of some of the cultural and emotional intelligence and teaming things that happen. But what we've also learned is that those frontline workers don't have the luxury of being somewhere other than where the value is being created on the manufacturing line, up on that cell phone tower, or in the street laying asphalt. They all have a job to do, and they have to do it in their presence. And so when we then connect those people and give them access to all of the information that we as connected workers in a hybrid environment accept and the collaboration, we find that that is a place that really brings the dignity of that frontline work up. It inherently makes them more engaged with their customer, with the job they're doing, with their peers that they can now connect to so seamlessly, and, frankly, with the company. So I think that there's a change here that's happening that's going to be about the right degree of connectivity for the job. And we'll do more of what matters based on the work that has to be accomplished. And we're just not at a place yet where robots are going to replace carbon-based computing systems that are self-replicating. That's the way NASA described people back, I think, in the '60s is a general-purpose computer that's carbon-based and self-replicating. And really, that's going to be with us for a long time. And the dignity of those people doing valuable work and helping focus on how do we make them safer and more productive in these very challenging environments? That's changing the future of work. And it's aligning more closely with this idea of, hey, being connected makes us more effective as a company, as a tribe, as a nation, whatever it is. Connectivity becomes extremely valuable. TROND: It's a big trend. And it's about time there's some justice to it. I mean, you speak with passion about this. It's almost unbelievable to me, and it should be [laughs] unbelievable to a lot of people, that we've invested billions of dollars in office software, in kind of automation for efficiency's sake. But we haven't, until this point almost, invested, certainly not the same amount of dollars and euros and yen, in human-centric technologies that are augmenting people at the same time. Because there's nothing wrong with these other technologies or if they're benefiting office workers, but as you point out, billions of workers could be enabled, knowledge workers. They just need somewhat different tools, and they're harder to make. This is not like making a desktop software program. These things have to work in a real rugged context. Andrew, thank you so much for enlightening me on the challenges and the exciting not future anymore. Andrew, it's the exciting presence of this technology in the industrial workplace, and what that bodes for the future when I guess, people see the picture and are willing to truly roll this out to every frontline worker who needs this kind of amplification. ANDREW: Well, Trond, thank you so much for having me. And I think when your listeners think and hear about AI, I know the first thing that crosses their mind is going to be this artificial intelligence, the compute power that's being built into the cloud to solve all these technical problems. But I'd like them to also begin to think about that as augmented intelligence, the way human-centric technology can make those workers better able to do the work that has to be done by people. And we're so excited to be able to talk about this. Thank you for the invitation to explore this topic. I really appreciate the chance to share some of the things that RealWear's done in this regard. And I'd love to come back next time and expand our conversation. TROND: You have just listened to another episode of the Augmented Podcast with host Trond Arne Undheim. The topic was Augmenting Workers With Wearables. Our guest was Andrew Chrostowski, Chairman and CEO of RealWear. In this conversation, we talked about industrial wearables now and in the future. My takeaway is that industrial wearables have come a long way. There is a big need for assisted reality in many workforce scenarios across industry. There are now companies taking good products to market that are rugged enough, simple enough, and advanced enough to make work simpler for industrial workers. On the other hand, we are far away from the kind of untethered multiverse that many imagine in the future, one step at a time. Thanks for listening. If you liked the show, subscribe at augmentedpodcast.co or in your preferred podcast player, and rate us with five stars. If you liked this episode, you might also like Episode 92: Emerging Interfaces for Human Augmentation. Hopefully, you'll find something awesome in these or in other episodes, and do let us know if you do so. The Augmented Podcast is created in association with Tulip, the frontline operation platform connecting people, machines, devices, and systems in a physical location. Tulip is democratizing technology but also, importantly, empowering those closest to operations to solve problems. Tulip is also hiring, and you can find Tulip at tulip.co. Please share this show with colleagues who care about where industrial tech is heading. You can find us on social media; we are Augmented Pod on LinkedIn and Twitter and Augmented Podcast on Facebook and YouTube. Augmented — industrial conversations that matter. See you next time.

After Dark with Hosts Rob & Andrew – Well, the cat's out of the bag, and voters are starting to see Democrats for who they are. As the election day draws near, voters are beginning to see things clearly and what they see is Democrats afraid to debate Republicans on the issues. They won't discuss their records of defunding police, cashless bail, sex education for children...

After Dark with Hosts Rob & Andrew – Well, the cat's out of the bag, and voters are starting to see Democrats for who they are. As the election day draws near, voters are beginning to see things clearly and what they see is Democrats afraid to debate Republicans on the issues. They won't discuss their records of defunding police, cashless bail, sex education for children...

Andrew Stotz talks with Dr. Mustafa Shraim of Ohio University about Deming's approach to variation, comparing it to Lean and Six Sigma. "When you do Six Sigma, you're basically outsourcing your quality to an external source, providing the training, the titles, and all of that. You can cut it off any time. But when you do the [Deming] theory of knowledge and the Plan-Do-Study-Act, you have to commit. The commitment is really the big deal here...the component that is missing [from Six Sigma] is a commitment to quality." SHOW NOTES4:30 Variation 12:40 The problem with Six Sigma 20:40 Statical Process Control Charts 25:44 Deming chain reaction 30:03 Suboptimizing departments 43:01 Management by visible figures 40:05 Why Deming, why now? Driving out fear 50:52 Continuous improvement and Plan-Do-Study-Act TRANSCRIPTDownload the complete transcript here. 0:00:04.1 Andrew: My name is Andrew Stotz, and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today I'm here with featured guest, Mustafa Shraim. Mustafa, are you ready to share your Deming journey?   0:00:19.8 Mustafa: Absolutely, let's go for it. Thank you.   0:00:21.5 Andrew: I'm excited. Well, let me introduce you to the audience. Mustafa Shraim is an Assistant Professor at Ohio University teaching quality management and leadership. Professor Shraim has over 20 years of experience as a quality engineer, corporate quality manager, and consultant. His PhD is in Industrial Engineering. He publishes widely, and he has a passion for Dr. Deming's system of profound knowledge. Mustafa, why don't we start off by you telling us the story about how you first came to learn of the teachings of Dr. Deming and what hooked you in?   0:00:57.5 Mustafa: Yeah. Thank you, Andrew. Thank you for inviting me back. So...   0:01:01.9 Andrew: Yeah.   [chuckle]   0:01:06.1 Mustafa: The whole thing started when I was doing my master's and that was the late '80s, at Ohio University, and I was concentrating on the area of quality. So, I was doing research, and my research touched up on what Dr. Deming was doing. I was doing it in design of experiments and quality tools and things like that. But of course, you come across Dr. Deming's work when you talk about quality control, in general, and statistical quality. So, that was the first encounter of learning about what Dr. Deming did in Japan and how he used statistical process control and things of that nature to teach how you can improve your processes, your products, and later on, the management. But at the beginning, I did not really get into his management philosophy so I was more on the technical end of Dr. Deming's teaching which was mainly quality control and SPC, and just improving quality in general.   0:02:24.1 Mustafa: So, as I went... So I went, and I started my first job as a quality engineer, and quickly after that, maybe after one year, I moved to another company, and I became a statistical quality engineer, and I was doing... I was a part of a training program there. I was doing training on SPC as a part of a training for employees at that company. It was a union shop, it was automotive, and so we utilized statistical process control and what Dr. Deming was teaching. So, that was the beginning of it, but later on in the '90s, I started learning more about Dr. Deming after I read "Out of the Crisis" and then "The New Economics" about his management method. In fact, his management methods just captured me. I knew I got hooked on the quality part first, but the management method just brought it together for me. And since then, I've been reading and practicing, trying to at least, what Dr. Deming has taught.   0:03:41.9 Andrew: And would you say... One of the things that I started realizing was that the statistical... What I thought was the end was the statistical tools. And what I started to learn is that, actually, the statistical tools start to have limitations if you're not doing the management of the whole operation in a good way. And I think that that's something that really resonated with me when I started putting the pieces together. How do you see the role... And in a little bit I'm gonna ask you about some more specific tools, but just generally, we have statistical tools, but we also have management. Many people may think that you can just apply statistical tools and solve all the problems, but I'm curious how you see that interaction between the tools and the management style.   0:04:30.2 Mustafa: Well, as you know and many, probably, of your listeners already know that Dr. Deming had understanding variation, or some variation, as a part of his system of profound knowledge. So, understanding variation, under it, is really learning how to distinguish between the types of variation that you would have in any situation, managerial or process situation. So, that interaction there is really big. That really captured me because what Dr. Deming says is like, more than 80% of the application for statistical process control is actually, should be in management, and not necessarily just on the line, controlling quality of the product. So that was... It captured me, and because of explaining how many managers, many supervisors, don't understand the difference between common cause and special cause variations, and they start managing people with common cause variation going up and down, and they reprimand if it goes down, and they praise if it goes up, and that actually just makes things even worse in the future. As you probably know, it's tampering with the process.   0:06:08.8 Andrew: The best way that I've ever come up to try to explain this is to say to people, "Imagine there's 10,000 people in a stadium. They all flip a coin, and you say, 'Hey, if you flip heads, go to one side of the stadium. You flip tails, you go to the other. Everybody sit down. Okay, now... '" Or basically say, "Flip the coin again, and if you flip heads again, so two times, stay standing. And if you flip tails two times, then stay standing, but if you hit the heads and tails, then sit down." And now, your audience is getting smaller and smaller. If you do this 10 times, you will have 10 people, generally, you're gonna have 10 people that have flipped heads consecutively 10 times, and people that flip tails consecutively 10 times.   0:06:54.1 Andrew: And if we said, if we started off the whole game by saying, "Tails is bad." Now you've got some people that have done bad 10 times in a row, and some people that have done good 10 times in a row. But we know, because of the design of that example, that it's purely random. So, the question... So, we can understand that, but when we think about random variation, what Dr. Deming started to do is show us how that fits into management and psychology and how we're missing that. I'm just curious if you can help us to understand how that variation fits into that management 'cause you started talking about rewarding and all that. So, just curious about how those things fit together.   0:07:38.7 Mustafa: Right. For example, within the control limits, and those are the limits that are on a control chart, and they are spaced three standard deviations up and three standard deviations down. All the variation within is mostly a common cause variation, and it's due to the system. It's a system variation. It's not attributed to any special cause whether it's operator or something else that changed. So, distinguishing between the two becomes very important because if you don't look at variation from the perspective of a control chart, what happens is that you are in the weeds, and you look at every point as either really high up or high down cause you don't have any perspective as to how to evaluate or filter this type of variation. On the other side, also you don't want to not react to something that is special. For example, if you don't have the control limits, and if you don't have a proper way of looking at the variation, then you might end up also passing a special cause as a common cause, or not reacting to it enough to fix it and to make it a part of your controllable system before moving on.   0:09:16.7 Mustafa: From both perspective, I think it's very important for managers, for leadership, to understand why we do this. It's not just something that you have to do on the production line. It is something that you have to do in management based on performance. Look at your data and see if it's a stable process in control or if it's not, then you need to start eliminating those special causes. Like Dr. Deming said that, "Nothing really is born perfect as far as the processes." I'm paraphrasing here. But when you start a new manufacturing process, it doesn't mean that it's going to be in control; you have to work at it. You have to eliminate one by one all these special causes that come up before you start seeing a stability. And then after stability, then you will be able to work on the system part of the process, which is a long-term continuous improvement projects.   0:10:29.9 Andrew: Yeah, it's interesting. I remember a story. When I was working at Pepsi, we had a bottling plant in Los Angeles that I worked at. And the management were putting pressure on the people that were running the bottling machine because the variation of the level of the liquid in the bottle was getting wider and wider. And so, as a supervisor on the factory floor, my job was to go and kick ass, basically, and tell the guy, "Hey, come on, what are you doing here? You're messing around." And he just said, "Look, Andrew," and I was a young guy who listened to what these guys said, and he said, "Look, look at that machine over there. They spent the money to buy that filling machine over there, and you see there's no variation. Look at the old machine that they've got, and they haven't bought the parts to repair it. I keep telling them, if they don't buy these parts, I can't get to that point." And he was like... And I realized at that point that it was a management decision that needed to be made to reduce that variation at that point. It wasn't an operator that we should be punishing for that. And I think I wasn't that popular bringing that information back to management 'cause they wanted to say, "Well, no. It's the worker," and that's where I started to think about that common cause variation, and how do you improve and reduce variation?   0:11:48.3 Mustafa: Right, right. And if you leave it also to the worker, sometimes if they don't know what to do, they start tampering with the, actually, production process, and it makes it worse. So, a training for them on variation is also important. It's not only for management but also for workers as well.   0:12:08.2 Andrew: Yeah, good point. I know your expertise in this area is so valuable, and I think that it's great to have you maybe break down the following four terms that we hear, and maybe just generally discuss the differences, and then we'll talk about them in more detail. But the first term is Lean or continuous flow, the second is Six Sigma, the third is 14 points, and the fourth is system of profound knowledge. So, maybe just give an overview. What are these things? What do they mean?   0:12:40.0 Mustafa: Okay. Well, the Six Sigma part came about in the mid '80s and started in Motorola, and a lot of people already know that. And the reason it came out is because Dr. Deming's contribution in the '80s just brought a lot of attention to variation. In addition, you have also some big issues like the Ford transmission issue that came up. And there was a study about variation, and so there was a lot of attention being focused on variation. So Motorola... Somebody at Motorola, Bill Smith, an engineer over there, actually, came up with this idea of Six Sigma. And what that means, in general, is that if you have a spec that is a certain width, like upper and lower spec limits, then you want your process to operate in about half that space. Basically, that gives you good capability of the process, and then you don't have to worry about it. The first problem that came about from Six Sigma was the controversy about the shift. The people who invented Six Sigma, or packaged it together, said, "Okay. Well, we know you wanna operate exactly in the middle, but, normally, processes shift like one-and-a-half standard deviation here, or one-and-a-half standard deviation there so we want to allow that."   0:14:18.7 Mustafa: So, that is one of the biggest controversy because when you shift something like that, the process may be out of control without knowing. So, they did not really take that into consideration, although they are teaching control charts within the Six Sigma body of knowledge, so that was not really taken care of there. But that was one of the flaws that is out there in Six Sigma. Now, there are topics in Six Sigma that are... They're okay. We can teach certain topics on continuous improvement, root cause analysis, things of that nature. But the statistical thing here was wrong. And again, the reason Six Sigma was popular is because it is packaged the way it was packaged. You have companies buying this, and you have all the titles that came with it, and you know how companies love titles, especially here in the United States. So, you got all the belts; everybody must have a belt. You gotta go through training, you gotta... And then after you get your belt, what happens? You're gonna save us money. You're gonna have to do projects, and your job is to save me 20, 30, 40, 50,000 or 100,000 sometimes. So, that was the Six Sigma part of the whole thing.   0:15:51.6 Mustafa: And so, the Lean later became Lean Six Sigma. But Lean, by itself, came from Japan, originally. It's eliminating waste. Think about things like over-production, waiting, inventory, extra motion, all of these little things that you think they're little, but when you put them together, that's a lot of waste. So, to make the process flow better, you need to eliminate all of this waste. It's more about productivity and moving things faster within the organization. Then, when we contrast that with the 14 points, the 14 points are the system for management. It's all about... It's about management. It's also about quality, like improving forever the processes and systems for example, and have a constancy of purpose like the first point says. This was the application of what then became the system of profound knowledge as we know it. I don't know... I don't wanna go too far with definitions and things like that, but the Lean Six Sigma, they had the problem of the statistical flow from the Six Sigma part, and then you have all the management by numbers, management by objectives from both the Lean and Six Sigma.   0:17:30.3 Andrew: And I'm gonna try to summarize what you just explained by talking about the Six Sigma. Is what you're saying the flaw or the issue was is that, in order to try to get good quality, why don't we just set our expectations of what we're gonna get out of the system so tight that when we actually produce, we're in a narrow range, but we're never... Let's say we don't allow... We built the system with so much margin of error that even if we move around in our output, that that still is within a very tight range. Is that the concept?   0:18:10.5 Mustafa: Yeah. That is the concept. But the problem with that concept is, if you move around, if you let the process move around one-and-a-half standard deviation, for example, which, what it says, this indicates that you could have special causes that you don't react to. You don't know at that point because you have moved the process. You end up having special cause variation based on that shift because that shift could be real, a special cause and not just allowing natural... Naturally, the process does not move one-and-a-half standard deviation   0:18:53.0 Mustafa: all of a sudden because there are tests on control charts that if the process... For shift. So, if the process, for example, gives you nine points in a row on one side of the center line, that's a flag because that's a shift. That's a shift in the process. Now the process shifted on you, and you're not reacting. You're not doing anything about it, so you have to stop and take a look at it. So, what Six Sigma is saying is, "Yeah, the process could shift one-and-a-half standard deviation." But in statistical process control terms, it can't without reacting to it.   0:19:37.5 Andrew: And a simple control chart, or run chart, will probably reveal this better than looking at a histogram type of chart, like a Six Sigma type of chart where you're observing the output of the system moment by moment. Would that be correct to say?   0:19:56.5 Mustafa: Right, right. So, the control chart... And I did a paper... And there are people that are out there and doing the same thing. I did a paper and showed that if you move the system one-and-a-half standard deviation, you will see all these points beyond the control limits by simulation, simulation of the process. You move it, and you'll start observing so many points being out of the control. And so, if you allow it, then all of a sudden you start seeing all these points beyond the control. And what do you do? So, there is nothing to cover that within the Six Sigma body of knowledge.   0:20:40.7 Andrew: And maybe it's a good point just to talk briefly about the control charts and what Dr. Deming taught about that. I think when I started seeing the control charts as he was describing them, I started to see a real intense focus on looking at... at trying to understand what's really happening with this system and trying to observe it in real-time. And the more that you did that, the more you really start to understand what's driving the performance of that system. So, maybe could you just take a moment, think about the listener or the viewer that doesn't understand the control charts yet, maybe just give a big picture about what those are, and what's the value of them?   0:21:27.7 Mustafa: So, the control chart is basically... If you think about plotting points over time, that would be a run chart. So, just looking at your performance over time and just plotting points, that's a run chart. A control chart is basically taking the run chart and creating control limits on it. And the control limits came from Dr. Shewhart who invented the control charts. And he put those control limits to minimize a couple of mistakes: not reacting enough when you have to, and not over-reacting when you see something. They were more economics. They were not statistical in nature. They don't really depend on statistical distribution or anything like that. They are very robust. They can be used in a variety of applications without having to look at the distribution of the data. And they tell you when to react to a special cause and when to leave the process alone.   0:22:41.3 Mustafa: So, when you leave the process alone, it means that you have common cause variation, just the systemic type of variation that occurs over time. But that doesn't mean that you don't work on it as management. This is a management part of the work. So, when you have a stable process, it means that this is a time for management to initiate, maybe, continuous improvement project or initiative to reduce that variation, and not... Because you can be stable and in control, but you still have a lot of variation in the process. So, the spread is very wide in the process or, in the control chart, it will be going all over with a lot of variation, but it's still within the control limits. It could have this kind of scenario. And that's when management has to step in and say, "Okay, we need to look at this from a big picture and try to look at all the causes and do some kind of continual improvement."   0:23:53.3 Andrew: Mustafa, I would think that when you look at it, it turns out that it's like a continuous experiment. And you're looking at the outcome in a control chart, and you're trying to think, "Okay, if we... " Let's just say that we add a new piece of machinery. We upgrade a particular part. Then we look and say, "Okay, how did that impact the output of the process?" And then you start to see that what you're talking about, and I think what Dr. Deming is talking about was the idea that, start to get this intense focus on how do we improve this process? And how do we reduce that variation to a point? There's no point in reducing it beyond a certain point. But just that focus. Whereas with Six Sigma, it's kind of a theoretical thing, and there's other aspects that you've talked about. But just that, a control chart really allows you just to focus on testing and understanding that the whole... The output is a function, not only of the people on the production line. Let's say if it's in a factory, and it's the machinery, it's the way you organize, it's the shifts that you work. It's all of these things. So, I can't help but think that it's kind of like the fun of testing and seeing the result coming out of it.   0:25:09.1 Mustafa: Right. When you say a special cause, it doesn't mean always that it's bad. It could be good. But you have to study it, and you have to see what happened. So, was it intentional? Was it unintentional? But at least you would stop and look and study. And that's the idea. It's not just to let it go without studying it. On the other hand, the common cause, you're just looking at the width of the variation in general. And you try to reduce that, like you just mentioned, over the long run.   0:25:42.0 Andrew: So... Go ahead.   0:25:44.8 Mustafa: No, I was just gonna go back to Dr. Deming before I move to Dr. Deming's chain reaction model. I use that all the time. I use it when I was doing workshops in industry, and I use it now in my classes. And I put that... The chain reaction model. And what the chain reaction model for those of the listeners who are not familiar with it, Dr. Deming says that, "You have to start with improving quality, and the rest is just a chain reaction." So what happens is, when you improve quality, and that is, and what he's talking about here, is a commitment by management to quality. It's not just a one-time improvement of quality, it's a commitment on improving quality. Then you start seeing defect decreasing. You start utilizing equipment better. Errors decrease and all of this becomes much less. Your productivity, as a result, goes up because the cost is down, or your input cost is down so now your output is better, and you have a good productivity which keeps you in business, and you provide better jobs to your community. I think...   0:27:18.8 Andrew: That topic is so interesting because I think most people, at the time of Dr. Deming and even now, think quality is a department; quality is something we apply in a certain area. And when you think about setting the purpose of a company to improve quality, it's a very risky thing. Most people think, "No way. Our company is about sales. Our company is about profit. Our company is about customer satisfaction," or whatever that is. Those things all are the intuitive things that we come up with to say, "That's what drives our business." And Dr. Deming, what you're saying is that... Dr. Deming says, actually, the chain reaction that starts from quality leads to all of those things. Can you elaborate a little bit more on that?   0:28:07.5 Mustafa: Right. So, we know that we have to start on quality. But take, for example, companies that are engaged in Lean projects. So, what they do in Lean projects, you try to eliminate waste. And eliminating waste could also be a risky business if you just arbitrarily start cutting costs of material, of employee hours, or eliminating jobs, for example. If you take it from the productivity block of the chain reaction model, you go nowhere. You gotta go back from the quality, improving quality, and that's where the chain reaction starts. But for many Lean projects, they actually start from the productivity block. So, improve productivity from the productivity block, that doesn't really work because you are not committed to quality at that point. So, what happens is, you start maybe buying cheaper material or eliminating jobs. That might help you in the short run. The short run may be the next quarter. It's going to help you out. You're gonna improve the bottomline. Later on, all of this is going to come back as customer complaints, returns, issues with employees, lack of motivation because now they have to do more with less hours, and so on and so forth. But it creates a whole set of problems that are addressed in the system of profound knowledge from the psychology part to the learning part, and knowledge and the PDSA.   0:30:00.4 Andrew: So, let's go back to then now. I wanna talk about the system of profound knowledge so that the listeners out there, some of them understand it very well, but some of them may not understand what that means at all. So, now we've kind of been through a little bit about Lean. We've been through Six Sigma. We talked a little bit about the 14 points, and I think the point that you're just making is that when you look at Dr. Deming's 14 point, first one is create constancy of purpose. The second one is to adopt a new philosophy, and the third one is to end dependence on quality inspections. It's like those top three are telling the senior management, "Your job is to improve quality." That is what's going to lead this chain reaction. And I think you've illustrated that in your discussion really well. So, take a moment and tell us about system of profound knowledge as you see it.   0:30:49.8 Mustafa: Okay. So, the system of profound knowledge is... There are four pillars or four components to it. And the first one is appreciation for a system, meaning that you have to see systems in place. You have to do a connection of different parts together, that you cannot do things in silos. You cannot suboptimize. You have to look at the aim of the system, and you try to work for the aim of the system, not the aim of each department. But with that comes the idea of creating the variation part, and what is systemic variation and what is a special cause variation? Systemic variation is a part of management's decisions. They have to make improvement on that in the long term. And how you react to variation. So, if the system has a certain capability, and then you ask somebody, "Okay, I want you to get me that which is up here, way up. That's your objective." If the system is not capable, what is the employee going to do? They're going to try to create that number to please the boss. As Dr. Deming was referring to, they tried to please their manager or the boss. So, you might take risky steps to do that, including maybe fudging numbers or coming up with ideas to create that number.   0:32:37.1 Mustafa: And that goes to psychology, so now you are... You don't feel good about it. You have to keep your job. You have to do all kinds of stuff to make sure that you don't lose your job because you could not achieve that. Now you become less motivated. You're not really engaged. And what happens? They provide you with incentives, outside incentives. Bonus is based on work that you have to do, but the system is incapable. You cannot perform beyond what the system is capable of. So, that creates all kinds of problems. And the last part is the learning part or theory of knowledge, and that you have to have a method. You have to have clear definitions and, basically, you have to know what you need to accomplish, and by what method and how you know when you get there. That's a theory of knowledge. There is no knowledge without a theory, and it has to be... It has a temporal element in it, meaning that you revise the theory, and you create more knowledge. So, that's in a nutshell how you... How all of these components are related to each other. But to me, the systems and variation, they're just out there, and I see it everywhere as a problem.   0:34:14.3 Andrew: Yeah. So, to summarize, the system of profound knowledge, as you've explained, is appreciation for a system. Number two is knowledge of variation, number three is a theory of knowledge, and number four is psychology. And one of the things that I came to learn about Dr. Deming is, I always say he's a humanist. He's a person that really sees that people should have joy in work, and he wants to see people reach their full potential, and he understood the powers of incentives like you just explained. So, now that we understand a little bit of the theory of the system of profound knowledge, what is going wrong out there in this world? Let's talk just briefly about, why is this so significant? Come on, I just go get my black belt in Lean Six Sigma and the problems will be solved, but what is it about the theory of profound knowledge that... Or the system of profound knowledge that people should pay attention to now?   0:35:21.5 Mustafa: Well, with... For example, let me just take it from a different perspective. If you look at Lean projects, and you eliminate. for example, waste. if you don't have a system of profound knowledge to check all of the things that needs to be checked, like variation and psychology and making sure that people are not fearful to do their job, then you're creating other problems, not only just... You're not just reducing waste, you are actually, maybe having... overburdening the employees with removing waste because when you remove waste, you may be removing jobs, you may be removing hours, you may be removing employees. That would create a overburden. You could also create problems for the customers and fluctuation and defects and variation.   0:36:21.8 Mustafa: That's why the system of profound knowledge is an integrated system. It's not a just one piece. Once you start going from one door, you gotta address all the other components that are tied together to it. So to me, from whatever door you go in in the system of profound knowledge, let's say you go from the psychology which is you drive out fear. You create a good climate. You do all of these things, then you start seeing people coming up with innovations, reducing variation, and working together collaboratively which creates a good system. So, whatever door you go in, you're going to get to it because they are connected. There is no way that you're not going to address the other points if you have knowledge about the other points.   0:37:15.0 Andrew: It's an interesting thing that I would say in modern management, in modern life, people are trying to compartmentalize things and thinking that being a specialist in a particular area, whether that's medicine or whatever in business, that by compartmentalizing, it gives us comfort that we can become an expert in this area and all that. But what you can see... And I'll tell you, Mustafa, about my mother who I take care of. She's 83. And if we have a problem with her foot, the doctor may say, "Okay, don't walk for a little while." Well, that causes another problem. You start to risk bedsores. You start to have problems with GI system. And what you find nowadays in medicine is it's getting more and more narrow where doctors are not seeing the holistic pieces, and I see myself always constantly thinking about the whole picture to that. And I think what I'm hearing from you is that, that we should be looking at things more holistically, and that's what the system of profound knowledge is teaching, is that... Would you say that?   0:38:24.1 Mustafa: That's exactly right. That's exactly right. So, you have to... The main thing there is, companies, traditionally, they try to just suboptimize through their management by objective, "We want each department to save so much money," and then, once they start doing that, everybody affects the other negatively, but they don't know until later on that they have done that. You might gain the objectives in the short run, but in the long run, it's going to be disastrous for the aim of the organization.   0:39:03.9 Andrew: So, you just raised another point that Dr. Deming teaches about is suboptimization. And what he tried to teach was that the objective of the senior management of the company is to optimize the system, not its component parts. Have you seen...   0:39:19.9 Mustafa: Right.   0:39:20.9 Andrew: In theory, people should know that, but how is that going wrong in this world these days? And why is it important to be thinking in this holistic way that Dr. Deming was teaching?   0:39:32.5 Mustafa: Because companies, if they don't do things systematically, and they don't apply the whole system of profound knowledge, altogether, they're going to rush into money-saving exercises, and those money-saving exercises could be replacing material with lower-grade material. It could be, maybe, not hiring experts and hiring somebody who doesn't know what they're doing, and not providing training, or cutting training, or foregoing maintenance. There are so many things that you can start focusing on because you have issues. So, you have issues with a customer, and you start focusing on cutting costs, arbitrarily, not with a method, arbitrarily starting cutting costs in different departments. When you put it all together, just things don't merge well together because you're trying to suboptimize. You're trying to lower the cost in each department and not really improve the aim, or attain the aim of the organization as a whole.   0:40:48.3 Andrew: We've covered so many different topics. It's pretty exciting, like this sub-optimization. I think is a really interesting one. And I wanna raise a new topic that is the opposite of one of the topics that you raised. You talked about the chain reaction. Let's talk about the opposite chain reaction. I'll tell you a story in my own coffee business. We had put some pressure on some of the people in the procurement part of the business to reduce cost. That's reasonable. Management wants to reduce cost so there we go. We put pressure on them, and we told them... We incentivized them. And what we saw was that they ended up proposing a lower quality coffee bean, green coffee bean. The production people didn't like it because all of a sudden they had to recalibrate the machines. So, there was already a cost right there because the... It was harder to hit the client's demand of what taste that they want, consistently hit it.   0:41:47.9 Andrew: Then the people that were delivering, when we delivered the product to the customer, we had some returns where the customer is like, "No, I don't like this taste," or that we would have much more variability. And all of a sudden, we had customer complaints. And then we started to realize that, "Okay, now we gotta go and replace that with the proper stuff," and then all of a sudden there was all kinds of cost. So, the chain reaction you talked about was, start with quality and you start to reduce costs throughout the chain. And a reverse chain reaction is when you start by trying to optimize one point and not realize that it's a whole system, and therefore what you've caused is a negative chain reaction of cost just when you thought you were cutting costs, you're actually raising costs.   0:42:33.7 Mustafa: Right. That is a great example of that because what you've done is maybe just looking at the productivity part, you wanted to make sure that the costs were down so trying to turn the knobs on certain things, and then it just backfired on the quality part, increasing errors, increasing customer dissatisfaction and all of that, and that happens all the time.   0:43:01.4 Andrew: And that's what Dr. Deming says, "How can you measure the cost of a lost customer? How can you measure the dissatisfaction and the frustration?" Some things are just unmeasurable. So, I wanna...   0:43:15.2 Mustafa: Right. So, that brings about the issue of visible figures. You're managed by visible figures only, and not really the stuff that are behind the total cost, which some of it is unknowable or unknown.   0:43:34.2 Andrew: Now, Professor, this is really strange. Here we are, talking about quality. You're such an expert in all of these statistical methods, and now you're saying, "Wait a minute, you can't just measure by visible figures." So, this is again a paradox of Dr. Deming where you come into his teaching, seeing all of these numbers and all that, and now what you're telling me is it's not just visible figures. Could you just elaborate on that?   0:44:02.7 Mustafa: Yeah, absolutely. Visible figures are figures that are available right there for you, and you just react to it. If things go up, you wanna reduce costs. You just take action. But visible figures are really a limited part of the whole story because the total cost of not doing things right or not following the Deming management method. They're not going to be... You're not gonna see them until later on. You may be able save for a quarter or two but, beyond that, things are going to start accumulating in terms of defects, returns, and things of that nature. So, from the Deming point of view, the visible figures are only a smaller portion of the total figures which cannot be measured at the time you're looking at the numbers and taking action.   0:45:04.3 Andrew: It's interesting because we hear sayings like, "What gets measured gets managed," and those types of sayings. And one of the things that I... When I teach young people about this, I oftentimes say, "Well, let's just look at a simple thing. What is the value of a hug? Measure it." It's immeasurable. Particularly, in a particular situation when someone is traumatized, or in a really painful situation, and that hug made a huge difference in their life that could actually have kept them alive and led them to another so that... I think that's the visible figures that you're raising. It's such a small part of this world. The bigger part is how it all fits together. And so, I think you really inspire me to rethink about this concept; that it's way beyond just visible figures.   0:46:03.5 Mustafa: Absolutely, absolutely. This thing is just... One of the things that really captured me with the Deming philosophy is visible versus invisible figures, and the sub-optimization part versus the aim of the system. And those things are just so powerful when you think about them, when you think about why we're promoting, or why we're talking about Deming, and why now and all of that. It's these things that are very common these days. And they have... To have a good system, to have good management, you have to eliminate management by visible figures on... You still have to have visible figures, but visible figures-only is what Deming is... What it was Deming opposing. What he was against, I guess.   0:46:57.8 Andrew: Yup. And you said, "Why Deming? Why now?" And I'm thinking about it myself. And my answer to that is that we have a whole generation of young people who think that successful management is, maybe, sitting at their desk behind a computer looking at KPIs. And then, when someone is down on their KPI, send them an email, kick their butt. And when someone is up on a KPI, give them a bonus, and that's it. And then you go home at the end of the day. And they're so lacking in the psychology aspect of the system of profound knowledge, but just in what management truly is. So, from my perspective, "Why Deming? Why now?" is because we have the risk of it turning into some kind of automation system of management that will always end up underperforming. Why would you say, "Why Deming? Why now?"   0:48:00.5 Mustafa: So, as you can see that, for me, "Why Deming? Why now?" is I don't see management using variation as a way to distinguish between the common cause and special cause, and also their reaction to it, or the mistakes that they make as a part of it. So, that's a big thing. The other thing is the fear that people are experiencing at the workplace. Recently, we've heard about the great resignation. People just don't wanna go back to work anymore. And a lot of people expressed that they just don't like the environment that they work in. And we know that most people, about 70% of people who quit, they don't quit because of a pay or anything like that. It's because of relationship with their bosses and the company, and they just don't feel that. So that the environment has a fear in it. So, when you create fear, you're not going to have people that contribute and collaborate, and I think that's big. If we learn anything from this whole pandemic, it is that you have to create an environment of trust because if people are away working virtually or work in the office, you shouldn't have to worry about them if you have created that environment or the trust.   0:49:34.6 Andrew: Yup. And you mentioned about the pandemic. If there's one thing we've learned, fear is a massive motivator. The level of things that people have gone through in a state of fear, things that people would have never imagined that they would have done. And so, I think what you're talking about is just one more of the many Deming principles, which is to drive out fear. And I just wanna summarize some of what we've gone through, and then we'll wrap up. So, we've talked about the differences between Lean and Six Sigma and Lean Six Sigma. We've talked about Deming's 14 points. We've talked about the system of profound knowledge. We've talked about optimizing versus sub-optimizing. We've talked about the chain reaction, and I gave the example of a reverse chain reaction. And then, we talked about visible figures and understanding that there's much more than that, which is such a paradox for me when I first started learning Deming's teaching because I thought I was gonna take comfort in those numbers and the visible figures, but he told me, "No, no, no. There's much more." And finally, we talk about fear. Is there anything else that you would add to this final wrap-up of the conversation?   0:50:52.3 Mustafa: So, we started talking about Lean and Six Sigma and... Six Sigma is a continuous improvement process, but you don't really need to use it to... You can use the Plan-Do-Study-Act to it. There is no problem if you use it, and you recognize what's wrong with it, and you try to fix it. There's no problem with that. But, I think the Plan-Do-Study-Act and the theory of knowledge is sufficient for you to start working on things. But, like I mentioned, some companies, they like the titles and the tags and the big investment because then they use that as a motivator to get people to start working on projects to bring money back, to save the company the money that was spent on them. So, that's the only thing I wanted to add is just like you can't just rely on something that is big. The Plan-Do-Study-Act was good enough, and I think it's good for any organization. The problem with applying the Plan-Do-Study Act is that you have to have management's commitment because remember, when you do Six Sigma, you're basically outsourcing your quality to an external source, providing the training, the titles and all of that. You can cut it off any time. But when you do the theory of knowledge and the Plan-Do-Study-Act, you have to commit. The commitment is really the big deal here, or the component that is missing is a commitment to quality.   0:52:44.9 Andrew: Well, in wrapping this up, I wanna come back to where we started. Where we started was you were a young master's student and coming out of studying about these tools of statistical methods and all of that stuff, and you entered into our conversation, and you entered into the introduction to Dr. Deming through these tools. But here we are at the end of this interview, and now you're talking about such much bigger issues, and I think, for me, that inspires me about what Dr. Deming has taught because it is expansive. And the more you study it, the more you see it's way beyond just tools. So, Mustafa, on behalf of everyone at The Deming Institute, I wanna thank you again for coming on the show and sharing your experience with Dr. Deming's teachings. Do you have any parting words for the audience?   0:53:41.5 Mustafa: All I have to say, you gotta get started somewhere, and the system of profound knowledge is it. So, I would definitely recommend... I have been through many of the seminars that the Institute offers, and I would highly recommend that and also getting Dr. Deming's book "The New Economics." That's a good start. Of course, the follow-up is also just as important and continuing with the journey.   0:54:15.7 Andrew: Well, great advice. Get "The New Economics;" read it. It really sums up a lot of Dr. Deming's teachings. He put it together right at the end of his life. And that concludes another great discussion within our worldwide Deming community. Remember to go to deming.org to continue your journey. This is your host, Andrew Stotz, and I will leave you with one of my favorite quotes from Dr. Deming, "People are entitled to joy in work."

About AndrewI create free cloud certification courses and somehow still make money.Links: ExamPro Training, Inc.: https://www.exampro.co/ PolyWork: https://www.polywork.com/andrewbrown LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrew-wc-brown Twitter: https://twitter.com/andrewbrown TranscriptAndrew: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief cloud economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at Redis, the company behind the incredibly popular open source database that is not the bind DNS server. If you're tired of managing open source Redis on your own, or you're using one of the vanilla cloud caching services, these folks have you covered with the go to manage Redis service for global caching and primary database capabilities; Redis Enterprise. To learn more and deploy not only a cache but a single operational data platform for one Redis experience, visit redis.com/hero. Thats r-e-d-i-s.com/hero. And my thanks to my friends at Redis for sponsoring my ridiculous non-sense.  Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at Rising Cloud, which I hadn't heard of before, but they're doing something vaguely interesting here. They are using AI, which is usually where my eyes glaze over and I lose attention, but they're using it to help developers be more efficient by reducing repetitive tasks. So, the idea being that you can run stateless things without having to worry about scaling, placement, et cetera, and the rest. They claim significant cost savings, and they're able to wind up taking what you're running as it is in AWS with no changes, and run it inside of their data centers that span multiple regions. I'm somewhat skeptical, but their customers seem to really like them, so that's one of those areas where I really have a hard time being too snarky about it because when you solve a customer's problem and they get out there in public and say, “We're solving a problem,” it's very hard to snark about that. Multus Medical, Construx.ai and Stax have seen significant results by using them. And it's worth exploring. So, if you're looking for a smarter, faster, cheaper alternative to EC2, Lambda, or batch, consider checking them out. Visit risingcloud.com/benefits. That's risingcloud.com/benefits, and be sure to tell them that I said you because watching people wince when you mention my name is one of the guilty pleasures of listening to this podcast.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. My guest today is… well, he's challenging to describe. He's the co-founder and cloud instructor at ExamPro Training, Inc. but everyone knows him better as Andrew Brown because he does so many different things in the AWS ecosystem that it's sometimes challenging—at least for me—to wind up keeping track of them all. Andrew, thanks for joining.Andrew: Hey, thanks for having me on the show, Corey.Corey: How do I even begin describing you? You're an AWS Community Hero and have been for almost two years, I believe; you've done a whole bunch of work as far as training videos; you're, I think, responsible for #100daysofcloud; you recently started showing up on my TikTok feed because I'm pretending that I am 20 years younger than I am and hanging out on TikTok with the kids, and now I feel extremely old. And obviously, you're popping up an awful lot of places.Andrew: Oh, yeah. A few other places like PolyWork, which is an alternative to LinkedIn, so that's a space that I'm starting to build up on there as well. Active in Discord, Slack channels. I'm just kind of everywhere. There's some kind of internet obsession here. My wife gets really mad and says, “Hey, maybe tone down the social media.” But I really enjoy it. So.Corey: You're one of those folks where I have this challenge of I wind up having a bunch of different AWS community Slacks and cloud community, Slacks and Discords and the past, and we DM on Twitter sometimes. And I'm constantly trying to figure out where was that conversational thread that I had with you? And tracking it down is an increasingly large search problem. I really wish that—forget the unified messaging platform. I want a unified search platform for all the different messaging channels that I'm using to talk to people.Andrew: Yeah, it's very hard to keep up with all the channels for myself there. But somehow I do seem to manage it, but just with a bit less sleep than most others.Corey: Oh, yeah. It's like trying to figure out, like, “All right, he said something really useful. What was that? Was that a Twitter DM? Was it on that Slack channel? Was it that Discord? No, it was on that brick that he threw through my window with a note tied to it. There we go.”That's always the baseline stuff of figuring out where things are. So, as I mentioned in the beginning, you are the co-founder and cloud instructor at ExamPro, which is interesting because unlike most of the community stuff that you do and are known for, you don't generally talk about that an awful lot. What's the deal there?Andrew: Yeah, I think a lot of people give me a hard time because they say, Andrew, you should really be promoting yourself more and trying to make more sales, but that's not why I'm out here doing what I'm doing. Of course, I do have a for-profit business called ExamPro, where we create cloud certification study courses for things like AWS, Azure, GCP, Terraform, Kubernetes, but you know, that money just goes to fuel what I really want to do, is just to do community activities to help people change their lives. And I just decided to do that via cloud because that's my domain expertise. At least that's what I say because I've learned up on in the last four or five years. I'm hoping that there's some kind of impact I can make doing that.Corey: I take a somewhat similar approach. I mean, at The Duckbill Group, we fixed the horrifying AWS bill, but I've always found that's not generally a problem that people tend to advertise having. On Twitter, like, “Oh, man, my AWS bill is killing me this month. I've got to do something about it,” and you check where they work, and it's like a Fortune 50. It's, yeah, that moves markets and no one talks about that.So, my approach was always, be out there, be present in the community, talk about this stuff, and the people who genuinely have billing problems will eventually find their way to me. That was always my approach because turning everything I do into a sales pitch doesn't work. It just erodes confidence, it reminds people of the used mattress salesman, and I just don't want to be that person in that community. My approach has always been if I can help someone with a 15-minute call or whatnot, yeah, let's jump on a phone call. I'm not interested in nickel-and-diming folks.Andrew: Yeah. I think that if you're out there doing a lot of hard work, and a lot of it, it becomes undeniable the value you're putting out there, and then people just will want to give you money, right? And for me, I just feel really bad about taking anybody's money, and so even when there's some kind of benefit—like my courses, I could charge for access for them, but I always feel I have to give something in terms of taking somebody's money, but I would never ask anyone to give me their money. So, it's bizarre. [laugh] so.Corey: I had a whole bunch of people a year or so after I started asking, like, “I really find your content helpful. Can I buy you a cup of coffee or something?” And it's, I don't know how to charge people a dollar figure that doesn't have a comma in it because it's easy for me to ask a company for money; that is the currency of effort, work, et cetera, that companies are accustomed to. People view money very differently, and if I ask you personally for money versus your company for money, it's a very different flow. So, my solution to it was to build the annual charity t-shirt drive, where it's, great, spend 35 bucks or whatever on a snarky t-shirt once a year for ten days and all proceeds go to benefit a nonprofit that is, sort of, assuaged that.But one of my business philosophies has always been, “Work for free before you work for cheap.” And dealing with individuals and whatnot, I do not charge them for things. It's, “Oh, can you—I need some advice in my career. Can I pay you to give me some advice?” “No, but you can jump on a Zoom call with me.” Please, the reason I exist at all is because people who didn't have any reason to did me favors, once upon a time, and I feel obligated to pay that forward.Andrew: And I appreciate, you know, there are people out there that you know, do need to charge for their time. Like—Corey: Oh. Oh, yes.Andrew: —I won't judge anybody that wants to. But you know, for me, it's just I can't do it because of the way I was raised. Like, my grandfather was very involved in the community. Like, he was recognized by the city for all of his volunteer work, and doing volunteer work was, like, mandatory for me as a kid. Like, every weekend, and so for me, it's just like, I can't imagine trying to take people's money.Which is not a great thing, but it turns out that the community is very supportive, and they will come beat you down with a stick, to give you money to make sure you keep doing what you're doing. But you know, I could be making lots of money, but it's just not my priority, so I've avoided any kind of funding so like, you know, I don't become a money-driven company, and I will see how long that lasts, but hopefully, a lot longer.Corey: I wish you well. And again, you're right; no shade to anyone who winds up charging for their time to individuals. I get it. I just always had challenges with it, so I decided not to do it. The only time I find myself begrudging people who do that are someone who picked something up six months ago and decided, oh, I'm going to build some video course on how to do this thing. The end. And charge a bunch of money for it and put myself out as an expert in that space.And you look at what the content they're putting out is, and one, it's inaccurate, which just drives me up a wall, and two, there's a lack of awareness that teaching is its own skill. In some areas, I know how to teach certain things, and in other areas, I'm a complete disaster at it. Public speaking is a great example. A lot of what I do on the public speaking stage is something that comes to me somewhat naturally. So, can you teach me to be a good public speaker? Not really, it's like, well, you gave that talk and it was bad. Could you try giving it only make it good? Like, that is not a helpful coaching statement, so I stay out of that mess.Andrew: Yeah, I mean, it's really challenging to know, if you feel like you're authority enough to put something out there. And there's been a few courses where I didn't feel like I was the most knowledgeable, but I produced those courses, and they had done extremely well. But as I was going through the course, I was just like, “Yeah, I don't know how any this stuff works, but this is my best guess translating from here.” And so you know, at least for my content, people have seen me as, like, the lens of AWS on top of other platforms, right? So, I might not know—I'm not an expert in Azure, but I've made a lot of Azure content, and I just translate that over and I talk about the frustrations around, like, using scale sets compared to AWS auto-scaling groups, and that seems to really help people get through the motions of it.I know if I pass, at least they'll pass, but by no means do I ever feel like an expert. Like, right now I'm doing, like, Kubernetes. Like, I have no idea how I'm doing it, but I have, like, help with three other people. And so I'll just be honest about it and say, “Hey, yeah, I'm learning this as well, but at least I know I passed, so you know, you can pass, too.” Whatever that's worth.Corey: Oh, yeah. Back when I was starting out, I felt like a bit of a fraud because I didn't know everything about the AWS billing system and how it worked and all the different things people can do with it, and things they can ask. And now, five years later, when the industry basically acknowledges I'm an expert, I feel like a fraud because I couldn't possibly understand everything about the AWS billing system and how it works. It's one of those things where the more you learn, the more you realize that there is yet to learn. I'm better equipped these days to find the answers to the things I need to know, but I'm still learning things every day. If I ever get to a point of complete and total understanding of a given topic, I'm wrong. You can always go deeper.Andrew: Yeah, I mean, by no means am I even an expert in AWS, though people seem to think that I am just because I have a lot of confidence in there and I produce a lot of content. But that's a lot different from making a course than implementing stuff. And I do implement stuff, but you know, it's just at the scale that I'm doing that. So, just food for thought for people there.Corey: Oh, yeah. Whatever, I implement something. It's great. In my previous engineering life, I would work on large-scale systems, so I know how a thing that works in your test environment is going to blow up in a production scale environment. And I bring those lessons, written on my bones the painful way, through outages, to the way that I build things now.But the stuff that I'm building is mostly to keep my head in the game, as opposed to solving an explicit business need. Could I theoretically build a podcast transcription system on top of Transcribe or something like that for these episodes? Yeah. But I've been paying a person to do this for many years to do it themselves; they know the terms of art, they know how this stuff works, and they're building a glossary as they go, and understanding the nuances of what I say and how I say it. And that is the better business outcome; that's the answer. And if it's production facing, I probably shouldn't be tinkering with it too much, just based upon where the—I don't want to be the bottleneck for the business functioning.Andrew: I've been spending so much time doing the same thing over and over again, but for different cloud providers, and the more I do, the less I want to go deep on these things because I just feel like I'm dumping all this information I'm going to forget, and that I have those broad strokes, and when I need to go deep dive, I have that confidence. So, I'd really prefer people were to build up confidence in saying, “Yes, I think I can do this.” As opposed to being like, “Oh, I have proof that I know every single feature in AWS Systems Manager.” Just because, like, our platform, ExamPro, like, I built it with my co-founder, and it's a quite a system. And so I'm going well, that's all I need to know.And I talk to other CTOs, and there's only so much you need to know. And so I don't know if there's, like, a shift between—or difference between, like, application development where, let's say you're doing React and using Vercel and stuff like that, where you have to have super deep knowledge for that technical stack, whereas cloud is so broad or diverse that maybe just having confidence and hypothesizing the work that you can do and seeing what the outcome is a bit different, right? Not having to prove one hundred percent that you know it inside and out on day one, but have the confidence.Corey: And there's a lot of validity to that and a lot of value to it. It's the magic word I always found in interviewing, on both sides of the interview table, has always been someone who's unsure about something start with, “I'm not sure, but if I had to guess,” and then say whatever it is you were going to say. Because if you get it right, wow, you're really good at figuring this out, and your understanding is pretty decent. If you're wrong, well, you've shown them how you think but you've also called them out because you're allowed to be wrong; you're not allowed to be authoritatively wrong. Because once that happens, I can't trust anything you say.Andrew: Yeah. In terms of, like, how do cloud certifications help you for your career path? I mean, I find that they're really well structured, and they give you a goal to work towards. So, like, passing that exam is your motivation to make sure that you complete it. Do employers care? It depends. I would say mostly no. I mean, for me, like, when I'm hiring, I actually do care about certifications because we make certification courses but—Corey: In your case, you're a very specific expression of this that is not typical.Andrew: Yeah. And there are some, like, cases where, like, if you work for a larger cloud consultancy, you're expected to have a professional certification so that customers feel secure in your ability to execute. But it's not like they were trying to hire you with that requirement, right? And so I hope that people realize that and that they look at showing that practical skills, by building up cloud projects. And so that's usually a strong pairing I'll have, which is like, “Great. Get the certifications to help you just have a structured journey, and then do a Cloud project to prove that you can do what you say you can do.”Corey: One area where I've seen certifications act as an interesting proxy for knowledge is when you have a company that has 5000 folks who work in IT in varying ways, and, “All right. We're doing a big old cloud migration.” The certification program, in many respects, seems to act as a bit of a proxy for gauging where people are on upskilling, how much they have to learn, where they are in that journey. And at that scale, it begins to make some sense to me. Where do you stand on that?Andrew: Yeah. I mean, it's hard because it really depends on how those paths are built. So, when you look at the AWS certification roadmap, they have the Certified Cloud Practitioner, they have three associates, two professionals, and a bunch of specialties. And I think that you might think, “Well, oh, solutions architect must be very popular.” But I think that's because AWS decided to make the most popular, the most generic one called that, and so you might think that's what's most popular.But what they probably should have done is renamed that Solution Architect to be a Cloud Engineer because very few people become Solutions Architect. Like that's more… if there's Junior Solutions Architect, I don't know where they are, but Solutions Architect is more of, like, a senior role where you have strong communications, pre-sales, obviously, the role is going to vary based on what companies decide a Solution Architect is—Corey: Oh, absolutely take a solutions architect, give him a crash course in finance, and we call them a cloud economist.Andrew: Sure. You just add modifiers there, and they're something else. And so I really think that they should have named that one as the cloud engineer, and they should have extracted it out as its own tier. So, you'd have the Fundamental, the Certified Cloud Practitioner, then the Cloud Engineer, and then you could say, “Look, now you could do developer or the sysops.” And so you're creating this path where you have a better trajectory to see where people really want to go.But the problem is, a lot of people come in and they just do the solutions architect, and then they don't even touch the other two because they say, well, I got an associate, so I'll move on the next one. So, I think there's some structuring there that comes into play. You look at Azure, they've really, really caught up to AWS, and may I might even say surpass them in terms of the quality and the way they market them and how they construct their certifications. There's things I don't like about them, but they have, like, all these fundamental certifications. Like, you have Azure Fundamentals, Data Fundamentals, AI Fundamentals, there's a Security Fundamentals.And to me, that's a lot more valuable than going over to an associate. And so I did all those, and you know, I still think, like, should I go translate those over for AWS because you have to wait for a specialty before you pick up security. And they say, like, it's intertwined with all the certifications, but, really isn't. Like—and I feel like that would be a lot better for AWS. But that's just my personal opinion. So.Corey: My experience with AWS certifications has been somewhat minimal. I got the Cloud Practitioner a few years ago, under the working theory of I wanted to get into the certified lounge at some of the events because sometimes I needed to charge things and grab a cup of coffee. I viewed it as a lounge pass with a really strange entrance questionnaire. And in my case, yeah, I passed it relatively easily; if not, I would have some questions about how much I actually know about these things. As I recall, I got one question wrong because I was honest, instead of going by the book answer for, “How long does it take to restore an RDS database from a snapshot?”I've had some edge cases there that give the wrong answer, except that's what happened. And then I wound up having that expire and lapse. And okay, now I'll do it—it was in beta at the time, but I got the sysops associate cert to go with it. And that had a whole bunch of trivia thrown into it, like, “Which of these is the proper syntax for this thing?” And that's the kind of question that's always bothered me because when I'm trying to figure things like that out, I have entire internet at my fingertips. Understanding the exact syntax, or command-line option, or flag that needs to do a thing is a five-second Google search away in most cases. But measuring for people's ability to memorize and retain that has always struck me as a relatively poor proxy for knowledge.Andrew: It's hard across the board. Like Azure, AWS, GCP, they all have different approaches—like, Terraform, all of them, they're all different. And you know, when you go to interview process, you have to kind of extract where the value is. And I would think that the majority of the industry, you know, don't have best practices when hiring, there's, like, a superficial—AWS is like, “Oh, if you do well, in STAR program format, you must speak a communicator.” Like, well, I'm dyslexic, so that stuff is not easy for me, and I will never do well in that.So like, a lot of companies hinge on those kinds of components. And I mean, I'm sure it doesn't matter; if you have a certain scale, you're going to have attrition. There's no perfect system. But when you look at these certifications, and you say, “Well, how much do they match up with the job?” Well, they don't, right? It's just Jeopardy.But you know, I still think there's value for yourself in terms of being able to internalize it. I still think that does prove that you have done something. But taking the AWS certification is not the same as taking Andrew Brown's course. So, like, my certified cloud practitioner was built after I did GCP, Oracle Cloud, Azure Fundamentals, a bunch of other Azure fundamental certifications, cloud-native stuff, and then I brought it over because was missing, right? So like, if you went through my course, and that I had a qualifier, then I could attest to say, like, you are of this skill level, right?But it really depends on what that testament is and whether somebody even cares about what my opinion of, like, your skillset is. But I can't imagine like, when you have a security incident, there's going to be a pop-up that shows you multiple-choice answer to remediate the security incident. Now, we might get there at some point, right, with all the cloud automation, but we're not there yet.Corey: It's been sort of thing we've been chasing and never quite get there. I wish. I hope I live to see it truly I do. My belief is also that the value of a certification changes depending upon what career stage someone is at. Regardless of what level you are at, a hiring manager or a company is looking for more or less a piece of paper that attests that they're to solve the problem that they are hiring to solve.And entry-level, that is often a degree or a certification or something like that in the space that shows you have at least the baseline fundamentals slash know how to learn things. After a few years, I feel like that starts to shift into okay, you've worked in various places solving similar problems on your resume that the type that we have—because the most valuable thing you can hear when you ask someone, “How would we solve this problem?” Is, “Well, the last time I solved it, here's what we learned.” Great. That's experience. There's no compression algorithm for experience? Yes, there is: Hiring people with experience.Then, at some level, you wind up at the very far side of people who are late-career in many cases where the piece of paper that shows that they know what they're doing is have you tried googling their name and looking at the Wikipedia article that spits out, how they built fundamental parts of a system like that. I think that certifications are one of those things that bias for early-career folks. And of course, partners when there are other business reasons to get it. But as people grow in seniority, I feel like the need for those begins to fall off. Do you agree? Disagree? You're much closer to this industry in that aspect of it than I am.Andrew: The more senior you are, and if you have big names under your resume there, no one's going to care if you have certification, right? When I was looking to switch careers—I used to have a consultancy, and I was just tired of building another failed startup for somebody that was willing to pay me. And I'm like—I was not very nice about it. I was like, “Your startup's not going to work out. You really shouldn't be building this.” And they still give me the money and it would fail, and I'd move on to the next one. It was very frustrating.So, closed up shop on that. And I said, “Okay, I got to reenter the market.” I don't have a computer science degree, I don't have big names on my resume, and Toronto is a very competitive market. And so I was feeling friction because people were not valuing my projects. I had, like, full-stack projects, I would show them.And they said, “No, no. Just do these, like, CompSci algorithms and stuff like that.” And so I went, “Okay, well, I really don't want to be doing that. I don't want to spend all my time learning algorithms just so I can get a job to prove that I already have the knowledge I have.” And so I saw a big opportunity in cloud, and I thought certifications would be the proof to say, “I can do these things.”And when I actually ended up going for the interviews, I didn't even have certifications and I was getting those opportunities because the certifications helped me prove it, but nobody cared about the certifications, even then, and that was, like, 2017. But not to say, like, they didn't help me, but it wasn't the fact that people went, “Oh, you have a certification. We'll get you this job.”Corey: Yeah. When I'm talking to consulting clients, I've never once been asked, “Well, do you have the certifications?” Or, “Are you an AWS partner?” In my case, no, neither of those things. The reason that we know what we're doing is because we've done this before. It's the expertise approach.I question whether that would still be true if we were saying, “Oh, yeah, and we're going to drop a dozen engineers on who are going to build things out of your environment.” “Well, are they certified?” is a logical question to ask when you're bringing in an external service provider? Or is this just a bunch of people you found somewhere on Upwork or whatnot, and you're throwing them at it with no quality control? Like, what is the baseline level experience? That's a fair question. People are putting big levels of trust when they bring people in.Andrew: I mean, I could see that as a factor of some clients caring, just because like, when I used to work in startups, I knew customers where it's like their second startup, and they're flush with a lot of money, and they're deciding who they want to partner with, and they're literally looking at what level of SSL certificate they purchased, right? Like now, obviously, they're all free and they're very easy to get to get; there was one point where you had different tiers—as if you would know—and they would look and they would say—Corey: Extended validation certs attend your browser bar green. Remember those?Andrew: Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was just like that, and they're like, “We should partner with them because they were able to afford that and we know, like…” whatever, whatever, right? So, you know, there is that kind of thought process for people at an executive level. I'm not saying it's widespread, but I've seen it.When you talk to people that are in cloud consultancy, like solutions architects, they always tell me they're driven to go get those professional certifications [unintelligible 00:22:19] their customers matter. I don't know if the customers care or not, but they seem to think so. So, I don't know if it's just more driven by those people because it's an expectation because everyone else has it, or it's like a package of things, like, you know, like the green bar in the certifications, SOC 2 compliance, things like that, that kind of wrap it up and say, “Okay, as a package, this looks really good.” So, more of an expectation, but not necessarily matters, it's just superficial; I'm not sure.Corey: This episode is sponsored by our friends at Oracle HeatWave is a new high-performance accelerator for the Oracle MySQL Database Service. Although I insist on calling it “my squirrel.” While MySQL has long been the worlds most popular open source database, shifting from transacting to analytics required way too much overhead and, ya know, work. With HeatWave you can run your OLTP and OLAP, don't ask me to ever say those acronyms again, workloads directly from your MySQL database and eliminate the time consuming data movement and integration work, while also performing 1100X faster than Amazon Aurora, and 2.5X faster than Amazon Redshift, at a third of the cost. My thanks again to Oracle Cloud for sponsoring this ridiculous nonsense.Corey: You've been building out certifications for multiple cloud providers, so I'm curious to get your take on something that Forrest Brazeal, who's now head of content over at Google Cloud, has been talking about lately, the idea that as an engineer is advised to learn more than one cloud provider; even if you have one as a primary, learning how another one works makes you a better engineer. Now, setting aside entirely the idea that well, yeah, if I worked at Google, I probably be saying something fairly similar.Andrew: Yeah.Corey: Do you think there's validity to the idea that most people should be broad across multiple providers, or do you think specialization on one is the right path?Andrew: Sure. Just to contextualize for our listeners, Google Cloud is highly, highly promoting multi-cloud workloads, and one of their flagship products is—well, they say it's a flagship product—is Anthos. And they put a lot of money—I don't know that was subsidized, but they put a lot of money in it because they really want to push multi-cloud, right? And so when we say Forrest works in Google Cloud, it should be no surprise that he's promoting it.But I don't work for Google, and I can tell you, like, learning multi-cloud is, like, way more valuable than just staying in one vertical. It just opened my eyes. When I went from AWS to Azure, it was just like, “Oh, I'm missing out on so much in the industry.” And it really just made me such a more well-rounded person. And I went over to Google Cloud, and it was just like… because you're learning the same thing in different variations, and then you're also poly-filling for things that you will never touch.Or like, I shouldn't say you never touch, but you would never touch if you just stayed in that vertical when you're learning. So, in the industry, Azure Active Directory is, like, widespread, but if you just stayed in your little AWS box, you're not going to notice it on that learning path, right? And so a lot of times, I tell people, “Go get your CLF-C01 and then go get your AZ-900 or AZ-104.” Again, I don't care if people go and sit the exams. I want them to go learn the content because it is a large eye-opener.A lot of people are against multi-cloud from a learning perspective because say, it's too much to learn all at the same time. But a lot of people I don't think have actually gone across the cloud, right? So, they're sitting from their chair, only staying in one vertical saying, “Well, you can't learn them all at the same time.” And I'm going, “I see a way that you could teach them all at the same time.” And I might be the first person that will do it.Corey: And the principles do convey as well. It's, “Oh, well I know how SNS works on AWS, so I would never be able to understand how Google Pub/Sub works.” Those are functionally identical; I don't know that is actually true. It's just different to interface points and different guarantees, but fine. You at least understand the part that it plays.I've built things out on Google Cloud somewhat recently, and for me, every time I do, it's a refreshing eye-opener to oh, this is what developer experience in the cloud could be. And for a lot of customers, it is. But staying too far within the bounds of one ecosystem does lend itself to a loss of perspective, if you're not careful. I agree with that.Andrew: Yeah. Well, I mean, just the paint more of a picture of differences, like, Google Cloud has a lot about digital transformation. They just updated their—I'm not happy that they changed it, but I'm fine that they did that, but they updated their Google Digital Cloud Leader Exam Guide this month, and it like is one hundred percent all about digital transformation. So, they love talking about digital transformation, and those kind of concepts there. They are really good at defining migration strategies, like, at a high level.Over to Azure, they have their own cloud adoption framework, and it's so detailed, in terms of, like, execution, where you go over to AWS and they have, like, the worst cloud adoption framework. It's just the laziest thing I've ever seen produced in my life compared to out of all the providers in that space. I didn't know about zero-trust model until I start using Azure because Azure has Active Directory, and you can do risk-based policy procedures over there. So, you know, like, if you don't go over to these places, you're not going to get covered other places, so you're just going to be missing information till you get the job and, you know, that job has that information requiring you to know it.Corey: I would say that for someone early career—and I don't know where this falls on the list of career advice ranging from, “That is genius,” to, “Okay, Boomer,” but I would argue that figuring out what companies in your geographic area, or the companies that you have connections with what they're using for a cloud provider, I would bias for learning one enough to get hired there and from there, letting what you learn next be dictated by the environment you find yourself in. Because especially larger companies, there's always something that lives in a different provider. My default worst practice is multi-cloud. And I don't say that because multi-cloud doesn't exist, and I'm not saying it because it's a bad idea, but this idea of one workload—to me—that runs across multiple providers is generally a challenge. What I see a lot more, done intelligently, is, “Okay, we're going to use this provider for some things, this other provider for other things, and this third provider for yet more things.” And every company does that.If not, there's something very strange going on. Even Amazon uses—if not Office 365, at least exchange to run their email systems instead of Amazon WorkMail because—Andrew: Yeah.Corey: Let's be serious. That tells me a lot. But I don't generally find myself in a scenario where I want to build this application that is anything more than Hello World, where I want it to run seamlessly and flawlessly across two different cloud providers. That's an awful lot of work that I struggle to identify significant value for most workloads.Andrew: I don't want to think about securing, like, multiple workloads, and that's I think a lot of friction for a lot of companies are ingress-egress costs, which I'm sure you might have some knowledge on there about the ingress-egress costs across providers.Corey: Oh, a little bit, yeah.Andrew: A little bit, probably.Corey: Oh, throwing data between clouds is always expensive.Andrew: Sure. So, I mean, like, I call multi-cloud using multiple providers, but not in tandem. Cross-cloud is when you want to use something like Anthos or Azure Arc or something like that where you extend your data plane or control pla—whatever the plane is, whatever plane across all the providers. But you know, in practice, I don't think many people are doing cross-cloud; they're doing multi-cloud, like, “I use AWS to run my primary workloads, and then I use Microsoft Office Suite, and so we happen to use Azure Active Directory, or, you know, run particular VM machines, like Windows machines for our accounting.” You know?So, it's a mixed bag, but I do think that using more than one thing is becoming more popular just because you want to use the best in breed no matter where you are. So like, I love BigQuery. BigQuery is amazing. So, like, I ingest a lot of our data from, you know, third-party services right into that. I could be doing that in Redshift, which is expensive; I could be doing that in Azure Synapse, which is also expensive. I mean, there's a serverless thing. I don't really get serverless. So, I think that, you know, people are doing multi-cloud.Corey: Yeah. I would agree. I tend to do things like that myself, and whenever I see it generally makes sense. This is my general guidance. When I talk to individuals who say, “Well, we're running multi-cloud like this.” And my response is, “Great. You're probably right.”Because I'm talking in the general sense, someone building something out on day one where they don't know, like, “Everyone's saying multi-cloud. Should I do that?” No, I don't believe you should. Now, if your company has done that intentionally, rather than by accident, there's almost certainly a reason and context that I do not have. “Well, we have to run our SaaS application in multiple cloud providers because that's where our customers are.” “Yeah, you should probably do that.” But your marketing, your billing systems, your back-end reconciliation stuff generally does not live across all of those providers. It lives in one. That's the sort of thing I'm talking about. I think we're in violent agreement here.Andrew: Oh, sure, yeah. I mean, Kubernetes obviously is becoming very popular because people believe that they'll have a lot more mobility, Whereas when you use all the different managed—and I'm still learning Kubernetes myself from the next certification I have coming out, like, study course—but, you know, like, those managed services have all different kind of kinks that are completely different. And so, you know, it's not going to be a smooth process. And you're still leveraging, like, for key things like your database, you're not going to be running that in Kubernetes Cluster. You're going to be using a managed service.And so, those have their own kind of expectations in terms of configuration. So, I don't know, it's tricky to say what to do, but I think that, you know, if you have a need for it, and you don't have a security concern—like, usually it's security or cost, right, for multi-cloud.Corey: For me, at least, the lock-in has always been twofold that people don't talk about. More—less lock-in than buy-in. One is the security model where IAM is super fraught and challenging and tricky, and trying to map a security model to multiple providers is super hard. Then on top of that, you also have the buy-in story of a bunch of engineers who are very good at one cloud provider, and that skill set is not in less demand now than it was a year ago. So okay, you're going to start over and learn a new cloud provider is often something that a lot of engineers won't want to countenance.If your team is dead set against it, there's going to be some friction there and there's going to be a challenge. I mean, for me at least, to say that someone knows a cloud provider is not the naive approach of, “Oh yeah, they know how it works across the board.” They know how it breaks. For me, one of the most valuable reasons to run something on AWS is I know what a failure mode looks like, I know how it degrades, I know how to find out what's going on when I see that degradation. That to me is a very hard barrier to overcome. Alternately, it's entirely possible that I'm just old.Andrew: Oh, I think we're starting to see some wins all over the place in terms of being able to learn one thing and bring it other places, like OpenTelemetry, which I believe is a cloud-native Kubernetes… CNCF. I can't remember what it stands for. It's like Linux Foundation, but for cloud-native. And so OpenTelemetry is just a standardized way of handling your logs, metrics, and traces, right? And so maybe CloudWatch will be the 1.0 of observability in AWS, and then maybe OpenTelemetry will become more of the standard, right, and so maybe we might see more managed services like Prometheus and Grafa—well, obviously, AWS has a managed Prometheus, but other things like that. So, maybe some of those things will melt away. But yeah, it's hard to say what approach to take.Corey: Yeah, I'm wondering, on some level, whether what the things we're talking about today, how well that's going to map forward. Because the industry is constantly changing. The guidance I would give about should you be in cloud five years ago would have been a nuanced, “Mmm, depends. Maybe for yes, maybe for no. Here's the story.” It's a lot less hedge-y and a lot less edge case-y these days when I answer that question. So, I wonder in five years from now when we look back at this podcast episode, how well this discussion about what the future looks like, and certifications, and multi-cloud, how well that's going to reflect?Andrew: Well, when we look at, like, Kubernetes or Web3, we're just seeing kind of like the standardized boilerplate way of doing a bunch of things, right, all over the place. This distributed way of, like, having this generic API across the board. And how well that will take, I have no idea, but we do see a large split between, like, serverless and cloud-natives. So, it's like, what direction? Or we'll just have both? Probably just have both, right?Corey: [Like that 00:33:08]. I hope so. It's been a wild industry ride, and I'm really curious to see what changes as we wind up continuing to grow. But we'll see. That's the nice thing about this is, worst case, if oh, turns out that we were wrong on this whole cloud thing, and everyone starts exodusing back to data centers, well, okay. That's the nice thing about being a small company. It doesn't take either of us that long to address the reality we see in the industry.Andrew: Well, that or these cloud service providers are just going to get better at offering those services within carrier hotels, or data centers, or on your on-premise under your desk, right? So… I don't know, we'll see. It's hard to say what the future will be, but I do believe that cloud is sticking around in one form or another. And it basically is, like, an essential skill or table stakes for anybody that's in the industry. I mean, of course, not everywhere, but like, mostly, I would say. So.Corey: Andrew, I want to thank you for taking the time to speak with me today. If people want to learn more about your opinions, how you view these things, et cetera. Where can they find you?Andrew: You know, I think the best place to find me right now is Twitter. So, if you go to twitter.com/andrewbrown—all lowercase, no spaces, no underscores, no hyphens—you'll find me there. I'm so surprised I was able to get that handle. It's like the only place where I have my handle.Corey: And we will of course put links to that in the [show notes 00:34:25]. Thanks so much for taking the time to speak with me today. I really appreciate it.Andrew: Well, thanks for having me on the show.Corey: Andrew Brown, co-founder and cloud instructor at ExamPro Training and so much more. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn, and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, along with an angry comment telling me that I do not understand certifications at all because you're an accountant, and certifications matter more in that industry.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

I burst into the Zoom with Andrew Janjigian—a writer and the baker behind the newsletter Wordloaf—as though he were an old friend, telling him about my drama with the dentist that was happening that day and explaining precisely how much I was already sweating despite the early hour of our interview. There are some people whose energy, even virtually, I just like and how I express this like is, frankly, by extravagantly complaining in the hopes of amusing the other person. This is all to say: Andrew is very smart and cool, and I was excited to talk to him.He has done so many things in his life, and it is all wildly impressive. He’s worked as an organic chemist, got a master’s in biology with a focus on fungi, and then ended up at America’s Test Kitchen, where he was the resident bread expert. That led, eventually, to Wordloaf, where he makes sourdough approachable. We discussed it all. Listen above, or read below.Alicia: Hi, Andrew, how are you?Andrew: I am very well. How are you?Alicia: I'm good. Thank you so much for being here.Andrew: Sure. It's great to be here.Alicia: Can you tell me about where you grew up and what you ate?Andrew: Sure. Ok. So, I grew up in a Boston suburb. And I live in Cambridge now, so basically in Boston. And what I ate was—I come from a big Armenian family, and Armenians are pretty serious about their food and their cooking. A gathering of any two or more Armenians is basically an excuse for a feast. And holidays and parties are sort of studies in excess. So there was a lot of food and a lot of cooking and recipes between my mother and my grandparents and my aunts and uncles. And so, I was exposed to kind of people who love to cook pretty early on. And beyond the Armenian stuff, my mother is a very good cook. And she was pretty adventurous, sort of, as interested in experimentation and research as anyone, and I think that's where I started having the same sort of tendencies. I grew up in the era where it was sort of where cooking shows were all on PBS, and Julia Child, if you didn't know how to cook and all those sorts of things. It was a time when food culture was just starting to become mainstream. And my mother was a part of that. I think that kind of sums it up. Boston was not particularly interesting in terms of food at the time. It's definitely improved since then.Alicia: [Laughs.] How has it improved? What's changed in Boston?Andrew: Well, I think it's mostly that the culture has grown to support the presence of just more interesting restaurants. I mean, I'm sure there were plenty of restaurants in, within cultural enclaves. But when I was growing up, you didn't know about them. There probably were fewer then, simply because there wasn't the support. But I think Boston is kind of a provincial place, or has been. And I think people are finally waking up to the, sort of the importance of foods from other cultures. And so, those restaurants are finally getting the due that they deserve. And so, it's definitely better. I mean, I lived in New York for a long time. And so I still kind of gripe about how much better it could be. [Laughter.]Alicia: Well, you've explained your career trajectory to me before when I've interviewed you. But can you explain how you ended up in food?Andrew: Sure. Yeah. I mean, I started out in it, and then came back to it. But the whole trajectory is really kind of convoluted. And I'm sort of somebody who has always had a lot of interests, and I kind of never do anything halfway. And so that sort of leads me to follow paths far away from one thing and come back to them. So I started out working in restaurants during—a little bit in high school, but in college in New York City as a way to have pocket money to pay the bills. And then in summers, where I was paying my own rent and things like that. I was a waiter working front of the house in a couple places. There was a chef at one particular restaurant who sort of took a liking to me and understood my interest in cooking. And he said, ‘Would you be interested in working in the kitchen?’ And he let me, kind of, with no—without real proof that I could do anything, to work garde manger. It was a small restaurant, and so I immediately just jumped in, do it. And then, never went back to waiting tables after that, because it was really much more my thing. And I did that for a few years and eventually worked my way up. For the longest time, I worked at a place in the West Village called the Universal Grill, which was a great place to work. It was a really tiny little restaurant. It was very unique in every way. It prided itself on, or at least thinking itself, as the gayest restaurant in New York City. Or the gayest restaurant in the world, I forget what their tagline was. But it was very a kind of a hub of a lot of gay cultural activity. And it was just a fun place to work, especially since the—while the food, it was important that the food be of a certain caliber, the owners didn't really want to have anything to do with that. So they left the few of us in the kitchen to our own devices to kind of come up with recipes and be creative. And it was small enough that if I was cooking, I was the only person—eventually I worked my way up to sous chef. And if I was there, I was in charge of the menu for the night. And so, it gave me a lot of creativity. That was kind of where I forged my skills. And then, I stayed in restaurants for a little bit longer after that. I moved back to Boston. But I kind of found sort of other interests pushing in against that one. And I eventually decided I want to go back to school. I had studied literature and film in college, and—but was, sort of caught the science bug. And so, I decided that I was going to be—I wanted to be a doctor. It seems kind of crazy now, I thought that. So I go back to school, do pre-med courses. I hadn’t particularly done any of those kinds of classes in college. And I started out in chemistry and found that I had this kind of acuity for it. I found it really interesting. And while I was doing some of these courses, I kind of talked my way into an internship at a pharmaceutical company here in Cambridge. And that internship ended up getting renewed several times. And eventually, it just became a full-time job. And I sort of dropped the pre-med idea in favor of just kind of becoming an organic chemist. Organic chemistry is basically cooking, at least in the practical aspects of it. It's just like cooking. You have a recipe, put a bunch of stuff in a container, you heat it up, and it transforms into something else. And I'd always been good at recipes and good cooking. So it's sort of like it was an easy shift for me.And I did that for 12 years, ’cause it was—working for a corporation, it paid well. And I enjoyed it most of the time. And then while I was there, I caught another bug and this was in the study of mycology and mushrooms. And one of the benefits of working there was that they paid for higher education. And so I was able to get a master's degree—or most of it, I didn't finish it until after I left there. But in biology, it was a study of fungi and in, called mushroom cultivation and foraging and things like that. That's where I was when, just by coincidence. I met somebody, a friend of a partner of my brother-in-law who worked at America's Test Kitchen and shared my crazy resume, my story of how I—what I'd done all these years. And they go, ‘You'd be the perfect candidate for a job at America's Test Kitchen.’ They love people with all those kinds of backgrounds, and also the sort of skill set was perfect for it. So I applied and I took a massive pay cut. And the rest is history. And I was there for about the same, about 11 years, up until last year.Alicia: When did bread become the focus?Andrew: So it's funny because I was thinking about this in—I worked in two bakeries in high school, and it didn't register as a thing that I was at all interested in. And during college, I went—I spent a semester in Paris. I'm sure I ate lots of good bread. But somehow, the idea that I was surrounded by all these amazing bakeries just never, never even occurred to me to think about it. While I was there, I was kind of more interested in spending time in movie theaters and art museums. And so, I didn't come to bread until very late in the game. And the thing that kind of sparked that was probably—this is probably true for many people—was the no-knead bread. I think I made it right after the article came out in ’09. It both kind of sparked the idea that good bread can be had at home, and that actually, maybe, at home, homemade bread is better than you can get, at least from bakeries at the time. Or just the fact that you're pulling it hot from the oven yourself means you're getting it at the peak of its freshness. I quickly was like, ‘Oh, I think I need to dig into this more deeply.’ The fundamentals, the foundation had been there all along. Because the thing that I, that brought me to cooking in the first place when I was a kid, before I started working in restaurants, was pizza; I was obsessed with pizza. I think the first cookbook and kitchen tool I ever personally owned was a pizza pan and a book that my mother gave me as a birthday present. And so, that had been something that all throughout my life since that moment, I've been tinkering with my own recipes. And Cook's Illustrated started in ’93. So that was as I was—during college. I think I subscribed to it from the beginning at that point. And so, I understood that iterative testing process for recipe development. And I did a lot of that with my pizza recipe over the years. And so, I sort of laid the groundwork for where I ended up. After no-knead bread, I started digging into recipes and taking classes. And that was really where I kind of fell hard for it. But yeah, that—Sorry, go on.Alicia: No, no.But yeah, how did you come to your kind of current approach to it? Andrew: Well, so there's a lot of aspects to it. I think that no-knead bread itself is something I came to realize is just, I don't know. It's weird to find something so basic that you didn't realize you could be in love with when you ate it all the time. And maybe it's just because I never had good bread, but I'm sure I did. But there's so many things about it that I love about it it's hard to even narrow it down. I think one of them is simply that bread bakers are kind of, they're really great people. The people who work in the industry and the teachers I've had, they're just really—they're really generous and they're fun to be around. And so when I was a student of it, at the beginning of my time, I just was like, ‘Oh, these are my people’ in a way. And their passion for it kind of quickly became my own. But in terms of the bread itself, and what—one of the many things I love about it, one of them is just like that it's, unlike any other kind of cooking, it's a relationship. It's a dynamic thing that is never complete. You never perfect a technique. Sometimes it works amazingly, and sometimes it doesn't. And you have to kind of constantly bring yourself back to the-I mean, it's a living organism. And if you're not paying close attention to it, if you're not kind of adjusting to it, then it kind of resists being what you want it to be. And so, you need to kind of bring yourself down to its level—up to its level, I should say.I do a lot of overnight recipes, in the fridge overnight or on the counter. Every time I come downstairs from my bedroom and see what's happening in the kitchen, it's a little mini Christmas morning. I'm so excited to see what I, what it's managed to do for me in the interim. So there's just a lot of little joys in it. Yeah.Alicia: And you left your longtime post at America's Test Kitchen to focus on your newsletter as well as freelance. And you recently wrote about competing recipe style guides, which I thought was really interesting, because—for myriad reasons. One, that I develop recipes. Two, that I was a copy editor.How has that transition been for you into working for so many different places plus yourself? Because I know that it is very difficult. [Laughs.]Andrew: Yeah, that's been one of the many challenges of doing this, all solo. As I said, I came to America’s Test Kitchen as a cook and a science person, and not as a journalist. I had no training in journalism. And so, the style guide wasn't even something—I mean, I'm sure I had MLA or whatever in college, but I didn't know that it was a thing. And so when I learned how America's Test Kitchen did their thing, I didn't think, ‘Oh, that's their style guide.’ I just thought that's how everybody does it. And I absorbed that over time. But then after leaving, I realized, ‘Oh, this isn't how everybody is doing it. It’s just one idiosyncratic approach to it. And other places do it differently.’ And that makes sense. Every place has a different kind of needs and a different audience to cater to. But it's maddening to have to—it’s like having to speak a different language every time you do, pick up the phone to speak to somebody else. And it's really hard to adjust. But it is what it is. I wish we could have like an International Congress of Recipe’s style guides and just kind of come up with one thing. Yeah. Alicia: No, it's funny, because I wrote about salt today and how I'm going to try and not use Diamond Crystal anymore. It was so funny.Andrew: The Cargill thing?Alicia: The Cargill thing [laughs], where I found out that it's owned by Cargill since 1997. I had like literally no idea. That's never the point of anything anyone's talking about when they're talking about salt and which one to use. It's always about what's accessible and the volume, and  it's never—I also want this standard recipe conference, because I want the salt issue to be resolved. Because The L.A. Times is like, ‘Ok, we're only going to use Diamond Crystal.’ And then The Washington Post is like, ‘We're only going to use fine sea salt.’ But how many salts do you expect a regular person to have in their kitchen? I don't know, and I think it needs to be resolved. I'm just really horrified that people have always been like, ‘Diamond Crystal is the best’ and no one's ever said that they're owned by Cargill.Andrew: Yeah, that was news to me until I think you probably retweeted somebody a couple of days ago, and it never occurred to me. I mean, somebody down to make a bespoke salt that had the exact same weight to volume ratio and is as, just as good in terms of the way it sprinkles or whatever? And then we can stop using it. I was a kosher salt, Diamond kosher salt person until maybe that also sort of swayed me in the other direction. But I do think that it's annoying as hell that kosher salt comes in these two different volume to weight ratios. And I think I'm now in the sea salt’s better camp because sea salt is sea salt is sea salt.  Alicia: Exactly. Yeah, no, apparently there's a Norwegian kosher salt that is the same as Diamond Crystal. You're not getting a 10-pound, 5-pound box of it. So that's the issue here, is how much—yeah, how much you're getting, how much bang for your buck, which I guess is why Diamond Crystal really owned the game for so long. [Laughs.] And continues to! I don't think I'm going to change the way chefs act. But at least I can let people, more people know that Cargill owns this and to make their own choices now. Andrew: Yeah.Well, the other thing is that's kind of a very niche question, but like the bigger question’s metric versus imperial and weight to volume and baking recipes and that stuff is just maddening. So you asked about my own style and what that was like. I feel like a style guide should always be logical and clear. It should also teach people something. To give people options is to not encourage them to pick one over the other. And so I decided I'm getting rid of volume measurements, because I think it forces people to do something that eventually they'll come to see is easier.Alicia: Right. No, and I agree. I hate volume recipes. I mean, the only thing for me is that, to keep batteries in my scale. [Laughs.] It's remembering whether it's double A or triple A when I go to the store. That's my struggle. But I wanted to ask how you're maintaining creativity and balance between the work you're doing for other people and for your newsletter, because people ask me all the time. And for me, I think it's kind of obvious, most of the time, what's for the newsletter and what isn't. Speaking, again, of the salt piece, I know how I could expand the salt piece and make it really a lot better and 3000 words and a lot more effecting, but I'm not going to do that for my weekly blog. But, yeah, so basically, how do you balance those things that you're doing?Andrew: Well, I think I'm sort of in a similar camp with that. It took me a while to figure out that that was what it was, but I use it as a sort of a scratch pad for whatever's on my mind. And I don't necessarily feel like things need to be kind of resolved when I write about them there. And I think maybe from the outside—I hope this isn't the case—but maybe from the outside, it sort of seems very disjointed. One week, I'll be giving a recipe and the next week, I'll be talking about style guides. And so I hope that when you see the overall arc of things, you can see that I keep circling back to certain themes. But I find it very useful as a kind of idea-generating place. And I'm kind of grateful that people are willing to kind of follow along there. People pay to subscribe, and that seems like an amazing thing that people want to kind of hear me just think out loud.Alicia: Right.Yeah. And I like that aspect of newsletters. I think a lot of people don't really get that. Maybe because they don't do it; they don't understand the value of having to be consistently creative. And that it's not necessarily an ends in itself, but it's just a way of thinking. It's just a practice that you can have. That people will go along with it is really interesting. And have you found a real connection with your audience there?Andrew: For sure. I've found that the fact of their presence in—I mean, I guess one nice thing about having a paid option is that if people are paying, they don't have to comment to show their appreciation for what you're doing.I feel like the one thing that I've wanted to—Well, it's not the only thing, but one of the things I want to develop more of a sense of community. I feel it's probably on me to figure out a way to foster that more. Because there is some of it, but not as much as there perhaps could be, where people are not only commenting and interacting with me but also communicating with one another more. And maybe that's the question of starting open threads or encouraging questions where people get to weigh in. The hardest part, or a hard part, of doing the newsletter and being a full-time freelancer is just finding the time to implement all these different ideas I have for making it better. It's very slow.Alicia: It's really slow. It's very hard. I want to open up to new, have other people contribute. But I have to make sure I'm fully available to do the best editing work and everything like that. I don't know. It's funny how Substack is, say, it’s all like, ‘Independent newsletters are the future, blah, blah, blah.’ It is, in a way, but at the same time, it's not sustainable at all to do without support. It's impossible to grow into the way that you might have a vision for without the support of a team. Andrew: Yeah, definitely. I can see so many places where it could be more than it is, and maybe it will be someday. But part of it's just a question of time. If I didn't have the freelance work, then I might be able to double the amount of stuff I do there. The problem is that I actually enjoy most of the, or nearly all of the freelance work I'm doing are things I'm interested in. So I'm happy to have it. Maybe there just needs to be more days in the week, although working more is not a good idea.Alicia: No, no. Yeah, it's a hard balance. For me, the struggle right now is finishing my book, and then—and also doing a newsletter.Andrew: Yeah, that I couldn't imagine. Although I have a book project that I need to get going on. So, I don’t want to talk about it much. But the idea of trying to juggle that seems impossible.Alicia: It's hard. It's really hard. The newsletter, in a great way, it became my—the bulk of my income. But I didn't know that that was going to happen. Thank God it happened. And then I have to keep it up to write the book, because the advance was so shitty. [Laughs.] And I sold the book before my—literally weeks before my newsletter kind of popped off, I guess, last year? I don't know. So, it's constantly maintaining this balance in this kind of work where you're weighing the pros and cons of literally every small decision. But I remember when I quoted you about flour in a past newsletter, and you talked about ingredient sourcing and flour sourcing, it caused a little bit of controversy in the artisanal flower community. I talked to Roxana Jullapat about this recently while talking about Mother Grains-Andrew: Which I loved.Alicia: Yeah, yeah.And we're all constantly trying to find this balance—or we're all, I think, people who try to care both about accessibility and taste and ecology, and trying to juggle all of these ideas at once. You have to think about what's good for your local ecosystem, and what's also realistic. And so, what are your thoughts on flour and accessibility right now?Andrew: So, yeah, I got kind of yelled at by somebody, for use—[laughs] for using the term ‘fancy flour’ to refer to sort of fresh milled local, regional, flours, which I love and use all the time and, I think are important to—it's an important aspect to the industry to promote.But it's only a piece of the story. There's so many issues with making that kind of thing accessible to everyone. It's very expensive. It's not accessible in terms of, most supermarkets don't carry anything like that. And mail order is definitely possible, but not only does that add to the cost but it adds to the carbon footprint of the thing. I try in the newsletter and elsewhere to encourage people to seek out those kinds of things if they're in their local economy, and to—I think a great deal of my audiences likely can't afford to spend as much as possible on flour, and maybe-So I think the person that wasn't happy with that term was coming from that perspective is—and like, ‘You need to kind of almost force people who can afford to use better products and more sustainable, whatever.’ And so, I think that's a good thing. But I think it's important not to forget that there are people who can't afford that, and some of those people might not be part of my audience, but they—maybe I'm not attracting them, because if I'm kind of limiting myself to boutique ingredients. I kind of want to come at it from both sides. There's another aspect which is kind of related to that, which is that you—the thing about flours, flours that are kind of boutiques, is that each one needs to be—the recipe needs to be developed specifically for that flour. Whereas if you called for a commodity, or sort of a well-known flour, they're consistent across the—people can get King Arthur flour from one side of the country to the other, and it's going to behave the same way no matter where you get it. And so then, all of a sudden, the recipe becomes accessible to more people. And so, it's a challenge, because if you want to encourage those kinds of things, you need to teach people how to use them and how to how to adapt to them, in a way, like to say, ‘I don't know what your flour is going to be like, but here's what to look for and how to adjust if that's the case.’ But still, I mean, it's really important, because I think maybe flour’s one—I think Roxana said this, or maybe she was talking about sugar, but I think they're similar in that it's one of those unexamined monoliths in our food culture that we don't—we just think flour is just the thing you get. You buy some flour. Whatever, it doesn't matter. As opposed to thinking about how huge the industry is and how difficult it would be to dismantle that sort of thing and replace it with something that is more sustainable and equitable. I think we have to start somewhere. And talking about flous that are made from grains that are grown locally—I'm lucky to live in New England, which before it was the heartland, was the breadbasket of America. And so, good grain can be grown here, and more and more is being grown. And so, I have access to really great local flour, but not everyone does. Although I think there's probably opportunities to grow flours that can be adapted for whateverenvironment you live in. I mean, there's some cool flours that grow in the desert, wheats that grow in the desert that are being built into flour. And actually, we might need more of them, because I haven't really delved too deep into it. But they're saying, this year has been really bad for droughts in the Midwest and Canada. I don't know if it's the end, or if it's just a blip and the kinds of things that we're gonna see more and more of over time. So it's a little scary to think, because if we can't grow—I mean, me being able to have, make my bread is important to me. But beyond that, access to something like flour going away is hard to fathom how damaging that would be to our economies and our lives.Alicia: Yeah.No, I think about that a lot, especially because living in Puerto Rico, I can get King Arthur, but I have to go to the special store and I have to pay way more than I would have paid in New York for it. And then it's funny, because I think if I tried to learn how to cook here, every recipe would be a nightmare because of the humidity and the—and so, because I already know how to cook, I'm—I know how to compensate for things. But I just want to see more recipes, I think, written—and I guess I should start doing this—for the gluten-free flours that are more locally produced like the cassava flour and the breadfruit flour and everything, and plantain flour even. Because, as we keep saying here, it's like, ‘Well, soon everyone will know what this is to live in the tropics.’ New York is subtropical now. And so yeah, it's just really interesting to think about and to kind of try to reframe—yeah, I use the local grain thing to question or whatever to think about, yeah, how we might make things in the future that are recognizable to us. Andrew: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's just hard to imagine a world, or it's hard to imagine living in a world where something as fundamental as wheat or, were to go away. It's scary. And I love alternative flours, but you can't get a baguette out of cassava flour.Alicia: Yeah, exactly. Thinking about life without a baguette is kind of depressing. [Laughs.] Yeah. That's what I'm gonna have for breakfast. I have some. Anyway. [Laughs.] Let me enjoy it while I have it. I’m not thinking about that. But through your newsletter, you're also kind of—you're teaching classes on Zoom. And we talked about the different styles of writing recipes. But just to write recipes down in a methodical manner is so difficult for me personally. What is your process for doing that? What tools have maybe helped you do that? How have you found your teaching voice, basically?Andrew: So it's really interesting, because I'm deeply introverted. And so teaching is the farthest—especially in person—but in front of people, Zoom, or in a room full of them. But I actually have come to love it. And I never would have guessed that would be the case. I started teaching baking and cooking because I saw it as an opportunity to get to kind of hang out in spaces that I was just a consumer of where I wanted to—I wanted to be able to go to places like King Arthur and, on their dime instead of mine. And so I was like, ‘Ok, I'm just gonna see if they’ll let me teach something.’ But I quickly realized that actually, I really liked doing it. And so, I do it for its own sake now. It's challenging, but also it's a great tool for figuring out and kind of codifying what I know and what I don't know. If I have to develop it, I often will propose classes for things that I haven't quite finished figuring out but knowing that it'd be an opportunity to get it done. And so, there's something fun about jumping without a net into something like that. And so, in terms of a newsletter and the recipes, I think I've figured out how to teach, or learning how to teach. And in classes, I think I have converted some of that into how to write about it. But I'm still developing that a little bit more early on in the process. I feel I've been cycling through saying things and figuring out the best way to say something. I often talk about the same kinds of the same topics, how to work with a sourdough starter, or how to do techniques like folding and what not. And I'm never quite sure how to pass that along to somebody who, for whom it—they're naive to those concepts. But I've spent a lot of time thinking about that. And I feel like the thing that I think about most in sort of an abstract way is, how do you teach people to think like a baker does? It's not straightforward. I don't know if it's true for every skill, or, but I spend a lot of time thinking about, like, ‘What is it gonna flip the switch in somebody's head when they're doing a technique?’ It's not just straightforward, do this and get that result. It's more like, ‘Think like this, and you'll be able to figure out how to get that result.’ It's one step removed from the process. But I'm still trying to, still trying to get my head around that.Alicia: Well, for you, is cooking a political act?Andrew: Yes, it is. I feel like it's important to keep that in your mind when you're doing it. I think it's such an easy thing to forget that food and cooking have—it's such a fundamental thing. Is breathing a political act? It's almost the same, but—air is important, too. Food is so fundamental that it's just easy to forget that it has so much, so many implications in terms of—the flipside to eating is hunger, and maybe you're satisfying your own hunger but other people don't even have the option to satisfy it. Or equity in terms of who's making our food or who's growing, picking our fruits, and then all the impacts on climate and resources. And so, I feel I try to deliberately keep that in mind. I mean, it's not always there, but I just feel it's important not, never to forget that. It's part of a system that is not great and needs a lot of work. And I think that, especially if you're in the world of food and cooking, you can have an impact, a positive impact in that if you keep it in mind. Alicia: Right. Thank you so much for being here.Andrew: Oh, it was my pleasure. I'm so happy to be here. This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at www.aliciakennedy.news/subscribe This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at www.aliciakennedy.news/subscribe

Are short-term rental businesses coming out of the COVID-19 pandemic and being resurrected? Do owners love the return on investment (ROI) and income, but tired of the turnover, logistics, and moving parts? If you're doing it all on your own, hand it over. Today's guest is Andrew LeBaron with BuyMoreTime, a flat-rate property management solution for short-term rentals. Andrew began his real estate journey by being the marketing director and a guest on Joe Fairless's Best Ever Real Estate Investing Advice Show. Then, Andrew started buying, selling, wholesaling, fixing, and flipping properties and got licensed to go even further. You'll Learn... [02:13] How Andrew went from greeting big-name podcast guests to becoming one. [05:15] Hoteling 101: Managing a hotel is not time and freedom. It's a lot of work. [05:54] Team Effort: If you don't have a team, you will not thrive (or sleep). [09:23] COVID: Great for short-term rentals, not for property managers or owners. [12:40] Questions: How much could my property rent for? What needs to be inside it? [16:23] Mistakes: Give gifts and leave notes for guests to make a big difference.  Tweetables “Shorter rental management is big bucks.” Hoteling 101: Owners of short-term rental properties just wanted more time and freedom, and managing a hotel is not time and freedom. It's a lot of work. “There's so many facets to this. There's legal, there's inventory, there is coordination with cleaning and maintenance. Then, there's guest responses. It's literally 24/7.” “When you have a short-term rental, you're not selling a place to stay. You're selling an experience.” Resources The Best Short-Term Rental Management Andrew LeBaron on Facebook Best Ever Real Estate Investing Advice Show with Joe Fairless BiggerPockets Grant Cardone Gary Keller Barbara Corcoran Airbnb VRBO The Giftology Stay Here on Netflix JF1896: How To Grow Your Property Management Company with Jason Hull DoorGrow on Instagram DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrowClub DoorGrowLive Transcript Jason: Welcome DoorGrow hackers to the DoorGrowShow. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors, make a difference, increase revenue, help others, impact lives, and you are interested in growing your business and life, and you're open to doing things a bit differently, then you are a DoorGrow hacker. DoorGrow hackers love the opportunities, daily variety, unique challenges, and freedom that property management brings. Many in real estate think you're crazy for doing it. You think they're crazy for not because you realize that property management is the ultimate high-trust gateway to real estate deals, relationships, and residual income. At DoorGrow, we are on a mission to transform property management businesses and their owners. We want to transform the industry, eliminate the BS, build awareness, change perception, expand the market, and help the best property management entrepreneurs win. I'm your host, property management growth expert, Jason Hull, the founder and CEO of DoorGrow. Now, let's get into the show. Today's guest, I'm hanging out here with Andrew LeBaron. Andrew, welcome to the show. Andrew: Thank you. Jason: Andrew, you're with an organization company called BuyMoreTime. Andrew: That's it. We are a short-term rental property management solution. Jason: Cool. Andrew, we don't have a lot of vendors and people on the show typically related to the short-term rental industry. This will be interesting because I have been getting a lot more calls related to that lately. Maybe a lot of people are starting to resurrect these short-term rental businesses coming out of the pandemic, where there's a black swan event that squashed the industry temporarily. Let's first get into a little bit of background about you and how you got into this industry. Andrew: Yeah, sure. It's funny. We're on a podcast right now. I actually started a long time ago as a marketing director for a podcast. I don't know if you've ever heard of the Best Ever Real Estate Investing Show with Joe Fairless. He buys multi-family apartments. That's his main gig. Jason: I think I was on that show. I've been on a lot of podcasts back in the day. Andrew: I wouldn't be surprised. Heck, maybe, I reached out to you some years ago, who knows? It's the world's longest daily real estate podcast. I mean his work ethic is insane. Years ago, I got into real estate. I jumped into (of course) Bigger Pockets. I jumped into Joe Fairless's podcast. On one of the podcast episodes he said, I am looking for a marketing director. Someone that can help connect me with more guests. If that's you, send me an email. I'm like, I want to try that. I sent him an email. I'm like, I don't care if he pays me. If he pays me, great. If he doesn't, so what? I was his marketing director and I got to meet some of the coolest people—Grant Cardone, Gary Keller, some really big names. I didn't get to speak to Barbara Corcoran, but I got to send an email. There were some pretty big names on that podcast and I was actually able to be a guest. I was starting my real estate journey and from there I started buying and selling properties, wholesaling, buying, fixing, and flipping. I started buying small apartments, 6 units, 10 units and so on and so forth. Then I got licensed because I wanted to take it a little bit further. I thought, okay, if I'm not going to buy these, I'm going to either manage them, and so on and so forth. Then I realized about 3½–4 years ago from an accident, actually, that shorter rental management is big bucks. In fact, we bought a house that we couldn't sell. We tried everything we could to move, the property just wouldn't move for some reason; it was just a weird property. I told my partner, whatever. Let's furnish it. We went to goodwill. We got these truckloads of just random furniture and we loaded up into this house—we're such rookies—and we put it up or lease or we set it up for Airbnb. I kid you not, this lady wanted to rent it for a week for $250 a night. I was like, it's got to be a joke. There's no way. She's like, no, I'd love to stay here, me and my family. From there, I thought, the short-term rental space is where it's at. We started buying more, furnishing more. Then all of our friends said, can you help us manage ours? We're like, okay, we can help you. It's hoteling 101, but that's how we became BuyMoreTime. We noticed that owners of short-term rental properties just wanted more time and freedom, and managing a hotel is not time and freedom. It's a lot of work. Jason: Right. I don't think there's any industry that takes more time and more customer interaction than the hospitality industry. I think that's rated at the top. Property management is second to that, they say, so it's right there. Andrew: It's pretty insane. There's so many facets to this. There's legal, there's inventory, there is coordination with cleaning and maintenance. Then there's guest responses. It's literally 24/7. There is no sleep. If you don't have a team, you will not thrive. Jason: Right. Tell us a little bit about BuyMoreTime. What is it exactly that you do? Andrew: BuyMoreTime is a flat rate management service for short-term rentals. We are a service-first company. If you have a property on a short-term rental platform, say, Airbnb, VRBO, if you have a motel, small apartment building, you want to do a couple of apartments and you want to maximize your ROI by leveraging the short-term rental platforms and its traffic, then you can hire us. We will manage that for you. We'll set it up. Most of the time we're looking for clients that already had it built, but we can set it up. We will set your teams—you're cleaning team, your maintenance team. We'll handle messaging 24/7. We will take over your hotel. That's what we do. Jason: Okay, the hotel. Awesome. Cool and I checked my inbox. I was on the Joe Fairless podcast back in May of 2019. It's been some years, but I was there at one point. Andrew: That's so cool. Jason: But I didn't even know it was that big of a deal. I guess that was pretty cool for me in hindsight. Andrew: That is really cool. Jason: Awesome. What would you say to people that might be tuning into this on the short-term rental side that are doing this themselves currently? Why would they want to get in partnership with you? Andrew: Well, just like our name prescribes, if you are tired of wasting or you're trading your time for money and you love the ROI, you love the income, 2–3 times than average rents across the nation is what you can expect from a short-term rental. If you're getting $700 rent in the south, you could get double that. You can get triple that. Depending on where you are. There are many variables. But if you're tired of handling that yourself, you can literally hand it over to our company. Our sales team will answer all your questions. We'll link you up into our software. We will hit the green button and you sit back and simply watch the interaction between your guest and our team and obviously your bank account. There is no touching it. I mean we literally set it up in the beginning so you don't have to manage it all. We have your team. We have your inventory. We would restock your toilet paper, paper towels. Sheets. There's just so much to say. It'll hurt your head if you think about it. Inventory management and supply chain, that's what we do. We handle all that. That's what your listeners can glean from our company. That's what we can do for them. Jason: Now, you had mentioned a little bit of info about how appealing it might be to get into the short-term rental game, 2–3 times the amount of income coming in. But what about those that have been burned by Covid? They said this was too painful. We weren't prepared for this. Money just stopped. Vacation rental market was just decimated. They're just afraid to get back into the game. Andrew: You know what's funny? Covid actually was great. I think that's the only thing I'll say about Covid as far as short-term rentals go. For a property manager or for an apartment owner, for property owners, Covid was not great because you have the moratorium. There's a lot of struggles there. For us, for the short-term rental gamers, it was wonderful. People couldn't leave. No one could go anywhere. We saw a decline in March of 2020. We saw a slight decline in occupancy. Our typical occupancy is hovering around 92%. Occupancy inside the short-term rental game is very different. You got 30 nights out of a month, depending how many nights you booked, that's your occupancy rate. It dipped I think just 70% flat, 70% or 73% flat. After March, we started exploding. It was quite the opposite. People couldn't go to Europe. People couldn't go to other countries, so they had staycations. In the beginning, this whole journey there's kind of like this Airbnb belief that when you have a guest that wants to go from one side of the city to stay in your place, that's a big red flag because it's probably going to be a party, probably going to be a kid. But at this moment, with Covid, it was like, look, I'm a tired mother. My husband and I would just want to get away. We got a babysitter. Covid shut us down, can we come stay? We haven't changed our [...], yeah sure. We don't discriminate, but at the same time, we would stop asking all the prying questions. Are you in college or not? College parties are the worst. But we would allow them to. We actually exploded really well during Covid. Jason: Interesting. I would have thought it would have been the opposite. Now, is BuyMoreTime location-specific? Is this all over the US? Is it beyond? Where do you guys do this at? Andrew: We're in five states right now and two countries. We're in Canada, in here, and five states. We can do this anywhere. We could pick up anywhere. Obviously, you need to qualify. We have a qualifying call. It's called a discovery call where we discuss what your property is like, its condition, your needs, and so on and so forth. See if we're a good fit. Not everybody's a good fit, obviously. Not every property is a good fit. Not every area is a good fit. We just want to make sure that it's going to be a win-win situation for everybody. Jason: Are you wanting listeners that are listening to the DoorGrowShow, to this episode, regardless of where they're at to just reach out, or are you looking for specific areas? Andrew: Regardless of where they're at to reach out, absolutely. Jason: Cool. What are some of the biggest questions that potential clients want to know when talking with you? Andrew: Number one question, how much could my property go for? How much could my property rent for if I was to work with BuyMoreTime? My answer is, when you come to BuyMoreTime, you should already be established. We're not a coaching company. We're not a let's boost your traffic. You should already be established, description, photos, 5-star reviews and you say, look, I got this in the bag. I just need to hand over the reins. That's all I want to do. For the costs, less than paying a VA every month, you're going to hire our team and we're going to run all of your operations. Jason: So this is for those that are just tired of the turnover, tired of the logistics, tired of making sure all the moving parts are happening. You'll handle all of that. Andrew: Correct. Jason: It sounds like you do it quite affordably. Andrew: Yup. $349 a month is our price and it doesn't fluctuate. The good news is we built this to service our property, to scratch our own itch. We're investors first. We have short-term rentals. We buy property. I'm sitting in one right now, up north. I've only been here for a couple months, brought my family into it. This will eventually be a short-term rental up in the pines. We wanted something where I didn't have to pay 20%, 25%, 15% of my profits. There's a lot of other companies out there like us where they have this really cool software and service—services, in my opinion, are subpar—but you pay out 20% of your profits on your highest month. It's like you're being penalized for using their service. To me, I would want some sort of program that I know what I'm paying for every single month. Every single month is the same rate, no matter what. In that way, I can easily predict my income for my highest months. Everybody's got the highest months. Austin's got a high season. Arizona, all over the place, they have a high season and low season. Florida, they have a high season. For us in AZ for example, it's going to be March and April. From other places, it is that same month or those months. These companies rob you 20% of your total proceeds. I thought that's not cool. Let's give the profits back to the owners and we'll just take a small fee for managing their property. Jason: All right, so the first the main question everyone wants to know is how much could they get and probably what is the cost. What else are they curious about, usually? Andrew: They usually want what I need in my property? What should be inside it? Especially, if you haven't done this before. Let's say you manage apartments, or you own a building, or whatever it may be, and you're talking to some partners or your client about setting up an Airbnb. That's probably one of the biggest questions is what goes inside of it? The one thing I need to tell people is when you have a short-term rental, you're not selling a place to stay. You're selling experience. I don't know, Jason, if you've ever stayed in a property on Airbnb before, but I just… Jason: I have. Andrew: You have? Just scrolling, you're looking for beautiful photos. You're looking for awesome amenities. You're looking for 5-star reviews. You're not looking 4-star, you're not looking for 3-stars, you want the best. You're looking for a very awesome experience. I think the biggest mistake that a lot of short-term rental managers go through is they're just trying to just fill it with stuff. That's not the case. If you have the ability to stock the fridge, stock the fridge. If you can leave a note for your guest, leave a note. If you could set up a system to leave nice things for your guests or send an extra message saying, we're so glad you're here, do it because that's what it's about. Jason: Yeah. There's a really great book called The Giftology, and in this book he talks about how just little gifts and little things actually make a big difference. And that makes a big difference giving something because that just makes it novel. It makes it stand out. It makes it different. I really enjoyed the show on Netflix called Stay Here. I don't know if you've seen that. Andrew: Yes. Jason: They're making these properties ready to be really amazing experiences, and that was a big part of the show is all about this experience. People are coming to Austin and have a certain type of experience. There needs to be a barbecue and some of these things. People are going to different areas in order to have the experience of that area and kind of tying that in. They made it really hyper relevant. Any other questions people tend to ask? Andrew: I think one other question they ask is how do I stand out? How do I be different? Everybody has got a condo on Airbnb. If you go to airbnb.com right now, looking at Austin, look in your zip code, you'll see thousands. How do I stand out? I think the biggest tip I have for those people that want to know how to stand out is, what is something that is going to make your place so memorable that people will be talking about it and they'll come back? There's a really easy way to do this by asking yourself what do people not offer that I can offer? What do they not have that I have? Some people have this huge TV, surround sound, just crazy entertainment, amazing sofa. That's good, but what is extra? I've seen some people add movie tickets or tickets to some amusement parks. I don't know how cost-effective that is, obviously, but depending on your budget versus how you can stand out, that's going to predict how you stand out. Jason: Interesting, cool. Well, how can people get a hold of you that might be interested? Andrew: This question always comes up in podcasts. I sometimes tell my cell phone number, but there's a link that actually you have, Jason, where you can get a hold of us. I'll just let you add that to the show notes. I'm going to just defer that back to you. Other than that, you could reach out to me on Facebook. Jason: Awesome. Yeah. He gave me an affiliate link, everybody, which is cool. I appreciate that. We'll put that link in the show notes. We'll link that on the podcast episode, online on our blog as well. It's been great getting familiar with you here a little bit. I really enjoyed the different perspective on Covid about the short-term rental industry. I know that I had lots of clients in the long-term game that were able to convert several into long-term during that time period in areas that they had challenges, but that was interesting. I didn't consider the staycation part, but I think a lot of people got really anxious, cooped up inside, and were looking for just a change of scenery, even if it was nearby. That makes a lot of sense. I appreciate you coming on the show, and until next time everybody, to our mutual growth. Make sure you subscribe on iTunes and tune into the DoorGrowShow on YouTube as well. And if you are interested in growing your property management business, we're having some really great success with our new DoorGrow and scale mastermind. We have one of our clients John [...] join in November, in the middle of the winter months, during the pandemic, in Boston. He added 125 doors in the last six months just using one of my strategies, and it cost him $0. He didn't spend any money on advertising. Anyway, reach out if you're interested. You can check us out at doorgrow.com. Bye everyone. Andrew: See you.

Rick Weddle (Site Selectors Guild): Welcome to Site Selection Matters, where we take a close look at the art and science of site selection decision-making. I’m your host Rick Weddle, president of the Site Selectors Guild. In each episode, we introduce you to leaders of the world of corporate site selection and economic development. We speak with members of the Site Selectors Guild, our economic development partners, and corporate decision-makers to provide you with deep insight into the best and next practices in our profession. In this episode, we have as our guest, Andrew Deye, vice president of Strategy for JobsOhio, the lead statewide agency for economic development and job growth in Ohio. Today, Andrew will talk with us about the role talent plays in fueling business opportunities and innovation across the state of Ohio. Please join me as we welcome Andrew Deye to Site Selection Matters. Andrew, your title is vice president of Strategy for JobsOhio. What an interesting role that describes. Take a minute or two if you will, tell our listeners a little bit about exactly what JobsOhio is, maybe what it does. Andrew Deye (JobsOhio): Well, Rick, thank you for the opportunity. JobsOhio is Ohio’s private economic development corporation, and like the Site Selectors Guild, we’re celebrating our tenth anniversary this year. Relative to other state economic development organizations, we’re unique in a number of ways, but let me highlight three. First, our private structure, we’re a private non-profit with a team of industry experts that support businesses with their growth projects that allows us to keep information confidential until the point of announcement. Second, we have a stable funding source. Back in 2013, a 25-year franchise of the state’s liquor enterprise was executed that provides us stable funding through ups and downs. And third, we have statewide coverage, JobsOhio operates with six regional partners, a team in Northeast Ohio, one Columbus, REDI Cincinnati, the Dayton Development Coalition, Regional Growth Partnership Northwest Ohio and Ohio Southeast. We were proud that Cincinnati was the host of the Site Selectors Guild Annual Conference in 2018, and hope you’ll continue to keep an eye on the exciting developments in Ohio. Rick: Well, thank you, Andrew. Thanks for sharing that background on JobsOhio. I think you got my attention when you said stable funding source. I think that speaks to the leadership of the state of Ohio to have an understanding that economic development works best when you can kind of find a line and work it and stay on top of it. So, congratulations to you and the leadership of the state of Ohio for hanging there for 10 years with that stable funding source. I’m sure your partners really appreciate that too? Andrew: Well, ultimately all projects are local, and so we think the three parts, you know, JobsOhio, our regional partner, and our local communities, and ultimately this is always about solving a client opportunity or problem, talent solutions, real estate solutions, and we look forward to continuing to serve clients this year and beyond. Rick: Let me follow up on that, you mentioned talent. One of the most important elements of business investment and site selection decisions really is talent or talent-related. How does Ohio stand or compare today on the issue of talent? What are you doing or going to do specifically to build on your talent ba

Sasha and Andrew talk about finding balance. How working on your shadow is just as important as working on the rest of yourself. They explore tarot and other tools along with personal stories of encounters wit the shadow.    Think about how much you've enjoyed the podcast and how many episodes you listened to, and consider if it is time to support the Patreon You can do so here.   Supporters get early access and at th e$5 level access ro a bonus recording for each episode - this one a 17 minute talk on how to work with your shadow.  If you want more of this in your life you can subscribe by RSS , iTunes, Stitcher, or email. You can find Sasha here.  Andrew is here.    Thanks for joining the conversation. Please share the podcast to help us grow and change the world.  Andrew You can book time with Andrew through his site here.    Transcription.  Andrew: Welcome to another episode of The Hermits Lamp podcast. I am here today with Sasha Graham. I met Sasha at Readers Studio a number of years ago where they were talking about shadow work. And recently, this summer, they came out with a deck called the Dark Wood Tarot, which digs right into that shadow stuff. And for people who've spent time around me, really owning both sides of that stuff is important I think to every spiritual journey. So I wanted to kind of have Sasha on here to talk shadow stuff and talk dealing with those things, especially at a time when COVID and racial issues and justice issues or the shadow issues of our cultures are really being brought to the foreground as well. It feels like an important conversation and an important thing to keep paying attention to. But maybe everybody doesn't know who you are, Sasha. So why don't you give us a quick introduction? Sasha: Yeah. Well, first off, thank you. Thank you so much for having me. So my name's Sasha Graham. I'm a tarot author and a deck creator and a teacher. I've written, I think, eight tarot books for Llewellyn and Lo Scarabeo. And I contribute to the Llewellyn's Magical Almanacs, which is Datebooks. And I've created two tarot decks, both of them kind of steeped in spooky darkness because I love that vibe: The Tarot of the Haunted House for Lo Scarabeo and The Dark Wood Tarot, which has just come out a couple months ago, with Llewellyn. Andrew: So tell me this, because you are a very positive-seeming, very upbeat, very energetic and outgoing kind of person. What's with all the darkness? What's with the appeal of that for you? What do you get from that? Sasha: I am a person who... The darkest parts of anything in my life that I've ever experienced, the most challenging things in my life that I've ever experienced has always paid itself back on the light side, if that makes sense. So I grew up in a very kind of... I think my childhood, to be honest with you, felt very terrifying. I lived in wild, rural places. I was on mountains and planes. We moved around. The world always felt very supernatural and very scary. And it was always kind of going in and embracing the things and figuring out all of the dark stuff helped me find the light that much better, if that makes any sense. And especially I think as a teenager, when there were certain things that I couldn't process that were happening in my life, it was easier for me to go to horror and Stephen King. I happened to come of age when vampires and Anne Rice became a thing and the goth movement first came out. So, to me, grinding yourself against the darkness, grinding yourself against the stuff that terrifies you makes you stronger and ultimately it makes you more whole. And then as I transitioned into my work as a taroist and as a writer and as like, I don't know, a spiritual creature or whatever you want to call it, I realized how profound and how the further you go into the... We're all here to evolve, right? As a taroist, as an artist, as a writer, you're here to move forward and to see further than you've seen the day before. The only way you can bring the light of consciousness to whatever it is that you do is by exploring the things you don't understand or you don't know. Now, oftentimes those things are scary. If you're doing between world work and you're encountering an energy that you're not familiar with, of course that's terrifying because you don't recognize it. But interestingly, that happening spiritually or in your imagination is the same thing that happens to us when we walk down the street and see something we don't recognize or a person that we don't recognize. Because something is not comfortable to us, we call that thing the other and we're afraid of it. And that's why the shadow work that you perform for yourself is applicable on every single level of our lives. And so it's not just about how you're relating inside to yourself, but also how you're relating to the external world, and how what I call the trick of the material world, which in the tarot deck would be pentacles, how you really get fooled by the way that something looks rather than paying attention to the energy of what it actually is underneath. And when you're looking at things energetically... Oh my God, I'm really running on here. But when you're looking at things energetically, it's a lot simpler, I think, than things look like on the surface. All right. I'm going to just stop talking now. Andrew: No. There are so many things to touch on in there. So the first one I want to ask you about though... I made a list here so we can make sure stuff doesn't get missed. The first thing that I want to say is... So I spent a lot of time in the wilderness. I grew up sort of North of Toronto in a town that I think it had about 8,000 people living there when I lived there. But I lived on the edge of town and there was nothing but farms and forests between us and the next town, maybe a 15 minute drive over or a very long, long walk or bike ride. And so I spent a lot of time in the woods and pretty deep in the woods and getting lost in the woods with friends and stuff like that or by myself. And I spent a lot of time cycling the rural roads. I would just hop on my bike and ride for hours and be like, huh? And again, pre GPS, pre whatever, like actually lost. Being like, huh, I think if I turn right here, I'm going to get back to my city, my town. But if not, then I'm going to hit this other town and then I'm going to have a really long bike ride home after that. I'm already really tired. Because for me, as I continue to grow and continue to live my life spiritually, my connection to the land, to wilderness, to sort of spirits from places, to plants and animals and all of those kinds of things that has its root in that time continues to flourish. Because I think that in nature, there's no avoiding the shadow. Nature doesn't avoid it at all. It's all kind of unified. Nature is what it is and that's it. And we sometimes try and glorify it and be like, "Oh, all these things are so perfect." And it's like, well, nature is astounding. Nature is magical and powerful. Nature is intense and scary. It's all there. So I'm curious what role some of your experiences of being in the wilderness or in nature and so on impacted on your journey in this. Was there a moment where you were out there and you were scared of stuff? Was there a moment where you had a spiritual encounter in the woods or wherever? Sasha: Yeah. And this is, again, one of those things where you asked me in the beginning, why do you love the darkness? One of the things that used to terrify me the most was I lived on the side of a mountain in Vermont. We had like a mile long driveway. I was in fourth grade. And I would have to walk from the school bus up the driveway and into the empty house and hang out for like two hours by myself before anyone got home. And so it was like I would leave the den of the school bus. And the second I stepped off that school bus, man, it got quiet. And the gift of being a young child and of being scared, because there's a difference between playing... Well, whether you're playing or whether you're kind of nervous and therefore kind of on alert, the gift of being very young and being in those situations is that you're not always necessarily sure what you're looking at. When you encounter things, I think that you encounter them maybe in their truer form than what people have. Because once you're told this is a doc, that is a red robin, you kind of place it in a box in a way. But when you're young and in nature... And I believe that being nervous and being scared, especially those walks up that driveway, because I was in kind of a heightened state of alert, I was certain I was going to get murdered or there was a troll under the bridge. He was going to devour me up. I really paid attention, like super-uber attention. And with that, yeah, I saw things and I experienced things on a much more profound level probably than I could even... I probably couldn't even express it in words. But again, it's something that I'm so grateful for because as I've grown older and moved deeper into the work that I do, I understand that now and I'm able to see things in that way or I know when I'm encountering something and what I would call between mortals experience, where I'm almost in two places at the same time and looking through the veneer of the material world into the energy that's underneath. So again, I think it's that full circle thing, when you have a childhood rooted in nature and go outside and play, you're immediately interfacing with all of this energy that in and of itself could be your teacher. You never have to pick up a tarot book or a witchcraft book or a Shelly book if you were just paying attention to and outside in the woods. So that's an example of why I'm grateful for something that was spooky that was my greatest teacher as well. Andrew: Yeah. I think there's something about fear that is really helpful sometimes, not always. You know what I mean? Sasha: Yeah. Andrew: I remember the first time I summoned Goetic demon to demand it to do something for me. It was one of the first evocations that I did. A friend of mine and I had spent a long time... We got this 10 by 10 foot canvas and painted our magic circle on it by hand. We did all sorts of stuff around setting that up. And I remember the feeling as I started that ceremony and the way in which it heightened all of my other senses and kind of opened me up. It wasn't that I hadn't been meditating and scrying and reading cards. I had been doing a lot of stuff. But something about the tension around that and sort of that taking it really seriously. And I think that whether it's a deliberate experience or whether it's a sort of situational experience, right? I remember being... We were at a friend's wedding somewhere north of the city and we were walking back, me and my co-parent and the two kids, one of whom was like an infant at the time. And we were walking back from where the post wedding dancing was happening around a fire with a bunch of drums and stuff like that, back to the cabin where we were sleeping. The road was pitch black and we didn't have a flashlight. And the only light that there was, was this little tiny gap above us where you could see a few stars through the trees. And I was just like, "Oh, this is fine. I know this." I mean, I don't know that place. But I know the forest. I know being here in the dark. I know whatever. And I was just like, "It's fine. Just put your hand on me and I'll just walk us back." And I just walked us back, following that faintest of trails. I mean, the road itself was big enough to drive a car out. So it wasn't like I was walking through the woods on a tiny goat track on a mountain with the kids. But it was dark. And that sense, for me, in that moment, of connection to all of that stuff around me made it really easy to be there. But I think that in the absence of that, that is a terrifying experience, right? Sasha: Mm-hmm (affirmative). And I think that, again, it's kind of the trick in the way that we address what's happening, like fear. So many of the same things that happen to us physically when we're freaked out and scared are also the same thing that happens to us when we're intensely sexually aroused. Your face flushes, you get goosebumps on your skin, you're really paying attention to everything that's going on. Well, what happens in those moments when you're on such kind of high alert, you're broken open. In the sense of the erotic, you're opening yourself up to someone and if everything's in your favor, you're about to have an incredibly transcendent experience with someone. And I think the great thing about really good horror movies, for example, or a great horror novel is that also opens you up and shows you something new. It shows you what's possible. And it doesn't necessarily always feel good, which I always talk about the three of swords being the heart opening card. To look at an incredible natural landscape can be kind of as painful. Beauty can be as painful as grief, and all of it is breaking you open. It's taking you out of where you were yesterday and it's moving you further into a deeper experience of being a human being and therefore understanding the world in a more profound way, which is why I think we're all here and why we do this work. Andrew: I love the notion of the sublime from like 19th century landscape and then kind of further into modernism and other things. This idea that we can have these experiences of something that is so vast and overwhelming that it allows us to understand our place in the universe and our relationship to source the creator or, as they would have said, to God. Because it is that a complete existential understanding of our place in relationship to everything else. And that sense of both our smallness and our bigness in relationship to things. A friend of mine had this land that backed onto 50,000 hectares. I don't know what that is in America, but it's huge. It's unbelievably huge. And the land was logged like a hundred years ago and then has been untouched ever since. And other than a few hunter shacks and stuff, there's nothing there. And I used to go pike in there and find a high spot, because there's just sort of like rolling Canadian shield, rocky surfaces that on the top of them there's just nothing there because they're just fair walk. And I would find a nice one and I would camp there for a couple days by myself. And at night I would do ceremonies to the sky goddess. And you're there in this vast wilderness and I'm like three, four hours walk through the woods from anybody else probably. And you're on this high point and you're away from all the cities. So it's just this vast, expansive starriness. And that sense of being lost in relationship to it, being consumed by the bigness and then connected to it and then returned back to myself is such a profound and healing experience. Sasha: And also, when I'm out in the woods by myself, what is always surprising to me is the sense that I'm definitely not out there alone. And I'm not talking about like tree energy or field energy. I am talking about something much more beguiling. And I would not even dare to kind of try and even define it because again, I think it's something that... What happens to you when you are truly alone without other people in the wild I guess is like the hermit and taro. You have to be out there to experience it yourself because I think it's one of the closest, comfortable ways that you can start to understand how you interface with the world around you. And I think it's an exquisite and always surprising and amazing. I just think it's amazing. Now I want to go hiking, or maybe it's the weekend that has caught up. Andrew: Yeah. I just got back from a week camping, not particularly remotely, but a week camping with my kids. And they were like, "Can we go again?" And I'm like, "Yeah, we'll go again. We can do on October." And maybe we'll go somewhere just slightly further that's maybe going to be a little Wilder, especially because October we're not going to be swimming or not likely to be swimming. It's going to be cold up here and stuff. Sasha: For sure. Andrew: One of the things I think is very interesting about you as well is that you have this background in acting. And you have this piece that's attached to what people talk about as sort of, in my mind, glamor magic, from like what you do and how you go about it, stuff like that. And so I'm curious for you, how do you think about it, or if you ever think about this sort of idea of how you are in the world as sort of a deliberate expression of yourself and us sort of being attached to that wholeness or that magic or those kinds of ideas? Sasha: I love that you just said glamour magic. That makes me so happy. So your question is, I'm sorry, how do I... Andrew: How do you think about this yourself in relationship to how you are in the world, like your shadow and all this stuff? You're out there as a teacher and a taroist and all these things. But how do you think about how you present yourself, about your persona, about your way of being in the world, especially maybe in relationship to your public self, or if you do at all? I don't know. Sasha: Look, from as far back as I can remember, I think there's two things that kind of occupied my mind and in terms of what drove me to do the things that I did, and that was, one, in a sense having some sort of agency or power. And two, with that, also being authentic to who I was or am. And that's something that I'm constantly trying to figure out. And I think anybody who's extremely empathetic, I pick up a lot of whoever I'm around. So I'm constantly trying to navigate, okay, is that me or is that someone else? I try to be and I continue every day, I was just in bed this morning with my husband talking about this thing, being the most authentic version of who it is that you are with that whole idea of the things that are placed inside of you that you are drawn to. So in terms of what I put out there, it's who I am. I love that you say glamour magic. I think supernatural stuff is sexy. I think witchcraft is so sexy. I think it's powerful. That's what I loved when I was an actor and I made like a million B movies. I'm looking at them right now. They're all right there. But when I look back at the roles that I did, I wasn't the girl being like slashed in a wet t-shirt. I was the vampire. I was the gargoyle. I was the mafia hit woman. It was all about claiming my power because I think for so long I felt powerless. So what I do now, as a woman... It's funny. The teaching just kind of came along with writing books. I never set out to become a teacher at all. But then since I started publishing, people were like, "Oh, will you teach a class. Do you guys do that?" So I was like, okay, all right. I mean, I'd rather be a student. Any day of the week I would rather be a student because I'm still figuring this stuff out and it's always felt odd to kind of be like, well, here I am the authority. Let me tell you what I know about the invisible world. How do I know that for someone else? I only know my experience of it. And even with my books, I'm always like you know more about yourself than I do. Throw my book out the window and write down what the symbol of a crown or a rainbow means to you. So as far as what I put out there, I mean, I'm just trying to be me. I like glamour and pleasure and beauty and travel and excitement. And I always felt, since I was very young, that life was cinematic. And it's why I love living in New York city and I love being in the mountains because it's like being in a movie thing and I do love the movies. So I don't know. That's just me, I guess. I'm trying to be me. Andrew: Because it sounds like there was a time where you didn't feel empowered and now there's this time where you feel more empowered or you're sort of aware of it and making a lot of choices that bring you into that place. How did that shift happen? Sasha: Well, the second I moved to New York city, I got a great therapist. I found myself a good, good therapist. I always had the sense... How did that shift happen? Taro has always been my jam. First of all, when I first started as a reader, I was like, well, if I'm not following my own advice, then I'm kind of like a total fraud. So I always already felt like it was like, okay, it was going to keep me on point. And the shift into... I don't know when it happened. I mean, I think it's been a slow and steady ascension up the cliff into whoever is inside of me that's trying to come out or trying to show itself. I don't know. Andrew: Interesting. Yeah. It's funny how that stuff sort of sometimes is easier to see in retrospect, that the change is happening, than it is to sort of notice in the moment. And I think that... Maybe you see this with people, too. Sometimes come for readings and they want that change today. And I'm like, yeah, that would be so nice, wouldn't it? If I could just, and then you would feel empowered or this or that or whatever. But it's often those accumulation of little things, or not even little things, right? Like, well, I did therapy for a while. I did this. I did that. I read my cards every day. I kept asking questions. I kept writing. Sasha: And it's so true. And I'm so curious. When people have those big moments... My sister, for instance, she was a heroin addict. And I'm always like that day of clarity where you woke up and were like, "I'm done," how many tiny things had to... And if you look bad at any moment in your life when you make a big decision like, "Oh, I'm finally really done." And you might call that a major care moment. I'm really finished with this. It's always the tiniest things that led to the biggest kind of I think outward, inward changes. And in a sense makes it so easy... I didn't know what I was going to do for a career. I was asking the tarot every day, what should I do? What should I do? If there's something you want in your life, ask what that is every day. And I guarantee you within three to six months, probably sooner, you'll get the answer. But it's just about kind of focusing yourself and realizing it's something small. Just asking a question and opening yourself up to the wisdom. It will come. And funny enough, my answer was like, oh, you should be a tarot reader. And it was right. So yeah, it is so often something that would be seemingly insignificant or small that is so incredibly powerful. Andrew: Well, I think that reminds me of maybe three, four years ago I was feeling very log jammed by stuff. I was running the store. I was doing readings. It was all going well, but it was a lot to deal with. I had kids. I got a lot going on. And I was reading cards and trying to figure out essentially how to be happier because I was not super happy in that moment. And I put out the cards and journaling again. And I wrote when I'm free, I want to blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. All right? And then I kind of stopped myself. And I looked back over like my past series of readings and stuff and almost all of them had similar language. And I was like, wait a second, when I'm free? Okay. I have my own store. I am my own boss. I can do whatever, maybe not immediately, but over time I can do anything I want with any of these things. I'm in a relationship, but it's an open relationship and I'm free to date other people and do whatever I want in that regards and so on and so on. And I'm like, when am I going to be more free than this? What would that even look like? It would look like, oh, I won the lottery and I've got $10 billion and I don't have to think about anything anymore. That would be more free. But I was like, oh, I already have this thing, but I'm putting my unhappiness onto this idea of lack of freedom as opposed to looking at my happiness and say, okay, what can I do to change this? And obviously, there are lots of people who are in positions where they don't have those freedoms. I was in a very privileged position around this. But I think that that idea of when we're reading or journaling or whatever, keep looking back and look for those patterns and look for those words that you're like, what's the central word there? What's the sexual thing there? And then try and unpack that and see what's there, because often there's something that could be done or there's a shift around our attention. And once I started dropping that story, I was like, "Oh, well, look at this. Now I'm going to do this and now I want to do that." One of the things was I was like talking to people on the phone isn't making me happy. I'm going to put in a booking system. And that's it. I'm going to stop talking to people by bookings. And I was like, oh, that's easy. Done. And I changed a few little things and it created a lot of movement. And then I started moving from there further, further into it. Sasha: And that's the funny thing. We nuance the stuff that we want and it makes it seem like we're swimming in this ocean when it's really quite simple. When I wrote 365 Tarot Spreads, which is a tarot spread for every day of the year, before I began, I thought, oh, I wonder if there's a limit of how many questions a human being could ask. And so I sat down and I researched it and I thought up as many questions as I could. And when you take out the personal nuances of your life, there's really under a hundred questions that a person could ask. And again, almost to the point of what we were talking about earlier, what's underneath is really quite simple. What we do is confuse it for all of this different stuff. I find that endlessly fascinating. And then you're like, "Oh my God, this is so much easier. I was making it all such a big deal." What you just described, and then realizing that you already have what you want. I love what I said about the magician card. It makes me so happy and it just gives me so much joy. He's got the four suits of tarot typically on his magician table. And I always say that you already have everything you need. It's in front of you. And that's the funny and interesting thing about making magic and casting spells when. Actually, I wrote an article, this technique called The Grief Eater Technique for one of the Llewellyn annuals. And it's about what happens when your witch's desires are not granted. You have to recognize that what you need is right there, perhaps you're not recognizing it or perhaps you don't see the gift or can't appreciate that what you are looking for us is staring at you in the face. And then that leads to the next magical tenet, which is know that you already have it. I have to say, a couple of years ago, I was dying to travel, but we just didn't have the money and the budget. And I have a teenage daughter. So the idea that the three of us could pick up and go halfway around the world was very ridiculous. And I thought, okay, tarot teaches me that the world repeats. That underneath all of this stuff, everything is the same. So I thought, okay, I can't go traveling the world right now. So I'm going to, every day, for five to 10 minutes, look for the entire world in my backyard. And whether that's on a city block in the city or that's in a puddle behind this house. And I started looking and traveling. And wouldn't you know it, Andrew, I swear to God, within a year for me doing that every day for 10 minutes, I was being literally invited to China, to the Middle East, all over the country. I started traveling like a fiend. And it was amazing, I think magic and tarot and figuring your stuff out can be so simple. We make it tough. Andrew: Yeah. I think it's interesting. Whenever people talk about magic, I'm always like, cool, what's the mechanism there? What accomplished that? And in the story you said, I'm kind of like, well, is that like doing devotion work to idea of travel for long enough that something, whatever it was, opened up and granted that to you? Is that aligning your attention to those things that started to make that more possible and sort of attaching yourself to those energies and actions and thoughts and stuff that make that happen? It happens on so many different levels. And I think that that kind of idea of ongoing continual practice around stuff is really fascinating and actually fits with a lot of what I do. I do a lot of sort of sigil and art-based magic. And on the regular, I'm making art sigils, art gifts, art petitions and giving them to the ancestors or giving them to whatever. And I just make them and make them and make them. There's a whole pile of them. I just sit there with them. And some of those are around bigger things or smaller things. A lot of them are just around like help me just understand what I really want and what I don't want. Help me to just be really clear about that. And that continuous, ongoing attention over years, it just turns into those moments where you're like, oh yeah, that's cool. Look, oh, I don't do that anymore. Oh, now I do know this. Oh, I have this clarity. Or also, hey, this thing opened up and this happened or that happened or, yeah, these opportunities, right? Sasha: And it's interesting. Because the impulse to seek that out or to create whatever it is that you're creating is already kind of implanted inside you, again, authentically. Talking about just being yourself, like a true, authentic version of expression of whatever is kind of embedded inside of you. When you either, A, I think recognize it in the material world or in nature, or when you write or paint, or also then create it, I do believe it's magnifying that energy which wanted to be seen. I love this idea that everything on the other side, all of what's in the invisible world or not yet manifested, I love the idea that it wants you as much as you want it. And not only just the things that you want, but kind of like everything. When you're walking through your garden and you can smell a cucumber or rosemary, I feel like it's begging you like, "Pay attention to me," Just like clients want to be seen in a tarot reading and they want you to understand them. I think everything in the invisible world wants to get your attention because it wants to be seen because it's exactly like us or that's us. It's all part and parcel. So the magical act is so inherently creative, there's just, I think, such power in the recognition and kind of the duality of creating it. And that's why it's so crazy and cool when you'll create a piece of art or write something and then like a year later you're standing inside of it. It's amazing. It's so cool. Andrew: So take away, magic school. Go through magic. Sasha: Practice magic every day. Do lots of magic. It's the perfect time of year anyway, if you're in the Northern hemisphere. Andrew: I think that's great. Well, maybe this is a good place to leave it with that and say, hey, go practice magic. Stay in it, stay curious, and look at that fear and work on it. Because I think that that stuff is gateways to all sorts of great possibilities. So for people who want to come and follow what you're up to, and of course people should do that, where are you hanging out online these days? What's your social stuff? Sasha: My social sitch. So I guess anybody who's interested in seeing what I'm up to can look on Instagram. I think I'm Sasha Taro Diva, Sasha Graham Taro Diva. Just Google Sasha Graham Taro and my stuff will come up. But I'm on sashagraham.com. I'm on Facebook and on Instagram primarily. Those are like my main social Hangouts. But more importantly, and probably something that would be even more interesting and helpful to you would be to like rather than looking for me online, look for my books and my tarot decks at independent bookstores. Support them. Get a tarot deck to play with. Grab one of my books. I promise you like 365 Spells or 365 Spreads is going to give you so much fun stuff that you can do and play with your cards and get into. Honestly, social is like a light version. Get one of my books, get one of my decks and play. I think that's the best way you can kind of get little piece of me. Andrew: I agree. I agree for sure. And speaking of that, we're going to wrap this up and we're going to go record a bonus episode for people who are supporters of the Patreon, where we're going to get into specifically how to play with regards to dig in and do a little shadow work. So if you're not already supporting the Patreon, go check it out and start. You're missing out on some fantastic stuff. All right. Thanks for being on today, Sasha. Sasha: Thanks so much.

What is the right percent profit margin you should target for your products? How do you get the most out of your Facebook ad buys? How much should you really pay attention to conversion rate? These are just a few of the questions that every small business and Ecommerce shop wants the answers to. On this episode of Up Next in Commerce, we picked the brain of Andrew Faris, the CEO of 4x400, a company that has helped grow numerous Ecommerce companies from less than 500,000 into the tens of millions. Today, Andrew spills some of his advertising secrets, including how to make Facebook your core driver for customer acquisition. Here’s a mini spoiler: human bias is leading you astray, but there is a simple way to correct course. Find out that, and more, on this episode! Main Takeaways: Conversion rate is so context-specific that it's not that helpful of a metric. Instead, analyze conversion rate relative to average order value and relative to the traffic sources the customer came from. Before you invest in anything else, you need to drive traffic to the top of the funnel. Currently, Facebook ads are the core driver of customer acquisition for online shopping. Andrew suggests that most Ecommerce brands should invest in the platform and then trust the algorithm to put you in front of the right audiences. You have to take big swings with your experiments. Don’t get hung up on micro-details like the color of your buttons or rewriting your copy. Instead, find big ways to make changes and then see how the outcomes stack up. Because we are all riddled with our own biases, we often cannot predict accurate models of the future on our own. Instead, use data as your guide as you peer into the future. For an in-depth look at this episode, check out the full transcript below. Quotes have been edited for clarity and length. --- Up Next in Commerce is brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Respond quickly to changing customer needs with flexible Ecommerce connected to marketing, sales, and service. Deliver intelligent commerce experiences your customers can trust, across every channel. Together, we’re ready for what’s next in commerce. Learn more at salesforce.com/commerce --- Transcript: Stephanie: Hey everyone. This is Stephanie Postles, co-founder of Mission.org and your host of Up Next in Commerce. Today on the show, we have the CEO of 4x400, Andrew Faris. Andrew, thanks for taking the time. Andrew: Stephanie, I am very glad to be able to do this. I have never been accused of not liking to talk about Ecommerce in particular, but just in general. So this is fun. Stephanie: Well, you're my perfect guest then. I was creeping as one does on your LinkedIn. I saw an interesting thing that you have a background in religion and theology. I was wondering how you transitioned into the world of business from that background. Andrew: Yeah. I can always tell when somebody has looked at my LinkedIn or not because that's maybe the only place where that's found anymore. Stephanie: You're welcome. Andrew: Yeah, yeah. No, I went to school for biblical studies, and then got a master's degree in New Testament. So that was my whole pathway, was to go into that and actually was a pastor for a while. Did that, and then about ... gosh, how long ago? Five and a half years ago stepped out of that not because anything in my faith changed per se, but just because I was just rethinking a bunch of stuff in my life and reworking a bunch of stuff in my life. So it's just total life change in all kinds of crazy ways. I didn't have a clue what I was going to do actually. Andrew: That educational pathway doesn't have a direct connection to almost anything that's not work in a church or academic setting or something like that in theology. So, I really loved that education a lot, but I was figuring it out. So I called a friend of mine named Taylor Holiday, who ... and I was talking to him about if there's any available work in his world of work. Just basically as an in between thing while I figured it out. I just thought I'll just go do something for a couple months to figure out what I want to do. He said, sure, and brought me to a company called QALO, Q-A-L-O. If you've seen the silicon wedding rings that are for- Stephanie: Oh, yeah. Andrew: .. on the internet a lot, QALO was the first big company of those. QALO went zero to 20 million in a year and a half and was not funded. So, I was bootstrapped. I went there and it was just growing super, super fast. Also, being not funded and being a bunch of people like that, it just meant that they just were, in those worlds probably some of your listeners probably know this story a little bit, which is like, you just find people who can do stuff in that setting. I literally started in the warehouse. At one point, I sat down with Taylor, who's now one of my partners. Taylor was running marketing for QALO at the time. His brother was one of the founders. Taylor said, "Hey, you've got a mind for numbers," which he knew because we were in a Fantasy Baseball League together and knew that I was a big baseball stat nerd. Andrew: May not be interesting to many of your listeners I'm sure, but I have a lot to say about the interplay of thinking about sports through statistical lens and thinking about Ecommerce. Anyway, so that was the origin. We had been in this fantasy baseball for a while, "I know you have a mind for numbers, why don't you learn Facebook ads and Google ads and learn digital marketing?" I said, sure, but still I was not really sure what I wanted to do in the longer term. But I was like, "All right, that sounds fun." So, did that and loved it. Andrew: I mean, I was so totally unaware of what was happening, but I still remember the first conversation I had with Taylor in a bank where he told me what I'd be doing. He's explaining to me how Facebook ads, Google ads worked and said, "Is it okay? Well, here's the deal. You get customers into the funnel with your ads and then you drive ..." and I stopped him in the middle of that sentence and said, "What's the funnel?" That was where my digital marketing knowledge was at. From there, that ended up being the pathway to the digital marketing and Ecommerce career growth. So I was at QALO for a while, went to CTC, the agency that owns our company, owns the majority of it and became the head of strategy there. And then now I run 4x400. Andrew: Yeah, it was a crazy set of circumstances with Taylor. We actually went to junior high together, but had not reconnected because of that. We reconnected outside of that. So, just weird circumstances. Stephanie: That's interesting. Andrew: This gets into my life philosophy a little bit. I'm a believer in divine providence and think there was some of that happening around. Stephanie: For sure. Yeah, that's awesome. Always good to be in business with someone who's willing to bet on you because you have that beginner's mindset and it's probably why you're doing so well. But I'd love for you to detail a little bit about the structure of CTC and 4x400 in the holding company structure because we haven't had anyone on the show quite like this. So, any details around what 4x400 is and how it's connected to CTC would be great. Andrew: Yeah, sure. Common Thread Collective, it grew out of ... Taylor was building the agency alongside the growth of QALO. Started really focusing on Facebook ads. CTC does a lot more in that now, but CTC is now a full service digital sales agency. We said digital sales sell digital marketing because what we're doing is selling things on the internet, it's consumer goods, really focusing on Ecommerce entrepreneurs. The mission of CTC is to help entrepreneurs achieve their dreams. So that's really what we're about. We're specifically really good taking people in somewhere in the journey from zero to 30 million. Andrew: I was a strategist there and then became the head of strategy there. CTC continues to grow and do well. Taylor Holiday, as I mentioned is the managing partner of CTC. Andrew: In the midst of that, we also were like ... I mean, we came from this background of starting QALO. Taylor also was early on with another one of our partners named Josh Rodarmel who founded Power Balance. If you don't know Power Balance, Power Balance was the really popular silicon bracelets that were worn by athletes for a long time, still are worn by some. Andrew: That company was another super crazy fast growth company. I think they were zero to 50 in a year and a half. Yeah, I think that was the number. But anyway, I did on the brand side selling consumer goods in those worlds. We're like, why don't we launch our own brands as well? So, that's how 4x400 started. Eventually I went over to that side of the business. We started with building our own brand from scratch. It totally saw giant failure called [inaudible] company, just a huge waste of money. It doesn't exist anymore. It was sports themed baby goods and it just ... there are a lot of reasons that didn't work Stephanie: Wait, sports themed baby goods, so- Andrew: Yeah, yeah. Stephanie: ... like onesies. Andrew: Yeah. Like onesies that look like football uniforms. They're adorable. I don't know why nobody bought them. Stephanie: Okay, that's super cute. I'll buy one from you. Andrew: Yeah. I think that you'd have to go find a flea market in Northern California somewhere. I had to go get it every day. Stephanie: I will find one, I actually need to for my twin. So, it'll be a long journey, but I'm going to do it. Andrew: Okay. You're in Northern California, right? Stephanie: Yeah. Andrew: Yeah, I think that's who we sold to, so [inaudible] don't worry. We did that, and then realized actually most of our skill at this point ... most last couple years that we have really been spent after we'd gotten out of the brand side so much growing brands, not so much building brands. So we thought, why don't we just do that? Now our model is, at 4x400, we work with entrepreneurs who are in early stages and feel a little stalled out. We provide them with a team around them that can help them grow it. 4x400 mission is also to help entrepreneurs achieve their dreams. We just do it in a different way than CTC. Andrew: CTC does that the traditional client relationship 4x400, takes the majority share of the brand. And then our goal is to make it so that by bringing us on as a partner and all of the expertise and resources we have around finance operations, marketing, growth customer service, even just really thinking through the whole system of what it means to be a great Ecommerce brand, we can help brands grow. We just closed actually our fifth brand that is currently in our portfolio. We're hoping to close another one soon. Who knows by the time it comes out, if that will happen? We're trying to work with brands who are doing less than half a million in revenue and saying like "We can try to grow you from there." CTC is the majority owner 4x400. 4x400 is the majority owner of these brands. So there's this giant web of relationships there. Stephanie: Yeah, okay. That helps me understand the landscape a bit more. How do you think about acquiring brands, how do you find brands that are willing to say, "Okay, we'll give you a majority share and come under your company"? Andrew: Yeah. Well, there's a few ways. CTC is a magnet for some of them. Sometimes brands will come to CTC and CTC will say, we're not the right partner for you. You're not a place where you can afford us. One piece of advice I have for a lot of it was like, if you are paying an agency not very much money you should really think about whether the agency is good because agency economics just require, for you to get great service, they typically require a pretty good investment. Just think about it. Agencies exist by marking up people's time. So, an agency works well if they are able to attract and train great talent by nature of access to large amounts of information. Andrew: The value of an agency is that they are spending millions and millions of dollars of other people's money on stuff. So, it's information arbitrage in that respect. You can come to an agency and get that information applied to your brand in a way that maybe an in house resource can't always do because they just are not going to have the visibility to as much of what's going on. For that to work, then you have to mark up that time of high quality, talented people who are probably not cheap. And then also for something like Facebook ads, Google ads, and then oftentimes there's a creative element of that and a writing element of that, and a strap gentleman have that, so that means you got to pay designers and other people like that too. And then there's web dev parts of it. You start to put that all together and if it's too cheap, then you have to be going like, wait a minute, what am I actually getting here? Andrew: Some brands in the early days, will come to ... they'll be stalled out or come to CTC for resources. CTC will say to them, actually you can't really afford this. What we actually think is a better solution for you is to talk about a deeper investment where we can really surround you with more stuff. What we find is a lot of entrepreneurs love product building and customer communication in certain ways. They love their customer, they love their product idea people, but they don't necessarily have all of the skills around everything else it takes to grow a brand. In fact, they don't want to do those things. Andrew: Most entrepreneurs don't start brands because they love finance, they don't. They don't even necessarily love tactical marketing. A lot of times what we can say to them is, "Let us take all that stuff that you hate doing anyway from you, you feel overwhelmed and stalled all the time anyway. You come with us, we'll pay you a consistent salary," which is also a big help to some people who are going like, I just don't even know if I can perform this anymore. We'll help you grow. Some entrepreneurs want to stay on, some don't, some just wants to take it. So it really depends on each entrepreneur, but that's basically a lot of how we think about it. Andrew: And then for us, we evaluate the brand by saying like, "Does it have basic product market fit and basic fundamentals to where we think as we bring in all of our tactical expertise and all of our specific expertise in various disciplines that we can then apply that to the brand and grow it?" A brand who comes to us who hasn't really invested much in paid media, but has done 100 to $300,000 in revenue, we look at that and say, "That's ..." Actually, we have a really high amount of respect for that. It's really hard to do that, it's hard to do $100,000 without being good at Facebook ads. It's not easy. So we look at that and say like, "Good job. We don't think you're a failure. If you come to us and want our help, we think we get it." We look at that and say, "That's very impressive. Let us surround you now with resources that we can scale this to 10, $20 million in revenue." Stephanie: Very cool. How are your brands performing now? Andrew: Yeah, good. They're doing good. Andrew: I think COVID really helped Ecommerce brands massively. Two things happen at the same time. One of them is that large corporations who have diversity of sales channels, but were spending lots of money on advertising, pulled their advertising budgets the way the heck back. Of course, lots of other companies couldn't produce products. So they couldn't sell products in retail settings, so they pulled a lot of the budget back. They couldn't produce products because of supply chain problems. And then at the same time ... So that meant that in large auction based advertising work universes like Facebook ads and Google ads, ads got suddenly way cheaper really fast. Andrew: The way that works is that because those are built on an auction, if a lot of people leave the auction everybody's prices get cheaper. We've looked at this data across CTC accounts. There was a giant plummeting of advertising CPMs in those worlds. And then at the same time in the last couple months, conversion rate on websites went up because the only place to capture demand was online. You couldn't go buy stuff in the store. So if you're selling things on the internet, that's where people are buying things from. And then of course, the stimulus checks it. As people have noted, that actually ended up being one of the largest increases in revenue to the average American family in history. So, all of a sudden, people have money to spend. Whether or not they should have spent it on consumer goods is a different question, I don't really know. But they had money to spend. Andrew: The less places for that demand to be captured mostly on Ecommerce stores. And then also, it got a lot cheaper to reach those people with ads. You put that all together and Ecommerce did really, really, really well for a couple months. So that really helped us. There's no question about it. We're still feeling some of the positive effects of that. It feels weird to be a winner in COVID, but there's no question that Ecommerce brands were .. To varying degrees depending on the category you're in, for sure. Andrew: We have three brands that are in the established stage and not in the start it up stage. Stephanie: What account is established, is it a revenue metric or- Andrew: Yeah, a good question. I'd say a million dollars during 12 months, or a million dollar run rate. We would look at and say, "Okay, we're growing at the pace that we want." I can just give you some numbers. We're projected this year to go to have one of our brains go to 8 million, that brand did 100,000 in 2017. Last year, we really took it over halfway through the year. I think we ended at 750 for the year. So, that's definitely our fastest growing brand right now. Stephanie: That's [crosstalk 00:16:47]. Andrew: Another one- Stephanie: ... some good growth right there. Andrew: Yeah. We feel good about that. That's profitable too, which is definitely in our model. We took on a little bit of funding early, but not a ton of funding. We function more like a bootstrapped company. And then another one went from ... just a little over two years ago, we acquired it. It was basically doing no revenue, it'll do 3 million this year. Yeah, that's a different story. And then another one went from 250 to a million to just under two, this year, we'll do four to four and a half probably. So those ones are all we feel established growing at the pace we want, we feel really good about. Stephanie: Yeah. That's some impressive number. How do you grow these brands? What are some of your tactics and strategies that you rely on those, what do you see success with? How can someone else learn from what y'all are doing to grow their Ecommerce companies? Andrew: Yeah. Facebook ads is the core driver of customer acquisition for us. I mean, selling consumer goods direct to consumer online, Facebook ads is still the most powerful tool in the world for reaching people. I'm hearing chatter about other things, YouTube, Snap, even Tik Tok, Google ads, product's changing. I just think still at this point, at scale, depending on what you mean by scale, people define that word differently. But for us, that's the core, top of the funnel way that we get traffic to our website. Andrew: I mean, you think about what Facebook ads is, it's not buying ads so much as buying traffic. I guess it's both really. But we look at that and say, "If we can make the traffic worth more than we're paying for it, worth enough more that we're paying for it to cover the cost of goods and things like that," I should say, "Then we can win." That's how we drive top of funnel traffic for us. And then after that, we try to do everything that we think great brands should do, which is like create a beautiful website that treats their customers great, has generous returns and shipping policies as much as we can afford to do it basically, which varies from brand to brand, depending on a number of factors. Do a great job with your retention email and other automated flow stuff. Constantly testing conversion rate optimization on our site in various ways. There's just a whole bunch of that kind of stuff that we're doing on the backend of that. Andrew: We are also certainly looking to invest in other top of the funnel type metrics, our traffic drivers as well. I would think of Google search as mid funnel and Google shopping as mid funnel. So, we're definitely investing there as well. I think we'll keep doing other stuff. That won't work forever. There's going to be a cap to how much Facebook ads does the driver work and we fully intend to add to our customer acquisition approach when we can. But our goal has been to grow profitably and we think that's one of the best ways to do it right now. Andrew: The other thing is it's not just one of the best ways to do it, it's just that we also have deep expertise in it. So, I'm just a believer that do the thing you do well as much as you can. I think it works for leadership and working with teams. Just as much as we can set up our team members to be doing the things that they love doing and they're good at. As long as the things that people love doing and are good at create value for the company, then you should pay them to do it. So that's the way we look at it too. Andrew: Just coming from the agency side, I personally have managed, I don't know, 25 ad accounts, that's probably more than that. Seen a lot more of that when I was the head of strategy and working with other strategists. I don't mean that to brag. It means that now I have some intellectual capital built up on what works. So, that's what we use from there. Stephanie: Cool. To drill in a little bit deeper then for the Facebook ads because I think a lot of companies probably have looked at Facebook ads, maybe they're using it. I haven't heard of anyone growing liked you guys are growing your brands consistently. So what tactics are you using specifically, or what do you see works well? Andrew: Yeah, there's a lot I can say about that. I think this is going to sound so fishy, but if you're getting serious about that, there's a couple of things ... The thing I would actually tell you to do, if you don't know where to start and you're getting serious about it, is to go visit your admission.co. I don't know, maybe I can give you a link to this, Stephanie, at some- Stephanie: Yeah, we can link it up. Andrew: Cool, yeah. So that is CTC's education program. It's not a course, it's different than every other education thing I know of in this world. It's actually a moderated community with access to ... Taylor, the CEO of CTC is in there doing webinars like our team members, our brand managers and people like that. Also, might jump in there and do webinars exclusively for that community. What we're doing is teaching all of the things that are ... what we believe are really the best practices for Facebook ads from the perspective of creative, from the perspective of targeting, bidding, all that kind of stuff. Bringing people through all of those things and then giving them continued support with access to the actual CTC teams who are doing that same thing that I was describing, which is spending millions of dollars of other people's money, so you can have access to that knowledge set. I think it's 500 bucks a month right now. Andrew: I even say sometimes there's even executive level people who will take their whole team through it. It's not like you're going to be in it for forever. The point is that you can do that and get access to what we believe works best. We're always evaluating that. There are certainly other things to do there, but that'll give you what we ... We try to be really honest and transparent where we can about what we're seeing. So that will give you mental ways to think about that problem. Andrew: I think one of the things that can go wrong is you could listen to me talk about this, and maybe you're an entrepreneur and you hear my numbers and you go like, I'm going to go do that. You just blow money because you make simple mistakes that somebody could help you not make, if you've just got some support. There is no way to learn besides doing it really. You're going to make mistakes, it's okay. In my view, creative needs to be really product focused in the sense that it's on Facebook ads and Instagram ads. You are driving high quality traffic by giving people a clear sense of what your product is right away. Clear wins over everything else first as a baseline. Andrew: Clear doesn't make you give you the best out in the world. They're clear plus some other things do that, but clear establishes a baseline of what you can expect and at least drives what I consider high quality traffic to your side. People who are interested in you because of your product. So that's probably the first basic principle I would say is focus on being clear in your creative before you focus on being clever or funny, or any of those kinds of things. You can drive a lot of very cheap traffic to your website with Clickbait tactics, but they won't buy anything. Ultimately, it won't matter how cheap the traffic is if they don't buy anything. So that's the kind of thing I would say. Andrew: And then the other big thing I'm a huge believer in is trust the algorithm. There was a world where people talk about Facebook ads as the value of micro-targeting that was one of the phrases people would talk about. This idea that you'd go find exactly your customer really specifically target them without everybody else. I think there was a time when that was part of how you did it. Those times are gone. What I would say is what you want to do is give Facebook as much information as possible and let Facebook's algorithm predict the future for you because humans are terrible at predicting the future. Algorithms are pretty good at it. So, algorithms do a really good job of looking at the data set of who's responding to your advertising. And then going and saying, here's some more people like that to put you out in front of. So, we believe in really broad targeting. Andrew: Let Facebook have as much freedom as you can to go and find the next person to put you out in front of. Over time, not even over that much time, Facebook's amazing in this regard much quicker than Google is at this. Facebook will find who those people are. So that's the broad principles I would say is trust the algorithm, be clear with your creative. There you go. There's just so much more I could say about the Stephanie, but I'm going to stop there. So I don't take up the entire rest of the podcast. Stephanie: Okay, cool. Yeah, we will definitely link that up. I think it's a really important point too to segment a piece of your ad budget for testing. I know we do that internally as I'll tell. Our team members are like, "Hey, you have this much money. If you spend it and you just learn from it, that's okay. Versus this amount let's actually protected and make sure we drive results with it." So I think it's good to go into a mindset being okay with using a portion of ads for an R&D type testing project. So, you feel like you can learn from it, but not blow your entire budget on it. Andrew: Okay, no question. Constantly testing is super crucial. What I'd say about that is, when I want to test on Facebook ads, the place I want to test most is take big swings with your tests. The common thing you hear people say with testing, you'll hear people like, I've seen so many articles trumpeting like, oh, we changed our CTC button color or we changed it from [inaudible] now and it was a 15% lift. Andrew: First of all, I just don't believe those studies anymore. Secondly, the reason you're writing about it is because it's exceptional. It doesn't happen all the time. I just think that's a waste of people's time. But most people need to do, if they're looking to go from not successful to successful, the larger the difference in outcome you want, the bigger the change you need to make. You can't just change the background color of your ad and expect that it give you wildly different results. That's once you have results you like and now you're just dialing in and trying to grab an extra 2% of value here and there. I just rarely see that thing work. Andrew: What I would say is much better to think to test is something like, what's the offer that you're giving people? What's the product you're starting with and leading with? That can create wildly different results. We just ran something for our jewelry company that we ... 31 Bits, which is our other most recent acquisition, our fourth brand. We started with a batch of ads focusing on one set of products were necklaces and bracelets and things like that. We were getting a dollar of 50 clicks, low click through rates, et cetera, and very poor conversion rate. Andrew: We changed the product set, same exact brand, similar styles of photography, but just different products to a whole different category of product and saw triple or more the performance suddenly CTC went way down. Click through rate, went way up, conversion went way up. The reason why is really obvious, it's jewelry, some people like some bracelets better than others. If you just use the same stuff all the time, people are going to respond to it the same way over time. There's no magic to that. That's how people shop for something that you wear. It's about what it looks like. So, by changing the products that we led with that made a huge difference. So that's what I'd say is for Ecommerce consumer good people, that's the kind of test you want to be running. Andrew: Give it a whole different products out, a whole different offer, a whole different way of framing the offer, don't just change little bits of the creative and copy if you want to change your outcome in a big way. Stephanie: Yeah. I love that. People I talk to sometimes are focused on those micro adjustments that you're talking about or just the minimal incremental pieces that they could change, whether it's button colors or all that. That's a good point too. Yeah. Focus on the higher level things. But how did you decide on what new products to show? Andrew: In that case, part of it was what new products ... there's a change in our product development, that's going to make it so, or in our manufacturing that was going to make it to that, we're phasing out some products anyway. We always start by looking at most products over various periods of time. This is a simple way to start. I mean, there's not a lot of science to it in that respect. I think we're just looking around- Stephanie: Just seeing what it's doing well in the market. Andrew: Yeah. And what's done well on our side. Honestly, part of it is for a place to start your testing just like make a hypothesis and test it. I mean, it's not- Stephanie: Yeah. What timeframe are you looking at? When you do the test, are you looking at 30 days? Let's see how it does and try something new, or is it like after a couple of days you'll know and try something different? Andrew: Yeah. I'd say budget is probably a bigger factor than time. So if you're spending thousands of dollars a day, it doesn't take very long good answers. If you're spending a couple $100 a day, it takes a little longer. It also changes relative to your average order value. What you need is a statistically significant number of responses and really a statistically significant number of conversions. You can think of conversions as micro conversions as well. For example, a click on an ad is a conversion in a sense. Clicks as a percentage of impressions is a conversion. Because it's pretty cheap to run Facebook ads, you can actually figure out a reliable statistically significant performance in a click through rate pretty fast without having to see how those clicks convert. Andrew: In that case, it took us, I mean, I think we're got 100 bucks, when we knew that this new round of ads was way, way better performing because the gap and click through rate was so significant between the two. That's another core principle here. The larger the gap and the outcome, or the larger the disparity in the outcome, the more likely it is that it's a reliable result, if that makes sense. In that case, I think we spent between the two products, that's a total of 1,500 bucks. The whole goal of that was to test those while we went and ordered new products to try and start scaling a little bit for a larger test in the future. I didn't really care what the actual result was. The goal is a bigger goal to win bigger over time. Stephanie: Yeah, that makes sense. When talking about growing, I saw that you guys live by a central Ecommerce growth formula. I was hoping you could go into that a bit. Andrew: Yeah. This is changing a little bit in some ways. I'll give you the baseline version of it, which is visitors tasks conversion rate times average order value. This is actually really simple. Every business in the world only actually has three factors that make up the value that you get from a purchase, or that make up your revenue actually. The first factor is how many people come to your business. This could be people walk into your store, it doesn't have to be a website. But just never people who show up. And then you multiply that by the conversion rate. So, what percentage of those people buy something from you? And then you multiply that by how much they spend. Andrew: When you look at that, that will equal your revenue. If you just say, how many people get there, how many of those people buy and how much they spend when they do? That's the entirety that makes up the revenue. That's incredibly simple and intuitive in a lot of ways. But what I find is that in the fog of war, people lose sight of that very simple concept. So, they start making tests and changes without a really clear idea of which one or multiple of those variables they're actually trying to affect. Of course, those all relate to each other. For example, your average order value goes up, your conversion rate goes down, that's a general rule of thumb, it's true across everything. It's intuitive when you think about it. Andrew: A smaller percentage of people are going to buy a $1,000 item than a $10 item. As you drive more traffic, it's highly likely that you're driving lower and lower quality traffic. Everybody exists along in the world, exists along a continuum of people likely to buy your product and unlikely to buy your product from your mother, who's the most likely person in the world to buy your product to- Stephanie: That is number one. Andrew: Yes. To a subsistence farmer who doesn't have the internet is the least likely person. The farther you go from your mom to the subsistence farmer, the more expensive it is to acquire that customer. So as traffic grows, then your conversion rate is likely to go down. That's just another helpful concept, I think. These are rules of thumb to heuristics they're not always true, but that's a basic way of thinking about it. We think about those three levers in what we do and really try to understand when we test something at any point in our funnel, whether it's on the website or ad level or whatever, which one of those am I actually trying to affect? Where's the problem in my business? Andrew: I've talked with friends of mine who own CrossFit gyms, and I've said to them like ... I'm thinking of a friend in particular whose gym was struggling. I was trying to help him think this way, which of these is the problem for you? Are not enough people showing up to your gym? Or when they show up, do they not buy a membership? Or do they buy a cheap membership or you give them a month free and then they don't spend any money after that? Which one of these is the problem? That probably gets towards LTV as well, or CLV, Customer lifetime Value as something to think about in the midst of all this as well. This is where you can make it a little more complicated, but that basic principle is true. Across the gym, just like on my consumer goods websites, it's the same problem. You just have to figure out which one of those things has the highest upside at the lowest cost to fix next. That's where you should put your energy. Stephanie: Yeah, I love that. Have you ever pitched a brand to be taken over by a 4x400 that you believed in where everyone else on your team didn't believe in it? Andrew: Oh yeah. This is where it helps to be coldly rational. Gosh, I don't mean rational like smart, I'm always right. I just mean my approach is unemotional to a lot of this stuff. To the probably emotional dysfunction in other ways in my life or something like that, I'm not saying you should emulate this necessarily. But that's why there's therap, so it's fine. So, sorry? I know there's some noise there. A lot of times, if we're tweeting about a new brand acquisition. People will say privately like, "I do believe in this," or "I don't believe in this." I just started think that's like ... I think without having the view that I have in the acquisition process, I just don't even know what somebody is judging that on. People just go by their general sense of what they believe about if it's a good brand or not. Andrew: First of all, other people are not like you. Your subjective sense of that may not reflect at all what I brought population to potential customers is. Secondly, to me, you can validate this pretty clearly by looking at simple product market fit, things like margin is a huge question, which makes businesses work and it makes other businesses fail, is one of the problems of opening day. We made a huge mistake by just giving ourselves away too little margin on the products. Stephanie: What's the little margin, what do you consider small? Andrew: Yeah. Well, I think if you're going to try and grow a brand with ... I'll just tell you, we target 70 points plus of margin for brands that we are trying to grow with our method of growth. And then that's really important. If you have other growth mechanisms that might not matter as much. But for us, we want 70 points plus landed margin. We can deal with a little less than that, but if you're going to try and grow a brand with Facebook ads, you're going to need to be able to exist at a two to one return on your money on ads probably. It's hard to really beat that number, if not withstanding something like coronavirus throwing those small. So we target that. That becomes a big question for us, if we think we can do that. Andrew: Sometimes actually it's part of the first thing we have to fix for a brand is, we see supply chain processes that are in our view broken and we would say like, "We love everything about this brand. It's convergent on site, is great relative to its average order value, relative to its traffic sources." We dig into all that stuff, and say, "But your margin is not good enough, but we think we can solve that. W can help with getting your shipping cost down by repackaging it differently, or thinking about what products to focus on or not, or changing your manufacturer or something like that." We don't want to ever do that at the expense of giving people a good product. We haven't compromised on that at this point, which I'm happy about. But yeah, those are all the things that we can look at as potentially something to fix. But in our view, 70 points plus, makes the game a lot easier for sure. Stephanie: Got it. I like that point too about, what would someone know when they're doubting a brand? Because that is definitely a human flaw thinking about ... even when I'm thinking about those rubber bracelets from a while back, for me to say, "Oh, that's dumb," I don't need to be balanced or anything, or I need help with that. It's funny because it's like, well, apparently a lot of other people did because look how many people bought it. Yeah, I think that's also a good lesson for anyone starting something up. If they hear someone say like, "Oh, that's dumb, you shouldn't do that." Probably good to take a step back and be like, well, that's just one person's opinion and not let it deter you from trying at least. Andrew: Yes, especially relative to the set of metrics I have in front of me, which are going to tell me something a little bit different. This is one of the things that's so great about data is that I'm just wrong, Stephanie, about so many things in life, I just know I am. So having some source outside of my own brain that I can look at. When my own eyes are lying to me, humans are just biased machines. We're just machines of bad thinking about stuff. So, finding ways to be aware of my priors going into something and my bias going into something, check those against some sorts of truths that exist outside myself. Of course, people can lie with data and data can be poorly collected. There's all kinds of ways that can go wrong too. But in light of all those things, I just think that it becomes really helpful to do that, to go and have a source like that to go check in. So that's what we do in our process. Andrew: There's various levels of excitement about brands even internally. But there's no question that ... We sincerely believe it can work based on the data set in front of us and a few other old principals. So that's what we do. Stephanie: That's cool. We're mentioning data, stick with the data when it comes to it and don't just listen to unfounded opinions. What kind of metrics do you look at that you think a lot of other brands aren't utilizing enough? There's obvious ones like conversions and click-through rates and all that kind of stuff and revenue obviously, but is there anything that you look at that you think enough people aren't paying attention to? Andrew: There's no magic here. After we acquired 31 Bits, this jewelry company ... really super cool brand. This brand was started by women who were anthropology majors in college and wanted to provide good quality jobs to people who could not access them by nature of where they lived in the world. So they started in Uganda after a trip there and had these women making these really cool beads. This started in 2009. These women were out to change the world with this brand. It's just totally authentic, beautiful brand story around all of this stuff. When we acquired that, I on my podcast, it's called- Stephanie: What is your podcast? Andrew: Yeah, yeah. I feel so lame doing this right now, but- Stephanie: Oh, sorry, Andrew. Andrew: I know. There's a tangent there. But anyway, if somebody really wants to hear how I think about this question, I spent about 45 minutes with Taylor, the head of our agency, talking about exactly why we acquired 31 Bits. We did an episode about that. I'll find it and send it to you for the show notes as well. And then we interviewed the ladies from the brand for the next episode after that, so people could kinda hear why they chose us as well. We tried to be really honest about why we think it'll work and why we think it could fail. I would say the metrics related to that, that I care about, it's not just conversion rate it's conversion rate relative to average order value and relative to traffic sources. That's a huge one for us. Andrew: Conversion rate itself is actually so context specific that it's not that helpful of a metric. I mean, think about the conversion rate of a direct click. Somebody comes to the website, types in 31bits.com, presses enter. Let's take a 45 year old female on a desktop computer direct versus a 25 year old male on their cellphone through a display ad on the internet, saying conversion rates to describe what both of those people are doing and getting a baseline is not going to be helpful at all because the baseline for those two different customers of what you'd expect, they're so different. I mean, just the device issue you're twice as likely to convert on desktop than you are as mobile before you talk about any of the rest of the demographic's software or anything like that. Andrew: We try to really give some specificity of the context of something like conversion rate. Even one thing you'll see there is like, sometimes the brand's conversion rate will look low, but it's actually not low. The reason it looks low is because they're getting a ton of blog traffic via organic search SEO essentially. That blog traffic is technically on their URL, but it's not at all related to their product and it's not people looking for their product. Therefore, that blog traffic will have an incredibly low conversion rate and will therefore negatively influenced the total conversion rate. If you bucket that blog traffic out, it turns out the conversion and the brand is fine and their website works great and you just didn't realize that. I don't know if that example made sense. But there's- Stephanie: It does make sense. Andrew: ... there's just all of these kinds of contexts, things like that, that I think are really crucial to look at all the way around. We look at some other stuff like we've looked at entire funnel on our site, so we'll look at not just the conversion rate thing. If somebody doesn't buy something on your website, there's a question of why did they not buy? Because they made it to your website, so what happened next? Did they never add anything to cart or did they add to cart and then drop off once they got to checkout or did they never even make it to checkout or what? We look at each of those things and try to understand what's going on. Andrew: If somebody adds to cart and makes them check out and then drops off, why? The answer to that question is probably because you're shipping cost is too much a lot of times, or it's going to get shipped slowly, or they're not confident in return policy or whatever. So we'll look at some of that stuff too. We have a value of 4x400, which is understanding before you act and paired with that is hard problems require deep focus, or require deep work. The basic concept is like, before I go and throw out a million solutions, I want to really understand as clear of terms as possible exactly what's wrong. Andrew: When I hear somebody say my Facebook ads are broken, the thing I want to say is, "What do you mean? What's happening? What broken- Stephanie: What are you doing? Andrew: Right, yeah. "Is the conversion rate broken? Are the clicks too expensive? Where is the problem? Are you not getting a high enough AOV? When you say it's broken, what do you mean?" To try to help people answer that question because then it can guide where to think about the next problem. Stephanie: Cool. I love that. Yeah, that was a really good example. Stephanie: Are there any things, technology or otherwise tools that you're using right now that are maybe new that you're excited about? Andrew: Well, I'll tell you what I think that is, it's not the answer you're looking for, but I think it's the answer that I get. Stephanie: Go for it. Andrew: My answer is no I don't. We will get there to where we'll need to do that, but I just think this is a massive distraction for a lot of people. I think people love to go chase the next new thing. They'll even say things like, "well, my customer is on Tik Tok." I don't really know what that means. Yes- Stephanie: I don't really know who's on Tik Tok right now. Andrew: I'm 36. First all, I'm 36, I'm too old and I don't get Tik Tok. I've never had Facebook on my phone, so I'm just the worst social media marketer ever in that respect. I do not understand what's happening in the world. I just don't always know what that kind of thing means. I think your customers probably also want Instagram because there's a lot of people on Instagram. So I could be wrong about that, I guess. I'd be so happy for somebody to correct me if that's the case and reach out and tell me, "You're not looking at this right." Anyway, I just think it becomes a huge distraction for people to go and try and find another new thing to go do instead of to get really good in one or two areas. Andrew: We will expand channels over time. I think we're really trying to build out more search and shopping as a next step for us, that is not a new channel at all. It's actually the oldest digital marketing channel, search in particular,. I'm playing around with some ideas from SEO, but really I'm just trying to make my customer more valuable at this point. So, just trying to really get better via email, post-purchase, via my unboxing experience, trying to think about how unboxing and product experience creates retention in word of mouth. I'm trying to dig deeper and get better at the things I'm already doing rather than adding a whole lot, I think. Stephanie: With everything happening in the world right now, it does seem like there, like you mentioned early on the show, there're a lot of changes happening, especially around Ecommerce. I know you're talking about focusing on what's working and all that, but is there anything you're preparing for over the next three to five years that you're anticipating around Ecommerce trends? Andrew: Yeah, all right. This is my coronavirus beat right non. This is a really fun question and is a great podcast fodder. I do not fault you for asking it and I don't want you to hear my answer to this as condescending. But there's no possible way in the world that I could predict the future that far out. Here's what I believe about predicting the future. The more complex the system you're project predicting with the more inputs that there are there, over the longer the timeline, the harder it is to project. So, I might be able to give you some sense of what's happening next week, but then also last week, all these companies started saying they're going to pull their Facebook ad spend. Stephanie: Yeah. I didn't why I mention that, but I'm like well, that seems like it's a good opportunity then, like you're mentioning to get on Facebook. Andrew: Yeah, yeah. Stephanie: I think Zuckerberg even said they'll be back or something like that, which is just funny. Andrew: First of all, who could have predicted over that timeline, that kind of thing would happen? Before you even talk about Zuckerberg, who ... There's just so many elements. The system of macroeconomics in the U.S., before you even talk to the world, is so big with so many inputs and so complex that I just don't believe in anybody's ability to really predict that. So what I think is that it's not helpful generally to do that. I'll say three to five years, the one thing I feel broadly, fairly comfortable with though, I think even this has, there's some basic questions is that Ecommerce, as an industry, Ecommerce is a share of U.S. retail spending, will continue to grow. Andrew: I mean, I just have no possible way of predicting that. So I feel like it's a good place to be if you're in Ecom, I think you should be investing in Ecom broadly. I just don't think otherwise it's very possible to do that. I mean, just look at what we were all saying about coronavirus two months ago and the models that we were all looking at about what this thing could be. It's been devastating. I don't want to underplay that, but it has not been in the U.S. the millions of deaths at this point, at least. Who knows that people were predicting? I just look at that and go like, that's because predicting that many things for something with that much unknown is really, really hard. Andrew: My take on this is to go read Nate Silver's book, The Signal and the Noise and to hone your skills thinking about what kinds of things you can and can't project, and even how to think about projecting things. And then to go from there, which means the way you win is not by predicting the future, but by honing your fundamentals and carving really good thought processes. This is what I really believe in the most. To think about this all like poker, which is that good poker players don't win by winning a hand, they win by playing lots of hands really well and by making the right move over and over. Understanding the game that there are going to be times when they're going to be in a big spot with a lot of money in the pot and the card will come up and go the wrong way. But if they play enough big pots and enough money in it, the law of large numbers says that they'll win over time. I think that's the way to think about it. Andrew: Get really good at understanding something like visitors and conversion rate times average order value and asking the right questions about that. Get really good at following your profit margins everywhere you can . Get as much clarity about them as you possibly can that way you know where your money is going and where you're making money and where you're not. If you can do those things over a long period of time and just get good at finding good people to work with and get good at those sorts of things, you will win. So ultimately, I bought into the partnership at CTC with my own money, I'm not rich. Andrew: The reason I put my money into that is because I believe in the humans that are the partner group there, and I believe that those people overall given enough chances will win. That's the way I think you should think about your brand and your business is find partners and find brands and businesses that you believe will play the right hand the most times and are people of high character. That is part of the right hand of what you're play, you're going to have a relationship with these people. Every part of your business, if you can do those things, then I think over the aggregate, you're going to win. Stephanie: That's great. That actually took a very nice spin because at first I'm like, okay, no one's going to disagree with you that Ecommerce is going to grow. But I like the spin that you just took on it about what you should focus on instead. So, good answer. Andrew: Thanks. Yeah, I know. It's a compound answer in some ways, but it's really what I believe is true about the world. It's so sexy to say, okay, over the next month, this is going to happen and this is going to happen. Next time somebody on the show gives you that answer, bring them back on in six months and ask them what happened and- Stephanie: I was just going to say that. I think the world is still missing a little bit of the accountability piece because I see people still on Twitter, even the people who are talking about the end of the world, no one's following up with these people, how come this guy has had a billboard out around California for a long time saying the end of the world was going to happen, I guess, a few weeks ago, and it didn't? What now, are we going to follow up with him and be like, "Hey, what happened?" Andrew: Yeah, that's a very California story. I like that. Stephanie: All right. We're going to shift now into something called the lightning round brought to you by our friends at Salesforce Commerce Cloud. This is where I'm going to ask you a quick question and you have a minute or less to answer. Are you ready, Andrew? Andrew: I am. But this is the ultimate challenge for me. Stephanie: This will be the hardest part of the interview. Andrew: Yeah, it probably are. All right, I'll do my best. Stephanie: I actually feel like you're going to have some great answers, that's why I've been excited to get to this. All right. If you were to have a podcast, who would your first guest be and what would the show be about? Other than the podcast that you're running now, you can't say that one. Andrew: Okay. I think it would be about exploring. Does it my guess have to be a live or can I pick anybody? Stephanie: No. Andrew: Okay. I think it would be about exploring big ideas about the world like theology, philosophy kind of stuff, but for the every man or woman. So, it would try not to be too much in the clouds, my guess would be C. S. Lewis, not because he's the most interesting thinker in the history of the world, although he's a really interesting thinker, but because he says things in really interesting ways. So, I think he would be a fascinating guy to just sit and talk with. When I think of a historical person I'd want to talk with most, would be that. Either that or a baseball ball guest. Stephanie: All right. Well, that's cool. That's a good answer. What's up next on your reading list? Andrew: Books I'm in the middle of or after? Stephanie: I'd say, you can do both, middle of and ones that you're looking back on like, that was a good book. Andrew: Okay. The Color of Law is the book I'm in the middle of right now. Richard Rothstein going through the history of government and forced racism in the U.S. incredibly helpful book for me so far. I'm three quarters away through. Highly recommended to try and get your head on straight about what's going on with race in the U.S. just pure history. It's really good. And then I am reading a Christian book called Money, Possessions and Eternity about how to use your money for compassion and care for people instead of for yourself. So, that's what I'm in the middle of right now. And a baseball book called Ball Four, which is a famous book. Stephanie: That's cool. If you were to pick a country to focus on to maybe buy a new brand from, what country would you look into? Andrew: A country? Stephanie: Yeah. If you were to bet big, I'm going to go for something in India, that's top of mind right now because I just read the whole thing between India and China and turning off Tik Tok in India. So, it's very interesting to me thinking about, if you were to bet on brands from a certain country or are you looking to go international, where would you go? Andrew: I think the answer is India. I think that's probably the right answer. The cost of reaching people in India is very cheap and India's economy seems to be growing very fast. But I'm just bullish on global economy in general. So, I think you could probably broadly pick out. In the last 50 years, massive amounts of extreme poverty have been alleviated in the world thanks to globalization and technology and all kinds of things like that. The world is a much better place than people make it sound. That's another book record recommendation, Factfulness by Hans Rosling. Go read that book- Stephanie: Factfulness. Andrew: ... it will help you look at the world totally different. Factfulness. Forget my other book my other book and finish reading that one. Stephanie: I'll link of that one. Yeah, no, I think that's where I would bet too because I think I just read that, it's a billion and a half people there only a third of them, I think have cell phones right now. They're coming online at a very quick rate. So, I think- Andrew: Yeah. I mean, it's incredible how much better life has gotten in the world for so many people. There's very hard life in the world for a lot of people, so to not to underplay that. But it's just crazy and it's going to keep happening. Stephanie: Yeah, I agree. What's up next in your travel destinations? Andrew: Anywhere- Stephanie: When you can travel. I think, just outside my neighborhood. Andrew: Yeah. I like Austin, Minnesota where my family is, hopefully in a couple of weeks, but we'll see. As far as other places, I love Boston. Would like to go with my wife there. I have a seven month old though, so the actual answer to this question is probably nowhere for a while. Stephanie: Yeah. That's my life too. I have four month old twin boys and a two year old. Someone asked me like, "Oh, where are you going to go on vacation?" I'm like, "Nowhere outside of 10 miles away." It's a mess to get into the car that would be- Andrew: Four-year-old twin boys? Stephanie: Yeah, yeah. Andrew: I think it's awesome. Congratulations. That's beautiful. Stephanie: Thanks. Yeah, it's a wild ride. All right, the last one ... Yeah, you know. What's up next on your Netflix queue? Andrew: I just watch the same shows over and over again with my wife. Stephanie: Does she get to choose? Andrew: She does most times, yeah. Stephanie: So you guys are watching Selling Sunset and things like that? Andrew: No. We watched Parks and Rec, 30 Rock and The Good Place- Stephanie: Okay, those are very ones. Andrew: ... over and over and over again. That's probably all we watch. I don't know. The decision fatigue I have on this particular issues, we just created a Slack channel that worked for media recommendations because I just don't know even what to do anymore about where to look next. So, I wish I had a better answer than that. It would- Stephanie: Let us know if you find something from your Slack channel. Andrew: Yeah. It's probably another episode of The Good place. My team is really hot on Yellowstone right now, so there you go. Stephanie: Okay. I don't know what that is, that just shows I am not with it either. So I'll have to check that out. Andrew: Kevin Costner intense ranching family season three. Stephanie: Okay. I'll have to dive into that one. All right, that was a good lightning round. Is there anything that you were hoping to cover, are there any last words of advice before we hop off? Andrew: I think just that in situations like this, I always just want to say that when somebody asks you for answers on a podcast, it's super easy to make it sound easy in some ways. But it's really hard actually to do these things and to grow business and to work in a team and all these things. So, I think the parting word for me is always just to say, it's not actually as easy as it maybe. I hope I didn't make it sound like that. It's just challenging at times. So, keep at it and surround herself with good people. Yeah, I think that's it. I think I just properly took all the wind out of the point that I was making by monitoring it at the end there. Maybe out of [inaudible 01:02:52]. That's the big piece for me, is just you can do it, it is harder than it sounds a lot of times. Stephanie: Yeah, I like it. Well, Andrew, thanks so much for coming on the show. It was a lot of fun and ... Yeah, thanks for taking the time. Andrew: Thanks, Stephanie, for having me. It's super fun.

I spoke to the chief economist of PwC in Nigeria Andrew Nevin. We had a conversation on taxes, central banking, and economic reforms in general. Andrew also explained his preferred measure of economic progress as opposed to GDP, and whether we should be more like China or India. I thank Andrew for agreeing to share his views with us.You can always listen or download right here on Substack or do the same on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, TuneIn, and Pocket Casts. There is also a transcript below. You can rate us on any of these platforms, this helps others find the show.TRANSCRIPTTobi: Hi everyone. I am on today with Andrew Nevin, the Chief Economist of PricewaterhouseCoopers in Nigeria. It’s great to have you, Andrew.Andrew: Great to be here, Tobi. Thank you so much.Tobi: I will like to start about taxes. Oil prices have collapsed, and along with government revenue, so naturally, the government is looking towards taxes as a way to buffer the government’s revenue source. What I just want to ask is, how realistic is that plan, especially in the current economic climate? Andrew: Well, I think that we all understand by now that Nigeria collects a small amount in tax compared to other countries. I think the number is about 6 percent of GDP, very small. So for the last few years, there's been this narrative from the government: we need to bring people into the tax net, people need to pay more taxes, more tax compliance, that I think we've all seen. And now of course with the collapse of oil revenue there's essentially no tax revenue coming from oil for the next few months, at least, and maybe longer. So, of course, the government is in a very difficult fiscal position. So naturally, they're going to say "we now need to increase our efforts to bring people into the tax net to increase the tax revenue". There are two problems with that. The first problem and we've highlighted this over the last four-five years is: it's very difficult to increase taxes when people feel like they're not getting services. So if we think about the social compact in Nigeria, certainly over a decade that I've lived in Lagos, the social compact is simple: the government doesn't really tax you very much but it also doesn't provide services. So people provide their own security, their own electricity, their own healthcare, their own education, their own infrastructure, and that has been the social compact. It’s not ideal, but that's the way it’s worked. Now the government comes along and says, well, we want to bring you into the tax net, we want to increase taxes, the rates, the number of taxes, and people say: hold on a minute, this social compact doesn't work unless I'm getting some services. So that's one challenge. The second challenge that we’ve talked about over the years and is really now quite a huge pressure is, [it’s] very hard to raise more taxes while the economy is not growing. Over the years from the 2015 recession we still had very low growth, 1-2 percent, a little over 2 percent in 2019. So [economic] growth has been below population [growth], which means that incomes have been going down, which means it's hard to take more money out of people. So both of those things remain challenges, we now have this confluence of events where effectively half of the revenue or more than half of the revenue going into the federation accounts collapsed and yet it’s very difficult to take taxes from other places. Tobi: It’s interesting you talked about growth because I was looking at data from the IMF a few days ago and per capita income in Nigeria has basically stagnated in the last four to five years. So basically people are not growing their income and it's very difficult to raise taxes. But there is another argument that I would like you to explore with me, which is that, is it also about capability for government? I mean, there is no national database and that is not cheap. How significant a barrier is that to expanding the tax base?You asked on a general level, on a general level, if we don’t get investment up, we won’t be able to bring people out of poverty. - ANAndrew: Well, I think that there has been a lot of progress on that, certainly in Lagos where I live. The electronic record of the LIRS [Lagos Inland Revenue Service], the ability to bring people into the tax net, the [indistinct words] that they have, those things have got[ten] stronger and stronger over the last few years and they've made progress on that. But I think that what you raised, Tobi, is a really...is a general point. I think there is a lot of capabilities, certainly the Federal Government, the Lagos government which I know best, and other States. But I think sometimes the problem is the capability is spread too thin. We have so many MDAs at the Federal level, so you have a pool of very talented civil servants and people [who] come from the private sector...to cite a couple - Dr Jumoke, Yewande Sadiku at the NIPC, Engineer Chidi over at the concession group...I mean you have some very high-quality people, high-quality staff, but we'll get so many MDAs, sort of create complexity and then there are pockets where the Federal Government or the State Government don't necessarily have enough capability. I think also at the state level, it's a real challenge. Many states as we know have very small IGR [Internal Generated Revenue], they haven't yet sort of got their records or their system in place to raise internal generated revenue from the businesses that do exist in the states, but the states are trying on that... but I think you highlight a really...yes, a very critical issue.Tobi: Still on income growth, what do you think has to change for per capita income to start growing in Nigeria? There are a few hypotheses that we are going to explore as we talk along but just your general view, what would it take, what has to change?Andrew: Well, I think the perspective we’ve had over four or five years is pretty simple. People talk about this program, and agriculture, it’s small business, and concessionary financing, all of these little pieces...but when you ask in general what the issue is? We need to grow. We’ve said for years that the country needs to have GDP growth of 6 to 8 percent a year to reduce poverty and alleviate unemployment. Why? Because we have population growth that is probably almost 3 percent a year, so if we're growing at 6 to 8 percent, per capita income will be 3 to 5 percent growth per year. So that starts to be meaningful over a few years. But more than just GDP growth it needs to be inclusive. I think the period from 2010 to 2014, there were lots of GDP growth but it was not shared evenly or not shared appropriately throughout the country. So we need to grow 6 to 8 percent. Now, how does that happen? At the very basic, almost mathematical or physics level, to grow requires investment. So how much investment? When we look around at the economics of this in some other countries, the investment needs to be close to 30 percent of GDP which in Naira terms, say, in 2018-2019 come in with, maybe, a 150 trillion Naira...so 30 percent is 45 trillion Naira of what economists call gross capital formation. We are only getting a little more than half of that, maybe 25 trillion roughly. We cannot grow 6 to 8 percent when there is not enough investment. So then that leads to a very simple question, why is there not enough investment?I lived for ten years in China. I went to China the first time in 1983 which was the beginning of their economic transformation and they have lifted 500-600 million people out of poverty, they’ve grown 8 to 11 percent, 8 to 12 percent, 6 to 10 percent for forty years almost now, and how do they do it? Well, you have to invest. So we have to invest in Nigeria. Then the question is, given that Nigeria is probably the number one economic story on the planet right now for potential, why are people not investing in Nigeria? Why are Nigerians not investing enough? Why is the diaspora, who have resources and know the country not investing enough? And then if those two groups invest, then foreign investors, direct investors will also invest but they are not investing. So that's the question we’ve posed to the Federal Government. You asked on a general level, on a general level, if we don’t get investment up, we won’t be able to bring people out of poverty. But why are people not investing? If we want to explain it very simply, what we say is: right now, it’s too complex and too costly in Nigeria to do business. Despite the incredible efforts of Dr Jumoke [Oduwole], a national heroine over at PEBEC, it’s still too hard. Too many agencies, too many costs, too much complexity, so people choose not to invest. I was talking yesterday to the CEO of a major Nigerian company, very successful company, and he was talking about one of the global giants that I won’t name here but who is evaluating between South Africa and Nigeria for coming into the country and they made the decision... they’ll eventually come to Nigeria, but they made the decision, for the moment, to go to South Africa. He said it was very simple, they just found it too complex dealing with too many agencies, too many taxes, not just the level of taxes but the complexity of taxes. So until the Federal Government and the State Governments are serious about wanting to make it an attractive...and I said this, sorry, let me also add, Tobi... I say this not as just the Chief Economist. My main role at PwC is I oversee our financial services practice, so I am out-serving clients, I run a business - PwC. I also have two technology companies that I have helped found in Nigeria, so, you know, I'm doing this I'm not just speaking about it and I can tell you - it is not easy in Nigeria. So we have this incredible opportunity, we have incredible entrepreneurs both Nigerians in Nigeria and in the diaspora and yet it’s not been tapped quite yet.It may be distressed, but I prefer democracy and Nigeria's democracy is a work in progress but it's a democracy. - ANTobi: That's interesting. You mentioned China, so let's explore that. Everybody would love to copy the East Asian model, right? But in Nigeria, it seems, at least to me, that we are still doing import substitution industrialisation rather than exports and oriented manufacturing that lifted Asia out of poverty. Now, I'm asking at a conceptual level, what has to change in policy circle for us to see the distinction between those two models?Andrew: Well, I think to begin with, I said I’ve lived ten years in China and I think there are some positive things we can take from it but the truth is, China is not a democracy. It's an autocratic, one-party state and I'm not sure it's a great model. Maybe, in the end, that would win out economically. It may be distressed, but I prefer democracy and Nigeria's democracy is a work in progress but it's a democracy. I think that we've advocated over the last one or two years that the right...and of course people come all the time, I go to conferences and people say Rwanda, Singapore as models for Nigeria, we said very clearly, we think: look, if you're going to take one country as the model for Nigeria, that we have the most lessons to learn from, it's actually India. And why? India is a large, diverse country. It has religious differences, it has cultural differences, it has geographic differences, it has very different topography and no one can argue that Nigeria is more complex than India. They are both complex. India, like Nigeria, is a messy democracy, a work in progress. But despite that, they have made a lot of economic progress in the last twenty years, really unlocking things starting in the beginning of the ‘90s. Then when you go to the economic model, what unlocked it for India was not exporting goods (physical goods), it was exporting services... particularly around IT. Many countries have a diaspora but the thing about the Nigerian diaspora is, they are at the top end of the income ladder. - ANSo one of the things that we are starting to say is, like, should we be focused so much on exporting physical goods because if you think about where we're at, a couple of things are going on. One, of course, is, to export a physical good, it just requires a real improvement in the infrastructure that we have - port infrastructure, road infrastructure to bring down the cost to be competitive. Secondly, where are we going to export to? If you think about what's happening in the world, the population in Europe is shrinking population, the population in North America is basically flat, are we going to be able to export into a shrinking market into Europe? There are already people that export physical goods into Europe, can we displace them? I'm not sure that we can that easily. Can we export to India? Well, they already have their own manufacturing. Can we export to China? Well, they’re sending their manufacturing here. So I'm starting to think that we should kind of leapfrog and actually go back to the lessons from India and export Nigerian brains without exporting the people. If we go back for a minute to the way the economy works here, the biggest source of FX is actually diaspora. So Nigeria, unlike many countries...I mean, many countries have a diaspora but the thing about the Nigerian diaspora is, they are at the top end of the income ladder. They are the best-educated group in the United States, they earn above the average American which is an amazing accomplishment for a new immigrant group. We are exporting Nigerian brains and then a lot of the money falls back. Now, we then ask the question, can Nigeria export people but without people leaving Nigeria? So that they are working in Nigeria but they are earning foreign exchange, they’re being paid at the global level or a little bit below because that's what people bid from the demand side, and it’s starting to happen. I want to highlight on this show one incredible woman, incredible Nigerian heroine, and [her] company. This is a company called Outsource Global which is based in Kaduna and Abuja and it outsources to global companies for different kinds of support - call centres, but also…the other support is not necessarily voice to voice but task, legal task in some cases. It has over a 1000 seats on there and it’s founded by this amazing woman Amal Hassan, and it's growing in the Covid-19 because people need more remote work. So think about what's happening here, we now are exporting Nigerian brains, very high value-added, they are not physically leaving Nigeria and this is starting to happen. If you look at some of the global companies like Microsoft, for example, they are putting more and more of their development into Nigeria. So what is that? Again, that's an export of Nigerian people, of Nigerian brains. So I'm starting to think that rather than advocating for trying to follow the East Asian model (that model is gone historically), we should follow more the Indian model, companies like Webpro, Infosys that has turned into giants now. They employed millions of people in India. Tek Experts is another one in Nigeria that is exporting Nigerian brains. To me, that's a higher value-added path at the moment.Tobi: My follow-up to that would be: that requires a relatively high level of human capital and the distribution is unequal and the ability to take advantage of that opportunity will be unequal as well. Maybe it will be different for Lagos, Kaduna, as opposed to Kebbi or...so now my question is do we really have to adopt a distributed, varied development strategy at the sub-national level?Andrew: Let me just go back to the point you made about exporting people being high end... absolutely. Remember, you want to export very high value-added things, that doesn't mean it's the whole economic strategy, so in terms of domestic sectors, we said for four years now the number one sector is real estate. Why? Because, first of, there's a housing deficit. I don't want to give the number because the number that's being repeated, very large number is not very accurate, we don't have that many homeless people in Nigeria but a lot of people live in substandard housing and there is a housing deficit. We need more housing not for the high end but for the middle-income people, lower middle-income people, and that drives employment domestically. So we are not exporting housing but we're doing housing, that is the biggest sector for us. The reason to our employment is every time you build, you need local building materials, you need carpenters, electricians, plumbers, labourers, caterers come on site. And once the place is sold, the family that moves in, they want to furnish it, [and] over time that drives other industries so that's one domestic industry. Agro-processing, we are very keen on as well, we've written a lot on it. But, again, it may not be for export. Some of it could be for export - cashews, maybe eventually palm oil will export but, of course, we have such big domestic uses of... just the domestic use of that is huge. So I don't want to say that exporting brains is the whole economic strategy [be]cause you're right, but it's so high value-added that if we had, I don't know...if we had a hundred thousand educated Nigerians exporting their brains but sitting in Nigeria will have a massive impact on the economy because they're earning good salaries. Now, they're spending the salary, they're buying homes and that's important to labourers, you get the normal, sort of, knock-on effect. So we need [the] export strategy and we also need, kind of, the domestic strategy. Now your question about sub-national, yes, we've said for a long time that one of the major issues in Nigeria is the imbalance of economic development. We have Lagos 30-40 percent of the formal economy in Nigeria and yet many people who are in Lagos that come to work but they don't want to be in Lagos. All of us who live in Lagos are aware of the challenges with the traffic, with the infrastructure. And if you talk to some of the senior political people in Lagos, they will say the biggest problem we have in Lagos is every time we address something, we get more people coming in. So we need development across the country, we need it in Cross River, we need it in Sokoto, we need it in Niger, we need it in the North-East as well. But I think that what's happened over the last two years is it’s not just us saying it, I think everyone recognises it. Domestically people are doing this and you start to see the emergence of some really incredible governors who have taken responsibility for their states. To name a few that I am familiar with...His Excellency Governor el-Rufai in Kaduna working very hard to move the state forward. Governor Makinde in Oyo State. Governor Obaseki, I mean, obviously there are some critical challenges in Edo State but he is very focused on the right things. So I think that's a great movement forward and the Federal Government recognises this too. So, again, we talk about PEBEC and Dr Jumoke, we talk about the National Investment Promotion Council with Yewande. Those groups are now working at the subnational level, I think that's a major step forward for the country and we're going to start to see the fruits of it. I think most governors recognise they themselves have to be out and getting this investment I talked about earlier and are making real efforts. So I think we should be encouraged by that but it's got to accelerate, we have to take the pressure off Lagos, we have to give young people, in particular, a reason to want to stay in their state, or not necessarily move to Lagos [but] to move to some other commercial center where they can find opportunities.Tobi: Deindustrialisation: how plausible is it an hypothesis for slow growth in Nigeria? I mean, services is growing really fast and in terms of value-added it has a higher share of the economy, and agriculture has also a large share but industry has shrunk over the last few decades. So how plausible is deindustrialization as an hypothesis for slow growth?Andrew: Well, I think that we all understand the challenges that industry...talk to MAN (the Manufacturers Association of Nigeria), for example, all the members there understand just how difficult it is to operate and of course you have power issues, you have infrastructure issues et cetera. But before commenting on that, one thing that is important to remember is sometimes the statistics are difficult to interpret. So if you look at the division in the country between services, agriculture, manufacturing get certain numbers... but if we have a tomato paste processing plant, does that get classified as agriculture or manufacturing? So I'm not so worried about, kind of, the statistics [be]cause it is very arbitrary which is what's happening on the ground. But in terms of the manufacturing side of things or the agro-processing which I think is a big component of it that should grow, (and) of course, it already happens...we have companies that do agro-processing. We have Flour Mills, UAC, Dangote...they do a lot of these. But of course it's been difficult. As I said before people have to build their own infrastructure, their own power situation et cetera. So MAN said, we’ve said, others have said...it's so obvious that [the] precondition to moving forward for more value-added manufacturing in any sector is obviously power. We've struggled with it with the privatization that happened 2013, but it seems sensible “oh, privatization, hopefully that will lead to a better power situation” but the truth is it's got[ten] worse and I think now the whole country, everyone recognises that. But I'm quite hopeful on the power situation. Again, first of, there has been [an] admission by everyone, every government, every private citizen that we’re in a power emergency. Two, you’ve got one of the leading figures/leaders in this country stepping up to lead the new super committee that is looking at power and I expect they’re going to come out with some...sorry, let me also say that I'm very very happy that Governor el-Rufai has recovered from the Covid-19 virus, it makes you realise how everyone at every level of society is vulnerable. Thank God that he recovered. But Governor el-Rufai I expect that committee comes out with its recommendations to do some radical things on that, recognising, obviously, we need a cost-reflective tariff, we need a way the bottom of the pyramid can get access to some power. We also need some, probably, decentralization because there are so many technologies for power, and so many decisions to be made it's difficult to make them all at the center. But I do think that would unlock a lot of these issues over the next few years, so I'm very hopeful on the power situation. Tobi: On the power issue, if you have to come up with, say, three things that would really need to happen for that sector to see the needed to change, what would be on your list?Andrew: I'll give you one thing. So we did put out a paper that suggested actually that we should focus the power that we have, uninterruptible power, to manufacturing [and] charge them more for it if they're willing to pay for that, but that's one idea. But the big idea that we put out for three or four years is simply decentralisation. If you look around the world...so I'm Canadian, I think most people who follow me know that. We often on Twitter have discussions about immigration to Canada from Nigeria, but in Canada, power is a provincial issue. So you have Nova Scotia which is a province of about a million people and I think it has (I'm just guessing) probably between 200 and 400 thousand customers between residential, commercial, and industrial and it's a provincial matter. As far as I know, I don't even think there is a national regulator of electricity in Canada. The provinces sort out their own electricity, there's lots of different models - some privatisation, some state/public-sector lead pieces of it and it works fine and then, of course, the provinces sell power between themselves, they sell power to the United States. The power from Niagara Falls which is a large (I am sure people have seen pictures of it, also not far from where I grew up) which [has a] massive hydroelectric dam there, sells its power to New York State and the Federal Government doesn't get involved. So if you wanted to put one big idea out there, it's decentralization. Today, the decentralisation is even more critical because there are so many technologies to produce power on a smaller scale than we had before. If you go back to when I grew up in the sixties, you had this image of big power plants, big thermal plant, big hydroelectric plants, big nuclear plants...now power can be produced in situ where you are at a smaller scale. If you take gas power for example, the scale economics aren’t that strong so if you have gas, you could produce power locally for local needs. So, in answer to your question 3 big ideas, let me put one big idea which is let’s decentralized the power decisions. And I think if you told States "get on with your power situation", they would find local solutions to their own situation to make sure that they had power, that their manufacturers had power, that the bottom of the pyramid had access to some power, maybe subsidized rates, but those decisions can only be sorted out locally.Tobi: Interesting. Decentralisation seems like the solution to a lot of problems in Nigeria.Andrew: Well, people say to me, why do you stay in Nigeria? You’ve lived all over the world, you can be anywhere. I say this is the future. I mean, as we know, the population projections having us come third largest most populous nation, hopefully in my lifetime we’ll see that. It's the biggest economic opportunity, people are incredibly entrepreneurial in tough conditions. So how do you unleash that energy? It's just easier to let people get on with it at the local level. I'm not the only one or PwC is not the only one saying it, except there is now widespread recognition that things have to happen at the sub-national level. I mean, of course, one powerful idea you want to see in any country is, a state has a great governor, I mean Governor Makinde focused on health care, focused on education, focused on continuing the projects of his predecessor rather than abandoning [and] wasting those resources. If the Governor in the next State is not doing it, people are going to say "Oyo is moving forward" and they are going to hopefully elect someone. But that goes back to what we discussed earlier, it's an imperfect democracy but all we need to do is push forward.Tobi: I would want to talk about the Central Bank, how Central Banking is being done in Nigeria. Now, take the power situation, the Central Bank Governor has been on a tour the last couple of years that, oh, this sector, textile, whatever, so they say power is the problem and this is what we are doing to finance power provision. My question is should that really be the remit of the Central Bank?Andrew: I think I will just go back in history a little, a short-term history. What brought me to Nigeria was the financial crisis in, well, the developed world in 2008. I moved to Nigeria in 2009 and my first client in Nigeria was the Central Bank of Nigeria when Governor Sanusi who, of course, became the Emir of Kano (and now is no longer the Emir of Kano) was running it. And he in 2013...I was at the bankers’ committee strategic retreat in Calabar in Cross River and that was his last bankers’ committee retreat. So CNBC came to the meeting and they asked him this... and we all watched while he was interviewed...it was sort of live interview with us in the room, bank CEOs, and people like me, advisory people, sitting in the back and the sides and they asked him exactly that question seven years ago (cause he started intervention programs and, in fact, some of the work that we did with him earlier was what encouraged his interest in agriculture because we pointed out that agriculture was 35 or 38 percent of the economy but had none of the lendings, so that got him thinking about that). So he said, look I get you, you can look around at different Central Banks around the world and they don't do things [like] what we're doing here. And he said but the reason I’m doing it is if we don't do it, who else is going to do it? [The] Central Bank has always been the Federal Government’s MDA that has the most capability, very talented people, high-quality organisation, so they've sort of stepped into the breach. That said, given your question, I guess we've sort of said...look, we're asking too much of the Central Bank in Nigeria.  Sometimes I go on television, and the monetary policy committee will be meeting and the next day or the next week they will be asked: should they cut rates, raise rates 13 percent, 12 and a half, 13 and a half? And I say, look, I don't even think that question is that important because the issues that we have in Nigeria the Central Bank can't solve that way. We have, I won't even call it fiscal issues, we have structural issues that can only be solved by the executive and the legislature at the federal level, at the state level working together, for example, on the real estate... to unlock the real estate sector. So we ask too much of the Central Bank, I wish it wouldn't get so much attention. If you look at developed economies, if I take Canada, for example, I don't think most people can name the Central Bank Governor. He does his part on that, adjust interest rates to some monetary policy intervention. Basically the economy works because it's structurally sound and I can give you an analogy. The Central Bank Governor of any Central Bank in the world is a racecar driver and if you give him a car from the 1920s, it's only going to go as fast as the car from the 1920s goes. If you give him a car from the 1950s, it's only to go as fast as a car from the 1950s. And if you give him a car from 2020, Ferrari (F1 Ferrari), it's going to go that fast. So the issue [is] that people should not be putting so much pressure on the Central Bank in Nigeria to fix our economic and social challenges. It's going to be fixed elsewhere.Tobi: Forgive me, Andrew, this leads me to a sort of question about institutions generally. Yeah, Sanusi started this and maybe, just maybe, he had the sense to know where the limits are, the extent of the capability of the Central Bank to actually solve what you have also said are structural problems that should be fixed at [a] political and fiscal level in Nigeria. Now, we've had some situation in the last couple of years where the Central Bank itself has been the source of domestic economic distortions, in terms of prices and exchange rate. I was reading a paper a few days ago by the former World Bank Chief Economist where he clearly said that there is some evidence, as much as we know what evidence are in economics, that there is some evidence that Central Banks in developing countries would generate a lot less distortions if they adopt some kind of rule-based intervention in the market as opposed to discretions. What I want to ask you is this: is it time for some kind of rule-based regime at the Central Bank? Some kind of legislative oversight over what the Central Bank is allowed to do so we don't have a situation where central banking will only function according to the disposition of the personnel in charge.If we wanted to have a more rules-based approach to monetary policy, absolutely, that would benefit the country, but it also requires the other pieces of the national leadership to do their parts so this will be part of a comprehensive whole. - ANAndrew: I think I would agree with that but the way I phrase this is, we need to take pressure off the Central Bank. I mean, the legislative and the executive arms need to say, okay, we get it, there's a limit to what the Central Bank can do. Obviously Central Banks need to be involved with questions around the currency, interest rates, stability of the financial sector, let's simplify the role here and you can do that and we will create rules that send positive signals to people involved in the economy and investors to do that. That would be great, but then the legislative and the executive arms then need to take on the task of doing what needs to be done to fix the economy structurally. In a way, what's happening is the Central Bank is intervening in tomatoes, intervening in SMEs, intervening in cultural things, in the power sector because the other arms of government have not stepped up to their responsibilities. So, absolutely. But it will have to be part of the whole package. It wasn't like the Central Bank was entering into terrain that was being already done, they enter in because there was a vacuum. If we wanted to have a more rules-based approach to monetary policy, absolutely, that would benefit the country, but it also requires the other pieces of the national leadership to do their parts so this will be part of a comprehensive whole. Tobi: Okay. Another question I want to ask you on that is, I spoke to Nonso on this show a couple of weeks ago. You know Nonso Obikili and one point he raised is that over the last ten years or so, there's been not too many economists at the Central Bank. Bankers have, sort of, exerted a lot more influence on the Central Bank. What I want to ask you is should we separate banking regulation from monetary policy? Would that be a useful way to go, like they did in the UK, for example?Andrew: It's a good question. Canada where I [am from]... everyone knows I'm Canadian...those functions are separated. The Central Bank of Canada is effectively just doing monetary policy. Regulation of the banks themselves, and we have five big banks, some other banks and, of course, the larger financial sector is regulated by any other group, works perfectly fine for us. So I think it's certainly an option. One of the things people may not realise, just for historical reasons, if I remember right two-thirds of the banks are supervised by the Central Bank and one-third supervised by the NIDC. Just for historical reasons they use the same standards, as an example. So we already have supervision done by [a] non-CBN group there, so I think both models can work but I think it's probably, you're right, easier in a leadership sense if the Central Bank can just focus on the core issues of monetary policy, exchange rate policy, interest rates and some other group does the supervision. But I think that issue in the context of our overall problem is probably a secondary issue for the moment.Tobi: Let's go out of that orbit a bit. The creative industry, Nollywood, music and all, how much of a growth potential does it have? Netflix is now in Nigeria and there's a lot of excitement.Andrew: It's massive. We've done some work in the creative industries, how to get funds to them. Even though there are lots of barriers, you'll still see the incredible success of the music industry and now the Nollywood industry around the world, and of course it's massive domestically. But to make it grow more we need to have a little more structure in the industry, particularly people that are creative, that create these incredible products need to be able to get the fruits of their labour. I mean issues around piracy and distribution. But I think enough people have recognised this now, as I said we've done some work...there are people, groups with money outside of Nigeria who now recognise and want to invest in this industry. And again, as we're saying earlier, Outsource Global, Tek Experts, Microsoft...they are exporting Nigerian brains and earning FX for the country increasingly. Nollywood and the music industry as well are earning FX for the country, big exports. And of course, it's not just Nollywood, it's also fashion, for example, it is a big part of African fashion, people around the world are listening. Last night after dinner we listened to Nigerian music, it's just... that's what we do now. It's fantastic, and I think it is also a fun industry. One of the things that Nigeria does better than any other place that I have ever really lived is events. I mean it's just incredible when you sort of see some of it...and of course, it's tied together and night clubs, parties, all of that is tied together with the entertainment industry is a great part of Nigeria.So I think it should get a lot of attention. Now, one of the things that is critical to it, of course is, again, financing. What's happened over the last few years is the banks have become a little more specialised in what they support. Five years ago you never heard of this but now there are some banks, I won't name them here, that are focused on the entertainment industry. The way it works in banking or financial industry is, you really need sector expertise. So if you look at, say, for example, Sterling Bank they have a public strategy, health, education, agriculture, renewables and transport. They really go deep in those sectors. FCMB has come out very clearly says it's going to be agriculture-focused and then some other banks as I said now focused on Nollywood and the music industry. To the extent they've got [the] expertise, they have better ways of channelling money into it. So I think we'll see it develop rapidly and that should be encouraged. Again, it's a service industry but it has great potential to generate value for Nigeria.Tobi: Let's talk about the tech sector. You are an investor and also an entrepreneur in that sector, what is the current state? I'm asking this because, of course, this is going to be a bit controversial... I have a few friends who think that the way things are currently is still a bit overrated...Andrew: The tech sector. The tech is overrated?Tobi: Yeah.Andrew: I think the thing about the tech sector you have to remember is... I meet so many young entrepreneurs, I always make time, someone reaches out on LinkedIn, I'll read the business plan...and, you know, the energy level of the entrepreneurs is just fantastic and just the sheer courage to try something. But the truth is into these, sort of, startup tech things, most of them are going to fail. Sometimes the young entrepreneur is absolutely convinced of his or her success which is fantastic, you need that energy. But the point is you might have fifty fail, but if you have three that succeed in a big way that makes a difference to Nigeria, that is what we want. I don't want us to focus on the failures, what I want us to focus on is how do you create something that works in the Nigerian condition? If we take two areas or three areas, so we take edtech, healthtech, and cleantech/energy. So, health and education - we have said it's basically impossible for Nigeria to duplicate the models that were built 150 years ago in these areas in developed countries. So if you think of medicine, you have physical doctor, physical nurse, you have one doctor for every 500 people on that. We can't mathematically ever get that many doctors in the right location, so there has to be some technological/healthtech kind of breakthrough to deliver. And I know lots of people working on it, we should encourage that and there will emerge out of that some successful ones that find the right models to put things together. In a way, Nigeria has spent its money and in many cases not getting anything for it. - ANSimilarly in education, particularly with Covid-19, people have started to realise they can learn remotely, they can interact with people remotely. Now, how do we solve it for education for Nigeria? But, again, the local conditions are so critical. I've seen some people trying to bring solutions from developed markets, but we don't have the power, we don't have the bandwidth and then your solution fails. What I want to encourage our young entrepreneurs is to try to find things that work under the Nigerian conditions and can piece together these challenges and solve it. Cleantech, as I mentioned, [is] exactly the same thing. Even if we build out the grid, we'd still have, I think estimated for Africa, if the grid was built out economically we would still have 400-500 million people who are not connected to the grid in Africa in 10 years. So the only way to deliver power to them is in situ, like, where they live the only way to do that is obviously through solar. Because if you have to deliver them some kind of fuel, one that pollutes but too, it's just the same problem as the grid, it doesn't really solve the issue. Again, what are the solar solutions that are coming through? Lagos is actually the centre of solar technology around the world, small-scale solar right now. We have so many companies trying so many different things. Some will fail and many will fail, some will work. What I will say about the tech industry is, yeah, there's a lot of hype, one of the areas that I'm not so convinced about is AI (artificial intelligence) you're always hearing about it, what does it really mean? But out of that hype, there's going to be people that build organisations and companies that solve real problems for Nigerians.Tobi: How significant is the talent gap in that sector? Jumia has their engineering staff in Portugal, I know a popular fintech that has their [it’s] engineering staff in Turkey, and is that a function of our low investment in education?Andrew: Well, I think as we know, when Nigerians are given the opportunity, they are incredible learners. We said before, the diaspora has gone and done great things in many countries when they get the education. But in answer to the question, Tobi, yeah, the country is underinvested. People are not getting enough education, resources are diverted to the wrong things, so we started to say the only thing that public money should be spent on are education, health and to some extent some infrastructure, particularly roads. Toll roads are quite inefficient so it makes more sense for the public to finance the roads, but not the port, not the airport, not Ajaokuta Steel, not refineries. In a way, Nigeria has spent its money and in many cases not getting anything for it...it has wasted its money the wrong way. The way we put it is, the only thing that [the] government should be investing in is the Nigerian people. Invest in Nigerian people, [the] economy is going to improve. [If] what you just described doesn't happen, we get programmers in IT people who are domestic, we get some of that exported through these kinds of companies I talked about, some of it go to the diaspora and we get a flow back. But, yeah, we need to invest in people, it's that simple. So if there is one message that we as PwC would like to give the country is if public sector resources are invested in people, the country will thrive.Tobi: Let's close out with coronavirus, the pandemic. The conversation in Africa and, of course, Nigeria has been about how affordable are the economic cost of this, weighed against the public health measures that are being taken - the lockdown, and everything...what some are calling a Keynesian supply shock that has caused even a larger plunge in demand and margins are down for a lot of companies. What I want to ask you is this, if you are in the room with the presidential committee or task force that is responding to this, what are the things that we need to do to have the right balance between the economic cost and the public health measures right now?Andrew: Well, Tobi, I'm not sure I'm wise enough to know the answer to that. I think we all grasp just how difficult the situation is and I really...as you said, the health unknowns, the economic challenges. Six or seven weeks ago, we said the two things that countries need to focus on are: one, getting resources to the bottom of the pyramid and, two, keeping the food supply chain intact. Why is that? Because we understood a lot, you know, in the beginning of this...what would happen is if you have a lockdown, all the people who are in the informal economy or even the formal economy that are effectively earning daily income, daily wages, they are going to lose her job. We've had tens of millions of people in Nigeria lose their source of livelihood in a very short space of time. Everyone needs to eat, so getting them resources is the most important thing and, of course, it doesn't work if the food supply chain isn't intact. The issue with the food supply chain is you actually need some movement [because] where food is grown is not the same place as where it's processed which is not the same place where it's consumed. I think the government has done a good job of focusing on those two fundamental issues, it's imperfect, we don't really have a great system for getting resources to the bottom of the pyramid on that, but I think that between the government, civil society, private sector...people have recognised this issue and they've really been doing the best they can. And, of course, individuals - every individual that's doing well in Nigeria is connected to people who rely on their daily wages and to the extent that they can, many I know are supporting people who have lost their livelihoods. So in the short-term, that's what the country needs to focus on and I think that the Federal Government has done a good job. That said, it's just so complex...it complex from a science, health perspective, we don't know everything about Covid-19, the transmission, asymptomatic people, how many people have it... it's challenging from a testing viewpoint in a place like Nigeria. Testing is being ramped up but still, we haven't tested in a lot of the population. So I don't know the trade-off, I think the Federal Government agency/taskforce is doing the best job they can but we're also seeing cracks with the coordination with the state level Governors, they are under pressure. We all see what's happening in Kano, what the Governor is saying about relaxation during Ramadan (Kano lockdown), yet, there are 100 new cases, over 90 in Kano. How many real cases are... I'm not second-guessing the government, I think they've done all they can in a very difficult situation and I think we're in for, at least, a few months of real challenges in Nigeria. And I want everyone listening to stay safe, keep as many people safe as you can, it is not easy.Tobi: Finally, Andrew, it's kind of a tradition on the show...what's the one idea that you would like to see everyone either in Nigeria or globally adopt?Andrew: We, and I, personally, have started to advocate in Nigeria that we don't measure GDP, that we measure the progress of Nigeria by the progress on the Sustainable Development Goals. The relationship between GDP and human welfare is not that strong and as I said in the 2010 to the 2014 period GDP grew a lot, but the benefits were disproportionately distributed. SDGs are very clear - no hunger, no poverty, good education, clean water access to healthcare... those are things that actually really matter to the welfare of Nigerians. So the one big idea we have is rather than every day we stand up and talk about GDP growth 2.1 percent, 1.6 [percent], 5 percent, whatever the number is, I would like to have a scorecard across the country in every state [of] how is the state doing on their SDGs and have a way of gathering. So people like me can stand up and say" Kwara State is doing fantastic on these dimensions that really matter to people, Cross River is doing great, this other state is doing not so well, Lagos is making progress". I want the language, let's call it the "lens" to shift from a GDP lens to  Sustainable Development Goal lens in Nigeria. That's my one big idea for the day.Tobi: That's interesting. Thank you very much, Andrew, it's been fantastic talking to you.Andrew: Thank you, Tobi. This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at www.ideasuntrapped.com/subscribe

  This conversation is all about how to listen and live in a magical way to the world around you. Enrique and Andrew speak about birds and language. Enrique's ideal new idea about divination. A special message Andrew got from the birds recently and much more.  Think about how much you've enjoyed the podcast and how many episodes you listened to, and consider if it is time to support the Patreon You can do so here. then you can check out the bonus episode where Andrew and Enrique talk about how to listen to the birds. Including a recording on one of Enrique's bird songs.  If you want more of this in your life you can subscribe by RSS , iTunes, Stitcher, or email. You can book time with Andrew through his site here.  Follow Enrique on Facebook here Andrew is @thehermitslamp everywhere. Thanks for joining the conversation. Please share the podcast to help us grow and change the world.  Andrew Transcript   Enrique: Okay. Andrew: Welcome to another episode of the Hermit's Lamp podcast. I am here today with Enrique Enriquez. How do you introduce Enrique? I think that we could say that they maybe are a poet, that they are maybe a magician. Perhaps it's easiest to say that they are an emissary for the nation of birds, but they're a person who does a lot of things. They've been on before a couple times, so if you enjoy this, definitely dig out the previous episodes, I think that they're well worth listening to. But how are you introducing yourself these days, Enrique? Enrique: I don't know, Andrew, it's very ... it's always very good to see you and I always find problematic to record these things with you because I am ... or I feel so at ease with you. But I always worry that nothing will come out of it. It's like just two friends hanging out. Andrew: I think that could actually be like the subtitle for The Hermit's Lamp podcast. Just a couple of friends hanging out and talking about stuff. I think that's every episode. Enrique: Yes, which is beautiful. Andrew: No, I don't know. I went to see a friend of mine the other day, she was visiting New York and I had to meet with her. The only chance I had to meet with her was the Beast Art Gallery, an opening that she was somehow related to, and I arrived there. She grabbed me by the arm and she walked me around the room introducing me to every single person as a magician. Andrew: And of course I flinched and then I flinched a little bit more and then I thought, "Well, she's philosopher, be smart. She probably knows what she's doing." Maybe she has reason to call me a magician, but I don't know. Enrique: Maybe we should ... we'll contact her and ask her what that reason was. We can share that somewhere afterwards or maybe it's best not to know, right? Andrew: Yeah. I think names should be given even ... We are given a name when we are born and then maybe we are given other names by other reality people, institution organizations, and it's the same thing. It's better for the name to be something that is given to you or maybe you get to live up to it. Enrique: I think that that resonates for me. I always felt like in this era of social media and online presence, that I should come up with some pithy, witty, catchy thing to refer to myself as, other than what do you do? Where are retail cards? It is so many people have these great slogans and catchphrases and so on. But I've never come up with one, I've given up. After 17 years, I think it's plenty of time to give up on that process. But I remember being in China a couple of years ago where I was doing some teaching and doing readings with my friend Carrie. And I was talking to this woman who ... she was talking to me about her guru and she was like, "How long have you been reading cards for?" Enrique: And I was like, "I've been reading cards for about 30 years and professionally for whatever it was at that time," and so on. And she's like, "Oh, so you're like a Grand Master then." And I was like ... and immediately, my response was, I'm like, "I don't know, maybe you should ask Carrie if that's true or not." Because I just didn't want it. Like you said, I flinched. But I've thought of it that moment a lot since then. And I think that acknowledgement from the community or from people of it or the bestowing of that name from people is actually where maybe the real power is. There are lots of people who posts, they sign off with Supreme Grand Master of Taro or whatever, so on and so on. Maybe it's true, but I think when it comes from the outside, it approximates truth more closely. Andrew: I completely agree and I would move by my friend Jasper because I felt okay, maybe I have done something to be called magician, and I'm okay with that as long as it's not me who is the one saying that's what I am. But I don't worry about ... I don't know names or labels. That's the problem with some words that really turn reality opaque in that way in which then nothing else can be seen through that name. People just give things a name to put a stop to having to think about them. Enrique: I'm an Aquarius. I'm a Reiki Master. I'm a ... whatever. Andrew: How are you? Enrique: I'm doing pretty good. I want to share with you a bird story. Andrew: Okay. Enrique: So seeing as seen as birds is something we definitely share a common in. And maybe I've told this on the podcast before, but I can't remember right now. But last October, I ended a long relationship and day two after I ended it, I found a bird nest on the ground with three robin eggs in it. They were all broken. And so I looked at it and I was like, "Yup, that's the end of something." And I saved it. I brought it in and I made sure it was dry. Around here somewhere, I kept it and I felt this very clear acknowledgement from that other side about this situation. Enrique: And then maybe two months later, I was walking through this lane way that I walked through to get to my studio most of the time. And I saw a pigeon with what looked like a branch stuck over its head. And I was like, "Huh, how am I going to convince this pigeon to let me free it from this thing that it's got. And when I got a bit closer, I realized that it was in fact not trapped, but it was ... sorry, I'm going to pause this, and episode afterwards. Enrique: Restarting now. I saw that it was in fact not trapped, but it was holding the branch in its mass and it was a pretty big branch. So it looked like part of it wrapped around its head and so on. And as I got closer, it flew up and it circled and instead of flying away, or instead of flying to one of the many patches on the building with the pigeons in that area, it circled above me a couple of times. And as it did, so it dropped the branch and it fell right into my hands. I didn't have to reach out for anything. Literally, it fell into my hands because I thought it was going to hit me in the face. And so I saved that and I was like, "Oh, now here's the beginning of that new nest. Here's the beginning of that new thing." So there is my bird story for you. Andrew: That's ... Thank you for telling me. I had never heard that before and it's just perfect. The weird condition of flying. You said they are at the same time. Part of the landscape and exception to the landscape. There all the time, but then there is a moment that particular image which would have been irrelevant otherwise gets active for you right there. And then there is something beautiful about the way that they give consistency to themselves. There's a second [inaudible 00:09:15] so to speak. The pigeon with a branch on its beak, it's even more relevant because you found the [inaudible 00:09:24]. Enrique: And this is symmetry to it, right? Andrew: Yes. And I think that the most important thing I learned from ... sorry. He said the space in between the cars, he's made out of time. On the table, we don't see that because it happens really fast and in fact all oracles are [inaudible 00:09:51] for all to accelerate time. But that space, that time, the more we look at card, the wider you become. So we can inhabit that space in between the images. And then we realized, "Oh, but that's space is light and the images are happening all the time." There is card that is eats with the three broken egg and then there is a card that eats the pigeon with the branch with its beak. And just in the space, in between, the key I think is to know how to wait. And I'm more and more convinced that wakened with ISA, of course, a very active dance of faint, of painting, it's the greatest oracle. That's the oracular state is the state of waiting. Enrique: I think that that capacity to be present and open, but not fixated is really important to magic, to divination, to listening to birds, to all of the things, right? Andrew: Yeah. I spent the weekend talking to some crows in Massachusetts and I think that one very important thing for me is that ... if they're having a conversation with a crow across the main street of this little town, and somebody wanted to know what the crow was saying. And then some other day, I told these crows and I start calling them day and night. They came and they drew a circle over my head. They were talking to me, but basically drawing the beautiful circle on top of me. Andrew: And what I find or what I encounter all the time is that people then want for me to provide some ornithological conclusion. I talk to the birds because somehow now I'm going to learn something about crows. And I have no ornithological basis. Both events like the nest you found or the bird with the branch on its beak, both are emblem for the language of the birth, which is precisely the stability to merit with time by paying a patient is the rhythm of the world. Of course, I'm just putting these images in the world and somehow, they add up because yes, you find somehow they're concrete reality. The facts go so on. Maybe in two months we will find ... I don't know what, with some sort of branch, we let it image that we'll [inaudible 00:12:58] in that moment. Enrique: Well, I think that people are often, and I at times have often been in a hurry to arrive at meaning or definition or so on, and I think that that's one of the ... if one of the powers of reading tarot cards is the space, one of the dangers is the definition. Yet to me, the definition of things is a thing that comes in time. And I think that especially at some point in my ceremonial magic career, I just started to treat meetings, messages, things that came, I'm like, "Well, we'll see what that means in time." Maybe in a few years I'll know what that means. Maybe in a few years, it'll feel true still. We'll see. And that sort of openness to it, it allows for change, which might actually be the most important part of the process as opposed to definition, which is comforting, or has the appearance of comfort but doesn't really necessarily always or maybe even often benefit us in a bigger picture sense. Andrew: Yeah. In fact, my suspicion as at the moment is that if we have a question and we need the answer right away, that means that's the wrong question. I think that there's a credential in our goals between motivation and acceptance. We want our spiritual materials, so to speak, the things we consume within the frame of the spiritual, to provide motivation. So we feel that we can tackle life or go up and do things, and accomplish something then which people call inspiration. Andrew: And I think that it's very important to focus on acceptance. Not only from the mentally, the acceptance of the dignity of that thing that is before, all good or bad, but also the acceptance of a bigger picture or a wider pattern that is taking place and one way of naming that will be changed as you're doing, is time and understanding that everything is simply happening. Of course for me personally, and I'm not suggesting people should do that, I will also say everything is happening and I don't matter, which gives me a lot of freedom. It's not about me. I understand that for people, a lot of them need to be the center of the circle. But in any case, yes, you become a witness of reality and somehow you realize that then you are reality too. And then we also become part of the landscape, an exception to the landscape now and then. Enrique: Well, certainly we can become an oracle to other people, right? Andrew: Yes. Enrique: As part of the landscape and an exception too. But I'm very curious about this idea as it relates to the more ... I completely relate to it from a spiritual perspective, from a practice perspective, even from my perspective as being a person who does readings for other people. To me, all of those things, I completely relate to it. I'm curious how you relate that back to the more mundane but also miraculous things like your appearance. How does that idea trickle back into parenthood for you? Or into your relationship or into those sort of day to day domestic parts of your life? Andrew: I always tell people that the fact that they can speak like a bird doesn't mean that they'll have to do laundry. No. And of course in New York, that basically means that you have to grab a big bag of 30 clothes and then go out. In most places in New York, you don't have this laundry machine in your apartment, so you have to actually want to go to those winters knowing who these places were. In the movies, there's always fantastic tech happening that's nice, but I go in the morning so it's really boring. So, a daily for steward of some ... let's call it [inaudible 00:18:27] it could be your head in the clouds thinking of a bird and words and signs and oracle. At some point, I think that that's the dignity. Saying like doing laundry. Andrew: And I remember I used to hate that particular thing. Going out to do laundry is just extraordinarily boring. And then I realized well this is somehow they cancel weight. I mean I need this thing. I need the key, I need the fact that they are hungry or bored because otherwise, I will just disappear. But you need that, you need that reality to keep doing pension. That versatility where all [inaudible 00:19:16] aspiring us. It's only rates if you have an [inaudible 00:19:20] and a view low. I appreciate those things now. I go to do my laundry in a suit because I feel that there is an extra-ordinary dignity in doing that too. And the same with everything, I think it's very hard to accept the dignity of the things we don't like. I suspect that at the end, we are all guided by our aesthetic preferences. Andrew: We have an idea of what's beautiful and then we pursue that and then everything else just gets along. But I do feel that the mundane half that wait, and that's what it is. It's a way that keeps you grounded. What I don't do is to focus any oracular pursue on the mundane. I think that there are questions that have no form and they manifest as intuition. They are not been named, you don't know what they are, so trying to be useful to somehow point you in some direction or ... but daily life takes care of itself. It works clockwork. So I don't agonize over children, family, school, I don't know, housing, work. I think those things will happen anyways. The ground is there. The problem is how high can you fly? So the ground is always there. Enrique: I think it's one of the things, it's always a good interesting question for me. And I am a person who points Oracle at mundane things but not regularly. Like sometimes and when necessary, but I tend to ... my daily practice, it drifted to this general question, how do I show up fully today? As my question to the cards and at some points in the last six months or so, the question just disappeared and it just becomes this open time, in a way that I imagine you with your pen in your notebook and letters and images and cards and ... where's it going? What is it? Who knows? It is what it is. And at the end, maybe there's something concrete that you could point out or show about it, but often it's just much more ephemeral than all of that, you know? Andrew: Yes. Very often, it's just about maintaining the day. And again to me, that has to do with the idea becoming one with time. It's not really about finding a solution or an answer because it's not even about asking a question. It's just about being present and of course I like this idea of a symbolic world, that it's [inaudible 00:22:49] not very clear and it's not real riding over your thoughts on the real world or daily life and it becomes more than or more federal depending on when and where we are. And I like to be a witness so that world, but many times it's the rare act of witnessing the life of form, what provides some benefits or a sense of being okay. Andrew: That can give you ... and I will maybe [inaudible 00:23:27] to put a very concrete example. I am completely convinced that what'd really help when we look at card, it's not they images just themselves, it's not the words we used to acquire the images, it's not the answers we get, it's the experience of looking of them. It's the consistency in the pattern of the images. It's a due painful experience of images that makes [inaudible 00:24:05] feel better. And somehow, feeling better it's not just ... I don't know, a sensation, it's that sense of truth, like when you feed a bird and you understand that you know something and you don't have to even to be able to [inaudible 00:24:24], but you know it, you'll know it. And it's the same ... Yes. Enrique: It reminds me ... I recently just reacquired a bicycle after having my bicycle stolen near the start of the year. The joys of living in a large city. I'm speaking of things that can be tremendously grounding but not in a desirable way. But this conversation and the idea of the influence of reading cards, it reminds me of ... I live in Toronto, which is a city of tall buildings and less open spaces and so on. And one of the ways in which I really have noticed that at other times is if I'm cycling across town, like maybe 20, 30 minutes to a friend's place and when I leave the house, if the moon catches my eye, for example, you go and it's like, "Oh look at the beautiful full moon tonight." Enrique: And then you cycle along and then you cross University Avenue and the buildings have this open pathway and suddenly, there's the moon again. And then a little bit later as you get out pass Bathurst, where the buildings start to get short, and you're like, "Oh there's the moon again." And having a reading is like that initial connection where you see the moon, you go, "Whoa." It makes you stop, right. Andrew: Yes. Enrique: Time stops for that moment. Look at it and you're like, "Look at it, beautiful, oh look at the color of the sky." For me, it always trickles out into a bunch of things usually. Once I notice a thing like that, at the very least admitted or to have me just gazing upwards and feeling the expansiveness of that experience and then having a meeting and then flows through into those other points through time where that process returns to us, whether through the images of the words or the idea of memory, and it echoes that trip across town of that, reconnecting with what I would call it with the moon and a sublime experience. Enrique: But certainly, the metaphysical or transformative experience of having a reading. Andrew: Well, because again, I think that the reading or the experience of the cards is just part of a continuum of science. There are some are being insisted upon us. So yes, maybe the reading is that based where we frame our attention and say, "Oh, this is meaningful." But basically, the moon that you are looking at in the cars is the ones that will reappear then behind a building. And the same thing will happens with the idea of the tower people breaking apart and then you will see two people walking in different directions. So you will see a chain that somehow snaps and you'll realize, "Oh, it's the same idea, the same idea is being insisted upon me." I don't think that there is any example that will talk your example with the nest and then the pigeon of the branch. Andrew: It's the same idea. You have a mindset and a series of concerns or a way of being in the world. And then reality is just giving you these things in a way to say, well this is how things are, this is where you are, this is who you are. And I think the cards are a great training tool for that. These days, I'm thinking that the Oracle of the future will be a person who has a hole puncher in one hand and the stack of blank cards on the other. So when the person comes with a question or big and scientists about something, the person just punch a hole in the card and give it to them. And that's the Oracle. Andrew: To me, there are two terms of Oracles. To me, two things are very important. One is that initial definition of the Oracle is an opaque statement, which by extension then names the person who gives or delivers those statements, and the other one is Heraclitus, the Greek philosopher when he wrote, the Oracle neither reveals nor conceals but gives signs. Which to me is the most useful model to understand what I do. Andrew: There is this idea of punching a hole in a blank card and giving it to the other person so they can see through. And of course the idea of through which in French means hold to and is the beginning of [inaudible 00:29:33] which is to find, and then the card which there is a French word name which you can use for. In Spanish, it's very easy, it's [Laminna 00:29:43]. In English, you don't have an exact word like that. But in any cases are worth four cards. You can have the card, which is this lamp and lamp sounds like lamp, which is the soul. The idea of punching a hole in the soul, so you can see through. It is all implicit in the act of handing somebody something that basically allows them to focus their attention in a very narrow point. Enrique: I love it. As you're speaking about it, I was picturing you in a fancy tent somewhere, in the fence. The people lined up, it's like be like, stack of cards and your whole puncher and still be like, don't tell me anything, there you go. Andrew: Exactly. Because at the end of course if we think about an Oracle, that's an opaque statement or the statement is the whole, and then the opaque is the actual card. Making a statement in the opaque is a way of playing with that idea of the opaque statement. But currently, I'm very happy applying the same thoughts to just making bird sounds. I think we talked about that last time. Enrique: Are you reading cards any more of these days? Andrew: No. Enrique: No? Andrew: Not at all. I have a daily engagement with the cards because I teach people how to look at them. And I have fine tune my practice, so we only look at the trumps of [inaudible 00:31:31] which is the card I'm interested in and it really becomes a way to understand a poetic structure that if or when it takes a hole in you, then you can find in the world to the point that you no longer need the cards. But the basis is that we look at cards and we talk about them Andrew: And then I have learned because of that work with people, we usually don't work with questions. We don't use questions in our practice, we just look at the cards and we describe what we see. And I realized that in time, that work has a benefit for those who engage with it, which is not only learning how to read the cards, it's that they feel better, which again confirms my idea that exposing ourselves to this rhythm of the images is in itself a beneficial thing. [crosstalk 00:32:36] please. Enrique: When I created the land of the sacred self Oracle, which is black and white surrealists Oracle deck that I made- Andrew: I remember it. Enrique: ... I created it with that intention. So it's like I created it not with the goal that people would look at them and be like, ah, this is what it means, oh, here's my affirmation for the day, or here's the concrete or the opaque thing that I can arrive at. But instead, as a hole through a card into another world for people where they could have experiences and engage with them and whenever I work with those with people, the experience is the same. The initial response is, I have no idea what's going on in this, and I'm like, "Great, that's perfect. Now let's look at it, now let's talk about it, now let's open up that space so we can go through it." Enrique: And at some point in that journey, they tend to feel better and have a sense of direction or what have you. And sometimes that is very communicable and sometimes it's not. And I think that the idea that we can have need an answer that we can express concretely to other people or we failed is not always true. I think there are times when it's true or where that's what's required. But I think it's a bigger picture practice opening up and engaging in that mystery is really what allows us to let the Oracle reveal itself to us, which is always something outside of being able to clearly articulate the scope of what it means. Andrew: Yes. A sign should either deliver or some knowledge, which I will optimally call poetic knowledge. That means that it's maybe not even again possible to express it in words, it's just this understanding that you get about the way certain aspects of reality coincide for work or the Oracle or the sign I'm sorry will be a call to action. Andrew: And I don't mean that in practical terms, I mean in an emotional way. Something torches you and you feel that you're ready to something or you're ready not to do it or you're somehow ready to take a stance, and it's a purely emotional response to a sign you have been given. Most of that exist outside of a rational analysis. And I feel even sometimes, people say, well, I saw you even a dream and you told me ... for example, you told me how to read the cards but I don't remember anything you said. Or, you told me something and it was very important but I don't remember the words. Andrew: And I feel very happy because I think that whatever that was, it's not meant to be put into language. It's just there. It's pure poetic knowledge. At the end, I always feel the same thing. We're trying to figure out how to leave and that pretty much means we are trying to protect our psyche from the daily grind, life throwing all these nonsense adults and we are just trying to remain somehow cool. And I think signs, oracles, they can do that. Enrique: I think the idea of definition of self is one that when it's rooted in language, like when I was trying to come up with that fantastic phrase to communicate the fullness of what I offered to people through divination, that doesn't go anywhere. Maybe it does for some people, but I've never understood it. It doesn't go anywhere for me. But this sense of the fullness of ourselves and the sense of the fullness of sharing that with someone else or experiencing it with the birds or the moon or whatever ways those, those things can be enduring in ways and solve problems in ways that definitions around language rarely seem to or don't seem to. And it reminds me how many years ago I started this podcast. I started the podcast because I had been thinking about my last year of working with clients and thinking about what I called my successes and not successes with those people. Enrique: And the question that I had was, why do some people change and why do other people stay the same? And so the first half dozen episodes of this are me asking various seasons card readers that question, and I think that hearing what you just said actually to me feels like it is actually probably the clearest answer that people need some emotional or internal shift to happen that isn't rooted in language or explanation and isn't necessarily accessible through language or rationality or explanation and until, or if ever that thing happens where Enrique and I appear in your dream and you can't remember anything but suddenly you wake up desiring to make a shift in your life. Enrique: Until that unpredictable peace emerges, we can seek that experience, we can foster it, but we can't guarantee that it happens neither as diviners nor as people. Right? Andrew: Absolutely. And I like to think ... going back to this idea of the magician, a friend wrote to me and asked me, "Are you a magician? I need the magic." And I told her, "But I do slow of hand." I believe or I'm interested in an idea of magic, which is not the imposition of a will, but the absence of a will. So you make yourself present, your presence has an effect in reality, even if you don't want to and then you wait. And there is a lot of magic that happened that way, but of course maybe this is the beginning of magic trick and we wouldn't know until tomorrow or the next year. And I'm okay with it. Of course again, going back to your initial comment, there is no way to create a slogan to market that in a powerful way, which I think is big to the honesty of the premise. Andrew: I think we are obviously rooted in language and actually we become subtle true language. Language is this thing that happens in our body and as the air goes out and we reshape it with our mouth and tongue and teeth, it goes off. And as soon as he's out there, you'd acquire some metaphysical consistency. So there is something remarkable happening there. But it doesn't mean that it's everything. And as you were saying, it's not until we have an emotional response that we are ready to change or to move or to basically experience all the things. Andrew: And perhaps, a paradox that I find in the current world is that when we talk about emotions, we confuse that with sentimentality. We have countless books and posters and memes and pictures that have these sugary tone because somehow they're going to appeal to your emotions and to appeal to our emotions when we don't need the pillow in the muffling the shot of the gun. Andrew: We just need the full blast. And there is that thing in the ... I don't know how to call it, the spiritual, the new age world that is all about muffling the sound. Making it comfortable, making it safe, which is the perfect recipe for nothing to change. Enrique: Well, we've been touching on the idea of sublime and the sublime, especially in landscape painting and that sort of historical stuff where people were working on that notion, that it was rooted in this idea that something was so grand and inconceivably large compared to our personal smallness, that it evoked a sense of overwhelmingness and openness up to a sense of our place in the universe. And there's a degree of at the least anxiety and that maybe if something much stronger too. Enrique: It doesn't need to be comfortable and it maybe [crosstalk 00:43:10] just can't even be comfortable.Right? Andrew: Yeah. Again, if you're comfortable in your chair, you won't stand up. Somehow, something has to happen. That chair has to get held or I don't know, a nail has to pull through and then you spring out of it and do something. But also, talking about the sublime, I guess that my main interest, which is this notion of the language of the birds, which has again, nothing to do with ornithology or science, but it has to do with precisely with some longing for the return to some ideal state, which is that we could use that word, just the state of the sublime. Andrew: This idea of the language of the birds is the original language or the secret language. So the idea of a return to the beginning and the idea that somehow that beginning is some paradise which is ... again, a place of longing. We look at a bird and it's almost consistently. The bird at least it's the longing for a promise that the bird is not making, but that we really feel it's there for us and we can achieve that return to that ideal state. State of freedom, state of weightless, state of beauty. And I think we are all somehow exiles from that place. And yes, we are all looking for a way back. Enrique: As always, I post on Facebook and ask if people have questions. And one of the questions that somebody asked was, how do you really listen to the birds? How does that happen? And I'm wondering if have a suggestion for people, especially if this is a newer concept for people. What could people might do to begin this journey, if they're inspired by this conversation? Andrew: Well, I am happy to report that I just finished teaching a class about the language of the birds that happened with me entirely talking like a bird. Every Monday, I will send a lesson, which was a recording of me talking like a bird, and then people had to listen and to transcribe that. And they were ... That too. Several different routes. And something very fortunate that happened is that mimicking birds implies understanding that we hear with our memory. The ear has some memory. That's how when you roll the wood against steel, you can hear a bird chirping. Andrew: [Gusto mashallah 00:46:35] the French writer has this beautiful idea, that the birds learn too by listening to a stream of water. And again, if you ... yeah, you can see it. If you hear the stream of water, the bubbling could be chirping. I'm talking about something that is so extraordinarily concrete and it's foreign. I hear to the birds in terms of the material. I hear to the birds and I'm all the time wondering, "Does that sounds like rubber, like wood, like metal?" How can I speak that language? Andrew: But also, one of the effects that this class had in some people was precisely that they were walking around and they will hear the brakes of a bus and hear a bird, recognize the same way again memory. I think what I'm trying to say maybe is that we need to listen to the concrete, to the actual form of the sound. And then to me, this has been even more important. We need to listen to the void inside the voice of the bird to the negative space, to the silence. And this is key when you're actually trying to mimic a bird because yes, you have the chirp and somehow you can make that, but then the rhythm only happens if you listen to how many times the bird stops. And that space could very well be the same space that you are walking on when you're between the nest and the pigeons. Andrew: It's always about situating yourself in that space. You think that sometimes ... Charles Bernstein, this American poet has a fantastic essay on homophonic translation and actually, he talks about bird song or he talks about this idea that poets have always wanted to talk like birds. So the idea of taking bird sounds and translating them into human words, something that for example another American poet, Robert Greene did in the past. He has all these sentences for the birds, which are human sentences, but they can be retraced back into the sounds of the birds around his home in Vermont. You can also do that. You can also try to find in the voice of the bird, that which is familiar, which is a way of saying you can try to find in the voice of the bird Dan, which is you. And then you're surprised by the things you find. Andrew: But then I had other people who work in this class with me. Did something brilliant and they use the bird songs as dream words. This is based on a 14th century, [inaudible 00:50:13] idea of name is widespread in the Sufi world or mostly where the idea that certain words, if you repeat them as you're falling asleep, they improve the chances that you will have beautiful dreams. A couple of people working with me did this, of playing the recordings of my bird voices as they were falling asleep and then they registered their dreams and the results were absolutely spectacular. Andrew: Going back to that sense of something that exists or is transmitted in a purely poetic way, there were all these beautiful immigrants and ... Perhaps with these, I'm trying to say there is a way of listening that is conscious. You could listen to see this sounds like this, this sounds like [crosstalk 00:51:11], I'm pretty sure that people will be able to or even [inaudible 00:51:14] French composer to write down the notation for the song of a bird. But there's another way of listening than maybe more unconscious. Listening when you're not listening. Enrique: It strikes me that there's ... you hear the song, you become aware of the song and at some point in the transition to noticing the space in the song or in art or whatever, there's almost like an inversion that starts to happen, where we get pulled inside of something else. That whole in the corridor all of a sudden. The card being the song that we're looking at, we're seeing the pattern and the things and then at some point, we noticed that there's an opening. And if we're in the receptive mindset to that, not sitting with expectation and anticipation, we can fall through that like Alice through the radicle and so on and end up in another world. Andrew: Yes, experience is ... Enrique: Are different are poetic but also inspire a sense of connection to ourselves and so on. Andrew: It's like walking by the sea. You walk by the sea and the sea now and then it brings something to the shore and you'll pick it up and you say, "Oh, this is fantastic. Or this is for the Detroit back." But you can't command the sea to drop on your lap what you want. You have to figure out how to use with the sea put in there. Enrique: Sure. [crosstalk 00:52:58] to drop a branch in his hands. Right? [crosstalk 00:53:03]. Andrew: Yes if you're there, you're paying attention, then you [inaudible 00:53:09]. It's a miracle, but also that's something else that happened this weekend, I was about to have lunch with my son and I heard this crow and I looked up and I realized what I saw was a bald eagle. Okay which was ... ex gigantic and then I get here in this crow, and it was so strange, so I move around three and I saw that this crow that now looked like a fly next to the eagle was trying to chase the eagle out of the tree, which is what they do is their job basically. Andrew: And then of course there was a moment when my wife ... wives always do the same things that ... something is happening to people are having an argument, an eagle on a crow and then your wife will say, "Go, do something. Talk to the guy." So I went and I talked to the crow and I managed to make him stop for a while, but the ... and then we went into have lunch, but this is the thing. This was the dining hall in this college my son goes to. And as soon as I entered and my son was inside and as soon as I told him there is a full eagle outside, every single kid in that dining hall dropped everything and ran out. Andrew: I never expected that reaction. There was no social media involved, there was just ... the absolute, the excitement was again ... by saying there is a bowl eagle outside, it was like I pressed an emotional bottom that was completely irrational. They didn't even hesitate or figure out, they just dropped it, the trades with the foot and ran out. And I felt again that they understand that it's a miracle. That thing out there, which is basically an object that fell off the symbolic world, and for a moment, it's there on the three. It's a miracle. And that's the choice, and I think that signs are always based on choice. We choose to activate or deactivate a sign. We choose to acknowledge this is a sign. You could have passed by that nest with the tree X and ignore that completely or kick it even. You decided, you choose to pay attention to it and just the way that, that prepare you to be aware of the pigeon with the branch. Enrique: And in the same way as choosing to go and walk by the ocean, if we persist in that practice, then the ocean will give us science because we're there. Andrew: Yes. Everything is ... absolutely and the present is there is the presence is meaning and that the word you use, it's a practice and of course again in time, you will feel that the sea is giving you things all the time. And it's not necessarily true, maybe we're a few weeks in between or months, but you are in your practice. So the hour, of that practice makes reality speak to you in really a constant way. Enrique: I'm reminded of ... Jason Miller wrote a piece about ... I'll try and include a link in the show notes. I think the title was something like your practice doesn't care if you feel like it. And the sort of gist of it was around devotional work that ... it doesn't matter if you're in the mood or not. If you've made a commitment, you should show up and do the thing anyway. Whether a thing comes from it or not, whether you feel better because of it or not, that in many ways, the power of devotion and offerings in the context of deity work is in your consistency, in your persistence over time. Enrique: And I think that in the same way, I had a lovely bike ride back from meeting my girlfriend for coffee today and I didn't have any miraculous occurrences. It was a nice bike ride, but the moon wasn't out, it was whatever. But that attention is always there so that when those things do wash up on the shore, I can pick them up. And I think that that endeavoring to be open to that at a basic level consistently is what also produces it, right? Andrew: Yes. And We have to be open and again, we have to accept the dignity of whatever that is. It may not be what we want or it may not be something. Actually I think the whole point is for it to be surprising, for it to be something we're not expecting. Otherwise, if it's only like a confirmation of bias, then what's the point? But I think a lot about gas career? This thing, the ... Enrique: [inaudible 00:58:42], Africa. Andrew: I love this idea of grounding egg shells to a powder that you can use to draw things with and somehow with those drawings, you call on something. Right. And I think that I ... I like to think that ... a friend of mine said that I draw a magic circle around this café I go everyday, that that's my magic circle. And I liked the idea that routine is discuss career. Routine is round in these actual to a powder. You do it over and over and over and over and basically yes, it comes to a point in which your routine drew a magic circle around you and then these things are happening there because basically, you are there. As you say, they happen because you show up. And of course, I'm sure that there are wonderful things that's happening while nobody is watching. Enrique: For sure. Andrew: And when we don't show up. Enrique: But when you went inside the bald eagle and the crow said, "Ooh, I'm glad they left. We can put this aside for a minute." Andrew: And that's also beautiful to think that ... to think of all the signs that are taking place in our absence. It's also something that fills me with joy. Enrique: No, I love it. Andrew: Older things are not for me. Enrique: Well, maybe that's a great place to wrap it up for this conversation. Go practice, go grind it down, go make it sacred, magical, or poetic or whatever you prefer, and listen and you'll see what shows up. Andrew: Yes, absolutely. I don't know why, I prefer poetic because perhaps it makes them more concrete. But at the end, it's all the same thing. Enrique: Definitely. Thanks for recording another one of these, my friend. Andrew: No, thank you. It's always so good to see you. Come to New York. Enrique: It's on my agenda for sure.

The gang get back together in their secret underground bunker to talk about what is new in their journeys. Andrew, Aidan, and Fabeku talk about the future of witchcraft, magic, grimoires, and how to best powder a scorpion. In a rarer moment they talk about their businesses and how they find their way forward through changing desires and capacities around working.  They also recorded a bonus for the Patreon only about how to connect with plants and build a magical relationship with them.  You can get it here by becoming a supporter.  Aidan can be found here.  Fabeku hangs here.  As always Andrew is here.  If you want more of this in your life you can subscribe by RSS , iTunes, Stitcher, or email. Thanks for joining the conversation. Please share the podcast to help us grow and change the world.  Andrew You can book time with Andrew through his site here.  Transcription Andrew: Hey everybody. Welcome to another episode of The Hermit's Lamp podcast. I am hanging out today with Stacking Skulls, which would be my buddies, Fabeku and Aidan. We have taken submarine to our secret underground bunker. We have concocted all sorts of beverages to prop us up for this from weird poisons from some lizards and reptiles and obscure sea fish. And we have found the long lost grimmer of the monkey safe nests, which we have properly venerated before we're going to start here. Aidan: I [inaudible 00:00:42]. Andrew: Welcome to the podcast. This is a fairly regular thing that we've been doing for a while with different guests as well as one last founding member, John. And today we're getting together for the first time in quite a while, just the three of us to catch up and talk about stuff that's going on. So I'm going to skip the introductions. Andrew: If people don't know who we are, well, go back and listen to one of the other episodes. But what's going on? What's new? What's happening? What's changed? We recorded last, I would say it was just after the fire, so I think that was early, middle of summer, somewhere around there. It was the last time we talked, which is about six months ago. So this is recording. Aidan: Well, other than rating Monkey Island for the [inaudible 00:01:38], it's all been smoking scorpions, but it's just been … it's good. It's been crazy times. End of the year is always crazy. Fabeku: Awesome. Aidan: I'm married to an accountant who's also somewhat clairvoyant. So there's this combination of stuff that begins before the end of the year that is … we are kind of shifting a full year ahead or two years out. So we run on a two-year plan at this point. And so it's just working that stuff out and deciding what the focuses are going to be for that time period as best as we can, knowing that things change. Aidan: But what are the targets? What are the time frames? Can we plan that enough that we can plan in some downtime? And then for me, it's kind of backing away from the jewelry work for a while to focus on teaching and writing. So that's the big one for me. Andrew: How's the preparation for teaching going? I mean, I've seen some on social media, but what's that like for you? Aidan: It's been pretty crazy because I decided that I really wanted audio. Video was too cumbersome to try and share, I thought, and I wanted people to be able to listen to it in different places where they didn't necessarily have rock-solid internet. And so it was a weird process. Aidan: So I started recording before I was ready, which was good, so that broke me in a little bit, but it's a different way of transmitting. And so it's been very interesting figuring that out. But I like what's coming along and the allies like what's coming along. And they got, as usual with projects, way, way, way more involved than I somehow expect, so there's a lot of that shaping influence in there that is how do I work in. Aidan: “Okay. Since you're only going to give me a quarter of the curriculum, how do I make it? Either give it all to me or stay out,” is what I would like to say in some ways. But it is good, but it is okay, so if that's taken over these two sections of the class, what else are we going to run in a limited timeframe. But it's fun. It's been very fun. Andrew: It's awesome. Yeah. I really did teaching a lot. I think … I mean, I know Fabeku does too, right? Aidan: Yeah, for sure. Andrew: Yeah. How about you? What's going on with you, Fabeku? Fabeku: Let's see. Yes. End of year, I pretended that I was taking December off and then had the busiest December I've had in any year. So not so much of a break, but it was mostly busy with good stuff, which was good. Fabeku: Yeah. I mean, kind of similar to Aidan, looking at the next couple of years and figuring out what it looks like and what I want to do more of and what I want to do less of and definitely continuing to shift more and more to the teaching, the writing, the arts, a lot of art. That's my question at this point. Fabeku: How do I do more arts is the big $64,000 question. And this might be the year that I actually do a website for the arts, maybe. I've resisted that for years for all kinds of reasons, but yeah. So that might be a thing. But- Andrew: Given you haven't updated your website since 1842, I'm not sure- Fabeku: Right. Exactly. Andrew: … I'm not sure I believe you at that point. Fabeku: Yeah, that's the running joke. I've got the out-of-date website on the planet. Yeah, that's the truth. Yeah. So just tons of art stuff, which has been good. I carved out some more time in the schedule this year to finish the book projects that I stalled at the end of the year between busy-ness and health stuff and I needed to get a new laptop and some other shifts. Fabeku: But yeah, so I'm excited about that and just looking forward to, like said, more teaching, more art. Aidan: How are you doing Andrew? What do you got going on? I know that you've got the shop open in your space, so how's that going? Andrew: So much is going on right now. So much is going on. I actually took 10 days off over the holidays, which is the first holiday that I've had in forever where I didn't go anywhere or really do anything. I checked a few emails, but that was about it. And I took a bath every day, took a nap every day, really just tried to sink into that. Andrew: I read a bunch and stuff like that. And I went from feeling exhausted from having reopened the store and rubbed my life through the fall to just feeling tired. So I feel like that's a major way, right? Fabeku: For sure. Andrew: The store is going good. It's reopened in a different neighborhood and I'm still wrangling with that. A lot of the same clients of course, but lots of different people. One of the things that's been sort of challenging me about it lately is trying to account for theft as part of the process. Right? Andrew: And it's just like it's almost every retailer tells me and knows it's just a part of the deal. But in the old location, the combination of the size of the store and its location really minimized that stuff, whereas now, it's definitely a thing that I'm paying a lot of attention to. And I feel a bit like it's kind of a metaphor. Andrew: I mean, it's obviously a literal problem, but I'm viewing it a bit metaphorically for how I'm doing that longer-term planning that both of you guys are talking about. Right? I don't want to be tired. I don't want to get back to being exhausted. I don't want to feel like I'm endlessly running around from thing to thing and I can't get ahead of the Arkin and so on. Andrew: And so really, looking at what's making sense in terms of my energy and my attention, I absolutely love having the studio. I have this private studio space, which is beautiful. It's like 300-square feet. It's got a lovely set facing window and high ceilings and it's a five-minute walk from my house. Andrew: So basically, I have no excuse to not come and paints and draw and come see clients here and so on. It's just really welcoming and lovely. And just looking at where are those things that are stealing my energy, that are stealing my attention? Where are those things where I'm not enthused to show a [inaudible 00:08:46] them and where are those things or what's getting in the way of the things that I'm saying I'm going to be doing, like painting every day or whatever. Andrew: What's actually interfering with that and what can I do to adjust that? Where do I make that space emotionally more than any other way? Because practically, the time is there, but emotionally, it's not always there to continue to work on my next book, to wrap up this bacon wizard breakfast Oracle that I'm working on, all those things, right? They all have a drag on them from the tensions in the system. Andrew: And I was talking before we got on the line here about how I rolled back my coffee consumption from ridiculous levels of caffeine and sugar to a manageable level. And I don't want to go back into that space where it's overdrive and you're always pushing, pushing, pushing. It's not the kind of space I want to be living in, so I'm just being really mindful of what I'm doing with my time and where I'm putting my energy and what are the actual returns. Andrew: I mean, certainly financial but also emotionally and I don't know their levels because sometimes there's those things that seem like a great idea, but the returns are not what you thought you would get from them in the end. Right? And they ended up being, well, to be honest, a fucking hassle. It's like, “Man, why did I do this? How do I learn not to do stuff like this again?” Fabeku: I've thought so much about this in the last couple of years. I mean, in part, because the physical stuff has changed my bandwidth in a lot of ways. But I mean, I would say up until about a year, a year and a half ago with the business stuff, I was at a point where I was constantly booked nine to 12 months out. The calendar was not just full, it was kind of overcapacity in a lot of ways. Fabeku: And it's interesting because I think to a lot of people, that looked like success. I mean, every spot filled, booked forever and ever and ever, lots of money. And it was fine until it wasn't. And then when I started to deal with some of this body stuff and would have to shift stuff around in the schedule, I'm like, “This is fucking impossible.” I've got a 12-month calendar. Fabeku: How the fuck do I move these people around without causing some ridiculous cascade that goes for three months and then all of a sudden, this thing that I really worked hard to accomplish and make happen, it's like, “No, I hate this. I can't do this. I don't want to do this anymore.” Fabeku: And really taking a lot of steps in the last couple of years to just … I think for me, it was about redefining, like you said, what's important, what the returns are, what makes sense, what success looks like. And just deciding that, “Yeah, I don't want a calendar that's booked 12 months out. I don't want to do that anymore. I don't want to be scheduled every single slot of the day as sometimes I'd like to sleep in or I'd like to spend the morning painting or whatever it is.” Fabeku: And that's been a big thing and I think in some ways, like I said, I've had to do it because of some of the physical stuff, but … And in some ways, it's been one of the best things because it really required me to take a way more conscious look at, “What are you doing? Why are you doing it? And does this actually make sense? Is this the shit you want to do?” Fabeku: And all of a sudden, I looked down and it's like, “Oh no, I don't want to do this. I don't want to do this and I want to do way less of this and way more of these three or four things.” And I think that's been so much of what the last, especially a year and a half, for me has been. It's just been remixing all of it and redistributing the weight to what I'm doing and why I'm doing this. It's been a big deal. Andrew: Yeah. Yeah. I made a change when I opened the studio, coming back from the fire that I only open a month ahead of time, like a week before the end of the month usually because I realized that otherwise, you end up with these commitments further afield than you can wrangle, right? Or that aren't easy to wrangle. Andrew: And I think that one of the values to me, and I think for you too, is this ostensible freedom with being an independent person. But it's very easy to lose any actual access to that freedom of schedule, right? Aidan: Yes. Yes. Andrew: To be like, “Oh, can I do whatever?” It's like, “Oh, well. No, I can't. I have a day full of clients and I can't easily move that.” And instead, just setting up those things so that there's a limit and … Yeah, it's great being booked ahead for sure, but I don't want to be booked six weeks ahead. Andrew: I want to be two weeks ahead and then be deciding what my next month looks like depending on opportunities and other things that are going on and all that kind of stuff. Fabeku: Yeah. For me, it drove the point home when a friend of mine who lives in Florida, she wanted to come in for a visit and she said, “Well, when are you free?” And I looked at the calendar and I'm like, “10 months from now.” What the fuck is this? It doesn't make any sense. And you're right. It's that kind of thing. Fabeku: And all of a sudden, I felt like … and it's not that, I'm not saying it's the same thing, but I felt like the person that's working for somebody else that had already used their vacation time and then wasn't going to be free until next year. It's like, “This doesn't make sense. This isn't the life that I want to live at this point.” Fabeku: And for years, it was fine. I loved it and enjoyed it and it was … I thrived in that environment. But I think that's for me, why I continue to look at this coherence as a process thing as opposed to some destination. It just stopped being coherent and I'm glad that all of us have the freedom to reshuffle the deck as we need to. Aidan: Yeah. I think, I mean, it sounds like we're all very much in the same place because that's what I got hit with the jewelry, is I went from the people who buy it at whatever rate they buy it and then I build according to what they bought and then custom work in there. And I dropped that and went to like, “I'll just offer collections and see how that goes.” Aidan: And what I found was those were fine ways to actually generate enough money for us to get by. The time that it takes for me to do what I like in that or what I want to do in that process is so immense that even when I wasn't booked forward, even when I was building the collections, it's still like, “No. I need all day, way too many days out of a month to dedicate to this,” which is on one level, fine, because I love the work. Aidan: But because there's so much … and this is probably true for all three of us … there's so much emotional and magical energy tied into what we're doing that the exhaustion level was just not reasonable. Fabeku: Yeah. Aidan: And again, realizing at some point, you go, “Okay, what am I actually interested in?” And for me, it's … both me and my allies are fully invested in this transmission to those people that maybe we can help. And it seemed like for a long time, that the talismanic work was the best way to do that. Aidan: And again, I love the whole process of it, but in the last, I guess like six months, that really shifted to like, “No, I really want to be producing books so that that is a wide range thing that can I go. Aidan: And then I want to teach classes where I can really engage with people because there's no time to do that with the jewelry work that I was doing in a way that I would like to kind of go, “Okay, this is what's … this is how some of the stuff that I want to share works. And then let's engage about it so that we can get somebody rolling,” in a way that I felt like I couldn't before. Yeah. Fabeku: And I think that exhaustion piece, that's always the sign. And I think … But I mean, how long does it take us or anybody to catch that? Most of the time, the solution is more coffee, more sugar, more shit food, more donuts, whatever it is for however long we can until … For me anyway, I reached the point that it's like, “Yeah, more caffeine isn't going to fix this.” Fabeku: The problem is not a caffeine deficiency. Whatever expenditure is happening, it's no longer coherent. And so it's taking more than it's giving. And yeah, I mean, I think that for me is always the sign, whether it's in a relationship or a business thing or whatever that, “Yeah, something has changed and so you need to change your response to it.” Andrew: For sure. Yeah. Well, I think that when you start showing up differently to places, it's like that's the problem, right? And that's the problem with me in the fall where I was just really run down from relationship stuff. A couple of long-term relationships ended for me in the fall. Andrew: And from reopening the store, which was no small amount of work and trying to wrangle that, but also in a completely new way that I would show up and things would just be making me crusty and I'd be like, “Oh man, what's up with that?” And I think that's another sign, right? When small things are … if they were singular, a small thing just irritates you so much. Andrew: You're just like, “Ah.” It's like, “Oh, that's also a good sign,” where it's like, “Man, I just got to step back from this somehow. I got to change this dynamic,” because showing up with that energy is not good magically for anything, right? Aidan: Yeah. For sure. Andrew: That is one of those situations where you can't start to influence what's going on with your vibes. Right? Aidan: Yeah. Andrew: And that's not ideal at all. Right? That's just not helpful, so. Fabeku: Well. And I think too when that exhaustion kicks in at such a deep level, how do you funnel the energy that you need into the magic? How do you fuel it? There's no fucking fuel there at some point. It's like you can sit in the car with no gas and jam the pedal down, but good luck. And there's just … and I think that's the thing. Fabeku: Yeah. And for me, that was another reason that I wanted to shift things because it's like if I can't fuel the art and the magic, which really to me, are the most important out of any of the things on the list, then what am I doing? If I don't have fuel for that shit, then something has gone really seriously sideways for me. Andrew: Yeah. Aidan: Yeah. And it's interesting too because we would like to believe that there's infinite capacity and there just isn't. And so at the point that I was working on the book, which is … it's mostly done. It needs a bunch of revision, but … and I realized I couldn't get the space to even do the revision, doing the jewelry the way that I was. And there's another three books waiting behind that one that are in process to some degree, though they're at their beginning stages. Aidan: Then it became really clear, like what's more important here? It's like, “Yes, I can make another thousand pieces of jewelry,” which I know is helpful to people and it's helpful again, financially to me. And I love the process, but this other thing is more important. So what's an appropriate feeder to that work? Aidan: And it's like, “Well, then I'd rather more directly involved with the people that are using the material to figure out what's translating and what's not translating so that I can get a clearer transmission.” So the jewelry and the books was no longer working, but the classes and the books seem like they will. So it's okay. I have to let go of that piece for the most part. Aidan: And it's not saying it won't come back someday, but there's enough on the table that it doesn't work with that, that I had to make that shift. Andrew: Yeah. There's time when we've been talking about teaching some here, but we'll jump in with one of the questions that somebody posted on somewhere, Facebook, maybe. When you're teaching, what do you learn from that process? What have you learned about yourself from that process? Andrew: How does teaching or does teaching change the way you think about things or talk about things? What's that role for you around that stuff? Aidan: I mean, for me, I haven't done direct teaching since the 90s except whatever goes on, on a small scale, but kind of focused work. So it's interesting. So the prep work for that really gets me clarifying how I think and how I feel about stuff because my problem is a lack of … I could do so much that it's like, “Okay, but what's a useful collection? Aidan: What's a useful tool of collection?” I don't want to just go and hit up the hardware store and throw every tool available into the box. Andrew: Step one, buy a hardware store. Aidan: So yeah, it's definitely … which is kind of unfortunately not a bad metaphor for how some folks approach all this stuff, right? Buy every tool in the hardware store and learn how to use it. It's like, “No, what we need is we need to get you the little lunchbox size, little kit that has a few things that you can do some stuff with.” But that also has to have depth. Aidan: And so I'm kind of the anti-complexity guy, so it's how do you get a coherent little package to use that term that somebody could either use as part of a larger thing or on its own. And so it really does. For me, it's been super clarifying is what I would say. Fabeku: Yeah. And I agree with that. So for me, I saw that a lot when I did last year. I think I did … it was like three weeks on hyper centrals, four weeks maybe. And it was interesting because I mean, that's the thing I've done forever and I could talk about it for six months and I didn't want to because I don't think it was necessary. It's like you said. Fabeku: It's like, “Here's the lunchbox size kit on hyper sigils that also talks about things that a lot of people don't talk about and gives you plenty of room to take those as far as you want for decades into the future without also simultaneously overwhelming you into thinking of, ‘Fuck, this is such a big thing. I'm never going to be able to use this or it's going to take me forever to get this.” Fabeku: And I mean, so I think that's one of my main considerations. It's like what's the minimum information you need to use this immediately and effectively? And that's what I'll teach. And some things, maybe we circle back some things, maybe we stretch out, like the divination thing I did last year and six months and that was a lot. Fabeku: We've dug into a ton, but I think that … and the other thing I'm always thinking about is like how do I teach things in a way that anybody with any magical ecology can make use of this? Right? I don't care if you're a Buddhist, if you're a Christian, if you're an atheist, if you're a Satanist, whatever, it doesn't matter. I want you to be able to take this and plug it into your magical ecology and use it. Fabeku: It's not … because if you have to adopt mine in order to use it, then for me, I think I failed as a teacher. Right? I mean, outside of teaching traditional practices or whatever. But you that's a big thing. So for me, it's always a question of, what's actually essential to the practice and what's my own shit that I built around either preferences or magical aesthetics or whatever, that doesn't really matter to anybody other than me? Fabeku: And have I stripped enough of that away so that anybody can take this thing and run with it? That's always a big consideration for me. Aidan: Yeah, totally. That makes sense. There's a practice that I'm teaching in the class that I have coming up that I actually went out to the Salvation Army and bought all new pieces to put together because I could see people getting fixated on the aesthetic that I personally use, which is really not relevant to the practice. Aidan: So it's like, “Okay, let's go see what I can pick up for five or 10 bucks that can assemble this structure so that it's not as linked to what's going on in my alter.” Because that's just my artistic sense and my aesthetic and what me and my spirits have come together on as a language that works. Right? And that's totally not necessary, but it's what people tend to get hooked on. Andrew: Well, that's the Instagram era, right? You know what I mean? So it circles back to the originating the thing about the name of this group. Right? Aidan: Absolutely. Andrew: How do ensure you stack the skull? Aidan: Stack the skulls. Andrew: The higher they are, the [inaudible 00:26:36] you are. tack. Right? There's nothing wrong with that at all, but the aesthetics over there are not super relevant. Aidan: Yeah. Not on a wider level. It's that thing that I talked about in six ways, right? That there's … I think that people, and I used to definitely have this, get super focused on this specific stuff, but the specific stuff is always super context and aesthetics fits in there. And what really is more relevant is what's the general thing that is not necessarily universally applicable but more universally applicable. Aidan: And in the age where we've got pictures of everything, it definitely can get really hung up. You got to have this thing that looks just like that. Andrew: Well, and just, because it looks good doesn't mean that it's alive. Right? Aidan: For sure. Andrew: Because there's the other piece. Fabeku: Yes. Andrew: Yes. I mean, I think that there are lots of things that I run across and not that I have to feel anything from everything, but I'm like, “Oh, it doesn't … I don't feel any feedback from this at all.” And maybe the other thing that's there just doesn't want anything to do with me. Andrew: It's possible, but maybe it's just … there's a failure to make that connection. Right? Just something [crosstalk 00:28:00] because the work itself that would support that connection is not strong, but the emphasis on all those other things is. Fabeku: Yeah. I think that's the thing. To me, the metric is, does this thing … can you feel it in your bones? Can you feel it in your animal body? If so, then who gives a fuck what it looks like? It doesn't matter if it would make a great Instagram photo. That to me, that's the wrong metric for shit like that. I mean, listen, I love the Instagram photos but in terms of magic, who cares? It's irrelevant. Aidan: Totally. Exactly. And it's also funny because people get hung up I think. And again, I know that I did this when I started out, but you get hung up on things that are, again, specific. So my current shop is filled with halved pieces of fruit with two lights burning on it. I could make up this whole story about why this is the way to do this. And it's like, “This is just what's going on this week. I don't really know why. Aidan: It's the thing that felt totally right.” I cut something in half and went, “Oh, man. That really needs candles on I,” and I could feel it and it works. And it's also the same thing. Yeah, I mean, there's so much weird shit in here right now because I think of who's hanging out for the class if it is really aesthetically wrong from that or even my normal thing. Aidan: I've got all of this beautiful stuff and the monster energies and the red bulls and shit. It's like, “What the fuck?” Old candy canes that I stole from the gym after Christmas. But there's people who like those. I'm not going to buy them if I can have them. Fabeku: I think people even do the same thing. When I was teaching the sigils course, it's one of the main reasons that I didn't take any pictures of the sigils that I drew because then suddenly people think, “Oh, well. That's what a sigil should look like you.” No, this is what they currently look like. Over the last 30 years, they looked a million different ways. Aidan: [crosstalk 00:30:03] shit. Fabeku: I mean, the first time, they looked exactly like the Pete Carroll sigils in his book. I think that's the thing and I get it and I think that people … I think it's so easy to fall into that subconscious even. It's not so much, “Let me copy Fabeku's sigil,” it's, “Let me copy Aidan's alter.” It's, “Oh, well. Fabeku: This is somebody who knows what they're doing, and so this is what it should look like so let me try to make it look like that.” And then, great. So then your brain says, “Okay, good job. You drew a sigil that looks like a sigil,” and then it doesn't do shit because like you said, Andrew, it's not alive. It's a thing that looks like a thing, but it's not the thing. Andrew: Or you end up in a cycle. One of the things that I've learned from teaching or been really clear about going into teaching, and I've learned how to make that happen is, I started in a school of thought that says, “Only the only the hammer from the top of Mt. Everest hardware store was acceptable.” Right? And by the way, only on the third full moon of the year and- Aidan: On Monkey Island. Andrew: Right, exactly. Not the usual Everest, the secret Everest. It's inside the hollow woods- Aidan: The secret Everest inside Monkey Island. Andrew: … which is inside the hollow woods. So you got to get in the hollow woods, you got to find the doppelganger, Himalaya Mountains and then you got to find the hardware store and you'd better bring their currency because they don't accept dollars. Whereas every town's got a hardware store. Right? Andrew: And what you find there is great. It's totally acceptable and if you want or need something else, there's a point at which that becomes aesthetic in personal taste, which is great. And if it helps you get in the mood, that's fantastic. And if it helps you feel aligned or if a spirit you have … there are times where somebody taps on my shoulder and says, “Hey, I want that.” Andrew: I bought … Marcus McCoy makes these copper harvesting knives. Right? And as soon as I saw one of those, one of my guides was just like, “That is exactly the knife that I want you to take when we go do stuff.” I'm like, “Perfect.” And then I'm like, “But not with that thing on it,” because there's like a triple spiral or whatever on it. So I was like, “All right, rushed markers right away.” I'm like, “Hey, can I get one of these?” Andrew: “Of course.” But that's specific, right? And that's specific to that relationship. That is not universal. Right? And you may find that you do want or need something like that, but you may never need it or it may not fit your aesthetic. And that's awesome too. It's completely acceptable. Right? Aidan: Totally. Fabeku: For me, I love … and maybe this is part of the art stuff or not, maybe it's just a personality thing, but I love shit like that and I love the collection like that. And I love the fancy silver pens for the sigils. And so there's … I don't make any apology for that, but one of the best things I did maybe 10 years ago was essentially put all of that stuff away and say, “Okay. Fabeku: I'm doing sigils on white paper with a blue ballpoint pen,” which I hate and never use. Or, “I'm doing candle magic with a bag of dollar candles from the dollar store,” or whatever. And part of that was to see, does this actually matter? I mean, it matters to me, but does this actually matter in any wider sense? And it doesn't. It really doesn't. That's the thing. What do you mean for sigil magic? Fabeku: You need something to write within a piece of paper. That's all you need. That's it. If you want to get the fancy black paper and the pen, cool. Do it. But I think it's a trap when we get stuck into thinking, “I have to have this. I have to have this.” Because that to me, it just doesn't seem true. Andrew: Yeah. I feel like that's where one of those pieces around, “You definitely don't have to have it.” And I also look to pursue my joy around it. Fabeku: Yeah, absolutely. Aidan: Absolutely on that. Fabeku: Yes. Andrew: I found these new pens at the art supply store. They're called preppy pens and they come in different sizes, but they're refillable with a cartridge and they're … I think I paid like $7 for it and I've bought a lot of other much more expensive fountain pens and whatever. And these ones, the feel of them, the flow of them, they come in different colors. Andrew: The outsides are color-coded and they're just such a delight. And so every time I stop by the art store now, I buy another one because there's somewhere in my life where one of those doesn't live regularly. And I was just like, “Why am I drawing with this crappy pen when I can be drawing with this other nice one that I like?” And there's a pleasure in that. Andrew: But again, that's so personal, right? That's not … it adds something to the magic if I'm doing magic, but it's also an active source of joy for me, which I think is also a super valid reason for things, especially if we don't say that that actually matters in the end on any real big scale. Fabeku: Well, it's like for me. So as an example, I just made this batch of lunar talismans a couple of months ago and I mean, I went all out. I had fossil dugong ribs. I had literally a lunar media writer, all kinds of shit in there. I spent forever finding the stuff. And it's not that I had to. I mean, again, like you said, it adds something. I mean, there's clearly something added to these pieces because of what's in them. Fabeku: But part of it is I look at it as a piece of art. It's like I'm putting the best stuff I can and there's enormous joy for me in grinding up a lunar media writer, fossil cave bear toe or whatever. But the reality is, could I have gotten a stone from the ocean and made a lunar talisman? Fabeku: Sure. Of course. But I think it is that weird thing. I don't think it's good to say it doesn't matter because it does matter, but it's not essential. And to me, there's the- Aidan: Right. Fabeku: And I think the problem is in that people look at it and say, “Well, I can't make a lunar talisman unless I have a lunar media writer.” And that's bullshit. That's complete bullshit. I love it. I love putting those pieces together in a way that's artful and beautiful and whatever, but you don't have to do that. Aidan: Right. Yeah. I think that's a big thing. Part of it comes out of I think … There's a whole kind of literature that says that this has to be done this way. Right? And we see this and not just magic, but it's extremely prevalent in magic. And that's very weird to me as somebody who came from these chaos, magic background. Even though I feel like I've, in many ways, moved away from that into something else, that's my own thing. Aidan: That's not consciously unrelated to it, but I was born there. Was that process of, “Well, what does this do? What does this piece of work do? What are the elements that actually matter here?” And then realizing that, “Yeah, there's stuff that really triggers something in me that is optimization and stuff.” Like, “Yeah. There's particular … if I got the hit that I needed to ride the bike up into South Mountain to collect dirt from there for something, I'm going to go do that,” because that's legit. Aidan: But it may not need to be dirt from there to do that work. That doesn't mean you got to come out here and go up to South Mountain, which is how a lot of stuff's written. And I think that it really has messed up a lot of folks because they do believe that if I can't have a beeswax candle to do this piece of work, then I can't do this piece of work. Fabeku: I think that for me, I think that's probably the best saying that I got out of the chaos magic stuff. You know what I mean? When you're doing magic with silly putty and bones from chicken wings, you can't really get too precious about, “Yeah, this is essential for magic.” It's like, “Listen, really?” I mean, it's just … For me, that really was the best thing. Fabeku: Because I think before that, I think I was fairly precious about it or I thought it had to be this or had to be that. And there was some things I just didn't have the money together. I didn't have the resources for whatever it was. And I thought, “Well, I just can't do that.” And then suddenly, chaos magic was like, “Well, actually, there's other ways you can do shit.” And for me, that was a huge thing. A huge thing. Aidan: Absolutely. And I remember, I've had a lot from the talismanic stuff. I would get people … and it's lovely that somebody recognizes that the work that you do is potent. I would get folks from places in the world that what I charged for a piece of jewelry is like a year's worth, going like, “I really want to do this. How do I …” and I would be like, “Don't.” Aidan: You're targeting a specific tree that is not necessary. It's just not necessary. And again, it's like, “Sure, if you've got the ability. I do this thing too. There's things that I have in here that I paid crazy money for because they really speak to me and I was in a position to do it.” Andrew: Yeah. Aidan: And sometimes, it was a stretch and sometimes that stretch was part of it, right? It's not like that's not a thing either. But again, it doesn't … One of the things that we know, again, like teaching the protection stuff for the class is it's all kitchen herbs. There's no … it's partially for that. It's like, “I don't know where you are. Aidan: I've got people from different parts of the world. I'm not going to … I might suggest that you get some Aubrey Camino if you can because it works, but it's really cool.” Andrew: Yeah, yeah. I think it's always fascinating, right, that kind of stuff. And I think that also becomes this matter of like, “What do you have? What can you connect with?” Right? And it's different depending on which practices, right? Like in the Aricia stuff, the specific plants are super specific, right? Andrew: There's no negotiating that beyond a certain point. There's a little wiggle room, but there's not a ton of wiggle room. Right. It's just like- Aidan: Totally. Andrew: … “Okay, we're going to do this. Therefore, we need these things. And if you don't have them, I'm not exactly sure what we do,” right? But outside of specific traditions, there's always those things. And it also becomes this question of, what do you have a dynamic of living connection with? Right? I just got back in after struggling to find a source for them for a while, Rose of Jericho, which is one of my all-time favorites, right? Andrew: And I had a Rose of Jericho at the store that I'd had almost the entire time that the store had been open, I think. And then it was very dynamic and a living connection and it had all sorts of things that I had given it over time and worked with it in a lot of ways and it just wasn't available and because getting stuff in Canada is complicated sometimes. And so when I finally found them, I'm like, “Great.” Andrew: So now, not only is that are they available in the store, which is lovely, but even more so for me, I can now reconnect with that plant and start to have that process again through the direct connection.” But it's like that also comes out of years of interaction and perhaps some natural affinity in some way or another. Right? But does everybody else need to not do financial magic if they don't find a Rose of Jericho? Of course not. Right? Aidan: Right. Andrew: Like you said there, there's a billion other bits and pieces. Are they really cool? Well, they are really cool. But also- Aidan: Totally. Fabeku: Well, it's like … I've worked with Alice Wood for … I don't know, 15, 16 years. It's one of the plants I work with a ton and I've worked with it in all kinds of ways to the point that I've got this like grimoire of aloes wood magic. And my question is, “Well, if I give that grimoire to you, is it going to work?” Probably not. At least probably not in the same way because either you don't have a relationship with the plant or you don't have the same kind of relationship with the plant. Fabeku: And to me, not better or worse, but it's just different. And to me, I assume that what the plant … and I think this is my baseline assumption for a lot of this shit is that what the plant has given me is about the dynamic that I have with that plant. Not that I'm channeling some universal grimoire of aloeswood magic that anybody. That doesn't make sense to me. Fabeku: I don't think that's a real thing. And I again, I think … and that's why I haven't talked to … Some people have asked about it because I mentioned it in passing and I haven't talked a lot about it because I have no idea if it's going to work the same for anybody. And I use what is expensive and not always easy to get and whatever. Fabeku: And I think it gives people the wrong impression that in order to do this, I need this plant or I need this. And I don't think that's true. My thing is find the relationship that you have that lets you do a similar thing that probably doesn't have shit to do with aloes would. Maybe it's Abra Camino, maybe it's Rose of Jericho, whatever it is. Fabeku: And I wish more people would talk about their practices that way instead of, “Here's the universal gospel of aloes world.” It's like fuck off with that. That's not real. Andrew: It's like how people talk about their issues, right? They come into the store sometimes and they're like, “I need Oshun candle because I need to attract some love of my life.” And I'm like, “Maybe.” But when we're … for initiated practitioners, and I think that for people who practice in a traditional way, the reality is although Orishas have a certain affinity to certain kinds of things, the reality is that if you're in good with shon go, you can fix your money, fix your home, you can fix your whatever. Andrew: Right? The reality is this, at a certain point, it's like having a good friend whose skill is not helping you hang drywall, but they're going to come and help you heck drywall because they love you. And they're like, “Sure, dude. I'll do that. That's fine. We can do that.” Andrew: These energies can work with us in a broad sense of a way, especially and probably only if we've taken that time to build a deep and lasting connection with them and probably that rest on some affinity that is hard to trace and makes it not necessarily universal. Right? For me, one of the local plants is Murdoch, right. And it's like, what do I need? Anything? Andrew: I'm just like, “All right. Hey, Berta, you got a thing for this?” Like, “Yeah, just trim this little bit off the edge of the leaf and do blah, blah, blah with it and it's going to fix this [inaudible 00:45:40] great.” I'm like, “Oh, you know what? I could dig up the whole root,” whatever. And it's like, “But on the outside of the room, not the inside of the room.” Andrew: It becomes a myriad of applications, which again, aren't necessarily universal or maybe they are, it's hard to say, but they don't seem universal. But they come out of that direct relational experience of it. Fabeku: I wish that was a point that was talked about more in the occult circles, right? Because every day, you see posts, “What's the best term for love? What's the best term for magic? What's the best spirit for money?”It's like, “Fuck.” I mean, I get it, but to me, that's the wrong question. Anytime people ask that, my question back is, “Who do you have a relationship with?” Fabeku: That's the answer to that. Not some random spirit or plant or stone or whatever that knows fuck all about you and what you're doing. Go to the spirits of the people you have relationships with. And I think … I don't know how this happened, but this falling into this trap of treating spirits, any kind of spirit as this one-hit wonder, right? This is a lover, this is a … it's just like, “Really? It doesn't make sense to me.” Fabeku: And I just wonder how different people's magic would look both in terms of the practice and the results if this relationship piece were more front and center. If it wasn't this weird, utilitarian, one-note, “This spirit does this,” like, “[inaudible 00:47:10] is for love.” It's like, “Come on. That doesn't seem real.” But it seems like such a pervasive perspective on things. Fabeku: And listen, I mean, I fell into the same shit for once. I'm not being critical of anything that I haven't been guilty of myself, but it just seems to be such a big point. It just isn't discussed enough. Aidan: Yeah. I've been thinking about this in a particular context. I made a joke to Charlene Coop saying that there's a way that people treat the name spirits like Tinder. We're just going to look up and find somebody local that's interested in getting down. Right? But usually, they're not doing that to just get down. Aidan: They're doing that because they want something deeper. Right? On the spirit side. I don't know what goes on the Tinder side, but I understand that's a misapplication of Tinder. And I think it's interesting- Andrew: Every app. I think Tinder is a misapplication. Aidan: Again, I'm out of those games largely. And one of the things that came up is then I had this … one of my trans things that happened a few days after that. I was thinking about that comment and I got this great vision and I was like, okay, so imagine that there's like … in North America, let's just say. In North America where the three of us are, but there's 100,000 potential partners for us, right, that would suit us, each of us. Aidan: But what ends up happening is that we've got the names and the photo of like 150 of them and so everybody wants to figure out which of those 150 would be a good partner. And to me, the thing is so much more than this wide-open of going, “No, I want to connect to the currents around me and the allies around me and then I want to work with them. Aidan: I want to develop those relationships through the things that I've learned work for me to do that.” And then why would I go outside of that to try and get something done? Maybe if I had to, if that was what I was guided to, but I'm certainly not going to go hunt for that. I'm much more likely to come in here and go, “Hey, Rutan candles.” Fabeku: Oh, that was the one that- Aidan: I'll buy you more energy drinks for this. Andrew: Those are a lot of magical place course I taught. Right? Which is … and I'm going to be reteaching in the spring. It's that energy of like, “All right, either where do those entities that you're connected to show up in your environment or what your environment shows up for you. And how do you start to build that?” Right? And it's just such a different approach. Right? Andrew: One of the things that I had to remind people taking that class, “Look, identify the plant. Great. Please make sure it's not secretly poisoned. Don't pick Poison Ivy by mistake and fall in love with it and take a bath in it, and then write angry emails. But also don't research it,” right? It's not about researching it. At some point … and just enough to make sure that you're safe and that you're not like, “Oh, yeah. Andrew: These berries look delicious.” And then all of a sudden … but allow that to expand. Working to allow that expansion to happen, that's the actual work of becoming a better magician, right? Aidan: Yes. Andrew: It's not necessarily just about knowledge and knowledge is lovely. And corroboration feels great when you're like, “Oh, I really felt that this plant was good for this.” And then you Google it and 10 people say it's good for that. You're like, “Oh, it's great. I'm making a genuine connection.” It feels great. Right? Andrew: And we may need some of that some of the time, but also just being open and being connected in that mysterious way. I think that's also really crucial to this process. Fabeku: I totally agree. It's like when people ask me, “How do I get to know this plant? Or how do I get to know the stone?” That's the first thing I say, “Don't Google it. Don't look up what you know witchipedia says this.” It's unnecessary. Right? To me, if you want to get to know a stone, if you want to research something, research it's geology, research its mineralogy, but then sit with it. Fabeku: Hang out with it just like you would a human being. Right? If I want to get to know Andrew, I'm not going to Google Andrew and read a bunch of ShowMe. I'm just going to … we're going to hang out. I'm going to ask you what you like. I'm going to pay attention to the music you listen to. I'm going to see what you eat. I'm going to ask you questions. I'm going to see how I feel when I'm around you. That's how you get to know shit. Aidan: Yes. Andrew: And I that is the key to Tinder's app. [crosstalk 00:52:08]? People are like, “How do you have success on this thing?” I'm like, “That,” right? If you meet somebody and you're actually interested in them other than just for something super transitory, actually do those things too. Right? Because people are like, “Oh, I don't know what to do.” I'm like, “Find it with that person. Be curious.” Right? I don't care if [inaudible 00:52:28]. Fabeku: No. I mean, at the end of the day, I agree. I think one of the best muscles to build as a magician is relationship building skills. That's it. You don't have to buy a million books. You don't have to take a million courses. You don't have to Google a bunch of shit. Just build a relationship with stones or plants or spirits the same way you would have people. It's the same shit. It's the same shit. Aidan: And it's crazy because it's so common. All of this stuff is really common everywhere. And I saw this recently and I didn't respond to it, though I probably should have. Somebody asked like, “So how do you get in? Where can I learn about connecting to desert spirits?” Aidan: It's like, “The only way that I really know is you get into that environment, whether this is … if you live near one, you can do that, but you can do this as kind of trancey stuff or daydreamy stuff of somehow connect to that space and to see what develops. See who you find. See who rises up and see what happens.” It's funny though, because I think … everybody knows I'm a total gym rat, but I see this all the time in the conversations about that. Aidan: Somebody will see somebody dead-lifting a world record and go, “Their form is wrong.” And you go, “That guy is the strongest in that move in the world ever. How is his form wrong? It worked.” That was the goal. It's the goal. It has nothing to do with the thing you're talking about. His goal was to pick up 1,008 pounds and stand up with it. So by definition, he did it right. And I think that's good learning magic too all the time. Fabeku: I think to me, the same idea … at least for me, the same idea applies in figuring out what to work with magically as it does hanging out with people. When I'm around people, I pay attention to how my animal body feels. Is there a pull? Is there … am I drawn to that person in whatever way? As a friend, it doesn't matter whatever it is. It's the same when I'm sitting with plants. I feel a ping toward this plant. Fabeku: I don't know this plant, but there's a pull. So I want to know this plant more, this stone or this place or this river. And that to me is guided so much of my practice, and again, it's the same with people. If I spot somebody and there's a pull, then I'm curious about them. And I want to know more about them, whether it's a friend or a partner, whatever, it doesn't matter. Fabeku: And me, that's a decidedly different thing than Googling which plants work money magic. Too me, it feels like we're coming at opposite angles. I mean, clearly, both can work, but for me, that pull is everything. And if I don't feel it, I don't give a fuck who told me this plant is great for money magic. If there was not that pull there, I'm not into it. I'll keep looking until I feel it. Andrew: It brings me to something that I've been thinking about a lot lately and this might be the perfect place to bring it up. We've all been in magic for a long time. Right? So I sound like an old person because I'm an old person. Stuff comes and goes and people are like, “All of it, this, all of it, that.” Andrew: And I've been watching a big surge of witchcraft in which the energy going on around the store, in culture, in my social medias and stuff like that. And whenever I see a big sort of movement into something, I'm always like, “That's really interesting. What is going on? What's motivating that? How is that serving people?” Andrew: I'm genuinely curious about that, right? And supportive of it. But I also wonder, because I understand how these things work, what's going to happen next, right? Aidan: Right. Andrew: Because this idea that … and maybe I'm wrong, right? Maybe I'm just old and curmudgeonly, in which case, delete this episode, please. Let's never speak of it again. But often, what happens is there's this big sway into a thing and then a bunch of people find a deep and lasting affinity with it. Andrew: And I'm really curious where those people are going to be in 10 or 15 years and what I'm going to get to learn from their journey through this stuff as they have a depth of practice under their belts in the same way that I learn now from those people who've already been doing these things for a stretch of time and have that. Andrew: But I'm also curious about where those people who were looking for something and either they found it and moved on or they were looking for something else and it wasn't here and then they moved on. We were talking about some … Aidan said something earlier about, they're actually looking for something deeper. Right? Andrew: And one of the things that I've been really noticing, which I find fascinating, is that I see a lot of people who've been all in on the witchy fronts over the last year or a couple of years starting to … their posts and maybe their magic … I don't know what they're doing privately, but certainly, their public stuff. It's starting to take on a much more explicitly therapeutic approach. Andrew: There's a lot more people talking about trauma, dealing with trauma. There's a lot more people leaning … not abandoning the magic side of it, but leaning into stuff where the relationship that they're trying to sort it the most is ultimately that relationship with themselves. Right? And I mean, I think that's always smart. I think that it's a great thing to get into around doing magic in general. Andrew: Certainly, it was a good chunk of my practice at one point to do therapy as a way of freeing myself in order to heal myself or to … I mean, not just be a better magician, but certainly, be better at magic and better in my relationships and all those things. But I'm curious if you've seen that or if you've seen other things, what do you think around that stuff? I know I just said a million things, but responses, please. Aidan: I mean, I see that. I think that we are … For whatever reason, I mean, we've got this crazy thanks to social media and the news cycle and everything else. We have this much clearer view if you're able to step back from it. There's really multiple ways of being in this world that are not really congruent. Right? When I was growing up, there was a lot of messaging that in the end, everybody wants the same thing. Aidan: Right? And that's not what I see now. No. We want very different things and we are not supportive of the other. And I think that this is that. I think it is the evolution of that trauma. And so I think that there's a lot of that out there and there's maybe just more … maybe it's gotten to the point where it's so overt that poor people are willing to do that work because I definitely get fed tons and tons of that work for my allies, both for me and then to share with people. Aidan: It's an interesting thing as to the … Again, I think that the media cycling is really interesting around magic. I just think it's fascinating because there are those who totally freak out every time. And I always remember there's a line from Quadrophenia by the who, a very old record of the slide where he says, “It's sadly ecstatic that your heroes are news.” Aidan: And I see that constantly around the witchcraft stuff in the last couple of years. People are like, “Yay, we got it on TV.” And, “Oh, my God. It's so bad.” It's like, yeah, but don't trip. It's just this is what goes on. Andrew: Well, it was like … what was it? Last week or the week before that bullshit article, I think it was in the independence that some journalists wrote like, “Oh, I tried magic for a week and it doesn't work.” And everybody was so upset about it. And I get it. I mean, it was a bullshit article, but I mean, to me, it was just kind of like, “Who cares?” I mean, I get it. It was a shitty thing to publish, but does this do anything to magic? Andrew: Does this do anything to people who actually give a fuck about it that are seriously interested in it? I mean, it was … I mean, she was wearing some witch's Halloween costume in the photo. What did you think the piece was going to be? It was bullshit from the beginning. And magic has been around way before this and it's going to exist way after this. Andrew: And I don't know if it's just a function of, like you said, getting older or just having limited bandwidth, but I didn't really get the upset about it. I mean, which doesn't just say people shouldn't be upset, but for me, it was just like, “Okay, next.” I mean, it was nonsense. Who cares? Andrew: Like Rumi says, right? The real work is done by somebody outside digging in the dirt, right? There's all these other bits and pieces and trappings and maybe they're important. Maybe they're a part of your journey. Maybe media representation for who you are is important for any number of reasons, but also, it's like that piece, a piece I shared this week from … I think we all shared it … from Jason Miller. Right? Andrew: Where it's like, “Just do the work. It doesn't matter if you feel like it or don't feel like it. If you're committed to a relationship with the spirit or doing magic or …” I remember this when I used to do a LIBOR rash, right? The four times a day solar adoration that Crowley and his various descendants propose. Right? Speaking of finding the hammer at the top of the Himalayan Mountains. Andrew: It's like trying to do something four times a day at the four quarters of the day, every day. Definitely, it's overly complicated. I'm not sure that it's actually necessary per day. It can be, but it's … yeah. But so many times, it just never felt like it. Right? And not to say that I did it 100% because I didn't. I really literally, over two years, maybe I did two months, 100% of that at the peak of it because it's really difficult. Andrew: But the successes that I had, and that's sort of 75% or 80%, which is more like the average of what I was accomplishing came because I was like, “I don't feel like it but I going to do it, so let's do it.” And even at one point, I remember talking to a friend of mine about it and he was like, “Well, some traditions, you yell at your gods to try and call them down.” Andrew: So maybe just … whatever. I just remember reciting it one day and just every second word was, “Fuck this, fuck that, fuck you. Fucking sick of being here and this whole thing,” and I broke through something and it got better. But, yeah. It's complicated the relationship to these things. Fabeku: Yeah. And I think that to me is what's interesting about … and going back to … we were talking about with representation and news cycles and all of that. The conversation in the last handful of years about the whole witches of Instagram stuff and I have very mixed feelings about it and at the end of the day, who gives a fuck what my feelings are about it? But all of the conversations about how this has turned magic into some joke. It's like, “No, it hasn't. This hasn't done shit to magic.” Andrew: Magic is always a good joke. Aidan: Magic is the joke that gets you killed. Andrew: That's the actual history of it, right? Aidan: Yeah. So the fact that it's on TV and they aren't burning those people. Andrew: Yeah. I mean, I think- Aidan: That's positive references for sure. Fabeku: My thing is it's like this has been around forever. And if the witches of Instagram thing, if 5% of the people that fall into that end up being solid practitioners, I think that's fucking rad. And I don't really give a shit about the other 95%. It doesn't feel like my problem to care about. I think magic will filter those people out over time. And I guess … I don't know. I mean, again, I get it. Fabeku: Because I do think … I mean, like we talked about in the beginning, I think it's problematic. It gives people the sense that magic has to be this photogenic, heavily filtered, photograph of whatever. And that's nonsense. But I don't know. I guess I just feel like magic is bigger than that and I don't really sweat shit like that. And even if I find it personally annoying, which I do, but- Andrew: I feel like it's … sometimes I think it's helpful to have the same conversation in different context. Right? So when I was 16, I tried to be in Goth for a week, seven days. That was as long as I lasted. And I realized … I tried to do it because I hung out with all these Goths, right? I was like, “Oh, well. This is fun and I could dye a hair black and put it up like Robert Smith and whatever.” Andrew: It's pretty amusing. Maybe I'll show some pictures sometime. But what I realized was, “No, no, no, no. I should actually have a Mohawk and I'm way more punk rock than I'm Goth.” And it doesn't mean there's anything wrong with that week of trying a day or two, right? I tried it for a week and I learned something very important, “Hey, this isn't for me. I'm just going to keep rolling.” Andrew: And I think that, like all of us, right? I started … people today might call it grimoire focus, but certainly like traditional ceremonial magic and Crowley and all that stuff. And I moved into other things and moved into other things and that's fantastic, right? Because that's the way it goes. That is if you happen to find a thing that you're in lifelong practice, lovely. Andrew: If you don't find what you're looking for or hopefully, maybe more to the point, it grows and evolves as you've grown and evolved as a person, well, then just keep evolving. It doesn't matter. There's no shame in any of that. Fabeku: Yeah. Aidan: Yeah. I think too, it's interesting because I have to remember how differently wired people are, right? Because this is one of the things that has always blown my mind around the magical world and this is primarily around the wick end of things is where I've seen it. And this is not to bash on that at all. It's just not my thing. Aidan: I have always been incredibly confused at the, “Let's get whatever our angle is represented accurately according to some specific definition so that it's acceptable to people.” And you go, “This doesn't work anywhere.” Yeah. Right? This hasn't worked for … Yes. You could end up at the big table of religions. It doesn't even work in there.” Look at America now and how acceptable Muslim religion is right now. Aidan: Right? So why is this a target? I've never got it. Because to me, it's so individual. It's like what is your … and it goes back to that thing. What is your relationship to this process, to these powers, to these entities or to these deities? If you do deity work, that's what's irrelevant. Everything else is out of your control anyway. You might … yeah. Go ahead. Andrew: Says the man who lives in a small house with a bunch of animals at the edge of America. Right? Fabeku: That's true. Andrew: I mean, I think I wonder where you're more community and socially minded and less … I don't know if hermetic, Kermit-like is the right word, but a range of practice if that would change how you felt about it. Aidan: It's interesting because I spent a lot of time living in cities and probably the most overt I've ever been in was living in San Francisco. But this was also a different time and it is one of the downsides of the social media thing that I definitely see is in the 80s and the earliest 90s really before pictures happened on the internet, freaky concept for some people that are not as old as we are, it was not a thing. Aidan: I hung out with people who were hermetic magicians who were Elamites, who were various Orisha angle's Santeria practitioners, Wiccans, what we would now consider traditional witchcraft, which basically meant

In today’s episode, our guest Andrew Cushman was a chemical engineer for more than seven years. In 2007, he and his wife decided to follow their entrepreneurial spirit and entered the world of real estate. Their journey began in flipping single-family homes, in which he completed 23 transactions- purchase, rehab & sell. A few years later, he made the transition into the acquisition and repositioning of multifamily properties. Today, he continues his success in the nation’s SE market.  Andrew discusses how he went through the recession of 2008, his strategy for buying single families and multi-family properties, why he chose the Southeast market. Andrew also shares the pricing strategy he used as well as how he decided to get into the mobile home park asset. Episode Highlights: Learning the Business & Becoming an Entrepreneur 2 Categories within Mobile Home Parks Bad Market or Bad Strategy? His insight on the Next Recession  Connect with Andrew: Website:  Vantage Point Acquisitions   - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - TRANSCRIPTION   Intro: Hey guys, today I am interviewing Andrew Cushman. And I'm in a very good mood for various reasons. Number one is because I'm very happy to interview such an amazing individual. Andrew is really a professional and I had the chance to talk to him a little bit before the show and kind of understand how he thinks. It really brings me to the point of understanding again and again, that it's all about the mindset, it's about faith or fear. If you're afraid, then you're going to be paralyzed, and you'll never succeed in accomplishing your goals. Cause with no risk, there's no reward, it's as simple as that. You'll also hear during the interview, how Andrew is a thinker and he goes against the herd, which is something I personally believe in.    I think it's always important and smart to go against the herd and analyze your own life and environment with total faith in yourself and your abilities. I think really, Andrew is that kind of person, which is why I enjoyed the conversation with him so much. The second reason why I'm in a good mood is that me and Eden are getting close to this mobile home park deal that has 70 units. I had a great time underwriting the deal and learning more about the specific market, where it's located. I guess I'm grateful. I'm just truly grateful for doing what I love, really being able to do something that is big and invest in real estate.    Sometimes I think about it, and I can't believe it, that I'm doing these things. And I really want to help others achieve the same goals and change their lives. So, I guess this is an opportunity for me to say that I'm grateful for you guys as well as our listeners, and I hope you are learning what you need here. And that in the future, when you are successful in real estate or in a future deal, then you think about us and the stuff you learned here. I think that's about it. Without further ado, let's get started. Lady: Welcome to the commercial real estate investing podcast with Don and Eden where we cover all aspects of real estate investing with special attention to off-market strategies.   Don: Hey Andrew, welcome to the show.   Andrew: Hey, how are you doing? Glad to be here.    Don: I'm doing just fine. Actually, we just had a conversation before the episode started. And I got to say, I had a lot of fun talking to you about what you do and your outlook. And also, I found out that we have a lot in common, right?    Andrew: Yep.    Don: Yeah. But before we get into that, how about you tell us a little bit about your background and how you got into real estate, to begin with?   Andrew: Yeah, I took the standard path into real estate and went and got a chemical engineering degree. But I always knew that was just a placeholder. It was just something that I could earn a decent income. So, I figured out what I would really want to do because I knew I wanted to be an entrepreneur. I worked as an engineer for seven and a half years, married a wonderful woman who had the same ideas I had about trying to be an entrepreneur. And so, we tried a variety of things. And they were fun and minorly successful, but they weren't something that could really accomplish her financial goals. And then, I think in 2007, we found, we discovered home flipping and we started doing that here in Southern California. We did our first one and then I said, "You know what, this is our best shot." So, went to quit my job. She did the same thing two years later.   Don: That's in 2007. So that's right before the crisis.   Andrew: We're at one of the epicenters of it Southern California, there were condo complexes here that dropped 70% in value. It was a great time to get into real estate because everyone was terrified. We had no competition. We'd go buy stuff at 50 cents on the dollar, fix it up and sell it at 80 cents on the dollar. So, whoever's buying it was getting the best deal around. And so even though the whole thing was collapsing, we were still making thick margins.   Don: Wait, wait, wait, let me figure this out. So, you were buying at 50 cents on the dollar 30 cents on the dollar you said in some cases, and you were selling it for 80 cents? How come? I mean, I know nobody was buying anything back in 2008.    Andrew: There's no such thing as a bad market only a bad strategy, right? And single-family houses, there are always some people who have to move for some reason. Their job gets relocated, family changes, whatever right? So, what we would do is let's say a house is worth 400. We'd say we buy it for 300 or 325. We've renovated for 25,000-50,000 whatever required but instead of listing it for 400, we list it for like 375. So that we were the cheapest and nicest house on the block. So whatever rare buyer was out there, they'd always come pick our house. It never took us even in the worst of the crash, it never took us more than 30 days to sell a house once we listed it.   Don: That is just a terrific thing. And you know what, I'm interviewing a lot of investors and entrepreneurs here in the show, I haven't yet found somebody that did that kind of strategy back in 2008. And that's very interesting. And now that I'm thinking about it, it really makes sense to me because I spoke to you a little bit before the show. And I also see how you think right now as an entrepreneur, and I can see the similarity in how you were thinking back then, right?    Andrew: We listed with a local realtor who was really really good. And I remember walking and deal with his office and another realtor sitting at a desk. He literally looked at us and said, "You're flipping a house, are you crazy?" And I was like, everyone else is creating, this is like the biggest opportunity we've seen in forever. So, we did that for about four years and then after three-four years, everyone else started to figure it out. And then also there wasn't that much equity left, it was still a good business, but it wasn't nearly as good. And we kind of said, well, what's the next big thing?    Now all these people losing their house, they can't buy another one for 7-10 years so they got to live somewhere. And the people who still could buy a house, they're scared of it. They don't want to buy a house. So, they still got to live somewhere. We're in a big recession. So that means we're eventually going to be coming into an expansion. So, if we add those three things together, apartments are probably going to do really well sometime soon. And so, we went and found a mentor, a guy who had done 800 units, we hired him to teach us the business.   Don: How much you paid him?    Andrew: I don't remember it wasn't cheap, but it was worth it.   Don: I love it that you had like an itch of doing something bigger. I feel the same thing as an investor. Like no matter what I accomplished in real estate, there's always room to grow as an investor, there's always something bigger you can do. And that's just amazing because you were doing single families, you're doing great back in the recession. So, you were making money when everybody else was losing money, right? And then you're starting to think about how I can make even more money? So how many single families have you flipped up until you made that decision to move up the ladder of commercial real estate?    Andrew: We were being very careful to only buy deep margin deals so we didn't do a ton. I think when we switched to multifamily, I think we had done like 25 flips in those couple of years. Nowadays, you hear guys are like does 70 a month right? But it's also much, much, much smaller margin. So, we did that full time for four years. And then our first apartment complex was mostly vacant c minus property on the other side of the country out in Macon, Georgia. That was 92 units. We syndicated that which course means we pulled investors money.   Don: What year was it?    Andrew: That was 2011.   Don: So back in 2011, you're signed to thinking to get into multifamily and commercial real estate and you're looking at Georgia when you're living in Southern California. So basically four and a half hours flight.    Andrew: Yep.    Don: So why did you choose Georgia- Atlanta?   Andrew: Idaho and Utah are getting overrun from people fleeing California. And then in the southeast, it's not just baby boomers because like Atlanta, for example, they're becoming a tech hub. They're also becoming an entertainment hub. Atlanta did or Georgia did more dollar business in the state of Georgia than it did in Hollywood last year.    Don: No kidding.    Andrew: Yeah. Well, for example, Stranger Things filmed in Georgia and a lot of the Marvel movies filmed in Georgia. There are tons of these huge sprawling film studios. Basically, what it boils down to is, is there are tons of people and jobs moving to the southeast. And to me, that's Florida, Georgia, and the Carolinas. And those are the two things that drive long term apartment performance and rent growth in jobs and population growth. And we're still not building enough apartments. We're still not building enough houses. So, there's the long term shortage. They'll be dips along the way but the big picture is very strong for multifamily, even single-family rentals, I would say, for probably at least 2030.   Don: You and I have a few things in common. As I mentioned, we're both started in single families, and we've ladder to doing some multifamily and commercial real estate. Also, we have another thing that we share, which is mobile home parks. So, I know that you just bought a mobile home park. I'm just looking at a seven-unit mobile home park deal right now that I'm probably about to close on. Let me ask you about your deal. You said you bought a mobile home park for the first time in the past year, right?   Andrew: Yeah, it was last December.   Don: I want to ask you why and where if you don't mind.   Andrew: It's up in a small market outside of Augusta, Georgia. And we didn't buy it because we necessarily want to be mobile home park operators. Not that there's anything necessarily wrong with that asset class. I know a handful of guys are doing tremendously well in the mobile home community space. But the reason we purchased it is it's very much in the path of growth. We also already own 100 apartment units, literally a half-mile down the street so we know that market very well. Really, it's a development opportunity. So, we purchased it to consider changing it into an apartment complex or developing new apartments there. But the beauty of it being a mobile home park is not just buying a piece of land... Don: It cash flows.   Andrew: You buy a chunk of land, you gotta pay the taxes, you've got holding costs, you might even have financing and then it's purely speculative. For this if for some reason the development doesn't pencil out, we've got cash flowing bubble I think happened at this point, we could sell it for more than we bought it, it was almost as close to a no-lose situation.   Don: So, you can buy a mobile home park based on two categories. So, you can either buy it for the land value, because remember, mobile home parks are big. They sit on six acres, seven acres, eight acres, sometimes in the middle of the city, especially if it's a growing city that had experienced significant population growth in the past decade. You'd still be able to find mobile home parks closer to downtown. And the beauty of it is that this is cash flowing opportunity to maybe develop something bigger like apartments and so we know right now apartments are basically sold for I would say low cap rates, so 5.5. So, when it's that low, then it makes sense to develop, right? And that's why I'm doing it. And that is why you're looking into it. How many acres is that park, what are you going to develop on it?    Andrew: Three acres, but as you said, part of the appeal of it is it's very close to downtown, you can literally walk to the Main Street. Due to the topography and the zoning restrictions and like the code that they have, they're probably only going to be able to put 20 to 30 units on it. As I said, it will be centrally located and actually the road that it's on is going to be widened in the next 5 to 10 years because the city's expecting that road basically becomes the new main road through town. We've got a set of drawings right now for 24 units. So, I'm probably going to look something like that.   Don: Nice. If you're looking to buy a mobile home park in Miami, for instance, you're not going to find anything based on income. Everybody's going to ask for 20 million bucks for that piece of land. So, you bought it based on what approach, based on the value or based on the income approach?   Andrew: It was bought more on the income approach, knowing that we can improve the income on it and if we decide not to develop it, then we can just hold it or it'll be worth a lot more than we paid for it just because we've increased the income. So that was part of the risk mitigation is we budgeted to do a little bit of cleanup improve the NOI on the mobile home park itself. Just that way, if for some reason we decided we want to get out or don't want to do the development, and we can still make a profit on it.    Don: You've syndicated over 1800 units. You're very passionate about real estate. And that's why I think it's important to understand real estate and the income approach as a more of an idea, rather than always focusing on one thing and not even hearing about the rest. Because you are able to do that being creative because you are able to look at a different type of deal to get to where you want. And I love that, I think that's something that is truly admirable.   Andrew: There's no such thing as a bad market, just a bad strategy. In today's market, we're having to adjust our strategy a little bit. Much harder to buy stuff that makes sense. And I see a lot of deals getting done because people can do them not because they should do them. You're going to pay $70 a square foot for C class property that you have to put another $10 A square foot into the end up at 80, or you can build something that's brand new for 100 or 105. It's like, "Well, wait for a second, why am I messing with this 40-year-old property when I get a brand new one for just a little bit more?"   Don: Yeah, definitely. You know what, I heard from one of my guests on the show, Bill Ham and he said something about the next crisis in multifamily being the properties that our C/ C Minus because these properties are old, they consist of galvanized plumbing. And then what really happens is that this entire plumbing system is about to collapse. And then people are buying these properties for very low cap rates because of supply and demand and everything has been going in the market.    So, it's very, very likely that these properties are the ones that are going to drive the next crisis in multifamily. And then they will be dropping in their price and people will default on their loans. I researched that strategy and I thought that it was genius, the way he thinks about it. And then I'm thinking by the time I get back to multifamily, it's either going to be developing which I'm doing, I'm developing also a 30 unit or it's going to be purchasing these properties are older but only after they drop.   Andrew: It's funny. When you're comparing an A-asset to a C-asset or B-asset to a C- asset, you have the C-asset will always look better on a spreadsheet. But they also never perform in the real world as they do on the spreadsheet.    Don: Exactly.    Andrew: The expenses are always higher, the economic vacancy is always higher, the headache factor is always higher. And then like you said, it's funny, everyone just looks at the net operating income and all the CapX stuff is put below the line. Well, guess what, when you own a property, it doesn't matter where on the p&l that CapX is, it's still coming out of your bank account. And if you've got pipes breaking underground, and all kinds of capital expenses going on, it might not technically affect your NOI, but it will affect your ability to make investor distributions.    What I like to say about those is if you're comparing as an A to a C or B to a C, you say, well man, returns on the C looking a lot better, is you know, the grass is always greener over the septic tank. And I do agree that the risk with those going forward is greater than with A and B not only for the mechanical issues that you just mentioned but also whenever we do get a recession, the next recession is unlike the last one is not likely to be real estate driven. And whenever we get into a recession, typically the people that suffer the most are the lower-income hourly wage workers. They don't have to lose their job, they get their hours cut back by 20%, they can't make rent. And that's typically your low C renter. And so those C properties will be the first to suffer and they'll also suffer the hardest where B and A stuff based on our housing shortages will probably do just fine. In fact, if you even look back at past recessions, typically A and B class apartments as a whole rent kind of many cases hold steady. May come down a little but you're typically not looking at a huge collapse.   Don: Interesting. Okay. So, in that case, I got to ask you, what do you think is going to drive the next crisis? Andrew: Well, what's going to drive the next crisis will be something out of the left field that no one's expecting. That's typically what drives the crisis right. Now long term big, big picture Robert Kiyosaki-ish type viewpoint, where we've got a huge problem with student loan debt and with federal debt. It's what we're currently doing as a country, both as individuals and as a whole. It's just not sustainable. And there's going to be a reckoning at some point. But we're really good at kicking the can down the road. So, who knows when that's going to be. In the short term, we could inflict damage on ourselves, right? If we take the whole trade war thing too far, poor legislation, for example, back in 1986, they changed the tax rules, and that created a big problem in real estate, right?    So, they're self-inflicted wounds, and then there's external. So, if things are looking actually a little bit better right now, but I wouldn't say good. If Europe goes into a recession, well, that affects us. Can't say exactly what's going to drive it. And keep in mind expansions don't die of old age. Australia has been without a recession for something like 26 or 28 years, but it's been almost three decades. Nothing that says, "Oh, we have to have a recession because it's been too long." It just doesn't work that way. right?    Don: It typically works this way.    Andrew: It typically does. Yeah. But the thing is, is our economy does no longer look like what it did from about World War II, up until maybe the early 90s. Right, where we were kind of our own insulated standalone economy. Globalization and IT and tech have really changed everything. I know other apartment operators that have 20 employees and 15 of them are in the Philippines and they're paying and $5 an hour. There are cycles that definitely can predict the future to some degree. We're looking at the past, but the world is a very different place really just in the last 15 to 20 years. And it has been for I'd say battling a world war two up until the year 2000. So, I think it's a little more difficult to say. We're all a lot more interconnected than we used to be.   Don: Yeah. But you know, it's kind of weird that you're saying that the C/ C Minus properties are going to suffer the most because what I hear from other people, they're saying just the opposite. They're saying that once there's a recession, then the rents are going to compress. And that's going to come off from the top. Which means that A-class properties are the ones that people aren't going to be able to afford any more. So what I'm thinking is that you're putting the assumption and I understand where you're coming from, but you putting the assumption from the premises, that it's going to be the lower class population that's going to suffer.   Andrew: I would say that is probably one of the most popular myths or half-truths in the multifamily world that is taught to everybody. It is not true. Reality is half of it is true. In a recession, yes, people leave the high priced luxury A plus apartments and they move down to an A-minus or B or something like that. And then where it starts to go wrong is then people say, oh, yeah, and then everyone from the Bs moves down to the Cs and then no one wants to go past the C and so the Cs do really well.    The reality is the people in that C demographic, they are already at the limits of affordability and when their hours get or they lose a job or the car breaks down, they have no margin for error or recession or drops in income. If you go look back at previous recessions, those C properties have the highest vacancy, the highest delinquency and then the most amount of problems. So yes, it's true that it comes off the top. The top-end suffers, but so does the very bottom in many cases, even more so.   Don: Yeah. And I'm thinking about a strategy. Maybe you should be looking for newer apartment buildings or maybe like if you're an apartment operator, right now trying to buy a property, maybe it's best for you to look for a new building that you could rent for not a whole lot of money. So that people could afford it no matter what happens with the economy and the numbers still work. And these deals are out there. You can definitely find them. It's not easy, but it's definitely there. Would you agree?    Andrew: There's always deals. It's just like you said right now, not only is it harder to find them, but there are far more people looking for them.    Don: Definitely. Yeah, I would say what I think happens is that a lot of people were very successful in the past few years with multifamily, because multifamily really performed well, especially during the crisis too. So, a lot of people made a lot of money. And when you make a lot of money from something, then it becomes something you're very knowledgeable at. And so, then you go ahead and you try to teach it to other people. But you teach something that is not really accurate because you're teaching a student to do something that you did, or you started doing five years ago. But then the market was different.    So maybe you're teaching them something that is not really up to date. You see a lot of students coming off from the streets and trying to make millions in an industry that it had changed, right? And so, I think like a real estate investor, you should always try to examine the current situation because real estate is not just about picking the right asset class, it is also about picking the right asset class at the right timing. People miss that point. And I see that a lot because I talked to a lot of people. It's about timing. It's about figuring out what the economy is doing, figuring out what you believe in as an investor, right?    When you become a commercial real estate investor, then this is the point where you need to start-stop listening to other people and you need to start listening to what you think and what you believe in and make your decisions based on that. And I think that's going to be a great way to conclude this episode. I want to ask you, Andrew, what would be the best way to connect with you who wants to invest with you or learn from you?   Andrew: Yeah, you can always connect on BiggerPockets or on LinkedIn. But if you actually want to really connect or possibly have a conversation, then there's a Contact Us form on our website. So, you can just google Vantage Point Acquisitions. Or it's just, the initials of that vpacq.com. And, yeah, that's an easy way to reach out and connect.    Don: Wonderful. So, Andrew, I want to thank you for coming to the show. I really had a lot of fun and also talking to you before the show, and I wish you to be successful in whatever it is you're going to do in the future and stay in touch.   Andrew: Alright, likewise, take care.    Don: All right, thank you very much.   Lady: Thanks for listening to the real estate investing podcast with Don and Eden. Stay tuned for more episodes. Till next time.

Published Sep 6, 2018 - [Chris] G'day world, Chris Hogan and Andrew Groat coming to you live from MeMedia Studio here at Burleigh Heads for episode 93 of Get Fact Up! And today we're talking about Research Backed Content Creation. So, Andrew, why are we talking about this? - [Andrew] Well, basically, this is how everyone should be creating content. And we talk about this a lot, like, why are you even bothering creating content if you don't know what you're doing it for, if you don't know what keywords you're going for, if you don't know what your competition is like. If you don't know if it's going to contribute towards sales or just people visiting, like that sort of thing. That's kind of what I want to talk about today. - I think this is also putting the consumer at the central part of the conversation. - [Andrew] Mmm. - Around content creation. They are the ones that are going to be your customer. They are the ones doing the searching. They are the ones consuming the content. - [Andrew] Yeah. - And if you don't actually know what it is they're searching for? You're just, pissing into the wind really. - Yeah, effectively, yeah. And talking about what they're searching for, that's basically where you start with all this, so, on this next slide here, I've got a bunch of keywords, and I'm using AdWords data here, so it's pay-per-click info. But it also shows the average monthly searches. So I decided we'll use home insurance as an example, here. Because it's competitive as, I mean if you look at the keyword bidding range over there, your minimum you're going to spend on a cost-per-click is 12.67, maximum about 40 bucks, so. - I love home insurance, or I love insurance as a test case. Because realistically, it's a boring topic, and I think we can take this somewhere, so let's have a look. So home insurance top, - Yeah, so. - What top of page bid range, what's the top bid there? - [Andrew] Okay, so that's to get to the top of the first page. - [Chris] Of course. - [Andrew] The low range is sort of the minimum you'd probably be spending to get there. Obviously different times and when different competitors are active, it's gonna change. And then the top of range, sorry the high range, is the most you'd be spending. I would suspect it's probably higher than that as well. - Yeah, so interestingly, $48 per click, on homeowner's insurance. - [Andrew] Mmhmm. - For that keyword, but has a relatively low average monthly search, so that's quite interesting, that that's the most expensive keyword. - It either means people are really not being smart with their ad spend, or that's a really high buyer's intent sort of keyword, so maybe that particular keyword tends to convert better. - True. - It could be one or the other. Probably a bit of both. - Or, or the campaign managers for the insurance company advertising are bidding heavily on the wrong keyword. - Yeah, could be asleep at the wheel. Could be just a bidding war for the fun of it, you know. My point is, it's crazy amount of money you'd have to spend to rank for this, so what do you do next? - Exactly. - What's a better place to look than keywords? Because if you haven't got your funnel tight, and, you know, all the leaks patched up in here, you're basically wasting money here, so, what's a better place to look? - So using, we use this place, this tool as a starting point for our research, and then we take it to a whole another level using various other tools, and our own smarts. But it is an interesting conversation starter for this type of research. And you know, it gives you, just some ideas around average monthly searches, and which keywords are more popular than others. You know, homeowners insurance quote, 30 average, 30 searches on average per month. Homeowners insurance, 140 searches on average per month. Home insurance, 12,100 searches per month. Now these are-- - [Andrew] Australia. - Yeah, these are for Australia, and they're also very high level keywords. - [Andrew] Yeah, yeah. - So let's keep diving in, because-- - So, yeah, moving on, like, obviously you could spend money to rank for these, but you prefer to get organic traffic for these, - [Chris] Hmm. - But, with that level of competition, and if we go to the next screen, we can see the organic competition as well. With that level of competition, I mean, how would you get to rank there? The difficulty here is 60, and that's just looking at the page authority and the main authority for all the competitors on the first page. Which is extremely high. I mean, you're going up against Allianz and Budget Direct and things like that. - [Chris] Compare the market, yup. - Also, if you wanted to rank organically here, obviously you would want to get maybe like your service or listings page, like the page with all your products, to be on here, not an article or something like that. So, how do you make that interesting? How do you get that on there? Well, you kind of can't. - [Chris] No. - You have to think outside the square, and I know that's where we kind of want to go here. - Well, sorry, let's rephrase, because you can, we know you can, but-- - You can't just make that page get there, you have to, just like a-- - Do a lot of stuff around it. - Call it like a hot air balloon method, where you're sort of using a lot of stuff around it to drag it up. - [Chris] Yup. - With everything else, so, the next thing you want to do is find related keywords, related long tail keywords to home insurance, and also what we call shoulder niches, which is more generalised verions of the same keyword. So I collected up a a whole bunch of different keywords that sort of fit in that category, they were related, or you know, very similar category to that but tied in, like someone that's looking for home insurance is also thinking about this. And amalgamated them, and we have a look here. So what we're trying to do next is find opportunities. First thing we see here is the difficulty is much lower for all these keywords. And you can see there's a couple examples down at the bottom I just sort of pasted there. - [Chris] Yeah. Organic click-through, right? Which is the purple one, is pretty high. - [Andrew] So that's good, so low difficulty, high click-through rate for all of these sorts of topics. And then the next thing we want to do is look at SERP features. And it's a little bit small here, but basically what that is, is I've analysed, what, other than just simple text results are there. So is there images, is there videos, is there local pack, is there maps? - [Chris] Yeah, so what are we seeing on those SERP features there, the first two, they're really high. - [Andrew] Okay. - [Chris] Competitiveness on content. - [Andrew] That's AdWords. - [Chris] Yup. - [Andrew] So basically, everyone's fighting in the AdWords space here. - [Chris] Yup. - [Andrew] The next one is there's a lot of maps listings, which obviously, everyone is gonna have Google My Business set up. - [Chris] Of course. - [Andrew] In this industry, one would hope. And then the other two bigger are shopping related. So obviously buying policies directly on Google. There's not an awful lot in the way of imagery. There's not an awful lot in the way of, like rich media articles, which is the one in the middle, that's dead flat. And there's not a lot in the way of video, so, this is where we can see there's some opportunity here. - [Chris] Yeah. - So rich media content, and we always talk about this. - Yeah, absolutely, we do always talk about this. And what we mean by that, is that obviously text content is where we all start. Our previous videos have indicated that a video, a two-minute long video, can actually cover about a thousand word article. You know, you can fit a thousand words into a two minute video, pretty much. - And best of all, it's high engagement, but I'm coming up to this soon. So, some pretty good related keywords I found here, like home insurance tips, why have homeowners insurance, that's not the exact keyword, but it's related enough, and then looking a little bit outside to broader sort of categories, how we calculate your insurance policy, and I like this one, how building materials affect your premium. - Yeah, that's really interesting. - I thought that was really cool, like, that's something people would probably want to read before buying a house or-- - Building a house. - [Andrew] Building a house, yeah building house. - Absolutely. So that's really interesting and I guess this is what I was talking about earlier, is putting the consumer at the central part of your content marketing strategy. What is it that they're interested in? What is it they're searching? You know, I know we didn't put it in here, but I started thinking like, well, the biggest thing that I want to know is how to save money on my home insurance. - [Andrew] Hmm. - You know, how do I hack, hack my insurance to-- - [Andrew] Yeah. - To get the biggest bang for buck. - [Andrew] Mmhmm. - Not just home insurance, insurances across the board, health insurance, am I wasting my money? Or how do I get the most out of it? If I'm gonna pay for it, how am I gonna get the most out of it? And funnily enough, I think maybe, insurance companies might be thinking, no, we, well at least me as a consumer, I think insurance companies are thinking, no, we don't really want people to get the most out of their insurance, because that's gonna cost us money. - [Andrew] Mmm. - Well, regardless of what you think, insurance companies, consumers do want that. - So if you actually deliver content to them that they're really interested in knowing, then essentially, you're going to attract them through organic and not have to pay per click. - Yeah, and something that people are probably wondering is, so a lot of these topics don't necessarily mean somebody's immediately about to buy. - [Chris] No. - So how do we get to that? - Don't worry about that for now. That's sort of in the last step here. At the moment we just want to get highly engaged traffic, relevant traffic, to your website. And then we sort of tie that back in. But moving on, I'm looking at okay, so just a slightly more related keyword to home insurance. We've got home insurance tips. Big difference here, difficulty to rank this organically is 27 as opposed to 60. You're going up against some, just slightly more general stuff, so you can fit in quite easily when you look at you're up against insurance council and finder.com.au. And best of all, organic click through rate for that is 100%. So people looking for home insurance tips are guaranteed to go into something on the first page. And that they're doing their research. - [Chris] We can't get better than 100%. - [Andrew] Yeah. - [Chris] Yeah, this is really interesting, yeah so, insurance council, finder, iselect, all non-insurance companies creating content which we know full well they're making money out of because they're probably doing affiliate marketing or something along those lines, and getting a clip of the ticket when people actually do sign up. But they could actually be selling advertising to those insurance companies or whatnot. - Mmhmm. - Now, insurance companies shouldn't be relying on these third parties. We're speaking-- - [Andrew] That's right, yeah. - About insurance companies as any business. Any business shouldn't be relying on third parties creating a bucketload of content about their industry niche, to then drive traffic to them. - As much as affiliate, an affiliate channel is a good income stream, and channel in its own right, if it's too big, it floods the market with content that just pulls people away from you and your direct brand, so it's an issue. So, slightly better difficulty, slightly better competition here, like it'd be easy to rank for home insurance tips. But how do you do that? So, we have a look at what obviously everyone else is doing. And we've seen that they're not doing much in the way of rich media content, so go for that sort of thing. Video, with subtitles, podcasts, relevant interesting images in your content, infographics, subheadings and sections to your content divided up so it's skimmable, and combine it all together, basically, like-- - [Chris] Combine all that content together. - Video, blog, images, all that sort of thing. Basically, you're looking for engagement. Interactions with your page, time on site, low bounce rate, pages per visit, that's what will get you above finder.com.au for home insurance tips. - And then, as an insurance company, if you actually surpassed all those third parties. - [Andrew] Mmhmm. - And they click directly on your content, you've saved yourself that affiliate marketing. - [Andrew] Yeah, they're not taking your clip at the ticket there. - [Andrew] So. Coming right back to that, how does that relate to you getting your service page, your home insurance page up? This last step is what everyone forgets. That's, - [Both] Internal linking. - [Andrew] So all of this awesome content that you're putting out there, it's getting you ranked for all these relevant terms to your industry, make sure you're linking back. In your content, inline your content, and in the footer with a call to action back to your home insurance service or catalogue page, I guess you'd say. Because all of these well-ranked articles that you're putting out there, they're all going up the Google ranks. They're all linked back to your main one, and that gets dragged up with it. Whoa. It's a little bit hard to do these movements. Your main page gets dragged up with it. So that's how you, basically, would rank a page that's difficult to rank with really high competition. - [Chris] Yeah. - And that's also what other people aren't doing, yeah. - Yeah, so this is tip of the iceberg, I guess, snapshots, of where we would start with our keyword research, you know the actual, I think the half hour prep time that you put into this, we didn't dive into all of the opportunities that would come out. - Aw, yeah, it's huge, and just the research phase in itself, you could do an entire three or four episodes on. - Absolutely. - You know I just, - Got the data ready. - Well, maybe we're geeks, maybe we're not, but I know there's high fives get thrown around the office when we find the, this awesome piece of gold, which is a keyword or phrase that is being searched, thousands of times per month, tens of thousands of times per month, and has super low competition, and/or has no competition for that rich media content. - [Andrew] Mmhmm. - And guess what, we're going to overtake you, as the competitor every time when we see that, every time. - Yeah, like we always say, we find and go for the low hanging fruit first, get results quickly. And we've seen some clients have, like one piece of content drives 50% of their traffic to the website now. - That's the role that-- - Hundred hundreds a week. - Well, that's right, but that's because we haven't just stopped at creating one piece of content. - [Andrew] Yeah, yeah. - We've created bucket loads of relevant, engaging content, yeah? Related to the keywords. - Mmhmm. - That have high search terms. - That we know people are looking for in. - And we're internal linking. And we're driving traffic back to those important pages. What do people want to know after they've started reading every piece of content? They want to know how much it is. If you know, even if they're not ready to buy, they still want to consider it, right, that's really interesting, how much? Wait, what? Okay, is there an opportunity to buy now? Well if I was going to buy now, how much is it? So, what's the details? How do I go through the process, if I wanted to? Tell them that. Link them back to that page, that conversion page, that you want to rank really well. People may not buy now, but they still want to know the process. And in an insurance case, just for example, it's going to be a year-long consideration, or at least half a year. Maybe halfway into the year, I'm going, hmm, where's my health insurance or home insurance sitting at the moment? Where could I save money on that? How can I maximise those costs? - And there's going to be a lot of searching, in between there as well. They're going to be researching a lot, so I'd say this is probably a niche that needs a lot of content out there, and I'm not seeing enough of it out there, to be honest. - Super slow burn, and again, we're just using home insurance, and house insurance, and health insurance, and car insurance as one example. This is the same case for everybody. Everybody is taking longer to consider what their next steps are. They're doing a lot more research. They're getting more educated. They got the resources. - Mmhmm. - You know, are sitting there. The internet is sitting there, giving them those resources as and when they want them or need them. And so, having all of that content, if people are constantly hitting your website on the topics that they're searching, and not somebody else's, for the course of a year, guess who gets considered, is the highest to be considered when buying. - Mmhmm, and who gets ranked the best. - That's the obvious sideline benefit, yeah? And we all know that Google organic traffic converts best out of all traffic. The pay-per-click stuff, it hurts. It actually hurts to pay that, geez, $48 per click. But the reason why they're doing it is because potentially, it's a high converting keyword. But if you get that for a lot less, as in free through organic, you'd take it every time, wouldn't you? But it does take an investment, a front-loaded investment. - Yeah. - To get it to that point. Cool. - Time. I hope everybody got some value out of that. Data-backed research on content creation is super important. If you're not doing it, like we said, you're just pissing into the wind. If you don't understand that, basically you're throwing money away, on your content creation. - Yeah, it's not worth, it's not worth doing it. - Yeah. - [Andrew] Because you could actually be having a detrimental effect to your brand and SEO. - Yeah. - [Andrew] If you don't do the research. - Yup. And you're just putting content up for content's sake. If you're not putting up rich content now, in this 2018. Forget about it. - Basically Google doesn't like trash content. Google is a garbage collector. - [Chris] Yup. - It has to clear out the crap constantly, so. If you're making Google's job harder, then it's going to consider you basically a pollution. - Yeah, and if you're not structuring your content to be skimmable, and you're just dumping that content on the page, copy-paste out of your word processor, with no formatting whatsoever, then essentially, yeah, you're going to lose me as well. You're going to lose the consumer. Yeah, I might come to the page thinking I get this awesome article, and all of the sudden I just see paragraphs of, you know, 12 point text, with no bolding, no headings, no images, no infographics, no video, nothing for me to share, nothing for me to take away, no reason for me to bookmark it and want to come back again. - [Andrew] Mmhmm. - [Chris] See ya later, I'm out, three seconds, you've got three seconds to keep me on that page. You'd better make that content look awesome for to start with. Anyway, let's wrap it up. Thanks for watching guys, MeMedia, Get Fact Up! We've been running this for a little over two to three years now. Two years, a little over two years now. And it's proof that content marketing works. If you want to talk to us about content marketing, you can tell that we've got the smarts, the know-how, and definitely passion to drive your business above and beyond on Google organic search search results, which is what converts the most, so give us a call. Thanks, and see ya next week. - [Andrew] Thank you.  

Published Sep 29, 2017 Chris: Hey world, Chris Hogan coming to you live from MeMedia Studio here in Burleigh Heads for 'Get Fact Up'. The new and improved version, delivering more content to you regularly, is in our vodcasting studio or podcasting studio. You can hire it out at Burleigh Heads as well, just enquire on our website. So here we are. Hanging on, Andrew? Andrew: Yeah, I'm good. Just had a double strength decaf. Chris: That did nothing. Andrew: Sorry, I was sitting on that one for a bit, sorry. Keep going. Chris: As you can see, we're keeping it light and humorous. So today we want to talk about the transition that's happening from broadcast, or traditional media, to online media. Basically, the millennials are moving away from traditional media and moving to social channels and whatnot for entertainment. Andrew: Well, the interesting thing about that is how we're delivering this today which, in my opinion, is shifting more towards live and daily content, and those sorts of things are happening on social. So what better way to deliver 'Get Fact Up' than through live video? Chris: Cool. Andrew: And that's what we're trying. Chris: So what are the channels that are actually performing best when it comes to live video? Andrew: Well, it's Facebook, YouTube, and then you've got other things like Instagram, which is obviously Facebook as well. It's like Facebook in your pocket, I guess you could say. And then, what else have you got? You've got Periscope. No one really uses Periscope. Chris: And also LinkedIn is coming out with their new update to allow you to shoot live video through their mobile app, and upload videos through the desktop. Andrew: Yep, LinkedIn always liked to party. But they're doing their thing. And then you've got things like Snapchat and all that, but from what I've heard, Snapchat's not gonna be around much longer. So let's not worry about that too much. Chris: Yeah, but those stories that are up there for 24 hours, they just aren't that interesting to anybody anymore. Especially the brands, I think, because ... Andrew: Yeah, it was a toy. People are getting past it. I don't know anyone that's really using Snapchat in that way anymore. And now there's also Instagram which has the same feature. Facebook has the same feature. It's really devalued that whole disposable story thing quite a bit. Chris: So with Facebook owning Instagram, we've seen a lot of changes in Instagram as well. They've actually brought in a lot of the features, their filters and all those overlays that Snapchat ... someone invented. And Facebook have kind of integrated those into both Facebook and Instagram. And Instagram have also updated their app, or their algorithm, to decrease the organic reach that people are getting to grow their channels. What problems does that present to newcomers to Instagram, do you think? Andrew: Well, I think when it went at a really saturated ... I don't want to call it a marketplace, because Instagram's not a marketplace. Chris: Channel. Andrew: It's a really saturated channel now. When I first started using Instagram and things like that, you could really grow a channel. You could easily get to two thousand followers, is that what we call them on Instagram? Yeah? Two thousand followers, just through organic means. Just through interacting with other people, and stuff like that. You just can't do it now. You don't get that sort of traction with posts and things like that anymore. You used to be able to put a post up and get two hundred likes, just by getting the right hashtag. That just doesn't happen now. You don't get that increase of followers, or that sort of thing. It's really just a feed now, and it's so saturated that if you're coming in with a unique idea, everyone is sort of doing that same thing. Everyone's coming in with a razor-sharp unique idea. You know, like the yoga paddle boarders and stuff like that. Everyone's coming in with something like that, it's just hypersaturation in there now. That's just how I feel about Instagram. Chris: We've talked about this many times, but I'm challenged by using Instagram due to the fact that when you're actually posting something, you can't actually put a link in the post, therefore not being able to redirect people off the channel onto your own. And here at MeMedia, we do a lot of content creation. We do a lot of marketing for clients. We call it integrated digital marketing. So essentially what we're doing is we're creating that content, we're using the social channels to distribute that content, and get traffic back to the website. That's an awesome indicator to Google to boost your SEO, boost your Google rankings. If you can't do that post on Instagram and actually put a link in the post and get the traffic to your website, the only way you can do that now is through using their advertising. Andrew: Using it in the profile, which is not helpful. Yeah. Chris: Or tell people to click on the link in the profile. Exactly. Not helpful. So to me, Instagram's not a great thing to use for SEO, for promoting people to come to your website, which is the media that you own. Obviously, when you're on these channels, you're only renting space. You know? And with Facebook updating algorithms, it's ... Andrew: You can't really turn that into leads, per se. You can use Instagram to get direct messages and stuff like that, but who wants to be walking around with their phone all the time replying to messages and things like that as a form of inquiry? You can't get calls and things off Instagram the way you can, unless you're doing ads and things. It's not getting it back to your website. Not in a meaningful way, anyway. Chris: They're actually using ads. Andrew: But it is a brand tool. And the people that do it well, the industries that do it well, things like cafes and clothing and things like that. But you know, they're getting their brand out there, and people see this, and they're like "I want that," and then they can go and find it. That doesn't work for everyone, that sort of effect on brand awareness doesn't work for everyone. You can't see a picture on Instagram of, for example, laser eye surgery, and think "that looks good. I'll just go and get that today." It doesn't work for everyone. Chris: So let's talk about what's happening with the aspirational youth and the Gen X, Y, Z. Basically, how they're becoming disengaged with traditional advertising. 99% of millennials are actually disengaged with traditional advertising. So trying to replicate traditional advertising methods on social channels isn't really that effective. Given that 55% of people watch videos online every day, there is this huge, I guess, shift from everyone to produce videos. Once again, they're trying to take that traditional ad that they've done previously ... Andrew: Ah, we're talking about traditional media, yeah. Chris: Yeah. They've done in traditional media ... Andrew: They're failing so hard. It's like they're jumping on these social channels and they're like "Great. So we use the TV formula on social media." And everyone goes, "I don't want to watch TV on Facebook. Goodbye." Or "I don't want to watch TV ads on Facebook, see you later." Chris: I don't even want to watch ads! Andrew: Well, yeah. And that's the thing. You have to be very creative with these new formats now. You have to really think around, okay, the people that are watching these formats, they're escaping TV. So if we come at them with ads, they're not gonna react well to it. Because they're ignoring TV and they're going to Facebook or Instagram or YouTube or something like that. Last thing they want is TV ads coming at them, because that's what they've come from. Chris: So yeah, cutting to that "Proudly brought to you by your sponsor, let's listen to a message from our sponsors," all of that type of messaging just isn't gonna work. And the reason why we're focused on millennials and these aspirational youth is because the global workforce by 2025 is gonna have 8% baby boomers, 28% Gen X, 33% Gen Y, and 31% Gen Z. So that's our audience. Andrew: It's all social media generations now, from here on in. Chris: Absolutely. Andrew: They're not going to react to a straight up sponsorship message, or a straight up advert. But the thing that's happening now is like these online sponsorship messages that happen in podcasts and things, where they just say "hey look, our podcast is funded by Rode Microphones or something like that." And people expect that. They know that you have to be able to make money out of these things. Chris: That's right. Then it comes down to authenticity. And one thing that you'll notice when you, or that we definitely notice, is that with advertising that's used in podcasts, the host of the show is actually delivering the message from their point of view. So like Andrew just said, we are proudly brought to you by one of our sponsors, Rode Microphones. And this kit is Rode Microphones kit. And it's bloody awesome! So we can actually say that, because we've used the product. Andrew: And we're literally using it right now. Chris: That's right. And just out of nowhere, we actually have extra kit if you want to do more podcast from this studio and have more people sitting at this table. So where to now? We're seeing these massive shifts to video, massive shift to live video, and what do we want to see when we're doing that? What are some of the ... we want to see reach, we want to see video views, and we want to see engagement. Andrew: The funny thing there is where it comes back to promotion. So we already know that people like live video. But you don't get an awful lot of rich engagement when the live video's happening. So with everything, eventually, it inevitably comes down to the paid promotion. Facebook used to be great. You put something on your Facebook page, or your Facebook page, followers saw it. Now, what percentage is it now? Chris: One? Andrew: It's like 1%? Chris: Organic, yeah. 1% organic. Andrew: That's so weak. So all of these new formats, they're great while they're happening and people think they're exciting, but then it becomes commonplace, and we need to look at the promotion side of things. And that's where it's a real problem. The two big contenders right now are YouTube and Facebook for the live video, and both of them had terrible paid promotion. It doesn't even exist, really. They both kind of, in their help, I'll just bring it up now. YouTube, for example, says during your event, yeah, you can create a highlight clip after your event. Or before your event get your followers excited, etc. But there's nothing for promotion of a live stream. I think you said Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg mentioned something at their F8 conference? Chris: Don't quote me on this, but it is a rumour that promotion of live video during the live stream is going to be available sometime in the not too distant future. There's a whole realm of issues that could present. Andrew: Yeah! Like, obviously it needs to happen because it's what people are getting excited about. It's where they're moving, so we have to be able to promote it. But what happens then? Because Facebook are kind of liable. They review ads, so we put like 200 ads up and they'll go through them and sixty might get through because of various reasons. How do they monitor the live video? So if someone says "I'm gonna do a video about this," but then it's about something else and it offends everyone, it looks bad for, say, Facebook or YouTube, so. Chris: Well that's where I think their feature that they've got now for videos that are uploaded is that they do have the ability for Facebook to process your captions. So for those that don't know, captions mean subtitles that appear at the bottom. That's pretty amazing technology. Obviously, that's done by a machine. And it's not 100% accurate, in fact it needs a lot of work. But if they have the ability to do that live, then potentially they can kick out those profanities and ... Andrew: Flagging things, and then someone comes in and manually watches it. Because Facebook already do that. What I've had explained to me by someone that does the forums on Facebook, there's an automatic review process, and that's what determines if your ads go live or not. And then if things get flagged, someone manually reviews it, so it's like a two step process. I think it'll be something like that. They're looking for profanity or things like that, and then someone will come in and check out that stream, maybe they check what the reactions are because people can react as they go, they can say "Like this, hate this." Maybe if it's too many people disliking it or having negative reactions, then someone jumps in. They'll have to find a solution around that if they want to monetise it, but they will monetise it because they love, especially Facebook, love monetising things. Chris: Of course, of course they do. Andrew: YouTube I'm not sure exactly how they're gonna do it. Chris: One of the most amazing things is, when we're actually creating content for our clients, is the reach and engagement that we get, and the video views that we're getting for our clients here at MeMedia. But one thing that's been amazing, and that's in a new venture that we've co-founded with two other directors, Leigh Kelson and Scott Burke, for Beach City, is amazing reach. Which is 1.8 million reach, 434,000 video views, and 109,000 post engagements on those videos. Andrew: And that's mostly with live video? Chris: Yes. All live video. Truly spectacular engagement, and that's the key metric that we're looking at there. Supposedly, 10% is excellent engagement, and we're actually getting over 20%. Given the multitude of places where we can post video, which we spoke about before, Facebook's an awesome place to get reach and engagement. People are spending less time actually viewing the videos on Facebook than they are on YouTube. Andrew: Definitely, significantly less. But YouTube's a video platform, so people are expecting it. There's still this sort of interrupted feeling for the live video on Facebook, because you get that notification saying "so-and-so's live." Some people just don't react so well to it. Some people are into it. Facebook's a feed of the content you're interested in there. So sometimes, "so-and-so's live" could be disruptive to someone just wanting to look at memes or something like that. But YouTube? Definitely, people are ready for live video on YouTube. Chris: There's a huge reason to post on YouTube, as we've discussed many times, and the reason why we post on YouTube is that obviously, Google doesn't crawl through Facebook's content to list it in the search engine results pages, which is the Google listings when you do a search. Whereas when you do post on YouTube, then there's an opportunity for those videos to appear in the search. Andrew: And that's something we often say to clients, it's like if you can't get a page rank for something because your competitors have great content for something, do they have videos? Probably not. Google's gonna favour videos, because they own YouTube. So that's a good way to sneak past. It's always a good reason to be putting videos on YouTube. Chris: And there's so many different ways you can create videos, whether it's slideshows or chats or podcasts. Andrew: Exactly. The other thing that's good about YouTube is it's always been a video platform, so it's more like a library than Facebook. Facebook's a feed, so things get lost if you post a lot. Things'll just disappear back. And people don't really go backwards through your feed too much. They might see something they like, and then they'll think "okay, let's look at old videos." It's not as easy to do with Facebook, but if someone sees something they like on YouTube, they can subscribe to you. They can get all your new videos. They can look at all your archived videos. It's a lot more organised for that sort of thing. But, the connectivity of people's not there on YouTube. Chris: No, that's right. Because I mean, there's just not as many people there. With Facebook having two billion plus monthly users ... Andrew: Yes. Let's bring that up. Chris: Over two billion monthly active Facebook users, with ages 25 to 34 making up 29% of those users worldwide. Andrew: Yeah, so this is all the people we're talking about. They're Gen Y, X, and millennials. They're all there, and they're online all the time. Something like 28 times a day someone checks their Facebook, on average. Chris: Of course. Andrew: In these generations. Chris: We're highly addicted beings and we really had no chance when the smartphone came around, to not be addicted according to Simon Sinek, the famous author. Some other stats. Like we said, the decline of broadcast TV. 24% decline in live TV for 18 to 24 year olds since 2016. There's a clear shift to social. There's a clear shift to YouTube. There's a clear shift to online. There's a clear shift in your very home, watching multi devices being used in the same room while the TV is still on, but just playing some average stuff in the background, to put it nicely. Andrew: That's, yeah. That's on a timeline that you can't really control. Chris: Yeah, so everything's on demand. 65% of global media consumers choose video on demand. Far out. Andrew: We're not even considering things like Netflix, the actual streaming TV services. Half the time when someone's saying TV, they actually mean Netflix. "I watched TV last night." They watched Netflix last night. That's another thing. But I suppose what we're getting at here about all this shift is what can you do about it? How can you leverage this from a marketing perspective? And that's where it gets interesting, because everyone's still trying to figure it out. How does this work? We're still trying to figure it out. And we're finding things that work, but how far can you push that before people start to get annoyed because you're in their personal downtime? If you're annoying someone on Facebook, you're in their downtime and people don't like being annoyed in their downtime. That's where it's leading edge right now, we're trying to figure out how to make this work. But the thing is, the big difference between traditional media and this new type of media like Facebook and YouTube and all this live video stuff is, you've got analytics, you've got metrics, so you can actually see the data behind this. You can see publicly accessible data about what people are reacting to, the results you're getting, and all that sort of thing. You're never gonna get that with TV. If you approach a TV channel and say "I want to put ads up," they'll tell you "You're gonna get so-and-so people, this many people watching it today." Chris: This is what our reach is per month and how many people we're reaching, this demographic. But you don't actually know what your specific ad or mention in the show, how many eyeballs it hit and how many people actually liked it. Andrew: And even if a TV's on, if there's a TV on and there's a family of five watching the TV, four of those people are on Facebook at any given time. So they can't really prove that. You see those, cinema advertising, which is probably even a step down from TV. You're watching a movie and it says "Cinema advertising works!" And you'll be the only person in the cinema. There's something wrong there. How can they prove any of this anymore? Chris: So clearly we've got a shift to social media, online media, and on-demand media. And we can actually give valuable ROI in terms of statistics and metrics of who viewed your particular piece of content, brand, you know, ad. So there's no time like the present, obviously, to make these shifts. And there's plenty other ways that are happening right here right now that ... you know, like, influencing marketing is another way to ... Andrew: Ah yeah, that's a mince higher with your podcast. Chris: Yep. I think we're gonna have to talk about that another time. So thanks very much for listening. Like we said, we hope you like Get Fact Up. The new way we're delivering, it somewhat helps our production time, helps us produce more content, and you can hire this studio too. Simply inquire on memedia.com.au. Thanks, and thanks to Rode Microphones for helping deliver this vodcast.

My guest today is Andrew Hinton. Andrew has worked in the digital design field for two decades. He's one of the founders of the Information Architecture Institute and author of the book Understanding Context. In this conversation, you'll learn about the foundations of information architecture and why Andrew thinks of himself as a “radical information architect.” Listen to the full conversation https://theinformeddotlife.files.wordpress.com/2020/01/the-informed-life-episode-26-andrew-hinton.mp3   Show notes Andrew Hinton Helix (database) Understanding Context: Environment, Language, and Information Architecture by Andrew Hinton The Information Architecture Institute The Information Architecture Conference The Informed Life Episode 21: Vanessa Foss on Event Planning Shared Information Environment: let's unpack that, shall we? by Andrew Hinton MUD Interactive fiction (e.g. text adventure games) World of Warcraft O'Reilly Media Peter Morville Ecological psychology James J. Gibson & Eleanor J. Gibson Phlogiston The Copernican Revolution Cartesianism Play-Doh Contextual inquiry Service design Ecosystem Map Bodystorming Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) The Informed Life Episode 15: Jeff Sussna on Cybernetics Norbert Wiener Claude Shannon Due app Apple's Reminders app Steve Jobs: “Computers are like a bicycle for our minds” The Mother of All Demos Doug Englebart Read the full transcript Jorge: So, Andrew, welcome to the show. Andrew: Great. Hey, Jorge, thanks. Very glad to be here. Jorge: So, you and I have been friends for a long time, but for folks who might not be familiar with you, would you please tell us about yourself? Andrew: Yeah, sure. I'm Andrew Hinton. I have been in the design community, in doing digital oriented design things for probably 25 years now, if we count things I was doing before I was being paid full time for it. But definitely 20 years solid now for actually this being my “job” job. And information architecture is kind of my, I don't know, I consider that sort of my home turf. My origin story in all of this really, I think is, is information architecture story. The first community I really kind of bonded with and got connected with was the early IA community, back in the late nineties. Since I started doing this, I've worked roughly half and half, as an internal in large organizations as well as an external consultant, or agency style person. but even then, typically it's very large like… Early on, it was manufacturing in the Southeast. That was like most of our clients in the company I was with then. So, I've worked with a lot of different, big companies and IT organizations and things like that. Nonprofits, profits. But before I got to doing all this, I was more of a humanities person and I still am, I think, at heart. Was a philosophy major, went to seminary briefly as a way to get a theology and philosophy graduate education, but then left because the seminary started getting weird. And then I went into literature and got a masters in that and then ended up with a Master of Fine Arts and poetry. Mostly all of this was just a avoid the real world until I was about 30. But then I had to get like a real job, and it turned out that this fixation I had on the internet, was something that people would pay for more than poems. So, I got into that at that point. But before then, I had really done odd jobs and things where I think a really early formative thing for me was early nineties working in a doctor's office while I was in grad school and all they had was a typewriter and a phone. And I had seen a demo and a Mac user group of something called Double-Helix, I don't know if you remember that. It was later called Helix. But it was just a sort of a drag and drop style way to make a relational database. And I was like, “Ah, we need a database for all of these clients, you know, all these patients, and their accounts and things.” So, they let me do that. And I had to teach it to other people who work in the office and kind of figure out how the interface would work. And really it was sort of this crucible for figuring out how to make things on screens that people could use. And I sort of went from there. Yeah, that's in a nutshell. I ended up writing a book, which just turned five just a couple of days ago, called Understanding Context. and I've been involved in the IA community for a good while, was one of the co-starters of the erstwhile Information Architecture Institute. And I'm looking forward to hopefully being in New Orleans, with my, the IA community, which I really think of like a family reunion for me, honestly. Jorge: I recently had Vanessa Foss on the show; she is one of the people who runs the IA Conference. And that notion of that event as a family reunion came up. It definitely feels like that to me as well. Andrew: Well, and it feels like a family is growing too, which is great. Like I used to worry that it was just a bunch of, you know, old hands getting together. But every year I see these new faces and voices who are stepping in and doing things, you know, and loving the community too. So, in spite of some of the ups and downs, with organizations and whatnot, I'm very optimistic about the community's health. Jorge: And the community is a community in part because of your work. Thank you for the efforts that you've put into the information architecture community over the years. You said that you had studied fine arts and poetry as a way to avoid the real world. And I will say this, you entered the real-world with a bang. I remember myself entering the information architecture community and being influenced by your writings. I remember one piece in particular about the centrality of hyperlinks and how that was different about this work. And then the book that you brought up, Understanding Context, which I consider an important book in the information architecture field. And I was hoping you would tell us a little bit more about that. Andrew: Sure. The challenge is that… A little bit of a qualifier: it's always hard to know where to start. But, really, I think where it came from was really, I think, very early on in my involvement in the IA field, as it was starting to get going as well in the web IA community, I guess I should say. I had already been online, doing things on the internet since right out of college. And I was fascinated with how something like — if our listeners are not familiar, there were these things called — and there are — these things called MUDs, multi-user domains, or multi-user dungeons, because some of the earlier ones are really more like online D&D games, like text-based adventure games, but made in a way where multiple players can be in the same place at the same time. And a precursor to things like World of Warcraft and stuff like that. But there were bunches of these, with different code bases. And it was just one example of where it felt like you were in a real place with people. Like there were emotions involved, there were social interactions and meaning being created. I mean, it really, it mattered. It wasn't virtual in the sense of somehow non-corporeal. It was real. People had bodies who were interacting with one another in this environment. It was just mediated through language, but it felt different than just a conversation. Right? It felt like you were in a place because there were structures, and those structures felt like they affected those interactions, and they mattered. So anyway, that and some other things just had me thinking for a long, long time about what is it that makes this feel this way and work this way? I didn't have this way of saying it then, but now, how is it that language can be environment in that way? So that's always been in the back of my mind. One reason why information architecture was so fascinating to me is because to me, it's never really been especially a metaphor. It's really been just a different way of making structures that people live together in. So, from that, I also was curious, “Okay, we were doing this thing called information architecture. What is it that we're making? Like what do we mean by that?” So, the architecture part is, you know, it's sort of clear, but then the information part is not so clear. I just really wanted to go deep on understanding; what is my material if I'm an information architect? And if we're going to have this discipline, then we need some kind of grounding. Don't we need to really understand what it is we're doing, at a very fundamental level? And I had this hunch that something about digital technology was changing the way human experience worked in terms of how context worked, because anything as simple as just accidentally hitting “reply all”, a button that looks exactly like the “reply” button, except for some minor differences, having a wildly outsized effect, compared to the actual action you're taking. As opposed to in physical life, right? If you want to talk to 10,000 people or whatever, instead of just one person, there's a massive physical difference in what you need to do. All you have to work with is just physical stuff, right? Nothing technological. All the way up to the way Facebook was, clearly, essentially, you know, even early on, basically almost phishing people to get at their information and to trick them into connecting to more people and inviting more people in ways that were manipulative. These were all really preoccupying to me. But also, I really cared about the IA community and what we were doing. And I thought, we need to understand what it is we're saying when we say this information architecture thing. Because I was willing to let go of the label entirely if it turned out it really didn't mean anything different that was important. But I was just so convinced — and still am — that there is a thing that we need, and we need it to be good that other phrases about things like interaction design or user experience and these other labels, they don't quite get at. So, all of those things together. I went on this, I thought, “Hey, I'm going to write this little book about context. I'm just going to… I've got some thoughts. I'm going to put them down.” Somehow, I talked to O'Reilly about doing this with me, and thankful to Peter Morville for helping me make that connection. And it just morphed. And I'll end with this bit that — and you've heard me say this before — I think I wrote 100, 150 pages of just all of these ideas and thoughts I've had from talks and writing, some things I've already done. And then I just got into this part where I was like, “Okay, well I need to address what information is.” And I just didn't know, having some [inaudible] academic background, I was like, “I need to make sure I'm really researching these things and being clear.” So, I asked around, and I asked some of people we know, who teach in universities, about information. And I asked them, and I could not get a straight answer. And I thought, well, that's interesting. And, anyway. Ended up finding out about this whole other way of thinking about information that comes from ecological psychology, the work of James J. Gibson and his wife, and how that was influencing embodied cognition as a theoretical approach. And it just kind of went from there and it blew everything up and I had to kind of start over. And then I ended up writing a much bigger book than I believed. But that was sort of the story behind like why I even got into it. And what it's done is it's really rewired the way I think about the way people interact with their environment. Even just me saying it that way is an artifact of that rewiring, right? I tend to talk about environments rather than just individual devices or things or websites and whatnot. Anyway, it just really changed the way I think about what I do, that I'm still really coming to understand. Jorge: You said that a part of your pursuit for writing the book was coming to an understanding of what the material is that we're working with when we are working on an information architecture. Can you speak more to what that material is or where you've landed on that? Andrew: The material, it turns out to be material. And what I mean by that is, I think early on I thought… So, I use this analogy sometimes. You know how early science and alchemists would use this term — “phlogiston” — to talk about some substance or thing that they knew must be there because they could see the effects of what was going on? They treated it as if it was a thing, even though it isn't really a thing. It was multiple things and processes and whatnot, that we now have names for. But to me, that's kind of how I was using that word “material” early on. It feels like we were using information in a material way, but I really couldn't explain what that meant. Now, after going through all this, I've come to realize, well, actually it isn't material like it's, it's stuff. It's our bodies — and our brains are part of our bodies, so I just say our bodies — are interacting with the environment around us. And the environment around us has stuff. You know, it's objects and surfaces and all of that. And that's where information comes from, and everything else is really sort of this linguistic construct that we've created, or in a human sphere of language-meaning. But all of that is ultimately grounded in our bodies and the way our bodies interact with the world, the physical world around us. So, it's really more of a continuum for me now between something like knocking on the table I'm sitting at right now — that's physical — to, if you go all the way to the other end of the spectrum and saying the word “table” and all the meanings that that can have. But ultimately, the only reason that those meanings can be there is because in some way, whether it's three or four or 10 degrees of separation, it's connected to that kind of meaning. So, to me it's about the relationship between the creature, of the human, interacting with that material world. And then when you add language to that, then you get this really interesting material that can be very slippery and hard to pin down because language is like that. But it's in that interplay between our bodies and our environments and the way we talk about our experience and communicate with one another. That's the material. Jorge: One of the challenges that many of us face — many of us who think of ourselves as information architects, primarily — is that the stuff that you're speaking about is stuff that we take for granted in our day-to-day lives. I think that it's in your work that I read about this analogy with fish and this old trope about fish not being aware of the water they're swimming in and somehow, we are swimming in language. And because we are dealing with architecting structures of language that change how people perceive the environment they're operating in — that's a fairly abstract notion. And I'm wondering, for you who have worked, like you said, part of your career internally in large organizations and also as a consultant, how does one make this palatable or actionable to the folks who need this perspective as part of their work? Andrew: So, one of the real challenges of trying to write about this and teach this is that very thing. And part of the challenge of that is, there's a sort of a Copernican shift that you almost need to be able to make, to see it differently. Meaning, you know, the Copernican revolution /[that was/] basically a complete reframing, right? Where it's like, no, everything doesn't revolve around the earth, all these planets revolve around the sun. And it changed… It simplified astrophysics, astronomy. But it was a really hard shift to make because people's just ingrained idea of their experience, where it was not that. And this is really coming from this undoing of Cartesian thinking around body-mind separation and things like that that's sort of been an increasing part of the conversation in the sciences over the last 20 some years, I guess. People are so… It's so ingrained to think about, especially the West, I guess it's, it's so ingrained to think about things in a certain way you know, this idea that you could take your brain and put it into a vat and it'd still be you. But, well, no… Your brain only knows what it knows because of your body and vice versa. That part it feels like it's, to really get a lot of this, you have to get to that, but I'm realizing too that like, well, I can't sit people down and get him there every time. So, the way I've been teaching the workshop, for example, it has been just starting off with just grounding people in a substance or an object and building up from there. Just getting them grounded in, “I have a body,” and so I use Play-Doh in the workshop. So, everybody gets their own Play-Doh and you have to hold the Plato and you have to write down things about like how your body's interacting with it. You put it back in the container, you cover it. You have to think about right now, okay, what is your body experiencing with the Play-Doh now? Well, you can't see it. You can't touch it, but you can see and touch this container. And these all sound like very simplistic, primitive questions. But that's the whole point, to ground people back in simplistic, primitive way of thinking about how bodies and environments interact with one another. Because ultimately what we're trying to get to is all of this abstraction we've created around ourselves, all this information-sphere, all these other things, our bodies want those things to be as straightforward as being able to squish some Play-Doh in my hand or to pick up a hammer and hit a nail. And so that's kind of how I've been framing it is, is getting rid of some of the theory at first, and just grounding people in, “Okay, you've got a body, you're experiencing things,” and then gradually trying to get to the point where we're talking about now, how does language function on top of that? And in what ways does language complicate that simplicity. And then when we add digital, there's a whole other realm of complication or complexity. But it's building up to the abstract, I think helps. It's what I'm ultimately trying to do, is to get at the root. That's why lately I've been calling myself a “radical information architect.” I felt silly that I didn't know this until just recently, that, that radical — the root — really, the root of the word “radical” is the word “root” or the same root. But basically, radical's meaning really comes from this idea that you're changing something at the foundations, right? You're rewiring what's underneath. And I feel like that's what I'm trying to do with this. So if I get people to get out of abstract-head and out of information-head, the way that we typically think of information and start with, how do we understand our physical environment and interact with it in the same way lizards and spiders interact with their environment. The principles are basically the same. And then build from there. That's how I can teach this. Now, if I'm working with just colleagues on the fly in the middle of a project, or I'm talking to my colleagues here at work, I don't go into all that. I mean, I've been here six months and I have yet to go into all that. But what I do is try to slip in this grounding and kind of draw on the whiteboard. Here's a person. Here's some things that they're interacting with. Here's how that might change over time. I'm always trying to locate it into like, you've got a human in an environment doing stuff. Because ultimately that's what user experience brings to the table. There's a human being, and we have to make all this other stuff we're making compatible with that human being. So we're creating new parts of their environment that we want them to use and understand, right? So, in my day-to-day that's just how I started and it's been helpful that we have methodologies like contextual inquiry and service design and things like that where you have some tools, with things like ecosystem mapping and whatnot, that if you really put some pressure on them to make sure you're staying very grounded with a human, with a body doing a thing, that really helps to get people there with you. Things like bodystorming can help too, but it's hard to get engineers to do bodystorming or others. So that's not as common for me. Jorge: You said that this line of thinking has changed how you work, and I feel like we're getting a little bit into that with this conversation, in your interactions with your team. I'm wondering how, if any, it has also influenced the way that you manage your own information and get things done? Andrew: Yeah. I kind of inadvertently learned a lot about myself and the way that I interact with my own environment. You know, another thing about me is, it wasn't until I was in grad school that I was diagnosed with ADHD. And that's something that plagued… I was going to say plagued. That's maybe not the best way to put it. But until I knew what was going on, it was — and you'll hear this from a lot of people who were diagnosed as adults — I really had a lot of challenges that, that really got to the core of myself as a person from that, because I really couldn't trust myself to behave in ways that I wanted to behave in the world and things done and understand things and to keep track of things and all of that. And in fact, just writing a book with one of the scariest things I could even consider. That's one of the reasons I felt like I had to do it, was because it's just very, very hard to marshal… People talk about a train of thought. And for years I've made this joke that I've really got this sort of a Beijing-full of rickshaws of thought. Like, I don't have a train, just these things bouncing around. Understanding this more has helped me to understand so much better that I have to design my environment around me so that it can supplement and help me. Right? And you mentioned earlier before we started recording, you talked about how in one of your podcasts you talked to Jeff Sussna about cybernetics. And honestly, that's a topic I wish I had gone deeper in when I was writing the book, although then I would've had to make it even longer. So, I don't know. But Norbert Wiener and the people who were working in cybernetics, they were really getting at something that the more abstracted Shannon information science, in-theory world, wasn't quite getting at, which was this very ground, that idea of how our bodies and our environments are, are very symbiotic. But it's taken a long time for mainstream thinking to catch up with us. But now I have no shame in creating crutches for myself. So, for example, I use an app called Due on my phone. And good Lord, if this developer ever stops making or updating this, I'm going to be in terrible shape because it works just the way it needed to, which is any little thing that I go, “That feels like something I'm not going to remember.” I put it in there and then it bugs me until I do something about it. Right? So, it allows me to snooze it in a way where I can snooze it in small increments of time or big increments of time of time. For me, it's much more successful than Apple's Reminders, for example, which are too calm for me. And in fact, I think it's the thing where it's like, if it comes up more than a certain number of times, it goes away. I've yet to even figure out what the rules are around Reminders; I find them untrustworthy. Whereas Due, I have this love hate relationship with, because it just nags the hell out of me. But it does it because I told it to. So that's for things in the moment or things I need to remember this at this time. One thing that I really love about Reminders on the iPhone is the location-based thing. So, I take the train to work, which in Atlanta is sort of like winning the lottery to be able to take the train to work. And there are things that I know I need to do as soon as I get to the station near my house, but I know I'm going to forget them because — and it turns out there's research about this, and I write about this in the book — that changing physical environment, affects what you're able to remember. The thoughts that you're having on one room can just disappear when you go to the next room and things like that. And it's not some magical problem. The problem is that your body, your whole cognitive system, is using your environment as a partner in the way that it is making thoughts and thinking through things and remembering things. So, anyway, I can set it so that it's going to remind me of something as soon as I get to the train station. And sure enough, every damn time, it turns out I have forgotten the thing. And I'm thankful that I had told my phone to remind me when I got to the train station. But that's helpful because it's variable. I never know exactly when I'm going to get there when I set the reminder. So, there's things like that I have to do, and I'm in it and it still feels like I'm treading water most of the time, but at least I'm not drowning. And I have other things I do too, but that's just an example of one of those things I've had to do. Other things like routines, where I put my keys, where I put my wallet, where I put my badge for work, I have to do it exactly the same way every day, and if I don't, or if I do this thing where — and again, this is an embodied cognition thing that I understand better now because of that way of thinking — if for some reason, I have some other object in my hand on the way out the door — and this is probably true for a lot of people — like if I've got a letter, I'm trying to mail or something, or especially if it's in any way the shape of another object that I always carry, I'll often forget the thing that I'm always carrying because my body is just sort of halfway paying attention and just assume it's like, “Oh, I've got everything.” Right? So, there's leaks that can happen, but I'm always trying to plug them. Jorge: One of the benefits that we've gained from having these digital things in our lives is that they can augment that relationship between the person and the environment in ways that give us perhaps a little more control and that make it possible for us to suit it better to our needs. Would that be fair? Andrew: Yeah, absolutely. And it's that augmentation again, the thinking around cybernetics, the original work was very much about, right? Which was, let's not create this whole separate alien thing. Like this is all environment, it's all human. So, let's use it to supplement. And even in AI circles, that's one of the big — I don't want to say tension points, but one of the big dichotomies — I guess is it's sort of the school of thought of, well, let's replace certain kinds of human labor using AI or certain human activities or behaviors or whatever versus let's use it to supplement humans and humans supplement it in this more symbiotic kind of a relationship. So, I think, I think that theme, that augmentation theme, I mean, even Steve jobs, right? The bicycle for the mind. I mean, this was, and I think he borrowed a lot of this thinking from… Sorry, his name is escaping me, but the mother of all demos, you know? Jorge: Doug Englebart? Andrew: Yeah. So, this idea of augmenting human needs with technology in this way, it's got a long tradition. But the devil's in the details, right? It's as to how, how do we arrange those things? How do we make them really good for us? You know, rather than things that somehow turn against us, or other people can turn against us. Jorge: Well, thank you. I want to thank you for your work and for helping us be more aware of those relationships. And thank you for being on the show. Where can folks follow up with you? Andrew: I'm online; andrewhinton.com is just sort of my home site and it's got the ways to ping me. There's a contact form, all that stuff, and links to my book, which people are still apparently buying it, because I still get a little check every now and then. So, I'm super happy to know that. I'm starting to feel self-conscious about, about some of the content cause it's getting a little old. But I feel that hopefully the principles are still stable. So contextbook.com is the home site for that. So, you can find me either one of those ways. Jorge: Fantastic, and I will include both of those in the show notes. Thank you so much for being on the show, Andrew. Andrew: Thanks, Jorge. This is great. It was great to catch up and an honor to be on your show.

This is the 6th annual episode with Barbara. Andrew and Barbara talk about making change. The challenges in trying to notice the end before feels like it has gone too far past us. The talk about the last year and the grand changes that are coming for both of them in 2020.  They also recorded a bonus for the Patreon on how to tell if something is fate or not. You can get access to that and all the great bonus material by signing up over here.  You can catch all the previous episodes here on my website. Or look up episodes 22, 44, 58, 72, and 90 where you listen to your podcast.  Think about how much you've enjoyed the podcast and how many episodes you listened to, and consider if it is time to support the Patreon You can do so here. If you want more of this in your life you can subscribe by RSS , iTunes, Stitcher, or email. You can find Barbara through her website here.  Thanks for joining the conversation. Please share the podcast to help us grow and change the world.  Andrew You can book time with Andrew through his site here.  Transcript ANDREW: [00:00:02] Welcome to another episode of The Hermit's Lamp podcast. This week I am catching up with Barbara Moore just before the end of the year for our annual podcast episode where we check in on what's going on, what's changed, and, [00:00:17] you know, talk a lot about the shifting perspectives in our spiritual lives and practices and so on. You know, it's hard to imagine people don't know who you are, Barbara, certainly anyone in the tarot world, but for those who don't, who are you? [00:00:32] BARBARA: Oh, I forgot about this part of the interview. Yes. My name is Barbara Moore. I've been playing with tarot for, I don't know, maybe 30 years now. I'm probably best known for [00:00:47] a couple of things: one, creating tarot decks and writing books to go with them, and a few stand alone books as well, and I'm also the tarot acquisitions editor for Llewellyn, and I sometimes do some work for Lo Scarabeo as well. [00:01:02] And I teach here and there. ANDREW: Awesome. BARBARA: Yeah. ANDREW: So, I mean, I guess, you know, one of the things that I wanted to talk about with you was, it seems like [00:01:17] for me, everything's changed, you know, since our last podcast, I have gotten divorced, and my ex has moved out. I had a fire that burned down my store, and I have since reopened and, you know, opened a studio [00:01:32] to see clients out of and opened a new store. And, so for me, it's been a massive year of change, you know, perhaps unsurprisingly, if you follow the tarot birth card, year card business, as my death card just ended [00:01:47] at the beginning of the month, but it's also been a year of or at least a time of change for you too, right? Like you're also, maybe not quite where I am on the other side of it, but really sort of [00:02:02] setting in motion a bunch of change for yourself as well. Right? BARBARA: [00:02:17] That is absolutely true. The cycle of change, I would say it started back in 2016, and it has ushered in a period of challenge and becoming stronger and having things ripped away to find out what really matters, [00:02:33] and, as your listeners, if they've been listening to our conversations know, that two years ago, I moved to California, my wife and I moved to California, and we've been having a great adventure as [00:02:48] well as a lot of challenges and struggles. And we have recently come to the conclusion that this has been a really fun adventure, and we're grateful that we had it, but it's time for the adventure to be over, and so we [00:03:03] will be moving sometime this summer. So that is a really big change that we can talk about. It's not like having a store burn down or having a divorce, a relationship, a marriage end, [00:03:20] but our relationship also has gone through some struggles, luckily came out the other end stronger and better, richer and deeper, but it's still, we're both like two different people now, so it's [00:03:35] almost like a new relationship because we're learning to be together in new ways. ANDREW: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Well, you know and one of the . . . one of the things that people always say is something like what you said, whenever they start talking with [00:03:50] their own things, like, it's not as bad as your situation or whatever, right? And, I mean, on the one hand, yeah, maybe, right, like I get that, but also I think it's . . . I think it's really real, [00:04:05] how difficult struggle is for people, right? And you know, I mean there is tragedy and loss and people dying and all, you know, all those kinds of things that you know, no joke are very difficult. Right? [00:04:21] But I think that it's really important to not diminish our own struggles too, especially in the face of that. Right? Like it's, there's no scale. There's no competition, you know? And maybe other people [00:04:36] feel differently, if they're in positions like mine, but I actually feel like just relating around stuff is so much better than when it starts to kind of slide into, you know, areas where it's like, [00:04:51] well, it's not as bad as your life, but you know, whatever. It's like, yeah, that doesn't feel so great. And now I feel like there's a sort of other element to it, that isn't, doesn't need to be there, you know? BARBARA: Like a competition [00:05:06] or something. ANDREW: Yeah, a competition, or a sense of apology, you know? I mean, I feel like if, if I know somebody well enough to talk about my life and their life, then we're on the same ground, right, you know? And everybody, I think [00:05:21] everybody understands that some things are more difficult than others, from a certain perspective, you know, but, but either way, I think it's . . . I think it's important to sort of just keep that relationship open, you know, and not, [00:05:37] I don't know, create that distance that sometimes comes with that for me. BARBARA: Yeah, yeah, that's a really interesting point. Like, how did we, as a people start doing that, because it really is a habit and I feel like it's a little bit like social [00:05:52] behavior niceties, because when I'm not talking publicly, like on a podcast, I would talk about what I went through in terms of now that I'm through it and I can see the other [00:06:07] side when I look back on it, it was so hard I don't even know how I got up every day. ANDREW: Yeah. BARBARA: You know, so to say to you, "Oh, it wasn't so bad." When, if I talk to you privately, I would be like, "Oh my God, I don't know how I did that," you know . . . so, you were right. We [00:06:22] are on equal terms here. It's been hard. ANDREW: Yeah, you know, and life is difficult, right? You know, I mean not all the time. Luckily there's great things, you know? I mean, one of the things that was interesting was being at the tail end of the summer, [00:06:37] and I was checking in with the kids, just before they went back to school this year, and I'm like, “How was your summer?” Right? And they were, they both gave it like rave reviews. And they were like, “Well, how was your summer, Dad?" And I was like, I'm like, you know, [00:06:52] “I don't give it an 8 a 10, and like those two missing points are cause like, relaunching the store during the summer was a ton of work and very stressful, you know? And like, just dealing with all the stuff that came with that was very stressful.” [00:07:07] And I was like, “Man, I'm doing pretty good at having a good time despite all this, you know, horrible stuff that's gone on and all the stress that comes with it,” right? You know?  But that also doesn't mean that there weren't days where I was like, “Oh my God, I have no idea, is that just [00:07:22] it, is this, you know, am I done having a store, is this over? Is that over?” You know, it's . . . Yeah, it's complicated when we lose that direction, right? I think it's . . . I think it's been challenging. And I think it's been a long time that you've been [00:07:38] sort of wrestling with this sense of direction, you know. BARBARA: Mm-hmm. ANDREW: I'm thinking about . . . We talked somewhere in one of the past episodes about, probably before you moved out there, right? When I did that impossible reading for you, and you were like, “Oh, yeah, I'm [00:07:53] going to do all these things now,” you know? It's been, it's been a quite a while in some ways, I think, right? BARBARA: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Yeah, I have, especially in terms of my tarot . . . well, in a lot of areas in my life, but in terms of my tarot career, [00:08:08] I have felt really lost. So, so lost and I . . . and there are a lot of elements to that. One, I should have wrote notes. [00:08:23] One thing that changed is I wasn't working with tarot for myself. Well, I wasn't reading for other people either. I quit doing that a while ago for, mostly because I didn't feel like I had enough [00:08:38] to bring, to give, I wasn't, my cup wasn't full. I couldn't fill anyone else's cup and I wasn't working with the cards for myself. So, starting in January, I started pulling a card a day, because that's like, what you tell beginners [00:08:53] to start and I would do it and I'd mark it in my daily journal and, but, and never did anything with them and so finally, but it was enough. I mean, I had, all I had energy to do was that. [00:09:08] And that was a start. I was touching my cards again and that mattered. Then when things started, mmm, taking an upturn, I added something like, "Okay, I want this daily draw to do [00:09:23] something more than just get marked down in my book and mean nothing, but use ink," and so I decided to start pulling two cards a day. And making them mean something. So the first card was [00:09:38] some energy that I was going to find myself into that day, you know, whether it was something that happened or my added something, just, just the energy of the day, something, and then with an eye to improving myself, [00:09:53] or becoming the person I want to be, more than I am. I pulled another card: "How can I interact with this energy?" To do that. And that has been super helpful. [00:10:08] That's made a big difference and made things more active for me in terms of like, doing something with the cards. So, you know, that's just a little thing but it's made a big, big difference. [ping from phone] I am so sorry about [00:10:24] . . . ANDREW: Well, that's okay. BARBARA: And I also had been thinking a lot about, like, I had been questioning the whole doing readings thing. Right? What do we do readings [00:10:39] for? What's the purpose? Oh, these mundane readings about our everyday problems. How boring is that? Or is that even the right thing to do? I mean, just very angsty, kind of pointless, spinning my wheels questioning, [00:10:54] and then, you know, when I was thinking about, we were going to talk, and I'd thought I'd like to talk about that, and I had a kind of a revelation. I'm not sure if it's going to stick, but it's a thought, that because I [00:11:09] want to do readings about different things, or in different ways, or with a different focus. I had to denigrate those readings, for some reason, you know, I think maybe it's human nature sometimes to make ourself feel better and more confident, we have to put [00:11:24] down something else for whatever reason. And so, even just that thought made me feel a lot better about things like, "Oh, well, just because I don't want to do that and just because I want to do this, [00:11:40] that doesn't mean the other is bad. I don't have . . ." You know? I mean, does that make any sense? ANDREW: I do. BARBARA: Yeah. ANDREW: Yeah, you know, maybe a year, two years ago, [00:11:55] I was sitting during my, you know, not daily draw, but regular draws, and I was like, writing in my journal, and I found myself writing something like, "Well, when I'm free, blah blah blah [00:12:10] blah blah," right? BARBARA: Mm-hmm. ANDREW: And, and I, for whatever reason, on that day, as opposed to the various other days when I'd written something similar, I stopped and I looked at it. And I was like, [00:12:25] “Well, when is that going to be? And what does that look like?” Right? And I'm like, you know, at the time I was in an open relationship without a huge amount of limits on it. I mean some, but not, you know, I'm like, it's pretty darn free, I'm like, [00:12:40] you own your own store and you work for yourself. Like, what, what is it that other people are defining for you or that are limiting for you, right? You know? And the answer became pretty clear that it was very [00:12:55] little, right? Not nothing. But very little, right? I still have to pay taxes, I still have to, you know, whatever, there are certain things, but . . . And, I spent a lot of time sort of chewing on that for a while and realizing how [00:13:10] how often, movement, change, you know, these ideas were sort of created on continuing to define myself in relationship to other things [00:13:25] that actually had no sway or real say over my life, right? You know, I mean if I, if I decided, you know, I mean, I'm a, I'm a very fortune-teller-oriented card reader, but if I decided that I had enough of [00:13:40] that, and all I wanted to do was psychological readings, I could just change my website and filter people based on that and inform them, when they tried to book that, you know, this was the process going forward and that would be it. Like there's, there wasn't a lot of [00:13:55] things that prevented me from the various things that I was sort of waiting to become free enough to do. And so, since then I've spent a lot of time keeping my, keeping my definition and directions [00:14:10] in check, right? Like really looking at them, and saying, “Okay, am I, am I defining this relationally? Am I in relationship with some idea that I'm not actually interested in or don't want to live by," and so on, you know, and it's, [00:14:25] it's not always easy, but I think it's really helpful. Right? So look at those pieces and say, you know, your practice has no bearing on day-to-day type questions, right? Your practice doesn't need to have any relationship to the way I read or other people read [00:14:40] or the, you know, the whims of the tarot community and, you know, this year, next year, or 10 years from now, you know. BARBARA: Yep. Yeah, knowing [00:14:55] what you want, cleanly, and being realistic about it, and not just finding excuses, that takes a lot of self-reflection and honesty, [00:15:10] but will really make a big difference.  ANDREW: Mm-hmm. BARBARA: In how you feel about your life in this moment. ANDREW: So, how do you, how do you generate that self-reflection? [00:15:25] You're talking about tarot, as one part, your tarot practice this year. How else do you talk--how else do you figure out? Because andone of the things that I think is--yeah, it's a bit of a theme, I think, with some episodes, it comes [00:15:40] up in various places, but this idea of like, how do you know when you're done? Right? How do you know when enough's enough? How do you notice that change, mark that change? You know? And so on, right? BARBARA: Yeah. [00:15:55] And, hmmm . . . Like, if we could come up with a format, a step-by-step format, on how to get yourself to that spot, we could probably be millionaires. Because everyone wants to know that, I [00:16:10] think. Because, at least for me, I have not come up with a method that, like, walks me to the spot where I can step over the line out of, you know, the mists of confusion into clarity. [00:16:26] I don't have that. For me, it has been, it has felt like waking up. ANDREW: Mmm. BARBARA: Like, like I've been either asleep or underwater [00:16:41] or walking through Jello or something. And I don't realize it at the time for that. I mean, I know I don't feel right, I know I feel confused and unhappy, no energy, but [00:16:56] I don't really fully understand that state of being asleep or underwater until I start coming out of it. And then I see it. And then I start thinking, [00:17:12] I don't have to be that way anymore.  ANDREW: Mmm. BARBARA: And so, when I can, it's like this pivotal point, this space where, like, a liminal space between what has been going on and what could be and [00:17:27] I have this opportunity to keep behaving the way I had been or changing the behavior. But before that, I don't know that I could have changed the behavior. I don't know that I was in a place where I could have [00:17:42] done that. ANDREW: Mm-hmm. BARBARA: So, for me, it's this point where . . . Or at least how it feels for me right now, is, I can't wait to get started on the next phase and [00:17:57] I haven't had that excitement, energy, or enthusiasm in two years. So how . . . But how do I know? It's, it's, it's vague. I don't have . . . well, maybe as we keep talking, I'll think of more concrete things. ANDREW: Uh-huh. BARBARA: But, to start the conversation, [00:18:13] it, that's what it feels like for me. What's that feel like for you? ANDREW: I mean, lately, so like in the last year, I've been noticing [00:18:29] where I'm not putting energy, that I officially think that I'm putting energy right? Where do I feel a difference between, you [00:18:44] know, something that I'm excited about, you know? It doesn't, it doesn't make it difficult for me. It's not difficult for me to show up and make art in my studio. You know, making art is great. I mean, [00:18:59] it requires, it requires having some time, you know, and it requires, you know, ideally not having sick kids at home or whatever, like certain things, but it's pretty easy to make that commitment. [00:19:15] You know, I've been sort of in and out of relationship in terms of polyamory this year a bit, and one of the things that I noticed around some of that was, where I was [00:19:30] willing to put in a certain kind of effort or show up in a certain way in one situation, but not in another. You know, and to me, that starts to be like, okay, so if I'm, if I'm willing to make the extra time or [00:19:46] hang out with them if they're sick or, you know, whatever, but with somebody else, I'm not feeling that as much, then those kinds of decisions start to be little flags for me. It's like, not necessarily that it's the end, but it's, something needs to change there, right? Or something has changed [00:20:01] there, and I need to sort of look at that. Right? And I think that, I don't know that we ever notice the moment, right? Like I don't know if there's a, you know, barring like, really, you know: And I said something and then they smack me in the face and I said [00:20:16] "We're done," like, you know, unless it's, like, ridiculous and dramatic, which is, you know, never really my life. I don't think that we ever notice explicitly those moments. I think that we notice, we can notice [00:20:31] when we're wobbling along that line, and then we can sort of reflect and see what's coming. Or what makes sense from that point, you know? BARBARA: Right. Yes. Yeah. Yes, you're right. It's, it is hard [00:20:46] in these things to pick a point, as you said, and for most of it's probably more like a process, you know, that it takes some time and, but, sometimes even within that process you can find like little mini points, you know, [00:21:01] like, I remember, I remember admitting to myself . . . Because we'd already started talking about how California wasn't right for us. ANDREW: Uh-huh. BARBARA: And, so, the next question was, where do we go next? ANDREW: [00:21:16] Mm-hmm. Is the answer Tijuana? BARBARA: The answer is not Tijuana. ANDREW: Okay. BARBARA: I found myself not being super excited about thinking about where to go next.  ANDREW: Mm-hmm. BARBARA: I knew I didn't want to be here. Didn't know where I want [00:21:31] to go So, I kind of made myself think about that, and in that moment, I had this realization that hit me very hard: I want to go home. [00:21:47] And that was hard to admit, and hard to feel, and hard to know, because I knew it wasn't going to fly for us, for us, my marriage, my, our family, our little, just the two of us were a family. [00:22:04] Because we didn't want the winters. We . . . The winters in Minnesota are just too, too, too much and we're not ready for that. But just knowing that, one of the things I learned during this adventure is my family [00:22:19] and my Minnesota friends are very important to me, like more important to me than I knew before I left. ANDREW: Hmm. BARBARA: And so that little, and that, so that was a mini, like, you know, moment. [00:22:35] And then, like, when I actually told Dylan that, that was another moment, because it was scary to say that, you know, for me, because it was like, I can't believe I'm gonna say this. Because one fear was, what if she says, “Okay, let's go [00:22:50] home,” and then I'm stuck in Minnesota winter again! But anyways, so, yeah, these little mini moments of, you know, revelation. Oh, and another thing that I have noticed. I don't know if you've had this too. But now that I feel like [00:23:05] I'm being more honest with myself, that we're on, we have some more clear direction on what the future is going to look like, synchronicities are happening.  Like, I can barely like, take a breath without something, like [00:23:20] helping me feel like I'm on the right path. You know, and I've heard people talk about that, like well, if you're looking for it, of course, you're going to find it. You know, like cynics might say that. And other people might say, [00:23:35] “Well, yeah, that's a sign that you're on the right path.” I don't know if I'd quite go that far, because I'm not sure what I believe about the right path thing. ANDREW: Mm-hmm.  BARBARA: Fate and destiny, that's going to be a focus of study this coming year. I'm very excited about it. ANDREW: [00:23:50] Well, you know, it's funny. I have those as listed, at the top of my list of things I want to follow up on in this conversation: agency, force, death, destiny, and free will. So we can, [00:24:05] we can set some explorations on it in this conversation and then, you know, a year from now we can report back as to where it's gotten. So yeah. BARBARA: Absolutely. Totally. Yes, right. So synchronicities, you know, [00:24:20] they always, I find them comforting, and encouraging, so whether they're actually real or not, it doesn't matter to me right now. I'm taking my comfort where I can get it. It's helping. ANDREW: So, and I think that, [00:24:35] first of all, I think, you know, as the song says, you know, whatever gets you through the night. Like, I think that finding comfort where we can is always, you know, as long as it's not too self-destructive. [00:24:51] I think it's always a great move, right? I think that, you know, this year of sort of moving through the fire and doing that has definitely been a year of more indulging- and comfort-orientated behavior [00:25:07] than is usual for me. And I'm just like, you know what? Life is fricking hard right now, so I'm not going to worry about that too much. And I'm just going to, you know, lean into that wherever and whenever I need to, you know, so there's been [00:25:22] more naps, more ice cream, and more TV this year than would normally be a thing for me, because sometimes that, you know, for me anyway, that's part of getting through these times, right?  BARBARA: Mm-hmm. ANDREW: I think that, you know, [00:25:38] so, synchronicities are a thing that I am very interested in, especially because it's often touted as the explanation of how tarot works, also, right. You shuffle the cards and the universe [00:25:54] through synchronicity arranges them in a way that is meaningful. And, you know, it's kind of, it's kind of fine and fun as an answer unless you try and like [00:26:09] say, “What does synchronicity mean? How exactly does that function? And you know, is there anything behind that?” And then all of a sudden you just like slide into utter chaos of inexplicable mystery, right? And I think that that's fine. I have, for me, I'm [00:26:24] like, you know, mystery is the answer, right? I'm like, tarot runs on mystery. That's all we need to know about it. BARBARA: Right. ANDREW: Exactly, exactly, right? But, so, I think [00:26:39] that synchronicity is, you know, lots of people are really into numerology, and, you know, they're like . . . I've, you know, people come for readings, like, "I've been seeing lots of triple eight lately, or triple this, or triple . . ." [00:26:54] And I'm always like, "Well, that's cool. What does it mean?" And you know, it . . . And then they'll often say a thing followed by the question, which is usually, “So when is that going to manifest?” Right? [00:27:09] And so, you know, and I don't mean this to make fun of people, like I'm not at all, right? Like absolutely, there are those moments where like, “Oh, there's a sign. Okay, where's the, where's the product?” Right? “Where's, where's the actual outcome of that?” So, [00:27:24] sort of more and more over time, I've been, I've been looking at what it is that I believe, how I approach things, and thinking about . . . [00:27:39] You know, people always ask me, like, well, so “What's the, what's the astrology in the Orisha tradition?” Right? “What's the astrology in your Orisha practice?” And I'm like, there is none, it doesn't exist. Right? It's not a part of it at all. There's no, no consideration [00:27:54] given to it in any real sense. There, there is, notions around times of day, a bit, depending on what we're talking about, and if you practice in a syncretized kind [00:28:09] of way with the saints, then maybe certain Orishas have their day, right? You know,  where many people celebrate them extra, but there is no astrology. And, and I've been noticing the sort [00:28:24] of growing tension for me between, like, astrology, which I stopped reading this year, and stepped away from and decided that I was going to actively not engage any more, and [00:28:39] the way in which I was feeling stressed and tense around that stuff some, and the fact that it's not actually a part of my religious practice at all. Right? And I'm kind of the same with, like, some of the [00:28:54] synchronicity stuff, you know? There have been times in my life where I was very intense on that kind of stuff and, you know, thought about it and wrote about it, had a bunch of experiences with it. And now there's [00:29:09] basically only one symbol from the universe that I'm interested in. Well, there's a couple. One, but the synchronous thing, or the thing that I think fits this way, is if I find a playing card on the street, [00:29:24] then for me, that's a message, and I will interpret the card based on my knowledge of reading them and we'll go from there. Right? The other thing that is synchronous, you know, from a certain perspective, but I see it as more directly as a message [00:29:39] from spirit, which kind of has a different definition in my mind. So, like, three months ago, maybe a little less, I broke up [00:29:54] with someone that I'd been with for a long time. We decided to change the nature of our relationship. And it was very kind and very honest. And you know, and the relationship has changed into [00:30:10] a really good friendship, which is lovely. But about two days after I . . .  that happened, I found a robin's nest on the ground with three dead eggs in it like broken eggs, right? And I was [00:30:25] like, everyone's like, “Oh, that's just so . . .” I'm like “No, this is just sad and unpleasant,” right? You know? And I was just like, yeah, that's, that's, that's definitely acknowledging like the depth of the disruption that's happened here. And, [00:30:40] and so, you know, I took that, I picked up the nest, and I saved it, and you know, it's around still. And, and then, maybe three weeks ago, two weeks ago, [00:30:55] I was walking through this laneway that I identify with the spirit that I work with a lot. And there was a pigeon on, like sort of flopping around a bit, with this, what looked like a branch [00:31:10] wrapped around its neck, and I'm like, "Oh, how am I going to free this poor bird? Is it going to let me get close enough to liberate it?" And as I got a little closer, the bird, I realized, was actually holding onto the branch. It was not stuck by it. [00:31:25] And it flew up and it flew directly up over my head, circled maybe like five feet above my head, three times, and literally dropped the branch into my hands. BARBARA: No way! ANDREW: And I was like, "Perfect, now [00:31:40] there's a new nest. Now I'm going to build something new. Now I've moved on, internally, I've moved on," right? BARBARA: Ohhhh . . . ANDREW: So to me, these are events that I take as as close to synchronous as people usually mean by that, right? [00:31:55] You know, direct message from somewhere else, right? And to me, they are clear, and concrete, and so on, in a way that, you know, not to diminish anybody else's experience, but [00:32:10] that those other kinds of symbols, I'm not sure what they mean, right? At least in my life, you know? And so, yeah, but also, you know there have been plenty of times in my life, where I'm like, [00:32:25] "Oh, yeah, I saw that, I saw that number again. I'm on the right path. I'm on the right path," you know? And I think that that's fair too, I think I just have a different relationship to it now, and I have a different set of expectations maybe. So. BARBARA: [00:32:40] Yeah. Okay, great. It all makes sense. And I love the story about the pigeon. Oh my God, I'm still stuck on that. Anyways, yeah. So, synchronicity, like levels of synchronicity, or is it [00:32:55] synchronicity, or is it a message from the divine, are they two different things? Those are really great questions. I think I agree with you. I think there is a difference between them. And, like synchronicity, I mean, I think the actual definition of it is like two [00:33:11] disconnected things that seem to have a connection. And I think that we humans are the ones who give that connection or give that meaning, so, so maybe what, why it's comforting to me is because if I [00:33:26] see something that brings to mind something else that's connected with what I'm doing at the time, or going through or thinking about, it just helps remind me that that's where my attention is.  ANDREW: Mm-hmm. BARBARA: So, you know, maybe it's just this, a [00:33:41] way of like stoking the fire, like, yes, this is what my intention is. This is what I want to think about. You know, but on a kind of more subtle level or something. And then, you know, messages from the divine, then, I think, are kind of different. [00:33:57] You mentioned finding the cards, playing cards, specifically playing cards on the street is pretty funny. It reminds me of . . . Dylan has something that she has always called parking lot divination, and she started it when she was [00:34:12] a book cover designer at Llewellyn. Now, as you could imagine, the trash cans, the big garbage bins outside of Llewellyn, sometimes would have cards in them, for, you know, if a package had been damaged or whatever. [00:34:27] And so, sometimes, I guess, they would blow around and she would always walk around the building, you know, for exercise every day. And so sometimes she would come across these random cards on the, you know, and she would always pick them up and they would mean, she would read them as [00:34:42] a divination, and she still does that to this day, and she finds a surprising number of playing cards just out and about in the streets. It's very strange. So, so yeah.  ANDREW: They're definitely around. BARBARA: Yeah.  ANDREW: The other thing [00:34:57] that's funny is I almost never find a whole deck. A couple times I have. Yeah, and often I'll find them clustered for periods of time, you know, like I will find [00:35:12] different, different cards in different places for a couple months, and then I'll find nothing for six months. BARBARA: Mm-hmm. ANDREW: And then I'll start finding them again, which is also, to me, interesting. Yeah. BARBARA: Huh. I have another kind of [00:35:27] a symbol story, and you know, does it mean something? Or does it mean nothing? Or did I give it meaning or whatever? That . . . it's a story that I wanted to tell you, you know, any, at some point today, anyways . . . ANDREW: Yeah. BARBARA: Cause it's very, it was very significant [00:35:42] to me. So, So, okay. How to tell the story? Okay. So, Dylan is not going to be here at Christmas. She's actually flying back to Minnesota for Christmas. I'm going to be [00:35:57] here alone, which is great because I have a whole, you know, personal retreat planned and ritual, and all kinds of crazy great stuff, but because of that, we did our little personal celebration on Sunday. And, [00:36:12] but we had agreed on no presents because of reasons. And, but she said, "But, I do have one present that I actually started the process for it a few months ago. So, there'll be [00:36:27] the one present." I'm like, “Okay, I can, I can let you give me a present, no problem.” ANDREW: Uh-huh. BARBARA: And so, well, so the back story that you need to know to understand the present [00:36:42] is: When we got married, she gave me a necklace, and it suited me perfectly, it was meaningful and beautiful and we both loved it. And it was just, it was [00:36:57] like a symbol, one of the many symbols of us.  ANDREW: Uh-huh. BARBARA: And in May, we were, we were out at the coast. I was taking a watercolor class, and we'd gone together, and I brought the necklace but I didn't, [00:37:12] I don't sleep in it. So I, you know, just take it off, and I, you know, put it somewhere, then . . . Long story short, it got left in the hotel, and when we called the hotel, they're like, “No, it's not in the room.” You know? So, [00:37:27] I mourned that necklace. I cried, it felt, it felt symbolic. It felt like “Oh my God, our marriage is,” you know? It's, it just made me so sad because [00:37:42] things had been hard, we're working through some things, and I just took it as this horrible, horrible omen, and it just broke my heart. And the company, [00:37:57] we couldn't find, it looks like the company didn't make the necklace anymore, so I couldn't even get a replacement, and it was just horrible, horrible. Well, so Christmas comes, present time. She gives me a . . . Okay. So she brings me a card and a little, little present and I opened the card and I start [00:38:12] reading it and I start bawling because she's written some stuff that is breaking my heart in a good way. And she's like, “Well, since you're crying, hold on, we'll just keep going.” And she goes in the other room and brings out a different package [00:38:27] and I start opening it. And it's wrapped in this kind of a gift baggy thing that we've had for years and we only use it for a very special gift. And . . .  ANDREW: That's really sweet. BARBARA: It [00:38:42] is, it is, we haven't used it in a number of years because you know, it hasn't been like that. And so, she, I start opening it. And then inside it is a bag from Arthur's Jewelers, Arthur's Jewelers [00:38:57] is the Jewelers in St. Paul where we got like our wedding rings from, and if we ever get like actual real jewelry, which we don't have a lot of, but we get it from them, and as I saw the bag and I'm like, she got me jewelry, what? And, and, then all of a sudden [00:39:12] I knew what was in that bag and I have never ripped the package open so fast in my life, and it was the necklace. And I saw it, and I have, I cried like my [00:39:27] soul was, I don't know what was going on. But I've only cried like that like maybe three times in my life, and it felt like a symbol, you know, like a sign like, okay, like, you lost [00:39:42] it. You guys were in the like, the three days of death or the three days after death, like, you know, in the bowels of hell fighting the demon, and now you're done, and now you, you know, you have the same, it's a new necklace, but it's the same necklace. It, [00:39:57] so, it's kind of like our marriage. It's the same marriage, but it's a new marriage and it was hard won. And until I lost it, I didn't realize how much it meant to me, and, you know, so, [00:40:12] I felt like the necklace, was always symbolic, the loss of it was symbolic, the reacquiring of it was symbolic. So that's another thing entirely, you know, was that divine? Was that something we, [00:40:27] that . . . I don't know. How did that happen? ANDREW: Mm-hmm. Yeah, I mean, I think that, I think that the answer is probably always really complex, right? You know, I mean, people, [00:40:43] you know, people talk about like, the fire, right? Me having the fire. They're like, “Well, you know, maybe it happened for a reason so you could whatever.” And I'm always like, "I don't, I don't buy that answer at all.” Right? I mean, you know, that [00:40:58] said, right? I think that, like many things, I hold sort of contradictory ideas about it, right? And in myself, they seem fine to be contradictory, right?  I know that, [00:41:13] you know, in some ways, that the fire must have been a part of my destiny, in some sense, because of the advice of the Orishas in the time around it, right? You know, we have this [00:41:29] kind of source of negativity, which is Otonowa, which means that which we brought with you from heaven, right? And sometimes it means, sometimes it means that literally. Maybe sometimes [00:41:44] it stands for things that just can't be changed and we have to work through in one way or another, but, you know, this was part of my advice from the Orishas around that time. So, I'm like, well, fair enough, something was going on there, in that regard. [00:41:59] But also like, the idea that, you know, I talked about this, I think in the last episode too with Chiron Armand, you know, the idea that we are always progressing towards other things, or better things, and [00:42:14] so on. I don't necessarily believe that, either, right? I think that, you know, we can look at people's lives and see that that doesn't happen, sometimes, right? Sometimes it does. Sometimes it doesn't. And the reasons for that are, [00:42:29] you know, complex and, you know, and always a bit obscure as well. Right? Why does, why does one experience sort of break a person in a way that they don't recover from? And why does it, you know, [00:42:44] you know, just deeply bruise or wound or maybe not even apparently sort of injure another person, right? You know, there's such a diversity amongst us all and why that is the case, right? But for me, I look at [00:42:59] these situations and I think that it becomes a question of what do we, what do, you know, there's, if we want to call it fate or whatever, those, those experiences that are beyond our apparent control, right? [00:43:14] Or that are the unexpected byproduct of decisions that we have made, maybe in the case of a relationship, that might sort of give the appearance of fate, and might coincide with synchronicities, right? That moment when you lost the necklace and it cued you to, [00:43:29] you know, all of the bigger changes that were going on, right? And then there's the question of what do we do with it? Right? You know? And I think that that is also, you know, such a big distinction, [00:43:44] right? You know? And like, me ending up in the situation that I'm in now, which is in many ways more ideal than the situation I was in with the store. You know? Or where the store was at, at the time of the fire. You know, on the one hand, [00:43:59] yeah, that's, it's great that it's, that it's sort of working out really well, but also there's a, there's a lot of it that's really, was already in my two year plan. You [00:44:14] know? Like I was already thinking about these ideas and working on them. And so, some of this transformation, you know, I'm just going to take credit for, by saying, you know, like look, I had these ideas that because of the [00:44:31] concreteness of having the store were going to take me a long time to make shift, that in some ways the fire basically just liquidated my assets into cash and allowed me to transform it, you know, [00:44:46] and applying it towards those plans. You know? There's that, that sort of balance of agency, free will, and the intersection of fate, right? Because I think that what we, what we do when things happen is, [00:45:02] you know, is important, and makes a big difference in that, you know? And I think that the more we cultivate a capacity to, you know, to make good decisions during those times, [00:45:17] you know, the better that can go and so on, right? So, anyway, I don't know, I don't know if that makes any sense at all. But . . . BARBARA: Oh, yeah. Well, as you say, these things get confusing to talk about, so, yeah, I think yeah, insofar [00:45:32] as it can make sense, it totally makes sense. And, kind of, almost kind of connected with that is, you know, this, the idea [00:45:47] of like judging something as good or bad. Okay. It's, and it's kind of connected with the idea, “Oh, it happened for a reason.” Well, I mean first of all, almost everything does happen for a reason because cause and effect exists. And you know, so there was a reason, [00:46:02] but I know people are talking about a grander reason then electrical faultiness or whatever. So, things happen for a reason, maybe, you know, they . . . Things happen, [00:46:17] is what what it is, and trying to judge whether they're good or bad. I mean, we want to do that because that's what we do because we're binary beings, I guess, you know like, “Oh, that's good. That's bad.” I mean, people always say [00:46:32] what they think, but you can't always tell if something's actually good or bad in the long run until time has passed, because there have been things that I went through that I wouldn't want to go through again, [00:46:47] but I'm glad they happened, because then XYZ happened, not saying it happened for a reason, you know, like because it didn't magically do anything. It also ties kind of into what you're saying, your own agency and own preparedness, [00:47:02] your own, you know, strength of will, whatever you want to say, you know, you can bring that to it and turn things around.  But it's also one of the things that bothered me, puzzled me about these, you know, more everyday readings, you know, like, people are like, “Well, [00:47:17] you know, I'm thinking of taking this job. Should I take this job?” And you know, I mean, I don't know about you, but like if I'm looking into the future, I'm not real comfortable looking more than six months out. I just don't. [00:47:32] And you know, so if I'm, you know, do a reading and it's like, well, yeah, the job says this, this, and this, and maybe some things they consider not good and then they don't take it. But if they took it, then it would [00:47:47] have led to XYZ. So, you know, just, we don't always know. We think we know what we want in the short term. We think we know what our goals are. Oh, I want to manifest this, I want to do this, if the cards say it's all going to be positive. [00:48:02] I think we lose something in that, because not everything we do has to be completely positive or successful to be worthwhile or to be part of a larger journey that might be more worthwhile. ANDREW: Right. BARBARA: Does that make sense? ANDREW: It does. [00:48:17] I mean, I think that, I think that the question of like, you know, one of the questions that I've been thinking about for a while, specifically around, you know, my work life, is like, what's enough? Right? [00:48:32] At what point, at what point am I successful enough? I mean, to put it in really basic terms, at what point am I making enough money? And what, what is it that I would like from going beyond that point? Right? You know? And I think [00:48:47] that, you know, working for yourself is not like kind of getting into a job description position that you like and just sort of like, "perfect, if I just stay in this job till I retire, that's great," because working for yourself doesn't really work that way, and I'm not sure the economy works that way [00:49:02] that much anymore anyway. But you know, but I think that we have these sort of notions of progress, of enlightenment, of, you know, all those kinds of ideas that are, you know, cultural [00:49:17] to capitalism and you know, like cultural to North America and so on, maybe, that, that I think are questionable how helpful they are, right? You know, like, [00:49:32] I don't, I don't know that . . . Like mostly what I'm interested in is making art, making more art, making more art, and doing the things that supports [00:49:47] that, right? And you know, like, I love running the store. I love doing readings for people. But I think that like, the idea of it sort of going anywhere. I'm like, well, I [00:50:02] don't know where, I don't know where it goes, and what the definition of where it goes, and what the grand plan is. I just want to, you know, do my practice, which is, you know, making art and reading cards for people, and just continue to do that. And I think that, you know, [00:50:17] that you're right, that it's hard to say, on a big arc of time, what might be good or what might be difficult. You know, like if we get, if we take a job, maybe it's crummy for six months and then it's great [00:50:32] after that, and so on. But I also feel like the idea of persevering through stuff towards an outcome. I'm really [00:50:47] less and less interested in that these days, you know? If something, if something, if the exchange isn't good in the short term, then I don't, you know, I don't, I'm not really that interested in sort of engaging in that [00:51:02] to get to a theoretically better long-term, you know? And, and I think that, I think a lot of people, especially around relationships, right, sort of work through, try to work through stuff, [00:51:17] you know, to get to . . . Especially newer relationships, right? Like maybe if you've been with somebody for a while as you have been, that, you know, there's a, there's a different math around, like, well, I was involved for this long. [00:51:32] And so now I'm willing to commit a longer stretch of time to working on things.  BARBARA: Right. ANDREW: But, but, I think that for me, I'm like, I'm not that interested in working on very much these days in those kinds of ways, you know, and if something isn't [00:51:47] flowing, I don't have the, I haven't seen the value of spending the resilience and capacity on working hard at stuff that is difficult [00:52:03] towards accomplishing longer term goals without making a change, right? You know, I think about it like Crowley talks about the Strength card or the Lust card in his tarot deck, right? And, and I think [00:52:18] that he draws a distinction in his writing on it, where he says that, you know, lust is not the absence of effort, right? It's not the absence of exertion. It is the absence of noticing the exertion, right? [00:52:33] Or something along those lines, right? And that idea that, you know, if we don't mind the work that we're not going to notice it, right?  BARBARA: Right.  ANDREW: And if we do mind the work, well, then, maybe we need to, maybe that's one of those cues to make a change, right? [00:52:49]  BARBARA: Yeah, that's gorgeous. And if you follow it, like if that's kind of a guideline that you're following for your life right now, as you were saying, then you probably [00:53:04] wouldn't be doing readings on things so much, because if you're like, I'm, I'm going with how things feel now, you are attune enough to yourself to know what you're . . . You know, [00:53:19] so you probably would need less readings because you're paying attention to your energy and how you're feeling and what you're doing and the effort and the payoff. Is that true or not true? ANDREW: That's true. [00:53:35] Trueish. I mean, I think that there are always practical considerations that are difficult, right? You know? [00:53:50] Dealing, dealing with insurance companies after having had a fire. It's like, man, nobody wants to insure you, right? It's like, it's difficult. And so, there are . . . For me, there are always practical questions, [00:54:05] and, you know, questions along the lines of, is there anything that I can do to make this better, to make it happen, especially because I have a very strong practical magical practice, right? You know, so there are those kinds of questions. [00:54:20] But really the question that I ask more often than not, these days, is either something along the lines of like well, should I run my Tarot de Marseilles class in January, or should I run my other course, [00:54:35] right? Like very sort of strategic business kind of things? Or a question, the question I go back to most of the time, is how do I show up fully today? How do [00:54:50] I show up fully in this situation? Right?  BARBARA: Mm-hmm. ANDREW: And you know, and for me, that's a question that I've kind of come to answer by a sort of multi-step open-ended [00:55:07] kind of practice. Right? Like I don't, I no longer just kind of, if I'm going to read cards for myself in that way, I don't like just draw a card or two cards for the answer. I'll usually draw start with drawing a playing card, [00:55:22] checking in with my guides and ancestors, drawing three trumps from the, from a Marseilles deck, reading those in light of what's already been set in motion in the early part of the reading, and then [00:55:38] drawing a card from my Land of the Sacred Self Oracle that I self-published. And doing some writing on that, and then usually photographing that, and then drawing, doing, drawing back into it [00:55:53] and embellishing it further, and then at some point, that feels finished. So, like that's the, the process that I do when I do that stuff. And you know, it's all, if you, if people were to look at it, which I'm not [00:56:08] going to share it anywhere. But anyway, if people were to look at it, you'd be like, wow. I don't know what sense this makes a lot of time because a lot of it is very nonlinear and very, you know, like a lot of channeled reading, writing, you know, like, [00:56:23] and so on. But at the end of the process, I'm like, “Oh, now, now I'm aligned for the day, and now I know how I stay aligned for the day. You know for this project or whatever.” Right? So . . . yeah. BARBARA: Yeah, well and yeah, [00:56:38] that sounds like a good process, and I think like, some, I've heard people, you know, say, “Oh, I can't read for myself.” And I think sometimes part of that is they don't read for themselves the way they read [00:56:53] for somebody else. Like they give themself short shrift. You know, they won't go through the whole process, just throw the cards, look at them, go, and then pick them up and put them away. You know, it's different. I think if you treat [00:57:08] yourself as if you were, how you would treat a client . . . ANDREW: For sure and I think if you're going to read for yourself around practical considerations, you just need to have a lot of discipline, right? You know? For me when I read for myself [00:57:23] around practical considerations, it's actually usually really short because I'm like, like, you know, it's whatever. The Tower card says, this is a horrible idea. Don't go down this road. It's like, it's like, it's the end of the conversation. Just stop [00:57:38] there, you know, because the more I talk about it, the more I might try and talk myself into it or think that I have agency where, where the Tower says it doesn't, you know? And so on and so on, right? So but for me, yeah, it's like, you know, there's a short list of [00:57:53] sort of core meaning that I would attribute to every card that if I want to read for myself, I'm going to hold hard to that no matter whether I like it or not, whether it even makes sense or not to me, and be like, “All right, the card says that [00:58:08] someone's going to really betray you here, 10 of Swords. It's like, well, all right, let's not go there then.” Well, so I'm going to go instead, “What else can I do?” You know? Yeah. BARBARA: I think that's important too when you especially, well, like your first practice was more of [00:58:23] an internal deeper kind of a reading. And now we're talking about practical readings, and I think one of the reasons we want to do a practical reading is because we want to bypass our head, because we keep thinking [00:58:38] about it, and we keep justifying, and we know we're justifying, or making excuses and we know we're making excuses. So, you do this reading and keep it short and hold yourself to it. It helps bypass all of that, but you're right, if you start thinking about it, like, well, the Tower [00:58:53] can be, you know, how we can sometimes spin things. ANDREW: Carl Jung thinks of buildings as being a symbol of our ego and our persona in the world, maybe I just need to change the way I approach this, so that I can have a different experience of this and then I can learn [00:59:08] and grow and blah blah blah. It's like, no. Still gonna get hit by the lightning. Definitely don't like that. Thank you, but I'll pass. Right? BARBARA: Yeah. ANDREW: For sure.  BARBARA: Or someone wants to know, "Oh, I started dating someone, how is it going to go?" Five of Wands. "Oh, it's going to be so exciting [00:59:23] and fun!" And you know, it's like, one of the exercises I would give beginner students is, for reading for themselves, is okay, before you do a reading, the question, you know your question, and you know what answer [00:59:38] you want.  ANDREW: Yeah. BARBARA: Go through the deck and just like, if you don't already have the meanings, like you have, for reading for yourself. This is new people, go through the deck and you know pull out the cards that you think would make that answer.  ANDREW: Yeah. BARBARA: And then [00:59:53] shuffle your cards--and make note of them--shuffle your cards again, and then do your reading, and then if, you know, the Two of Cups, Ten of Cups, whatever doesn't come up. It can be like, "Well, okay. This isn't one of the answer cards. [01:00:08] This is a different answer." And it's a way to kind of discipline, discipline yourself, which is what you said when we started. ANDREW: Sure. Yeah. No, exactly. Well. It's like, you know, I think that that approach is, you know, really [01:00:23] helpful for a lot of things, right? And especially for, you know, I mean not everybody reads for, for everything, you know, but I do. Right? Like I don't really have limits around what I'll read for, you know, for [01:00:38] the most part. So, like, if someone's like, well, am I going to get pregnant, right? Am I going to conceive? Well, I have a short, short list of cards that answer yes to that, right? There's only like three or four of them, [01:00:53] depending on the deck I'm working with, and if those cards don't show up, then I'm going to say, "The cards don't give you a solid yes." Right? And you know, the same with the question people are like, “Am I cursed?” I'm like, “It happens, magic is real. I believe [01:01:08] it,” you know. But there's, there's only a couple of cards in the deck that are going to answer affirmatively to, to me around that, and my expectation is that the mystery will surface those cards, so that the answer feels unequivocal, [01:01:24] you know. And I think that that's also a practice that is a bit hair-raising when people are starting, but I think that, you know, as we talk about it, I realize how many different kinds of questions I have a very short list of [01:01:39] cards that I would take as a solid answer to, you know, and I think that that's a really helpful way maybe to, to avoid feeling ambiguous about the readings that you're giving, right? BARBARA: Right. ANDREW: So, yeah. [01:01:56] All right. Well, maybe, is there something else you want to add? I see you looking like you're gonna . . . BARBARA: Yes, I, there's one, like, I kind of said that I was going to be studying fate and destiny in the coming year. ANDREW: Yeah. BARBARA: The other thing I'm [01:02:11] looking forward to is, over this past year, I've heard a couple of people refer to mythic living, like I should know what that means, and I don't, and I've asked a couple of people, you know, "Well, what do you mean by [01:02:26] that?" And I haven't gotten, I was, kept getting this idea that it was like, where you just live really big and loud and you know, mythically legendary, you know? And, but . . . I read something a couple weeks ago that made me think okay, you got that wrong, obviously, [01:02:42] and what this blog said was, it's when you understand the mythic rhythms of life, things that happen, the mythic, well, [01:02:57] anyways, you know what I mean. And when you understand them and when you can learn where you are in your life in terms of a mythic story, or cycle, then you can learn how to live within that. [01:03:12] Have you ever heard anything like that? What do you think of that?  ANDREW: I mean, isn't that how people feel about the hero's journey? BARBARA: It's the whole, yes, exactly. Okay. So similar thing. ANDREW: I think, right. I mean, I've my [01:03:27] own ideas about mythic stuff, but we'll save that for later, for another time, maybe. But I think that, I think that [01:03:42] the idea of sort of myths as true guides to our, to our lives, or as, you know, true models of experience, in the same way that I think of this sort of way in [01:03:57] which people sometimes default to astrology, and sometimes default to other ways of creating definition. I think they're, I think that there is value in them, and there are [01:04:12] values in those stories, you know?  And as a person who practices a religion that is based on, we could say, has a huge swath of it that's based on stories, right? You know, nobody, nobody [01:04:27] in my tradition would tell you . . . Well, no, nobody with a solid grounding in reality would tell you that, you know, as a child of Shango, I'm gonna live the life, live the myths of Shango, [01:04:42] right? You know? And you know, and I think that this idea that, that sort of these myths define the arc of human experience, right? I think [01:04:57] it's pretty questionable. I think that there is truth in it, right? You know, like the, the myth of Percival, which is so popular amongst, you know, Western initiatory stuff, [01:05:12] right? It's like, there are pieces of that that are true, and valuable, and you see most people encounter in some way, right? Like, you know, once the, once the hero decides to go on their journey, something arises to distract them, right? You know, [01:05:27] Kundria arrives to distract Percival from pursuing whatever, right? But the idea that every myth ends with, you know, “Oh, you are the person you were searching for all along and you had it with you the whole time.” [01:05:42] I don't think that's true at all. Right? I see lots of people whose lives are, are not that way, right? And, you know, and yet, the, the, questions that arise from looking at that myth a bit, like what would, what would distract you from your deeper commitment? [01:05:57] Right? In what ways are you not already acknowledging your gifts, you know? And so on, right?  Like those, those are powerful questions, but as sort of models for, for sort of promoting everybody's [01:06:12] experience, you know, it's like the hero's journey. I'm just kind of like, I'm like, "Yeah, maybe, for some people, some of the time," but then we're back to this question of like, agency and free will and how much does our expectation that is the course that we're going to [01:06:27] continue on then shape the course that we live afterwards, right? And I think that, yeah, so. But yeah, so I think that that's a really mixed bag [01:06:42] of things, you know, for me, you know? And probably because I did not come out of tarot from that sort of Angeles Aryan, sort of archetypes of people, you know, archetypes are what's behind [01:06:57] tarot piece, but came from a sort of practical magical and sort of ceremonial background into this stuff and then into a non-Western tradition religiously. I always look at those pieces, and I'm kind of like, eh? [01:07:12] I get it. I see it. Like I can see how you see it. And I can see how it's there, but it's like, what it's defined as, seems overstated or, or incomplete in some way to me, [01:07:27] in a way that I've never been able to reconcile it, or kind of close the loop on it. So yeah. BARBARA: I guess that's why there's a lot of different approaches because . . . ANDREW: Yeah. BARBARA: Some work for some people and some work for others [01:07:42]. ANDREW: Exactly, right, you know, and it's, of course, it's not to say that, you know, if people find value in that, fantastic, right? BARBARA: Mm-hmm. ANDREW: You know, please, please don't write me, I don't need to have this conversation again. I've had it so many times, you know? But no, not [01:07:57] that, not talking, talking about you, but like, but yeah, it's like I've had many people, very smart people try to convince me. Or want to have conversations around convincing me about it. Like it's not my jam. I just, I just don't, I just don't jive with it, so we could just go [01:08:12] talk about other things instead, right? BARBARA: Right, or yeah, because that's not a really interesting conversation, because trying to convince someone who has, especially someone who has a perfectly workable system, you know, and they're not like [01:08:27] asking for advice or looking for a new way to live or think. It's just evangelizing, and why do you, why . . . Just because you believe something is true, the, the other person doesn't have to think it's true. [01:08:42] That doesn't diminish its worth for you. You know, you don't, everyone doesn't have to believe the same thing. ANDREW: Exactly.  BARBARA: You know, what might be more interesting would be to say, "Well, let's talk about what I think and what you think and see if there are any parallels and maybe talk about where they [01:08:57] differ. And isn't that interesting? And why is that?" You know. ANDREW: No, for sure. Yeah. I'm curious to hear what your explorations of mythicness deliver to you, bring to you, over time, though, for sure. BARBARA: I [01:09:12] know. I have a feeling that next year, next fall, our conversation is going to be super interesting. I mean not that these haven't been, but these have been personal, and hard, and important, and [01:09:28] valuable, but I think for next fall, we might, our listeners might get a treat of something different. ANDREW: Or maybe they'll just get a lovely, what are we at now, fourth helping, fifth helping of, you know, [01:09:43] whatever this is. But yeah, we'll figure it out. We'll, time will tell. BARBARA: That's right. ANDREW: Well, thanks for making time again, Barbara. I appreciate it as always. BARBARA: I do too. I love these conversations. ANDREW: Me too!  

Andrew and Chiron discuss shaman sickness, transformation, and growth – and all the things that pretend to be those real experiences. They discuss authenticity, how to discern if an experience in real, and approaching spirits. They also get into talking about the invitation to collude with with the problematic elements of our histories and the world in general.  They also recorded a bonus recording where we revisit the theme of shade and Chiron shares a bath anyone could do to clear themselves and do some healing. This can be found by becoming a Patreon supporter here. If you want more of this in your life you can subscribe by RSS , iTunes, Stitcher, or email.   You can find Chiron on FB here and on his website here.      Thanks for joining the conversation. Please share the podcast to help us grow and change the world.    Andrew   You can book time with Andrew through his site here.  Transcription.  Andrew: Welcome to another episode of The Hermit's Lamp podcast. I am here today with Chiron Armand to talk about everything because one of the things that I appreciate having followed their orbit for a while is they do a lot of different stuff. They practice a lot of different traditions. But I think that one of the things that's inspired me about having them on is they seem, from my point of view, to do it with a lot of integrity, which I think is something that can be very difficult or sometimes just totally lacking when people are involved in a variety of different paths. But for people who might not know who you are, who are you Chiron? Tell me a little bit about yourself. Chiron: I'm a dude from Queens, 33 years old as of the time that we are recording this. I'm a Taurus with a Pisces rising and Leo moon, Venus [inaudible 00:01:04] Mars in Capricorn and I happen to be a spirit initiated shamanic healer with some initiations in a few other traditions including Haitian Voodoo as in Malidoma Somé. I am the founder of impactshamanism.com and I've written a couple of books on magic and am hoping to move more into my artistic life because I also have a background in the arts and academia that has been not as flourishing as I would've liked it to be over the past few years as I've gone through various virtual experiences and stuff, but I'm finally regaining my footing when it comes to which parts of my expression that are ratchet and nerdy and all that. Social media has been a fun place to remember aspects of myself that I haven't been able to play with [inaudible 00:02:01]. Andrew: Yeah, it's always interesting. I find that for sure, as time goes on, things come back. Right? I mean, I went to art school right out of high school, graduated art school and I was like, "Fuck this business." The art scene's horrible. And I [inaudible 00:02:21] for a long time. But those pieces return, right? Which I think is interesting. And it's interesting how and when they return as well. Chiron: A former teacher of mine would say, "Nothing true is ever lost." And that is something that's been really near and dear to my heart. Especially if you are someone who has experienced a lot of loss or a lot of initiatory descents, it'd be really scary because you're in the becoming of something new, perhaps even over and over and over again. But things come back, things come back and its really beautiful when they do for sure. Andrew: Let's talk about that, the initiatory descent. Tell me what you mean by that because not everybody's necessarily going to know that term or have and idea about it. Chiron: Sure. When I'm speaking of initiation, I'm generally speaking of one of three different kinds of things, but number one, the most important thing when I'm thinking about initiation is was the initiation efficacious. So, I'm talking about what we often consider to be initiation, the idea of a spiritual teacher, a priestess, a mambo or ouanga or something or tata. I have been initiated into [inaudible 00:03:52] initiated into Palo. I have been [inaudible 00:03:58] human beings who had certain licenses who then put me through a ritual process on the other side of which I became someone new. And my experience of being initiated into certain traditions, there are some similarities no matter what. There's often some kind of a stripping of way of that which you were. [inaudible 00:04:22] it shows up in different ways. I often think of the myth of the descent of Inanna. You have this springtime goddess who's moving through these, I believe, seven portals into the underworld. At each stage she literally, she's having an accessory of piece of clothing removed. So, initiation can happen under the tutelage of a spiritual teacher. Initiation is also something that life is doing to us all the time. We go through these cycles [inaudible 00:04:56] life grabs us by the neck and we lose things. We experience a divorce. Our house burns down. We lose a job that we've had for 30 years. We are being forced through a death experience on the other side of which is rebirth, but first you have to recognize that the death is happening, surrender to it and if you don't do that, and we don't, we resist it, we're like, "Oh fuck no. I like this amount of money. I like this lifestyle. I like this person who is probably not too great for me." We all love, we have a very death resistant culture. Andrew: Or even if you don't like it, that experience of I don't actually know what else to do. Chiron: I don't know [crosstalk 00:05:45] Andrew: This is all I can see and I don't know what else there would be if I let go of these things. Chiron: Absolutely. And side note, one of the things that's been really interesting to me as I'm trying to make sense of some of our societal ills, I have been looking a lot at what I consider to be a certain individual and collective stagnancy that occurs that makes us particular vulnerable to possession through our refusal, individually and collectively, to die, to die, to die well and become something new. If you've been avoiding a good death energetically for 30 years, then you're just a really stale individual and just like water that is stagnant, it's going to attract flies. So, that's just a side note. Life is always trying to... There's obviously initiation by spiritual teachers.  There's the idea that life is always supposed to be trying to initiate us. Also, there's another piece here that's between spiritual teachers and life, which is I am a strong believer that we are supposed to be initiated into adulthood, the killing off of the child self. That does not occur in our culture. That's another staleness view of us all as wounded children walking around in adult bodies and that's not cool. And then the third initiatory kind of stuff I'm talking about is spirit initiatory stuff that sometimes a god shows up or a deity or a spirit or even an energy. I think that this doesn't get any play, but it happens. A craft can come and initiate you. Suddenly, you start seeing books about knitting everywhere and you're like, "Whoa, I am dreaming about knitting," and sure, that can be backed up by weaving deities and the lineage of grandmother spirits who are [crosstalk 00:07:50] Andrew: [crosstalk 00:07:50] ancestors, right? For sure. Chiron: Exactly. And energy, whether it be deity or ancestral energy or even a gift can absolutely move into our life in a shocking and overwhelming way, demanding our attention, demanding that we bring our attention to it and that can be very harrowing. Andrew: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Well, and I think that those kinds of transformations on all levels and they're not easy usually. Sometimes they are. I mean, I've been through initiations. When I spent my time in the OTO doing Crowley derived ceremonial stuff, I would always know that I was ready for the next initiation because I had a dream about it, that I was literally walking into the temple and there I am and some of the elements after on the other side of the initiation, I was like, "Oh yeah. Look at that." There's not the whole piece but it's pieces of it in the dream state and it was very interesting to have those [inaudible 00:09:10] and in that case, the work was often impacting me ahead of time. It would start. I'd be like, "Oh, I can feel the itch. The next initiation's coming because there's some turmoil here," and then I have the dream and then I work on the turmoil and then I have the dream about the ceremony and then at some point not too long after usually, then I get the call where it's like, "All right, we've coordinated a date for you. You'll show up on this date and we'll do the thing." And then in that case, the formal side was more of a cap on the work. Like a completion of the work and an opening to whatever is next.     Chiron: You can totally feel that door just starting to become [inaudible 00:09:56] if you have dreams, energy of slightly discomfort, a new opening is beginning. Andrew: I'm always curious about this from people because to be completely honest, I am somewhat cynical about spirit led initiation. Not because I don't believe it's true and not because I don't believe it happens, but because of all you need to do is go on the internet and all the BS that shakes out from that sometimes. Chiron: [crosstalk 00:10:35] Andrew: From your point of view, how does a person who's feeling a connection with an entity, with an ancestor, with the stuff, how do they differentiate between an ego thing, between something that's real versus maybe getting in their own shadow and ego stuff. Chiron: Get good divination, preferably from someone with a spirit centered practice. I say that because there are so many different kinds of diviners and I love all of them. I love us all. Kind of.  That's the shade part that we were talking about. Andrew: We'll get to the shade part later. Chiron: Well, I have to allow myself to be bitchy where I think it serves. There are so many amazing diviners. There are individuals who use tarot in very psychological model. I myself have benefited from spirit workers who are psychotherapists. We're all intuitive. Sometimes I have to get out of being spirit centered. I have absolutely benefited from friends of mine who are far more grounded in Midgard, in middle world who say, "Chi. Chi, get [inaudible 00:11:59] fucking 401K Chi, 401K." [crosstalk 00:12:03] Andrew: [crosstalk 00:12:03] do your taxes. Chiron: Exactly, do your fucking taxes, Chi.  But I think that when someone is thinking I might be encountering the numinous in a profound way, then go to someone who is grounded, who has encountered the numinous in a profound way. Absolutely, experience some of my earlier shamanic initiatory illness experiences I knew I had experienced something and I had some ideas about what I experienced, but then I went to spirit centered diviners, all of them in different traditions and they were able to say, "Yes, this happened to you. This is exactly what you think happened [crosstalk 00:12:55] fuck dude, that was real. Here are some next steps." [inaudible 00:13:00] profound being nothing if it doesn't become actionable. I have a friend who, I'm here in Guatemala in a cool ex-pat city that's also, I like it, I like the vibe, but nearby there's Lake Atitlan where there are various small towns which are more touristy than others and I have an ex-pat friend who is currently volunteering at a hostel there and he was like, "You totally got to come down, Chi. It's going to be amazing. There's drum circles and cool shit and a lot of people in white cotton drawstring pants doing ayahuasca and injecting frog poison in their arms," and I'm like, "Okay, that's a lot." But what struck me was that no one's integrating their experiences. They're just like, "Yeah, I shoved frog poison in my arm and I almost died. It was crazy 30 minutes." And I'm like, "And then what?" Andrew: Yeah. For sure. Chiron: And so, there's that descent into [inaudible 00:14:04] initiatory experience [inaudible 00:14:08] but then there has to be an ascent. You have to come back. That's the whole point. Andrew: Well, when I was 14, I was in the Dominican Republic and I was driving a motor scooter and I got hit head on by a dump truck and almost died. I spent a long time, first of all, I spent a year learning how to walk again. Physically it was really, really challenging. But also, that question, "Okay, so this happened, now what?" And the now what became I'm going to read everything that I can find. The now what became I'm going to run into spiritual people and I'm going to be cornering them and asking them questions and so on and so on. And that process of trying to make sense of a thing. I mean, there's the psychological level, there's the why did this happen level, there's all that stuff. I think that that's the challenge with a lot of these things, you know what I mean? I spent plenty of time in my early 20's joyously exploring psychedelics and other things and again I had this really profound experience and I was like, "Well, now what?" And the now what was I don't need to do this anymore, I need to go do other things. I need to get to this place without anything else and experience it directly. So, I think that that process as you talk of it, it's amazing to have an opening experience. It's not amazing to have a horrible experience like getting hit by a truck, but it's amazing from a certain perspective, I suppose. But it's a question of what are you going to do with it. What does it mean? How does it change your life? How does it change your self, your sense of self? I think that's really integral to these kinds of things.  Chiron: Sure and oftentimes we need people on the shore with their arms outstretched welcoming us back and helping us come back, whether that is the spiritual people that you're cornering, whether that is the people who helping you move through various initiatory experiences in the OTO. Where not supposed to be doing this alone, so our collective lack of understanding of initiatory process is tremendously to our detriment individually and collectively. I absolutely hit a point in my initiatory illness stuff, where I was just desperately trying to get back to the human world and to the stable and to quote/unquote real and was flailing terribly. And through a perfect, I mean, utterly profoundly perfect scheme of synchronicities, was led to another spirit initiated person, who called me up like, "Hey, let's talk about some essays I just wrote," and they said some key words that actually showed me that they were safe enough to share what I was going through with speaking with them because I had been being gaslit by a lot of people. And those keys words [inaudible 00:17:32] and they were like, "You need to come and live with me. Come live with me." And I actually moved in with him for three months and those three months, they gave me the space and time and knowledge to better understand what had happened to me and the [inaudible 00:17:53] to finish piecing myself back together. Andrew: I think that brings up a really important point too. People need to be safe. There are lots of people who that are like, "Oh yeah, you're totally having this experience," and "You're meant to be the next great whatever." And I think that the more people are selling you stuff in terms of ideas and whatever and big pictures, again, the more suspect I tend to be about it. Chiron: Absolutely. Andrew: I think that there comes this place, point where it's like, "Yeah, you're in the middle of some shit and you got to patch that together." It's so much different than... I get people occasionally who get sent to me and essentially the question is, "Am I insane or have I made contact with God directly," or whatever. And this particular person I'm thinking about, they were hanging out with all these people who were telling them all this great stuff and what it meant and how wonderful it was that spirit was moving in and they would lose days to possession and whatever and this and that. And when we sat down and we flipped some cards, I'm just like, "No. It's none of that. You need to go, preferably right now, to the hospital and say 'I'm hearing voices, I'm having psychotic episodes and delusions. I'm losing time.'" And they had a big emotional purge about it and then I don't know what they did because they left. And I don't actually know them. But it was one of those things where, depending on what people are telling you and the bigger the crown they're saying is on your head, the more suspect you should be of it, I think.  Chiron: For sure there's a famous anthropology story. I forget exactly the cultural context, but there is a woman who is experiencing or expressing certain symptoms regarding illness and madness and you have the ethnographer there, the anthropologist there who is watching what's happened and some shamans are called in from nearby town to actually come in and do divination and say is this person going through shaman sickness. Is this person in an initiatory illness experience? And the shamans end up agreeing no. This person is actually just experiencing symptoms of mental illness. And it's very interesting because the anthropologist goes on to say, "Well, you know, this is actually evidence of the issue of patriarchy in the tribe and that the woman was of a lower economic class," [inaudible 00:20:56] rather than accepting the spirit centric animistic view of, "No, the shaman said that she's not." This is actually nothing political. This is actually not what's going on. Get thee to a hospital. Andrew: Well, and I think that that's a thing that the western mindset struggles with. That it is possible to have a concrete solid answer. People feel that Oshun is visiting them, something that I run into as a priest of Shango in Afro-Cuban lineage. People show up and they're like, "Oh yeah, Oshun's talking to me." And I'm always like, "Well, I don't know. Maybe." I'm like, "But if you want to find out, there's a way to find out." There's traditional divination, there are these things that can give us answers. And almost everybody who gets the answer that's "no" doesn't accept it. This idea that we could get an authoritative, 100% reliable answer to a question about things like that is something that people really struggle with because they won't look for other reasons. Instead of just being like, "Okay." Orisha says, "No." "Okay. What do I do now?" Chiron: Well, what do I do now is a really important question too. We're struggling with a tremendous lack of meaning in our culture. Identity is a huge issue [inaudible 00:22:43] and we're all supposed to be having experiences of the profound and some understanding of the intrinsic profundity of our own true nature and being denied that, but having a soul that is wired for that. We're really fucked, frankly. We're so badly fucked. But don't take this one cool thing that tells me that I'm more than are rat race away from me. Like, "No, I had this dream, it was a golden woman, it had to do with a river. It has to be this. Don't take the first time I'm experiencing some level of profound meaning in relation to my life away from me." Andrew: Well, yeah. This question of that identity is one that I am fascinated by. How do people construct identity and how do people find identity. And in some ways, I've definitely talked about this on the podcast in a few places, especially probably on the Stacking Skulls stuff, about this notion that a lot of the [inaudible 00:23:56] magic that I do for myself, I term it as identity magic. It's how do I change my consciousness to identify myself in a different way to make things possible.    But yeah, people are often looking, it seems, for the identity, the end of the searching for identity, end of the question of who we are and I don't know when that happens. If you've found it, you let me know, but I feel like it's a continuous set of questions. Chiron: It is a continuous set of questions. I think that one of the things that I've been most blessed by was my working for some kind of a teacher who really focused on the idea of the authentic self. That you actually are here with a purpose and understanding certain aspects of that purpose can give you an idea of some of the things that you're here to do. So, bring your attention to that. That has shown up for me in big mundane ways like, obviously I have a better understanding that I'm supposed to be doing certain things like this here and there, but even the small ways. I'd be like, "I'm going to craft a spell. I'm going to craft some magic," and the push that I've experienced in the spirit world, like, "Make sure you include song in that." I'm like, "[inaudible 00:25:21] yeah, I used to sing as a kid," but that was a piece. That's one of the pieces of my soul's purpose energy, is music is there. We are this beautiful charismatic energies, but most of us have no idea what that prism consists of. So, even getting a little bit of understanding of, and it's not just an understanding, it's really a remembrance of little remembrances of who we are. Which is also really helpful when it comes to protection, so that you can stop listening to every voice, human and nonhuman, about what to do. There's almost nothing more valuable in the cosmos than the human heart. And human heart is easily hijacked, easily persuaded and influenced. You got to get that shit on lock. Or at least start who am I? What am I doing? Why am I [inaudible 00:26:32] here? And make sense of it. So you have understanding of what you have to [inaudible 00:26:38] because that trickster spirit hiding behind that Oshun face wants that heart, girl. It wants to eat you.  Andrew: Yeah, for sure.  Well, and I think that [crosstalk 00:26:55] Chiron: [crosstalk 00:26:55] someone's knocking on my door. My apologies. I know what I wanted to say next, actually. Andrew: Yeah, go. Chiron: There's also an article going around, very interesting from a number of perspectives. It's an article, the title, I believe is called, Shaman's View Mental Illness As Something Different Entirely. It's a very interesting article because on the surface, the image often shared in relation to the article is that of a South American medicine person. While the article is referencing a West African medicine person. This is just, I'm a nerd. The article is referencing the work and teachings of Malidoma Somé, who is a Dagara elder and who's written about mental illness and his experiences of psychiatric hospitals here in the west and the oftentimes spirit influences that he sees going on in regards to mental illness. Never does he say all mentally ill people are shamans. But that's kind of the takeaway that the article provides and that most people who are sharing it seem to have... And it's extremely harmful and reductive of the vastly different states that we can experience [inaudible 00:28:31]. Is there a link sometimes between spirit work and mental illness or experience of madness? Absolutely. I fall into that category. But- Andrew: And it goes the other way. Being bipolar, being schizophrenic, having a wide range of certain kinds of mental illness makes one susceptible to spirits coming around in the same way the being stagnant, we talked about earlier, makes people susceptible to spiritual complications. But there's a big difference between a spiritual complication and what you're talking about here as an initiatory sickness or solely caused by a failure to be aligned with your destiny or whatever. Chiron: And it also comes back to the identity issue that what one experiences in terms of mental illness or spiritual intensity stuff. None of these things necessarily mean forever. Some of these experiences and states are temporary. But in our desperation for identity, give me something to call myself, give me something to be besides a consumer and capitalist. Andrew: We could just end the episode right thing. Just big bold quotes. "Please, dear God, give me something other to be than a consumer and a capitalist." Chiron: Yeah, yeah. Andrew: Right? Yeah. Well and I think it's fascinating because this article really talks about something that I wanted to ask you about. Which is, depending on the backgrounds people come from, you'll hear different ideas about what's going on. And some people have much more, animism is a word that people tend to know these days. But really, a spirit rich world. Because I think of it before people started using animism. I remember talking to, because the first store I worked at was 80% Caribbean clientele who would come for readings. And they'd be like, "Oh yeah. They've got a disagreeable spirit on them. Oh, they've got this on..." and everything was a spirit. I think that my question for you is how do was engage animism? How do we think about these ideas because I think that they're true in certain ways. And what do we do with them? Does that make sense? Is that even a question? I don't know. Chiron: Well, I remember reading in my very, very early days of animism and solitary neo-Wiccan practice, always coming across walkers between the worlds and all that. Became the walker between the world and it was like, "Oh, that sounds so cool and so sexy." And here I am, 12 years later I'm like, "Oh fuck it's horrible! It's just so complex." And again, you're not supposed to do this alone. I can't do this alone. My life has, to a certain extent, very, very often been far more spirit centric than is healthy than is healthy for a person who lives in a body. So, again, coming back [inaudible 00:32:17] the ascent, coming back out of initiatory experiences and the troubles that I've had with coming out of initiatory experiences. And then there are people who have the opposite experience. They're living solely in a western consumerist secular materialistic model and as much as we're told this is satisfying; the next step is to go to college. The next step is to have a kid. They're not satisfied, so they need someone, because again, we can't do this alone, who has that access to the other side. I think we [inaudible 00:32:57] I'd like to see us culturally become more spirit centric than we are. Yes, not because I just want to jerk spirits off, but because I think that our relationship to the spirit world offers us a lot when it comes to understanding of right relationship. But I think we need both. I think we need both sides. Andrew: I wasn't anticipating this episode to be a tour de force of identity and good boundaries and groundedness, but we're coming back to these ideas. I think that it's important. Mostly, I just do my work, to be honest. My own initiatory practice and my God kids and stuff, that's one piece of time, running my own business and reading for people and doing work for people and running the store is plenty of time and then you throw a couple kids into the mix and you try and have some time to have fun it's like, "Man, that's all the time I've got." I tend to drift in and out of looking at what's going on in other places in terms of social media and so on. And maybe we're sliding into the shade part of the conversation now, so we'll see. Chiron: We are. Andrew: But, it's interesting to me what counts as animism. And for me, there's this question of does everything have energy? Absolutely. Does everything have a consciousness that we can interact with and benefit from interacting with? Meh. I become less certain about that at a certain point. And I think that this question of animism, for me, is one of where are the limits of it? Where are the values of it? What is functional? I remember, I had the pleasure to spend a bunch of time with done indigenous elders for northern Quebec and one of the things that we talked about when they were talking with me about the energies that are around me and people's reactions to them and stuff was like, "Yeah, some people be worried about that, but I don't worry about it. We don't worry about it." Like if something shows up, the question is what can we put it to work on? What can it do, what can it accomplish in this situation? And they said specifically the phrase, "If the devil shows up, that's fine. We just put them to work too." But for me, with this question of animism, there's this functional piece that I'm always curious about and that I don't always see in other practices. And that may well be because I don't understand the internal process that they're doing with it or maybe because it's just not present. But I'm curious, for you, how do you think about animism? What are your relationships to the boundaries of that or engaging with that at this point in your journey? Chiron: At this point in my journey, I think a lot has to do with the local for me. The local and what needs to be paid attention too. And that's going to be different for every person. And I think there might be things that are particularly exciting to me or interesting to me and I have to be aware of my biases in that respect as a professional spirit worker who is also doing readings and stuff. What biases am I generally bringing into my readings? What ideas? What has been [inaudible 00:36:53] to me? What have I found interesting or have survived through that might have no bearing on the life of my client and might even require me to say, "You know what? I'm going to send you for a referral to this other person [crosstalk 00:37:06] since I, in terms of the boundaries of animism, I'm currently speaking to you via my laptop on my desk, neither of which I make any offerings to or generally consider a conscious [inaudible 00:37:21] of land and house spirits because those kinds of energies have fucked me up to no end in the past in tiny ways that I've had to gain an awareness of and my relationship to and tend to those kinds of relationships in different ways. And going back to what you were saying about the indigenous elders from Quebec, how do we put at that time to work, it reminded me a little bit of something a client said to me recently after a spirit helper's consultation. Everything in my work is highly actionable. If you have a session with me that is especially spirit oriented, at the end of the hour or hour and a half, what I'm generally telling something at the end of every session is I know this was weird, profound, crazy, interesting, resonant. The last thing I want you to do is leave this session thinking 10 years from now, "I had an interesting experience with a shaman who told me some weird things and..." No. You have homework. There are things to do. Everything here is actionable. Some of the things I have expounded upon were to give you a better felt sense of the reasons why this is actionable and why this worthy of your attention. But all of these energies are meant to be cultivated. There are actions to take. Everything is about being highly actionable. Andrew: Yeah, I think of it like I don't want people to leave a session identifying with something. Chiron: Yes. Andrew: I remember reading for this person and they just like, "Yeah, yeah, you're right, that's my problem, that's this, that's whatever. That's great advice. Yeah I should do that. Whatever." And we finished the whatever amount of time we had and they were like, "Oh, but I'm a Gemini, so I just never will." And I was just like, "Wow. Man that identity is so destructive to you." And I think that my time with Crowley and the Thalamic stuff was really helpful. There's a lot of it I've left behind at this point. But one of the ideas that comes up there is success is the proof. You do a thing, you take the action and something happens. Or there's an alchemical saying that I came across at one point where it's like, "Work and be free." Like, "Show up and do the work." Do the things and then the rest of it comes from there. And it's not about coming to divination to create or solidify an identity, but to learn to do the actions that make the change. External, internal, whichever.  Chiron: Work and be free. I love that. I'm taking that. Andrew: Yeah. I'm actually going to make a little piece of art that goes above the door to my studio that just says that so that I can be like, "Yeah. Why am I here today? Oh, I'm here to do that. Okay. Why are other people here today? For me to facilitate them doing that." Chiron: Yeah. For sure. Andrew: All right. So, let's talk about shade then. Now that we've done all that stuff, let's talk about shade. I enjoy your Instagram because it is delightfully full of shade. And especially in ways that... because sometimes shade is just straight up meanness in a way that I don't dig. I'm just like, "Eh, that's not really funny. You're just being a jerk now for no good reason." But tell me how you think about shade. Tell me how you approach this. Because I actually think it's one of your magical works, the way in which you go about it. Chiron: I'm someone who has spent a lot of time in this lifetime trying to be very nice and trying to be very good and wanting to be loved. And it is so at odds with certain energies that show up in various traditions of my life that do not give a fuck. They really just don't give a fuck. And part of my own healing has been becoming someone who gives less of a fuck and has been becoming someone who is not afraid to speak my truth. As corny as that sounds and After School Special as that sounds, it can be a real issue for people who've struggled with boundaries throughout their life, for people who might even have a performance background and are very used to acting and trying to be palatable. And the year that I finally come to understand. There's also a story we tell in our collective mainstream new age spirituality that someone who does the work that I do is supposed to be nice. And [inaudible 00:42:42] someone who traditionally actually supposed to be very ornery. Actually traditionally someone like me is very ornery and frightening and it's been like, "Okay, I should accept that." I should accept that I have come to have certain experiences in this lifetime and see certain things that really if anyone saw them, they would probably be, consider humanity somewhat distasteful and that's okay. The parts of me who are sometimes fed up with individual and collective bullshit are totally valid. It is not my job to quickly bury that so that I can coddle everyone. I do think that there is a tremendous lack of comfort that [inaudible 00:43:34] harm in a real nurturing, rooted sense of identity, etc., etc. however, when it comes to certain topics and certain ways of being, especially when it comes to other spirit workers, I think that it really serves me as a way of calling us in to have some shade and to be a little bit bitchy. Yeah. So, that's where I am with shade right now. There's a lot I don't share that only the people closest to me might hear. But I [inaudible 00:44:07]. Andrew: And by the way, half the listenership was just like, "How do I get on that private list of extra shade? Where do I sign up for that? Is there a Patreon for that? Can I get some extra shade Patreon please?" Chiron: I guess the shade that's generally going on in my head and heart just has to do with the collective stories that we tell about power and how frustrated I am with them. Experience in the spirit world, whether they be our collective very, very strong attachment to certain identities that may or may not serve us or may not be actually actionable, may have nothing to do with, that to me sometimes are very, very distracting. I can say, "Witch, witch, witch, witch, witch. I'm such a witch. I'm wearing all black. I'm such a witch, I'm such a witch. I have all the stones." And I'm like, "This is so distracting me from this very specific [inaudible 00:45:11] woman ancestor who has been trying to get me to do this very specific work that would enable you to, if went through what she's trying to get you to understand and see, bring some healing to your family, but no, you're so caught up in this glitz and idea. Or I'm coming originally and primarily from a folk magic background, an urban folk magic background, a New York City filled with botanicas, different traditions, but always the story about like, "Oh, that ungan, he is so powerful over there doing that really big intense work and the cemetery is so powerful." And I remember very early in my professional practice and having clients coming to me who were being thrown at by people who were very effective, but always this conversation about "Chiron, I really hope you can help. This person is so powerful." And needing to start breaking that down. What do you mean by that?  What's the conversation? Because there's a lot of, a lot of our stories about power are really caught up in the abstract. We actually don't know what the fuck we're talking about when we're saying that I am a, or that some else is so powerful. And then, [inaudible 00:46:39] I've often found to play out when someone specifically, we'll talk specifically just because it's a good template around the conversation of curses and crossed conditions. Oftentimes when someone is coming to me and they are really invested in entertaining the story that the person who is working against them is so powerful, what's often playing out is a few things. One, if someone actually is throwing at them, they aren't someone who is just abstractly powerful in the sense that they had just training very, very well and is truly in harmony with the tremendous force. Usually that person might be, frankly, very possessed and full of intrusive energies. Oftentimes it's someone who has no real hold on their own power.  [crosstalk 00:47:30] Andrew: Sure. Or they have a ton of rage or something. Some massive- Chiron: Yeah. And it's flying [crosstalk 00:47:36] Andrew: [crosstalk 00:47:36] emotional energy and every now and then, they just narrow it down on person X and then something happens. That's not power. [crosstalk 00:47:45] Chiron: Exactly. Andrew: Not in the sense that people mean it in this conversation. Yeah. Chiron: Exactly. And then I think about, okay, well what about your own vulnerabilities? And I don't mean that in a victim blaming way, but oftentimes when someone has gone to a significant extent of cleansings and reversals and protection work and they have not found it to be effective and I've often found that that person has certain, rather odd vulnerabilities. I have absolutely seen people who might have an ancestral curse that makes them especially vulnerable through curses from the feminine. And now you have this, perhaps a woman who is in a rage and she was in a rage against you 10 years ago and you just have to shake it off. Those kinds of things happen. So, to me, power is what is actually happening in this person's energetic sphere that's allowing them to have broad influence and understanding of and attempts to heal one's vulnerabilities to me is also powerful. And then we just do not give enough credence to the simple, humble, heart-centered medicine person in the remote setting, who by way of their initiatory experiences and the work that they do on themselves, has made themselves nearly invulnerable to harm, nearly invulnerable to some of the macro possessions that we have going on in the world. And that kind of person to me is the most powerful, frankly. Andrew: Yeah. And I think that the more people tell you how powerful they are, the more they're not, for one. The more somebody needs to express that, the less really stuff is going on there. I, I did martial arts for a long time and I worked as a bouncer for a while to see where I had gotten with my skill because I didn't want to go get in real fights, but I did want to be in real situations. And it became really obvious. It's in the way you carry yourself. And I think that in the same way that maybe those humble practitioners where people wouldn't identify them as showing the signs of power, I think that a lot of work that fixes things also don't show the signs of power. If you need a spiritual cleansing and we're like, "Oh, you know what? Burdock says it's going to help you here. So, you go down to the park with a little shovel or something, this is what it looks like, go and talk to it, make this offering. Dig up some of the roots and take a bath in that." Or whatever. It's like, "Oh, but don't I need candles and don't I need the-". I'm like, "No, you don't need anything. You just need this. This will fix everything." Because power on a magical level doesn't necessarily look like we expect it to. Or we have become accustomed to it being performance as. And it's not to say that there aren't those times for those big things. You and I both participate in traditions that have big things. I went to a Awan for Babalú-Ayé, big community cleansing and it's a whole production. But that's its own thing. That's not the small things. And often even then, people come for traditional divination with the Orishas and the answer is "Yeah. Bring this for Shango. Shango wants a pomegranate. He wants some bananas. He wants whatever. Oh, do this. Get a couple coconuts. Okay, you're good." It doesn't need to be dramatic in order to be effective. Chiron: As you were saying there's room for the dramatic. The dramatic kind of [inaudible 00:52:02] need to happen in some capacity [inaudible 00:52:06] is learning when and where and If I tried to make every cleansing that I do dramatic, I would never get anything done. And I [inaudible 00:52:14] one of the reasons why I fucking love diloggun and I fucking love the... Evil is very often very simple. But the effects are tremendous. And I revel in when my spirits tell me to refer a client to a diloggun reader because I'm like, "Oh. Yeah. You're going to get the medicine back. You're going to get the medicine." Andrew: For sure. And think that that's definitely a thing too. That referral. You said it already. I think it makes tons of sense too. I want to go back to this question about thing though, before we wrap up today, about being a nice person. Because I think that there are a bunch of false dichotomies or false positions around this conversation. On the one hand, you have the people who feel everybody should be nice, spiritual people should be nice and kind and calm and benevolent and whatever all the time. They shouldn't be ornery or anything else. And then on the other hand, you have this people who feel that they should be dark and powerful, gothic as it were. Whether literally or functionally. And then I think there's all these other positions. What do you think about that? You've been moving away from being nice, you've been moving towards being more direct. How would you describe that position? What advice would you give to people around trying to make sense of those kinds of positions? Chiron: Well, one thing that I've been studying a lot over the past few years is the energy of collusion, the ways in which we unconsciously make ourselves available for things that are not our truth or things that support us. The things that done support other people. There's so much evidence of what collusion looks like in spiritual community and politics, in the entertainment industry. And I am becoming more and more aware of place in my own life where I collude. I just shared on Facebook some months ago this moment where I was walking through the San Francisco BART station and a beautiful person who was asking for donations was singing and I really, I had already made some charitable efforts earlier in the week. I also was broke as fuck. And I just had a couple of things I wanted to get done that day, but this person's song was like a siren song. It was one of those beautiful voices and they had a sign up and I'm walking and I'm like, "I really want to support this person." I strongly believe in acting from a place of movement in one's heart and I'm feeling moved in my heart right now, but I really can't give right now. Do I share their sound cloud? What can I do to make this energy move? [inaudible 00:55:26] of me who looks at this person who's singing and looks at me and grins as we are exiting the BART station. And the grin was something that felt like, "Oh, poor unfortunate soul. We're not that person, right?" Like, "Look at us ascending out of the San Francisco BART station into the light with whatever resources we have. And in that person meeting my eyes, I suddenly felt a lot safer and more comfortable not making any effort. And in that moment, I was able the catch that unconscious collusion that would happen. Now, this isn't significant. There's no children in cages involved here. There's no sex abuse claims that I'm d- it was just so simple and small and tiny and perhaps even slightly laughable, but it was a very important moment for me to recognize a place in which I was vulnerable to other people taking me off of my center. Andrew: Well, and for, as a straight looking cis dude, the amount of dudes who try and pull me off of my beliefs about equality and feminism and gender identities and all these things, it's amazing how much effort there is to create that collusion where people will be like, "Oh, bla-bla-blah." I'm like, "Dude, that's a sexist joke. I don't actually find that funny." Or whatever. And the amount of persistence and pressure. And I think that when I listened to that story, one of the things that I hear and I think is really important is on the one hand, it's not cosmically and historically changing a particular moment, but when we have those experiences where we notice the collusion and we make a different choice, then that creates more space for us to free ourselves from that collusion and to continue that centeredness. And I think that this goes back to the, the simple Imbolc, the simple offering. It's not always lightning flash awakened everything moment. Sometimes it's those little things that start shaking us onto a different path, a more centered path, a more authentic path.  Chiron: [inaudible 00:58:07] things that have a hold on us individually and collectively that need to be fought against. Coming back to the conversation around niceness. Well, what about justice? No justice, no peace. And there are things that need to be fought against. There are things that we are all in agreement with. There are ways in which I myself am still colluding with past abusers in my own way. They might not be physically in my life, but the parts of me that are like, "Yeah, you kinda do suck, Chi. You kinda did deserve to be treated that way." This is an ongoing conversation around healing and reorienting ourselves towards the energies of healing and justice and that's not going to be nice. And that's not going to be complacent. Andrew: Well I read this interesting brief piece that got me thinking somebody from my kink community was writing this piece about being a nice guy versus being a good guy. I mean, linguistically we could shake it up in different directions, but the point that they were getting at and where it took my mind was essentially what they were talking about was when we're being a quote/unquote nice guy, we are doing positive behaviors in one way or another or nice behaviors in one way or another with the expectation of reward. With the expectation that it will get us something or take us somewhere. And they were talking about being a nice guy in order to eventually get the person you want to be with and stuff like this versus being a good person, which they put forward as being honest, being direct, being authentic. Being really deeply real and not necessarily not being kind or whatever, but also not doing it with, not being kind or nice with ulterior motives, which ultimately isn't niceness. And I think that in our culture, there's a lot of niceness. Going along to get along, being polite to avoid problems and sometimes that's absolutely important. Sometimes it's better than what else might happen, but I think that this question of being centered and authentic and genuine versus trying to make everything smooth, easy, nice and so on. Chiron: Yeah, totally. The promise of reward, but even the promise of safety. Andrew: Sure. Chiron: [crosstalk 01:00:51] Andrew: And that's definitely a reward. That's an inauthentic equation. I'm being nice because I want this thing and not that that might not be like, "Please, if you need to do stuff to be safe, be safe. Please, everybody." But there's an inauthenticity there- Chiron: Absolutely. Andrew: ... which it behooves us to, as we are able to work away from. Chiron: Absolutely. Abs- and I would say a significant part of my work is looking at times in childhood when we were making compromises to be safe around the adults around us who weren't actually adults. Andrew: Or to get that love or to get that affection or whatever. Any of it. For sure. Yeah. For sure. Well, I think that is a profound and wonderful place to wrap this up. Let's shake off those things. Let's challenge those collusions or as my friend might call them, internalized oppressions and let's move on from there. Let's see what we can do to change ourselves and change the world. Chiron: Absolutely. Andrew: Yeah. Remind everybody where they can find you okay? People should absolutely follow you on Instagram, but there are other places too. Chiron: Sure.  On Twitter and Instagram I'm Chiron Armand. And I have a Facebook page, Impact Shamanism. My website is impactshamanism.com. Thank you so much for having me. Andrew: Oh, it's been absolutely a pleasure. It's been as delightful as I imagined it might be.

This long overdue episode was record back in the summer.  Andrew and Mal talk about the nature of magic, initiation, religious practice and more. They talk a lot about how to know if you are on the right track and the pitfalls of walking a magical path. The upsides and pitfalls of gnosis. How to become a bishop by chance and much more.  Think about how much you've enjoyed the podcast and how many episodes you listened to, and consider if it is time to support the Patreon You can do so here. If you want more of this in your life you can subscribe by RSS , iTunes, Stitcher, or email. To find more out about Mal check out Lux-Umbria or hang with him on Facebook here.  Thanks for joining the conversation. Please share the podcast to help us grow and change the world.  Andrew You can book time with Andrew through his site here.  Transcription ANDREW: [00:00:02] Welcome to another episode of The Hermit's Lamp podcast. I am joined today by Mal Strangefellow. And I've been following Mal online for quite a while. And recently, he's gotten into starting a church. And [00:00:17] a lot of the dialogue around that has been very fascinating to me. So I thought that inviting him on to talk about some of these things would be really entertaining because I think there's so many fascinating questions about legitimacy, legacy, [00:00:32] lineage, and all sorts of stuff that people are or ought to be thinking about as they're going about in various traditions right now, and at the birth of something new, seems like a great place to revisit those conversations. So, for people who [00:00:47] might not know you, Mal, give us, give us the introduction. Who are you? What are you about? MAL: [laughing] Oh, wow, um, you know, and I don't mean this to sound, sound like I'm bragging. It's mostly just because [00:01:02] I'm getting older and my memory is lagging, but when you, when you've done, I don't want to say so much, but when you've done enough, at some point, it starts to become difficult to figure out how to answer that question. [00:01:17] [laughing] ANDREW: Sure.  MAL: I got my start in esoterica during the mid-80s. I'm solidly in that, you know, Boomer cusp/early Gen X region. [00:01:34] Went into, went into the army right out of high school, and after that, got it into my head that I wanted to be a Buddhist monk.  ANDREW: Mm-hmm.  MAL: And ended up doing [00:01:49] that for a number of years. I was a Tibetan Buddhist monk, a novice and, and fully ordained getsu and gelong. After a few years, or early 90s, wanted to go and get a college degree, [00:02:04] went to the University of Oregon--go Ducks!--and you know, discovered that it's a lot harder to be a celibate monk in a university than it is in a monastery! ANDREW: [laughing] Uh huh. [00:02:19]  MAL: Go figure! ANDREW: I imagine. MAL: And ended up returning my vows, and, at that point, just kind of wandered back and forth among a number of different things, sort of exploring [00:02:35] alternate routes of spirituality, continuing to practice magic. Of course, the Internet was really just sort of starting to become popular at this time. You know, we were moving beyond the [00:02:50] text-based, green screen kind of stuff and actually getting a graphical interface to the Internet discussion boards. Alt magic, of course, was going like gangbusters. This is just at the cusp of the, the [00:03:05] infamous Golden Dawn Wars of the early, early to mid-90s, and ended up getting involved with the Golden Dawn. Was--actually, my neophyte initiation in the Golden Dawn was done [00:03:20] with Israel Regardie's handmade tools, and I believe a mutual friend of ours, Poke Runyan, was the keryx for that and gave me his flu.  ANDREW: [chuckles] MAL: So.  ANDREW: That's a magical blessing, indeed.  MAL: [00:03:35] Right? And kind of . . . There was some floundering, I would say towards the late 90s. Got involved in the Temple of Set, stayed there long enough to [00:03:50] be recognized to the third degree, their priesthood, at which, and this, I bring this up because it encompasses sort of a pivotal event for me. James Grabe was [00:04:05] also a member of the temple and a member of the OTO, and at the time, when I actually met him in person, there, he was on the outs with the current leadership. I [00:04:20] mean, he has made, I don't know if I'm saying that right, I've never done any OTO stuff. So. That guy. And I don't know what there was, so I don't know if they were, I think there was some sort of lawsuit or some-- Anyway, they were pissed [00:04:35] off. We were at a conclave, which is an annual temple gathering, and we were in the hotel bar, and just sort of chatting, and you know, I was a second degree adept at the time, and so I was star struck at his degree and [00:04:50] his history. And we were just talking and he was mostly talking. And he had mentioned that he had apostolic succession as a bishop, and one of the things, among other things, that the current leadership wanted from him was consecration [00:05:06] as a bishop for their EGC.  ANDREW: Mm. MAL: And he was basically just inviting them to peruse the fine example of the back of his middle finger on that. ANDREW: Mm-hmm. MAL: And you know, he said, "You know what, basically, [00:05:21] I'll consecrate, you know, anybody else, anybody but them. Right? Hell, you want to be consecrated?" and I was like, "Um, yeah, okay." He's like, "All right, cool." So we actually made a plan for the next night. He [00:05:36] had a suite in the hotel and I showed up and we went through deacon priest and I was consecrated a bishop that night. And it was like, "Here you go. Now, you're a bishop." I was like, "Well, awesome. Thank you." This is [00:05:51] 1998-99-ish and, which, oddly enough feels like, you know, maybe five or ten years ago for me, but . . .  ANDREW: Sure.  MAL: Yeah, I was like, you know, "So what do I do with this?" It was like fuck, [00:06:06] I don't care. Can I say fuck? I can say fuck, right?  ANDREW: You can say fuck. It's fine. Go ahead. MAL: All right, cool. Fuck, yeah. [laughing] He was like, "I don't care," you know, "here's some stuff," and I got like loose leaf print outs, you know, some ideas that he had had [00:06:21] about sort of a Johannite spirituality and you know, I got, you know, an old Xeroxed copy of his succession, apostolic succession, and stuff like that, and I just sort of filed it away and did nothing with it. [00:06:36]  ANDREW: Mm.  MAL: Until I resigned, after I resigned from the temple as a priest. It was, you know, interpersonal political stuff. ANDREW: Isn't it always, right? MAL: Right, you know, it's, there was a group that was up-and-coming [00:06:51] in the temple. They have since been, been purged out, but I was not in that group, and ended up just resigning rather than dealing with all of the, the people bullshit that comes with that, and [00:07:06] in trying to figure out, all right, what the hell do I want to do now? Said, you know, well, I've got these kind of things to fall back on. I wonder if I could do this? And so I pulled out all of James's stuff and decided [00:07:21] you know what, fuck it. I'm, I'm a start a church!  And that's how the Apostolic Johannite church was founded, [laughs] and I ended up posting on a couple of message boards online at the time: "Hey, are [00:07:36] you interested in an esoteric organization and an esoteric church?" And got a couple of hits. One of the very first ones was, of course, the current patriarch of the AJC, and you know, the rest there is history. [00:07:51] I ran the AJC for a couple of years, and at that time, kind of felt like I had some unfinished stuff that I wanted to do elsewhere. Plus, [00:08:06] I feel like, at least for me at that time, it took a different personality to run things than it did to start them, and I didn't know that I had the personality to keep that [00:08:21] thing going, and I feel justified in making this statement, you know, in hindsight 20/20, but just in looking at how well they've done, you know, since I, since I handed it over to Sean McCann, their current patriarch, you know, I think [00:08:36] it's the, like the largest, fastest growing international gnostic church on the planet right now, some crazy crap like that.  ANDREW: So. Let me ask you a question.  MAL: Yeah, yeah! ANDREW: Cause you've talked about so many things here and I want to . . . MAL:  I know, I'm sorry.  ANDREW: No. No, it's [00:08:51] why I had you on, I want to have these conversations and I love hearing you chat. What, what kind of personality does it take to run these things? Because you know, I've, you know, I've been in my share of, you know, I was in the OTO [00:09:06] in several different groups that all imploded or exploded. And I was in the Aurum Solace for a bunch of time, and change of leadership and it, you know, my local group was excommunicated. And you know, I [00:09:21] was in the AA for a while and there are various, you know, things with that, that just left me, you know, with nowhere to go. What is it, you know, and I've seen my share of that in the, in the Lukumi traditions as well, you know, different places. [00:09:36] What does it take to run a thing like that well? Because I feel like there's, you know, what I've seen is, there's, like, if there's a strong personality and they can kind of hold it together with their personality, [00:09:51] that works until it doesn't, until they leave or retire or whatever. What actually does work? What makes sense when it comes to sort of bigger organizations around that kind of stuff? MAL: You know, I think you [00:10:06] kind of hit on it with the, the big personality, not in that that's the answer. But in that, that's not the answer.  ANDREW: Mm. MAL: I think a strong personality, a willingness to get shit [00:10:21] done, to say, you know, what, screw it, we're going this way. We're doing it. Like that's the kind of personality you need to start something, to really get it going, to gather people in, to inspire other people, but to keep it going, [00:10:37] I think you need somebody a lot more conciliatory.  ANDREW: Mm. MAL: You know, somebody, somebody who is open to, willing to, desirous of working with other people and incorporating them into the, [00:10:52] the, the living, you know, the daily life of the organization, a strong personality. You know, again, I think it's absolutely necessary to get a thing started. ANDREW: Mm-hmm. MAL: [00:11:07] You know, there's just so much inertia there, at the beginning of anything that you need to build up a certain amount of momentum to, you know, to, to overcome initial obstacles and you know, nothing kills [00:11:22] momentum faster than a committee meeting.  ANDREW: [laughing] Especially if not much is already happening. Right?  MAL: Right. Right! You know? So you need that strong personality, but after you reach a certain point, I think that strong personality [00:11:37] becomes detrimental, you know? ANDREW: Mm-hmm. MAL: And if you don't have it within you to drop that and become more conciliatory, then you're just kind of a, you know, you're kind of a bully, you, you end up with, you know, strong personality clashes [00:11:52] with other people who, you know, who might be able to come in and do amazing things. Yeah, I think of . . . Okay. So, a perfect example of this going back to where I was and where Sean McCann was at the beginning of the AJC when I handed things over to [00:12:07] him . . . You know, he was, he'd only been a bishop for like a year.  ANDREW: Okay.  MAL: You know, I'd consecrated him and, to be fair, I had even gone, like right after his consecration, [00:12:22] I went on vacation!  ANDREW: Uh huh. MAL: Like six months! [laughing] And I was like, you know what, I just need a break from all of this. I'm tired. You run things. Call me if you need to, but I'm out for a while. So, you know, really, even that first six months, he [00:12:37] was kind of running things. Because of his age, and because of his natural temperament at the time, you know, sort of, you know, not really sure of himself, [00:12:52] not wanting to make a mistake. MAL: Okay. So the current primate of North America for the AJC, Mar Thoma, was a bishop with [00:14:07] another organization who came into the AJC. We had become friends while I was still there, but he officially joined the AJC after I left, and he is a very strong personality. But he's also [00:14:22] been, you know, has been just an amazing asset for the church and, you know, in looking back, I don't know, like, would I have given him the same opportunity? You know, when you've got those, the [00:14:37] two alpha dogs clashing, right? The, you know, the two strong personalities, would, would the same results have come about? And I'm not so sure that it would have, you know? I think by me stepping out and by Sean coming in [00:14:52] and having that, that natural conciliatory manner and welcoming him in, [coughs] excuse me, as a, another leader. I think that was a huge part of their success. And so, what does it take to run [00:15:07] an organization? I think it takes the ability to find, to find that in yourself, to realize that, you know, you know, it's not all about me.  ANDREW: Mm-hmm. MAL: If I care about this, if it's going to run, I need to, I need to be conciliatory. [00:15:22] Does that make sense? ANDREW: Yeah, I think so, for sure. MAL: Oh good, cool. ANDREW: Because you know, yeah, a lot of people just . . . A lot of what I've seen is, it gets to a point where people are just like, look, it's my way or the highway, and then you know, and then you just [00:15:37] have, you know, whatever, right? Like, like the thing around the apostolic succession, where they're like, will you please give this to us? And be like, absolutely never, you know, like you just end up in these things where it's so stuck that there's no, there's no movement possible, right? You know? MAL: Right, right. ANDREW: [00:15:52] Mm-hmm.  MAL: Yeah, and you know, when you lay down something, like it's my way or the highway, you end up with a ton of fantastic people choosing the highway. ANDREW: Yeah. MAL: And, and you're left with, you know, just the, the sycophants, [00:16:07] and what happens to your, the organization, then? I mean, you mentioned your experiences in the Aurum Solis, and I remember, you know, when Leon proclaimed it an all Christian organization [00:16:22] when he was still, you know, Grandmaster. And, you know, it was that, this is it, it's my way or the highway. This is what we're proclaiming.  ANDREW: Mm-hmm. MAL: A bunch of people chose the highway! [laughing] You know, and then he kind of pulled back from that a little bit and then [00:16:37] somebody else took over and then [garbled right before 16:43] Anyway. Yeah, I think that that's a perfect example of what you were talking about. When you have leadership like that, [00:16:52] things tend not to grow organically and even if they do survive that personality, that type of personality, they don't survive the end of that personality. ANDREW: Mm-hmm. For sure.  MAL: When that person dies or, you know, [00:17:07] converts to evangelical Christianity, and says, you know unicorns are bad or whatever. [laughing] ANDREW: Sure. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I think it's interesting. You know? I also think it's, it's interesting how . . . I wonder how, [00:17:22] contrary to what people might think, that that sort of more conciliatory aspect actually works to sustain the teachings versus dissipate them? MAL: Mm-hmm. ANDREW: Because what I see where there, where there's no [00:17:37] or nominal flexibility, is then there's these sort of backlashes and waves that come back and forth, right? You know, the new group comes in and you know, they're, they're all, they're all into witchcraft, and that's it. And if you're a Christian, you're [00:17:52] out, right? In response to the Christians who are like, "Well we're Christian," you know. And especially in a group like the Aurum Solis that, at least sort of in its heyday was so founded on research, you know . . . I mean, I think that, you know, what's, what are you losing, [00:18:07] you know, by these massive sways, right? So, yeah. MAL: Right, right. You know and also you get, you know, you get buy-in from everybody when, you know, regardless of the kind of organization, right? Whether it's a business or a teaching [00:18:22] order or a church or . . . You get buy-in with conciliatory leadership. You know, people feel like they have ownership, you know, they have a stake in it, and so they care about it. Whereas if it's just: here it is, [00:18:37] it's my way or the highway and then you know, well, okay, it's your way. It's never my way at that point, no matter where I am in the organization. If I'm not on top, it's never my way. It's always, I'm doing their way and you know, we as people, we [00:18:52] tend to like our way . . . [laughing] ANDREW: Well, and especially more magically inclined people. Right?  MAL: Right. Yeah. ANDREW: You know, I think there's, there's a tendency towards ego, you know, not necessarily in a bad sense, but just ego, that [00:19:07] doesn't really, if it's not addressed in some capacity, you know? So, how did, how did you find the transition of, how did you sort of manage that transition from Tibetan Buddhist practice, which [00:19:22] is pretty, you know, which is very structured, you know, to, to kind of your other practices, which sound like there are through lines, but they weren't as rigid? If that's fair. [00:19:37]  MAL: Oh, yeah. Absolutely. [lost words--exception?] about that. Yeah, you know, actually, I think it was . . . Being on sort of those diametric poles was beneficial to me. ANDREW: Mm-hmm. MAL: You know, as structured and rigid as [00:19:52] Tibetan monastic life was, the Temple of Set, on the other hand, and I think why, why I enjoyed and sort of embraced what they were doing so much was because there's so much [00:20:07] more open, right? You know, you show up and one of their, their primary tenets from The Book of Coming Forth by Night is, you know, "the text of another is an affront to the self." You know, so, every, initiatory degrees, you know, [00:20:22] okay, it's time for you to be recognized as a second-degree adept. They don't confer initiations. They recognize after you've achieved something, and then they say, okay, well now, go write that initiation ritual, you know, go [00:20:37] do it. Go create it, you know, come up with your own, you know, have it, have it . . . You know, don't, don't just pull crap out of your ass, you know. There, there's, there's a very scholastic aspect to them. I think when I, when I [00:20:52] joined, I got a binder that was like, and I'm holding up my fingers. Nobody can see them. [laughing] It's like an inch and a half to two inches thick and the vast bulk of that was a reading list. ANDREW: Mm. MAL: You know, so, and part of recognition [00:21:07] is, their recognition process is, go out and read these books. ANDREW: Mm-hmm. MAL: Go out and study this material. Go find more and then come back and tell us what you think about it, you know. You know, so there's this, this, this scholarship and then this production [00:21:22] and it's really, you know, and I don't want to give the impression that it's this loosey-goosey kind of thing. But it, it is very different from the structure that I experienced in Tibetan Buddhism. Right?  ANDREW: Mm-hmm. MAL: And [00:21:37] I think I tried to incorporate some of that in in my later work and it's still something in my own personal practice and when I'm working with students, it's still something that even down to, you know, giving them offhand a reading [00:21:52] list. ANDREW: Mm-hmm. MAL: And saying, you know, pick, pick six books, or pick three books, or whatever. Read them all from different categories, and then come back and let's talk about how, you know, what [00:22:07] material from this book on this topic and this book from this incredibly different topic. How do they play together? ANDREW: Mm-hmm.  MAL: And what do you get from reading both of those back-to-back that you wouldn't have gotten from reading either one separately, [00:22:22] right? In isolation. What, what new comes out of that? And I think that's sort of been, that came out of that experience, of strict rigid practice with, with Tibetan Buddhism and then the [00:22:37] more open, but, but scholastically-informed Setianism, like, like this kind of was born out of that, and I think that has been, regardless of what I've done since, sort [00:22:52] of my, my entire method of, approach for things.  ANDREW: Mm. MAL: Does that make sense? I really feel like I'm just rambling on . . .  ANDREW: No, no, not at all. It totally makes sense. MAL: Okay cool.  ANDREW: I mean, for me I kind of went in the opposite direction. You know, I was doing ceremonial [00:23:07] stuff, you know, throwing some chaos magic, and you know, all that kind of . . . different things and then I'm, as I moved into Lukumi, and you know, the Orisha tradition that I got initiated in, it's, [00:23:22] there are just ways that things are done, you know. MAL: Mm-hmm. ANDREW: And so it's been a move away from, from that kind of structure and a stepping into that structure, and what I see is that so many people struggle with that axis. MAL: Yeah. ANDREW: You know? Like, you know, [00:23:37] for people to accept that there is a way that things are done, or, you know, in light of a tradition, the way that things are done, and that that part isn't [00:23:52] subject to conversation so much is very difficult for a lot of people, you know? MAL: But it's also a really important experience, I think. ANDREW: Mm-hmm. MAL: You know, I went from the founding of the AJC into East Asian esoteric [00:24:07] Buddhism, tendai [spelling?], and from their Korean Zen, you know, Seon Buddhism, and those are both, I mean, you don't get more rigid than the Japanese. ANDREW: Right.  MAL: And, but there's a purpose for that. You know, they, [00:24:23] there's this idea that when you take all of these people together and you force them to do this sort of thing, this sort of way, we kind of polish our rough edges off. ANDREW: Mm. MAL: You know, and if everybody was just allowed to go off and do their own thing, [00:24:38] you would never find your rough edges, you know, and so in practicing tendai [spelling?] Buddhism and then in going through, you know, the Zen Buddhist koan curriculum, that was, it was very rigid, there's a way [00:24:53] you do it. There's even an entire different language almost for going through koans that if you don't, if you don't know it and if you don't do it, you're not going to pass. You're not going to advance. You know, it's almost [00:25:08] like learning that language, which is both, you know, poetic and performative. You know, there's a physical aspect to it. But learning that language is what allows your brain to operate [00:25:23] in the way that it needs to operate in order to get the insight that you need to get.  ANDREW: Sure.  MAL: You know, there's no book that you could read that, that, that, you know, could tell you that. There's a story out of Daido Loori's [00:25:38] place, Zen Mountain Monastery, back when he was still alive. They had a book with all the answers to the koans in it, and somebody stole it. And one of the head monks was like, you know, ran up to Daido Roshi and was like, "Hey, you know, somebody stole the book. What are [00:25:53] we gonna do? What if they publish it?" And Loori Roshi was like, yeah, don't worry about it.  ANDREW: Mm-Hmm.  MAL: The answers aren't in the book. It doesn't matter what was written down. The answers aren't in the book.  ANDREW: Yeah.  MAL: The answers are what we see in front of us. It's like, you know, I live here in Cincinnati. [00:26:08] And, if you read a ton of books about Cincinnati, but had never been here, and then tried to pass it off, you know, in talking to somebody that was born and raised here, they'd know pretty quickly you're full of shit. ANDREW: Mm-hmm. MAL: You know? [00:26:23] Whereas if you've both, you know, if you've been there, if you've visited there, if you're talking about "oh, man, you know, did they finish the construction over on . . ." or you know, all of that sort of stuff that just, you know, then they're like, "oh, yeah, yeah, you've been there." So I think . . . [00:26:39] There's definitely value to "this is the way things are done" for a lot of traditional things, just because, if you don't do it that way, you don't get the experience or have the effect that it's supposed [00:26:54] to provide, you know?  ANDREW: Mm-hmm. For sure. Well, it's why, you know, my experience of memorizing tables of correspondences when I was doing ceremonial stuff, you know? MAL: [chuckles] ANDREW: I mean, on the one hand, it's like, well, why memorize [00:27:09] it, there are books, but on the other hand, it's, it preloads your cognition with a framework that stuff that wants to work within that framework can then work straight through . . .  MAL: Absolutely. ANDREW: As opposed [00:27:24] to, you know, having to attempt to bridge that gap without that extra framework there, you know? MAL: Yeah. Absolutely. ANDREW: It's possible, anybody can have a vision of, you know, take your pick, and that might be authentic and whatever, but It's [00:27:39] a lot rarer and it's really atypical, as opposed to sort of the, you know, that that more you've done the work, [lost words at 27:48? sounds like "you're fed up"?] and now they're going to show you a thing in this way.  MAL: Absolutely. Well, and you know, putting on my clinical [00:27:54] psych hat, in the middle of all of this I also went on and got various graduate degrees in psychology. We know that the thoughts that we think change the physical structure of our brains.  ANDREW: Mm-hmm. MAL: You know, and so, memorizing [00:28:09] tables of correspondences, it's not just putting information in your head so that you can have it at quick recall. It's literally making a physical change to your brain. ANDREW: Mm-hmm. MAL: Is that physical change necessary? Is that, [00:28:24] you know, an integral component to the experience that you're trying to have? I-- Maybe not, but maybe it is, and if that's the case, if it's not just about being able to have something on immediate recall, in which case, you know, why don't [00:28:39] I just load, preload 777 on my phone?  ANDREW: Sure.  MAL: And then if I, if I need to know a correspondence, I'll pick it up. But you know, if it's not just about having that piece of information, but if it's about the change that it's affecting in your brain that is allowing [00:28:54] you to maybe perceive or experience, you know, something, then, you know, by not doing it, you're either never going to get there, or, like you said, it's going to be really damn rare that you get the experience that, you know, that [00:29:09] you're hoping for. ANDREW: Yeah. I think the, the, you know, the real answer is, the magic is in many, many parts of it, right? MAL: Yeah. ANDREW: And not just in the quote unquote secret word that activates the ritual or what, right? [00:29:24] MAL: [laughing] Exactly! ANDREW: It's got so many parts of it that that are not, they're not necessarily glamorous. They're almost never talked about overtly in books or in other contexts, right? MAL: Yeah. ANDREW: You know, I almost never see anybody talk about [00:29:39] that when I read a book about magic. It's like "yeah," and then you just like, do this thing and it'll happen. It's like, oh, maybe, maybe so.  MAL: [laughing] Yeah. Sure. It's just the magic word. You just say the word, the word.  ANDREW: Well, the bird is the word, right? That's where we'll go with that? MAL: [laughing] [00:29:56] Yeah. Well, I was going to say, Aidan Wachter recently made a post that I think brilliantly comes to this point and it was a . . . Oh, how did [00:30:11] it go? [sighs] See, I brought it up. Now I should at least be able to remember it, but it was along the lines of you know, the vast majority of success comes from mastering the basics.  ANDREW: Yes. MAL: Not from some advanced, you know, rarefied thing, you know, [00:30:26] and he was coming from it from both an esoteric and a physical, you know, point of view. And I thought it was brilliant when I saw that. ANDREW: Yeah. I remember that post. He was basically sort of saying like, you know, sure, some super custom tailored [00:30:41] fancy technique might get you this extra increase, because--it was coming from a fitness training point of view, the article that he linked to--but the reality is, you know, showing up four days a week and you know doing the basic things, [00:30:56] that's going to get you almost everything and the other stuff is, you know, especially over the arc of time, right? So.  MAL: Right. And that applies to so much of what we do, right? Just showing up and doing the basic stuff. And . . . ANDREW: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Absolutely. [00:31:13]  MAL: Oh crap, there was, where was I going to go? There was . . . ? Eh, never mind. It'll come back to me if . . . [laughing] ANDREW: Let me ask you this question, then. So . . .  MAL: Yeah. ANDREW: We've popped out this term a couple times here and there: gnostic.  MAL: Okay. ANDREW: What is, [00:31:28] what does that mean to you? What does that mean? You know, like I hear it a lot. I've seen it a lot. You know, I mean, you know, Crowley talked about it a bunch, you know different people talk about it, you know, there's the knights cathars and you know, all that stuff or whatever. [00:31:43] But what does it mean to you? What does it actually . . . What's the relevance of it at this point in time? MAL: Sure. Well, so first off a caveat, I . . . Technically, I don't even really identify myself as gnostic any more, [00:31:59] which, I suppose is actually kind of peak gnosticism, itself. ANDREW: We live in a post gnostic era? MAL: Right. And I'm glad when you asked, you asked, you know, "What does gnosticism mean to you?" Because it is [00:32:14] a . . . I mean it's . . . We apply it retroactively to a lot of ideas, right? None of the ancient texts, like none of the Gnostic Gospels say, "And I am now writing this Gnostic Gospel."  ANDREW: Mm-hmm. MAL: Or, you know . . . [00:32:30] Gnosis, for me, the way, the way I learned it, the way I taught it, and the way I experienced it, gnosis is knowledge as opposed to [00:32:45] information. ANDREW: Mm-hmm. MAL: And specifically, it's that, it's that noetic apprehension that comes after the sort of die neue [spelling?]. [00:33:00] After the intellectual information gathering and crunching and . . . It's an apprehended knowing, you know, in the spiritual sense. More mundanely, it's just knowing [00:33:15] right? It's eating peanut butter rather than having somebody read off the ingredient list of peanut butter to you. ANDREW: Mm-hmm. Yeah. The experience of it.  MAL: Yeah, you can never tell somebody else what peanut butter tastes like. ANDREW: Mm-hmm.  MAL: You can taste it then and then from then on you will forever and always [00:33:30] know what peanut butter tastes like. And that is, you know, exponentially different from knowing what goes into it. ANDREW: Mm-hmm.  MAL: And, and so, in a spiritual and in a magical sense, then, gnosis is [00:33:45] that experience, just like we were talking about, that experience that comes from doing certain things.  ANDREW: Mm-hmm. MAL: You know, and, and it's specifically that experience that can only come from doing certain [00:34:00] things as opposed to just reading about them. Whether that's a, you know, an in esoterica or spiritual, religious, and, and oftentimes those are blended. You know, you can read about an experience [00:34:15] of the divine. Or you can have it. I think one of the most underappreciated esoteric texts out there is by St. John Chrysostom, in defense of the hesacasts. So hesacasts, heretic [00:34:30] Orthodox, not heretic but almost, near heretic Orthodox sect, who practiced hesachasm, this, this mystical combination of the Jesus prayer kind of a yoga position and breathing [00:34:45] technique that they said would allow you to experience the energies of the divine.  ANDREW: Hmm.  MAL: In fact, you know, advanced practitioners of this were said to literally physically glow, like they would just glow in the dark. And this got [00:35:00] a lot of bishops' panties in a twist and John Chrysostom wrote this brilliant defense of them, basically laying out theologically why this, this theosis, this knowing of [00:35:15] God is not heretical. You know, they're not saying they can know God, because you can't wrap a finite mind around an infinite thing, but you can experience, right? Can you hear that humming right now?  ANDREW: [00:35:30] No, from your side? No.  MAL: Yeah, so, my mic, I'm going to flick it real quick. [thump] I fixed it. Sorry, I've got a loose connector there. ANDREW: Uh huh. MAL: But, you can experience it. You can have an experience of it and he likened it to a number of different things. [00:35:45] One of them was, you know, sitting in a ray of sunshine: you know it, you can experience it. It's not all of it. Nobody's saying it is. But that, that's gnosis to me, [00:36:00] that experience.  ANDREW: So, let's, I'm gonna ask you a really unfair question. Okay? MAL: Okay. Sure.  ANDREW: So, how do people determine what is different [00:36:15] between an authentic gnosis with something, with a spirit, with god, with wherever, and a more [00:36:30] psychological, or, you know, even intellectualized engagement with it, you know? Because there's so many people who have experiences of different things, and you know, going back to your, your Zen stuff [00:36:45] and to your Tibetan stuff. There are very clear things that are markers, right? For what's an authentic experience, you know, and I even remember when I was in the Aurum Solis, I came to my teacher and I was like, I had this, I had this experience [00:37:00] with one of the archangels, and they showed up in this way. And he's like, "Great," and then he pulls out a piece of paper and shows like, pulls out a book from his notes about it and shows me what I saw. He's like, that's, that's [00:37:15] because you're, you've moved beyond your own cognitive stuff being in the way of that connection.  MAL: Yeah. ANDREW: You know? So, how do people know that, though? How do people even begin to work with that if this is a new idea for [00:37:30] them? MAL: You know, it's, the easiest way is having a teacher, right? ANDREW: Sure. MAL: There's the famous story of Gampopa and Milarepa, his, the yogi Milarepa, who was Gampopa's meditation [00:37:45] teacher and at that time, you know, the Tibetans generally don't meditate in groups. They don't do silent meditation. They get the instruction. They go away, they practice, then they come back. And Gampopa came to his, Milarepa after some time practicing, [00:38:00] and he's like, "I don't know what's going on, but I'm beset by devils constantly. This is what . . ." And Milarepa was like, "Just chill out, keep doing the practice, that that'll all go away." A few months later, Gampopa comes back again, and he was like, "Teacher, you're, you're so right. It's amazing. [00:38:15] All the devils were chased off. Now. I'm visited constantly by angels and dakinis and it's just wonderful and it's bliss." And Milarepa was like, "Uh huh, that's cool. Just keep practicing, that will go away."  ANDREW: Sure.  MAL: You know, having that that teacher that can that can guide you . . . [00:38:30] You know, in Buddhism, especially in Tibetan Buddhism, emptiness, shunyata, big deal, and having an experience of emptiness is a big deal. Like this is [00:38:45] one of the major mileposts and the literature is just scattered with warnings about, you know, don't intellectualize this, don't intellectualize this, because [00:39:00] when you do, when you get an idea in your head of what that experience is, you reify it and then you're stuck, right? You're stuck with that idea. And you think "Oh, I have had this experience and therefore . . ." You know, and without [00:39:15] sort of that external verification by somebody else who's been there, right? Without talking about Cincinnati with somebody who's also been there, you know and confirm: Yes. Absolutely. I know exactly the street corner you're talking about, or you know, whatever, you can easily [00:39:30] be led astray.  How, how does somebody working on their own do this? Well, that's tough, you know, at that point, I think you have to, [00:39:45] I think initially approach, you know, unverified personal gnosis, UPG, with skepticism. ANDREW: Yeah. MAL: You know, I think that has to be the default when you're on your own, no matter how amazingly lifelike and 3D [00:40:00] this apparition was, or like, initially approach it with some degree of skepticism, keeping in your mind, well, this could just be wishful thinking or this could be, you know, whatever, [00:40:15] and then give it time, right? If it was a teaching, if it was a practice, if it . . . Does it bear out? ANDREW: Yeah. MAL: Are there, are there, are there are external things that coincide with it? If you . . . You know, you're given a vision of this, you know, amazing new practice [00:40:30] and then the very next day somebody randomly starts talking to you about, you know, a symbol which is exactly like the linchpin for that practice or, you know, you know, somebody brings you something that you [00:40:45] specifically need in order to . . . You know, you look for confirmation still from outside, even if it's not from a specific like teacher in a lineage of a thing . . . ANDREW: Mm-hmm. MAL: You're still looking for that external confirmation. [00:41:00] And it may not be for years and years and years that all of a sudden something happens and then it clicks and you're like, oh my God, I had that dream, you know, three years ago about this and then here is this . . . [00:41:15] Holy crap. This is a, you know, okay, then you go with it. But no, if otherwise, if somebody shows up and just says, "hey, you're the chosen one," or you know, you're yet another incarnation of Alistair, or you know, whatever, [00:41:30] you know, maybe keep that in your back pocket. ANDREW: Yeah, for sure. Yeah. I think that that time will tell, right? MAL: Yeah. ANDREW: Time will tell. We'll see if this holds the test of time, for sure. MAL: Right, you know, and you can have, I think, amazing personal experiences that are meaningful [00:41:45] to you.  ANDREW: Mm-hmm. MAL: That you never say anything to anyone about or do anything with. And that's okay.  ANDREW: Mm-hmm. MAL: They don't have to be huge revelations. Or they don't have to be, you know, even if it was something that was just the product of your own mind, [00:42:01] maybe it's useful to you. But again, yeah, I think that in order to tell the difference between genuine, a genuine experience of gnosis, like that, yeah, it's external confirmation. ANDREW: And so, [00:42:16] that brings back sort of one of the other questions that I wanted to check in about: what role does lineage play, for you, in all of these things? I mean, I know in my Lukumi lineage, you know, lineage is everything. You know? I mean [00:42:31] you are, you are, in that, in my tradition, you are initiated into the lineage. MAL: Right. ANDREW: You know, lineage becomes your family, and, and that changes so many different dynamics because of it. You know, it's not just like, it's not just [00:42:46] about the information that was passed from person to person, but it's actually the license to practice certain things, the requirement to practice them in a certain way in accordance with lineage, and a connection to all of those spirits who carried that [00:43:01] lineage forward, you know? MAL: Right. ANDREW: So it's a, it's a very living dynamic thing. What role does lineage play for you? And, and what do you see as its sort of values and challenges? You know?  MAL: Wow. [00:43:17] I'm going to cheat and refer back to something that I wrote a while ago. ANDREW: Which is always welcome.  MAL: Okay, cool. I tend to think in terms of three different kinds of lineage for any organization.  ANDREW: Yeah. MAL: Physical lineage, [00:43:33] practice lineage, and, you know, ultimate or primordial lineage, right? Which, so, and what do I mean by these? The physical lineage is just the people, the stuff, right? The boots on the ground, the people doing the thing, the [00:43:48] buildings, the, you know, the institution. The practice lineage is the stuff they tell you to do. Right? These are the, these are the teachings that ideally have been, you know, tried, [00:44:03] tested, passed on, initiatory aspects of initiatory power, right? That are meant to facilitate things. Obeah or apostolic succession. These are all conferrals of a power [00:44:18] meant to facilitate something. Sorry. I'm going to thump the mic here again. ANDREW: I think you might be picking up on the, someone's running a shop vac or something downstairs. I'm also hearing that in the background.  MAL: [00:44:33] Then I'll trust it's on your end and not mine.  ANDREW: Yeah.  MAL: So, yeah, the practice lineage there. And then the primordial lineage is what you're ultimately connecting to via these three things, [00:44:48] right? So, the physical lineage exists primarily to transmit to the people it brings in. The practice lineage, which then facilitates connection to the [00:45:03] primordial lineage. And, you know, the first two exist ultimately . . . They function only to the point that they do those things, right? If at any point a physical institution loses its connection [00:45:18] to the primordial lineage, they're dead. Right? It's just a, it's a fossil. It's a club. It's a, it's, you know, it's cosplay or whatever. If the practices [00:45:34] no longer facilitate connecting you to that primordial lineage, then they're not doing their thing, right? They don't work anymore.  But then once that connection to the primordial lineage is made, at that [00:45:49] point, new practice lineages and new physical lineages can be instituted. Without that connection, they can't be. You know, this is, this is one of those things that, like in Buddhism, people, [00:46:04] there's this idea from people outside of it. For example, tons of sutra is attributed to the Buddha, but he, you know, we know historically he didn't say these things. The Buddha didn't write that. The Lotus Sutra isn't taught by the . . . But no, technically, yeah, he did, because [00:46:19] within . . . You know, the game rules of Buddhism state [chuckling] that there is only one Enlightenment, right? Buddha means awakened. Once you have had that experience, right, once you're connected [00:46:34] to that primordial lineage, there's no difference between you and Siddhartha Gautama, right? So, if you have legitimately had that experience within the game rules, you can write something today and [00:46:49] say this is a text by the Buddha.  ANDREW: Mmm. MAL: And that's, you know, 100% legit. There are institutions [00:47:06] where I think you can bypass some of this, but I find them to be so phenomenally rare. Right? The person that just [00:47:21] stumbles upon either a practice lineage that works to connect them to a primordial lineage, or, or, you know . . . Okay, a big example of this, you know, with what I'm doing now, apostolic [00:47:36] succession is a huge thing. Right? There is a conferral of authority and power with that, without which, none of the other sacraments will be there. Period. Full stop. Yet, [00:47:51] within broader Christianity, very few people question the legitimacy of Paul as an apostle. Because in the middle of his, you know, previous [00:48:06] life as a, and I don't know if you can hear the air quotes I put around that, [chuckles] as a, you know, assassin for hire, he had this vision, on, was it, the [00:48:21] the road to Emmaus? [He means Damascus. The road to Emmaus is where Jesus appeared after his resurrection.] I think. Anyway, he had this vision of Christ and he converted and now he's an apostle.  ANDREW: Mm-hmm. MAL: And I think most, most people in the broader Christian world: "Okay, we'll accept that." You won't find any apostolic lineages, [00:48:36] I believe, tracing themselves back to Paul. I'd be surprised if you did, but you know, nobody lists him as an apostle with an asterisk by his name, kind of thing. ANDREW: Right. MAL: But you also then don't hear about this happening [00:48:51] all the damn time.  ANDREW: Mm-hmm. MAL: You know, nobody spontaneously . . . Well, damn it, okay. The gnostic revival in France in the 19th century, [laughing] Jules Doinel. Yeah. Okay, he claimed it. But then, even [00:49:06] he went on to get actual apostolic succession. So. You know, I think it's rare. It's more rare than people think.  ANDREW: I think there's a big difference between a connection to spirit, [00:49:23] you know, and even a spirit that might have, you know, like, you know, I mean, I'm certainly not the reincarnation of Crowley, but perhaps, perhaps I could connect to his spirit in a way, and his, his Spirit could act as [00:49:38] a guide and an animating force in my work, you know?  MAL: Absolutely, yeah. ANDREW: I'm not saying that that happens per se, but, but that could happen. And that is not uncommon, you know. MAL: Right. ANDREW: [00:49:53] Like there, there are lots of things you know, where . . . MAL: But, when those things do happen . . .  ANDREW: Yeah.  MAL: But when that does happen, there's a lot that preceded that.  ANDREW: Yes. MAL: Right? It doesn't, it doesn't happen to, you know, the random grocery [00:50:08] store clerk who has, you know, never even picked up a copy of book four, or you know, whatever. Right? ANDREW: For sure. And, but that experience is also not necessarily the same as the experience of the [00:50:23] connection to that primordial, you know, energy or the current even though if I was connecting to Crowley, I'm connecting to you know, the prophet of Thelema, that doesn't mean that I'm actually connected [00:50:38] to that step behind that, you know? MAL: Right. Right. ANDREW: And I think that . . . I think that's also an interesting distinction, you know, and that's where lineage and traditional initiation facilitate that.  MAL: Mm-hmm. ANDREW: You know, because you may connect to that current, possibly, as you [00:50:53] say, there are examples, but I think there's a big difference between connecting to a spirit that engages your work and guides you and something sort of one step further beyond that into that lineage, that [00:51:08] deeper force, you know? MAL: Right. And, and access to one aspect of a lineage also doesn't necessarily confer access to another aspect of lineage. So, for, you know, I have [00:51:23] apostolic succession via the episcopi vagantes, you know, right, the wandering bishops. And we may trace our lineage, you know, even up into, you know popes in Rome, but that doesn't make me [00:51:38] a Roman Catholic bishop. Right, that's the physical institution, and even though I might have access to both primordial or, you know, both practice and primordial lineage there, that grants me absolutely no standing whatsoever in the physical, you [00:51:54] know, lineage kind of thing, which is something I think a lot of people tend to forget, especially in the independent sacramental movement. They tend to not get that these things are [00:52:09] . . . They're disparate. They're separate. They're discrete things. Yes. Generally they're connected and hopefully, you know, if you get involved in one, it is, but yeah, if you stumble across it, if you just happen to meet up with some guy in [00:52:24] a, you know, hotel bar in Ontario and get, this sounds so bad now that I'm saying it out loud, get invited back up to his hotel room to get consecrated as a bishop one night . . . [laughing] Great. [00:52:39] You know, that doesn't mean, you know, you can show up at the Vatican and be like, you know, where's my room?  ANDREW: Like, yeah, that dude. He initiated 50 people that week. Come on!  MAL: [laughing] Right? [00:52:54] Yeah. So. It's, you know, lineage is, lineage is important. And, you know, I'm sure you could make the case that even though I'm breaking it down into three different things that you could say, well, they're really all the different aspects of the same thing, [00:53:09] and you could probably break it down even, you know, you could break it into four different aspects or two or whatever. But you know, in general, I think, for those three reasons at least, lineage is important, especially [00:53:24] in religious, spiritual, and, and esoteric bodies wherein the point is connection with something higher, with that primordial aspect. If, you know, if the point is just [00:53:39] education, then, you know, lineage is, you know, by-the-book kind of. Like the modern grimoire revival. There's no living lineage, you know, Solomonic lineage that's [00:53:54] passing this kind of thing . . . No, it's: you find the book, you, as best you can, decipher what the hell they're talking about.  ANDREW: Uh-huh.  MAL: You do it as best you can and you hope like hell you have an experience similar to what they said you're going to have. And that's [00:54:09] kind of it. The book, at that point, is the lineage until, you know, you make that connection. The book then is the practice lineage. There is no physical institution, you know, physical aspect of it. And then, you know, hopefully you do the practice until [00:54:24] you get that that connection that then continues in your work. You know, I think a physical institution could happen, but it's not necessary. So I guess even in that [00:54:39] sense, there is a lineage or just accessing it through the information that's passed on through both having the right book, having the, the brains to figure out what the hell it's saying, and then having the guts to follow through and do what it's saying. [00:54:54]  ANDREW: Yeah, I mean I tend to look at some of that stuff as more, more technological, right?  MAL: Mm-hmm.  ANDREW: Like, I mean more in that second realm of the practice.  MAL: Yeah. ANDREW: Than the lineage, because I think [00:55:09] that you can, to some extent, plug some of that into whatever lineage you, you might have access to, right? Or whatever sort of primordial elements you would have access to, you know? MAL: Right. ANDREW: When I was very interested in those kinds of things, [00:55:25] you know, I was, I was not interested in the Golden Dawn. I was very interested in Thelema. And, so I would just go through and swap out all the words, you know, the words that weren't Thelemic for words that were Thelemic and do work in that direction, [00:55:40] and then use that, that sort of connection to that primordial juice and that piece of it to you know, you know, call up whomever and be like, hey, listen, by the power of Babylon you're going to do this, or whatever . . . MAL: [laughing] ANDREW: You know, and, and [00:55:55] I think that's possible, because it's, it becomes, the grimoire stuff can be more technological maybe than sort of lineage-based necessarily.  MAL In general, I tend to think tech is tech. [00:56:10] But you know, then again there are lineages where, without having the appropriate lineage, it doesn't matter what knowledge or information you have, it's not gonna work, or it's not going to work the way you want it to. You know, when you look at, [00:56:25] you know, Tibetan Buddhist magic, or just Tibetan Buddhist practice, you know, if, if you're, if you don't have the empowerment of a particular deity, the practice is at best ineffectual [00:56:40] and at worst dangerous, because you're in effect, you know, trying to contact these, these powerful personalities and they don't know who the hell you are.  ANDREW: Right. MAL: Right? It would be, it [00:56:55] would be like showing up at, I don't know, pick a, pick a powerful, a famous powerful person who could be dangerous to you. I immediately, I don't want to make this political, I immediately think Trump. [laughing] [00:57:10] Not that you can, anybody, I don't, you know what? I'm not even going to go there. Um, but yeah, you pick a person with temporal power. All right, prime minister of Canada, Justin Trudeau. He seems like a really nice guy. [00:57:25] Right? I mean everybody in Canada seems so super nice to us here in the hinterlands, but I bet as nice as he is, if I went to Canada, and I saw him on the street, if I came running up to [00:57:40] him at full tilt saying, hey Justin, let me . . . You know, trying to get . . . I'm thinking there's some people that would tackle me to the ground.  ANDREW: Exactly. Yeah. MAL: You know, and so, you know, the empowerment, that connection to that lineage at that point is the facilitation of that contact, right? It's somebody [00:57:55] coming in who has that connection, somebody who's saying, hey, you know what? Let me introduce you to my good friend, Mr. Trudeau. ANDREW: Mm-hmm.  MAL: And then, once they facilitated the introduction and we've shared a couple of drinks or whatever, at that point, you know, I can then, you know, wave from him [00:58:10] from across the street and maybe he'll remember me and then we bump into each other, you know, that sort of thing.  ANDREW: Sure.  MAL: And, and I'm absolutely convinced that Tibetan Buddhism can't be the only place where something like that is, is [00:58:25] required, where if you don't have the hook-up, if you don't have the official connection to that lineage through the prescribed means, you know, best of luck to you.  ANDREW: Yeah, yeah. Something might happen, but who's [00:58:40] to say what it is and yeah, how it's going to go.  MAL: Yeah. And whether or not you wanted it! [chuckling] ANDREW: Exactly, exactly, for sure. So, we've been, we've been chatting for a long time, because this has been really lovely, and I want to ask you one more question before we wrap it up though. [00:58:55]  MAL: Sure. ANDREW: Because there's one other thing we haven't gotten to, which I was delightfully enjoying on your Facebook, which is these various statements of gnostic belief, [00:59:10] you know, or the sort of, you know, where you're discussing how you believe in, you know, this, the fallen angel, and the energy that comes with that, and how you believe in Christ in this way, and how you believe [00:59:25] in, you know what I mean? If we think about the apostles' creed, we have a very clear example of a statement in that direction, but you know, all sorts of traditions have their own. But your seemingly contradictory, [00:59:41] from some people's perspective, ideas about the nature of the universe, really both sort of tickled my fancy . . . MAL: [chuckles] ANDREW:  And, [laughing] if that's, if that's not a weird thing to say and reflected [00:59:56] a bunch of my own kind of contradictory or apparently contradictory notions about it. So I'm curious what, what you were looking to do as you were expressing that and sort of what kinds of beliefs you have around, [01:00:11] you know, the nature of the universe in that kind of construct.  MAL: In general, I have a very dim view of belief. [laughing] I think they're very dangerous things, people ought to stop having them. ANDREW: Uh-huh. MAL: [01:00:27] And when I post that . . . I think one of the worst things that ever happened to the world was--and this is ironic, I think, coming from me--is Christianity and its emphasis on creeds. You know, Christianity was weird for any number of things, when it arrived on the [01:00:42] scene, but one of the things that it was most weird for was that it was a creedal religion. It was, you know, it pivoted around what people believe as opposed to what people did. It wasn't performative. And, you know, this idea of having right belief [01:00:57] then is something that came into play and, you know, I think history has shown us what a dangerous thing requiring right belief can be. ANDREW: Sure. MAL: And then determining that. When I post [01:01:12] shit like that, and I feel absolutely justified in calling it that, a lot of times it's just to kind of work out for myself what's been bouncing around in my head, what's going on at the time, [01:01:27] and also looking for a little bit of that sort of external verification, right? If everybody responded with a what are you on? or did you not sleep last night? or is that . . . You know, then I know, okay, this is maybe a little bit out there, but then when I get responses [01:01:42] like, you know, that really tickled my fancy, or you know, that's a sign that, okay, you know, maybe, maybe I might have figured a little bit of something out, or maybe I might have glimpsed a little bit of something here. And I think [01:01:57] having creeds that don't fit together nicely works together well for me. And by creed, you know, having beliefs that are paradoxical, that, that aren't, you know, that are sometimes juxtaposed [01:02:12] against each other, is beneficial. I mean, it goes back to, I think what I was talking about with my own sort of practice, where you know, you take these two disparate things, you take these two different books, two diametrically opposed . . . See what comes out of it. [01:02:27] See what, see what you make from it. And I think a lot of times, the thing that makes something paradoxical is really just a limitation of our language. ANDREW: Sure. MAL: You know, [01:02:43] I get a lot of, I think I get the most push back, for example, with the Church of Light and Shadow, which is, you know, my newest endeavor, because I talk about the morning star and people [01:02:58] are like, well, okay, you seem to be implying that this is both Jesus and Lucifer, which is it? And I'm kind of like well, yeah, you know, we have this tradition that Lucifer is the Fallen Angel. However, [01:03:14] there's only one figure in the Bible who ever identified themselves as the Morning Star.  ANDREW: Mmm.  MAL: That's Christ in the Book of Revelation. ANDREW: Sure. MAL: You know, and the more I sat with that and their specific [01:03:29] roles and functions, especially the. you know, not, not the, not the Satan of you know, the HaSatan or you know of, the opposer of . . . ANDREW: Or Anton LaVey.  MAL: Right. Yeah, but this . . . [01:03:44] more the Lucifer of Milton and Dante, and, you know, the very popular romantic Promethean myth of Lucifer that we have today. That is very much a Christ figure [01:03:59] when you look at the role that Christ played. Right? Christ did not show up and be like, "You know, what? All right, everybody just do what the temple priests say, and follow . . ." You know, he was very much an ego-driven [01:04:16] individual. I mean, we can consider the gospels as spurious as we would like as far as whether or not this figure, Jesus, actually said these things. But the [01:04:31] one thing that you know, like when you get to, like the Jesus scholars, that came together and try to figure out well, what's most likely that he said? One of the things that they had pinpointed as most likely coming from Jesus, based on what we know of the context, and what got passed . . . [01:04:47] His doing away with the old law and saying, "A new law I give to you," right? "Love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and love your neighbor as yourself." [01:05:03]  And what people gloss over here is, it's not saying, love your neighbor, which by that he means that everybody, right, love everybody else. He's not saying love them more than yourself. He's not saying debase yourself before . . . He's saying love them [01:05:19] as yourself. And if you don't love yourself a great deal, you're gonna be shitty at loving anybody else.  ANDREW: Mm-hmm. MAL: You know, how Luciferian is that? You know, he . . . [01:05:34] And so looking at these two figures in that way, looking at them both as, as light bringers . . . You know, in fact, it was really, it was not until I looked at [01:05:50] the gospels and teaching of, teachings of Jesus from a Luciferian perspective, that they really started to make sense to me. ANDREW: Mm-hmm. MAL: Does that make sense?  ANDREW: It does. It does, for sure.  MAL: And so, I think there's, [01:06:05] there's, there's definitely something there, and this, this perspective is not new. I did not make this up. ANDREW: Sure. MAL: This idea of having a, you know, a sacramental Christian Church practicing [01:06:20] folk magic is also not new, you know, magic and Christianity have been tied together for as long as they're . . .  ANDREW: Catholics everywhere. Right?  MAL: Right. Yeah. I mean, I think I commented recently on Facebook that you know, if you're not ready to accept that Christianity [01:06:35] is a weird necromantic cult, then you're not ready to study church history.  ANDREW: Yeah. MAL: But when looking around for this, you know, for something that really embodied and [01:06:50] embraced that, I couldn't find it. There's nothing, you know, like there's, there's, there's nothing out there. There are Catholic witches that are, you know, going to mass, and you know, practicing in private or in secret, [01:07:05] and there are Christian witches, but there's no organization that's embracing both of these things. And the more I kept looking for this, and the more I kept posting, you know, both things like, you know what? I believe this and I believe this and the more [01:07:20] feedback I kept getting from people saying, you know, yeah. Yeah, me too! Where's that from? This ought to be a thing! ANDREW: Mm-hmm. MAL: And you know, I'm a firm believer that we have enough independent apostolic [01:07:35] Christian churches running around. I don't know how familiar you are with the independent sacramental movement, but in general, you know, you end up with jurisdictions of one, somebody belongs to a church long enough to get consecrated a bishop. [01:07:50] And then they're out of there so they can go do things the right way. ANDREW: They had a great experience while they were in Vegas from somebody they met in the bar.  MAL: [chuckling] Right? Next thing, you know, then they're off.  ANDREW: Yeah. MAL: You know, and so, I get in trouble, I get [01:08:05] people in the independent sacramental movement angry with me when I tell them, you know, look, if it's really about the mission, like you say it is, you would stop what you're doing, find a larger church that's actually already doing this, and doing it a lot better because they've got the bodies [01:08:20] and the resources, and you'd join them, you're doing this just for the title. And so I was, I was loathe to start yet another church. ANDREW: Mm-hmm. MAL: You know.  ANDREW: Well, and I think just before [01:08:35] you move past that point, too . . . MAL: Yeah. ANDREW: And I think there's also value in doing a thing like becoming a bishop for yourself.  MAL: Oh, absolutely. Yeah. That's great too. ANDREW: You know, I mean, many many Orisha practitioners become priests for their own [01:08:50] well-being, you know, and that's fantastic, but be clear about that, and then go from there, you know.  MAL: Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely, you know, I went for years ordaining people and limiting their faculties. [01:09:05] So, when you're ordained a priest, you receive faculties or permissions from the bishop that tells you what you can and can't do, basically. And I would ordain esoteric practitioners who just [01:09:20] wanted that, that plug into apostolic succession for their own spiritual and magical practice. And I would, you know, I would tell them well, okay, great, but without any sort of pastoral education, I'm not going to license you [01:09:35] to do any sort of pastoral work. [laughs] You don't get to go start a church, you can say mass in your home privately, that sort of thing, that's fine. Just go be a private priest. And it took a lot to move me away from that [01:09:50] and, and decide, okay, you know what? I think I am. I think there's enough momentum around this to do something about it, to found it. I'm a firm believer in, if you have an idea for something great, and nobody else has done or is [01:10:05] doing it, maybe that's a sign it's supposed to be you. And after poking around and getting enough encouragement, I decided all right, screw it, we're going to do it. But if we're going to do it, this is how it's going to happen.  ANDREW: You'

The band brings back Jenn Zahrt to catch up on how the winds of change are moving everyone. The gang gets into how to roll with change and work magic to aid it too.  Think about how much you've enjoyed the podcast and how many episodes you listened to, and consider if it is time to support the Patreon You can do so here. If you want more of this in your life you can subscribe by Spotify, RSS , iTunes, Stitcher, or email. Fabeku is at Fabeku.com and Facebook.  Aidan is at AidanWachter.com on Facebook and Instagram Jenn JennZahrt.com or CelestialSpark.com and on Facebook and Instagram. Andrew is on Facebook, Instagram, and TheHermit'sLamp.com.  Thanks for joining the conversation. Please share the podcast to help us grow and change the world.  Andrew You can book time with Andrew through his site here.  Transcript ANDREW: [00:00:03] Hey everybody, welcome to episode 100 of The Hermit's Lamp podcast. I decided to get the band together for this episode. So, I am here with Stacking Skulls, being Fabeku and Aidan and myself and we have corralled [00:00:18] Jen Zahrt to come in and add to the mix today. So, hey, everybody! FABEKU: Hey. AIDAN: Howdy.  ANDREW: It's three months since we recorded, four months since we recorded, what's going on in your worlds? How are things, what's up? [00:00:34]  AIDAN: I've been good. I'm just enjoying the spring. Weather has been lovely. We got new kittens and yeah, everything is good. I, since the last time, we crested the one [00:00:49] year on Six Ways. So that's kind of wild, is to realize that that's been out and perking for more than a year.  ANDREW: Yeah.  JEN: Wow. AIDAN: And yeah, it's just, just keepin' on! ANDREW: That's great. [00:01:04] How 'bout you, Fabeku? FABEKU: Uh, good. It's been, yeah, probably the best thing for me. I've been doing tons of art, just cranking out tons and tons of art on an almost daily basis, which is good and [00:01:19] fun and exciting and then writing like crazy, usually in the middle of the night, which kind of sucks, but you know, at least it's getting done. Yeah, digging the spring/summerish weather that's finally happening, and [00:01:35] yeah, it's good, mostly things are good. Tea, donuts, cats, you know, usual shit. So. ANDREW: Usual stuff.  FABEKU: Yeah. For sure. ANDREW: Curtains being destroyed. FABEKU: Yes, every day, every day. [laughs] ANDREW: How about you, Jen, [00:01:50] you went on a bit of an adventure?  JEN: Yeah. I realized I'm on day 87 of my trip. [laughter] JEN: And it's been um, three continents, and also, you know, [00:02:05] I thought to myself like when I go home, I'm not really going home to anywhere specific and that it's been almost just over 400 days since my apartment flooded last year. So, I really haven't been home for quite a long time. Yeah, so [00:02:20] it's a wild ride.  ANDREW: How do you find that sense of continuously shifting right? Because since the flood you've been sort of on the move in one sense or another that whole time, right? [00:02:35]  JEN: Yeah, pretty much. I always have traveled to England for work. So, when I come here, I feel . . . That's where I am right now. I'm in Bristol, United Kingdom right now. So, I'm staying with somebody who I've stayed with for longer than I ever lived in the apartment that I had, so [00:02:50] it feels more like home than my home did, but it doesn't have any of my stuff in it. So that's a continuity. And yeah, it really makes you think about continuity and change. I really enjoyed the cross-country trip that I took last year, [00:03:05] and I went to Mongolia last year as well. So, these things were sort of moments of excitement and I was staying in a temporary place in Seattle. But yeah, so it's just kind of, it's been kind of having to roll with it. And ironically, [00:03:20] it's been amazing creatively because I've had all of this energy unlocked to just do my stuff, you know, like, and try to do magic on the run. [laughs] So, yeah.  ANDREW: And how is magic on the run? JEN: [00:03:37] Not as easy as you'd think. Well, I mean, maybe you wouldn't think it's easy. [laughter] JEN: But yeah, it can happen. You can do it. It's possible. You just have to get really creative and not be too attached to certain things. You know, you can't reify like, that object, you [00:03:52] know, you sort of have to just launch a sigil when you need to launch a sigil and not be too concerned about being precious about the things that you're using.  ANDREW: But do you think it's changed your, the way you're approaching stuff going [00:04:07] forward, or do you think you'll sort of revert to what you were up to before once that's more of an option? JEN: I don't really know. The astrology's showing me that it's going to be quite a while until I have something that people [00:04:22] would consider fixed and stable. So . . . [laughs] Knowing that, I'm just kind of like, okay, you know what? Here we go, swim, you know, you can't really fight it. So I'm really trying to go with it. Yeah.  ANDREW: Yeah. AIDAN: We're trying to pretend that we're being, that we're fixed and stable but we expected this. [00:04:37]  [laughter] JEN: Well, that's just it, you know, it is actually an illusion!  [laughter] AIDAN: It's probably a load of crap, so . . .  [laughter] JEN: It's an illusion, and sadly, Andrew knows all too well! You know, you have this thing where you're like, it's all good, it's going, it's going, and suddenly, boosh, it's gone. And like what are you going to do, you know?  ANDREW: Yeah. JEN: And you just have to keep going, you know? AIDAN: Well, that was my interpretation of Andrew's stream of questioning, is he's like, okay! [laughter] What can I dig out of here that would be helpful? [laughter] ANDREW: Right? For sure! For folks who may not know, on March [00:05:08] 20th, my store had a fire and basically everything was destroyed. You know, nobody was . . . Nobody was hurt seriously. Firemen had some issues with smoke during the fire. But other than that, everybody was okay, and they're okay now. [00:05:23] But yeah, it's a big change, right? You know, I've been running the shop for six, almost seven years, I've been in that space for almost, for over 5, you know, and it's . . . Yeah, what can you do, right? [00:05:38] Uranus transits your midheaven and you're like, "Oh, I guess I'm changing a whole lot of stuff about where I'm going." [laughter] ANDREW: Unexpectedly, right?  JEN: Yeah. Exactly.  ANDREW: Yeah, and you know, I mean, kind of what I hear from what you're saying, Jen, which is what I've been [00:05:53] really trying to do is: Okay, how do you just lean into that change, right? JEN: Mm-hmm. ANDREW: Instead of being like, "Oh my God, how do I get back to where I was?" How do you, how do you kind of lean into that? How do you accept that and embody that? You know and I, [00:06:08] because you know, after the fire, there's so many questions about whether or not, like what would be the future of the space that I was in. I have the answer now. It's going to be a very long time and I'm not going back there. So, that's done. [00:06:24] You know, what's, what do you do next? How do you do stuff? You know? JEN: Yeah. ANDREW: And when you've been doing it for a while, it's often, if, it's often so much easier to sustain than it is to step [00:06:39] back into it as if you're starting over, you know? And so, you know, for me, the the prospect of retail is a big question mark, as it stands because rents in Toronto are insane, and because I'd been there [00:06:54] for such a long time. I had such a good deal, right? So. JEN: Yeah. ANDREW: Looking at all those possibilities, but also endeavoring to lean deeply into that change and be like: Okay, what what can I do? What would I like to do? Where's my excitement about this [00:07:09] stuff? You know? And so, just last week, from the recording of this, I took over a space that I'm calling The Hermit's Lab, and it's a space to, you know, see clients and teach, but also to work magic [00:07:24] and make products and make art and you know, really kind of get into what I've been enjoying anyways, which is the, the process of, like, you know, collecting plants and making things from them, and you know, doing stuff like that, that sort [00:07:39] of more, more, more active magic and craftsmanship, and more stuff that comes out of, you know, my, my sense of connection to the land and the plants and the things that are here, you know, [00:07:54] so, yeah. JEN: Yeah, yeah, it's, it just clears the decks in a way, and you think differently because all the potential things that used to be habits are completely shifted and you can't rely on that default mode anymore.  ANDREW: Yeah, exactly. [00:08:10]  AIDAN: Yeah, it is an interesting thing to think about cause there's a way that I look at . . . I know what Fabeku's up to, I know what y'all are up to, and the shifts that I did in the shop and everything kind of produced that same thing. You know, Blu and I just looked at it and went: [00:08:25] Okay, if we do this, we'll be able to pay the rent, and so, let's just do that and see where we end up and what makes sense to do in there. And we're way deep in that process because it's, it is, it's like, yeah, we've gotten into the habit we were in, even though we've [00:08:40] moved a lot, and switching that up changes, changes the possibilities.  FABEKU: Yeah. I think it's interesting because I was thinking about, I mean for me, a lot of the flux and shift . . . It hasn't been location-based so much, because that's not, [00:08:55] that's hasn't been much of my experience. But you know, there's just been weird health shit in the last handful of years and stuff just pops up out of the blue like, every, everything is totally cool, and the next thing you're in the emergency room. And they're like, "Oh, you could have died." And it's like, what the fuck is happening, right?  And then [00:09:10] on the other side of that things are different, and you, like Jen was saying, you, you end up doing magic differently. Again, for me, not because I'm traveling and don't have access to my stuff, because there's, there's different physical capacity, there's different energetic capacity, or there's just different bandwidth. And [00:09:25] you know, I was thinking, I think originally, one of my main drivers in getting into magic was I wanted . . . This was, you know, 30 whatever years ago. So it shows the sort of naivete of youth, but it was this desire [00:09:40] to somehow control the chaos, right? Like if I can, if I can just get a firm enough grip on it, then shit won't pop up out of the blue and shit doesn't happen and these weird things . . . you know, of course, all this anxiety, fear-driven kind of stuff. And then at some point, you realize: "Oh, [00:09:55] that's, that's not the way life works." Right?  So instead now, it feels to me like magic is more about, for me, figuring out how to sort of surf that chaos, you know, how to stay on the board, instead of getting taken under by the waves and drowning [00:10:10] in the process and, realizing as the wave travels, as it goes, life looks different, magic looks different, the responses to magic looks different, and just learning to be way more fluid with that then, then I ever really thought I would be or could be, [00:10:25] or wanted to be, really, so. ANDREW: Yeah, I mean, I think that the, the magical cultivation of resilience and capacity to go with the flow. You know, it's [00:10:40] not, it's not sexy. Right? You know? [laughter] FABEKU: Not at all. Not at all.  JEN: I think I make it pretty sexy. I have to differ! [laughter] ANDREW: I think we all make it pretty sexy. But I think if one was to publish a book that says, you know, The Magical [00:10:55] Guide to Resilience. I'm not sure it'd be a best-seller, you know?  JEN: Are you challenging me? Are you challenging? That's a challenge! I'm writing this down. [laughter] AIDAN: Don't worry, I think we could have-- ANDREW: I'll write a chapter, it'll be lovely. JEN: Good! AIDAN: Exactly. Surviving the chaos . . . ANDREW: Yeah. AIDAN: . . . while generating chaos. Yeah.  ANDREW: [00:11:19] But yeah, that's, I mean, that is a lot of what's been going on. Right? And a lot of what I've been doing, you know, I mean, I only recently returned to divining for myself. I was just like, "I don't know. What am I going to ask? Is it going to be okay? Is it going to be okay? Is it going to be okay? [00:11:34] It's like, well, you know, just work at it, work at making it okay, as opposed to like, you know, going to the cards all the time and you know that kind of stuff. And you know, and I think that a lot of the, [00:11:50] the stuff that makes getting through these challenging times possible, is about just showing up where you're at and being, "Okay, you know, this is, this is where my health capacity is. This is where my energetic capacity is. This is . . ." [00:12:05] You know, it's like, you just, you go there and then you work from that place and then, that's either the new limit for the time being, or a permanent limit or whatever, but you just kind of keep trucking with that, right? I mean, I think that's, [00:12:20] that's the deal.  AIDAN: Absolutely, and I think it's super interesting because it's a . . . There was a guy who was one of the co-trainers at a strength-training seminar thing that I did years and years ago, who dropped [00:12:35] off the map. He had kind of a highly relevant website for me for a while in the . . . Around 2010, is when I was kind of really involved in his stuff. I don't remember him from the seminar, but I know he was there assisting. And he just popped [00:12:50] back up on my radar because he had, in the interim, become a Green Beret medic, and then got blown up and lost both of his legs. And the thing that was, is the most fascinating [00:13:05] about that, to me, is, it's like it really made me look at how much I kind of . . . Because the guy looks great. You know. He's like . . . His target is like, "I won't be able to ski this year, but next year I'm skiing." You know? And he's got that kind of [00:13:20] capability to ride that, go, "Okay, I did this thing that truly mattered to me, and this is part of what came from that, and so that's just what it is, and let's continue, you know?" And I think it's been very helpful for me, that he popped [00:13:35] up when he did because I was kind of being a whiny whiny person about some stuff. And it's like, oh, yeah. No. No, all of this is kind of because of how I chose to live my life and all of that. And I haven't had anything severe happen. It's all good. It's all, it's all stuff I can [00:13:50] functionally work with, you know?  JEN: Yeah. I mean the length of my lease-less-ness or home-free-ness, I would say, is my own fault because I could have easily flipped around and said, "Oh, my apartment flooded, let me sign a lease," but my goal was actually to travel, [00:14:06] and then I just didn't stop. AIDAN: Right. JEN: And I haven't stopped and now I'm actually getting to the point where I'm realizing what my limits are, because I've finally met them, but I didn't, I hadn't met them until this point, you know? And so, and it's good like, now I know, but I just kept going, [00:14:21] you know, it wasn't enough. I had to go to Mongolia. I had to spend three months in Africa, you know? And now I finally get it and it's like, "Oh, I think I could probably be okay with signing a lease now, you know?" But for 400 days, it wasn't okay, you know, and I was choosing not to have that, so I wasn't [00:14:36] complaining about having a home. It was more like, I'm, I just, wasn't done with my trip. You know. [laughs] I was choosing to continue it as much as it needed to be, I guess. AIDAN: Yeah. Well, it's [00:14:51] interesting. I was, I've been thinking a lot about you, Andrew as you roll through with the Instagram feed and stuff and seeing your thing. And it is such an interesting . . . It's an interesting experience when kind of life makes the move, right? Because [00:15:06] we like to have that impression that we make the move, and in general, we just don't, right? [laughs] Or we pick the really safe minor ones, and then something really major that is seemingly random, you know, from our control [00:15:21] side. And it's been interesting to see because I can kind of cycle going like, "Okay, what are all the things he's got to figure out now?" ANDREW: Mm-hmm. AIDAN: Because I know you're not really . . . There are some folks that, that happens, and they go, "Okay, [00:15:37] 90 days, I'm back in business as I was before, bigger and better," right? That's kind of, we're not going to tip. We're not necessarily going to take any information out of what occurred. What do you find is kind of, what's the process [00:15:52] that you have going on with you about that? What are you thinking about? What do you find is brought up by this?  ANDREW: So, I think that leading up to the fire, like always, I'm always sort of like, looking at: [00:16:08] Where am I? Where am I enjoying stuff? Where am I not enjoying stuff? Right? What are the challenges? And you know, I sort of had like an 18-month to two-year plan to shimmy stuff in different directions, right? And, you know, I had been finding myself [00:16:23] realizing that there were things that I wanted to do that having a retail store kind of acted more like an anchor to, you know? Going to a conference is a huge effort [00:16:38] when you have to make sure that the store is running in your absence. Right? Taking time off is more complicated when you don't have full, full-time staff and you have to kind of cover payroll and make sure everything's flowing around your work time. [00:16:54]  And I've been having this sort of impulse towards making more art, making a new deck, you know, like a bunch of stuff like that, and, and I didn't have any time for them. And not because I'm [00:17:09] like, horrible at managing my time, but between, you know, having, having two kids half the time and running the store, it's not a lot of spare time left over, you know? And so, when [00:17:24] this happened, my first impulse was like, I mean, I certainly felt that like, "Hey, you should decide stuff now, you should get going," and my first impulse was like, "I'm not doing anything for like two or three weeks. I'm just not going to think of a decision. I'm just [00:17:39] going to deal with immediate stuff, insurance and what-have-you," right? And then, and then, I felt this like, push, be like, you know, you should, you should re-establish something, you should whatever and I was like, "No, you should make a list of things [00:17:54] that you would like," you know? And it . . . One of the things that it started with, so, in Toronto, I live, some people would say downtown, but kind of downtown-ish. Right? And when you go north to where the shop was, there's, for Toronto, [00:18:09] not for where Aidan lives, a big hill, right? AIDAN: [laughing] ANDREW: And it used to be that I cycled everywhere, right? But I'm a person who gets kind of sweaty, and [00:18:24] in the winter, it's dangerous, because we get snow and ice, right? To go up and down that hill. And I don't have a shower at the space, or anything like that. And I was thinking about where it would be nice to be and kind of one of the, like what I would like? I was like, you know, it'd be really nice, [00:18:39] really nice, if I could just cycle to work again all the time. Like if I could just not take transit very much, and just, you know, just cycle, and then as I was sort of kicking around looking at opportunities, you know, there's . . . [00:18:54] I was out strolling around with my partner, Sarah, and we saw this place in Chinatown. And I was like, "How great would it be, to like, you know, be, be just 15 minutes from my house?" As opposed to like the, [00:19:09] you know, somewhere between 40 minutes and an hour that it takes depending on transit. You know? I was like, "That'd be really nice," and it just sort of became this like question of like, what's possible? And what can I make happen? And so on? And then, [00:19:26] my other partner, Erin, sent me a link to this space that I ended up getting, which is literally a five-minute walk from my house. And it's just kind of, it's amazing. Right?  And so now, they're these changes that happen where, [00:19:43] things that I wanted to do but wasn't doing because of time, things that I wanted to do, like, I've been thinking about running a men's circle for a couple years now, but it doesn't make any sense if I have [00:19:58] to commute an hour each way to get there to run it or go in that much earlier than my regular day. But now, I'm like, oh, that's a five-minute walk. I can just, I can do it on any day that I feel like, and just be like, oh, yeah. I'm going to walk down to the shop. [00:20:13] You know? I'm gonna be there in five minutes. I'll be there a few minutes early, we'll hang out, we'll do our thing, we'll go home or whatever. Like, it's easy, right? And you know, the, the prospect of, you know, I mean, having kids, it's easier now, but I live [00:20:28] in Toronto. I don't have a huge place. And having space to make art and really like make a mess and whatever, you know, it's complicated, right? And leaving out my paints and stuff. I mean, the kids are great about it now, but it's like, there's not a lot of room, you know. The place [00:20:43] where . . . I either was thinking about setting up some space and giving up the walk-in closet in my room, glamorous space, right? Or it's the kitchen table, which you can't leave it on indefinitely, right? But now I have this space where I'm just going to have a permanent [00:20:58] worktable and easel and wall space for doing big stuff and you know, these kinds of things.  Because that was one of the other things. I was like, thinking about . . . People kept . . . People have been making references between the Orisha deck I made and Basquiat's art. And [00:21:13] I remember how much I loved how big a lot of his stuff was. And I'm like, I would love to be painting big, but I just have nowhere to do that. Well, you know, I've got 25 feet of wall space here. It's got enough and it's just, I can have it [00:21:28] on the floor. I can do whatever I want on it, you know. So, so it's this process of like looking for where the excitement is, looking at . . . You know, I sat down one night and made, [00:21:43] made this big list of, okay, kind of panicking about the future, is how do I, how do I make the kind of money I was making before? Which I need to support everything that I do in my life. How do I get to that? [00:21:58] You know? And my partner Sarah and I made this list of like, okay, well, what's everything that you can or have or would like to do for money, you know? It's just like going down a list of all these things. You know? One of the great realizations was, I was like, okay, what do I need [00:22:13] for these things? And the only one that requires a store was retail, right? AIDAN: Right. ANDREW: You know, that was the only one on the list that actually required it, you know. There's like, a whole, you know, field notes little pocket journal of like list of like 25 [00:22:28] things that I could do or have done or, you know, are currently doing, that I can just opt into instead, right? And it's just, so, it's not like I've been sort of, I don't know, [00:22:43] aimlessly leaning into abundance mentality and thinking that I'm going to just manifest everything without kind of thinking about it or working at it, but it's a lot more like I've been looking at possibilities, challenging assumptions, [00:22:59] looking, looking to keep an open-ended set of possibilities, you know? Like, even the place that I'm in now, you know, the advertisement said that you had to be willing to sign a year lease and I, when I came and I was, met the landlord and was getting shown around, I was like, [00:23:14] "So, what do you think about six months, because this is my situation" and they were like, "Yeah, that's cool. We can do that." You know, like, it's like, let's see what's possible, you know, and I think that when that happens then, you know, more becomes possible [00:23:29] and, you know, I've been thinking about stuff that I never even considered before, you know?  One of the projects that I'm going to start undertaking is I'm going to hand paint a set of majors, [00:23:44] major tarot cards, and you know, and then depending on how that feels, maybe I'm going to offer to do that for people, you know? AIDAN: Right. ANDREW: Like, you know, it's like, my friend Sullivan, who from [00:23:59] Tarot Sheet Revival, who does the Budapest Tarot and other stuff. Hey Sullivan, if you're listening, this is, this, this is a question I'm going to email you about soon. I'm like, he mixed cards in the traditional way, right? And he comes to Toronto sometimes. And that, you know, so he hand laminates all the layers, [00:24:14] and folds the background onto the front, and does all this stuff, I'm like how, let's do a workshop on that because like I want to learn, I'm sure there's lots of people that want to learn, you know, and so stuff that, that was never even on the table, that migrates in different directions starts to feel [00:24:29] really possible. And then also noticing the, like, yeah, that's what I want to spend my time doing, you know, really, really takes it that way, you know, so. Anyway, that's my long-winded rambling answer to your question, Aidan.  AIDAN: No, [00:24:44] that's awesome. And it syncs up with my kind of experience so well and it's interesting because I'm like, I don't have much resistance to change compared to most people, but I still do have that [00:24:59] thing? ANDREW: Sure. AIDAN: And then I have all the kind of layers of worry that come along with, if you're going to make a big change and it's going to directly impact your ability to pay the bills and, you know, feed your people and all that stuff, but . . . ANDREW: You've got kittens to take care of, right? AIDAN: [00:25:16] I've got kittens to take care of! Kittens need beef!  [laughter] AIDAN: Beef is the answer to all kitten ills, truly. A little off [00:25:31] and not right. We switched them to half beef and they're giant now and totally healthy. So, beef is the answer. ANDREW: Perfect.  FABEKU: I think the piece of it that makes sense, in my experience. What you're talking about is that [00:25:47] that kind of figuring out where the zing is, you know, figuring out the things that are exciting, figuring out like it sort of, once the chaos happens, it creates this weird kind of break in state where, rather than just continue to roll through the list of shit [00:26:02] that you do every day and assume that that's the program and that's the thing, you have a moment where you either get to or have to look at that stuff and say wait, is this really the stuff I want to do? Is this the stuff that matters? is the stuff I'm excited about? Is this the stuff that drives me? It's [00:26:17] this, you know, whatever it is.  And you know, I mean it's certainly been, you know, kind of a big reassessing and reshuffling of some of that stuff for me, and you know, kind of redistributing the weight of attention and you know, what I'm, what I'm spending my time doing, and [00:26:32] you know, I think for me that kind of sinks up to that deeper idea of looking at that chaos and kind of relating to it as like sort of building materials. You know, it's like somebody takes it and throws it all up in the air and it's like, okay, now that it's everywhere, rather [00:26:47] than look at that as some tragedy, and not that there's not tragic components to it, obviously, but you know, rather than sort of drown in that, looking at okay, now that the deck has been reshuffled, how can I how can I reassemble this stuff? You know, what do I want to keep? [00:27:02] What do I want to toss out? And if this is what's left, then, you know, what is, what is the new, the new octave of stuff look like on the other side of this, this weird chaotic event, so. ANDREW: Yeah. I mean, one of the things I find myself saying [00:27:17] sometimes to people around the Tower card is, you know, when when the Tower gets struck or whatever that disruption is, you have a choice, right? You can either be like Bugs Bunny in the cartoon sticking fingers in holes in the dam and hoping [00:27:32] that it's not coming down, or you can get at the sledgehammer and help, and then once it's disassembled, then you call in the architect and the engineers and, you know, work together to figure out what's happening next, right?  FABEKU: Yeah.  ANDREW: So. Mm-hmm. So, and I also think [00:27:47] that you know, one of the things, you know, to be clear too, because I think that there's a lot of "rah, rah, I just overcome stuff," out there, right, you know? And, like, this process [00:28:02] and what I'm talking about now, you know, it's almost three months post fire, you know, and, like, you know, I was in shock for the first two to three weeks, like literally just still physically in shock, you know, and [00:28:18] there were, there were times, you know, like I . . . I'm usually a person who has a lot of control over their mind, you know, I mean, I spent years sitting and meditating and training myself in different magical and sort of yogic [00:28:33] driven ways. So, like, for me to not be able to wrangle my mind back under to, you know, some semblance of control is, you know, it doesn't really happen much. And it totally happened after this, you know, I was out [00:28:49] at a concert, and I was I was just watching my friend play, and then this thought just came to my brain, which is your house is on fire, your house is totally burning down right now, and people are trying to call you, and you're in the concert and you can't hear them. And [00:29:04] I couldn't restrain it. I . . . In the end, I pulled my phone out and looked at it. I'm like, nobody's called me. If someone . . . at that point, I was like, okay, now, nobody's called me. Somebody would have called me if my place was on fire. There are lots of people who would get direct ahold of me. It's fine. But [00:29:19] you know, it's, it's important to really notice that stuff and to deal with that too, right? FABEKU: Yeah. ANDREW: Because even, you know, even as somebody who has, you know, a lot of experience sort of wrangling back their mind from various things, [00:29:35] there comes a point where it's just not controllable and that's fine. You know, it's acceptable. It's real, you know, and to, to work with that, you know? And like, I also, you know, I have a person I do peer counseling with, [00:29:50] and other friends I get a lot of support with, and, you know, my friend that I do peer counseling with was like, I'm available as much as you want, and I saw them like, a couple times a week for the first stretch, just you know, and just one-sided more than an exchange, because it's just [00:30:05] like, I just need the support. I just got, I just need to talk this through, you know? And so, I think that leaning into the possibilities is absolutely crucial, and, you know, dealing with the trauma of it, whatever [00:30:20] level that's at, is the other side of that equation, right? Because without that, you know, I feel like I would just carry the sense of worry about stuff going forward . . . FABEKU: Mm-hmm. ANDREW: And it would make every exchange with things, you know, like, [00:30:35] you know, like when my landlord voided my lease, you know, that would be a re-triggering thing, when, you know, this happens, you know when you're sitting waiting for the insurance to tell you how much money they're going to give you, that'd be another thing, and you know, just keep stirring [00:30:50] it up and stirring it up. And instead, I'm like, you know, have done a lot of cleaning up of it and so, it's way way easier now. So, yeah.  FABEKU: Well, you know, one of the things that happened for me after the [00:31:05] other big health event last year, which was about . . . It was mid-April last year, and after that for like six to nine months every time I would have even a tiny sensation anywhere in my body that didn't seem completely normal, [00:31:20] I would freak the fuck out. It was like, that's it. It's happening again. I'm about to drop dead. What's going on? At one point, I was talking my doctor and I said "Listen, this is a thing that happens." And she said, "Right, you get that like people get PTSD or some version of PTSD from events like that [00:31:35] that pop up." And I was like, "What?" And she was like, you know, "Come on, like, this is a thing that happens to people." And so, I get that, I think that there . . . And, and I appreciate that you brought that up, because I do think that it gets a little . . . The conversations [00:31:50] about it get a little one-sided. I mean the possibility is great and that's useful and important and helpful and there is this other shit that you know, it just kind of goes along for the ride with these weird kind of chaotic life events.  And then figuring out how [00:32:05] to manage that and how like you said kind of clean it up, and for me it was a process, and it's still kind of a process sometimes, of, you know, like how do you peel, how do you peel those layers of that charge off of that thing to where, you know, when your, when your leg goes numb because you're sitting weird, you're [00:32:20] all of a sudden like, "I'm about to drop dead," and then you just lose your shit, you know, it's inaccurate and not helpful, you know? But I think that that's it and you know, one of the things that my doctor said to me, it was interesting, was she said, well, you know, over time, [00:32:35] just, that I get that you're not going to love this answer, but, she said, "Over time you'll get that you're actually not about to drop dead, you know, because these things have come and gone, and you know, they pass and you're still here and it's fine." And yeah, I didn't, I didn't really love [00:32:50] that answer too much. But, but that's it. I mean that is part of the, that sort of peeling off of the charge, and I think that's that's a huge part of the process. It's a huge part of the process, for sure.  JEN: Yeah, it took me a long time to feel that [00:33:05] charge dissipate. When I was in downtown Seattle, it hurt and that's one reason why I kept leaving, was because it hurt too much to be near my old apartment. I felt like it had somehow spontaneously rejected me and said no, you can't live in downtown Seattle anymore [00:33:20] and it was physically painful and it took . . . It wasn't until I got back from Mongolia that it started to be, and that was about four months after the event? And then it slowly started when I would leave and come back and leave and come back, [00:33:35] each time I came back from a long trip, it would be less painful and less painful. And now I can walk around just fine, and I don't feel as much, but being there was painful, so I had to go and then return and . . . Just that, it was almost like I had to establish a new [00:33:50] story of my relationship to the city, because my only relationship had been with that apartment, and suddenly that was gone, and it was like, now, how do I live here? I don't know how to live here. It doesn't want me. You know, it felt like it was rejecting me. So, I had to re-establish that [00:34:05] relationship by rejecting it many many times before I could say, oh, okay. Yeah, I know, I think I can actually do this, you know.  AIDAN: Yeah. It is really interesting . . . ANDREW: [34:15 something is missing] AIDAN: [chuckles] Yeah, it's super interesting, because I do think that we, and I think that we've been [00:34:20] over all pretty good in these conversations in kind of going back to the reality, because it's you know, it's like, Fabeku and I have kind of, you know, I was thinking about this the other day, our time lining on a bunch [00:34:35] of stuff has been really similar, even though what's gone on for us is very different. And for a lot of that, I was a wreck, you know, it's like I was totally able to do certain pieces of what needed to be done. And then there was a bunch of shit that [00:34:50] just kind of had to be jettisoned. And I do think that it's kind of what you were talking about, Jen, is like post injury and surgery and stuff like that. It's been really a weird feeling out process, getting comfortable [00:35:05] moving pretty actively, and doing what I do, because it is, it's like, so, I can pick this thing up. And I know that that will be good for my body overall if I get back to working out because I kind of need it, but is this going to cause me [00:35:20] to have to go back and get opened up again and fixed again, right? And you've slowly got to go, okay, we just take it easy and do what you can do in any moment, but I think yeah, it's a . . . The Instagram culture [00:35:35] is right. Nothing ever, nothing bad ever happens, if you have, if you have the ability to grind hard enough. [laughs] ANDREW: Well, that's just it, right? You know, for me, you know, back when I used to do martial arts, it was like, oh [00:35:50] you just sprained your ankle. Here. Here's some tape. Let's go, you know? Tape it up and keep moving. Right? You know? It was such a bizarre, otherworldly thing, right? And so, you know, I kind of got to the place where I would get injured, and my response to it [00:36:05] was, did I go into shock? Because if I didn't go into shock, I don't need to go to the hospital. I'm probably okay. Which is which is really not ideal at all. Right? And so like, you know, as I've get, you know some injuries and stuff around climbing, you know, and going [00:36:20] back to climbing, it's always tempting just to push, and I'm still, you know, you could still be strong and weak at the same time, right? With injuries, you know? And so, I was like, how do I control this? How do I like, derail my impulse just to like [00:36:36] get excited? And it's not even about being macho in that sense. It's just like, oh my God, this is so fun, and this is so exciting. I really want to like, hang off this upside-down thing and try and do this move now, right? And it's like, oh no, that's not good. And so [00:36:51] I was like, okay, what I'm going to do is this: I'm gonna go to the gym and I'm a climb every single climb of one level in an evening, and when I can do that, then I'll go up one notch, you know? And you know, it's like, but it's this constant [00:37:06] thing, and you know, just be like seeing stuff and looking at it, being like, oh my god, I'd be so excited to do that. But then it's like, well but can my body, actually, in a deep way, sustain that, right? You know?  AIDAN: Right.  ANDREW: It's, yeah, requires patience and attention, you know. [00:37:22] So. AIDAN: Yep.  ANDREW: Well, and the other thing that's, you know, interesting for me is, I mean, all my Orishas are at my house. So, they're fine. [00:37:38] But almost all of my functional magical gear and altars and statuary and all of those things all burned, right? They're all gone. You know. I saved one meteorite that I had, that I found, I'm like [00:37:53] if it can go through the atmosphere, it can go through this. That's not a big deal. I'm gonna see if I can, if I can clean, and I mean like not spiritually, but just practically, clean my, [00:38:08] moldavite pendulum. I'm not sure, you know, it was exposed to a lot of smoke stuff. And, and that's it. You know, all my, all my cards are gone, you know? All the decks that I've had over the years are gone. [00:38:23] You know, and I mean, for me it's fine. I can replace many, if not all of them, and I don't really need a ton anyway, but yeah, it's this question of like, okay, what do I need? You know.  And I just remember it was a time in the process where [00:38:38] it was kind of getting down to, they're like, okay, so the engineers have been in, it's safe, you need to go in and decide what you're taking, and then everything else will get disposed of," right? Because you know, although a lot of people were like, oh you can clean stuff [00:38:53] and whatever, it's like, you know, my couch burned, so like all that Styrofoam smoke is in the space, you know, like so much toxic stuff, right? And it's like yeah, maybe you can clean that off, but I'm not really sure. And I don't know, [00:39:08] it's got toxic stuff on it, and I don't want to keep a lot of stuff, you know, and that smell is really hard to get rid of, even off of hard stuff, right? And so, I just kind of went in and I went where all the, all the shrine stuff was, [00:39:23] and just brought flowers, and I'm like, all right. So, this is a juncture, my friends. If you want to continue with me, let's continue, carry forward, and if this is a time at which you want to, you know, go on to do something else and then then let's called it at that, [00:39:38] you know, and just spending some time there. And you know, it's sort of, there's been a bunch of conversations where people, you know, expressed sort of that the loss of these items was the loss of that connection to spirit and, you [00:39:53] know, for me it hasn't really been, you know, and I don't think that it ever needs to be, but I think it's easy to identify in those kinds of ways, and you know, I'm like, I wonder how that is for you, Jen, too, like, did you lose magical things that you've [00:40:08] had to reorganize yourself around? JEN: I did not. I had a very lucky experience in that the part of my house that flooded destroyed property I was already getting rid of but that was quite valuable [00:40:23] and so it turned into a car. So, my apartment left, my things were fine. But . . . And the flood happened in a part of the apartment that made it unlivable. It was the entryway, the bathroom, and the front hallway. [00:40:38] And there was nothing in the bathroom of worth, and then the front hallway, there were stacks and stacks of astrology books that I was going to sell but they were all destroyed so I couldn't sell them. And then, the insurance replacement cost was enough for a down payment on the car. So, [00:40:53] I ended up converting them that way and yeah, anything else, it was, you know, not really things that I missed. You know, certain things I had to get rid. I had to get rid of because they got wet and just was, you know, [00:41:08] we didn't know what was in the water, basically, but overall, the most important things did get saved and so I was lucky in that way. But I put it all in storage. So, I haven't really had access to it up until just before this trip, [00:41:23] but then I left for 90 days. So, it still is like not in my possession. But so, yeah, our stories differ somewhat in that respect and I feel really lucky that I didn't lose everything in that way. Yeah, [00:41:38] I had a feeling that the protection magic that I had set up in my house was quite strong and it could have easily been that the water had gone in the other direction, which would have been catastrophic, but it didn't go that way. So. And also in terms of timing, is, Aidan, you were speaking that you and [00:41:53] Fabeku had the line up, Fabeku's health incident happened the exact same weekend that my flood happened. So, we were commiserating about that at the same time. AIDAN: Right. JEN: "Holy shit. What is going on right now?"  AIDAN: Yep. JEN: Yeah.  AIDAN: Yep. [00:42:09] Yeah, it is. It's a peculiar thing I had . . . This is kind of a switch of topics. But one of the things that was really kind of fascinating, this [00:42:24] last week, is I went and visited my brother in San Francisco. And his place is super cool. They're like, they do an amazing amount of really cool work. [00:42:39] Some of that is art and a lot of it is food and fermenting, and you know, they've got the bees and all of that stuff. But one of the things that I found really interesting is that there was a big fire on their block that took out [00:42:54] the building next to them, basically, even though it was a gas line fire in the streets, just because of the way that the pipe was pierced. It like shot this jet of fire at that building and messed that up. And then, [00:43:09] to get that building put out, the fire department ended up destroying a number of apartments basically, just with water damage, you know, that were attached to that. And then across the street, but moving away from their apartment, got taken [00:43:24] out by smoke and heat, because of the way the wind was blowing, you know. So, it was really, I'm sure they had a mass-, way more awareness that I did. It was very odd being in this house that was like, you know, a couple of feet [00:43:39] away from not existing with so much stuff in it. That was, that they've put so much work into. And it's, yeah, it's pretty interesting, because we've moved so much, we've become kind of so [00:43:55] minimalist, in some ways, though not in the way that usually gets used, that there's not much here if that happened. And that's where I kind of went. Like, I don't have much left, you know. It would be easier if I could grab [00:44:10] my computer. I would be happier if I could also grab a couple of guitars, but other than that, other than that, it's just the animals but there's really not, there's not much left in here that I am attached. And so that's an odd . . . It was just kind [00:44:25] of an odd thing. Like, yeah, if this place burned down, I could walk away. I could just walk away, and it would be no . . . It wouldn't be fun and there would be shit after the fact, I'm sure. But in general, I don't have enough for it to get taken out. That's [00:44:41] a weird thing, though.  JEN: Yeah, I think it all goes down to also like an illusion of stability, you know, we can set up shop somewhere and unpack and feel the continuity of a certain [00:44:56] period of time and then if it gets cut short, out of our control, and it's not our choice to move, or our choice to end the lease, it feels totally destabilizing, and yet we were actually unstable the whole time, really. You know, it's, it was sort of a, [00:45:12] I don't know. I've been thinking about that a lot. Like what is continuity? what is rupture? You know, how . . . What is security, even? And you know, through these types of challenges, can we still feel a type of security, even though we know at any moment it could change, you know? [00:45:28]  FABEKU: Well, you know, for me what's been interesting with that, kind of going back to that kind of post-event sort of panic trauma stuff that would kick up. I -- and I'm not pretending it's all the way resolved. But I think the way that I finally figured out how to manage [00:45:43] it on a day-to-day basis was, like I started to figure out like how do I, what do I do? Like, how do I amp this anxiety down? So, it's not a constant thing, and I was I was failing at that, because I was trying to grab hold of something [00:45:58] that would say: Oh, you're fine. It's stable. Nothing to worry about, nothing will happen again. It's not a big deal. And that was bullshit and I know it's bullshit because you know, that's, Jesus, I mean, I'm 44, shit happens.  But, and so that's ultimately how I started [00:46:13] to amp it down. It's like, well, the way you amp it down is you realize everybody dies, and everybody dies at some point, for some reason, however that happens, and you really have zero control over it. So, this constant anxiety and this, this grasping [00:46:28] for some kind of control mechanism that absolutely doesn't exist. It's a . . . it's an unwise investment at the end of the day. It's unwise, and it's ineffective and so it really was that kind of almost cliché thing of like making as much peace as you can with your [00:46:43] death, right? It happens, people die. And the only thing that I can reliably trust is that I'm in the current. I have no idea what the current's going to do. I don't know where it's going to go. But I'm in the current and that's all I know and that's it. And again, [00:46:58] I don't love that. You know, I mean, if somebody gave me the option of, you know, here's a, here's a foolproof control mechanism, I would probably take hold of it and say "give me door number one," but that's not a thing. It's not a thing. And the interesting thing . . . And I fought that [00:47:13] as a resolution because there was, there was a part of me that that kind of increased the panic for a minute, like well, that's a shitty answer to the question. But then when I realized that's literally the only answer to the question. That is it. There is, it might be shitty, but [00:47:28] there is no other answer. Then there is, then there was a whole lot of levels that started to settle in, and, and it's just stay in the current, that's it.  And then that also then circles back to what we were saying about, you know, figuring out what you're [00:47:43] actually excited about, and prioritizing the shit you spend time on, and the people you spend time with, and, you know, all of it. It's, so that's, that for me is the thing, and I don't, and I want to be clear, like I'm not, I'm not coming at that from some enlightened state. Like, it's not like, [00:47:58] "Oh, I realized my own mortality and I'm at peace." I'm not at peace with any of it, but it is what it is. And so that, the constant trauma response has amped down considerably, once I realized that, just stay in the fucking current. That's it. That's [00:48:13] the only option you have, really, so. ANDREW: Well, and I think that, you know, too like, you know, we all do some form of looking towards the future in divination and astrology and whatever, right? And you know, people ask me like, oh is that, you know, did [00:48:28] you see it coming? Did you whatever? And I was like no. No, I mean I didn't see it coming, right? And you know, there's, there's, in the Lukumí divination that I do, there's, when, [00:48:43] when you're in a sign of loss, say or like, you know, whatever, right? And I was in a sign, in a negative sign, when the fire happened, unsurprisingly, but there's a modifier that goes with it, which is Otonawa, right? And it means, [00:49:00] kind of loosely translated as that which you brought with you from heaven, right? And it tells you that it's, it was immutable, right? That whatever, whatever this is going on, the actual core of it you can't change. Maybe you can mitigate [00:49:15] it. Maybe you can bob and weave with it. Possibly, hopefully, you can accelerate your, you know, ramping up back out of it, but it means it's coming, right? And you're not going to be able to change that and make that happen--make [00:49:30] that not happen.  And, you know, understanding and thinking about life in those ways, where it's like I'm literally in a time where this is . . . So many things are beyond my control. And that that energy continued for a good stretch, right? Because, [00:49:45] you know, the insurance company is going to do what the insurance company's going to do. I have some say in that, but not a lot, you know. The landlord is going to do what they're going to do. The other people are going to do what they're going to do. And you know, you have to, you know, you have to [00:50:00] make some kind of peace with the fact that all you can do is are those things that are in your control and keeps, as you say, staying in that flow and moving forward, you know? So.  FABEKU: Well, one of the two things for me was-- JEN: When I--  FABEKU: I did a consult [00:50:15] with Jen last year and, we're kind of looking ahead at the year, and she said, "Well, you know, like I kind of hate to tell you but like in October there's a thing that looks a whole lot like the thing the past April where the big health--" and I was like, [00:50:30] "Fuck me, are you serious?" Like what the fuck! And then it was this whole conversation around so what can we do about it? Right? So, like you're saying, fundamentally the energy is there. That's the frequency. And then I think as magicians the question [00:50:45] becomes, how do I, how do I handle that frequency? It's not like I can just hit the delete button and it's gone. So instead, you know for me it was this whole Saturn thing that was happening.  So, I did this nine week long thing with Saturn and all kinds of shit. [00:51:00] And so something that could have been a life-threatening thing: I still got sick, weird shit still happened, and I saw the potential in it for things to get super serious, but it didn't. It wasn't serious. And I moved on the other side of it, because I think again, [00:51:15] there was this looking to the future, and okay, how do we and-- Listen, I wanted to completely eliminate the energy, but I got that's not how it's going to work. So instead, how do I shape this shit so that it's as least problematic as possible. You [00:51:30] know? And again, I didn't love any of that. But, but for me, that was, that was, that was the way to stay in the current at the time, and continue to maintain a relationship to the current as a magician, when it would have been super easy for [00:51:45] me to just lose my fucking mind about the fact that oh, this period of time looks a whole lot like that period of time that was super horrible. ANDREW: Mm-hmm. JEN: Yeah. So, did you, Andrew, [00:52:00] do the Lukumí reading right after the fire, to get that message? ANDREW: I was already in a reading.  JEN: Oh, okay.  ANDREW: They govern at least 28 days. So yeah, I was already within that structure. So, yeah.  JEN: So [00:52:15] when my flood happened, the city condemned the apartment as unlivable, and I had five days to move, and they would help fund relocating. So basically, just pay you a bunch of money to leave. But you have to leave within that period of time. And I called my neighbor and I said, "I [00:52:30] have to go, because there's a lot of money on the line, and I'm ready and willing. I mean, you guys know me, you say 'jump,' I'm just gone," you know. So, I was already packing and everything and I said, "I just need a mover, tell me who I should get." So, she said, "Call TGA Movers," so I called his number, and this guy named Harvey [00:52:45] comes on, and he comes by on Saturday, and I have to leave by that Tuesday. He appraises everything, and says, "I'll come by tomorrow with my truck and a guy named Eddie." I was like, "Okay, cool." So, on Sunday, he rocks up in this truck. It's this white van. And on the outside of [00:53:00] the van, there's this massive black elephant. And on it, it says, "The Great Ancestors Moving and Maintenance." ANDREW: Mm-hmm. [laughter] JEN: So, I'm like, you mean the great ancestors are moving me out of this [00:53:15] flooded apartment? [laughter] JEN: Like it suddenly went from being this like very traumatic, like holy crap, my life is just completely changed in one weekend, and I had to come back from, you know, speaking in a planetarium about astrology early, from, I was in Alaska when the flood happened, so [00:53:30] I had to fly home early, and this was so chaotic and everything, and then suddenly like within that week the ancestors are moving me? And I was just like, "How can this be a bad thing?" You know, and it suddenly from that point on was like, oh, okay, like this is actually something good, you know, and it feels bad [00:53:45] now and it's definitely traumatic, but you just can't ignore a sign like that. I mean, what are the chances? I didn't even look what TGA stood for, you know, and then there it was, like the great ancestors, you know. So.  ANDREW: That's amazing.  FABEKU: I think that kind [00:54:00] of going back to that thing I said earlier about originally wanting to kind of control or eliminate the chaos. Now a lot of my magic is focused on sort of asking that the chaos works out in my favor. You know? That it, and again not in some weird Pollyanna [00:54:15] like, oh everything works out the way it should, because I think that's a fucked-up idea. But it, to me, that's the way I shifted, like, as much as I would love to eliminate that kind of chaos all together, realizing that's not going to happen. So instead if we can kind of slant it [00:54:30] so ultimately, as shitty as it might be, as uncomfortable as it might be, as horrifying as it might be, somehow it sort of shakes out in my favor at the end, as opposed to . . . So again, to me that's the sort of asking the current to carry me forward versus, you know, kind of pulling you under [00:54:45] and the undertow at some point. So. ANDREW: Yeah, for sure. I mean, I did a lot of praying to have the intelligence and awareness to benefit from situations [00:55:00] and to find my way through them, right? You know, they're like, I'm like, there's definitely some like, "Hey everybody, grease the wheels for me, please," but then there's also like "and help me see, help me be aware, help me like, notice these things instead of just gloss [00:55:15] over them," you know, so that I can actually, you know, benefit from those opportunities and so on. So. FABEKU: Yeah, for sure.  AIDAN: I think that's a really, that's a really brilliant thing. And it's something that is actually kind of came up in a way this morning in the Six Ways group. [00:55:31] Is there's this, to me now, there's this difference of how I work. Like there's, there's the stuff like, the sigils on the wall are saying, "I want this, like this," right? But the vast majority of the work is more in line with what you were just describing. [00:55:46] It's like, there's all the stuff that is always going on and always changing, and this is the general direction I'm trying to go, and what's really important is that I keep going into something that is pretty similar to that, but [00:56:01] I don't care, in truth, most of the sigils are the best idea I have of what would get me there, right? But kind of the offering side or the prayer side, if that was how I thought of that, [00:56:16] is way more geared towards "yeah, let's, let this, let's let all these crazy things that occur, occur in a way that I could use more so than not, and yeah, let me have the brains [00:56:31] to not fight it and be able to get on that right track or get into that right current. Let me know when I actually need the paddle board rather than the straight up surfboard because otherwise it could be a very slow ride," you [00:56:46] know. ANDREW: Mm-hmm. Well, you know, that kind of, kind of segues into one of the questions that we got on Facebook. I think it was Dre was asking what skills, what [00:57:01] skills do you not have, you know, that you would like to have, and how might that relate to your magic as well? Like not necessarily just magical skills, but kind of skills in general, you know? Is there stuff you're thinking about learning, [00:57:16] building up, adding to your to your vocabulary, or the things that anybody needs to kind of, or sees it as a benefit for moving forward? AIDAN: Man, that's such an interesting [00:57:31] one, because I'm always working that stuff.  ANDREW: It's clean and press, isn't it? Or . . . AIDAN: Yeah.  ANDREW: More clean than press.  AIDAN: Yeah, totally. Yeah for me it's, it's like, [00:57:46] I'm trying to not live so entirely in my own head. Like I'm aware of it, but I still get trapped by it, and how that usually happens is that someone else will say something that seems [00:58:01] crystal clear, but that I have actually totally misread, [laughs] and that's my biggest thing, and that's really interpersonal more than specifically magical, but that's I would say my biggest kind of . . . That's the [00:58:16] biggest hole that I'm aware of that I'm really working on is, especially if I think it's totally crystal clear, asking for . . . to verify, you know, because I find that I'm usually wrong. FABEKU: [00:58:33] I think for me, I was just having a conversation. A couple weeks ago, my oldest friend in the world was in town and we were, we've known each other since we were three or four. And we were talking kind of late at night. And, and I said, "You know, I feel like the next level for me [00:58:48] personally and probably beyond that is," and one of the things you said, when we very first started, Andrew. This thing of, after these things happen, like you're not the same anymore, and I think that what I've realized for me [00:59:03] is an in response to the last handful of years and some, just events and shit that have happened, there's . . . When I was in some, doing some trance work, one of the others spoke about it as, spoke about it as like this, this accretion of grief, which I thought was kind [00:59:18] of a fascinating language and it made it clear for me in a way that it was a little--it wasn't before--in this, the way that these, almost like the way a pearl forms, you know, like these layers of grief kind of buildup. And sometimes it settles, sometimes it's not, [00:59:33] but then over time, all of a sudden, there's this thing that just sits there and you're like, fuck, what is this thing? And then, you know, you realize what it is.  And so, I've been kind of looking at that and the way that that's affected me and you know, how to deal with that magically, how to deal with it in other ways, just how to deal [00:59:48] with it personally, and kind of moving through that, and, and again, not in the sense of being who you were before, because I don't think that's the way things work. But, but how to peel off some of those layers, that, that begin for me to feel really problematic [01:00:03] at a certain point. And I don't, I'm making some progress, but I, I for sure know that I don't have the . . . I don't have the skills yet and I don't even necessarily have the full sense of the right angle of approach. [01:00:18] You know, it's more, it feels, and I've had a few of these dreams, where it's like being inside of an egg and kind of pecking at the wall to figure out, okay, where's the where's the thinnest place to make this kind of initial puncture? Kind of a thing. [01:00:34] And I don't know if that makes sense as I'm saying it. I don't know how lucid that sounds, but yeah, I think for me that's, that's the focus. You know, how do you, how do you work through and sort of peel off some of those layers that have built up over time?  ANDREW: Yeah. I mean, [01:00:49] I think that it fits with stuff that I've talked about on the podcast somewhere, but I no longer remember where, about my work with meteorites and my idea of sort of like leaving, leaving the, the Earth or leaving for a different orbit and a bigger, [01:01:04] sort of more universal picture, right? You know. FABEKU: Yeah.  ANDREW: I wouldn't have sort of said originally that that was tied to grief, but it definitely was tied to a process of shedding a lot of things that . . . FABEKU: Yeah. ANDREW: . . . Have their roots back in some of those kinds of things. [01:01:19]  FABEKU: Yeah. ANDREW: And either were, you know, either became dead and unhelpful or were just problematic to start with, you know, so. FABEKU: Well, and it's interesting you mention it because I'm sitting next to this heart-shaped meteorite that I've been hanging out with for weeks and weeks and weeks and I, I [01:01:34] get, I get, yeah, I get what you mean on a real visceral level with that.  AIDAN: Yeah, that's pretty interesting. That's, that's, as you know, Fabeku, cause we've talked about it some, that that's a lot of what I've been doing for the last chunk of time, both on [01:01:49] grief and then kind of on the PTSD from just being fucked with in various ways at different points, you know?  ANDREW: Yeah.  AIDAN: And running a couple of people now through the process that I was given by the allies to see if it works for anybody else. [laughs] Cause [01:02:04] that's not always the case, but so far it seems to be doing its thing. Yeah. I think that's a very real thing. FABEKU: Mm-hmm. ANDREW: How 'bout you, Jen, anything, anything that you're working on, hoping [01:02:19] for? JEN: I don't have anything specific in mind at the moment. I think what I need to work on is not traveling. [laughter] JEN: And actually understanding [01:02:34] what it means to be in place and develop a kind of soft momentum as opposed to the fire hose that I'm used to. So, if anything, it would be learning how to throttle down and understand [01:02:49] sort of compa-, not capacity, but like amount, you know? Like not turning everything all the way up to 11 all the time, but figuring out more subtle modes, and also, you know learning [01:03:04] how to gather moss a little bit, because I feel like at this point, I'm like a polished little bullet, you know? And that can be fun to a point b

Lonnie and Andrew explore the how reconstruction and revisioning of heathen traditions plays out in Lonnie's life and the world. Going from both the inspiration in Lonnie's life to the racism and problems that also exist in some adherents. The also talk about chaos magic and finding your own path.  Think about how much you've enjoyed the podcast and how many episodes you listened to, and consider if it is time to support the Patreon You can do so here. If you want more of this in your life you can subscribe by RSS , iTunes, Stitcher, or email. Lonnie can be found on facebook here, and Weird Web radio is here.  Elhaz Ablaze can be found here.  Andrew can be found here.  Thanks for joining the conversation. Please share the podcast to help us grow and change the world.  Andrew You can book time with Andrew through his site here.  Transcript Andrew: Welcome to another installment of the Hermit's Lamp Podcast. I am hanging out today with Lonnie Scott. And I know Lonnie from the internet, from tarot community, from all sorts of different places. And not that long ago, for me, even being a guest on his show, Weird Web Radio. But for folks who don't know who you are, Lonnie, what are you up to you? What are you doing spiritually these days?  Lonnie: Oh, boy. What am I not doing spiritually these days? For most people who may not know that personal side of me, I'm a heathen, I generally practice within reconstructed, reidealized paganism practices inspired by Northern Europe and ancient Northern European practices. But more of if you want to call it, what we call the down and dirty title, chaos heathen. Chaos heathenry is something that was started by the guys at the Elhaz Ablaze website and blog many years ago. I found my way to them just trying to navigate to something within heathenry that wasn't just religious. I don't feel like I have this strict sort of religious practice. I'm more interested in magic and sorcery and how those things work, but within frameworks that resonate to me. And heathenry's always spoken to me that way.  Essentially, we are chaos magicians who found a spiritual home in heathenry. Jason Miller coined something not too long ago called chaonimism. When I read that, I thought, this is the term that applies really well to the way we think, especially myself, within that chaos heathen sort of framework. We're seeking the real results of practice and trying to find what it is that works and the sort of tech that we can plug into and apply to our lives. At the same time, recognizing that spirit is real and it doesn't require my permission or my belief to exist. It's really there if that makes sense. Andrew: Does for sure. I'm just pulled up the thing from Jason, chaonimism now. Approach that combines the wild freedom focused on results and non-hierarchical view of reality inherent in chaos magic with a belief in spirits as organized consciousness not dependent on belief. Yeah, you know, I mean, I think that, I think that's such an interesting distinction, this question of, I actually have no question about it but I think that the dialogue about it has been interesting and it's always interesting when people come to it, which is, are spirits real? Where do they exist? How do they exist?  And for me, I've pretty much always approached them as discrete entities with no reliance on me. They have a life of some sort extraneous to me entirely and we just bump into each other if I'm lucky at the appointed times, you know, when I make the appropriate phone call, you know. In a sense, we are that spiritual being, we're embodied as spirits, if you buy into that framework.  So, you're a spirit too just as long with all these other spirits that are surrounding us. We're not better or worse than any of those that exist, we're just existing on sort of a different framework or different vibrations, I guess, if you want to take it that way. So, why is the nonreligious side of that important to you or what does that mean in terms of your practice in your life? Lonnie: Yeah. My practice isn't centered around devotions, I guess is the really, the only distinction I can come up with that makes any sort of sense. I'm not setting up permanent altar, temple structure type relationships to any deities or trying to come up with specific philosophies or dictate practice or anything around particular god size spirits, if you will. In that light, I'm not the religious, but I do on the same token have these relationships with different gods and goddesses within the heathen framework and without. Go ahead. Andrew: Heathen is always a word that people, I see around, and I feel like I sometimes struggle to articulate what it means clearly though myself. What does heathenism mean to you or how would you define that word? Lonnie: Sure. Heathenry is just kind of a general umbrella kind of term. It's similar to pagan in that fashion, they can cover a lot of different styles and approaches and practices that fall under that category. Heathen is a more specific general term that, again, it covers things that are being reconstructed or inspired by ancient Northern European practices, going out through Germanic lands, Scandinavia, Iceland, Anglo Saxon sort of practices. And there are different specific religions fall under that umbrella depending on what area and region people are being inspired by. Andrew: So it's more of these, for you, about the geography where it comes from or the collection of spirits where it comes from? Lonnie: I guess by sheer accident, it's associated with the geography because that's where the ideas come from. But for me, it's more about the ideas. It's not about the land or the places that these original ideas sort of sprung up. My interest- Andrew: I was going to say, your accent doesn't sound Northern European to me. Lonnie: Right. My appeal to heathenry is more about the concepts that are inherent inside of it. Things like hospitality and reciprocity being important, the land spirits being an important part of honoring them, honoring your ancestors. And then going at a deeper more mystical level, talking about the norms at the center of all things. The tree and the well being central elements of the cosmology. The more I dig into it, the more I go about the list. It's less and less and less and less about gods and goddesses to me, and it's more about these concepts and how I relate to the world and my relationship with the people, the land, the spirits that I work with. Andrew: It's more of a philosophy and a theology and a worldview in that sense? Lonnie: Yeah, I think that's more accurate. It's more of a mindset and a worldview than it is a religion at least in my practice. Andrew: Sure. So, how did you find your way to the Norse or Northern European deities and world view then? Lonnie: Oh, by accident, like all things. You had your accident, I had mine. When I was a teenager, I started exploring into different parts of paganism and the occult. I tell people I wasn't raised to be anything. My parents weren't religious, they weren't forcing me to attend any churches on Sundays. My sister and I weren't baptized. We were just left to be whatever it is we were going to be. But sometime around the age of 12 or 13, I got interested in all things spiritual and I started checking out books in the library, asking questions to people who were around. By the time I'm 15 or 16, I've probably read most of what Scott Cunningham stuff was on the book shelves, started digging into Crowley's different material he provided. There really wasn't much available when I was a teenager in the 90s, early 90s.  But then I meet some friends and all in one swoop, it's funny, one friend on one hand says, I think I found the perfect book for you and he hands me, Liber Null & Psychonaut. He says, I've read through this, I think it's crazy, I can't even wrap my head around it but I think it's definitely for you. And he was right. It was definitely for me, is exactly what I was looking for. All in the same time, another friend, within a day or two of this incident is really getting interested in runes. And he's got Futhark by Edred Thorsson. He's got some of Kveldulf Gundarsson's early stuff, Teutonic religion, Teutonic magic. And he's got this big goal in mind, he wants to end up on the high read of The Troth. And he starts studying this stuff. I'm just borrowing books from him.  So I sort of find my way to modern esoteric rune practices through Futhark, and then I've got Liber Null & Psychonaut in my other hand. These two books sort of form the foundational practice of what propelled me forward into heathenry and the occult both.  Andrew: It's fascinating. Yeah. I went through a period of time where I was very interested in runes. I was in art school, so like, back in the early 90-ish, you know, I was very interested in them and so on, and was doing a lot of, using them for a lot of magic. I even made some brands and did some branding work on myself as part of creating permanent protection work and stuff like that. So, it was very, back in my body modification piercing interested days and stuff like that. So yeah, very much I get that, that kind of chaotic like, not chaotic in the sense of like on structure, but like that open-ended like, what can I do with this stuff? Where can I put it to work? How can I work this in a way that makes sense to my whole self? Lonnie: Well, sure, that's right. I'm looking at the back over time at this, I've got, in Liber Null, you've got the instruction manual for creating sigils, starting to work sigil magic, and how to adopt different mindsets, to apply magic, to get results. On the other hand, I've got a book about runes and these really angular shapes, they look like they want to do something more than just write. Inherently, the aesthetic of them appeal. When you start creating bind runes, bringing different runic forces together, they're a much more magical looking thing to me than just creating a sigil, the way it's taught in chaos magic. I think they're working on the same principle.  Andrew: For sure, yeah. I think it's kind of like, you can have a bunch of wood and some nails and some hammer and you can make anything you want. Have some Lego that locks together in a really easy structure, right? Both ways you make a thing, you know, and I think that the bind runes and the runes themselves have that sort of ease of interconnection that really does lend itself to that kind of process, right? Lonnie: Right. Yeah. And this goes back to like, you were talking about how did I get into heathenry, how do I explore it further into heathenry. The more you study the runes, in a modern esoteric framework, you're essentially looking at what do these runes mean, and most of that modern framework is based on The Elder Futhark. We know what they mean because of the diligent work of academics who have reconstructed proto-Germanic so we can have an idea of what these runes all say on rune stones that dot the landscape. But for you, if you're a practicing heathen or you're trying to use runes for magic or divination, what does Fehu actually mean for you on a magical or divinatory purpose. It can mean fee, cattle, money. And you can leave it at that.  But if you really want to dig deeper into runes, you can't help but sort of fall into these deeper heathen ideas because you ask yourself, well, what did cattle mean to the people who came up with this symbol? What was the concept of money and this idea of fees? And then you find your way to the rune poems and you start finding your way to the Eddas and the stories that hold the mythic tale of the people who came up with this whole symbol set to begin with. It enriches what you can do with the runes on one hand, but like I said, you just kind of fall into these ideologies and worldviews if you're willing to actually look deeper into what these things are. Andrew: So, I'm certainly not going to ask you to stand for everybody who uses these things. But, I've also seen a lot of stuff kind of creeping in around some kind of more extreme people who are using runes and Norse stuff for racist ideas and stuff like that. I don't even know what the question I have for you around that is. I guess I'll go, what do you think about that? Do you think that that's in any way inherent in the structure? What do we do about this, you know, where people are, you know, from my point of view as someone outside of those kinds of traditions, co-opting something? Yeah. Lonnie: Let's dig in. I'm on the high read of The Troth. It's an international inclusive heathen organization and also the steward of Illinois for the same organization. We make inclusive a distinction because it's necessary. When modern heathenry was reborn in the minds of people in America, it'd gotten its rebirth in a way earlier in Iceland. But when it relaunched itself somehow in America, it came with a stain from the very beginning. This sort of romantic notion of the viking as this sort of road warrior today. This idea that this is somehow a tradition or a religion that should only be ethnically attached to European descendants. So, you'll start to see different factions split over time over how deeply they adhere to those ideas. So, on one hand, you've got people like me and The Troth, who are what we call inclusive, meaning that regardless of your sexuality, your gender, your ethnicity, your physical, mental abilities, your economic status even, none of these things are important for you to enter a heathen practice or get to know more about heathen worldviews or join The Troth or any of that. On the other hand, you have other organizations who say it's for, they call themselves folkish. And usually, that means that they want you to be descended from Northern European countries. And what they mean by that is they want you to be white. I don't know how else just to spin that other than they just want you to be white. Andrew: And folkish as in the word like folk, which means people. Like from the people as opposed to like folk practice? Lonnie: Yes. They're usually when they're saying folk, they're talking about of the people, these specific sorts of people, trying to set it up in a more tribal sort of, and have boundaries is their argument. When you see, like you're saying, you see these people who are using runes and other heathen ideas that are occupying some pretty far right not so good ideas, at least as far as I'm concerned, it's all not, let me stutter over my words, none of this comes from a culture in history that was closed off to welcoming the stranger or the other into their communities. We come back to those ideals of hospitality and being both a good guest and a good host in a climate where you had to have those sorts of ideas for people to survive. But even then, we have evidence and stories of people who are, where they freely adopt others into their tribes or their families. None of that comes up as an issue, they're not really part of this family, they're not really part of this tribe. Once you're adopted, you're in. It's a matter of what you can do, not what you look like, not even probably what you believe. It just comes down again to one of those classic heathen sort of phrases, you know, we are our deeds, you are what you do, and nothing else should really matter, the least of which the color of your skin, which is one of the most ridiculous notions that I think should be attached anything heathen. Andrew: Yeah. Is there an effort or is there a consideration or does this even make sense as a question like within the group, like, because I've seen people, people I know, like avoid posting and being involved in runic stuff because of its association with some of these far right people. And they're like, I just don't even, I don't even want to be associated with it. I might have a personal practice but I don't even bring that out because I don't even want people to misunderstand where I'm at or what I'm about with this. In your organization or from your point of view, is there something to be done to sort of delineate these things, to sort of, I don't know, re-reclaim, you know, organize away from these sort of pieces? Lonnie: Yeah. Well, I mean, first, the reclaiming, right? The argument usually hinges on this is our culture not theirs. So, the people who would want to bar entry from anyone based on ethnicity are making the argument that there's this living culture that they're the descendants of and you, whether you're black, brown, Chinese or anything else, you have your own traditions to go out and find. That's the argument that they make. And that you should go out and find those. They're more about segregation in a way than they are sort of some supremacist idea.  Heathenry is not a cultural inheritance. It's not a living tradition that came down through the generations. The ancient heathen cultures that inspire modern practices are dead and they're gone. There's 1000 years of Christianity and other forms of Abrahamic religions, more than likely, and little folk practices, of course, between us and the last heathen who was living pre-conversion times. There's nothing there to living inherent, or inherit. Andrew: It's like if you want to call up Zeus and do some work with Zeus or whatever, there's no living legacy of that practice continues to today. There's the disruption. Lonnie: Not only is there no like direct line through generations. There are hundreds of years of broken connection there. It's a revisioning, it's a reawakening, it's a rebuilding through different ideas and what's important. We have that ability to look at it in a sort of bigger picture and take what's the best of what we can know about their ideas and bring that forward without including any baggage or bullshit that's unnecessary. But even then, that ethnic closing of a door to people, I just don't think is something that they would have recognized or accepted as part of their own way. I'm sure they had their own barriers to entry to their families and their clans and their tribes, but I very highly doubt it had a thing to do with skin.  With that said, you asked, are there ways to offer alternatives or combat this. The Troth is an organization that works very, very hard to do that. We do it by providing publications and resources to people who are interested in heathenry that are one, based on real and solid scholarship, two, effective modern practice, and three, inclusive, being honest about what we expect and who we are, that there's nothing that's going to bar you from being part of what it is that we do.  And last year, I decided to use social media as a way to put up more of a face on inclusive heathenry. And it's funny you were talking about, you know, people who are reluctant to publicly say that they use runes or something or get involved in groups that are more akin to runes because of those associations with less desirable people or ideologies. I had a conversation with a guy who was basically confessing the same things to me, saying, look, I've got this deep, passionate relationship with Odin and Freya from the Norse Pantheon and the mysteries that surround them. And in my own trance work, the things that I'm discovering in my own relationship are amazing and I want to write them down, I want to share them with the world. But I'm gay and I'm black and I can't. I mean, he really felt like because he's gay and he's black, he can't share what he's discovering in his own journey, in his own path with these two specific divine forces. Hearing him say that broke my heart because here I'm having a conversation with a guy who is one of the most brilliant occult practitioners I've ever had the honor to talk to him my life. And he knows who he is and he knows he inspired this movement even. So I got to thinking about it, how do I work harder to make sure that that door's open to people like him, that he's not afraid to walk through that? The fact that he's scared or reluctant to or anyone else, for that matter, I think weakens and cheapens the growth and the movement of modern heathenry. The more great minds and the more practitioners that we have with these different backgrounds and different ideas that they bring to the table can only enrich our own practice. So, I started this thing. It's a hashtag, #knowourheathens, and #inclusiveheathenry attached to it. And you can search those on Facebook is mostly where it's been happening. And just asking people, to put a picture of yourself up on Facebook or anywhere else on social media, include these hashtags, and tell people that you're heathen and you'll accept anyone into heathenry regardless of gender, and race and ethnicity and sexual orientation and so on. And I've been very pleasantly surprised by how many people are willing to take that stand and just let people know that the door is not locked, it's not even closed. And here we are, we're going to stand here and hold it open for you.  I already know that there's criticism of this idea even sort of from my own camp, saying, you know, I don't, you don't have any divine right to say who can and can't come to the gods, right? It's all about honoring the gods properly and so on. But I also think that I can't pretend that the world isn't what it is. I'm a straight white man who practices heathenry. I can walk into any heathen gathering in the world and if I don't open my mouth and share my thoughts or bring that friend who doesn't fit the straight white man mold, no one's going to question my presence there. All those heathen doors are open to me, no matter what extremist ideas those groups hold because I look the part.  So I'll take that sort of privilege of looking the part and open the doors as wide as I can, to make sure that people who don't look the part the way these more extremist factions want can find their way to it as well.  Andrew: That's great. I think that that falls to all of us, right? And the more privilege we have, the more it falls to us to make sure that we do what we can to take steps in those directions for sure. So, I think that's fantastic. I hope people continue in that direction, lots of people continue in that direction, and in whatever other ways makes sense to continue to open those doors, because it's always been my experience that, I'm sure there are spirits that care a lot about place or family lines or other things.  But it's never been my experience that I've run into a spirit who's like, run into like traditional practitioners even in sort of living lineages who are like, oh, you're not from here or you're not from my group, therefore, you can't be involved. I've never run into that anywhere. And so I think these these other people who are fronting that, it's not coming from the spirit sides, it's coming from all the crappy, horrible things that that comes from. Lonnie: Yeah. Oh, I agree. It gets to the idea of ancestry as well. A core concept of heathenry is honoring and venerating your ancestors. That doesn't mean that you have to take a laser focused microscope on a specific region of the world within a specific set of decades and say, those are my ancestors. Sure, but have you ever looked at a family tree? Have you done the sheer math on how many people resulted in you that you had a whole lot more ancestry covering a lot more territory. And not just from that region. It backs up into previous ages and people move and they migrate. cultures blend and mix. And even religions are much more syncretic in ancient times than they are these dogmatic solid approaches.  I mean, even today, Christianity, you've got a 2000 year unbroken lineage, something that all pagans would love to have, right? But there's, I can look out my window, there's a Catholic Church three blocks away that direction. There's a Baptist Church four blocks away in that direction. Neither of them agree on a lot of principles of their own religion but they use the same holy text. The idea that there's this unbroken sure way to do it is funny to me. And at the same time, that thing about ancestors. If that's your sole argument for being part of heathenry, as an example, just be honest and say you have this super hyper focused love of a specific place in time because it's a poor representation of ancestors as a whole. Andrew: Well, you know, so in my tradition, we have, our notion of ancestors a [inaudible 00:33:00]. It includes your bloodline, for sure. The people who actually genetically contributed to your presence on the earth. But it also includes your initiatory lines. And the word means both. I mean, I think that there are different ways to have familial bonds. You talked about hospitality and so on, and to be welcomed into that family, you know, because I think that that's one of the things when we find our group of spirits or our group of ancestors or whatever, in that broader sense, we become ideally a part of that connection both in terms of receiving the blessings and owing obligations and all of that. I think it's important. Lonnie: I think it's important. You know, you talked about family, bloodlines are important, sure, you know, you honor the ancestors of, I call it the ancestors of blood and bone, those people who literally genetically results in you. But again, you're talking about thousands of people throughout time, and various traditions and various cultures and different values all throughout the generations. And family's bigger than blood. I would wager most people listening to this are closer to some of their friends than they are some of their own siblings and would give more to them for that. Andrew: I'm sure almost everybody has that aunt or uncle who's not actually related but who's just so close to the family, right? Lonnie: Yeah. And then, you know, if you research your ancestry like I have, you're inevitably going to find someone who is adopted or something of that fashion, isn't actually someone of blood and bone coming down generation to generation to you. They were adopted into the family or they came into the family by some other means that still results in you somehow, but they're not actually blood related. In my practice, ancestors are an even bigger scope than that. You have ancestors of place and the people who are important to the history of where you actually live and do your work. Ancestors of tradition, like you were talking about, who have made your practices possible today in some way or form. It's so much more than what, than what some of those folkish type heathens would like to box it into. Andrew: So, is the idea of, because, maybe because I've watched too many movies or like HBO specials or whatever, but like, is the idea of like being a warrior relevant to heathenism? Or is that just again, a pocket that like a limited number of people have sort of emphasized? Lonnie: I think it's a pocket that a limited number of people have emphasized. It's easy to do that when you, the most of the surviving lore that we have comes from the sagas and the Eddas that were written down post-conversion near the viking period. There's an awful lot of conflict going on back in time that these written down or the time that the stories come from, of course. People are moving all over the world, tribal conflict is occurring. One local chieftain becomes bigger chieftain, scoops up everybody on the farms and they go raiding and he wants to be bigger king, and so on, and so on, and so on. This isn't something that's even restricted to just heathen areas, that's just how the world worked, and I can even argue still works that way, we just don't call it the same things.  So no, I just, there are people who are, of course, who are inspired I guess to be soldiers or pursue a life in the military because of heathenry. It's certainly not frowned upon. It fits into some of the mold. You have gods and goddesses that are associated with war and victory. So why not have people who inspired by that, pursue that? But that is certainly not all that these gods, goddesses, the worldview is associated with. Again, I would point to ideas of the tree, the world tree that's connecting all the worlds and the mysteries that you can explore there in. The well that holds all that is and was and ever will be, and explore the mysteries therein. What are the norms, what do they really mean? How can I apply hospitality to my life? What does reciprocity mean? What is a right relationship with the world around me? And none of that has to do with, has to be anything at all about war or fighting? Andrew: Yeah, it's interesting how there're all these different ideas. It's like so many ideas around my tradition, people, especially people who hear about Santeria, and they just think of it as, like witchcraft that's going to help them get their lover back or whatever, when in fact, there's whole religious living tradition around everything to do with life as opposed to just sort of this one very particular sort of limited notion about it, right? Lonnie: There are. In a tradition, I guess in traditions such as heathenry where everything that we're building on even to get our inspiration for what we're going to do today comes from things that were written down by Christians well after conversion, inspired, of course, by their ancestors wanting to share those stories, the surviving oral traditions for whatever reason that make it into whatever we have left. But still, ultimately, were written down post-conversion by Christians. So, you have to sort of take an honest view of those things and explore everything. Archeology and what are the latest academics and scholars discovering on there. And of course, balance that out with your own personal practices and how you transform that into a living tradition.  Just a random thought, yeah, talking about those sagas and Eddas and everything that was written down by this Christian hands, every American knows the story of Paul Revere, right? I'm guessing a lot of people do, the midnight night of Paul Revere, one of by land, two of by sea, during the Revolutionary War. That's how they were going to let them know the British are coming. And he's this revered folk hero from a couple hundred years ago, the early formation of the United States in the war against Britain for independence. But what people don't realize is, here's a story in a living culture that everything is written down. There's no oral block of hundreds of years which you've got to worry about what gets remembered properly and putting your own twist on it and everything, everything is written down. And growing up as a kid, everybody was told the story of Paul Revere.  What people don't realize, though, is Paul Revere sort of falls into this cultural memory because his name rhymed best with the story, the poet who was telling his story came up with. There were many more writers that were out to notify all the villages, the town that British were coming. In fact, Paul Revere, according to the sources I've read was actually captured and was the worst one at his job at notifying everyone the British were coming.  So, you take that as an example of again, that living culture, a folk hero even, legend, everything is written down generation to generation and even taught in schools when you're young. And the story is not true.  Andrew: If his name had been Paul McGregor, he wouldn't have [inaudible 00:42:24] Lonnie: Yeah, Paul McGregor was probably better at it than he was.  Andrew: He was done his work and own the pub enjoying a pint, you know. Lonnie: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. That is why I just don't take a hard line approach to any of this. Ultimately, because we can't always be sure about how much, one, how much we actually received that's accurate, and two, even on the things that are accurate and we can verify that are accurate, it's so little of it that you can't rebuild a real thing out of just that. You have to do comparative work with other mythology and other traditions and so on to put it all together. And my own practice is more focused on magic and sorcery. I want to do trance work and I want to do divination and I want to use magic to get results in my life or the things that I need in the world right now and I want to communicate with spirits. I'm telling you, right now, the instructions for all of that are pretty non existent in a heathen framework. Yeah. Andrew: So, where are you borrowing those instructions from? Is it from Peter Carol? Is it from, you know, where are you pulling those instructional pieces in to create that for yourself in this heathen framework?  Lonnie: Excellent question. It starts with Peter Carol, Liber Null, of course, and working through all of that material. I approach that like a kid who is starving and I just discovered McDonald's for the first time. It was wonderful. And that led to Phil Hine in his early work, which was fun. It took a much less serious approach to chaos magic than Carol was taking, which was a nice balance with that. And then, you know, in that time, you'd get online and there's different Yahoo groups, like the X, that was one of my favorites. And then the Chaos Matrix is still online today, deposit of articles to help the budding chaos magician get their start. You just experiment and you explore. Like I said, you explore outside of other traditions and other things.  I found my way to Tarot and becoming, falling in love with tarot and enriching myself spiritual practice with that helps inform everything that I do. It has this rippling effect across all of it. And I get better at divination in general and my intuition develops stronger. You learn different things. I don't know, over time, honestly, by the time I got to Elhaz Ablaze, finding that website around 2007, I was sort of frustrated, I kept running into too many of those sort of heathen groups or people that held those folkish ideas and I just didn't resonate with them. They weren't my kind of people. Until I found Elhaz Ablaze, I didn't even know for sure if there were heathens out there who were super involved in magic and trying to do things with it.  And about that same time, I started finding Jason Miller stuff, and found my way into strategic sorcery and took his course. And again, it has this profound rippling effect across my personal life and my practice. I go where, I try to focus all of my pursuits in the places where I see people getting the results.  Andrew: I think that's a really important thing. If we're going to bother to do magic, then we really need to, need to really get results, like otherwise, why bother? It's a lot of work most of the time [inaudible 00:46:42] something from it.  Lonnie: One thing I know true about magic, it works. The other thing I know true about magic is it doesn't work the way I want it exactly or even most of the time. So either, it's not like electricity, you can't just plug into it and get everything that you want out of it, or I'm a shit magician. And I choose to believe in myself. I'm going to go with, it's a much more subtle sort of thing that we tap into, and our influence probably plays with probabilities more than it produces profound effects. Although, I can't help but wonder sometimes if those profound effects are available to us, we just haven't figured it out. I know I haven't. Andrew: I think it was in one of Peter Carol's books where he talks about sort of divine over the short term on a shorter term and magic on a longer term to get the best combination of results.  Lonnie: Yeah. I saw one time, I'm pretty sure it was Peter Carol from years ago who suggested that you should do divination and try to communicate with yourself in the future. See if you're going to get the results from the work before you do the work. It's not my thing but it's similar sort of idea. Andrew: I'm so curious, which runes your future self would send you in divination to indicate the success on a particular work, you know? How'd you know that it was a correct, you know? When you work with manual divination cards, runes, whatever, they have no choice but to answer. So we can't assume that there is an actual connection going on, right? Even when I divine with coconut with Orishas, unless I'm feeding them certain things, you always have to ask if they're actually there first, right? But I'm like, what would you set up as your own kind of like thumbs up. It's like people when they know they're going to die, they'd be like, if I come back and speak to a medium, if they don't say this word, it's not me. That's some of those things. How do you set that up with yourself?  Lonnie: Yeah, that's a good question. You do bring up an important point there. I often have this conversation with people in paranormal investigations. I'm really happy to see more people using runes and tarot especially in paranormal investigations and trying to communicate with spirits just like the rest of us. But the minute you get those runes out or you pull a tarot card, you will have an answer, but that doesn't mean you're communicating with something. There has to be some sort of established thumbs up, some pre-game decision, this is how I know I'm really talking to something. Otherwise, that fool card doesn't mean anything other than I pulled a card.  Andrew: Yeah. It's like when I'm, divining people coming in they're asking if they've been cursed. As somebody who reads to the public it's a question that I run across a lot. And I'm not dismissive of that question, I think that it's a valid question. I think that the answer is generally a lot less than than many people would think. But nonetheless, it can happen. But like, for me, there are only two cards in the deck that I will take as an affirmative answer to that question when that question is asked. So that's two out of 78. And one of them has to show up in a certain position for me to be like, okay, yes. They're actually saying, yes, this is real.  And I think that having those clear understandings, what is that card that's the future Lonnie speaks card, you know, or whatever, right? Or future me speaks card. I think it's a really exciting idea. Lonnie: It's a fun idea to play with. I don't know how much merit I would give that idea of communicating with future selves. The armchair sort of, I watched a bunch of shows with Michio Kaku and Brian Green so I know something about science idea. I know they suggest that time may not be this arrow, that it could be more of a all time happening now kind of thing in one scenario. So maybe in that situation, if that's true, you could communicate with the future self. But then you get into all these possibilities and multiple futures. What if you know something too far ahead now, you you just change your mind so that doesn't matter anymore. How much are we locked into fate? What choices do we have? Andrew: Tells us a lot about ourselves once we start thinking about it. Lonnie: Yeah. You want to really hurt your brain. Andrew: I prefer to kind of go in a different direction generally with the future me stuff, which is, what should I do right now that future me will thank current me for having done. That's my often mode of operation. And that applies to like magical stuff, for sure, but it also applies to like getting my filing done and being on top of my bookkeeping and like all sorts of things. Because it's like, there's nothing like coming up to your thing, something happened recently, I was going to an event and I was like, oh man, I can't remember if I ever emailed back the person who I was supposed to stay with. And so I sent them a message saying, I hope it's not too late, I'm really, sorry if I left you hanging. They're like, no, no, you, like six months ago, you said, absolutely, I will be there. So I was like, oh, thanks past me.  Lonnie: Yeah. Even when I do divination for clients or even myself, I don't ever look to see what the future is involved in that. That's not how I read. I'm more of a what's at play in your life now kind of thing. I even visually represent that, like with tarot, I can do this. When I shuffle the cards, I shuffle them nine times to represent the nine worlds of heathen cosmology. I split the deck three times to represent the three norms. I remove the middle, the middle pile of that as the cards that I'm going to draw for the reading because I think it represents the norm [inaudible 00:53:58], which is the present, the things that are becoming at play in your world now.  I really think ultimately, that's what's most important to us. You know where you've been and if those things are important, they'll show up or they'll become more clear by the things that are happening now. As for what's going to happen tomorrow, what choices are you going to make? You're still going to be susceptible to the choices that other people make too. Andrew: For sure. Well, maybe that's a good place to leave it. Hey, listeners, go do some magic to mitigate the choices of other people and encourage the choices that you want to happen. One of the things that I would like to encourage for you the magic of my voice is for people to come and find you online where you're hanging out. You have your podcast and other stuff. Where should people come look for you on the internet? Lonnie: Well, you can absolutely find me at my own show, Weird Web Radio. Everywhere you get your podcasts. If there's not someplace you can find it, let me know, I'll figure out a way to get it on there. Weirdwebradio.com. Offer all my professional divination services at tarotheathen.com. On Instagram, Twitter and Facebook, as Weird Web Radio, and also have a special group for Weird Web Radio fans. If you want to get to know me more personally, I'm game. Just Lonnie Scott on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram as well. Andrew: Beautiful. Well, thank you for making the time to be hanging out for this conversation today. I hope having the table turned on you as the guest versus the interviewer wasn't too traumatic for you. Lonnie: No, not a problem at all. And just real quick before we get Out of here, I talked about Elhaz Ablaze quite a bit earlier in the show. And I wanted to let everyone out there know that we released a compendium of chaos heathenry not too long ago, it's just titled, Elhaz Ablaze: A Compendium of Chaos Heathenry. It's a collection of essays from those of us who do that and I've got an essay in there concerning some of my ancestral practices. So, go out and check that out. Andrew: Yeah, get your magic on folks. Lonnie: Yeah, get your magic on. Andrew: All right, thanks so much, Lonnie.  

Marcus and Andrew talk about what it means to really deeply connect with the land or space where you live. They explore their experiences with plants, spirits, and magic. Going further they talk about how you might grow beyond your limits through exploring this kind of magic  Think about how much you've enjoyed the podcast and how many episodes you listened to, and consider if it is time to support the Patreon You can do so here. If you want more of this in your life you can subscribe by RSS , iTunes, Stitcher, or email. Marcus is at these spots online Facebook, House of Orpheus.com, and Instagram. And their great conference is found here VeridisGenii.com. As always I am at thehermitslamp.com Thanks for joining the conversation. Please share the podcast to help us grow and change the world.  Andrew You can book time with Andrew through his site here.    ANDREW: [00:00:00] Welcome to another installment of The Hermit's Lamp podcast. I'm here today with Marcus McCoy, and I would say that Marcus is a Renaissance person, in a way. You [00:00:15] know, I was thinking about how I would introduce them and I'm like, well, they're, they're into magic, and they're into plants, and they're into perfumes, and they're …. And I just started thinking, you know, they're kind of into everything as far as I know, you know, there's not a lot that [00:00:30] falls outside of the scope of their interests and so on. And I had the pleasure of meeting Marcus a few years back at the Northwest Tarot Symposium, and we had a great time hanging out and making ridiculous esoteric jokes, and a little bit of serious conversation [00:00:45] too. But yeah, but for people who don't know you, Marcus, give us the, give us a quick down low. MARCUS: Renaissance man is pretty good. That's a pretty good aspiration. When I was younger, I would try [00:01:00] my hand at pretty much any art form. I could, I just had to be creative and I'd get really bored [laughs] or hit like a [garbled at 1:11] and have to like pursue some other art form. And yeah, that's pretty accurate for me. Yeah, [00:01:15] I I own two different businesses. I have the House of Orpheus and Troll Cunning Forge. Troll Cunning Forge is a artisan blacksmithing [00:01:30] talisman-making project that I've started a couple years ago, when I started blacksmithing, I've only been doing that for a couple years now. I really love it, I'm really passionate about it. And House [00:01:45] of Orpheus is my perfume company. I've always had a passion for perfumes, I'm . . . not the typical passion for perfumes, but it's something that's really interested me for a [00:02:00] very long time. So that project, those are my two businesses and then we run the Veridas Genii Symposium, my partner and I and, what else? Yeah, I've [00:02:15] got my, we have a lot of different projects that we're working on.   ANDREW: For sure.   MARCUS: We're also going to be starting [garbled at 2:23] and a lot of different things ….   ANDREW: Very cool. So I guess one of the things that stands out for me, and [00:02:30] one of the reasons why I wanted to have you on the podcast, was to talk about, kind of, kind of what you do, for sure, but also the way in which you approach it, because you know my experience of kind of both [00:02:45] talking with you and seeing your stuff online, is that there is a different sense of relationship to plants and spirit and materials then, then maybe I run into in a lot of places, [00:03:00] you know? And I've seen a lot of talk over the last couple years as the word animism returns to favor in the, you know, in the Western magical circles and it seems to me [00:03:15] that you've been an animist since before animism was cool. If that makes any sense, you know, but….   MARCUS: I've been making animism cool, actually.    ANDREW: Yeah.    MARCUS: Yeah, the Bioregional Animism Project, bioregional animism [00:03:30] was something that I had coined. I started that many years ago and started an online community, back when tribes dot net was a thing?    ANDREW: Okay.   MARCUS: And, and had a, the [00:03:45] first blog on bioregional animism, called Bioregional Animism. That sadly got taken offline when Blogger got [00:04:00] bought up or absorbed into Google and they made it impossible for you to like maintain your, or renew your account with them. So, yeah, I got [00:04:15] absorbed but I still have all the information. It's still in Blogger. I just can't have the Bioregional Animism.com anymore. It got logged. Yeah.   ANDREW: So, tell me about how you came to that. Like, how did you come to bioregional animism?   MARCUS: [00:04:31] I was working with a South American shaman doing a particular set of ceremonies every year. The ceremony, the [00:04:46] particular ceremony was called the Long Dance Ceremony, and he would incorporate South American shamanic practices with this North American dance that he had learned from his teacher and a beautiful [00:05:01] painted arrow. And a lot of the insight that you got from the Long Dance Ceremony was that you are the land dancing, you are place. And so as [00:05:17] an extension of place, the spirit of place moves through you and creates the prayers it dances. And through that insight, I started recognizing that animism [00:05:32] as a whole was the genus loci or the spirit of place moving through us, creating new traditions, establishing relationships to maintain an equilibrium within [00:05:47] the bioregion, in the larger ecological whole, which includes human beings. But the problem is that most people think of themselves as being separate from that . . .   ANDREW: Sure.   MARCUS: Ceremonies like that [00:06:04] allowed us to or assist us in recognizing that we are the spirit of place and we are an expression of place and that the traditions that we think that we are creating: We're actually [00:06:19] just also an expression of that place experiencing itself as us. And so, I think that that was the, that's what I experienced, and wanted to share with other people and [00:06:34] so Bioregional Animism became a way of communicating that to other people. Now keep in mind, animism at that time . . . I had an anthropology background. I was, I had my degree in transpersonal [00:06:49] anthropology. So I was, I was young when this started, in my 20s, when I first started writing about bioregional animism, and I was incorporating a lot of words that I [00:07:04] felt could articulate it carefully. And so I went against the old animist anthropological structure of what animism meant and were the new research [00:07:19] and the new academic perspectives on animism, which were highlighted by religious scholars like Graham Harvey. So he's . . . what he did there was basically redefine animism in a way [00:07:34] that was more akin to global populations of animist people, how they actually perceive it. The previous model, the Western anthropological model, or perceived perception of what animism [00:07:49] was, was a projection of neoPlatonism onto indigenous world views where they . . . Which, I mean, that's kind of what the colonists have always done, you know? [laughs]   ANDREW: Sure.   MARCUS: from what . . . doesn't everyone think of things in terms of spirits? [00:08:04] And you know, like, the mind-body split and all these neo-Platonic ideas. We just project them everywhere or see them everywhere. But the reality is, is that once you get involved with a indigenous [00:08:19] world view and start to learn their perspective, you start seeing that it's not, you know, there's more than one ontological system in the world. [laughs] IAnd it's not all neoPlatonism and they don't all view the world in the same way that we do in terms of, [00:08:34] like, there being a body and a spirit and when the body dies the spirit goes into the spiritual plane, and that's not how all the, all the world sees it.    So instead of thinking of [00:08:49] animism as things having an animating spirit, we move over to a new way of looking at it, which is a relational ontology. And I think that's the thing that a lot of people, now that animism is really popular, a lot of people are [00:09:04] really missing that. They're still thinking from this old colonial projection of animism onto animist people, indigenous people, but they, they're doing themselves a [00:09:19] great disservice, to not thinking about it further and actually looking at what indigenous people did and instead they're just maintaining, they're not animist, they're still there, they're still neo-Platonist, but they're now just allowing [00:09:34] other things to have a spirit.    ANDREW: Right.   MARCUS: Right.   ANDREW: So, so that distinction between sort of projecting a human experience as a spirit in a body, right? [00:09:50] being extended to everything else, which is the sort of Platonic model right? And, and then in the other model, can you say more for people about what that's, what that difference is? How is that difference [00:10:06] seen, you know, and I understand there's no universal difference there. But like what are, what are some other ideas or other ways of thinking about that that, you know, that use smaller words, maybe.   MARCUS: [laughs] So. [sigh] You [00:10:21] want me to use smaller words? Damn it. Okay! I used to do that in the psych ward all the time and I led student groups . . . [laughs] So maybe, so [00:10:36] we are lending, we are. We are accepting that there, the world has many different viewpoints as to how it may work.   ANDREW: Mm-hmm.   MARCUS: Right? And that not one is superior to another.   ANDREW: Mm-hmm.   MARCUS: And [00:10:52] that it is very mysterious.   ANDREW: Mm-hmm.   MARCUS: And that that mystery may never be solved.    ANDREW: Yes.    MARCUS: Okay? So that, that's, that's, that's how we can get our foundation of what may be an ontology.    ANDREW: Yeah!   MARCUS: From [00:11:08] a simple standpoint. But then, so from a relational ontology standpoint, we're run understanding that it's our relationships and how we relate with the world around us that helped create the way we perceive the universe. [00:11:23]   ANDREW: Mm-hmm.   MARCUS: And so in that, what makes animism a relational ontology is that we accept and lend our own personhood to others. And [00:11:38] we acknowledge others as being persons . . .   ANDREW: Mm-hmm.   MARCUS: That have the ability to communicate with us, just as we do, because that's a trait that persons have.   ANDREW: Mm-hmm.   MARCUS: They can communicate, right?   ANDREW: Yeah.   MARCUS: And so [00:11:54] now we've gone and we've taken animism and we've removed it from this idea that it has to revolve around an animating spirit.   ANDREW: Mm-hmm.   MARCUS: Because having an animating spirit revolves around one particular ontological [00:12:10] system.    ANDREW: Yeah.   MARCUS: And we defined that as being neoPlatonism, right? That we're projecting onto all worlds' ontological systems. So we stopped doing that and now we can open up and acknowledge that there may be other ways of relating [00:12:25] to persons.    ANDREW: Mm-hmm.   MARCUS: Right?    ANDREW: Yup.   MARCUS: That are still animist because of the relation aspect. So that means that there's a whole lot of different ways that we can relate. And I [00:12:40] think that's really interesting from a, and that's where I really got into the bioregional aspect was that when I was writing about it, I never wanted anyone to identify as a bioregional animist, and that's kind of against the point [laughs], was, is to [00:12:55] relate to place as self and to allow place to express itself as you.    ANDREW: Mm-hmm.   MARCUS: And so you would, as, in doing so, you would get to know yourself as place and, and [00:13:10] new traditions, new ways of being, new practices would become like an expression just like a plant evolving in a place and, and, and now taking on new traits as it evolved [00:13:25] surroundings. And so, unfortunately, a lot of people like these catchphrases and they want identity and so they don't want to go deep with that. And so they just identified bioregional [00:13:40] animist and they still are working with these old ideas of what animism means and they weren't really paying attention when I was talking in the first place, apparently. [laughs]   ANDREW: Well, and I think that, you know, having having relationships [00:13:55] to, to spirit and to place, you know, so often people are, at least from what I see and hear, a lot of it is very identity-driven, is very narrow [00:14:10] in its perspective. Right? And I think that there's .  . . and what I hear you talking about, there is a multitude of possibilities that continue to be present all the time, you know? And I think [00:14:25] about it like, you know, I mean I'm practicing, you know, the Lukumí tradition, right, you know? There there are things that have aché, right? They have energy and they have a certain kind of energy that, that [00:14:41] might be seen to be inherent in them. But those things are modified and that energy is changed or different depending on the relationship, and what's going on in the time and place, and [00:14:56] where it's active, and it's different depending on the presence of the spirits and whether the Orishas are present and whether they are embodying those elements, or using those elements in a certain way, at which point that thing [00:15:11] becomes something different than it was before. And, in amongst all of that, it's continuously shifting and able to sort of hold a variety of energies, relationships, [00:15:26] or, or spirit for that matter, and, but it's not easily definable in terms of: this is the thing that it is, right? Does that make sense? Is that kind of some of what you're [00:15:41] talking about?   MARCUS: Totally, and Lukumí is really an interesting example because it's something that spread from Africa to the New World and in every place that adapted [00:16:00] to or recreated itself in, whether it was, I guess, Cuba and Brazil being the primary places. And some people could argue, I guess, that [00:16:15] there was influences, of course, too, like Haiti, but you can see. And I may be wrong there, but I'm no expert . . . [crosstalking at 16:22)   ANDREW: That too, for sure.   MARCUS: Yeah sure. So it really is fascinating to see the differences in the way that they express themselves [00:16:30] and how they adapted to place and how they had to adapt to different plants and wildlife and nature itself, you know, and those are . . .  It's nature religion in a sense. Yeah.    ANDREW: Yeah. So [00:16:45] how do people, how do people start to, to find this kind of deeper connection? Like what, what do people, you know, now that your blogger group is gone. How do people, how do people approach this? What, you [00:17:00] know for people looking to, you know, go beyond sort of the kind of more direct or limited perspective we started off talking about and looking to kind of dig deeper into how do we, how do we live in relationship [00:17:15] to space and to the things that are there? What do you suggest people do?   MARCUS: Well, I think, I mean, it's difficult because we're not born with that. You know, like the, the language of speaking [00:17:30] place isn't our first language, you know? We're taught a consumer-based language, you know, a trade language, you know, at least in North America, you know, it's a what is it, a Creole or a English is a considered a Creole or a trade [00:17:45] language, which is interesting. But we need to change, we need to learn the language of the land itself. We need to go out and start deconstructing [00:18:00] the identity that we've been taught that excludes place from being self.   ANDREW: Right.   MARCUS: But we got to discover why that is, within ourselves, and all these different things that the ego is clung [00:18:16] onto to create that structure that we identify as, as, as you are I. And that's a process that's individual, but it needs to include place and the spirits of place in that process. [00:18:31] Humbly. And I also believe that one of the greatest ways of accomplishing that is through the venue of humble service. I think finding a way to integrate [00:18:47] your motivations and your spiritual path in that process of discovering and deconstructing the ego and replacing it with a sense of self as, as, as one with place, [00:19:02] is best done through the lens of a path of servitude, humble servitude.   ANDREW: Yeah. I think, I think it's easy to, you know, it's just come up on many podcasts that I've done over the past few [00:19:17] years. It's easy to have a very transactional relationship with spirit. Or to try and have a transactional relationship with spirit. You know, I mean, I think about how people approach the goetia and other things right? Listen, here, you do this. I'll do this. Let's [00:19:32] get it done, you know, it's . . . But you know, it's not necessarily, it doesn't, it doesn't necessarily work that way, or I mean, it can work that way, but it's not, it can't be . . . like connecting to place can't be centered around that [00:19:47] as the practice.   MARCUS: I think that what I learned from Peruvian practices is the idea of like sacred reciprocity, where there's a, there's a, an experience of life force always [00:20:02] going on and that it's not transactional per se, it's more of a respect and honor and gratitude and there are these things that make animism, that are kind of like, [00:20:17] that, you can see between all animist societies that become like a, sort of, what you, we, consider spiritual where it's a, it's living from the heart and the will, you know, like where you're, [00:20:33] you're honoring everything.    ANDREW: Yeah.   MARCUS: All the time. [laughs] And your respect to everything all the time and you're in such deep gratitude to everything all [00:20:48] the time, you know? Like a good friend of mine in a ceremony once told me, you know, when we were talking about, you know, and and trying to deconstruct those, those ego constructs that, that prevent [00:21:03] us from, from feeling and allowing the the spirit of land to be us and he looked at me and he's like, you know, the more I'm grateful for, the more I have to be grateful for. And [00:21:18] it was just these little, these little things, these little insights that come throughout life, you know? When you're dedicated to working on that, that path, that you remember they are [00:21:33] so simple, but they keep, they keep your feet on the ground.    ANDREW: Yeah. For sure.   MARCUS: For making [garbled at 21:42] process.    ANDREW:  Yeah, and I think that there's a quality to the way in which we [00:21:48] pay attention that changes with these kinds of approaches too? You know it's not about . . . It's about noticing what happens and noticing those things as as the dialogue, you know, [00:22:03] and being part of that conversation, you know? I think about, you know, the birds that visit my backyard, I think about the surprising plants that emerged this spring, new, that I have never had my yard before. I [00:22:18] don't know where they came from, you know, I'm like, excellent, wonderful, welcome, new friends, what's, you know? And, and that will be a thing that I will mull over for months to come, you know, and sort of get a sense of what those, what those are, and what they want, and why [00:22:33] they, you know, why they're here. And I understand that on one level, we could say, “Well, probably the squirrels dug them up or the birds spread the seeds,” but but that's not really what it's about. Right? It's about understanding what that relationship means and what that shifting [00:22:48] relationship means as an extension of, as you say, ourselves, and as our sort of very very extended sense of self within a space.   MARCUS: Yeah, and you know, it's interesting as an herbalist, I get really excited because there's [00:23:03] this idea called, like, volunteer plants, where like a plant will volunteer itself or introduce itself. And it's literally like discovering a new part of yourself, right? [laughs] Like, I didn't [00:23:18] know that I was really like that or or this is something about me that I never realized before, you know, that's similar. It's a similar sense, or, like feeling, but you get really excited when this, this new plant introduces itself, or a new animal. Any time I see a new life-form that [00:23:33] I've never seen before, you can ask my partner. I'm just like, [laughs] “oh my God.” [sighs]   ANDREW: What is it? What's going on? What do you mean? What do you got to say? Sure, yeah.    MARCUS: [laughing] Yeah, I get just entranced and I just fall in love with [00:23:48] all these new plants that I discover, I remember when I first discovered, talking more about plants now, but there's a plant called the ground ivy. And this plant [00:24:03] just kept appearing. I just kept seeing it here and there and it kept showing up, kept showing up, kept showing up and I was really fascinated by it, and it just caught my eye, and it was such a subtle plant where you really would, you would just glance over at, [00:24:18] you wouldn't even notice it. It just has, it grows like in the grass. You can't even see it sometimes. And sometimes you'll see like entire outcroppings of it. But it's really inconspicuous and doesn't really show itself and [00:24:33] it's got these little green kidney-shaped leaves and these little tiny, every once in a while, it'll have these little tiny purple flowers. And you really don't notice it and when you pick it and you . . . Its aromatic properties are kind of [00:24:49] maybe a little like on the mint level but a little bit more pungent like a geranium kind of like in this place in between the two, but like, more, little bit more like leaning towards like the stinking geranium side. And, and [00:25:04] so you're like, “Okay, well, maybe it's kind of a bitter,” and then I did some, you know, I tried finding out what it was, trying to identify a plant that you've never heard of before, just found, it's kind of challenging.   ANDREW: Sure.   MARCUS: But I was, I was able to find some some people that were like, “Oh [00:25:19] it's this,” you know, and I posted a picture and and found some, talked to some other plant geeks and figured out that it was what it was and started doing more research looking at folklore stuff with it. And lo and behold this [00:25:34] plant is used to help you identify who's a witch.   ANDREW: Okay.   MARCUS: And that it will help you identify who's done witchcraft on you. But that's just in the folklore, you know, like you read [00:25:49] this and I was like, “okay.” Well, there's no, no one tells you about like how they used it or what the folklore was, other than that. It's just that's what it was used for or that's what its purpose was. Its other purpose was as [00:26:04] a gruit, so adding it to beers, as a flavoring for beers, which is also kind of interesting.    So, I get to know this plant and I'm getting to know this plant now over years. It's like three or four years of me [00:26:19] having this, like this courtship with this plant, getting to know it better and better and better and better, and there are other ways that I've learned to get to know a plant really well, if I really need to. Working [00:26:34] with different visionary plants, you can, like Ayahuasca, for example, you can get to know a plant spirit really easily. And also, if you start practicing any of the work from the Grimoire Sympathia, Charubel's work [00:26:49] that's incredible. It's very much akin to South American plant shamanry.    But, at any rate, I wasn't taking the relationship that intensely with this plant and I just wanted to get to know it the long way, but through [00:27:04] just attuning myself to it and working with it, I started getting this idea that I should. take the vine, wrap it into a kind of a wreath, [00:27:19] a small wreath like about the size that could go up your wrist, and look at through it like a monocle just symbolically and then place it into your pocket and carry it around with you. And when I did that, [00:27:35] all of the subtle witchcrafts that people do . . . And when I say subtle witchcrafts, I talk about, you know, like glamour, making yourself look like you're someone that you're not, or envidia, you know, or envy, [00:27:50] the evil eye, these little things that everyone's capable of that happen all the time to people, and that are also magical, and I started seeing [00:28:05] these things happen and people's glamours especially started to fade away and I started seeing people that were in my life for who they really were, which was really startling. [laughs] And [00:28:21] I was really just blown away by this plant's ability to do that. And yeah, I grow it now. It's been very helpful. It's very helpful.   ANDREW: Well and I think that, it's [00:28:36] one of the things that's fascinating. If you spend that time listening and relating, then the plants will show their mysteries, right? You know, and it's so different than, than, [00:28:51] the idea that we'll just, you know: “Marcus, tell me, what's the way what's the thing I do? How do I, you know, what's the spell? What's the, whatever, right?” And I mean, that stuff's great too, like it's fine. But, but I think that becoming [00:29:06] curious about it, and being open through curiosity to get to know it, I think often reveals something different. And to me, I think it's also, it's sort of like the idea [00:29:21] of like having a license from the plant to work with it. You know? If it reveals its mystery to you through whatever means, to me, that's often going to be way more effective or [00:29:36] powerful or fruitful than maybe the stuff where you just went and read some stuff in a book and were like, “oh, okay,” and it's also going to be back to that idea of place. It's going to be, you know, where you are and [00:29:51] what's available to you, right? As opposed to, you know, like, as I practice Lukumí in Canada, right? It's like, it's hard because there's not a lot of stuff here that grows in the Caribbean, right? Some.    MARCUS: You know, I'm here in Seattle, you know in the [00:30:06] Washington area. Yeah, my friends that practice Lukumí, you know, up in Seattle and Renton. Yeah, they have to do the same problems, you know, like with different trees or plants and things and having to order them. And, yeah, it's interesting, that [00:30:21] tradition and its adaptations to place, working with the local plants. I don't . . . a lot of it. I've seen, I've heard some people trying to work with local plants. But yeah, I haven't seen too much success [00:30:36] with it yet. But once again, you know, like you were saying, we're, we're treating the plant as a person. Not an object.   ANDREW: Mm-hmm.   MARCUS: Or [00:30:52] a tool. And I think a lot of times, the Western perspective is to treat things as objects and tools and to have a very utilitarian relationship with it. You know, A more [00:31:07] of a new anim-, we'll call it a new animism approach, would be to relate to the plant as a person and to, like you were saying, you know, like establish a relationship with it. Let the plant teach you its, its, its [00:31:22] secrets, you know, instead of trying to pry the secrets from the plant. We're getting to know it and a lot of plants really want to help, they [00:31:37] want to introduce themselves to you. They want to, just like I was saying with the volunteer plants. It's amazing. Motherwort is a classic plant for new moms. And [00:31:52] it will, it's, historically, it's been known to to just start growing at a new mother's house, start growing there and that just helps, you know, if you know motherwort, it's a bit of an anti-anxiety, [00:32:07] and I'm, I'm sure that your nerves are frazzled when you're a new parent. [laughs]   ANDREW: Definitely, I can attest to that for sure. Well, there's something too about being in relationship to those plants over time. You know, I, I used to do this ceremony [00:32:22] at this particular sort of woodland on a, on a farm just north of Toronto, and we did ceremony every month for two years there, basically, and one of the, one [00:32:37] of the highlights was, I spent 10 days there by myself fasting and doing ceremonies and stuff. And during that time, my connection to that place grew tremendously, you know, because [00:32:52] I was there, because I was around it, because I had seen it through seasons, you know?   MARCUS: Mm-hmm.   ANDREW: And the culmination of that particular retreat, there was a tree, a large cherry tree that [00:33:07] there was, in sort of west of where that the west edge of the, the space we did ritual at, and at the time that I was there, when I was doing my, my evening sun salutations, I [00:33:22] realized that the cherry sap was oozing out of the tree because as the sun set behind it, it became like little stained glass, you know, gems, you know?   MARCUS: I know. Yeah, yeah.   ANDREW: And there are those moments where [00:33:37] you know, that's, that's a 15-minute window in the day at one part of the year, you know, but being there for that, it, opens you up to, to different things until you know different ways of relating to it, you [00:33:52] know, collecting with that resin and working with it and doing other things and you know, and so on, right? It's just, it's like, it's like, it opens a road for you to start traveling down.   MARCUS: Mm-hmm. Indeed. And it's even more, it's [00:34:07] even more interesting. They, so a lot of different animist societies believed, because it was, once again, they didn't necessarily all have this idea of like a spirit or a spirit world. A lot of things were just supernatural, right? [00:34:22] And another trait that persons had was the trait of being able to shapechange or become invisible. So we have invisibility and shapechanging as being traits [00:34:37] that persons have, especially supernaturally powerful persons. And plants and animals were considered some of the most supernaturally powerful beings around, other than huge aspects of nature, you know, lightning, thunder, mountains, [00:34:52] rivers, lakes, things like that, the ocean.    And so, when you meet a plant and it has shapechanged into human form and it talks to you and [00:35:07] you get to relate to it as a, as an other than human person that is taking on the shape of a human person so that it can relate to you. [00:35:23] You . . . The level of intimacy and the way that you can relate to that plant changes all of a sudden, because we now see that, we no longer see that plant as other, we see it as as human. Oh, wow, [00:35:38] it's got a human face. It's got, it's a person, you know, like because we're still so indoctrinated especially to only see persons as human persons.    ANDREW: Yeah.    MARCUS: It's very hard for us, still, [00:35:53] especially, I think, in Western society to, to lend over personhood to other than human persons or to things that we perceive as being other. We, even within animist societies, that there were things that they didn't [00:36:08] think of as being a person, and that's something that's important to like discuss on the table when we're looking at animism, is that not all things were considered persons, not all rocks were rock people. Certain rocks were! [00:36:23]    ANDREW: Yeah.   MARCUS: There were specific rocks sometimes and then sometimes all rocks were considered rock persons, but for the most part, not all rocks were considered rock persons, and that's, that's something to consider and to bring into the conversation, but it's [00:36:39] really interesting when you do have that experience and say, like with the cherry tree that you saw, or the, you experience that you have this really beautiful experience with. You imagine meeting that being, that [00:36:54] cherry tree as it shapechanged itself into a human being and spoke with human words in a way that you could understand and it had a conversation with you, or it taught you something or gave you a song, or it taught you a particular type of magic, [00:37:09] or it taught you a particular type of magic that you could do with its body.    ANDREW: Mm-hmm.   MARCUS: Right? Or it taught you lessons and related its own personal virtues. You know, the virtues of the cherry [00:37:24] are renowned throughout poetic history. [laughing]    ANDREW: For sure. Yeah.   MARCUS: And so, and its use in medicine and culinary things, you know, like I [00:37:39] once met strawberry and had, received a powerful lesson from strawberry on sex magic or how to attract and allure and to use glamour to attract people to you. Strawberries [00:37:55] most definitely are very skilled at that. [laughing]   ANDREW: Our emails are gonna be full after this comes out now, right?   MARCUS: Now everybody's gonna want to know how to talk to strawberries. [laughing] But, but, it's really, [00:38:10] it changes when you allow that to happen and I believe that the work, like I said, once again, really want to introduce more people to Charubel's work and the book, The Grimoire Sympathia. [00:38:25] He was a Welsh, a Welsh wizard from the 1800s, who was able to basically accomplish much of the same thing that we acknowledge that like South American [00:38:40] Ayahuasceros are doing, or [badgatalistas?] are doing with with Ayahuasca, but through just honing his psychic abilities to communicate with plants . . . And he did it from a very Western esoteric model, [00:38:55] which I think is really important for Western people to recognize, like here we have this Welsh, you know, if we want to call him a shaman or a sorcerer or a magician, whatever, you have him doing this thing that we exoticize down in South America [00:39:10] and within indigenous communities, and here, this is someone from, you know, like a Western European standpoint. We don't need to go and and you know, info mine and culturally appropriate from these other cultures in order to like have [00:39:25] communications and have relationships with plants and we don't have to borrow indigenous traditions that we don't understand either. The . . . Here this guy has given us, through this book that he wrote, an ability [00:39:40] to do that. And so I'd like to encourage more and more people to do it. The book is available via PDF only at this point, it's a very rare book. But yeah, the Grimoire Sympathia is great. ANDREW: Well, and I [00:39:55] think that that's, people should definitely check that out. I haven't read it. So I'm going to go check it out and I think it's back to that idea of like, what's, what's, where you are, right, you know? What's the, what's growing where [00:40:10] you live, what you know, what's growing in the parks and ravines and forests or whatever depending on where you are. And how do you, how do you, how can you relate to that? You know? Because I think that there's so many wonderful [00:40:25] and powerful plants. You know, like people, you know, there's a lot of discussion about sage and smudging and fumigation and stuff like that. And you know, if you want to clean something spiritually, you know, like [00:40:40] one of my favorite things to go to is, you know, I have a very deep and long term relationship with the burdock plant, you know. And you go dig up some of those roots and, you know, cook them up and use that to spray around your place, does a really [00:40:55] good job of getting rid of a lot of stuff, you know? And it's not . . .    MARCUS: Yeah.   ANDREW: You know, and it's not exotic or fancy or glamorous or whatever. In fact, it's a lot of work of trying to get those roots out of the ground, but it's worth it. You know?   MARCUS: Yeah. [00:41:10] Yeah. Yeah. I mean there's a lot, there's a lot of different things that you can do too, I mean whether it's in just paying attention to your surroundings and I mean around here, we have Western red cedar and Western red cedar's always been worked with for, for [00:41:25] cleansing amongst the indigenous people up here. But if you just start paying attention to the plant, you know, you don't have to go through and like adopt their, their beliefs, you know, or imitate their behaviors. [00:41:40] You can actually just look at the plant and to go, “Well, this plant doesn't allow anything to grow underneath of it.”    ANDREW: Yeah.   MARCUS: Nothing grows underneath of a red cedar. And if you stand underneath of a red cedar in the middle of summertime [00:41:55] peak heat you can actually feel the essential oils dripping out of it in a vaporing form and falling on you and then those get into the, they saturate the soil as well as, [00:42:10] you know, the branches falling down, but within that, within the essential oils, volatile oils that are within the plant, you've got insecticides and herbicides and all these different like things that prevent other things from living underneath [00:42:25] of it.   ANDREW: Sure.   MARCUS: And so it cleanses, it creates a protective circle around itself because trees grow in the circle [laughing] and so they naturally protect themselves and so, [00:42:40] you look at the relationship. It has with water. You, what you do, you sit underneath of a cedar tree in the rain and you, you pay attention to like, well, you know, through the the branches, the water are taking those [00:42:55] same volatile oils and they're driving it deeper into the, into the soil, right? So there's a relationship between the rain and the cedar. And when I saw that and experienced that I was given a gift. [00:43:11] Of taking branches from the cedar, you know, like giving some of my hair in return, you know, and like, like taking a branch or tobacco and, and, and taking the cedar branch [00:43:26] and dipping it in water and then using that to, to spurge . . .   ANDREW: Sure.   MARCUS: Or to cleanse myself and that's not imitating anybody, that's not culturally appropriating anything. That's me sitting [00:43:41] underneath of a cedar tree paying attention to how it grows and what its place is amongst all the other life forms and the forces of nature that helped create it. And we can do that. We [00:43:56] can take the time to pay attention and to learn. And like I said, if you really go deep and you can allow yourself to even allow the the land to move you physically, it can move your mind, it can move your, your voice. [00:44:11] It can speak through you and to actually have that experience and to allow the spirit of place, the spirit of the land, the intelligence of the land, the genii of the land to move you physically [00:44:27] in a dance or in a trance state is powerful.  And to allow a plant, certain plants are more prone to doing that than others, like teacher plants or tutelary plants. They can come [00:44:42] in and they can move you and they can physically teach you and share your body and when that happens, it's pretty incredible. And it's a pretty cool thing. And [00:44:57] that's when you start, it's through having those experiences repeatedly that you start, that that level of reverence intensifies, and that level of gratefulness [00:45:12] intensifies, and that level of respect intensifies, and the way you live your life becomes shaped by those things, and they become that, and the way you relate to the world around you starts to change, and [00:45:27] that's what we would call spiritual but that's once again . . . [laughing] Spirit is a word that's kind of constructed by the Western, you know, philosophical language base and it's not necessarily . . . We have to kind of find our own way of relating [00:45:42] to it and it's . . . the word spiritual might not really even apply anymore.   ANDREW: Well, and I think one of the things that happens too, is that when you're, when you're working to be present in that way, whether we want to think of it as the [00:45:57] Earth reveals more things to you or perhaps the plants and other things that are there, you know, encourage their friends to reveal more to you, you know, but it becomes this process of expanding [00:46:12] and sort of opening towards, you know, deeper access, deeper knowledge, you know, more mystery . . . because I think that mystery is always a part of it and I've found personally that you [00:46:27] know, the longer, the longer I try and hold this approach to working and being in the world, the more often something emerges even in advance of when I actually need it or [00:46:42] before I know that I need it too, you know, there's this kind of fascinating thing where something will start to show up and then, you know, a month later, I'll be like, “oh, hey, I'm glad, I'm glad I saw you, and now that, now that this thing came up, what [00:46:57] do you think about helping me with that?” And it's, you know, it's like it was already, it was aware of it before I was, right? You know? Which I think, Which I think is fascinating, and you know, some of the, yeah, what's the right word, [00:47:12] deeper magic, more wondrous happenings, around this kind of stuff, you know. Yeah.   MARCUS: Yeah, those wondrous happenings that kind of maintain and create that sense of of awe, you [00:47:27] know, having that being a source of humility for yourself. Is beautiful, having more of those awe experiences. [laughs] I mean to me, I mean, that's, that's a motivating [00:47:42] factor into the exploration of magic itself, you know, like having more of those awe, like, awe-dropping sort of experiences. It's amazing. Yeah. That's where it's at.    ANDREW: It's [00:47:57] definitely where it's at. Well, maybe we should wrap it up on that point: go out, and find the mystery and engage the . . .   MARCUS: As I learned in a ceremony once, it's that we must perpetuate the mystery at all costs.   ANDREW: [00:48:12] Mm-hmm. I like it.   MARCUS: Me too.   ANDREW: So for folks who want to find out more about you or follow along on your great creations and shenanigans on the [00:48:27] Internets. Where should they come and look for you? Where's good places for your stuff and for where you're hanging out?   MARCUS: Okay, so I have House of Orpheus.com that you can find pretty [00:48:43] easily on Facebook as well as just House of Orpheus.com. And we're also on Instagram. I post on Instagram multiple times a day for each one of the projects that I work on, just to keep [00:48:58] people informed. Then there's also my metal work, working with talismans and blacksmithing, and that's at Troll Cunning Forge and we're mostly on Instagram and Etsy. I [00:49:13] post a lot of my one-off stuff on Instagram though. And so, just keep updated with the Instagram profile. And then the Veridis Genii Symposium, which is VeridisGenii.com. [00:49:28] So that's V I R I D I S . . .   ANDREW: We'll put a link in the notes.    MARCUS: Yeah, if I was writing it down easy, no, and [00:49:43] then we, so we have a Instagram for that as well as a Facebook profile and website. That's going to be coming up really soon, people that are really interested in plant magic. I highly recommend checking it out. We've got Daniel Schuelke and [00:49:58] Corinne Boyer and there's a whole bunch of really just amazing people speaking this year and it's, really looking forward to it. It's going to be a great event.   ANDREW: And also there's a publication in the same name which we . . .   MARCUS: Yeah.   ANDREW: Which [00:50:13] we carry in the shop, when we're back up and running, but you know, yeah, it's around, you can definitely get that as well. And there's a lot of great stuff in there that's worth checking out.   MARCUS: Yeah, we just edited . . . This is our fifth year. So the fifth edition, it's [00:50:28] going to be amazing. So yeah, really looking forward to it being published, and we publish that when it comes out during the, the event so it's available at the event for people.   ANDREW: That's awesome. Well, thanks for hanging out with me today, Marcus. It's been a pleasure.   MARCUS: Yeah, [00:50:43] likewise. It's been great. Any time.

Kelly and Andrew explore the influence of the planets in their lives and the lives of their clients. Sharing ideas about Uranus moving into Taurus. They also talk about the possibilities and limits of resolving challenges with more difficult placements. They also laugh a lot! Think about how much you've enjoyed the podcast and how many episodes you listened to, and consider if it is time to support the Patreon You can do so here. If you want more of this in your life you can subscribe by Spotofy, RSS , iTunes, Stitcher, or email. You can follow Kelly's work here.  Andrew's fundraiser is located here or using andrew@thehermitslamp.com to send money via PayPal or transfer.  Thanks for joining the conversation. Please share the podcast to help us grow and change the world.  Andrew You can book time with Andrew through his site here.  Transcript  ANDREW: [00:00:02] Welcome to The Hermit's Lamp podcast. I'm hanging out today with Kelly Surtees, who is an astrologer, and someone that I've known for, you know, at least a decade, I'd say now a bit longer. And [00:00:17] their approach is really interesting to me because they're super smart about what they do, but they have a great sense of humor about it as well. You know, there's a way in which they seem [00:00:32] to me to continue to laugh and enjoy life and all of those things even when talking about intellectual stuff or hard stuff or whatever and I think that that's a trait that I super admire and [00:00:47] try and kind of hold in myself as I go through all of life's ups and downs and so on. But you know, hey Kelly, for people who don't know you, why don't you introduce yourself? Who are you?  KELLY: Hey Andrew, well, I'm Australian, which might be obvious now [00:01:02] that I started talking. I married a Canadian and so I live, currently, just outside Toronto, but I'm an astrologer, probably what people are more curious about, and I've been an astrologer full-time professionally for nearly 20 years, [00:01:17] so it has been my life's work.  I came to astrology very young, not because anyone in my family was interested in astrology, but because I was, and I started learning the basics when I was 10, 11 years old, back [00:01:32] in Sydney where it was a lot warmer than where we are now, and carried on with my sort of personal exploration. It was style of astrology through my teenage years and then in my early twenties, I actually signed up to do a massage therapy [00:01:47] training course and the college I was studying at in Sydney offered an astrology training program, which just had never occurred to me was a thing. So that's kind of how I got started, and what I do today is, I work with clients and students around the world, [00:02:02] I do one-on-one consults in astrology, but primarily what I'm doing more and more of these days is teaching the next generation of astrologists through my online training programs.  ANDREW: Amazing. So before we, before we were recording [00:02:17] here, we started kind of talking about astrology and we were talking about the history and the way in which sort of history and tradition and sort of practice all flow together, and I think that I'd [00:02:32] love to kind of try and pick that up and talk about that a little bit, right?  KELLY: Yeah.  ANDREW: You know, what, where did your, where did your astrology start? Like what kind of, did you start out studying older forms? Did you, did you...? KELLY: Absolutely not. Not, I started with a [00:02:47] very modern psychological astrology, which was hugely popular in the 80s and 90s, like 1980s, 1990s. I started studying astrology in the late 1990s. And yeah, just had a very, [00:03:02] I would say, a very modern introduction to psychological, almost evolutionary, components in astrology. And that was great, it got me started got me into my practice, and it was when I attended my first astrology conference, which was the FAA [00:03:17] conference in Melbourne, I think in 2004, that I was lucky enough to hear people like Demetra George, John Frawley, and Lee Lehman speak, who are very well respected astrologers who all practice slightly different forms of mediaeval [00:03:32] or traditional astrology, and connecting with those teachers really aroused my interest in things like, where did some of these things we use in astrology come from? Like who first created the houses, for instance? Or why is [00:03:47] this planet associated with the things that it is associated with? So yeah, I would say within, you know, the first five years of starting my practice, that had become a real interest for me and that was like going down the rabbit hole.  ANDREW: Yeah, for [00:04:02] sure. I think that there's, there's always this question about that kind of stuff for me, which is really like, where, how far down do we go? KELLY: Yeah. ANDREW: You know, starting, starting out for me, you know my interest in astrology [00:04:17] came out of you know, studying Aleister Crowley and studying his magical systems. And so, you know, it was a lot of magic and ideas around the inner planets predominantly, you know. KELLY: Yes. ANDREW: And you know, and sort [00:04:32] of like working with that and looking at that as a magical model and so on. But you know, as you start digging in and you start looking back, you're like: Okay. Well, where does that come from? And what is that? How far does that go? What, where is the source from which that wisdom [00:04:47] comes from? You know? And I think it's such a, such an interesting and challenging question to kind of slide into, you know?  KELLY: It's a huge question, because it, you know, something… To try and answer that for astrology [00:05:02] takes you back to the origins of philosophy, to the origins of mathematics, you know, things like wondering why we've associated a particular physical thing or phenomenon with a certain emotional experience [00:05:17] or a certain philosophical construct. So when you dive into these origin stories, if you like, of some of the magical practices, you are almost going back to the dawn of human thought and human ideas and that can [00:05:32] be a very broad research project, because then you're not just learning explicitly about the origins of astrology. You're actually reading, you know, ancient philosophers, and you might be reading some of the original mathematicians to get a sense on why [00:05:47] they did what they did and where they were coming from.  ANDREW: Mm-hmm. Yeah, and I think it's so important to also try and understand, it's not just about what they said, which is certainly important. But it's also, [00:06:02] what were they? What were they thinking? How were they thinking about it too? Right? Because you know, like in a divination class that I've been taking with one of my elders, we were discussing how, you know, a hundred and fifty years ago, [00:06:18] the scope of life's experiences, that we needed to speak about in divination, were equally complex probably on the human front, but on the practical fronts, were much narrower in some ways, you know? The range [00:06:33] of human experience and the range of things we have access to is so different. And then you know, when we go back to, like, what was it like in ancient Greece and what was it like in, you know, here, there, or wherever, you know? Yeah, it's hard to even, I think, understand [00:06:48] exactly how they considered certain things.  KELLY: Yeah. That's a . . . That's a really great point. I mean, two topics that come to my mind. One of them is, in the older literature on astrology, there's a lot of questions and a lot of detail around dealing with [00:07:03] ships and dealing with crops. So there's a lot of, you know, what indicates shipwreck? Or is my ship going to come in? And that seems a bit weird to a modern person, because why are they so obsessed with ships? But then you have to remind yourself that [00:07:18] many, many hundreds and thousands of years ago, ships were actually the primary form of transport. We didn't have trains or planes or obviously automobiles... ANDREW: Yeah. KELLY: And just to your point there, you do kind of have to almost put yourself back into: What was life like, two [00:07:33] thousand, two and a half thousand years ago, when things like crops were more likely to perhaps fail, water quality was a massive issue because that obviously led to the spread of disease or illness, life expectancy [00:07:48] was shorter, things like pregnancy were life threatening, in many cases, for women, and many more babies died, you know, in the first 12 months of their life then do today with modern medicine. So a lot of the questions and a lot of the, their life, if [00:08:03] you like, just to almost give a superficial summary, they lived a lot more, closer to the line of life and death than what we do today. And one of the kind of attacks against older forms of astrology is that it's so fated, you know, [00:08:18] and it's so deterministic, but the intention was to try and give clearer answers about really meaningful topics that were, you know, more touch-and-go than what they might be today.  ANDREW: So where [00:08:33] do you, where do you fall on the sort of fated spectrum of things?  KELLY: Oh, this is a really good question. And I've thought about it because it does come up. I have any . . . . ANDREW: Yeah!  KELLY: Over the years. There's a beautiful quote. I think it's by Albertus Magnus, [00:08:48] who says something like, actually, maybe instead of bastardizing it. That's how you know, you're an absolute asteroid nerd, that you have books like this handy, [00:09:03] because there's, he has a beautiful quote that I kind of . . . . When I first discovered this quote, however many years ago, it really helped me clarify my own answer to the fate versus free will argument. So he says, "There is in [00:09:18] man a double spring of action, namely nature and the will, and nature for its part is ruled by the stars, while the will is free. But unless it, the will, resists, it is swept along by nature and becomes [00:09:33] mechanical."  And that idea, like fate is sort of your, your nature, or what's kind of ruled by the stars, and the free will to my mind is our very human thinking, you know, application of effort, and I've seen [00:09:48] this in chart work with clients and students over the years now, enough that I know it to be true. That your birth chart might be, if it's almost like a map of your fate and if you do nothing, if you just allow the fate to manifest freely and purely, [00:10:03] it can give very clear sense of this area of life flows, and that's where you have success, and this area of life is where you're going to hit blocks after blocks. But if you choose to apply your free will, I'm not saying that anyone can make anything [00:10:18] happen because I don't actually believe that's true.  ANDREW: Sure. KELLY: But I do think that there are certain topics, as indicated by the chart, where the application of one's effort, aka free will, can move the needle from completely dissatisfying [00:10:33] to perhaps somewhat satisfying or maybe from somewhat satisfying to more fulfilling. There are some topics in some charts that that have a bit of a firm no and that sort of response. So I do think we [00:10:48] have free will within a scope, if that makes sense.  ANDREW: Yeah.  KELLY: Yeah. ANDREW: Yeah, I think people come--because I do predictive card reading, right? KELLY: Yes. ANDREW: People are always like, where does, where's my free will? Like, [00:11:03] you know? Or they're like, well, just tell me how it's going to be. I'm like, well, in this case, it's a free will issue. How do you want it to be? In this case it's not a free will issue. You know? KELLY: Yeah, I think that's, that's a beautiful way of describing it. I mean, I've looked and worked with clients over the years and I've beautifully been blessed to have [00:11:18] a couple of clients allow me to share some of their chart work in my teaching. But I have a handful of clients who have been single their whole lives, and whatever they have tried or not tried or maybe they haven't even been interested. The topic of relationships [00:11:33] has simply not come alive for them. And there are ways to see things like that in the chart, and then there are other charts where it's like, there are some challenges here, but if you put the effort in, you got to be able to get a little bit more. But I like how you summarized [00:11:48] it there, that there are some topics that are kind of fated, and a little bit out of our hands and there are others where it's like, you can move the needle on this, if you desire it enough. Yeah.  ANDREW: Yeah. I often think of [00:12:03] it this way: You know, so, we live on a planet with seven point whatever billion people.  KELLY: Yeah. ANDREW: All of those people are seeking to exert their free will.  KELLY: Yes. ANDREW: However, you know, everybody is to a greater or lesser extent [00:12:18] acting based on culture, which is, which is a force that, you know, if it's internalized and not undone, you know, it's just like fate, right? You know, like the cultural bias or cultural experiences or cultural expectations, [00:12:33] right? KELLY: Even family conditioning.  ANDREW: Right? Well, that was going to be the next thing, right? Like, you know, our baggage, our personal baggage, right? And then we're, so, we're not only trying to exert free will, but we're trying to exert free will into the sphere where everybody else is exerting [00:12:48] those forces and maybe some degree of their own free will, and then there's some amount of chaos in the system, and then there's some fixed points, and it's like, so how much, how free is that free will? And I think, you know, maybe it's, you know, [00:13:03] as we're talking about it, I think it's a carryover from my time being so focused on Crowley's kind of magic of cultivating the will and building the capacity, you know, in the way that that quote talks about, right? Like, you know, it's like, how [00:13:18] free can we become from those things? The answer is, never free.  KELLY: Yeah. ANDREW: Fully. But like, we can create a lot more space and in many areas of our life, maybe we can create a lot more space so that then we can kind of act, choose, [00:13:33] or discover where we are aligned better maybe? You know?  KELLY: Yeah, and I think that's a huge part of any type of magical healing work, whether it's astrology or tarot, or other ritual practices. One of the things that [00:13:48] Dimetra George said in this very first conference years ago, which has stuck with me, she described that it's partly the astrologist's job to help the client understand the areas of their life that are most likely indicated flowing [00:14:03] fulfillment, and the areas of their life that are less likely to give a reward or sense of satisfaction relevant to the amount of effort that they might put in, and I think that's, you know, sort [00:14:18] of, to what you're speaking about here--We're speaking about. We can influence certain things to a certain extent, but you made a great point, like the 7 billion people, all trying to influence certain things. We [00:14:33] can't all get everything. It's just, it's not the way things are built. I won't have as many children as Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, no matter how hard I try, that's just not part of my experience, [00:14:48] and other people might be like, but I want, you know, the wealth of Bill Gates or Warren Buffett or what have you and like, that's not, you know, so part of our work is to help guide people. Like you might think that you want these things. It doesn't really bring you fulfillment. Like there is an exploration [00:15:03] around the self-awareness, self-knowing, like knowing the self and moving beneath some of the things that we think we want, to get in touch with the things that really make us all come alive.  ANDREW: For sure. Yeah and I know for me too, you [00:15:18] know, like because I spent a lot of time, especially magically, but you know, definitely in other ways too, kind of working to counterbalance the, you know, tendencies in my chart or the things that are more problematic there.  KELLY: Yeah.  ANDREW: But even [00:15:33] at that, you know, like, you know, like my placement of Saturn is just, you know, it's a it's a recurrent point of friction for me. And that's probably never going to change. I can see it coming. I can see it coming more now. I [00:15:48] can have better strategies for dealing with it when it kind of like, brings up its thing. I can make some degree of better choices in advance. But you know, it's sort of, it's a, it's a, it's in a place where it [00:16:03] just kind of continuously causes a certain kind of friction in my life. And you know, the reality is, it's like, well, I've just got to roll with that, I've just got to accept that, and I've got to learn to to see it and roll with it and move through [00:16:18] it and to not hold onto it. And, and even kind of at this point, you know, I used to think that I would eventually kind of like learn the lesson of that position and and be free of it in a sense, and I've even caught a move past that where I'm like, [00:16:33] I don't even think that-- I'm sure there are lessons that I will continue to learn about it.  KELLY: Yeah. ANDREW: But I think that, that that's also a wrong idea. I think that, you know, stuff like, some of the aspects are just about straight up acceptance, you know, and just be like, look [00:16:48] at that. That's just the way it's going to be. Stop hoping it's going to be different.  KELLY: Yeah.  ANDREW: And then see what changes, you know?  KELLY: Well, that is a really powerful piece. I mean, it reminds me of people who are like, I wish I was taller or I wish I was shorter or I wish I had, you know, different, [00:17:03] I mean, you can probably change your hair or your boobs or what have you, but it's very hard to change your height. You know, it just, you are either a tall person or a short person for the most part, and these-- You just have to work with it. You know, I'm a tall person. I'm 5'10". [00:17:18] I'm like a hundred and seventy eight centimeters or something. And you know, when you're a teenager, you hate that, because everybody, you can't hide in a crowd, people see, but you know, as an older woman or a more mature woman, it's lovely. I can carry a little bit of extra weight and [00:17:33] nobody knows, kind of thing.  So my relationship to that fixed thing in me has changed over time and that's kind of, what you're speaking to here is that there are certain parts of our self and our psyche that we do have to [00:17:48] kind of just accept and it's what, the piece that I got really excited about, that you said, is what if I stop mentally and energetically and emotionally resisting this thing that is one way that I so desperately wish was another way? [00:18:03] If I just breathed out and allowed myself to acknowledge and accept, you know, I always have to be vigilant about money or about sexual interactions or about career, whatever it happens to be, based on, you know, you mentioned your [00:18:18] Saturn, someone else might have a problem with their Mars. You know, if you just kind of go into an acceptance place with it, the freeing up of energy and emotional power that you have been using to try and force back on that is incredibly liberating and when you take [00:18:33] that energy and you apply it to, you know, a talent or a skill, the idea of enhancing the good, you can radically change your life, not because you made that problem thing be anything other than what it was, but because you stopped [00:18:48] giving it all your focus. And you put your focus on to something that actually has, you know, some potential to take you in a more fulfilling direction. ANDREW: For sure. And I think that that's, I mean, that's one of the reasons why, going and sitting with an astrologer, [00:19:03] if you're not, you know, or learning it yourself is so helpful because there are aspects, you know. I mean, you brought up Mars, right? You know, I mean, I've Mars in Aries, I was a very angry young person, you know, and I have a, I have, when [00:19:18] it emerges, a very very bad temper. KELLY: Yes. ANDREW: But it's not that much of an issue any more. I mean, I still need to be mindful of it. But that one has been way more amenable to management and modification than [00:19:33] other aspects of my chart, because, because of its nature, maybe because of my nature, probably, because of its placement, and so on. So. There are those things where it's great and you can kind of turn them into an advantage. I mean it's part of what fuels my drive to do [00:19:48] what I do around work, right? Like I have a lot of energy, a lot of the time, and so I can do a lot of work and run the shop and do all those things. You know, whereas other people are always like, how do you do so much? I'm like, I've got Mars in Aries. I've just got gas in the tank. It just keeps going? You know? [00:20:03]  KELLY: Yeah, you're the Energizer bunny, it just keeps going and going. I mean, what we're kind of alluding to here is something that comes to us from the Hellenistic astrology, form of astrology, that has to do with sect, which is S-E-C-T. Which kind of divides [00:20:18] charts into daytime or nighttime. Very simply based on the time of day that you were born. Then this working theory is that if you're born in the daytime, Saturn is going to be a little bit more helpful or productive for you and Mars a little bit more problematic. [00:20:33] And if you're born at night time, the reverse is true. Where in the nighttime, the cool of night tends to calm the heat of Mars, so you tend to get less sharp Mars problems. And in the nighttime, the cool of the night exacerbates [00:20:48] the kind of curmudgeonly Scrooge-like energy of Saturn, so you tend to get more of a harsher Saturn.  ANDREW: Sure. Yeah.  KELLY: In a nutshell. I don't know if that rings true for you, personally Andrew, but...  ANDREW: Definitely, I was born at 9:30 at night. So.  KELLY: Yeah, that was going [00:21:03] to be my question to you, just based on the fact that you seem to really like-- I mean, your Mars is placed in one of its home signs in Aries, and that also is a way of getting a little bit more of the positive potential. The other thing you're talking about too, though, is we are all hotter [00:21:18] as energetic beings in our youth, and if we have Mars problems, they will tend to be worse in our teenage years or in our 20s.  ANDREW: Sure.  KELLY: And then the aging process, where we cool and slow, just biologically, that does [00:21:33] temper some of the Mars problems. The reverse is true for Saturn, though. Saturn problems can sometimes be something we do have to carry with us, even as we age, because the nature of aging tends to kind of stimulate more Saturnian type manifesting.  ANDREW: When [00:21:48] you talked about the, the coolness at night exacerbating, you know, Saturn.  KELLY: Saturn... ANDREW: Yeah, I've had this image of like, oh, it's chilly, and my knee hurts cause it's cold now, and oh.... [laughing] You know, it's just like, oh, man, such a Saturn image, right? KELLY: Yeah, to have sore knees, or a sore back, and it's worse in the winter, because winter is like exacerbating Saturnian qualities as does nighttime. Yeah. I mean [00:22:16] there is a positive reversal here, which is that Venus and Jupiter, considered the two benefic planets, people born in the daytime tend to have more Jupiter type gifts or talents, because the [00:22:31] heat of Jupiter is really conducive to the heat of day time. Whereas Venus is more of a moist cool planet, generally speaking, and she really comes to the fore in the evening. So if you're born at night time after the sunset or before the Sun has [00:22:46] risen, and obviously daytime and nighttime is different depending on season and time of year and birth location. So-- ANDREW: Sure. KELLY: ....being born at 9:30 at night, if you're born in Europe in July, you might still be a daytime baby, because it's a very [00:23:01] late sunset, but if you're born at 9:30 at night in January or February in Canada, you're definitely a nighttime baby though. ANDREW: For sure.  KELLY: Yeah. You do, you get like a specific type of problem, depending [00:23:16] on whether you're born in the daytime or nighttime, and then you get a planet that is giving you, you know, Venus is, can be, more creative or more relationship-oriented and that's nighttime gifts. Jupiter is more about that wisdom and teaching and inspiration and motivation and that's more [00:23:31] of a daytime gift. I mean, you have to look at the planet in the chart as well. I mean...   ANDREW: For sure.  KELLY: You'd want the Jupiter or the Venus to be in a nice sign or making a great aspect. Yeah, but that's, I don't know just when you were talking about your problem with Saturn, I'm like, I feel [00:23:46] like you must be born at nighttime because this is very-- ANDREW: For sure. Yep. My parents remember exactly what time I was born, because my dad was watching Hockey Night in Canada, which was on a Monday, [00:24:01] and you know, whatever right? Like he's like, there's like a very specific set of things that we associate around that, the memories around that, so they're like, there's no question about what time you were born, you know?  KELLY: I love birth stories like that. Yeah. That's fantastic. ANDREW: Yeah, for sure.  KELLY: So yeah, so this [00:24:16] is my guess, we got here, I'm like, how did we get here, fate versus free will and what's in the chart? And [24:24 not quite clear] really amazing.  ANDREW: Yeah, I definitely think so. So, I'm also very interested, because I've been following along [00:24:31] what's going on in the stars these days, even though, even though it sort of, on a personal level, astrology has shifted away from what was at one point a more professional folks into a more just kind of personal curiosity. You know, I got really curious [00:24:46] about: we have this big shift into into Taurus right now, right?  KELLY: We do.   KELLY: Big energy. KELLY: We're recording this just as Uranus, like a big explosive volcanic planet, has moved into Taurus, which is the most [00:25:01] fixed stubborn stable sign in the Zodiac. There's a real contradiction, if you like, in the symbolic imagery here, Uranus loves to shake things up. It literally is like earthquakes and volcanoes and lightning strikes and [00:25:16] Uranus is like the farmer in the field. He's just plowing year after year, so this is a huge-- We're starting this new kind of seven to eight year cycle that is going to radically reshape society, [00:25:31] culture, and individually, each of our lives as well.  ANDREW: Yeah, it's been, it's been interesting to watch sort of-- In my orbit, there's been a lot of people who've had a very [00:25:46] sort of disruptive shift go on in the last kind of, you know, like in the last few weeks, really, kind of you know, and it's sort of like, we're going along, I'm going this way. Oh, wait, what the hell am I doing? No, I'm [00:26:01] going to go this other way, you know? And it's such a, such an interesting shift to watch happen, you know, and to sort of, and also to try and roll with it, you know, because it's been-- A bunch of that's had an impact on me as well. So it's always, it's really [00:26:16] interesting to see it's going on everywhere. I'm like, all right, I'm gonna keep my eyes open, could be anywhere now, because it's the other thing about it. KELLY:  Well, that's-- I was talking about this with a client earlier this week, and they had something in, their chart is being activated by [00:26:31] Uranus, they're a little bit resistant as you know, everyone with planets. So if I back up a second, Uranus is moving into Taurus, so it is activating anyone with planets in the sign of Taurus, but the way the planetary aspect patterns [00:26:46] or energetic patterns work, while Uranus is in Taurus, it will also have a fairly dramatic impact on the other fixed modality signs, which include Leo, Scorpio, and Aquarius. So those four signs, Taurus, Leo, [00:27:01] Scorpio, and Aquarius are all quite activated but it does get a little more technical than that in the sense that Uranus moves quite slowly. And so we actually had a taste of Uranus in Taurus in 2018 between [00:27:16] May and November, but Uranus was only activating the first one or two degrees of Taurus in 2018.  This year in 2019, Uranus is going to activate all the way up to the first six degrees of Taurus. So [00:27:31] for people who might be familiar with their birth chart. Very specifically, if you have a planet between zero and six degrees of any of the fixed signs, so taught, you know, you could have, could be four Leo Well, three Scorpio or two Aquarius or five Taurus. [00:27:46] They're all getting that Uranus transit. And I was talking, I had a client this week who fell in that category, and they were very sort of resistant around: What if I don't want to make this change? what if I'm not ready to make this change? And [00:28:01] I kind of laughed because having worked with, you know, Uranus for many years, here is an indicator of that major kind of upheaval and change that leads to new freedoms and Independence. You know the Uranus change has a purpose, it leads [00:28:16] to new freedom, it leads to new authenticity, it leads to Independence. But if it's coming, it means that the shake-up, the time for the shake-up is now. And it can definitely surprise you.  And I have a personal story where last [00:28:31] summer in the northern summer, I was very frustrated with where we were living. I just had sort of done 10 years in a little small town and I was just a bit restless and bored, and what's next? and when can we go and live near the ocean again? And [00:28:46] and so my husband and I had some really big talks over the summer, and we pulled it apart, his career really has him here, and we came up with a plan by the end of the summer, this was all while Uranus was in Taurus, where we would move to the West Coast in two [00:29:01] years time, when he would retire. And I was like, that's great. You know, it wasn't as soon as I wanted, but it was sooner than he wanted. So we did that lovely relationship compromise and then like a month later, he came home and said, there's a job in [00:29:16] a whole other part of the world, that I think I'm going to apply for, and I was like, okay, well just apply and see, and anyway, long story short, it took a few months. There's a lot of interview processes and we found out that he's accepted the job and we're now going to be moving [00:29:31] literally in the opposite direction to where we thought we were going to move and that's how Uranus works. I felt the energy of being restless and bored and we started doing our lovely logical human brainstorming about how we could come up [00:29:46] with a practical plan and Uranus is like, you're on the right track, but I want to throw a few surprises into the mix, and so here's an unexpected out of the blue wild idea. Do you guys want to say yes to this? And we did. And that's [00:30:01] so what you're saying, Andrew, it works like almost scanning. Where is this Uranus thing coming from, even when you know to expect the unexpected, Uranus can still surprise you and you know, give you those curve balls. They can be very exciting and very liberating [00:30:16] but they will not be what you had thought.  ANDREW: Yeah, for sure. I feel like my experience so far of this energy is that I was thinking that I would be doing a lot more traveling and teaching over the coming while?  KELLY: Yep! [00:30:31]  ANDREW: And the shift in energy and the shift in circumstance over the last little bit and like right around now has, has gotten me canceling most of my travel plans, and being like, you know what, I think that, I think that what I [00:30:46] need to actually do is focus more on creation and focus more on like, sort of deepening the, the foundation of the store, and, and my work in regards to that, as opposed [00:31:01] to the sort of like, I'm going to go around and teach all over the place, which I love but it's like, it's like, no, that, that's not where you're going right now, and I'm like, all right.  KELLY: Yeah.  ANDREW: Fair enough.  KELLY: So did you have a relatively quick kind of you know, I set up [00:31:16] this schedule and then just a few months later, kind of changing it and reshaping things?  ANDREW: Yeah. I mean, it's really, some of the stuff has been set up for a while, but it's yeah, there's just been a bunch of projects and ideas that have been on the table that, that, [00:31:33] you know, starting, starting about, well really, starting at the start of this year, you know, sort of. So, I mean, I got divorced last year, and then, so I've been, you know, sort of like living separately now for about four [00:31:48] months by the time this goes live and I was just realizing that a) I'm kind of tired because it's been a lot, right? KELLY: Yeah. That's a lot to process, yeah. ANDREW: So there's that. B) My entire day to day living [00:32:03] situation has changed, you know, I have my kids half the time, you know, all my other work life tries to live in that sort of compressed other half time.  KELLY: Yep, three or four days a week.  ANDREW: Yeah, and, you know, and there's a lot more, oh, a [00:32:19] lot more, there's a lot of kind of running around that's a part of my life, you know, especially as my kids get bigger.  KELLY: Yes. ANDREW: You know, they're not big enough to be... KELLY: All the driving. The driving.  ANDREW: Yeah, or you know or like, taking them around, I mean, we live downtown so, you know, but they're, they're cool [00:32:34] to go. The older one's cool to go places they know, but if they're going anywhere new, they need us to take them, you know? KELLY: Yeah. ANDREW: So, it's like, all right, everybody's on the bus. Let's go here. Let's go there. Let's do whatever, right? KELLY: Yeah. ANDREW: And, and so all of those changes just made me realize [00:32:49] that, you know, I needed to kind of shift back to reassess my actual energies and that I also needed to kind of look at what's, [00:33:04] what am I what am I doing? And what am I hoping to get out of it? And does it make sense from that space, right? And so there are a bunch of things that I've been doing where, like, from a practical point of view, they seem like [00:33:19] they make sense but maybe more from an emotional point of view, I'm, I have some other agenda for being there that's not being met? KELLY: Yes. ANDREW: Around the growth of my career, around, you know, interconnection with people, around a bunch of different stuff, right? And once [00:33:34] I realized that discrepancy... And I was like, okay, so all of these things where I have an unofficial agenda, that's really my actual agenda, that is not in alignment with doing these things, I should stop that, you know? And, and [00:33:49] a lot of the travel was sort of geared around some of that stuff, right, you know, fun, escape, you know, status, whatever, I'm like, none of those things matter that much ultimately and if I want to have fun I should just go have fun. And if I want to like [00:34:04] escape, I should like, take a day off work and go do something, but like, traveling to go work somewhere else is not a way to accomplish those things, you know? KELLY: Yeah. Yeah. ANDREW: So.  KELLY: So this is great because it sounds like you're coming into a deeper sense of what [00:34:19] is authentic and real and right for you. And that's, you know, the whole pathway of Uranus is that it is, it awakens us, if you like, to things that might have been latent or forgotten or neglected, but the [00:34:34] chaos or the upheaval of of changing things is a really critical part. It's like there's almost a dare, a cosmic dare, you know, if you would like this level of authenticity, how much are you prepared to change in your life that's kind of on the fake end of [00:34:49] the spectrum, to really sit in that deeper sense of self.  ANDREW: Yeah. For sure, yeah, it corresponds with sort of a drive that I've been feeling as well. Like there are lots of parts of my life that I haven't [00:35:04] been public about. I mean, I haven't been secretive about them, but I haven't been like super public about them either? KELLY: Yeah.  ANDREW: And you know, so like, you know, being a polyamorous individual. It's a thing that people, if they know me, know about me, but it's not a thing that [00:35:19] I've sort of historically, you know, broadcast per se, right?  KELLY: Yeah. ANDREW: But also, I've been feeling like that's something that I wanted to change and so I actually recorded an episode, the episode previous to this is about poly, [00:35:34] polyamory and love and spirituality, you know, and so it's like, it's also that, right? Like what are the risks you're willing to take, right? What's, what are you willing to put in? How much discomfort are you, are you able to engage to get that authenticity? Right?  KELLY: [00:35:49] Well, and this is the key, is that there is some discomfort and that's a really beautiful way. Like what risks, what are you prepared to lose, or put on the line so that you can be more authentic? Are you prepared for people to maybe judge [00:36:04] you a little bit because you're owning your stuff? And Uranus is really correlated with things that are counter cultural or might be defined against society's norms as a little unconventional or atypical.  ANDREW: Yeah. KELLY: I always [00:36:19] think about Uranus in Taurus is like just letting your freak show out, like fly your flag, basically. We all have parts of ourselves--  ANDREW: Yeah. KELLY: That are a bit weird and a bit odd or bit unusual and when [00:36:35] Uranus shows up and really starts, because the last eight years we had Uranus in Aries. So there was a very specific type of Uranus vibration going on. And what I would say is, for most people, the last eight years brought a lot of that chaos [00:36:50] and call to authenticity. The next eight years probably won't be as strong for you, just because, you know, if you are activated by the areas or the cardinal sign piece, you may not have as much fixed signs, you know, in your life, but there is always a risk. There's always a level like [00:37:05] Uranus is like, how can you let the part of you that feels like a black sheep be more on display more of the time, you know, if you think you're wearing red when everyone else is wearing white, how can you embrace that part of you? So. ANDREW: Yeah.  KELLY: It's wild, I mean and Uranus [00:37:20] in Taurus has some pretty specific collective themes that I think we're going to see as well. I don't know if you looked into those.  ANDREW: Well, I'm, I listen to you and Chris and... KELLY: Austin. [00:37:35]  ANDREW: Austin, I was going to say Aidan, and I'm like, no Aidan is a person who's on my podcast, Austin, on The Astrology Podcast where you do a-- It's a great thing, you should go check it out. There's lots of good stuff about it. The episodes that I listen to are [00:37:50] the sort of monthly forecast episodes where the three of you discuss what's coming and so, you know, I heard the discussions about, about that and the other elements, you know, that sort of tie it into maybe a bunch of economic change and other stuff [00:38:05] that might be coming. So, but yeah, if you want to share some of that I would love to hear it here too.  KELLY: Yeah, I just thought, I mean, I always love the personal because I really love working at the individual level, but I know, people are often interested in the collective. So, the last time we had Uranus in Taurus was from about the mid [00:38:20] 1930s to the early 1940s. So we did have Uranus, I just to give people some context, Uranus is in Taurus about every 84 years. So we had that period early in the 20th century and then the time previous to that was like 1850s [00:38:35] kind of mutant 19th century and some of the things that happened globally in one or another of those periods, the mid-1850s, mid-nineteenth century period, was the gold rush, where we had this idea of like mining, [00:38:50] literally blowing up parts of the earth, which is Taurus. The blowing up part is Uranus, and we would, people were discovering gold or precious metals from the land, so there is definitely an environmental component to Uranus in Taurus, around [00:39:05] what are we doing to the land, the environment? What kind of an impact does that have, is it having?  Unfortunately, you know, there may be some innovation in how the land is created or mind or what have you that may not be, that may be destructive [00:39:20] initially. So I'm not saying it's all perfect in that 1930s, early 1940s period: food, manufacturing, really, took off. A lot of what we call sort of modern food manufacturing, the food technologies were really developed [00:39:35] then. Some of those were fantastic and some of those things were relatively quickly proved to be actually quite dangerous. So, you know, every innovation that comes through around safe food, whether it's food production, food cloning, food [00:39:50] development, that type of thing, some of them are going to be great, that we'll want to keep around and others, you just, keep your wits about you but-- The other thing that's really different: Taurus is a feminine sign. It's ruled by Venus and it tends to be associated with [00:40:05] feminine type archetypes or feminine type people in society. And historically, there have been a lot of technological developments that have freed up women and changed women's roles in society when we've had Uranus in [00:40:20] Taurus.  So things like washing machines or sewing machines or spinning looms have been developed in previous Uranus in Taurus cycles, you know, which was typically sort of woman's work with air quotes. And so, if it would normally take you four hours to [00:40:35] do something by hand and now you can use this, use this gadget and get it done in an hour, it gives you back your time. So there is something about Uranus in terms of freeing up time. And you know, one of the big things in that, the, because the [00:40:50] last time Uranus was in Taurus was through World War II, and one of the changes around sort of gender roles that happened then was so many young men sent away to war in many sort of English and first world societies, at the time, women [00:41:05] were allowed to leave the home and the domestic setting to go and fill some of the working job roles that were previously run by men or taken by men. So women got this taste of their own independence. They tried on different roles. [00:41:20] Of course, you know, the men came back from war and then the women were kind of sent back from the offices to their domestic duties if you like, but those women were the mothers of the women who-- mothers, sometimes grandmothers, [00:41:35] of the women who then really got very involved in the 1960s liberation that went on.  So you can see some of these seeds of larger cyclical change that can come through. So just with Taurus being a [00:41:50] little bit more of a feminine sign ruled by Venus, the sign where the Moon is exalted. So the, two sort of typically feminine planets, nurturing, you know, anything to do with people who identify as feminine and, and whether that creates limits or opportunities [00:42:05] in society, and a lot of stuff I suspect also to do with women and childbirth and child-rearing basically, so there are some really key collective themes that we can keep an eye on.  ANDREW: Yeah. Over the, [00:42:20] well, I think, I think it'll be interesting to see how those play out. I mean, I think that we can easily look at what's gone on in the last few years as setting the stage for that, right? Like the emergence, you know, of the me [00:42:35] too movement, you know, in the spiritual communities, the sort of rise of witchcraft and being a witch and the way in which that empowers the feminine often, you know, in a broader sense of definitely a lot of women in particular senses, [00:42:50] you know, I mean, I think that there's, there's lots of layers where, where I can sort of see that energy being ready for a change on some level, and you know, yeah, we'll see where that is.  KELLY: Yeah. Yeah. I mean and I was saying, you know, [00:43:05] I've said to one client this week, you know, it's the idea of, watch this space. You know, Uranus, we know is going to pave new inroads and new types of innovation, new types of technology, 3D printing is a massive Uranus in Taurus thing, the idea that out of the ethos [00:43:20] we can create material objects, but you know, watch the space, just be open, the Innovations are going to surprise all of us, even those of us that are expecting them.   ANDREW: Well, they always do, right?  KELLY: Yeah. ANDREW: They always do. Yeah. Yeah, I was [00:43:35] just thinking the other day about about my cell phone and about, for some reason I was talking about the, back when I had a pager, to my kids, right? And they've never known any of those technologies. And they're like, what do you mean? Like someone would just send you their phone number and then you'd just call them? [00:43:50] And I'm like yeah, that was it worked, you know? And that wasn't that long ago. I mean, it was a while ago now, but it's not that long ago, right?  KELLY: It's just been that, in our lifetime, Andrew. I mean, I don't know, I think you and I are relatively similar ages. Like when I was a kid, we were on a rotary [00:44:05] phone still? ANDREW: For sure. Yeah.  KELLY: Yeah. It's really interesting. Alan Turing, who is a code breaker who worked in England, in Bletchley Park, decoding the German codes, funnily enough in World War II, he was [00:44:21] this mad kind of technological guy. He had a very prominent Uranus in his chart. So he's kind of relevant to what's being talked about. He had this image in the late 1940s. He imagined a day where women would be walking around the park [00:44:36] with their computers in their hand. And that was quite striking to me when I read that because that's essentially what we do these days with our phones. There's so powerful that they are I mean, you can store files and record video and interact [00:44:51] with, you know, people halfway around the world, and the phones we have today are better than the computers of the 50s, basically. So it is phenomenal. ANDREW: I mean, they're better than the computers of our childhood too, right?  KELLY: Well, exactly! Those big... [Traces the shape of a big computer with her hands.]  ANDREW: Think about my  big 20-year, [00:45:06] my early PCs, or whatever, right? I mean, those things, you know, they didn't even have color monitors, you know? KELLY: No! We played black-and-white Pac-Man, basically.  ANDREW: Yeah. Yeah.  KELLY: Yeah, I remember being in like, I don't know grade three or four in primary school and there was [00:45:21] one computer in the classroom and each student, you paired up with a buddy and you each had about 20 minutes, you know, whenever computer time was, and all you did was play games. I guess it was just to familiarize us with the fact that these things existed.  ANDREW: Yeah. [00:45:36]  KELLY: But that's you know, that's the late 80s. That's a while ago now.  ANDREW: Yeah. Yeah. Well, I had a Vic-20 and we, I was very excited, that I would spend like a long time doing programming and then I would run the program and it would like change the screen color. [00:45:51] And it was exciting and exuberant and then I, and then I would record my program onto the data storage unit, which was a cassette tape-- KELLY: Oh, my goodness! ANDREW: And it would like record it onto the cassette tape, right?  KELLY: You could put a computer program on [00:46:06] a cassette tape back then because the-- Oh, my lord.  ANDREW: Because they were so small, right? Like it was just text, right? Yeah. So funny, right?  KELLY: Oh my God. Yeah.  ANDREW: All right. Well now that I feel old. [laughing] KELLY: I know, now that we've made ourselves really feel middle-aged, [00:46:21] nurse? Yeah, it'll be fun. It'll be fun, yeah.  ANDREW: So, is there anything else that is coming up that you're, that you're, inspired about?  KELLY: Yeah, there is one thing that [00:46:37] I'm really excited about.  ANDREW: Yeah. KELLY: And this is the great conjunction between Jupiter and Saturn that is happening in December of 2020 in the sign of Aquarius. It's a very nerdy type of timing cycle. It's currently being completely overshadowed on [00:46:52] the astrological airwaves because everybody's focused on the Saturn Pluto conjunction in early...  ANDREW: Sure. KELLY: Which does have, I'm not saying it's not important. I'm just saying, personally, I'm more interested in the Jupiter Saturn. Jupiter and Saturn conjunct every 20 years, [00:47:07] but every couple of hundred years and, well, the thing is, every 20 years, they make these conjunctions in signs of the same element. So we have this elemental, you know, 200-year-cycle, and the conjunction in December [00:47:22] 2020 is really officially the start of the, air grand mutation, if you like. And so the last couple of hundred years, we have had Earth Jupiter Saturn conjunction. So we had a lot of Earth-based focus [00:47:37] collectively. We've had the Industrial Revolution. We've had structured work days. There's been a huge focus on money and mining and accumulation.  And the air period is very much about ideas, movement, and interaction. So that's kicking off [00:47:52] December 2020 for the next 200 years. So for all of us alive now, we are going to witness this massive collective shift over the Air, out of the Earth element that has really governed so much of human experience since the [00:48:07] early 1800s. And we're going to be a witness to this change, which the type of technologies we were just talking about is a huge part of.  The last time we had the Air elemental 200-year period, late 1100s, all [00:48:22] through the 1200s and most of the 1300s. Now, that was actually considered to be sort of the very first start of what then became known as the Renaissance. But in that time frame, we had these weird technologies like paper manufacturing being [00:48:37] perfected. And so the idea with Air is that we're talking about ideas and the dissemination of ideas. Astrology actually went through a massive rebirth in that time period, pre the official Italian Renaissance. And [00:48:52] I think what we're going to see is, ideas or philosophies are going to become more of a focus and they're going to spread more. We're also going to have people moving around a lot more. There was a lot of invasions [00:49:07] that happened in that time frame where people spread out with their ideas more. The big disease that happened through that time frame, of course, was the Black Plague, which is an airborne disease. So the idea, at the end of 2020, as we start this Air [00:49:22] period, where everything is to do with the mind, to do with the intellect, and to do with technology, and to do with the dissemination of ideas becomes much more. And it's hard to imagine how it becomes more than what it has become already, but it is going, is going to be faster accelerations [00:49:37] there. And then I think you know from a disease perspective, those types of airborne issues are also something we're going to need to be more mindful of, so yeah, so a few hundred year chapter. ANDREW: Time to double [00:49:52] down on getting your flu shot! [laughs]  KELLY: Yeah, flu shots, you know, when you think about how mobile people are becoming, in the sense that we don't all go to 9 to 5 jobs in specific locations anymore. That's a very Earth kind of thing to do, [00:50:07] and also, you know, this podcasting. I mean, it's the radio of the modern era, but it is about-- Like I think podcasting is just going to get more and more popular, anything that's online, that involves the sharing of ideas or insight or [00:50:22] wisdom is just going to explode. We haven't even touched the tip of it yet, basically. ANDREW: Yeah. It's an exciting time to be alive. KELLY: Exciting time to be alive. I don't know that it bodes well for things like banking industries or credit systems, because I think they're going to go [00:50:37] through a massive upheaval, but that's... We're probably due for that.  ANDREW: Yeah, I think so. I think that, yeah, I mean, I hear every single year that the banks here make more money than they've ever made before. [00:50:52]  KELLY: Yeah.  ANDREW: And I'm just like, how is that even possible? And, you know, and the answer is well, you know, there was a time where having a bank account meant that you accrued money on your, on your savings, [00:51:08] you know, but the idea now, like, you know the amount of fees and this, that, whatever, there's no way, you know, unless you have heaps and heaps of money in there, that, you know, anybody's going to be making any money off of a bank account. So, you know, so those dynamics are going to, you [00:51:23] know, shift again at some point, right? So.  KELLY: Absolutely, and we're seeing that a little bit with alternative payment process and alternative money transfer options, you know... ANDREW: Yeah.  KELLY: Back in the day, we had to go to what, Western Union, to send money internationally. And now, [00:51:38] there are companies, and I, we use one called Transferwise, which allows you to send money if... There's more of a mobility here that the banks don't have the monopoly that they used to. Now look, they still have a massive monopoly, and they're making huge amounts of money.  ANDREW: Sure. KELLY: But [00:51:53] you're seeing more of these little startups popping up that I think are going to become increasingly popular. Venmo, I think, is really popular in the states, that type of thing.  ANDREW: Yeah. Well, even, even PayPal and you know, Apple's integrating it [00:52:08] directly into the, directly into the phone, so you can just text people money and stuff, like it's all changing, right?  KELLY: That's, that's the thing, like you used to have to go and get cold hard currency and nobody has...  ANDREW: Right?  KELLY: ....physical cash anymore, money is just a number on a computer [00:52:23] screen.  ANDREW: Yeah, you don't even have to talk to people anymore. [laughs] KELLY: You don't! I mean, you know, you go to a bank, and nowadays there's more machines than there are people because of the automation, if you like.  ANDREW: Yeah, for sure. KELLY: That's something I think we're [00:52:38] going to have to work on as a human race, is humans get something from being physically with other humans that we can't duplicate, you know, and even doing things like this where we're online and we can see each other. It's great, and it's a, it's a functional [00:52:53] substitute, but it cannot replace the exchange of multiple levels of energy that happen when you're physically in person. And so I think that's going to be almost our goal, is we have to still come together in the flesh, [00:53:08] even though we don't have to any more.  ANDREW: Yeah. So take away from this episode: go hang with your peoples.  KELLY: Yeah. ANDREW: Watch your money.  KELLY: Yeah.  ANDREW: And if and if a company called Skynet comes and wants to sell you some robots, say no thank you because [00:53:23] nobody needs a Terminator showing up at their house later on.  KELLY: Right, nobody needs a terminator. ANDREW: Well. Thank you so much for making time to hang out with me today. It's been so nice to catch up. For people who want to come and follow you. I mean, I already mentioned [00:53:38] The Astrology Podcast and that thing, which I'll put a link to in the show notes, but where else are you hanging out, where should people come and find you to be in your orbits?  KELLY: Yeah. Look, if anyone does want to, follow along if you like. My main [00:53:53] website is KellysAstrology.com, but you can also find me on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. I'm a little bit chatty on Twitter occasionally. It is actually my preferred social media platform. Like, I know that sort of sound and I'm not, that's weird these days. in addition to [00:54:08] the monthly episode on The Astrology Podcast, I also do a weekly show with two Aussie girlfriends called the Water Trio Astrology Podcast, and you can find that, as well as The Astrology Podcast on SoundCloud, iTunes, and YouTube.  Coming up at the end of March [00:54:23] is my next online training class on career and life direction in astrology. So the idea here is, I'll be showing you how to answer the question of what should I do with my life and that's a four-part training. There will be a live weekly class initially, but it will also be all online, [00:54:38] and one of the new offerings that I just started last year that's been really popular is my monthly astrology guide service, which is a subscription-based offering where you get details about every astrology aspect happening every week and every month. So if [00:54:53] you're kind of obsessed with astrology and you want to follow along at home with your own chart, that resource provides all the info you need. Everything that you might need on any of those counts can be found on my homepage of my website, KellysAstrology.com.  ANDREW: Awesome. [00:55:08]  KELLY: Yeah. Thank you so much for having me, Andrew, it's been great to chat.  ANDREW: Oh, thank you for being here.

Andrew and Chaweon talk about the art of using glamour as a form of magic. This isn't an episode just for those who like make up or feel beautiful. It is about how to use things like makeup, hair, fashion and more as acts of magic to help create the things you want in life. We also talk about charm and how to cultivate. Finally, we talk at about Andrew's moustache.  Think about how much you've enjoyed the podcast and how many episodes you listened to, and consider if it is time to support the Patreon You can do so here. If you want more of this in your life you can subscribe by RSS , iTunes, Stitcher, or email. You can follow Chaweon on their YouTube channel of search hichaweon everywhere else.  Thanks for joining the conversation. Please share the podcast to help us grow and change the world.  Andrew You can book time with Andrew through his site here.  Transcription ANDREW: [00:00:00] Welcome to another episode of The Hermit's Lamp podcast. I am here with Chaweon to talk about magic and to talk about glamour and all sorts of interesting things. I've been following their work for a while, [00:00:15] and a little while ago, they were discussing how they were working glamour to forward their podcast and some of the other stuff in their lives, and I thought, yes, this is this is a topic that I really have been looking for a chance to talk about and this is the person [00:00:30] that I'd love to talk about it with! So, for those who don't know you yet, why don't you introduce yourself? Chaweon? CHAWEON: Oh, well, thank you for having me on your show. So, my name is Chaweon and I am Korean American, [00:00:45] and I started off in life as a hardcore atheist skeptic. I've only been doing magic for about two and a half three years, but, unknowingly, I've been doing glamour magic my whole life, and about [00:01:00] two years ago, I started to get more into magic and then that was about the time I started my YouTube channel. So my YouTube channel started off first as like a mukbang, which is the Korean word for like people just eating a massive obscene amount of food, but [00:01:15] then it slowly evolved into me talking to other magic practitioners. I was extremely lucky that Jason Miller, he was an early supporter of mine, and thanks [00:01:30] to the interview that I had with him, I was able to get other guests on I've had: Aidan Walker who you've had on many times . . .  ANDREW: Sure. CHAWEON: Loved his book and throughout my journey-- You can see on my YouTube channel, just with [00:01:45] each person that I talk to, I'm learning as I'm interviewing them. I'm not at all a very experienced witch, but it's me talking to them, trying to get their expertise, and using my glamour magic or [00:02:00] trying to use glamour magic on each video. Like my goal in my YouTube channel is, every video I want to look like 1% cuter.  ANDREW: Uh-huh.  CHAWEON: I mean the thing about glamour magic, especially when it's visual, is that you can tell when it works and you can tell when it doesn't work, the feedback is instant, [00:02:15] it's obvious, because it's visual, so that's kind of how I practice my magic through something as quote unquote mundane as doing a YouTube channel. ANDREW: I think it's great though. I think that. . . . You know, a long [00:02:30] time ago, I used to work in advertising, and, you know, I realized that, when I started wanting to freelance, that I needed to be way more charming than I actually had been, you know, and, and, and so, I [00:02:45] set it as a thing to work on, you know? And I did a little bit of magic around it for sure, and I did a lot of like, all right, every time I went in in public, where's my opportunity to be to be [00:03:00] charming to somebody and how do I pursue that, you know? And just motion that comfort zone all the time, and then, after a while, you know, it didn't take, didn't even take as long as I thought, you know? It's just started to switch into this capacity to drop [00:03:15] into different social situations and sort of find the right way to sort of be, to be myself, but would be within those spaces as well, you know, so.  CHAWEON: I think you're very charming.  ANDREW: Well, thank you.  CHAWEON: No, I think that's what [00:03:30] a lot of people get wrong about glamour magic. They think that it's, you know, faking a persona. They think that-- And I call that faux glamour, F-A-U-X glamour, because, you know, it's almost like a pretending, [00:03:45] almost like you're on Instagram and you're pretending you're in Paris when you're not and pretending to have a great life when your life isn't that great. That's not glamour magic. That's faux glamour and I consider that actually a type of black magic the advertising world, the marketing world tries [00:04:00] to put on people to make them feel bad, but real glamour magic--you can tell when somebody has real glamour magic because in their presence, you feel warm, you feel accepted, you feel empowered, just by being around them. And [00:04:15] so that's how you know, when you go onto an Instagram account and you feel like “my life is shit” after seeing their Instagram account. That's faux glamour. When you go on somebody's Instagram account and you feel great after you see their pictures, even if they're super beautiful. They're living a super [00:04:30] amazing life. And you feel great about yourself. That's how you know, they're doing real glamour magic. ANDREW: How did you learn this stuff? Where did that-- I mean you talked about, you know, you've been doing it in one way your whole life, right? But where [00:04:45] did, where did the, not necessarily the transition from atheist to witch, but the transition from, you know, not being conscious of what you were doing as glamour magic to being conscious of it. How was that transition? How did that come about? CHAWEON: [00:05:02] That's a really good question. I think that all women and all people of color and people who are not on, you know, like the either/or spectrum all their life: They do have to practice some sort of glamour magic [00:05:17] because they're trying to make themselves more palatable to the mainstream so that they can survive. So I think as a woman, as a person of color, as somebody who considers myself gender-fluid, I always had to do glamour magic, but when [00:05:32] I became conscious of it, was literally when I did my YouTube channel and the feedback that I was getting, like when I was doing my YouTube channel, people were saying things to me that were very complimentary.  And I realized that this [00:05:47] wasn't like a natural talent that I had in terms of like, I'm not somebody who you can put in front of a camera and I like, no, you know, I'm not like this inborn actress. I don't have that going on, and yet I couldn't deny that when I looked at the video I was just like, [00:06:02] “Girl, you know, either the sun is like hitting you right or something like that, I don't know what's going on, but there's something there.”  And so that's when I started to study the YouTube videos and and I was just like, you know what? I think this [00:06:17] is glamour magic, I wasn't sure, but I was like, “I think that's what glamour magic is,” and then I started to experiment like, “What happens if when I look in the camera, I bring this like energy up?” And I don't know how else to describe it, but it's like what [00:06:32] happens if I bring this energy up to my eyes and then I looked at the videos, just like holy shit. I can see it. So I think it was literally like two years ago. I was like, “Oh, okay, I'm doing this.” ANDREW: Yeah, that piece about, you [00:06:48] know, sort of the way in which you manage your presence around it, I think that that's really profound. You know, when you find that, when you can figure out where that is, then people are super [00:07:04] receptive to that. You know, I used to officiate weddings at one point and it was one of the things that I always sort of did on the day of, right, you know, basically from the time I [00:07:19] showed up and was hanging out with a couple before the wedding to like the actual ceremony, you know? I wouldn't usually stick around afterwards, but even afterwards for a little bit, you know, just having that presence and sort of seeing everybody from [00:07:34] that place and providing that energy to it, you know? And on the days where, you know, for whatever reasons, maybe I didn't vibe with the couple as well, maybe I was just really tired, that was harder. You could see it, you know, everybody [00:07:49] could see it, right, and those were the ones where it felt more like a performance versus an actual connection and engagement. CHAWEON: Absolutely, and that's the reason why I consider glamour magic to be one of the most sophisticated types [00:08:04] of magic, because you have to be so self-aware, you have to do lots of shadow work. You have to be also kind of aware of yourself in the context of others. So you're working on so many different levels. You have to be authentic, but you also have to be, [00:08:19] you know, just aware of how you are with just society and the realistic aspects of, “Okay, this is what society is like right now: How far can I push it, further my agenda, without getting completely like killed?”  But [00:08:34] I think also that the thing about glamour magic too is that it's very democratic and it's a meritocracy. So the thing is, is that I think a lot of people, a lot of women especially, they tell me: "Oh, you know, I don't [00:08:49] know how to do makeup. I don't know how to do this. I don't know how to do that. So I can't do glamour magic." And I'm like, no, that's not glamour magic at all because glamour magic is something that you can develop, anybody can develop. So again, it's like you don't have to be [00:09:04] mainstream beautiful. All you really need to have is a willingness to be completely authentic and that is a type of bravery that I think most people don't have. So just the fact that you can even entertain just being yourself means that you're already one [00:09:19] foot into glamour magic.  ANDREW: Yeah, being open and being present with people.  CHAWEON: Yeah. ANDREW: Like, that is a profound thing and that's the thing that isn't about what any of us look like.  CHAWEON: Yeah. ANDREW: Or any of those kinds of things. It's [00:09:34] about, you know, that inner state and that kind of inner coherence that we might have, right, if we're able to show up in that way, you know? And I think of it-- the Uber drivers that I have, you know, I live in a big city and I take a lot of Ubers, and you [00:09:50] know, some of those people are just so open and accessible and that's really charming, you know? That pulls me in and then there's the other people, you know, like my ride today, where they just sit and stare at the front window and driving, you know, the music's really like loud, and it's obvious they [00:10:05] don't want to talk, that's a completely different thing, and you know, in those situations, it's random whoever you get, but but in life, it's not, right? And so, if you are more in that first category of people then people are interested in, drawn to that more, [00:10:20] right? CHAWEON: Absolutely, and think about it: The Uber driver who is more accessible and open and makes you feel comfortable just in their vibe, they're more likely to get a bigger tip, and that's just for everybody, just any aspect of life, where you [00:10:35] want to be successful instead of faking it when you're just being you and you're just brave and you're just loving like everything about this human experience. It's not even good. Look. It's almost like because you're being you and you're bringing that out in other people. Your glamour [00:10:50] magic brings out the best in others and it's just this domino effect. So this is why, for me, this, you know, faking faux glamour is so dangerous because in today's world, that's what we see so much of and that's also [00:11:05] something that I want to make sure that people realize that is not glamour magic whatsoever.  ANDREW: Yeah, for sure, you know, and there are definitely people who cultivate that a lot too, right? You know, I run into them in various places, at conferences and [00:11:20] on the street and wherever, and you know, it's-- You can see that, what they're looking for. I mean the, that ultimately it's all ego, right? You know, it's just all their ego trying [00:11:35] to become the center of attention to, you know, it's got a sort of a narcissistic feel to it. There's not space in the connection for anybody else, often. You know, those are the sides that I see as being problematic, kind of like you talked about earlier, right? Like, [00:11:50] how do you feel after you spend time with them? Do you feel like, “Oh my God, I just hung out with a fancy person?” Or do you feel like, “Wow, what a what a great and fulfilling connection I just had.”  CHAWEON: Exactly, and faux glamour is about [00:12:05] hierarchy. It's this very, like, I don't know, like toxic, even if it's a woman doing faux glamour, it's a toxic lead masculine way of like trying to make yourself higher than another person, making things very binary, [00:12:20] making things less fluid, and to me, glamour magic is the epitome of like what very empowered feminine magic is about, and when you think about what does feminine healthy energy feel like, it's fluid. There [00:12:35] isn't hierarchy, you know, there's this watery depth to it. And that's what we're going for, the sort of like wonderful kind of like permeable sort of energy. And in that energy there is no room for I'm better than you, I [00:12:50] know more people than you, have more followers than you. There's no room for that. ANDREW: Yeah, for sure. Yeah. I think that, you know, it being tied to toxic masculinity, being tied to sort of capitalism and all that kind of consumerist [00:13:05] stuff, right? You know, I think that, that all of those pieces can-- because we've, you know, predominantly all grown up in those kinds of elements or around those elements, right? That's part of that going in [00:13:20] and exercising, you know, removing those things, basically being like, “Huh, that feels off, that feels like, that makes me feel grabby or greedy or competitive or this or that or whatever,” looking at [00:13:35] those feelings when they emerge, and you know, and then sort of saying: “Okay, well, what is that about me and where did I get that from and how do I, how to release that so I don't need to carry that with me into this process?” CHAWEON: Totally, [00:13:51] and I think that you know, people think that men can't glamour magic, but, you know, men can often benefit the most from this feminine fluid non-hierarchical type of magic that is glamour magic.  ANDREW: Sure. CHAWEON: And when you're around a man who's doing glamour [00:14:06] magic, right, again, it's that same warm wonderful feeling, it's not this, like, “Whose dick is bigger than whose?” you know? So again, it's like the kind of magic that I do is very makeup-centric. So it's very femme-centric, but there's lots of different [00:14:21] types of glamour magic. It's a very diverse democratic thing.  ANDREW: Sure. Have you seen my moustache? Right? [laughing] The amount of people who comment on it and engage with it and whatever, it's like, you know, it's funny. I have [00:14:37] been going through all the stuff in my house, you know, getting rid of stuff and reorganizing and stuff over the last couple of months. And I just found this picture that I've been like looking for, for a little while, which is me at [00:14:52] high school graduation: my 12-inch Mohawk and my fish tie and my fabulous plaid jacket that I wish I still had and you know, all this stuff. And this conversation today reminds me of the [00:15:07] various ways in which, you know, that was glamour magic, right? Being like those kind of expressions. So clearly articulate, define directions for connection, right?  And, you know, the people who would just come [00:15:22] up to me and start talking about my hair or whatever. Back then, you know, it both tended to draw predominantly great kinds of attention my way, contrary to what many people would think, and, and then, [00:15:37] occasionally it would steer the other people away. You know, where people would be like, “Don't look at him, don't look at him,” I'd be like, “Okay, whatever,” right? That... come on, but, but either way, you know, it sort of sets an energy into the world right now, you know, it's the same, you [00:15:52] know, having a big handlebar moustache right before like, you see kids, they love it. Right? And I think that, yeah, I think the exactly who I think that you know, if you're not certain about these kinds of things, look at what the, what kids [00:16:07] are drawn to, right? What did kids, how do kids engage with you, you know? Because in-- With both of these things, you know, kids are like, “Oh my God, I love your moustache,” or they're like, “I love your big spiky hair blah blah blah,” like, they don't have that bias and they're such a great [00:16:22] indicator of that glamour, you know. I'm sure that you get that too or they're just like “Wow, look at how great your hair is,” or your, your eyes or whatever, right? CHAWEON: I definitely have, especially like, even little boys, they [00:16:37] like the sparkles that I have on my face--  ANDREW: Sure.  CHAWEON: Fun. So what I found is that glamour magic, if we're talking about visual glamour magic, there's many different kinds, but visual glamour magic, for me, is when you're wearing your heart on [00:16:52] your skin. So your outer matches your inner. And to have that congruence between inner and outer, that's a skill, when you can go out into the world and the way that you present, it matches how you feel on the inside. That [00:17:07] is something that most people, in their life, they feel like they can't do. They repress whatever it is. So when you're going out with your mohawk, with your handlebar moustache, you know, you're being you. And that's like an aspect of you that matches how you feel on the inside, that sort [00:17:22] of like, maybe, for the handlebar moustache, it's like more playful, like stylish aspect of you that's like, you know, showing on your skin. And so the way that people interact with you when you're being you, I would have to say, there's [00:17:37] probably lots of people who wish that they could have the handlebar moustache, but I don't know, they're worried about what other people might think or who knows? And so they're not able to just be themselves and be authentic, there's that block. So again, [00:17:52] it's like glamour magic, it requires this amazing amount of self-awareness and bravery. ANDREW: Hmm. Yeah. It's definitely true. And I also think it's-- It requires-- It seems to me that it requires a real [00:18:08] centeredness.  CHAWEON: Yes. ANDREW: Yourself, right? You know, I think about the, you know, like I was joking with, somebody was talking about clothing in there. Like, I'm sorry, we'll pause for one second while the phone rings here. That's the downside [00:18:24] to being at the shop. There's no off button on the ringer. It's like . . . CHAWEON: I feel like you should put like a photo of your handlebar moustache. Like-- ANDREW: I've totally got to, yeah, for sure. Yeah, just [00:18:39] there should be like a gif or GIF of me just being like . . . [laughing] CHAWEON: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I have a friend who does like photos like, you know, professional portraits and stuff like that. And they're just in India right [00:18:54] now, but in, maybe, I think the back, next month when they're back, I'm going to do a photo shoot and stuff and just, yeah, the whole, like, have it super waxed, and yeah, I definitely do like a couple more of those, you know bad guy kind of . . . CHAWEON: That like Salvador [00:19:09] Dali sort of like-- ANDREW: Exactly, exactly. All right. I'm going to clap and we can get started again.  So, I think there's also that temptation, sometimes, to look at [00:19:24] what other people are into and what other people are doing, you know, or to kind of get pulled off track by that, you know? Somebody was asking me a little while ago, because I've been reorganizing my house or having conversations about the kinds of things I have, and they're asking me like, [00:19:39] a big fancy attire and I'm like, I own my kilt, and I think, I think I have a suit that probably doesn't fit me anymore that I don't, that I never want to wear again anyway, because my detour into that [00:19:54] stuff was just so incongruous with me and how I am, right? You know? I'm just, that's not my thing. And yet, because of the fashion industry, because of media, you know, I think it's so tempting [00:20:10] to kind of get drawn into those other areas, and you know? And we may find something exciting there. But we may also kind of come out the other side and be like, that's really just not me and I don't need to ever do that kind of thing. You know? CHAWEON: Yeah, [00:20:26] I think the thing about glamour magic too is that there is a danger also of maybe taking it too seriously. So for me, glamour magic is very playful because you're not taking the way that [00:20:41] you look or the way that you sound, you're not taking the five senses. So seriously, when people start to identify too much with whatever it is, they're too close or something and they stop experimenting. I mean, I'm glad that you went through, you know, your [00:20:56] little suit phase, you know, you had to go through it, see what it was like, you had to try it. The thing about all those people who haven't had the handlebar moustache, maybe they would love it. They haven't tried it. It's true, right? So, I mean, like looking [00:21:11] at your-- Right now I kind of wish that I could grow one as well, because I'm gonna be super awesome, just like when I'm thinking, just be like, you know, like kind of like playing with the ends of them, you know, and I'm gonna work, you know?  So the thing is, that people [00:21:26] who are really opposed to glamour magic, even if it's authentic, they say that it's superficial. I say, so what? Why is it that people put so much emphasis on whether it's too much about the superficiality or too much against [00:21:41] it. When you're too identified with the visuals and beauty, then you become a slave to it versus when you're distant from it, when you're just like, this is just the thing. This is my need to die. I'm going to die, whatever. I don't give a shit, then it's just fun, [00:21:56] then you can be like, I'm going to try this. I'm going to try gender to me. I'm gonna try, I'm a dude but I'm going to wear heels just because I've never worn heels and who knows, I might like it. Maybe I won't. Oh, I hate it. Okay, but I tried it, whatever. ANDREW: Yeah, for sure. I think, you [00:22:11] know, hopefully, we're all going to live to be old and super wrinkly, and you know, like, yeah, it's-- People used to ask me stuff about my hair back when I had my Mohawk and whatever, you know, and I remember like, at [00:22:26] some point, in one of those conversations, like looking at my dad whose hair was kind of thinning and knowing that my grandparents on the other side, you know, their hair was kind of thinning. I'm like, I just want to have fun with my hair while I still have it, because I like that I have it. Someday, you know [00:22:41] what it's like, like what are we going to worry about? It doesn't really matter, you know? CHAWEON: Exactly. Like right now, like, my tits are amazing. So of course, I'm going to just show them everywhere, because my tits, when I'm 80 years old, like I'm going to look back at all the [00:22:56] pictures where my tits are hanging out and I'm just gonna be like fuck. Yeah, you know what, so, but the thing is is that I can say that and think that without feeling like, “Oh my God, I'm going to die when I don't have these tits anymore,” because again, there's that distance. It's just, this is [00:23:11] just this, sister look, it's just your body, whatever, just have fun with it. ANDREW: Yeah, I think that this-- There can be so much seriousness around magic. Yeah, you know like, you know, see, [00:23:26] your piece about Instagram altars, see, you know, you know, like all sorts of stuff, right? We'll link to that one in the show notes for people, go and read it, but, but, you know, the-- And I remember being like [00:23:41] super serious about magic, you know, at one point in my life, right? Just like "This is such a serious topic; I must treat it with the most respect ever," and you know, it's not, it's not that I don't respect it any less at this point, but it's also, [00:23:57] like, life is, life is really to be enjoyed and reveled in, right? You know? We come down here to have this experience, you know, from wherever we are on the other side, and to, you know, to be in a body and to [00:24:12] enjoy that and to experience it and to be playful and enjoy the different things that life has to offer, you know? Maybe I'm just too much of a Sagittarius but I was like, why do we not just enjoy all these things? You know? And why do we not let magic aid [00:24:27] us in all of those things, you know?  CHAWEON: Exactly, and that's the wonderful thing about glamour magic for those who are just like, “Well, it sounds very self-centered and like you're not really caring about what society's doing,” and I totally beg to differ because [00:24:42] what glamour magic does is, it kind of positions you in a way that's palatable to the mainstream, so that you can actually push the boundaries better than somebody who's coming at it from a way that [00:24:57] society's just gonna be like, “Whoa, too much too soon,” you know? So it's kind of like, for example, you know, we all know of artists who, you know, we all say, “Oh, they were born 20 years too early,” you know, or they were just way ahead of their time versus [00:25:12] somebody who went in at the right time, you know? So the groundwork was already laid, like society, it moved a little bit too. Let's say the left, you know, a little bit, a little bit, a little bit, and that's what kind of magic is. It's putting yourself in the place [00:25:27] so that you can push this idea just a little bit to the left because you're not threatening. And I think Westerners, especially, are just like well, why should I pussyfoot? You know, why should I try to cater to or why should I try to be anything, but you know, there's [00:25:42] this thing we have where there's honor in being confrontational and being like that ass bitch, you know, like in your face, all that stuff. You can do that or you can do it with honey. It's your choice and glamour magic is for those of us who would rather do [00:25:57] it with honey.  ANDREW: Mmm. Yeah, I think that-- I think that it's interesting how people from different backgrounds have different approaches to this kind of stuff. Right? And I think that-- I think there's a time and place for both, depending [00:26:12] on which you're doing, but I think it's really, you know, really, it's really interesting. How, depending on what you do with stuff will depend on where it goes, you know? And [00:26:27] I think that there's a time to, you know, you know, hold protests and stand in the street and yell about stuff, and that is, that can be its own glamour as well, right?  CHAWEON: Totally. ANDREW: And there's time to, you know to [00:26:42] be in a different space. You know what, it's always like, you know, because I practice an Afro-Cuban religion, you know, it's my background, and you know, I mean, Santería, the more common name for it, [00:26:57] that stuff tends to freak people out a lot. But whenever they have conversations with me about it, because I don't have any, in part because I don't have any internal conflict around it and any real concern about it, and [00:27:12] they're like, “Oh, that actually sounds super reasonable.” I'm like, “I know, that's why I'm involved. It's super reasonable.” You know, it's not this, that, or the other projection that people have put on it and those kinds of things really open people's eyes to a different way [00:27:27] of looking at it, to a different way of experiencing it. So. CHAWEON: Right, there's all different types of glamour magic and one of the most successful types of glamour magic that anyone can do is becoming accessible. You know, I [00:27:42] call it kind of like the “girl next door/boy next door” sort of vibe. And that's when you have somebody who you can just see is pushing society in some way, whether in their lifestyle or their looks, and yet when you approach them they're so [00:27:57] warm and accessible and they take away that, scary, ooh, “too much, dude!” feel. And that's sort of, glamour magic is again, after you leave talking to them, you feel warm and you feel great. The next time you, your friend [00:28:12] says some shit about that sort of lifestyle, you're just like, “Well, but I met that dude and he was pretty cool.” Mmm. So, but that's very difficult to do and I think that to do it successfully, you yourself, you have to be so like into like [00:28:27] your self-awareness and self-development and that's hard work. So glamour magic is definitely not for those who want like an easy, easy way out or like easy way to become like I don't know, Mcmagicky, with all the Mcmagicky [00:28:42] people. . . . ANDREW: Magic, mcmagic, mcmagic. [laughing] CHAWEON: Exactly. ANDREW: Well, I think that you know, let's be honest, if you're, if you're looking for the easy way, don't go to magic, go do something else. It's not as straightforward as [00:28:57] that, usually. You know, I mean for simple things, yes, but for like sort of bigger life arc-altering work and stuff like that, you know, it's a lot of work and it requires work on many levels. So yeah, for sure, so [00:29:13] I want to, I have a different thing that I also wanted to talk to you about. So you basically said, “Fuck this, I'm going to Bali a while again,” and just laughed, and I'm super curious about [00:29:28] how that happens. How did you get to making that decision, you know, tell us the tale. CHAWEON: Okay. So, I'm Korean American. So I grew up all my life in America. [00:29:43] I'm an American citizen. But about three years ago, I went to Korea, and that's my motherland and that's actually when my magic came to be. So, coincidence that I started to [00:29:58] really get into my witchy stuff in, you know, like my ancestral homeland. I don't know, but after a while, I was just like, you know what, Korea, I've extracted everything I need to get from Korea, and the last eclipse-- You know, [00:30:13] when you're doing magic, you know, it's good to look at astrological transits. So the last eclipse, like last year, like in July or something, my work situation. It was just, you know, the rug was pulled out from under me, very typical eclipsey stuff, and [00:30:28] you know, when that happened, it was kind of like, you know, like in South Park, Cartman, where it's like, “lucky guys, I'm going home,” you know, like it was sort of like that seal and I was just like, “Yeah, bye,” you know. It was this idea that magic, it will help me through making [00:30:43] this very impulsive within three months after deciding. You know, fuck.  Yeah, Bali. I was in Bali and I didn't know why I exactly chose Bali but I was drawn to it and once I got to Bali, Bali [00:30:58] is hands down the most magical place I've ever been to, and there's magic going on literally on the streets like 24/7. Hmm, especially in Ubud, which is the cultural center of Bali. So, how did I end up in Bali of all places? Right? [00:31:13] How did I go from, you know, skeptic in America to going to my ancestral homeland, becoming a witch, and then going to hands down the most magical place I've ever been to, baby, I'll ever go to, I'm in Bali, and these things, these currents, [00:31:28] that magic, has brought into my life and steered me too without a doubt. I attribute it a hundred percent--well, you know, like 80 percent--to the magic that I was doing. ANDREW: Hmm. And [00:31:43] so, what kind of-- Like this is the glamour magic, was this other magic, like what kind of what kind of stuff where you up to at that point? CHAWEON: Well, definitely glamour magic. It's something that I practice every single day. But I was also working a lot with Hecate and [00:31:59] I was giving a lot of like just offering soul and spirit, you know, just like the basic stuff that Aidan Wachter talks about in Six Ways. So I love his book, and I think that all new bewitches should read that book and practices [00:32:14] that he lays out there, not difficult to do, and they have wonderful effects in your daily life. And so it was nothing even that huge except for, you know, like the sorcery packet in Jason Miller's course that I've been taking and the glamour magic that I do and Aidan [00:32:29] Wachter's Six Ways. ANDREW: Hmm. Yeah Aidan's book is fantastic. You know, I wish-- I wish many years ago and that that had been the book I got first, you know, instead of finding, I mean, Magic in Theory and Practice, which [00:32:44] is what I started with, which is, which is great, but also like, yeah perplexing and contradictory, and so. CHAWEON: You know, I kind of skipped over a lot of the books that a lot of magic people they started with [00:32:59] because, again, I've only been doing this for like consciously for the past two years.  ANDREW: Sure.  CHAWEON: So, like, it's only now, like I just interviewed Marco Visconti, Marco Visconti, and [00:33:14] he's like an Aleister Crowley expert. So it's only now that I'm just like, “Oh shit, oh, yeah, Crowley,” right?  ANDREW: Yeah, that dude.  CHAWEON: That guy. Yeah! So like, the way that I got into magic, it was just so, I don't [00:33:29] know, like, it's non-traditional. But again, it's like the magic that I was doing, I feel like anybody could have done it, and maybe they wouldn't have had the exact same results as me, but definitely their life would have shifted, and you know, like, life would have pulled them in the [00:33:44] way that they were supposed to be going. ANDREW: Yeah. Yeah. I think that when we start doing magic, then the world starts reciprocating, right?  CHAWEON: Oh, totally! ANDREW: And, and, you know, I mean, in your case, and [00:33:59] in many people's cases, maybe the ancestors start reciprocating, right? You know? And like pulling in a different direction, of helping you find those places where you feel so, something completely different, you know, and, [00:34:14] and that might be right around the corner from you, or it might be, you know, far far away, right? CHAWEON: Absolutely. Like, so, Korea is a very neo-Confucian culture. So Confucius, for those of you who have [00:34:29] never heard of him, he was a Chinese philosopher. And he was around when like China was going through a shit ton of wars and he was just like, “Oh, chaos, this sucks, hey, let's build like an ordered society, let's build hierarchy, and people on top, [00:34:44] old people, dudes on top, and everybody just kind of like obeys and order,” and then Koreans were like, “Love that system, and we're just going to take it even further. We're going to inject steroids into that system.” And so a lot of [00:34:59] neo-Confucianism it has to do with ancestor veneration. So it's like literally like in the DNA of like millions and millions of Koreans, like modern Koreans, like the ancestor veneration in Korea is like, there's two major holidays in Korea. [00:35:14] And on those days, the country should sound, this is like a first world country, right, like super modern, it shuts down, and people, millions of people are setting out a table filled with like food for their ancestors and worshiping ancestors. [00:35:29] They may not understand why, but it's happening across Korea on two days, specifically, millions of Koreans. And of course Americans, we don't really do that.  Yeah, and Christianity when it came into Korea tried to discourage [00:35:44] that, but when I went back to Korea, and Koreans are very good at kind of meshing a lot of the old confusing ways. Christianity, and Korean Americans a lot more hardcore with their Christianity, but that's totally different story. But when I went to Korea and I was in the presence [00:35:59] of the mountains, which are considered like ancestral, like, like holy places-- By the way, North and South Korea: It's like split in half, and there's this mountain range that's considered like the spine of the dragon that's been cut in half because the country was cut in [00:36:14] half and even Kim Jong, Kim Jong Hoon, Kim Jong-il. Anyways, those guys, the North Korean dictators, like all their propaganda, it involves like them being on the mountains, like mountains are a huge deal in pre-industrial anything. [00:36:29] So, being in the land of the mountains, and my ancestors, and just being part of this magical current like, without a doubt. Like I think that ancestor veneration is probably one of the easiest [00:36:44] ways to get into magic. ANDREW: Yeah, I think so. You know, in my tradition, everything starts there, right? Yes, but come with your ancestors, you know, sort of, it's tough with your ancestors. You know, it's the, it's the place where you can gain the most ground the quickest. [00:36:59] It's a place where people can do the most on their own, I think, and it's the place that if you don't sort it, that business, then like, you can work on your shadow all day long, but if you're doing a lot [00:37:14] of magic and your ancestors and your relationship to the ancestors isn't resolved, that's basically just a big piece of ancestral shadow. They can always come in and mess things up, if you haven't fixed it, you know. CHAWEON: Yeah, I totally [00:37:29] forget where I read this, but it was about how, what happened to your grandmother, like DNA, like whatever sort of life that she led. It's like in your DNA, as well as something about up to certain generations. So think about how [00:37:44] many people in the world, maybe the majority of the world's population, they have so much trauma in their DNA, because of war and and all that. I mean, especially in places like Asia, Korean war happened in my grandmother's [00:37:59] generation.  ANDREW: Sure.  CHAWEON: And if you're in Southeast Asia, we're talking the Vietnam War that happened after the Korean War, we're talking about massacres that happened in Cambodia. Yeah. There's a lot of trauma that's in our DNA and I didn't really believe in any of that to [00:38:14] be honest about the skeptic. But I remember there's this one doctor. I think his name is Dr. Bruce Lipton or something like that, and he's like a mainstream doctor, right? He's not, you know, like this woo guy. Then, he was talking about DNA and about [00:38:29] the effects of basically ancestral trauma on DNA, and that's when I was just like, oh, a little bit more open-minded about it. So if mainstream science is starting to sort of get into it more, I'm just like, oh well, magic was way ahead besides, I'm sure. ANDREW: Yeah, and [00:38:44] I think, if we, if we think about, you know, the past several generations, right, like we don't have to go back very far before there was probably difficulty, tragedy, poverty, [00:38:59] war, the Depression, you know, like all those wars and conflicts of the last century. And then also, just, you know, more random things, like violence, tragedy, you know, we go back a few generations. What was the infant mortality rate? [00:39:14] How many people watched their kids die? You know, I mean, so many of those things were just way of life, right? But that doesn't mean that they didn't come with trauma and they weren't difficult and it didn't mean that they're not still affecting us [00:39:29] now. So for sure, yeah. CHAWEON: Yeah, so I think that, clearing out the ancestral trauma. I interviewed Liv Wheeler, who's a contemporary voice diviner. And this was [00:39:44] an interview that was the first interview that I did in Bali and it was such a neat coincidence that I was able to talk to her, and she works a lot with ancestral spirits, and she was talking about how she, you know, and people are sensitive. They can see how-- I [00:40:00] don't want to say that there are ghosts but like there's ancestral residue that can stick to people.  ANDREW: Sure.  CHAWEON: So clearing it is, you know, like guys, like, that's for everybody's benefit, like it helps. The ancestors were [00:40:15] able to kind of like let go of their baggage, it helps you, so it's like a win-win for everybody, for sure, ancestral cleaning. ANDREW: Yeah, absolutely, or even just paying attention to them. Right? Like just, yeah, say [00:40:30] some prayers for them, you know. Let it go. For them, periodic knowledge that you know, like just, just that alone can make a huge, huge difference, right? You know, it doesn't, it doesn't need to be, you know, big shamanic this that or the other thing or elaborate ceremony [00:40:45] or whatever, you know, just be like, hey everybody. Hey, all you people that I came from, we're saying these prayers for you. These are the prayers that I think you would like, you know, because that's what you liked when you were alive, you know, or whatever, and it's so helpful, right? Can [00:41:00] move so many things and provide some of the possibilities. CHAWEON: Exactly and for the skeptics out there: When you do these rituals, okay, even if you don't believe in any of the ancestral residues or anything like that, and you're just like [00:41:15] well, you know, just doing it, just makes you feel better. It's a placebo effect. So what, it helps you, it brings peace to your life anyways, so I don't see any downside to it. That's how I've always operated. I'm still a skeptic in a lot of ways. So [00:41:30] for me, it's like, what do I say? In this mundane world that shows that it's working, but I just go on that, and every time I've done magic my life has become more authentic and it's moved in ways that feel better. So even [00:41:45] if I'm a skeptic, I'm okay with it. ANDREW: So how has your skepticism changed over time? CHAWEON: In a lot of ways, it's become more entrenched, because now, I'm just like “Oh shit, I'm starting to really believe in this stuff, can't [00:42:00] do that,” you know, got to stay like uber skeptical, especially now that I'm starting to be like, “Whoa, this is magic. Hmm.”  So there's that, and I think that's a very healthy way of moving through [00:42:15] magic because, okay, one of the things that I learned in Bali-- There was this amazing Balinese friend that I have. Well not was, but he still is, not-- Oh, and he was just a simple woodcarver, [00:42:30] and that's you know, he was just a master woodcarver, him and his dad, and he was talking about how at the age of 40, a lot of Balinese people decide they're going to retreat from public life and they're going to just study. And in Bali, they do like a-- It's [00:42:45] mainly a Hindu island, but they do kind of like their own tropical Hinduism, but he was-- Think how a lot of people, not a lot, but there's all these people who decide you know, “I'm just going to read the books, I'm smart, I can learn [00:43:00] what I need to learn, like from these books and stuff,” and they don't get a teacher. And you can tell, because these are people who become super ungrounded.  And he was like, “Oh, you know, you can tell that they didn't have a teacher, because they're going to go out and they're going to like, talk to trees, but like like crazy [00:43:15] person, and you know, their life is going to go to shit, versus when you have a teacher and you're grounded because you have somebody who can tell you, ‘Whoa, you're seeing visions, kind of ignore that, maybe that's just your imagination. Oh, you're having visions and it came with this. Maybe there's something to it.'” He [00:43:30] knows, having somebody to help guide you, so it's almost like an outside skeptic. That's very helpful. And that's when I realized the importance of having teachers, mentors, and like a community outside to kind of help steer you away from being [00:43:45] way too ungrounded. ANDREW: Yeah, I think, you know, as as a, I think godparent in my religion to people, you know, you could definitely sort of say that one of my [00:44:00] jobs is to be skeptical of some of that stuff for people, right? Good guy. Let's get-- “You had a dream. Let's go ask. Let's go actually ask the oracle that we use to speak with these spirits and see what they say.” Like, let's see, you know, or whatever, right? And you know, and sometimes we find out something [00:44:15] really profound when we notice things and sometimes we find out that it didn't mean anything, right?  I remember, I remember I was like doing this series of ceremonies and every [00:44:31] day I was doing this series of ceremonies for a while. And at the same point in the ritual, which was also kind of like the peak of the invocation parts, the sound would start happening in [00:44:46] my temple space. And I was like, “What is that? What is going on? What's manifesting?” Whatever, and you know, and I go around, and I'm like, trying to figure out if it's something, is it like the pipes, or is it this or that, nothing, [00:45:01] right? Like no obvious reason why that sound is there. So I went to my teacher and told him and he's like, “I don't know,” and I was like, “Oh I wanted to do something profound, but okay.” And, and [00:45:16] this went on for like, I forget how long I was doing this work, like maybe a month, maybe six weeks, and then right near the end, what I realized was that the oil lamp that I was using, it got hot enough, uh-huh, sounds right and it just [00:45:31] happened to coincide with that moment in the ritual. Right? So, you know, it's just like things, that the phenomenon of things aren't necessarily worth getting caught up in, they're worth noticing, but they're also worth saying, “Well, if that's significant, [00:45:46] I'll know that in time, but right now, I'm just going to notice it and carry on with what I'm doing,” right? CHAWEON: I think there's this thing where I just get very-- Okay, because before the magic thing, I was one of those women who saw other women get really [00:46:01] into new age stuff, and you know, they're like, so into crystals and like whatever and it was just kind of like, it was very annoying. I call it like the Gwyneth Paltrow effect, right? And it was very like, have you seen this YouTube video called like “Shit New Age Girls Say”? It's [00:46:16] like a parody. ANDREW: I've seen a bunch of those videos. I don't know if I've seen that specific one, but-- CHAWEON: Oh, it's so spot-on and I remember thinking, “Oh girl, you are so ungrounded. I can't be around you,” you know? Like everything is pleiadian and alien spaceships [00:46:31] are, you know, right above you, and you know, like you're going to wear purple skirt and shit because it's like bringing your energy somewhere, and I was just like, I can't deal.  ANDREW: Yeah. CHAWEON: And I was like, okay super ungrounded energy. I don't like that. And so, that's the reason why, [00:46:46] the more I get into magic, the more like, stringent and hardcore my skeptic has to become, because I'm just like, if it doesn't do that, then I'm afraid that, you know, like instead of being in this world and doing magic in this world, I'm just going to be like, often, [00:47:01] like I'm doing magic in like some abstract fourth, fifth, 20th dimension. ANDREW: Sure or nowhere at all. CHAWEON: Or nowhere at all. [laughs] And that's no fun because we're like, in this world, we're living in this world, you know, like let's have fun in this world. ANDREW: [00:47:16] Yeah. Absolutely. Well, I want to thank you for taking time to hang out and chat with me today. CHAWEON: Thank you. ANDREW: And I understand you have a thing coming up a course on some of this stuff that might be of interest to [00:47:31] people who are listening. CHAWEON: Yeah, so I'm actually putting on my very first magic class and it's going to be about, surprise, surprise: glamour magic. And it's called Fierce, like “ooh girl, you look fierce,” and it's just [00:47:46] basically a very accessible way of starting out in glamour magic, so, bringing in archetypes to start putting makeup on your face, to invoke, evoke, and conjure up these archetypes. And so, this [00:48:01] is just for anybody who may not be a hundred percent into magic, or maybe you are, but I see it more as like also a really great introduction into a little bit of astrological magic but also it's a whole lot of magic in terms of like makeup [00:48:16] magic. So I mean, makeup is like a huge part of like my identity. I used to be a makeup artist when I was in college. So it's how to transform yourself using mundane tools. Instead of using like a wand, you're using a [00:48:31] blush brush [laughing]; instead of drawing sigils on a piece of paper, you're drawing a crisp cat eye with an eyeliner brush, hmm with liquid liner. Same thing. So it's taking magic with makeup and transforming [00:48:46] yourself and doing it all with this like, real glamour, not faux glamour. ANDREW: Perfect. And where do people who want to come and bask in your glamour find you on the social media these days? CHAWEON: Oh, well, they can just Google Witches and Wine. [00:49:01] Usually my YouTube channel comes up like first thing, and on, on social media, it's, you can just look me up. It's hichaweon, but I think it's mainly through my YouTube channel, all my social media stuff is there.  ANDREW: Perfect. [00:49:16] Awesome. Well, thank you so much for making time to chat. It's been a real pleasure. CHAWEON: Thank you, Andrew. So good to talk to you.  

The Stacking Skulls Crew (Aidan, Fabeku, and Andrew) are joined by Theresa Reed this week. In many ways this conversation circles around endings. They talk about Marie Kondo and letting go. The process of know when to change in life. And the ways our energy shifts what is going on depending on how we show up.  Think about how much you've enjoyed the podcast and how many episodes you listened to, and consider if it is time to support the Patreon You can do so here. If you want more of this in your life you can subscribe by RSS , iTunes, Stitcher, or email. Thanks for joining the conversation. Please share the podcast to help us grow and change the world.  Andrew You can book time with Andrew through his site here.  ANDREW: Welcome to the Hermit's Lamp podcast and another episode with Stacking Skulls. I'm here today with Aidan and Fabeku, and joining us is Theresa Reed. So, you know, everybody probably knows who we are, but, Theresa, for those who don't know who you are, who are you? What are you about? THERESA: Hey guys, for those of you who are not familiar with me, my name is Theresa Reed, but I'm better known as the Tarot Lady. I am a professional tarot reader and I've been working in my industry for close to 30 years. And that's me in a nutshell.  ANDREW: Awesome! So, the last episode dropped about three months or so ago. What's new? What's going on? What's changed?  AIDAN: Hmm. I actually reopened the shop ... ANDREW: Yeah! AIDAN: After many months off, and that's going very well. Under the new model. It seems to be working well. That's pretty much it for me. It's been winter. Not a lot goes on except the cold.  ANDREW: Right. And a lot of snow apparently this winter.  AIDAN: We did get the blizzard, which, thankfully all of our neighbors tell us happens every seven to 15 years, cause otherwise our 500-foot-long driveway would have been perhaps not the choice we would have made! [laughing] We were only trapped for like two weeks.  ANDREW: Yeah. That's fair. Well, you don't have to get your kettlebells off the mat, then. You can just shovel snow every day?  AIDAN: I really don't do that. That's why we were trapped for two weeks. We saw it coming and went shopping and stocked up the house, and said, "Fuck it. We'll leave when we're done, when it's done." [laughing] ANDREW: Excellent. Nice. That's awesome. Well, how about you, Fabeku? What's new in your world?  FABEKU: Yeah, what's new? Ran a few classes, finally wrapped the super long divination course that I've been doing since the summer, doing a thing now on some hyper sigil stuff which has been fun and kind of intense. Managed to survive the holidays, thank God. That was great! Yeah, writing like crazy, just writing like crazy, for some reason. I'm not sleeping a lot, which is fantastic! And so, I'm taking advantage of the long evenings and turning out piles and piles of words for a few book projects. So, it's fun. It's cool.  ANDREW: And how about you, Theresa? What's the start of your year brought you? What's going on with you these days?  THERESA: Just busy with work but also, I have two books coming out this year, and actually today, I just got the pdf version, and so they want me to go over everything and check everything and doublecheck it, and make sure every i is dotted and t is crossed, and recently I saw the cover of my third book, which is coming out in November. So I'm in the phase right now of handling all my regular work, and also with these two books coming out, starting to do all the proofreading to make sure things are right.  FABEKU: That's a lot.  THERESA: Yeah, it's exciting.  ANDREW: It's a lot of work, right?  THERESA: Oh my god. But I like the editing part better than the writing part.  FABEKU: Really?  THERESA: Isn't that sad?  FABEKU: Well, no, it's fascinating. I think it's ... THERESA: I love to read, write, and I love to spill out all my ideas, but I think it's because I have those three planets in Virgo. Going back and editing gives me a real special jolly.  FABEKU: Wow. That's cool. AIDAN: I kind of got that with Six Ways. I had a blast going, kind of taking in all the information I got from the various first readers and my folks to kind of dive in and tighten it up. That was a pleasure.  ANDREW: Yeah. I don't dig the editing at all. FABEKU: Yeah, me neither.  [laughing] FABEKU: Totally hate it! ANDREW: Yeah, it's interesting. When I did, I wrote the book for the Orisha Tarot, I sat down and just, I wrote the book just straight through, just piled it all out and whatever. And because there was some changes around the timeline and I had to deliver it a little bit earlier, I was like, all right, I'm just sending it, I'm not even going to reread it, I'm just going to send it to you this way. Cause it was already a contract, right? So it wasn't like I was trying to get the deal. I already had the deal, but I just didn't have the time to finish everything up for their timeline that they had moved it to, and still sort of like sit and really reedit it, and I was like, doesn't make sense to re-edit part of it or all of it or, you know. So I just sent it in. And, yeah, it was, most of ... The thing was, “please just go through and fix the typos.” [laughs] And I was like, "Sure!" [laughing] And then there were a couple other, very few comments, but then the editing was almost nonexistent for it, so.  FABEKU: That's great. THERESA: Wow. But they liked it, so you know, obviously you're a good writer. ANDREW: Yeah, it just kind of. By the time I get to writing something I usually have thought about it a ton. And then it mostly just kind of emerges pretty intact, you know? And sometimes I need to adjust stuff, mature things. Most of what they wanted me to change or edit goes back to, the biggest challenge for me around writing historically, which is: why write 50 words when 10 words will do? But the reality is, those 10 words do when you know what the subject is, but they don't actually do it for everybody else. So learning to sort of expand everything into sort of a more, yeah, a more thorough explanation, so you kind of use a lot more words for it, that's been one thing. And the edits that came back for it were kind of, "You might know what this is, and I might know what this is, but there are lots of people who are going to read this who don't, who won't understand. So add a couple of paragraphs explaining this and this and this, and stuff." So. FABEKU: I always think it's an interesting thing when you're communicating stuff to people--so, my version of that is, in this hyper sigil class that I'm doing now, there were things that to me were super obvious, and so I essentially said, "Hey, do this and do this, and go have at it," right? And then people were like, "Wait, fuck, what? What about this, and what about this, and what does that mean? and can I do this? should I do this? should I not do this?" And I was literally like, "What the fuck is happening? Just do it!" And when I realized it was like, oh, right, okay, so all of the shit that in my head was super obvious, apparently I need to circle back and kind of spell out in way more detail than I thought. So it was kind of an interesting experience for everyone involved.  Yeah. [laughing] ANDREW: Yeah. For sure. AIDAN: This is why the lifer magicians shouldn't probably be the bounce-offs on whether you're coherent for anybody else, right? [laughing] I was like, dude, got it, boom! [incoherent laughing] AIDAN: Fabeku comes back around like, "Why is everyone confused?" I'm like, “uh, oh, cause they haven't been doing this for 30 years? I don't know!” [laughing] ANDREW: Yeah. FABEKU: Yup. THERESA: And words have power, but that power doesn't always transmit to everyone the same way. You know years ago when I used to teach astrology, it all starts out fun. But then you start getting into the math, which you know is another interesting ... I think math is very magical. And everyone, all the tears came. All the tears came. People don't get it. And so, explaining astrology to laymen is actually, it's very artful, it's very hard to do.  FABEKU: Mm-hmm.  ANDREW: Yeah. I think teaching stuff is complicated. Right? And I think that, you know, when … A couple years ago I was in Portland and I taught this class on calling in the person-who-was-getting-the-readings' guardian angel, to feed into the reading process, right? And, you know, in teaching something like that, there's the words, right, which is one part of it. You know? It's like try this, do this, think about it this way, but then, like you say, it's also how is everyone receiving that, what's going on? And a whole bunch of people came up to me after the workshop and basically said, "I've never experienced anything like that before in my life, you know, and I've been doing my own practice," or whatever, and the secret was in that case that essentially I expanded my energy to encompass everybody in the room, and I was modulating everything that was going on, to some degree with everybody there, right? And like, seeing what felt wonky in the space so I need to go over and talk to that person, or maybe I just needed to like, put a little extra energy there for them, and you know, there's so many layers to transmitting something, right? That go well beyond book-learning and words and you know, straightforward things like into another level, right? So. FABEKU: You know, we just had this conversation in the hyper sigil space this week or last week or whatever it was. Somebody was talking about an experience that they have. So I call, instead of calls, I call them live transmissions, cause I do that, cause for me, that's what they are, it's not some marketing shtick, but you know, they were talking about experiences they had listening to the transmission, and I said, "listen, like, I call these transmissions for a reason." Like, the delivery of information is actually the smallest reason why we're on the phone at the same time doing this. There's a million other ways I could deliver information. I don't really give a shit so much how it happens, but it is that kind of energetic maintenance of the space, of creating currents that people wade into and then you navigate their experience with the current with them while delivering the information and for me that's 90 percent of it, the information, I mean, fuck, I could send out a pdf, I mean it's, you know, who cares about the delivery of the information? In some ways. I think, to me, the real key, and I think the thing that, like you said, give people that experience, is that current, and to create it, and kind of lead people skillfully into it and out of it and you know, yeah, that's the whole thing, for me.  THERESA: Do you guys feel when you teach that you're doing it from an altered space?  FABEKU: Yes.  AIDAN: Yeah, totally.  FABEKU: Almost every time. Like as soon as I kind of dial in, sit down, like I'll  start to sweat. As it goes on, by the time I'm done, like I feel like I ran a marathon. And that's not a thing that I do.  [laughter] ANDREW: Yeah, for sure. AIDAN: That's a definite thing, and it's interesting. I got an invite this morning to teach at 2020, and that was one of the really odd things, was remembering live teaching, cause I haven't done that since the 90s, and that's kind of a really strange concept to think about revisiting after 25 years. It's like, okay let's wander into a conference space, and do my thing. Cause to me it's always a super altered state, it's not subtle. And that's a, it's a very . . . It is an odd thing. ANDREW: And for me it's the same doing readings as well, you know. It's the reason I don't dig asynchronous reading processes that much, is I find that the energy's harder to manage . . . THERESA: Really?! ANDREW: Yeah. It's way easier for me to sit with somebody and just go anywhere, do anything, whatever needs to happen, but like, to do readings and ... You know, for a while I've been offering these channeled readings, where I channel one of my guides and stuff, and I'm actually going to stop, because channeling without the person being synced in somehow just wears me out. It's really kind of ... So like a 15-minute session of doing that like, and recording it and sending it to somebody, is like ten times more fatiguing than channeling for an hour with the person sitting here. So.  THERESA: See for me, when it comes to email readings, energy is energy. You know and I always like to say I'm an energy reader, so it's the same energy that I'm tapping into, it doesn't matter if the person's sitting there and with me. I prefer when I'm doing, I prefer the phone readings, because I really feel like we're directly connecting with each other. But the email readings work just as good, the only difference is I think sometimes when people send information via email, they're not completely tuned in.  ANDREW: Mm-hmm. THERESA: You know, and so you have to, maybe this is why you feel double the work, is you're having to like, you will have to do double the work, because maybe they'll just send a vague question or whatnot, so it's different.  ANDREW: Mm-hmm. Yeah, maybe it's so.  THERESA: Yeah, I don't know.  AIDAN: It's interesting. When I think about doing the, you know like in the Six Ways Facebook group, the best thing I did was I decided to start shooting video, just cause it seemed like it would be an easier way than writing everything? And what I find is that that's the  . . . it's way easier for me to be talking and transmit kind of clearly is writing. And, like we're doing this on Zoom, and I think if I get around to starting the online classes I'll do them on Zoom for the same reason. It's okay that not everybody will be present but if I've got a body of people present that I can be directly feeding with, it'll work better.  THERESA: My problem with the typing is, my arthritis. I mean that's the biggest problem. I find it's more like, it's labor intensive for my hands, it's not the transmission of the energy. You know when you're just talking and teaching like that, you're not using that same physical processes as you're doing with your hands . . . So I think that's where I find it to be harder. AIDAN: Right. I think that for me it's just that I can't type very well.  [laughing] ANDREW: That's fair. That's totally fair. I'm actually going back to writing, a series of blog posts and stuff. FABEKU: Oh, cool.  ANDREW: I feel like I haven't typed much for a long time. In terms of doing that kind of work. But I feel like--for two reasons, I like to make everything accessible, so I like to get transcriptions of stuff done, like this podcast will be transcribed, and that's a time-consuming process that comes with its own expense, and two, I feel like I'm planning on getting a book proposal in over the winter, and I sort of slide more into that writing space. And when I'm already in that writing space, then it's easy to like, you know, write for a couple of hours, grab a coffee, change gears, and then write something else for an hour, for me, so I can kind of just stay in that space, whereas the recording transmissions and stuff like that, you know, since the separation and divorce that happened in the fall and winter, with my new schedule with the kids and stuff like that, it's a lot harder for me to find a time that's actually quiet to sit down and record something, it's not nearly as simple as it used to--my schedule used to be a lot more flexible, so. Now it's like I can sit and write just fine, and they can be doing whatever in the house, it's not a big deal to me, but to record and then have them, you know, their shenanigans in the background, it gets a little complicated, so. FABEKU: Yeah, for sure.  ANDREW: Mm-hmm. And I guess that's been the big change for me, right? You know, my relationship of 21 years ended, I think we talked about it some in the fall podcast . . . AIDAN: Yeah, we did.  ANDREW: Yeah, and mid-December, my ex moved out, and so I've had sort of almost two months now, I guess, or a month and a half of settling into what it's like to be independent half the time and with the kids half the time and you know, kind of going through this process of going through everything that I own and reassessing it, and seeing what do I want to keep, what's important, what's not important, and, you know, kind of extending that further out into like lots of things, I'm kind of reevaluating where I'm putting my time on kind of every front right now and trying to see what feels like it makes sense to me or doesn't make sense to me, you know? I had a great time watching that Tidying Up show with Marie Kondo. You know? Me and the kids and one of my partners watched it, and you know, it's like, that notion of what's exciting and what's not has continued to kind of fuel a bunch of decisions in different directions. Like looking at my work life and thinking about what am I, what am I really really inspired by? And what feels either burdensome or kind of to make it even more to the point, if the thing that I want from it is not a thing that it can give me, you know, there's kind of like an incoherence of the agenda, you know? And where I'm recognizing those shifting agendas kind of going along, I'm not going to get that from this, so I really ought to reconsider my investment in this. If that's not going to happen, what's the value to me then, you know? or is there a value to me then? You know? So. Yeah. So it's a lot of pruning going on, a lot of throwing out stuff around the space and sifting back through a bunch of stuff. Yeah.  AIDAN: Yeah, that's definitely been going on over here too.  ANDREW: Yeah. AIDAN: That was what led to the change in the shop, cause that process just clipped a ton of the work that I didn't like around the shop, it's just gone now. And then that's kind of feeding in. Like the shop itself, which as y'all know  is a tiny space, is just way less busy. There's a lot less in here now. A lot of like, who are the helper spirits that are actually helpers? And who are the hangers on that are sometimes helpful but not really, not paying freight, and let's cut ties there and simplify it. It's definitely the season for it, I think.  ANDREW: Yeah. FABEKU: Yeah, that's been the same thing here. I mean on all fronts. The work front, you know, there's been stuff I've been contemplating for six months, nine months, longer. And kind of finally brought some of that together. Like this thing that I used to dig? I don't dig it as much anymore. So I'm not going to do it. And this thing that I still kind of dig, I'm going to change it, so I can dig it more than I do at the moment. AIDAN: Yeah! FABEKU: You know, on the personal front, there was a long relationship I was in that was kind of agonizing over longer than I needed to, and end of the year, it was like, yeah, no, this doesn't make any sense any more. Like you said, that--I like that language, Andrew--the incoherence of agenda, cause it was like, this is never going to fucking shake out the way I want it to shake out, no matter what the fuck I do, it just doesn't make any sense, and you know, at some point it was interesting and thinking, about the mundane stuff I could do, the magical stuff, and it's like, why? it's just, what the fuck, it doesn't make any sense, just pack it up and move on.  ANDREW: Mm-hmm. FABEKU: You know? I don't mean it just in the context of the relationship but with a lot of things, you know? And I think for me it feels like a time when it's kind of important to reduce, to pretty radically reduce the noise, to amp the signal even more than it has been. It seems like, I don't know, kind of midway through last year I started to realize there's--not even more noise--but there's just more shit in the field to manage. And I just don't want to do that.  SOMEBODY: Yeah. FABEKU: I just don't want to do it.  AIDAN: Yeah.  FABEKU: Let's get the few things that are solid signal and crystal clear and right fucking on and amp the shit out of that, and the rest of it? I'm just not interested in it. I'm just not into it at all at this point.  THERESA: I've been doing a major decluttering too, so I watched that same Tidying Up thing. And, you know, we have a real problem with clutter around here. My husband's an artist, first of all, and you know, I know how artists are, and you guys know how artists are.  [laughter] THERESA: Artists collect a lot of stuff, and we have a lot of things, and this is a really big house. So, it got filled. You know the more we took over the house, the more he found things to fill. So we went through stuff and we're still going through stuff, and you know, my big problem is my books issues.  ANDREW: [laughing] There are only about 30, right?  THERESA: Yeah well, that's not going to happen, guys! [helpless laughter] THERESA: Cause you know, most of the books are stuff that I use. The thing that I have to go through, though, you know, right now, the clothes are done, I'm not a big clothes person, I'm not a big shoe person, I'm not one of those chicks, I have very few shoes, I don't care about shoes. You know I used to have a lot of purses, I don't care about that. I was hoarding lipstick--you know, this is my new lipstick, guys! FABEKU: It looks fantastic!  THERESA: Thank you!  [chuckling] THERESA: But also, my books and, you know, cooking gadgets, so, slowly little by little we've gone through things and, you know, the biggest thing we have left to do is the books. And Terry right now is upstairs and tearing through the cooking things, which is kind of horrifying me, because he doesn't know exactly what I use to create that magic in the kitchen, but, I'm just like, you know what, I don't have the time to do all this decluttering, go declutter it. But it's also making us a lot more mindful about the reasons we keep on holding on to our clutter. So we've had long discussions about that, and we've come to the determination, it's because we both grew up poor. There's that tendency then to want to hold onto things because it's the fear that you're going to need it or you may not have it again. So that whole way of growing up, it really does then create that energy where you hold on for dear life and then nothing else can get in that's worthwhile. So why am I holding onto this stupid thing, this Hello Kitty spatula that's too small to even turn over an egg? Why? It's got to go! It's not serving the purpose. FABEKU: Yeah, and for me I get that probably the most with the books, right? Because, you know, in the past I managed to scrape together cash, get a couple books, and then when I was broke as fuck, had to sell the books, and now that I've got them again, it's like, "I'm never getting rid of these books," which of course isn't the smartest thing. But it's exactly that thing. Like I remember having to box up, you know, 12 boxes of books to take ‘em to Half Price Books and they give you ten fucking dollars, you know, you have grocery money . . . THERESA: Yep.  FABEKU: And it's like yeah, I'm never doing that again. So for me now, I've got thousands of books, which is madness, but, yeah, I think there is something to that, I think that that experience of either not being able to get it, or not knowing if you'd be able to get it again, I think for me anyway, it does, it creates a thing of wanting to hold onto shit way longer than makes sense. THERESA: Yep.  FABEKU: … is the case, for sure.  ANDREW: I really feel this intense impulse that I want to make things, versus own things.  FABEKU: Mm. ANDREW: If that makes sense? You know? Books have a way of creeping back in, you know, partly because people give me a lot of books, because of the store, because I'm friends with them, and my friends publish books and that's fantastic, and I love looking at what my friends are doing, and that kind of stuff, but like, even I'm looking at the books that are on the shelf in the reading room here. I don't even know like, other than maybe two or three of them, I don't even know the last time I opened any of them.  THERESA: Wow.  ANDREW: Like it's been a long time, right? And you know, somebody was ... having this conversation about having tarot books and being a tarot reader, and whatever, and I'm like ... I don't, I mean, I read my friends' books, cause they're my friends and they wrote them, but I don't really read books on tarot any more. You know? Not because they're not good and not because maybe I couldn't learn stuff, but you know, I was, I listen to this podcast called The Moment with this guy Brian Koppelman, he makes movies. And there's some really great ones. The ones with Seth Godin are really interesting. And he has one with Salmon Rushdie. Which is fascinating. But one of the things that he talks about is how, when he drops into a project, he doesn't want his ideas contaminated with other things. And because I'm sliding more and more into being creative, visually and with words and these things all the time, I don't really, I really want to express what I want to express, and that brings about this place where I don't really want to bring stuff in. Because it's easy to get in my head about it. It's easy to think too much. It's easy to be like, "oh, this person said this thing, what do I think about that, do I need to address it?" It's like, it just slows the process, it creates drag in the creative process for me, so I kind of move away from that. You know, most of what I learn about card reading I learn from, you know, just doing more and more readings all the time. Or sometimes hanging out and talking with people about card reading, more so than actually sitting and reading books about it and such, you know?  FABEKU: Yeah. I think one of the-- THERESA: [simultaneously] Sometimes I like-- Oh, sorry. FABEKU: No, go ahead, Theresa.  THERESA: I was just going to say, real briefly--sometimes though I do like looking at what other people write about tarot, because I 'll look at it and say, "well that's interesting." You know I'll probably discard it anyways, because I'm very stubborn about my methods . . . ANDREW: You?  THERESA: [laughs] But I do like-- But I do sometimes like, just like, you know, looking and saying, "well, that's very interesting.” It's still not going to change the way I'm doing things, because I've been doing things for so long, but it might at least give me a little different perspective. Okay, Fabeku, sorry about that! FABEKU: No, no, you're fine. I think for me, one of the best things I did in my business, maybe six or eight years ago, I just stopped looking at all the business shit. I didn't . . . I haven't read a business book in six or seven years. I haven't read business blogs, I unsubscribed to everything, and again, it's not that I didn't give a shit, really, but I kind of didn't give a shit. And it was mostly because of that, that noise thing.  You know, it's like I just, like you said, Andrew, I want to transmit my thing, like I don't want--not that there's anything wrong with anybody else's thing, I just don't want their signal mixed in with my signal. And I think the results of that, and the same has been true for me with magic, with divination, with everything--it feels like the more I reduce that noise, the clearer I can get to my signal and transmit it, and then I think, the better that is for everybody that's on the receiving end of it. You know, I think that--and people say, well, you know, do you miss, do you miss being up to date on what's going on? Not really. I mean and again, I'm sure there's brilliant stuff out there. it's not that I-- I'm not acting like it's all shit--I just--for me, I think it's the processing power that's required to read it and then still keep it isolated from what I'm doing. It's just too much. It just--I don't, I don't want to do it--I just would rather get down to whatever my thing is. Whatever that means.  THERESA: See, Fabeku, you need my way of doing things. I'm just so fucking stubborn . . . [laughter] THERESA: It doesn't matter how brilliant it is! I'm still going to do things exactly the way I'm going to do things, and I've always been that way, and it's ridiculous. But again, I'll get the little information, I'll get the feedback, I'll look at it, and I still do everything exactly the fucking way I'm going to do it.  FABEKU: Sounds familiar!  [laughter] AIDAN: Hear ye, hear ye! THERESA: That's the key! ANDREW: You know I remember talking to Enrique Enriquez, and we were discussing this in one of the podcast episodes that I did with him I think, and we were talking about how we'll be reading something, and we'll just get to a sentence and be like, "Huh, I just need to think about that for a month now." You know? And so like--there's a reason--I haven't finished Six Ways yet! Because, I get through to a certain point, and then I hit an idea, and I'm like, "Huh. Huh." I just put it down and just sit for a while, and just like chew it over for a while, you know, and maybe it gets misplaced for a little bit after that, and then I find it again, I'm like, "Oh, I should really finish that book," and you know, it's, when you told me that my name was in there somewhere, I was like, I haven't even gotten to that yet! And it's like, you know, kind of halfway through the book or so, right?  AIDAN: [laughing] ANDREW: And I'm just like, huh. And I'll get through it, but for me I like to digest things really thoroughly if I'm going to let them in, and I think that's part of it too, right? You know it's back to like my own thinking, and that kind of stuff and how much of that, not even willingness for that to be let in, but where there is stuff that's really thought-provoking, I only have so much space for that too, you know?  AIDAN: Yeah. I have, you know, it's interesting, once you put out your book--I imagine, you've all done this, I think, so you have had this experience. All of a sudden you become a book guy who has done this thing. And so, I get a fair amount of like, review copies now, pdfs of books that are due to come out to see if I could write for them, and most of them I just have to tell them I can't, cause it's just not, I wouldn't know, or want, to read your book on goetia [laughing]. I wouldn't know how to review it if I did, cause I have no interest in that kind of spirit interaction.  But like I've been really lucky to get two books, recently, one from Devin Hunter and one from Matt Auryn, that are really great, and part of the reason that they work for me is that their approach is really like a psychic clairvoyant take on witchcraft. So it's like witchcraft with the kind of traditional psychic components brought way to the forefront. Which are not my strong point. So it's one of those things that I can read and go like, “Oh, yeah, I can see how I could grab this practice here and use this to develop something that I don't have,” you know. And so they've both been really good for that. But in general, kind of reading within the field gets harder and harder for me as time goes on because I'm so stubborn that it's like, I'm reading and kind of just going, nah, nah, nah, or I've seen this so many times, it's an interesting balance. But ... THERESA: Can I just say this to you? It's not that . . . I know this sounds terrible, but I don't get my inspiration, you know, from reading tarot books. The inspiration that I get from life comes from way different sources. You know, I'm more likely not to get inspired by reading your tarot interpretations but by, you know, maybe listening to a Lil Wayne song. I get my inspiration from very very different places, so . . . AIDAN: Yep.  THERESA: And I think it's because too, I mean every day I'm in tarot. I'm like in tarot and in astrology every day of my life. And so I do still like to read the books, but my creative inspiration rarely comes from that. It rarely comes from reading someone's tarot or astrology book. It's going to come from a very very different source. Cooking is one of my main ways . . . And watching cooking shows and cookbooks, I actually get a lot more inspiration from that. And one of the things I love about cooking--Cooking is very magical. You know I'm very superstitious about food. I won't eat food prepared by somebody I don't like. Food has to be prepared with intention. And what I love about the whole process of cooking, because in another lifetime I should have been a chef, is I love to cook because you're creating and then you destroy it immediately! AIDAN: Yeah. THERESA: It's gone. Boom! It's done. I mean it was there. You know that the remnants are still there because it's showing up either in your waistline, or the indigestion, or the pleasure that you're feeling, but it's gone. It's all gone. I mean, food is magic. FABEKU: It is magic. It always reminds me--first of all, I agree about the source of inspiration. To me, art has been a bigger inspiration on my magic than magic stuff has.  AIDAN: Absolutely. FABEKU: Cooking has been a bigger inspiration on my business than business shit ever has. The ... all of that stuff. Cooking, and I remember there was one time I was eating this really fantastic meal at a restaurant that did amazing food. It was the place you and I ate at, Theresa.  THERESA: Mm-hmm. FABEKU: [00:33:33] When they, when they brought the food out, as I was eating it, I had that moment where it felt like, you know, when you see the mandalas that the Buddhists create, right? THERESA: Yes! FABEKU: They spend fucking forever making these things and they're amazing and they're beautiful and you see them and it's this experience of awe and they're gone-- THERESA: Yes! FABEKU: You know, they just they just wipe them out in a moment and it's like this is what this feels like. it was--and it felt like taking in all of that. Like you said, the creation of it, the attention to detail, the care, the creativity, the magic, and then making that a part of you, and literally it's gone in minutes. It's . . .  THERESA: Yeah! FABEKU: It, to me, that's the kind of thing that that just wows me every time and it does, it doesn't have . . . shit, I don't care whether it's an expensive meal, it doesn't matter about that at all. It's just that thing of something that's been amazingly created and you know that they spent all day in the kitchen prepping for that and literally in a matter of minutes the plate's empty.  THERESA: Uh-huh.  FABEKU: It's, it's phenomenal. AIDAN: Yeah. THERESA: That's like true magic. I mean when I go to when I go to Portland every year there's a restaurant called Castagna that I go to. They now know me because they know I'm nuts about their rolls. and they serve weird stuff. I mean, but it is meticulously prepared and it comes out and I mean I grew up Catholic, so when you eat it, it's like communion. You're taking it into your body, the soul of that chef, and their creativity, and there is nothing more magical than that. AIDAN: Well, I think that that also sinks into another kind of concept that ties into some of Fabeku and I's experiences recently, because we've both been playing [00:35:03] with hyper sigil work. Is that . . . that element of like, you're doing this for right now? And then you're going to do the next thing and the next thing and the next thing. I think is missing from a lot of people's approach to magical arts, that they're like, they're somehow want to use this kind of technology of radical change to produce a static state that will always work for them, is what comes to mind, thinking of that, which has really never been my take. It's like, no, I'm just walking, right? And I'm going to choose where I go. I'm going to . . . but I'm not walking down the street to then stop at that house and then live in that house forever. I'm just walking and sometimes it's easy and sometimes it's hard and sometimes it's snowing, right? but it's very much like that food concept that you bring up, Theresa, and I like that, because it is, it's like, there's not, it's not working to an . . . a permanent end point and I think that all the really cool stuff is like that. For a lot of it, you know. THERESA: Well, a lot of people think they're going to get a permanent result from magic. Same like from a tarot reading, that it's going to be a guarantee of your future and there's no guarantees. I mean, I always say you can have a perfectly great astrology chart and be a complete schmuck. You can get a great reading and you can decide to make different decisions that change and alter what's coming. And when it comes to magic, you can do all the magic in the world, but nothing's going to be permanent, nothing's guaranteed. [00:36:33] And, so again, it's very much like eating. You make something, you make a beautiful ... you put all of your intention and your energy into it, then you've got to like, destroy it and forget about it and see what happens and keep that kind of an attitude about it. AIDAN: Right, or you go on the three-week nothing but dark chocolate binge and you discover you don't feel great at the end of that. THERESA: Well, I do!  AIDAN: Right? THERESA: I have a dark chocolate emergency stash! [laughter] THERESA: We have dark chocolate every day and we always feel good. [laughter] ANDREW: For me, it reminds me-- FABEKU: Yeah, go ahead, Andrew. ANDREW: Go ahead, Fabeku. FABEKU: No, you're good. Go for it.  ANDREW: Okay. Reminds me, you know, one of my teachers when I was in the Aurum Solis, we had this big conversation about students and neophytes and people coming in and you know, how people, why people drop out, why people don't follow through, you know, and all this kind of stuff. and you know, I think that some of the reasons are for the reasons we talked about here. I think there's a variety of reasons, you know, people are, people are in the wrong place, people need something other than the actual longer term arc of it, you know, many reasons that aren't even to do with failure, for why people drop out or don't pursue or stick with these things over time, but I think that one of the things that I realized about myself in that conversation was that at some point along the way I had decided that I was I [00:38:03] ... I was committed to being ready to give up who I thought I was . . . FABEKU: Mm. ANDREW: In order to discover who I was now. THERESA: Mm. ANDREW: You know? And somewhere, and I don't even know where it started, this sort of notion of an anchored identity or an anchored sort of concrete sense of self or practice or other things. I just . . . you know, I just decided that that wasn't useful. And so I stopped thinking that way and started noticing those moments where that slip in the gears or that incongruousness emerged, you know? And then later on when I, you know, when my godmother was still alive, we'd have these conversations, you know, about something or about my reading for a year or whatever. You know, I just remember there were a number of times where she started laughing, she goes, “Well, it's a good thing you have a flexible ego, Andrew, because blah blah blah” whatever. I'm like, “Oh, yeah, all right, [38:59 or so: for change, for change?],” you know? But I think that that stuff is so important and so hard to come by and even at that, you know, I mean, I don't think that it's always easy, right? Like, you know, I mean, I went through a divorce last year. It went well as far as those things go, it went really well and I've changed my ideas around it or I have emerged sort of more clearly who I am on the other side of that. But the . . . all those things take time as well. Right? So even at that, there's no magic to something to be like, all [00:39:33] right, boom, you know, done, changed, whatever, right? Because really if I had that kind of magic, I would, I'd be summoning those goetic spirits and having them finish sorting all the stuff at the house that I'm still trying to sort through. You know? [laughter] AIDAN: Totally. ANDREW: How did Solomon make that happen? How did he get them all working? Right? That's my problem. AIDAN: [39:52 Reblendo? What?] ANDREW: I can get one of them working. But all of them at the same time? I never got that trick down!  [laughter] FABEKU: I think for me what . . . And what you said makes total sense to me, that, that, that fixed sense of identity to me feels really problematic as a human being, and it feels even more problematic as a magician. You know, I think that it feels like, in a lot of ways to me, at this point, magic is just kind of just perpetually riding a wave like Theresa said, there's no, there's a fixed point. There's no done. There's no finished static, got it, nailed down. It's . . . this is what the wave looks like now and now here's what the wave looks like and maybe it's fast or slow or big or it's crashing or whatever the fuck it's doing. But to me, it feels like the most effective thing I can do as a magician is learn how to ride the wave more skillfully and learn how to direct it in, you know, whatever ways that we can. And yeah, I think if you expect something fixed and static, whether that's an experience of yourself or an experience of the world, magic will kick you in the fucking teeth with that stuff. THERESA: And also, if you look at this from a scientific perspective, not that I'm some scientist, I'm not, but . . . ANDREW: Please [00:41:03] ignore the lab coat. [laughter] THERESA: But think about this, you know, everything is changing constantly. We get a new body every seven years. Our cells are constantly changing. So we're not looking the same as we did seven years ago. I mean, I wish I had the same body I had 20 years ago. I don't! Because every seven years your cells are completely regenerating. So when you think about that from a magical perspective, there is no way in hell, you're going to get like some kind of a permanent thing, because everything is always evolving. And my friend Joe one time said to me, and it really pissed me off when I was younger. He said, “You know, the only thing, kid, that's unchanging, is change.” And I'm like, “What the fuck kind of logic is that?” It took a while for that to sink in, but it makes sense. Nothing is going to be an absolute permanent thing. And so when you're doing magic, like you said, Fabeku, it's more about riding with that energy, working with the energy. You can still enact change, but you still have to find a way to move with it.  AIDAN: Right. FABEKU: Yeah, I think for me, my initial interest in magic felt like it was about control and fixing things. And fixing things, I don't mean as in fixing problems: creating a static state, right? And that was all based on my anxiety. THERESA: Yeah. FABEKU: If I can, if I can magic the shit out of this, I can get it solid enough, the way I need it to be, where I need it to be, where I'm going to be fine. And then at some point you realize: even if you can pull that off, tomorrow, it's a different thing. [00:42:33]  THERESA: Yes. FABEKU: Next week, it's an entirely different thing. And so I think for me I spent too much time figuring out: Okay, what's the magic that I can use to create the static state, which of course is bullshit. And now it's: what magic can I use to ride this fucker as effectively and as skillfully as I possibly can, and you know, hopefully keep my head above water in the process.  AIDAN: Yeah. THERESA: I think a lot of us come into magic though, around that whole notion of trying to fix things or control things. Because I know when I got my first introduction to magical things I was a little girl and I would see the ads for The Magic Power of Witchcraft with Gavin and Yvonne Frost in the back of the National Enquirer that my mother used to get. and I would pour over those ads and I thought, “You know, if I get this book,” which, I didn't have the money to get the book, but “If I only could get this book, we'd no longer be poor and then everything would be magically fixed.” Which as you guys know, that's a very childlike way of looking at things. We all know that, let's say we do the magic and get all the money. It's no guarantee that you're not still going to be a loser, you know? So but in my childlike mind, I would look at those ads and that was like, this is the answer I need, to do this witchcraft stuff. I need to get this magic, get rich so I can get out of this household and everything will be better. FABEKU: Yeah. AIDAN: Right, and it's funny because then I think, you know, I . . . It kind of sinks it all that [00:44:03] stuff. Whereas the reality is, like, well, when you get out of that household, it'll be different.  THERESA: Yeah.  AIDAN: And that will probably be better, just because it will be different, right?  SOMEONE: Mm-hmm. AIDAN: And I think that that's one of the games that people can get fucked up by, is not realizing like no, no, no, that's . . . You're looking at an end step that might really be step one. Like if your situation isn't working, it may not be that you need to do magic. It may be that you need a different situation. Which is often really hard and really uncomfortable but you can almost always have one.  THERESA: Yes! AIDAN: You're not incarcerated, you can walk out of your life right now and do something different. And everybody goes, well no, there's all these things. You go, no, those are all real things, but none of those is stopping you from walking out your front door and having a completely different life. ANDREW: Yeah, I think that . . . AIDAN: And it may be ugly as hell, but you can do it. FABEKU: Yeah. ANDREW: Yeah, I think that, you know, if you're, if you're caught between those things, right? You know, like between sort of starting a new life and not. You know, magic isn't necessarily the answer either, right? Because, like thinking back to sort of like this time last year, you know my ex and I decided to call it--in July right on one of the equinoxes--or, one of the eclipses [00:45:33]--that happened, right? So, you know and . . . but like, the first half of that year leading up to this was just sort of like, clear noticing on both sides that stuff wasn't right. And this notion of like, well, what if we do this, what about this? What about that? You know and then trying those things, and a lot of that stock is predominantly, in this case, you know, not in everybody's case, because there's many different experiences, right? But like a lot of that stuff was psychological, right? THERESA: Mm-hmm. ANDREW: And that kind of clarity, you know, comes from processing it, right? Not from, not from a magical act, be like. All right, give me clarity, you know, like not even from like, you know, I mean, I could have asked the Orishas, and be like, hey, should I, should I, should I get divorced, you know? And they would have given me an answer, you know? But, but even that, if we're not clear in ourselves and we're not ready to make a change, the question is not, the question needs to move away from do I stay or do I go, but how do I get clearer in myself about it? And how do I get organized and acknowledge what are my concerns, what are the real-world challenges? What are . . . you know, all that kind of stuff so we can actually get ourselves to a place of clarity and some of those smaller steps might be susceptible to magic. Like hey, you know what? Maybe if I, if I had more money, I [00:47:03] would make a different decision here. THERESA: Mm-hmm! ANDREW: Well, I could do some magic around that, but that's not the same as making a piece of magic to get to that clarity necessarily, or to carry us through this idyllic state on the other side, you know? Does that make any sense? FABEKU: Yeah, it makes . . . It makes total sense to me, because when . . . So I got divorced five years ago, five and a half years ago, whatever it was, and it was a long process for us. It wasn't . . . Nobody just woke up one day and said, “Oh shit, I'm done.” Like, it . . . little . . . years of it in some ways. And I've thought a lot about like, why did that take so long? Not in a bad way, but kind of in a curious way. And what I realized is that she and I were both, like you said, kind of inching our way toward that clarity because it wasn't clear: be done, stay, whatever. And so we would try this and then that didn't work. So that moved us a little, a little forward in terms of clarity. Okay? Well, let's try that. That didn't work. And then you kind of reach the end of those things and then you feel clear and it's shitty. It was for me. It was shitty, it was devastatingly sad for her as well. But I think that's the thing. There is a process to that clarity and like you said, how do you magic that? I don't, I don't know how to magic that shit. I mean there was, you know, we both did work around capacity to be open to, let's try this. Let's try that. And also, at some point I said, I think maybe we should also be open to the fact that this might not work in a way that we want it to, right? So not just capacity to fix it but capacity to say, I think that what we need to do is just move in different directions, you know, and that was, that was a process that took a couple fucking [00:48:33] years for us. I mean that was not a fast thing at all. THERESA: But sometimes magic can support things that we're going through, but you still have to do your work.  FABEKU: Yeah. THERESA: You don't ... And that's one of the things I think too, a lot of people, you know, when you first come to, like magic and stuff, we just think it's going to suddenly make our lives better, but it doesn't always work like that. Years ago, when I lived in New York, there used to be a shop called The Magical Child and it was run by a guy named Herman Slater and you can go in there and buy these little magical kits. So my roommate and I were both convinced we had bad luck. So I said, “Let's go ahead and get one of these kits.” And so we got the kit, we did the magic rituals together. I got to tell you, the whole energy in the room shifted. I mean it was weird. It was one of the most intense magical experiences I've ever had. And I looked at my roommate after that and I said, “Did you feel that?” And he said, “Yeah, I felt that too.”  Well, what's really interesting is after that experience, my life did start to change for the better. And a lot of it was me becoming more conscious about: How did I get in the, how did I get into the situation? How can I get out? Whereas even though my roommate and I did that ritual together, his life continued to spiral in terrible directions. And the thing is, you can do all the magic in the world. But if you're still making crappy decisions or not being conscious of the process of getting yourself into a better place that magic is going to be not very effective.  AIDAN: Right. One of the things that I've been ... I've got a piece that I think will be coming [00:50:03] out in the next collection. It has to do with that idea and it's a ... it's a talisman that's focused on the idea of effective power. Like, you know, you can have the stick, you can have the rock, and you can beat them against the other rock and not much happens. But if you know how to set it up as kind of a fulcrum and a lever and you do that on the right side so that once that thing breaks free, it doesn't roll down on you or something, you know, then that's what we would like to have happen more often in our lives. It's like where do we ... And so I think magic can absolutely help but it's, you have to have enough sense of clarity or use it to get enough sense of clarity or use divination to get enough sense of clarity. Whatever gets you there to go: Okay, I want this to change and here is a point that I could apply some pressure where that will happen. And then I'm going to have to probably do follow-up to keep that moving in the direction that I want to because again, nothing's static. It's not like that you pop that pop that spell and then everything is done.  THERESA: Wouldn't that be nice? AIDAN: It would be awesome! [laughter] AIDAN: But it might give you that that that initial push that gets over the inertia that allows you to then kind of keep working on a more, you know, easier level or a less stressful level to get where you want to go. FABEKU: I think one of the things that, that I'm always thinking about and talking about is this idea that magic forces coherence, you know, it's ... It sounds fine to sit down and [00:51:33] enchant for a partner. And then let's say that partner shows up and you've got all kinds of emotional baggage. You've got unresolved bullshit, you're not as available to being loved as you think you would be. So what the fuck happens right? This person shows up, if they show up and then you get to eat shit sorting out your stuff.  So, I mean the magic works right? You got the person, you had the money, you got the job, you got whatever the fuck it is. And then I think it also highlights all of the things that you need to shift in order to be coherent and that's usually not a magic. I mean, sometimes it's a magical thing, but sometimes it's just like “Oh, yeah, I just need to deal with my shit.” Like, “I've got a bunch of stuff. I need to deal with my shit.” Or “I've got money, but I'm really shitty at managing money. So I need to buy a book on managing money.” Like that's the thing. It's ... I like that idea of that fulcrum thing. It will move things in a certain direction and then you have to figure out what the fuck to do as it moves in that direction and if you're unskillful at that, magic's not going to fix that. It can't fix that. And I think that, in a lot of ways this goes back to what Andrew was saying about that fixed sense of identity, you know, so I think that magic in order to change things has to also change who we are and if that doesn't happen, I think we're either going to not have very effective results with magic or I don't think we're going to be able to sustain stuff over time, you know? And most of ... most of that forcing coherence shit fucking sucks. AIDAN: [chuckling] FABEKU: It's not great. You know? It's not a delightful thing. Nobody's like, “Oh great. My new person showed up, now I get to eat shit sorting my stuff.” Nobody wants to fucking do that. [00:53:03] It's a mess. It's a total mess.  THERESA: It's kind of like when people win the lottery. They often think that their problems going to resolve but the money actually brings out more of what they really are. And if they haven't resolved who they are, they end up either blowing it all or doing really awful things with the money.  FABEKU: Yeah. Yep.  THERESA: You've got to resolve who you are because all the magic or tarot cards or astrology or you know, whatever, none of it's going to work if you don't resolve who you are, you have to go there and do the work on you. AIDAN: Yeah, I have a ... I have a guy that I knew through a friend who won the lottery. And I've known a couple of people through friends that have had the usual win, a couple million dollars and just fucking crash and burn and end up in a much worse state than they started and he was like ... I think he was like 16 years into his military career and he was like the perfect guy to win the lottery because he kind of went like, “Oh, that's nice. I will now spend the next four years till I get my pension from the military figuring out what to do with this four million dollars.” He like didn't really do anything because he knew he was not the guy to figure that out, but he could become that guy and was disciplined enough that he actually ... He's doing fabulously as far as I know 25 years later because of that. And he was just set. And he was not carrying a ton of wreckage and he knew where his problems were and he applied himself intelligently [00:54:33] and I think that that's the game.  ANDREW: Yeah. The person who runs the pizza place near where I lived a long time ago. They won the lottery twice. I don't think like a million dollars but like hundreds of thousands of dollars several times and they just kept running the pizza business. Right, like they just kept showing up and making pies and you know, whatever. Like I don't know what they did with the money but like they just never stopped, you know, the place still runs now, you know, and it's like, yeah, life continues, right?  AIDAN: Totally. ANDREW: I think, I think it's actually, you know, I look at ... I look at different people in my profession. And there are some people that I see and based on conversations with them and based on how I see them approaching work, I see them like working to get out of it, you know, they're working to retire. They're working to get enough money or they don't even have a plan to retire maybe and they're hoping that they'll somehow hit it a certain way and get out of it and whatever and, and I think it's, it's really problematic, right? You know, it's like, it's fine if you know, that's what you're doing and you handled it really well, but I think that if you know, like if your buddy in the military had been like, “Ah, I can be late for roll call or whatever because I got a million bucks in the bank,” if ... that's not going to go well, right? you know?  And for me, like [00:56:03] people have asked me a number of times like, “Well, what would happen if you won all this money?” and whatever. I'm like, you know, well, I'd still run the shop and I'd still do readings and I'd still whatever. It would change a bunch of things and it would change how I went about it and maybe how much of it I did. but it's not going to change anything else, because, because I'm in this and I see myself being in this for, you know, indefinitely, you know, as opposed to an end, right? And just with a sort of periodic re-visioning of it to suit where I'm at that point, you know? You know, I'm sure in 10 years I'll have a different approach to being in the store and doing readings than I have now. In 20 years, I'll have a different approach again, but like the notion that I'm not going to be somehow doing what I'm doing in that amount of time just doesn't exist, you know? and I think that it's very, it's very interesting. Like the way in which people think about their future or think about, you know, like now, sort of, you know, not being ... well, I was always polyamorous anyway, but like looking at dating and stuff and it's a hundred percent find [not sure if I heard this right: find?] that people are on OkCupid or Tinder or whatever to meet their person and get off of there. But it's such a, such a complicated energy to bring to something to be there only so you could not be there anymore. You know? AIDAN: Totally. THERESA: I always think when I work that ... Oops. I always think: I get to work today. I [00:57:33] never look at it: “Oh, God, I got to work.” It's always: “Yay, I get to work today.” So I come from a long line of people who love to work and everyone in our family has a good work ethic and we love what we do. So I can't imagine a full retirement. Sorry Aidan. I didn't mean to jump in. AIDAN: Oh, no, I was basically going the same place. You know, I did 30 years of retail, which I didn't love. And so now that I'm able to do something that I do love, I have no intention of quitting. And yeah, it's like you said, if you give me a couple million dollars, I will probably get a warehouse nearby and have somebody build me a half pipe because I'll be able to afford the insurance and going to Panama for the stem cell treatments to repair my injuries instead of just being fucked up. And I will skate a lot more, you know. But yeah, I don't see it changing the whole thing, you know, it's not a ... It wouldn't be a ticket out. It would be like, okay now I can really just kind of chill and go crazy on: What is the best form of this thing that I do if I'm not as reliant on it being somewhat reasonable for people to be able to play with me? You know. ANDREW: For sure. And, you know, and obviously we're not talking about, you know, like I worked at 7-Eleven in high school. If I was still working at 7-Eleven... [laughter] AIDAN: Totally! ANDREW: You know, like, like, you know, we're all definitely in different positions than that, right? THERESA: Right. ANDREW: Like you know, you said you worked retail for [00:59:03] a long time. And that wasn't your jam, you know, and that's completely fair too, right? So like, you know, I don't want anybody feeling bad because they're like, “Oh, I have this job that sucks.” It's like some jobs suck, you know, I mean, you know, some jobs, you know, and whatever, but, and that's where, you know, maybe working some magic to start making some change and see what else you can do to kind of move in different directions, right? Like none of us got where we were and where we are and not that I'm hanging us up as role models either in that sense, but like all of us got where we are over a long period of time, right?  THERESA: Yeah  ANDREW: Lots of changes and lots of acts of magic and acts of dedication and practice and discipline and whatever, different things, luck maybe even, right? you know, like there are lots of ways in which we got where we are. So yeah. FABEKU: And you know, I think, I think a lot of that--going back to the identity thing. I... For me, the reason I keep going back to it is because it seems like such a critical piece, because if you have a fixed sense of identity and you're in a job you hate or you're in a relationship you hate or whatever it is, and you keep telling yourself: “This is who I am. This is what my life looks like. This is what I can do. This is kind of it.” How the fuck do you ever change that, right?  So I think that if you instead kind of look past, this is not the easiest thing to do, but if you, if you can stretch past that and look at the things, like what am I telling myself I can never do that's impossible? The shit I could never have. Why am I telling myself that? Where the fuck did that come from? Is that actually true? If it's not true, what could I do now, that's different, [01:00:33] to get a different job, a different person, a different amount of money, and start looking at those things? But I think it ... that for me, the identity piece and the possibility piece are so intimately connected, I don't think you can separate them.  And you know, if somebody that ... because I think about my dad, like he wanted to be an artist. He wasn't an artist. He spent his entire job in some high-level government corporate bullshit thing that he fucking hated. He was miserable, but that's who he told himself he was. That, that, that was his thing. He couldn't be an artist. He couldn't have a life he loved. He had to go to this place. And he died that way. It was fucking terrible, you know? And almost all of that came back to this identity stuff. And I wonder, you know, if he had, if one day he had said to himself: “Hmm. Is this really true, the bullshit I'm telling myself? It's probably not.” Like I wonder how things would have been different for him. So I mean, I think ... You know, I think those are just important things for people to think about when they find themselves with shit they don't dig.  THERESA: Mm-hmm. ANDREW: Yeah, I was you know, I live, I live on the edge of a really fancy neighborhood in Toronto. And there's, there's this design store that sells, you know, fancy designer stuff. They do interior design for all these like multimillion-dollar homes and stuff like that. And I was looking for, I've been looking for a chair for my bedroom, so I have a spot where I can go and read and be away from, like if my kids want to watch TV and have their friends over, I can be like, that's cool. I'm going to go to my room. You have the main space and I'm going to be comfortable [01:02:03] and relaxed and not feel like I'm like forced to like sit on my bed like that, you know, whatever, right? Because I don't want that resentment. Right?  And, and I was walking by this place and they had this beautiful armchair in the window and it had this amazing bird print fabric, like just these huge finches printed on it. And, you know, being a really fancy store, the fabric was cut perfectly, and the relationship of the birds, the shape of the chair, was amazing. I was just like, “Oh my God, that's such a beautiful chair.” And then I went and looked at it and it was like two and a half thousand dollars or something like that. And I was like, “Huh,” and I walked away. I'm like “Man, such a nice chair, I could never have a chair like that.”  And then I caught myself, because I had to walk past it over a while, and it's like, “Man, well like I can't afford it today obviously, like that's not

Local musician and author, Andrew Castro, discusses his new book Overcoming Your Anxiety for People on the Go.Transcript:INTRO: This is Method to the Madness, a bi-weekly public affairs show on K-A-L-X Berkeley celebrating Bay Area innovators. Today, your host is Ojig Yeretsian. She'll be speaking with Andrew Castro, a professional singer-songwriter turned author. He's recently written a book, Overcoming Your Anxiety for People on the Go. OJIG: Thank You, Andrew, for coming in today. Welcome to the show. Can you tell us about yourself and why you wrote this book? ANDREW: Yeah. So for me, the book wasn't planned. I kind of just spontaneously decided that I had all this information in my head, and I wanted to sit down and write it. And for me, it was just years of personal experience with the content that's in the book. And so I just kind of felt like a gut feeling that I needed to sit down and just put it out. So I just sat down at my computer, wrote it, and I'd struggled with anxiety and stuff. But it didn't really become like a problem for me until I was about twenty five, I’m thirty three now. It was just kind of built, kind of like happens for a lot of people like a hidden layer that you just think it's kind of who you are. And then all of a sudden, it just kind of explodes just from too much buildup. And that was kind of what happened with me, and I went through years of it, pretty debilitating stuff. And then then I kind of got over it, but I went back in the same patterns, and then I, uh, had another bout with it again for a couple of years. And then I decided that, you know, it's time to make an actual change, not just let's see if I can fix this a little bit, but go back to what I was doing. So I had to really change my entire life patterns along the way. Along the way, I've been a professional musician, too, and that lifestyle doesn't always give the best results for not having anxiety, you know, because you're constantly not knowing where you're gonna be next kind of thing. So but yes. So the book just kind of came out, and it didn't take that long to write. It's short, but I outlined it for a couple weeks and then took about two months on and off to write it. OJIG:How do you define anxiety? ANDREW: I wouldn't put any single definition on it because there's so many different variations of it. People have social anxieties. In a simple term, for me, it's just overwhelming. I think that would be the best way to describe it. It's just an overwhelming feeling that there's, you know, social anxiety people who, like I have a friend who has social anxiety. He has more panic, and I have more generalized anxiety, but it's all comes down to just being very overwhelmed by whatever situation you're in with that anxiety. I have small social anxieties like most people do, but nothing that's overwhelming for me. But, you know, for him, social anxiety is overwhelming, like interacting with new people or being in group settings. It just and I don't feel that. But I can understand what he's going through because I think the general of feeling of anxiety is pretty, pretty close to the same. Just depends. Some people have it in this situation, and some people have in that. For me, I would say it's over just overwhelming sensations in thoughts, and they can just cycle and go back and forth with each other. OJIG:It sounds like it's very common. ANDREW:That's the biggest thing I think I tried to come across within the book is that you're not alone. That's the thing that people see and struggle with the most is when they get these feelings. You can't feel what somebody else is feeling, so you don't know that the things you're feeling aren't just you going crazy that they're actually like a pretty common thing, and I don't usually use stats much. But like there is one that always stuck out was that there's about forty million people in the United States alone that suffer in their life with some sort of anxiety disorder, which is an enormous amount of people. And those were just the people that are telling the truth. You know, there are some that are hiding it or don't want to talk about it. I think in some way almost every human in their life goes through some form and some get caught in it more and it lasts for a very long time and some some don't, some just have, ah, easier time letting go of things. For me, it wasn't like that, I just got caught in a cycle. Habits are a big thing, but, yeah, people are alone. And when that's the first thing that I realized when I started reading other books and other people's blogs and stuff, and I was like, it made you feel a little like, ‘Oh, there's other people with this’. You take a deep breath and then a lot of them have gone through it, and they're like, Oh, yeah, things the anxiety doesn't really bother me anymore. And so you go, ‘Okay, how'd you do that?’ And then you start to learn. I try to tell people to educate themselves as much as possible. Understanding something is the first step to getting over it. I think I compared it in the book to when you have your ah, cell phone and they put, like, new software on it. And, you know, you don't know what the heck’s going on. You know, the apps are changing. You don't know what you're doing, and you get frustrated. But the more you do that, you're not gonna learn anything. So if you just take fifteen minutes and start to learn ‘ah ok’, then it's like ‘Oh, this is actually better’ and then you start to learn the phone then all of a sudden, like, just take the time to learn it and you're not afraid of using your phone. You were like, I mean, with anxiety prior to take a few months or even a year. But if you learn about it, it diminishes the fear that you have over it. OJIG: Take us through the process. How does anxiety start and how does it grow? ANDREW: For everybody is different. So I'll speak for me. It definitely started when I was a young. So I talk in the book about this thing called a snowball effect. And it's a pretty common thing that people use for a ton of things that I thought it applied well to this. I think you kind of have a point in your life where things start to happen and you can go this way or that way, you know. And, uh, I chose this way, whatever that way is. When I was young, I had this memory of being at a drive-in movies with my parents, and I was just I was four or five and I just started crying because I had these overwhelming thoughts that my parents were going to die someday. And I was really young, but the feeling that I remember is that I couldn't control, that was gonna happen. And that for me, it was like a big thing throughout my whole life is not being able to control things around me that are uncontrollable. And then I don't like that. And then, you know, you worry about those things, even though it's impossible to stop those things from happening. But I did that from a young age, and you just don't know. You're unconsciously you don't know what you're doing to yourself. So for me, it started like that when I was really young. And then I went down that way, and I would just constantly worry about things over and over and same patterns. And just after years of doing that, it just ballooned, snowballed. And then best way to put it is that it explodes. When I was in my twenties. I mean, I liked to go out on my friends and drink, and that doesn't help somebody who's already sensitive to anxiety. So then, ah, yeah, just just kind of exploded. So that snowball just builds and you don't know it's building and the only way to stop it from building is to change, and that's very hard. But if you don't change, you know it's like that, Einstein quote, paraphrasing: but the definition of insanity is doing the same things over and over. So a lot of people want to not feel what they feel, that they're not yet willing to change what they're doing. But that's not their fault, really. It's just kind of a symptom of anxiety. They're afraid to do it, but when you get there and you start the process, it's well worth it. OJIG: There are a lot of self help books out there about anxiety. What makes Overcoming Anxiety for People on the Go unique? ANDREW: So I definitely took a couple examples from a couple books that I love. And I think what makes my book and those books unique is that there's no, it's not about tricks and gimmicks. No pinch this nerve or, you know, take ten deep breaths. I'll use this essential oil and that, and those are fine, like I'm not knocking those. Those are good, but they're all temporary things that are very impermanent, simple things that will help you in this moment. And my book is more about the long haul. So it's about the process of changing your perspective on your thoughts and your sensations and all that stuff. And I think a lot of books out there nowadays are doing that more. Ten years ago or so, it was just about the gimmicks and tricks. But we've learned so much about, uh, your your mind and, you know and sensations and your awareness that the way to get through anxiety is acceptance, and being aware of it, instead of just reacting to it. Had people interview me before, and they always they go ‘so what are some tricks and tips on how to you know’ and I was like, I mean, I don't really want to give those cause that's not what it's about. I've done those before, and they will, they kind of will help, like breathing obviously help. It does help. But it's not gonna, it's not going to do anything tomorrow or the next day. So you gotta learn, to just see things differently, and it takes a long time. But everybody's process different. Some person get over in two months, two years, five years. It's all different. Everybody's different in that way. Yeah so I think it's unique and just that it doesn't. There's no tricks or gimmicks. It's just everything in there is about how to take big steps to getting or little steps to where you want to be. OJIG: I found it to be engaging, humorous and a very quick read. Why only eighty pages? ANDREW: Because I think I just wanted to engage people. And I don't I don't like long books. When I get a book that's like four hundred pages and it looks like a daunting task. So when I see a book that short, but I packed a lot of content in it and just, you know, eighty whatever, pages it is. I wanted to be a book that people could read in the sitting or two to sitting three things, and then it's just something you can take with you, and you can just just reference it. OJIG: And its small so you can carry it in your purse, backpack, satchel.ANDREW: Right and that's what I wanted it to be something like you said in a purse or backpack or whatever. And nowadays, to people don't have attention spans either, you know, so keep it short and the people love that, ‘Oh, I read your book and like to sitting down to go back and re-read some stuff’. So that the whole idea of keeping it short and carry it with you people are saying that they're doing that.OJIG: That's great. So you've been getting positive feedback so far? ANDREW: Yeah, it's been it's been great. And it's a little overwhelming sometimes, like, because I'm not a doctor or , you know, a psychiatrist, or therapist and whatever. And sometimes I don't feel totally qualified. But I'm not, I'm not giving anybody advice for like this is what you need to do, I'm just telling you, here's what I did. And if you can try that and it works, then great. If it doesn't, then you know. But I try to encourage them to read other books, and if they're not going to therapy, they probably should. I think everyone should go to therapy like the whole world. Everybody should, have some sort of therapy sometime. OJIG: We're all the walking wounded. ANDREW: Yeah, exactly. Everybody everybody has, you know their things. And but I have given people advice, but I try to do it from my own experience kind like a book. I stick to that because I don't want to tell somebody that they need to do something for them because I could get in trouble with that, especially if they do something and it doesn't work or they hurt themselves or something. I don't want it. So I just ‘Here's what worked for me’. And yeah, a lot of people message me and told me that they're implementing a lot of things I said and that it's helping little by little. You know, basically, I try to tell them is to be patient. That's the hardest part. It takes a lot of a lot of courage and a lot of willpower, because sometimes I'll have really bad adrenaline. Just pumping through my body, and you just I have to sit there and just watch TV or read your book. Just sit through it, because if you start fighting it, it just gets worse. And the cycle continues. And I knew that I had just to be like, ‘Okay, come on and just let's just have it out’ and then you sit there and sometimes it last for hours. It's draining, and you want to quit all the time, but gotta find it in you to keep pushing through. OJIG: It sounds like it's a practice. ID/BREAKIf you're just tuning in, you're listening to Method to the Madness, a bi-weekly public affairs show on K-A-L-X celebrating Bay Area innovators. Today's guest is Andrew Castro. He's speaking about his experiences with anxiety and depression. He's recently written a book, Overcoming Your Anxiety for People on the Go. OJIG: What are you hoping to achieve with this book? ANDREW: Well, first I wrote it, I think a lot for myself, just like a therapeutic process. And I just want, if it could just help some people. I don't know how many that’s going to be, if that's a hundred, I mean, five hundred, as long as it helps some people that's it's accomplished its goal. I just wanted to get people and I want people to know that that you don't have to be like this forever. That's the thing that scares I think everybody. And still I get that sometimes, like, I'll get a little bit of anxiety, and then, you know, those old thoughts would creep in and be like, ‘What if it's like this forever?’ But then I now I just ‘No. Let's just give about thirty minutes’ and you'll see it's just gonna fade away, and it usually does.OJIG: Is this the book you would have wanted to read when you first realized that you were dealing with anxiety, that this is what it was? And did you seek any medical guidance or advice? Did you see any professionals? ANDREW: Yeah. So this I didn't know it, but this would have been the book, you know, that I wanted to read. And then I did. There was a book called At Last The Life by Paul David. And my book is very much modeled like his but, just with my own experience. Yeah, that book was the book that was like that started me on getting to my recovery. You don't know what the time you're just looking for anything. I started therapy was in seventh grade. I remember just being overwhelmed by a lot of things then, and I, at that age, asked my parents to see a therapist. And, uh, it was very bene- I went to it for, like, ten, twelve years, something like that. And then I stopped. And now now I see one down the street from where I live in Sacramento every every few weeks or so. Just, you know, sometimes I don't even necessarily need it. But I talk about it. And then as far as medication and stuff for a couple months, I was on Xanax. But there was always something in me that I didn't want to be a slave to something. I think medication is great to help you get where you want to go. But if, I know a lot of people who take it just to get rid of their symptoms. I always try to, like, really walk the line here because medication is very beneficial in the right circumstances. But it just it could be a crutch, and you sometimes never want to let go with a crutch. And a lot of people just take medication and just don't change anything in their lives. That's when you ah, you don't go anywhere, you're just you're basically just you're numbing yourself and which some people you need it. At times, it's so overwhelming that you have to have it. But if you don't implement the other, the other practices that will actually change your whole perspective on what you're going through, then you're always going to need the medication. If you need medication, you should go to a professional and you should have a whole game plan and say, ‘Okay, I'm gonna be on this specific medication for four months and at two and a half months we're going to slowly wean off it, and while we're doing that we're going to get deep therapies to what's happening because what medication does it can take the edge off to give you room to, implement these things.’ Like sometimes people get so overwhelmed that they can't get their mind to accept what's happening because they're so overwhelmed. I've been a nervous flyer before too and still kind of am. And I've taken Xanax on a plane, and it works. Like you get you get really, you know, kind of mellowed out, and it gives you room to kind of organize yourself a little bit. But, you know, I always had the bottle, but it was almost like a comfort. And I remember, I go on trips and I always bring the bottle because I was like, just in case something doesn’t go over well. But I knew I wasn't gonna take it, like I just knew. But I knew if it was there and I had to or something that I could and then but when I really started noticed I was getting better was I remember that time I just had it and I was going on a trip and I just didn't bring it. I was like, ‘well, let's just see what happens’. And then I got through the trip and then you get confidence more you do that. So that's what from me, what it was was I felt personally that I could get through it without using medication. Not everybody can. I don't know if everybody should try either. OJIG: You have a phrase in the book you mentioned ‘Don't believe everything you think’. Explain what you mean by this. ANDREW: I got into meditation, like a couple years ago, two and a half years ago. That quote there didn't mean anything to me two and a half years ago. But, you know, I read a lot of books on especially on Buddhism and Eastern philosophy, you know, and, you know, my own personal perspective on is they seem to have something right on all that. And so what it is, what it means is that I have a section the book called The Thought Factory. And so I say that your brain is like a factory and its main product that it produces and exports are thoughts.OJIG: Assembly line.ANDREW: Assembly line, just thoughts. And they're just that's all they are. And if you really want to get really deep into it. You're really not even necessarily thinking all those thoughts. They're just just taking in stuff. And then, you know, smells will trigger a thought, or a sight will trigger a thought or a person will trigger something that just stored in your brain just keeps getting sent up. And then there's a great line in a book: Your mind directs your thoughts towards your awareness. So your awareness, you know there's awareness which we don't exactly know what it is. But there is awareness, and your mind projects these thoughts, and then they're so real and something overwhelming that we put all our energy in awareness into them so you can take a thought, like from get on airplane. And before I get on it, I just picture it crashing and burning and whatever. And that's not happening. That's not a real thing. That's hard for you to understand that, but like to not believe that is that's reality. That thought is happening right now. But you were projecting yourself into the airplane crashing and you're making yourself get all worried. But you're just sitting in the airport, doing nothing. So it's just a false, just false. OJIG: Having the space to ask yourself in the moment ‘Is this true?’ANDREW: Right, yeah, especially during meditation. You, can see thoughts just pass. They kind of float and then they burn out. That's a big thing with people with meditation is they think they're not supposed to think like I couldn't stop thinking. Well, you'd probably be dead if you weren't thinking. One thing that helped me was that your heart its function is to pump blood to the body, your liver, you know, detoxifies, your digestive system digests your food, your eyes see and your mind thinks. It's just a function of your body, and that's what it does. It thinks, and you can attach your awareness to certain things to problems, all the do all this stuff. But if you attach your energy and awareness to every thought you have, it's going to be, it's going to be rough. And, um, that's what happened with me. I would have negative, scary thoughts, but I would believe them so much because they were in my head. So I was like they have to be true and you have thousands of thoughts all the time. Like if those are all true that the world would be a really weird place. You don't have to believe any of it. You get to choose what you want to put your energy into and believe and go from there. But meditation really helped me with that. There's a monk, who said, ‘Don't believe your thoughts. They're fake news’, which I thought was great, especially for this time. OJIG: It's the beginning of the new year, and people may be setting intentions. Can you share a nugget of how listeners can change their habits or make a change around this? ANDREW: Yeah, I think doing one little thing differently is a start. When I was younger, I had bad OCD. And I did a bunch of different things before I went to bed. Like it took me a long time before I could got to sleep, right To check the blinds. I checked the locks and do this. You know, one night I just decided to eliminate one thing. You know, one little thing like tonight, I'm not going to do that. It was hard not to do that one thing. And then I don't the other things, but And then once I didn't do that one thing you to try and take it. So I think for people you know the new year. I think if you have ten, you know, really crappy habits that you know are just these aren't doing me any good, get rid of one and go from there. Because the biggest thing is gaining confidence and they talk about that a lot in Buddhism too; it’s faith in the things you've done, give you the confidence in the faith in yourself to keep going kind of thing. And any faith is great. But that, for me, was a big thing. Because so when people eliminate one little habit like for a New Year's resolution and they see that after a few weeks and ‘oh the habit’s kind of gone or it’s changed’ and they start to go, well, I could probably that with another habit and then you slowly start to do that, and that changes your perspective on, on, things. Because humans, we are our habits. If you consciously go through your day, you'll probably notice fifty things that you do every day almost the same way. And if a lot of those things are negative, you're inflicting harm on yourself through some of those habits than it's just going to keep building. And that's when you're gonna have a lot of stress and anxiety and depression. You know all that stuff because you're like watering those seeds. So that's what's going to grow. OJIG: Can you read some passages for our listeners? ANDREW: Sure. So I really like this one here. This one I'd like to talk about with people, but it's hard for people to hear this. I'll read, and then I'll explain. It says the universe doesn't owe you anything. The sooner you realize that things are just the way they are, and sometimes they're crappy, the sooner you will learn to accept your situation from that point on, you can decide who you want to be and how you want to get there. It's all up to you, But please realize your anxiety is not special. I've been so lost my own anxiety that I didn't realize close friends around me were suffering from the same thing and vice versa. We're all in this together. We all share some form of suffering. The quicker we can all realize that suffering is a part of life, the quicker we can master our response to that suffering. Basically, a much more gentle way of putting it is you are not alone. Okay, so I like this one's in the afterward, and it says, anxiety is not something you need to carry with you the rest of your life. At least you don't have to carry it the same way you have been carrying it. I hate when people tell me to manage my anxiety. The only thing I'm going to manage is keeping myself on task and dedicated to eradicating old habits, to shift my perspective on life. We got ourselves into this mess so we can definitely get ourselves out. So I like those because especially the first one, there was a friend of mine who was going through the same the same thing. And I didn't even know that because you're so caught up in all this is my problem. No one's feeling the way I'm feeling. But there are millions people feeling not only the way you're feeling, but exactly the way you're feeling. This isn't something that's unique to me. Like I'm the only one who has this disease or something like it's not a disease. It's just, you know, it's a psychological disorder and millions of people have it. And there was something I learned from Will Smith actor and he said he was using much of examples. But one was like If you were abused when you were a kid, which is awful and you have trauma from it is terrible. And it's it's a weird thing to hear because I'm not saying anything negative. But it's still that person's responsibility to fix it and to deal with what's happening because no one else can deal with it for them. People can help them and support, but same with, like, if you have a death in the family, do you still have the things that are left inside you that you have to learn to accept and be responsible for OJIG: Healing yourself.ANDREW: Healing yourself and you need you need support, you need people around you. But in the end, if you can't make the decision, the universe doesn't know anything. It's just, basically, you have to take the initiative to do it. What I've gone through is very minimal compared to someone who's like lost a parent when they're young or, you know he's living in some country that's torn apart by war. My problems are small comparatively, but I still need I need to sit down and go. These are my problems. I have to fix them. And if you want other people to fix them for you, that's never gonna happen. I wrote an article for this local online publication in Sacramento, and I said that I'm the one who built my life, so if I built it, I can tear it down and I can rebuild it kind of thing. And obviously, sometimes, genetically, you're more prone to things. But that doesn't mean that has to be you forever or whatever. It just means you have to work a little harder rebuilding it. My choices and habits built this building of anxiety. So, I can knock it down and I can build a new building next to it or far away, or whatever. You know what you're going through is not special. It's very common. And that's That's a good thing. I'm not trying to be mean about like it's just it's not special. Like I had somebody call me once. They were going through a really tough time they were asking me, How do I get rid of these feelings right now? And I just told him, You can't That's hard for them to hear. It was somebody close to me, so I was like to realize you can't get rid of it actually frees you from fighting them. OJIG:So it's part of the human condition. ANDREW: Yeah, that's like we were talking about Buddhism that we saw because there's lost there's disease, There's pain, there's all this stuff and you're never gonna be able to get rid of those things. You gotta learn to deal with those things. OJIG: How has anxiety or living with anxiety impacted you as a musician and as a performer? ANDREW: Started playing, writing songs maybe, like nine years ago. And I love doing it so much that I wanted it to be my career, But it's not a very easy thing to make into a career. So it caused for me a lot of stress because I just felt I wasn't made to have like a what you call a normal job. I guess, you know, you go to the office or you go work, whatever. But then I had this thing that I love to do that. I was getting better out, but it doesn't make any money, and money is a big stress builder. It's one of the biggest things that people have regrets about or, you know, are worried about in the future, and it causes a lot. And that caused me a lot of anxiety because I want to do this thing. But I couldn't make money at it. Then I move to Sacramento because a smaller area and I really networked and I made it my profession and I toured. It's a very exciting thing, so make a little exciting way to make a living. But it's very draining because you play shows sometimes with two people. When you leave town Or you're playing some restaurant or bar and no one's paying attention. Or you have ten shows booked in February and then four people call you cancel and you just lost like a thousand dollars. It's ah, the unknown cause me a lot of anxiety and stress. And so when I start writing this book, I took a break from music till about just a couple weeks ago, and I started writing again. I took, like, six months seven months. Just no, no writing, no recording and again changed my whole perspective on music. So before I was chasing it, like I wanted to be a star and beyond stage and playing music, and it was like getting competitive and stressing me out. I just now, I don't. Now they don't care. I don't want those things. I just don't I don't put my energy into go about a different way. I won't write the songs. I want to write a play. And people like him great. If they don't, no that’s it. OJIG: Did your anxiety ever prevent you from getting on a plane to go to a show or from going on stage? ANDREW: No. You know, I just have a weird way of doing things. I can't remember a time where I was just really terrified and didn't do it. I used to have to get drunk to get on the plane. That's how I used to do it. No matter what time is, the flight was at 7am and I got there. It was bad. But that's how I had to get on a plane. Because I was just, you know, on then that I've changed is now I don't I don't do that. The stage fright. I definitely had it. Remember, going open mikes out when I lived out here, I'd go to one's all around Berkeley in San Francisco, and I'd sign up. I go, Okay, I'm fifth, so I have about forty five minutes or an hour. So I go sit my car and I practice my songs over and over like two songs. That's all you get down like in there for like, an hour practicing. I get really nervous. But then once I get on stage, there's no nerves. And so I started to realize that, and I had a big show out here in San Francisco at The Independent and was opening for this guy, and I was like, sold out. No one knew who I was, and I was so nervous, so much adrenaline because, you know, it's five hundred people out there, and I was like, I'm solo act, or was, I’m gonna get a band now, so I was just by myself all the time. So I was just backstage. My friend came and I was just jumping up and down, trying to shake stuff out. Because I was just, like, really amped up. I’m gonna forget the lyrics, I’m gonna forget the melody. I’m gonna forget all this. And then I just got up there and the crowd just started cheering and screaming like I was the headliner. Well, all right, that's cool. Then I just started playing and everything's fine. So the anxiety has never prevented me from doing anything. Even when I was at my worst, I knew if I didn't do it, then it'd be easier to not do it the next time, too. Same with flying. I love to travel the one time I don't get on a plane then it's going to be easier to not get on the plane the next time. You know, the fear will just build and take over, and it’ll become easy not to do it. OJIG: Has writing this book helped you in your musical path? ANDREW: Yeah, it definitely has. Because at the time I wrote this book and made me take a break from music, which I never did. People would tell me this, this isn’t me saying like, you're the hardest working musician, it’s inspiring because I would just go to every open mic, play every show, I released four E.P.s within, like a twelve month span and then an album, and I just wouldn't stop. And then I took a break, changed my perspective, kind of like what's in the book. I just changed my whole perspective on it, and then my writing now is different than it was before. I think before I was trying to be something I wasn't. My first musical loves were like Tom Petty and Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen, all those. I want to got to go back to writing those songs, get a band and write like some pop rocks stuff that I really want to do . So that's what I'm doing now, and it's so it's learning more to just be myself.OJIG: Andrew, what does the future hold for you in terms of next steps?ANDREW: I'm going to start a podcast, so that's in the next. Hopefully in January, I want to talk a lot about the content of book, and just even it's going to be hopefully like bi weekly. And it'll even talk about the current state of the world because that causes a lot of people anxiety right now. I'd like to get into talks to in front of groups, especially places like here, like colleges with younger people that are at that point where these kind of things can really, creep up on them and then music for me. I'm gonna start a band, and I'm going back to the studio, hopefully this week with some new songs and try a whole different approach to it. OJIG: It sounds exciting. ANDREW: It should be hopefully.OJIG: And where can our listeners get more information and find your book? ANDREW: Yeah, so the easiest way to find it on just Amazon. You search probably just search Andrew Castro but or the title of the book is Overcoming Your Anxiety for People on the Go. There's a Kindle version, and there's the paper back. I have a website, but I'm waiting till I get the podcast going everything before I start directing people to that. Right now, everything's going through Amazon. OJIG: Any parting words for listeners who may be anxious but struggling to name it? ANDREW: Yeah, I would say one is to educate yourself. There’s this book, mine, At Last a Life by Paul David. There's a book called Dare by Barry McDonough. Those are three, including mine. Three good books that you can go to, and those will help you and be patient. You're going to feel good when you read the books, like, Oh, you know, and then that's going to go away and you're going to go back to the way you felt. Never put a time limit on your recovery. You go into it with a full dedication and trusting the process. You're going to have setbacks, big ones. If you're having a setback, that means that before the setback you were doing better. Educate yourself, be patient, and you're not alone. I mean, there's probably hundreds of millions of people that are going through some sort of anxiety disorder at some point in their life. If you're not patient, you're gonna drive yourself into the ground. And if you don't educate yourself, you're not gonna understand that what you have is pretty common, and it's it's fixable. And then if you don't understand, you're alone, you're always going to feel isolated. So I think those three things are good to take with you.OJIG: Thank you so much.ANDREW: Thank you for having me.OUTRO: You've been listening to Method to the Madness, a bi-weekly public affairs show on K-A-L-X Berkeley celebrating Bay Area innovators. Today's producer was Ojig Yeretsian. You can find all of our podcasts on iTunes University. See you in two weeks. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Rebecca and Andrew talk about the way plants work in their lives – through sharing about their studies and personal journeys with plants. They also talk about fear and how pushing through that brings better things even though it isn't easy. Finally they also talk about traditional knowledge and how to respect elders an indigenous people.  Find Rebecca at BloodandSpicebush.com and the classes at Sassafras-School.com Think about how much you've enjoyed the podcast and how many episodes you listened to, and consider if it is time to support the Patreon You can do so here. If you want more of this in your life you can subscribe by RSS , iTunes, Stitcher, or email. Thanks for joining the conversation. Please share the podcast to help us grow and change the world.  Andrew You can book time with Andrew through his site here.  Transcription ANDREW: [00:00:01] Welcome to The Hermit's Lamp podcast episode 93. I am here with Rebecca Beyer, who is an herbalist and plant person and does all sorts of wonderful things in that environment. For [00:00:17] those who don't know you, Rebecca, give us . . . give us a quick introduction. Who are you? What do you . . . what are you about? REBECCA: Hi! I'm about, I guess, I'm about Appalachia and I'm about plants and [00:00:32] I'm about traditional witchcraft. That's like those three things. I think. ANDREW: Yeah. Well, if people don't know what Appalachia is . . . REBECCA: Yeah! ANDREW: Let's start with that, because maybe not everybody does.  REBECCA: That's so interesting and [00:00:47] I love that you all are up in Canada. So it's really cool to to know, you don't know what Appalachia is! [chuckling]  ANDREW: I mean, I think people . . . I do, but yeah, let's, let's just make sure nobody has to go Google anything mid-podcast.  REBECCA: That's such a good idea. Yeah, Appalachia is a region, [00:01:02] which is debated, that's cultural and ecological in the Eastern side of the United States. It's a mountain range that extends from, culturally, I would say, you know, Western Pennsylvania through Northern Georgia, [00:01:17] but mountain-wise and ecologically through a few different regions on the Eastern Seaboard, kind of inland. ANDREW: Mm-hmm. REBECCA: So, this big mountain range, the Appalachian Mountains. Mm-hmm. ANDREW: And there's a lot of spiritual tradition that's [00:01:32] kind of from that area, right? Like a lot of, sort of more folk magic and you know, those kinds of approaches, right? REBECCA: Yeah, that's one of the things that I am a student of and teach is Appalachian folk magic, and [00:01:47] I'm very passionate about . . . and especially where plants and plant lore come into that story. ANDREW: Mm-hmm. So did you grow up with that or did you find your way into it? Like how did that come about for you? REBECCA: That's a good question. I did not grow [00:02:02] up with it. I grew up on a farm in New Jersey. ANDREW: Okay. REBECCA: And, yeah . . . and halfway in both states. And it's funny cause when I tell people I'm from New Jersey, they're like, "Oh, you're not, you don't seem like you're from New Jersey at all," and I'm like, "Are you saying like, I'm not an asshole," like what? ANDREW: [laughing] REBECCA: What are [00:02:19] you saying? I don't know if I'm allowed to say that on the air. ANDREW: I'm sorry to everybody in New Jersey who's listening to this. Yeah. REBECCA: Well, I'm sorry, because I like, you know, I had a beautiful upbringing in a very pretty little country spot in central New Jersey. ANDREW: Mm-hmm. REBECCA: And I [00:02:34] loved our little farm, but we didn't raise plants. We just raised animals.  ANDREW: Okay. REBECCA: But I've always loved, I feel like since I was a little girl I wanted to be a witch. It was just something I've always been interested in and I was raised in the Unitarian Universalist Church. [00:02:49] So I met a lot of witches and it was easy to start studying witchcraft seriously. At around 12, I kind of dedicated myself to studying it and, through that, became more interested in plants and realizing that they could be used for more than food. [00:03:04]  ANDREW: Mm-hmm. And, so how did the head of the Appalachian part come in? Like, did you meet somebody, did you like, you know, go stand on a mountain and be like, oh, this is home. Like . . . ?  REBECCA: That's a good question. [00:03:19] I was obviously a very weird kid as we've, most of us probably were. ANDREW: Sure. REBECCA: And very socially isolated. We moved nine times when I was a kid, so I didn't have strong connections with other human adults till I was 18, when I moved to Upstate New York to go to college [00:03:34] at Bard College, and I met my now best friend Sarah Lynch Thomason, who's an Appalachian ballad singer, who's from Nashville, Tennessee. And she moved to Asheville right after we graduated from college. She graduated ahead of me, and she was like, you [00:03:49] HAVE to move here, Asheville, North Carolina, like, it is what's up. So I just packed my truck with all my things and drove to Asheville. And--after I graduated from college--and I just lived in her living room for two weeks. ANDREW: Right. REBECCA: And then I just fell [00:04:04] in love. I tried to leave, once, I think to go back up to Vermont where I had been living before, and I think that lasted like three weeks and I came back. So that was in 2010 when I moved here. So I've been here for longer now than anywhere I've ever lived in my life. ANDREW: It's [00:04:19] interesting how, you know, like I think about . . . I mean, Vermont's got lots of mountains. Upstate New York's got lots of mountains, you know? It's funny how, you know, from a geologic point of view, anyway, there's [00:04:34] this like, oh look. Well, it's all mountains. What about . . . what is it about those mountains? What is it about that place that drew you in or captivated you?  REBECCA: That's a good question. Well, I think, geologically speaking, the Appalachians are so special, [00:04:49] because they're some of the oldest mountains in the world, which we forget in America. We often like to excoticize--and I'll say North America, to include all of us on this continent--like to exoticize things from far away, but we have some of the most ancient land masses [00:05:05] in existence right at our fingertips, and it's pretty incredible. And plant communities that are very unique. And to me, the extreme biodiversity of where we live in southern Appalachia, where I live is temperate [00:05:20] rain forest. So we have more plants than anywhere except for North Alabama, which has the most diverse plant life in the United States.  ANDREW: That's amazing. REBECCA: Mm-hmm.   ANDREW: And did you find . . . do you feel like . . . You [00:05:35] know, like, lots of people talk about sort of spirit of place, right? as a thing that's sort of emerged into people's awareness more over time. And you know, at least more recently from my perspective. REBECCA: Yeah. ANDREW: You know, do you feel that that's part of it [00:05:50] for you? Like is there, is there a spirit of the land where you're actually hanging out that's, that's part of your life?  REBECCA: Yes, my friend Marcus McCoy who started the Veridis Genii Symposium . . . ANDREW: Yeah. REBECCA: When I was [00:06:05] early 20s--you probably know him--when I was in my early 20s, I stumbled across his blog, Bioregional Animism, and it really changed . . . It gave me words for things that I had felt but I didn't know were names for and other [00:06:20] bloggers have now gone on to further that idea, which was, you know, kind of coined, I'd say in the 70s with the rise of bioregional scholarship, on just like, policy and land management.  ANDREW: Mm-hmm. REBECCA: They took it deeper, you know? I [00:06:35] wrote a lot of my thesis--I have a master's degree in Appalachian Studies--and I wrote my thesis on--which is really silly, I know. But I looked a lot at like the history of bioregionalism and like what makes Appalachia and regional studies important. ANDREW: Mm-hmm. REBECCA: And [00:06:51] to me, in this globalized world, you know, we struggle for meaning, you can see it everywhere. Especially white folks, like without any cultural, strong cultural ties, will grab onto any strong cultural tie from any culture that [00:07:06] we can find. And yeah, and I think a lot of that comes from a lack of grounding in place. So to me, I do think there is a spirit of Appalachia. My friend Byron Ballard, who's a well-known Appalachian folk practitioner, she, in our area, says there's [00:07:21] a mother Appalachia, this kind of an entity that makes this place so special. And to me, I'm also a musician, I'm an artist, and all the things I do revolve around Appalachian folk practice. And to me, it's like helped me ground in, because [00:07:36] I wasn't raised here . . . ANDREW: Mm-hmm. REBECCA: Into the life way and the art way and the music way of this place. And not necessarily say, this is mine, it's from me, but wow, I participate in this, and I love it, and I want [00:07:51] to, you know, support it and continue it and nurture it.  ANDREW: Yeah. I think it's always interesting when people, you know, or never mind people. For me, you know, I mean, I found my way into being a Lukumi, you know Orisha [00:08:06] practitioner, right? You know, so, I'm initiated in an Afro-Cuban religion, you know, and that's, that's been my journey for, you know, getting towards being 20 years now, you know, but I think that it's really always interesting when people are looking [00:08:21] for that meaning and they find it somewhere else. How do you go about exploring that and connecting with that, in a way that is, you know, respectful, meaningful in a broader context, because it's . . . [00:08:36] I think that you know what people do in general, even if it's not respectful, might be meaningful to them personally, you know, but problematically culturally, right? But what do you think about . . . how you know, how, how would you recommend people approach this [00:08:51] kind of stuff if what you're talking about is something that they're drawn towards?  REBECCA: Yeah, I think that's such a good question and it's a sensitive one. You know, there's . . . I always notice that I feel fear and I feel nervousness when [00:09:06] talking about these things, because, unfortunately the way that people communicate online is very different than how they'll communicate in real life. [laughs] Discovered . . . I just taught a class, this is a great example, and I think will answer this question, on [00:09:21] the uses of fumatory plants worldwide to address cultural appropriation issues. ANDREW: Sure.  REBECCA: Because, specifically with white sage being overharvested, and a lot of indigenous Western folks saying, hey, can you guys slow your roll on this, you know? buying all this unsustainably [00:09:36] harvested sage? [laughs] ANDREW: Mm-hmm. REBECCA: So, like, why do you feel the need to burn this plant specifically, when it's not part of your cultural lineage? And I don't think anyone at this point in the world is like, you can't do anything that's not from your specific ancestry, because I mean I have eight different ancestries. [00:09:52] You know? And it's . . .  ANDREW: Sure. REBECCA:  Most people do. And, and, and I think that's not what people are saying, and a lot of folks get defensive, and say, "Well, what, am I not allowed to do anything?" and it's like, "No, calm down. [laughs] No one's telling you that." And I think what you're doing when you're initiated in something . . . [00:10:07] Initiation is an invitation. ANDREW: Mm-hmm. REBECCA: If you are studying with a person from that, you know, Afro-Cuban lineage, who's saying, "You're welcome here, come into this space." That's very different than when someone says, you know, "I'm gonna self study [00:10:22] this thing, and then declare myself an expert and then make money off this thing . . ." ANDREW: Mm-hmm. REBECCA: And never study the cultures that this thing comes from. ANDREW: For sure.  REBECCA: Yeah, because what I do, I'm not technically Southern Appalachian, but I practice and teach Appalachian folk magic. And some people, I'm sure, would take issue with that. But [00:10:37] what do I do? I think it's all about how we how we raise up the cultures that we are benefiting from. How do we support them? How do we not try to speak for them and do the like white savior thing? And like, how do we invest [00:10:53] ourselves in the continuance and preservation and nurturance of the cultures that bring us such joy and meaning. And I include myself in that even though, technically, Appalachian folk culture is largely based on some things I have cultural access to. It's also based [00:11:08] in Cherokee and African traditions. ANDREW: Mm-hmm. For sure.  REBECCA: That have direct lineage too, that I need to respect and call attention to.  ANDREW: Yeah, and that's an interesting thing about a lot of those, you know, Appalachian, you know, root work, hoodoo [00:11:23], like a lot of those, sort of, you know, from there, heading further south, traditions are really such an interesting meld of, you know, of cultures, right? REBECCA: Mm-hmm. ANDREW:  You know, they're, they [00:11:38] involve stuff that came from Africa through the slaves. They involve stuff that came through the indigenous communities that were there alongside those people, you know, and then they have a mixed in, you know, depending on the region, [00:11:53] you know, European Christian or other folk traditions too, right? Like it's such a . . . it's such an interesting meld and I think that it's so helpful to really respect the fact that they come from a bunch of different places. They [00:12:08] come from all those lineages, you know?  REBECCA: Yeah. Mm-hmm. ANDREW: Yeah, because it's easy to, like, it's easy to be like, well, you know, this is just like this person's thing or this is that person's like . . . They're diverse and their strength [00:12:23] comes from that history, right?  REBECCA: It's true. It's true, and it's great talking to my friends who are hoodoo practitioners, and saying, you know, the first time I met my friend Demetrius, who I don't know if you know, from New Orleans at [00:12:38] Veridas Genii Symposium. We were kind of like doing a comparison like, what do you, do you do this, in hoodoo?  And he's like, well, do you do this in Appalachian folk magic? And it was just like, such overlap that we were like, of course, these things are so similar. ANDREW: Mm-hmm. REBECCA: And it was wonderful and then we were like, "Let's sing a Scottish [00:12:53] ballad," you know, and like, because he does a lot of ballads. And then I'm like, let's, you know, he's like, "Do you want to learn this song in this West African language?" And I was like, "Oh heck, yeah." It was just, it was really cool, because it was like living that experience of seeing the lines . . . ANDREW: Mm-hmm. REBECCA: By sharing verbally [00:13:08] those things and song and in tradition and looking at different charms we were talking about. ANDREW: Mm-hmm.  REBECCA: And I loved that. It was really special and what you're saying, too, is, we tell stories about traditions being [00:13:23] all one thing and they're . . . One thing I learn as I get older--and I'm 31, I'm not terribly wise--but I notice things are always more complicated and beautifully complex than we think they are. ANDREW: Mm-mm. REBECCA: The're never black or white. It's just [00:13:38] complex. ANDREW: For sure. Yeah. Yeah. I think that one of the other things I want to circle back to, you know, is, you mentioned, you know, briefly about, like, sustainability and stuff like that. And I think that that is [00:13:53] also such an important part of the equation of what's, what we're talking about here too, right? Like, you know, if you're going to live in, you know, in connection with plants and connection with [00:14:08] the spirits of the, of a place or whatever, right? I think that, that that attention on making sure that it's sustainable, making sure that there's some left, you know, like . . . I mean, you know, in my tradition, we use a lot of plants and some [00:14:23] of them do grow up here. Some of them I grow myself inside. And you know, some of them are just not possible in the far far north where I practice, but you do what you can. But you know, one of the things that my elders always stress is, you know, you never [00:14:38] take it all. You always leave enough that it keeps going, right? You always want to make sure that whatever you're working with, that, you know, later on it'll have regrown or next season it will regrow or whatever, because there is this eye towards . . . [00:14:53] You know, this is, this is a thing forever, hopefully. And therefore we want to keep that going forever, you know?  REBECCA: Yeah. Mm-hmm. ANDREW: Yeah. REBECCA: Yeah, I teach foraging classes as my day job. [laughs] ANDREW: Yeah! REBECCA: That's what I do [00:15:08] for a living. And this year, I'm actually going to teach foraging at the University of North Carolina. ANDREW: Amazing. REBECCA: As a college course. I know, I feel so honored. It's one nice thing about having an Appalachian Studies Master's, is now I can teach at colleges and that's, you know, even though they pay terribly, it's very good. [ringing phone] ANDREW: [00:15:23] I'm sorry. Can we pause for one second here? I've no way to make the phone stop ringing. [whispers] Stupid phone! [laughs] It's . . . REBECCA: Also, I have to say . . .  ANDREW: What's that?  REBECCA: Your mustache is spectacular.  ANDREW: Thank you, thank you. REBECCA: It's like, that mustache is [00:15:39] on point.  ANDREW: I started it as a joke, like a year and a half ago. Somebody on the radio was saying like, mustaches are coming in. And I was like, I've never grown a mustache. I wonder if I can grow a mustache? And, and then, I started growing it and I posted to Facebook and [00:15:54] everyone was like, yes, keep it going, and now, I'm just like, all right. This is my, this is my life now, so. REBECCA: That's amazing. Mustache life!  ANDREW: Mustache life.  ANDREW: Mustache life. All right, I'm going to clap and then we can start again. [claps] All right. [00:16:09] You were talking about teaching at the university.  REBECCA: Yeah, I'm really excited to get to teach at UNCA. I'm teaching foraging, and you were speaking about sustainability, and there's a lot of interesting, confusing, [00:16:24] complex arguments about wildcrafting in the United States, especially. ANDREW: Mm-hmm. REBECCA: And in Canada, and any place that is colonized indigenous land. And what, as settler folks, who are European ancestry, like what are our responsibilities to [00:16:39] be good wildcrafters. Some people say you shouldn't wildcraft at all, zero percent is sustainable. ANDREW: Mm-hmm. REBECCA: Others say, you can just take indiscriminately and do whatever you want. But obviously, I think the truth, there's no such thing as truth, [00:16:54] but I think a more balanced view is somewhere in between and something I've been really interested in and enjoying doing is: there's a lot of plants we call invasive and some of them radically alter their landscape, like one of my favorite plants, kudzu. ANDREW: Mm-hmm. REBECCA: Which [00:17:10] on Gordon White's podcast, I mentioned I like kudzu and you would not believe the angry humans on those comments. [laughs] ANDREW: I would, I would.  REBECCA: I did not say we should go plant kudzu. I did not say like throw its seeds everywhere. I just said I love kudzu. And that triggered [00:17:26] a lot of people. Because it's edible, it's medicinal, and I'm in recovery from alcoholism, and kudzu's root has some great compounds in it that specifically help with the cravings for alcohol. So it's one, spiritually very in line with my heart and my personal journey. So, [00:17:41] and it was used in Japan and China for that purpose for a long time. But it's just funny because I can harvest as much kudzu is I want, you know, and like, I'm not going to put a dent in it. [laughs] But, I mean, if I want to harvest as much bloodroot, a native [00:17:56] plant, as I want, I can destroy that plant population. ANDREW: Sure.  REBECCA: So, it's just so . . . And, like, to me, saying all or nothing is never the right answer because harvesting invasives is actually beneficial to the environment, because it frees up space for more native [00:18:11] plants.  ANDREW: Yeah. I love dandelion. REBECCA: Me too! ANDREW: And you know, there's another one, like there's just, you know, I could never get rid of it in my garden, even if I tried probably. So, the amount that I can [00:18:26] take of that is basically everything that's showing, any time I want, and it just, you know, give it two or three weeks and boom, they're back again with another crop. REBECCA: Mm-hmm. ANDREW: You know, so, yeah.  REBECCA: And those plants have followed us from Europe here and [00:18:41] from Asia and from all the different places that all the different people that live on this continent now come from and it's the story of the colonization of this continent is evident in our plant life. ANDREW: Mm-hmm. REBECCA: And it marks the times that all the different people have come over here. And [00:18:56] all the different trading has occurred. You know, kudzu came over, I think, in the 30s and 40s for the World's Fair, as an erosion control plant and a crop for animals to eat, because it's very good for horses and cows and pigs and chickens and [00:19:11] [laughs] and people to eat, it's fine protein. So, I just think, you know, focusing on harvesting invasive plants and plants that are abundant is a great way to ask the question: Is this sustainable? And also know that you will never know the answer. ANDREW: Uh huh. REBECCA: A lot of: plant [00:19:26] world are like, "I know the truth!" And you're like, you do? That's . . . Okay. I see you're very confident in yourself. Because we're always finding new things out, and ecology is just like folk magic or any magic spiritual tradition, always changing.  ANDREW: For sure. And also, you [00:19:41] know, with climate change.  REBECCA: Oh, yes. ANDREW: Like, I think that that's another thing that comes into this where it's like, we might have an idea based on, you know, our experiences or our lifetime or you know, maybe even like our parents' or grandparents' lifetime, [00:19:56] but, things are changing a lot now. And you know, that's going to change what, what all these plants do it, you know, and and also, you know all these, you know, continuously there are new plants being introduced and shifting back and forth [00:20:11] and all that kind of stuff, right? So. It's such a dynamic system.  REBECCA: Dynamic is such a good word to describe it. And I think, you know, once again, it's so funny. Like I even feel fear saying like: Invasive plants. Harvest them. Because you know, it's like, it's tough. People have very strong opinions [00:20:26] about how plants are to be managed and a lot of very good and important hard questions come up around that. ANDREW: Mm-hmm. REBECCA: But the thing is, we do need to eat and heal ourselves from illness.  ANDREW: Yeah. REBECCA: Most of those things can [00:20:41] be done with a lot of the invasive plants. And that's not to say I never harvest native plants. Like I use poke a lot, which is a native plant, but most people think it's a noxious weed. They'll say, oh, that's a weed. ANDREW: Sure.  REBECCA: It's not, it's a native plant. It's, you know, it's just [00:20:56] funny that people are like oh, this horrible weed. And I'm like, what are you talking about? ANDREW: Well, it's true. It's like, you know, so a bunch of the plants that grow around here, that I use often in my religious practice, [00:21:11] you know, purslane, you know, stuff like that. You just find them growing out of the sidewalk, right? Like, in the city, it's, you know, you just, you go down the back lane way and you're like, oh look, you know, here's this one and that one [00:21:26] and you know, and they're just growing up between cracks in the cement and wherever, because those, those really hardy, you know, aggressive plants, you know, one, they have a lot of strength magically, you [00:21:41] know, in a general way, I think. But, but, two, they, you know, they're, they're everywhere and again, they're the kinds of things where it's like, you know, you don't take it all but also, even if you did, they're so resilient, like, people are [00:21:56] trying to get rid of them all the time and they cannot, you know, so yeah, it's very interesting. REBECCA: Yeah, and that's a great way too, to find places to forage. I talk to a lot of farmer friends and I'll say, you know, I love dandelion root . . . ANDREW: Mm-hmm. REBECCA: For its liver medicine. And it [00:22:11] definitely is, you know, is a plant I feel is aligned with the element of air, it's very good for spirit work and communication, but also not toxic so you can use it with impunity in some ways. ANDREW: Mm-hmm. REBECCA: And call my friends and say, hey, do you mind if I bring my apprentices and our trowels out and we'll dig some dandelion [00:22:26] at your house. And they're always like, oh come on over. Or you call people in, you know, and they're like, oh, come on over. So we go to different farms and kind of weed them. ANDREW: Mm-hmm. REBECCA: And then we go home with all the things that we want. It's a great symbiotic relationship. [laughs] ANDREW: For sure. Yeah, I have [00:22:41] raised beds in my, in my garden . . . REBECCA: Oh! ANDREW: And then the rest of it is this sort of crummy hard pack, you know, dirt that's . . . whatever was like, you know, when [00:22:56] they built it, they filled in because we're over a parking garage, right? And yeah, it's, all the stuff that grows there is all wonderful energetically. And you know, dandelion, and plantain, and you know, like all that kind of stuff. It's like we [00:23:11] would just go out in the yard and my kids are like, you know, they go ahead and pick a bunch and come back and make salad out of it and all that kind of stuff, you know, because it's there, and it's useful if you know what you're looking at, right?  REBECCA: Kids are so good at learning plants. I teach a lot of children. People bring their kids on our foraging tours [00:23:26] and they always, at the end of the tour, can recite every plant we met. And the parents are like, oh, what was that one? And the kids are like, you know, it's bitter, hairy bittercress and I'm like, oh good job. [laughs] ANDREW: Yeah.  REBECCA: They know everything. And they'll remember all the uses. They're so good. ANDREW: That's amazing. [00:23:41] So, I'm curious, because you've mentioned this a couple times now. Is the sort of, you said, I'm afraid to talk about this. I'm afraid to talk about that.  REBECCA: Yeah! [laughs] ANDREW: What . . . [00:23:56] tell me about the reservation. Like . . . REBECCA: Yeah! ANDREW: What, what is it that you run into around that? REBECCA: Well, I think a lot of it come up recently for me with my fumatory herbs class. I got a lot of really mean aggressive and [00:24:11] I would even say violent communications around me daring to suggest to folks of non-North American indigenous ancestry that maybe they shouldn't burn white sage with impunity. And I [00:24:26] think, I tried to say this compassionately and patiently as I could, I tried not to use attacking language. I called my, you know, my own self and my own shortcomings into the conversation, because I make mistakes constantly. I don't know the right answers. I'm just guessing. ANDREW: Mm-hmm. REBECCA: I'm just trying, you know? [00:24:41]  ANDREW: Yeah. REBECCA: And I . . . the venom with which strangers will write to me is horrific, and it's funny because, you see this over and over again, on Internet communications. Because when I taught my class in person, I was terrified that people would yell at me . . . [00:24:56] ANDREW: Sure. REBECCA: There would be fighting in the class. Like I was afraid it would be really bad. I had probably 40 people show up to this class. It was incredible. People were compassionate and patient. Nobody got a millimetre out of line. ANDREW: Yeah. REBECCA: And [00:25:11] just like, I thought that was the case, but I'm so glad to see this is true. And everybody was just building together. Asking questions. Even if someone didn't understand something, no one was like well, you're an idiot for not understanding this complicated concept. [00:25:26] And I just appreciated how kind people were to each other and I see that that's the case. ANDREW: Mm-hmm. REBECCA: You know but online when you're anonymous . . .  ANDREW: Definitely. Yeah. REBECCA: And that's where it comes from for me because I just see other herbalists and I'm [00:25:41] often holding myself back in my work, I think, because I'm terrified to make mistakes and hurt people. But it also prevents me from sharing more information, or you know, providing access to education to more folks that want it. ANDREW: Yeah. I totally get that. You know?  REBECCA: You feel [00:25:56] that way? ANDREW: I . . . last fall, I had made an Orisha Tarot deck with . . . that got published through Llewellyn. And so, it's basically everywhere. And--which [00:26:11] is great--and the amount of apprehension I had about being an outsider, about, you know, even, even with the blessings of my ancestors, or like, my elders, my ancestors, the spirits through divination, like, even with [00:26:26] all those things, there's just like "ohhh, man," like waiting for that, that, you know, potential thing, right? And sometimes you get it and sometimes you don't, right? And definitely online is a place where it's way more likely, because online people [00:26:42] . . . Be kind, people, just be kind! I'm sure nobody listening to this podcast is mean online. REBECCA: [chuckles] ANDREW: But, yeah, but, but, that apprehension, right? And then also that realization, now that it's out there, that how much people [00:26:57] are benefiting from it, you know, and how much people are, you know, telling me how grateful they are that I made this offering, you know, to the world and whatever. And I think that it's such a delicate line . . . REBECCA: Yeah.  ANDREW: For, for us, [00:27:12] for people doing work, for people offering teaching, you know, and that, there's so many people out there who are just like, "Rah, rah, rah, do your thing, screw everybody, give no fucks, whatever" and I'm always like, that's horrible. Like, let's not be like [00:27:27] that! That's not useful. REBECCA: [laughs] Yeah! ANDREW: But then also there's like so many people doing good work like, you know, what you're up to, where it's, there's also that like, "Oh, should I? How's it going to go? What's gonna happen? I don't know," you know? REBECCA: Yeah. ANDREW: And, [00:27:42] and, and it's real, you know, that tension is really real. And I think that so many people experience it around their work and stuff. You know, how do you find your way through it?  REBECCA: I think a lot of it is, I try to use, [00:27:57] like I am an incredibly privileged person. You know? ANDREW: Yeah. REBECCA: I'm a large able-bodied white tall physically able person, who can appear heterosexual in certain situations. [laughs] And I . . . And [00:28:12] feminine, you know, and it's . . . So I can use those things to leverage messages and voices that are erased and largely unheard in my friends' communities, especially my indigenous friends. And I do a lot of work with [00:28:27] with the Catawba Indian nation. And the . . . I'm hoping to do some more with the Cherokee Nation around ethnobotany. And reestablishing control over the knowledge of foraging to the people who taught it to my ancestors here. [00:28:42]  And I think it's kind of crazy that me, as a European-ancestored-person, am going and teaching indigenous people how to forage, because their own knowledge was erased from them, through genocide. And it's, to me, like acknowledging those things, and like [00:28:57] when we come together as people in the real world and real life, together, me and my friends and those nations, we can create pretty amazing things. And we talk about really hard, uncomfortable, scary stuff and it's tough. You know? It's hard. It brings up a lot for both of us. But [00:29:12] instead of allowing it to paralyze us and prevent us, we're like, what can we build from the space? Like, where do we go forward? Let's acknowledge these things, talk about the hard stuff, the history, the harm caused by my ancestors, and let's [00:29:27] build something new from that. You know? ANDREW: Mm-hmm. REBECCA: And I think that's really tough. It's because we don't know what to do. None of us really know. And for me, like constantly giving word, voice, accolade, and when I have extra resources, [00:29:42] putting my resources towards the people whose land this was and is, still. That to me is what I can do. And I know that's not what everyone would say is the best way but for me, I know, I don't . . . Unfortunately, being [00:29:57] a Appalachian folk magical practitioner is definitely not a great way to make a lot of money . . . BOTH: [laughing] REBECCA: I don't have a ton of resources and I have a lot of debt. ANDREW: Uh-huh.  REBECCA: But I have a lot of non-monetary resources, like access to academic information. [00:30:12] So I do a lot of research for my friends who don't have access to journals. ANDREW: Mm-hmm. REBECCA: And I give them, you know, my university, don't tell my university I give them my login.  ANDREW: Nobody from university is listening, it's fine.  REBECCA: I know. They're not. Don't worry. But just finding ways to constantly figure [00:30:27] out like, okay, who am I speaking for? How can I help make space for others to speak and how can I make my resources available to them that are most helpful? And not what I think is most helpful, but what they need.  ANDREW: Yeah. I think that part about asking [00:30:42] people what they need? I mean, I think it's such a such a piece that gets overlooked so often in any kind of restorative approach.  REBECCA: Yes! ANDREW: Right?  REBECCA: Restorative, yeah.  ANDREW: That, like, say you're sorry, like whatever [00:30:57] it was, personal thing, you know, a generational thing or whatever, say, "Hey, I'm really sorry this happened, and then ask, like, "Is there something you need? Is there something that, that you think that I might be able to do that you need?" And then you can really [00:31:12] see where the conversation goes, right? Because I find so often people make these apologies or, you know, like, you know, I mean, again, maybe I'm being judgmental about people who are raging against you about using white [00:31:27] sage online, but I'm like, listen, just start with an apology, or just start with saying, "Huh. Well, what could I do instead. What might make sense?" You know? And maybe, maybe there are people, and probably there are people, who a hundred percent like have a deep deep connection [00:31:42] to that plant? Or, you know, like the white sage plant. Or there are lots of ways in which you can procure stuff sustainably, if you want to. REBECCA: Yeah. ANDREW: Like, you know. I got some stuff here. There's a new farmer in [00:31:57] Ontario who started growing stuff. You know, he got laid off from his job and he started expanding what he was already farming for himself, and it's great. You know, it's local, it's organic. It's . . . You know, it's sustainably harvested because [00:32:12] he's farming it himself, right? You know, it's great.  REBECCA: Yeah. ANDREW: Right? So like there's lots of options but being mad about it. That's not, like, that doesn't help anybody and . . .  REBECCA: Yeah, they don't like being told they can't do something. People are mad at me for saying . . . And I didn't say that. I said, "Hey, [00:32:27] maybe listen to indigenous people."  ANDREW: Yeah. REBECCA: And too, look at how this plant is now entering threatened status. And like, these are two things that are very important for different reasons.  ANDREW: Mm-hmm. Yeah. And, and I think too, you know, I mean, it's [00:32:42] always something that's very interesting to me, because my approach to working with plants, outside of my traditional stuff, which I learned from my elders, is I go for walks in the ravine, you know, or in the the forest in the valley here or [00:32:57] even in the lane ways. And, when I find a plant, like something'll grab my attention. And I'll be like, "Huh? What are you? What's going on?" And I'll just sit down and hang out with it for a while.  REBECCA: Yeah. ANDREW: And, you [00:33:12] know, none of those plants are mad. I've yet to find an angry plant. You know? I mean, like, that kind of like, conflicty energy, you know. Even, even plants that are in competition with each [00:33:27] other or whatever, I never have that feeling from them, that they have that aggressiveness, you know? And I think that it's an interesting thing to sort of ask yourself when you're working with plants. Like, what is the energy of this plant, [00:33:42] and how am I aligned with it? And how are my feelings aligned with it? And what's going on from there? You know? I don't know, does that make any sense to you? REBECCA: Oh, definitely. And I think . . . I totally agree with you. And I was talking to a friend the other day and he's like, "How do we separate [00:33:57] the spiritual from the political?" And I was like, "I don't think we can, and I don't think we should, at this point, but I think I see why people want to." They say, "Oh, can we just leave politics out of it?"  ANDREW: Sure.  REBECCA: Like well, that would be great. But unfortunately, with [00:34:12] the way things are, we can't. And it's . . . there's, you know, a lot of Internet explosions around things like that. ANDREW: Mm-hmm. REBECCA: Because people are like, "Well, you, don't bring up politics at this event." And it's like, well, you can't talk about plants or harvesting [00:34:27] or medicine and magic and not talk about the people it's come from, how we know about it.  ANDREW: Yeah.  REBECCA: And the story of how we got to this point. And it's . . . We need to do better as you know, as a community, especially, you know, in the white herbal world and [00:34:42] white practitioners need to do better about being open to like, talking about hard stuff and realizing it doesn't mean they have to fling themselves off a cliff. [laughs] You know? ANDREW: For sure, right? Yeah. REBECCA: You know, sometimes people think that's what people are asking of them, and it's like no one is asking you to fling yourself off a cliff. Maybe some people are, but you [00:34:57] don't have to do that. And it's just about being able to say like, whoa, what's the real story of how I got this information?  ANDREW: Yeah. REBECCA: And you know, the real story of when I harvest poke, I know what poke's medicinal uses are because indigenous and African [00:35:12] folks told my ancestors those things. So I need to, every time I work with that plant, I think about that. And I don't think about it in a negative or combative way. I think, like you're saying, I think about it in a, like, thank you, gratitude.  ANDREW: Yeah.  REBECCA: A building.  ANDREW: [00:35:27] Yeah. I don't think we can ever separate. . . I mean, yeah, I don't think we can really ever separate or ought to, as you say, at this time, separate politics from our spirituality. You know, I think that that that makes no sense at all [00:35:42] to me and even historically, you know . . . REBECCA: Yeah. [laughs]  ANDREW: You know, you look at a lot of, like the the stories of the Orishas going back, you know? So many of them demarcate political shifts in power and other kinds of things that [00:35:57] are, that are historical, you know? This group came in. They took over this, this region. They deposed the kind of person who was in charge. And the spirit that that person, you know, was most aligned with got a new story, where they [00:36:12] got demoted somehow because of something, right? Or what have you, you know? There's a lot of that. And, it's why, when I wrote the book that goes to my deck, I included the politics, a bunch of politics, all through it and even a chapter in the front that's . . . The, the header is like, why are there [00:36:27] politics in this book? And you know, and it's like, there's a few pages on like why, why I wanted to, you know, really make sure I was engaging in honoring some of that political content because it's true of the religion, it's true of [00:36:42] the world, and it's true for people who are living in the world and using these tools or these plants or whatever. We're all running into politics all the time, you know? And so I thought the idea that we could free ourselves from that somehow is, I [00:36:58] don't know, reminds me very much of like the Golden Dawn notion of like . . . REBECCA: [laughs] ANDREW: We'll get back to like the one true history behind all of the movement of the last, you know, thousands of years since Egypt and we'll, you know, access pure spiritual being or whatever. It's like no. That [00:37:13] doesn't exist. You know? REBECCA: I think you're so right. That was really well said and I totally agree. And I . . . it's . . . to me, I don't want to shame the, like when I hang out with a lot of hippies in Asheville and they're like, we're one human family. I'm like, we are, you're right and it's . . . it's great. [00:37:28] We're all humans. We have these shared human experiences. But within that human experience, my experience is very different than my friend who's, you know, Latinx or a person of color or disabled or a differently [00:37:43] abled or you know, blind or deaf or like anybody that experiences the world and and the, unfortunately, the baggage that the world puts upon them, in our culture . . . ANDREW: Mm-hmm. REBECCA: The different reasons and the different oppressions that people experience. [00:37:58] I don't understand the . . . Like, for me it's difficult to understand when people are like, let's just pretend that things don't exist, because it's hard! ANDREW: Sure. REBECCA: To deal with and it's hard when you don't experience a lot of those things, to be compassionate enough to say, what would it be like? What . . . How can I put [00:38:13] myself in that person's shoes? ANDREW: Mm-hmm. REBECCA: And be compassionate to them, and be like, wow, you have had it way more difficult than me. And that doesn't mean that once again, I need to jump off a cliff, but it means I need to be aware of how I move through the world and who I'm stepping [00:38:28] on, who I'm profiting off of . . . ANDREW: Mm-hmm. REBECCA: And who I'm supporting in the way that they would like to be supported, not the way I think they should be supported. ANDREW: For sure. REBECCA: And like you said, I don't . . . I always tell my students, I'm like, I don't know the answers. I have no idea what I'm talking about. I'm just . . . [laughs] I [00:38:43] do have some idea. But I'm guessing and I'm list-, trying to listen to my friends, and what their needs actually are, and I make mistakes. ANDREW: Mm-hmm. REBECCA: And I have to be sorry, like you said, and then ask, what do you, what word did you use, recon-, not [00:38:58] reconstructed, but re- . . . You used a great word to kind of describe that asking somebody, what can I do? What do you need from me? ANDREW: Mm-hmm. REBECCA: To- . . . true apology. ANDREW: Yeah. Yeah, for sure. I can't remember right now, but you can rewind and listen to it later. [laughs]  REBECCA: [00:39:13] Well, that word, you know . . . ANDREW: Mm-hmm. REBECCA: And that concept of . . . That to me is so integral in our in our work, especially with plants. It's so complicated. And like I said, many people will either say, "Right on," you know, or say "Wow, [00:39:28] she's a crazy communist," you know, or "Wow, she's actually horrible and she shouldn't harvest any plans at all." And I know, at some point, I want everyone to like me . . . [laughs] You know, I want everyone .  . . I'm a very people-pleasing person, being socialized female growing up, you [00:39:43] know, I always want to make everyone happy and feel safe. Also quadruple Cancer here. ANDREW: Wow, that's a lot of Cancer. It's a lot of Cancer. The struggle is real, eh? REBECCA: A real struggle but, I've got a lot of fire too. So it's hard to find out . . . ANDREW: Mm-hmm. REBECCA: What to truly do about that. [00:39:58] But I think what you've said, like, and the way you handled it in your book . . . There . . . People will be mad at us, no matter what we do in life and dislike us and that's okay.  ANDREW: Yeah. REBECCA: Looking for places who are causing real harm. That's to me more important than dealing with people who are on the Internet screaming. ANDREW: Mm-hmm. REBECCA: Real [00:40:13] purpose. [laughs] ANDREW: Yeah, for sure. Yeah, people can, people can do whatever they want on the Internet. It's fine. It's the Internet. I mean, it'd be great if people were kinder, but well, it's the Internet. So. [laughs] So that's the modern monster we've created right? Now, it's [00:40:28] funny, I've been . . . So, I guess, I have a question for you and then we will wrap up because you know, we've been on the phone for a while here, which has been super fun and we could probably talk for a long time. But so, my [00:40:43] question is: If you were to pick a plant or maybe a couple plants, that you think their energy harmonizes with kind of what we've been talking about here. What, what plant would that be, for you, for somebody [00:40:58] to get to know, you know, on an energetic level or whatever level makes sense, you know?  REBECCA: Yeah, that's such a good question. I think, for me, one of my most patron plants is mugwort, Artemisia vulgaris. ANDREW: Uh huh. REBECCA: And [00:41:13] it-- [laughs] Most gardeners in my town will be like, I hate mugwort, because it has running rootless, and it goes all over the place . . . ANDREW: Yeah. REBECCA: And it's a weed. But mugwort has been used historically all over the world as a banishing herb. ANDREW: Mm-hmm. REBECCA: The way that [00:41:28] many like new age folks use white sage now, which is not really its intended purpose, is what I've been told . . . ANDREW: Mm-hmm. REBECCA: By different folks and you can read a lot more about that by actual indigenous people online. If you want to look up the original uses [00:41:43] of white sage, I'd encourage you to do that. But mugwort, whether burned or even just hung up as a bundle, was used to keep away evil, to cleanse things, to remove disease-causing spirits, and in Asia, as well as North America and Europe, [00:41:58] and now it's naturalized. It's not native. It's naturalized all over the United States in lots of different species. And they're fragrant. They're edible, medicinal, important plants and I invite you to meet mugwort. And especially if [00:42:13] you have German ancestry, it was one of most important fumic plants of the German folks, which my last name means "from Bavaria." So, as you can imagine, that's some of the stuff I focus on in my work, but I invite people that to meet mugwort, because when you harvest it, you're weeding [00:42:28] out an invasive plant, you can make all types of food and medicine, and I have a post on my blog about the history of its magical uses, if people are curious with it.  ANDREW: We'll include a link in the show notes, for sure. That's awesome. Yeah, mugwort's [00:42:43] a really great one. You know, it's funny. It's amusing. I don't know. I don't even know what the right word is. I'm always surprised at how hard a sell it is to people sometimes? When other things are just such an [00:42:58] easy sell, right?  REBECCA: Yeah. ANDREW: But, but now I'm just going to be like, you know, look, Rebecca says you should use this one. I'll there put a little sign above the . . . You know, your face, saying, "Get this one!" right where we sell it in the shop. [laughs] Yeah. Yeah, [00:43:13] the one that I leaned on a lot through, through that kind of like journeys with this stuff was, was actually was dandelion. REBECCA: Hmm. ANDREW: You know, it's a sort of like, you know, partly because of its notion of like, that deep [00:43:28] taproot as sort of staying deeply grounded in my own practice and being really really like grounded in what I do. Partly, you know, because of, like even though people see it as a weed, the beauty of its flower, right? That sort of like [00:43:43] offering of a radiance to the world throughout what I'm trying to do with my work, and also because it's, you know, often used for like detoxifying and stuff like that, that sort of like inner cleanse. It's like, I've got to root out this stuff, that's conditioning and [00:43:58] cultural baggage and other things, so that I can be more authentic to myself and what I need to be doing, you know? So that was definitely one that I leaned down a lot. You know, last year, especially through the summer time, [00:44:13] whenever I was like, feeling, feeling that worry about what was going to happen when the thing came out. I was like, all right, let's go out in the garden, dig up some dandelions, make some tea, or like hang out with them, or put a put a bunch of them on the table for a while or whatever, you know, so. [00:44:28]  REBECCA: Yeah. ANDREW: Yeah, for sure.   REBECCA: That's amazing. I love that. Thanks for sharing that with me.  ANDREW: Yeah! So, for people who want to check out what you're up to, and people should definitely check out what you're up to. Where do they find you? Where . . . [00:44:43] what are you up to, where are you hanging out online right now? REBECCA: Where do I lurk? Well, I have a website and an Instagram account called Blood and Spicebush. And my website is BloodandSpicebush.com. Spicebush is one of my favorite native plants and a blood cleanser, [00:44:58] hence the name of my website! And I also run a small folk herbalism school with my friend Abby Artemisia, called Sassafras School. And you can find us at Sassafras-School.com. And we have a few more spaces left in our yearlong [00:45:13] program on folk medicine and wild foods, as we're both female botanists and foragers and medicinal practitioners. So, we're excited to share that, because there's lots of amazing clinical herb programs, but we've seen there wasn't really any folk [00:45:28] program. So we decided to give it a go and see how that goes. ANDREW: Nice. That's awesome. Amazing. And you're going to be in Hamilton this summer, for folks who are local to the shop. So, you know, we'll put a link in for where you can find that as well in the notes, [00:45:43] but, Rebecca's going to be up in up in our part of the world a little bit where the shop is, so.  REBECCA: End of June. Yeah. ANDREW: End of June, yeah. Well, thank you so much for being on. It's been a wonderful chatting with you. Thank you. REBECCA: It was a pleasure. Thank you. 

  Enrique and Andrew catch up on what the birds are saying. They talk about the effect of living with an oracle versus reading and oracle. The conversation winds through ideas of how being in tune wit the oracles impact their relationship with the rest of life. Finally they end by answering listeners questions.  Episode 13, Poetry, Magic, and Ice Cream, and episode 63 [00:00:30], Definitions and Silence. Think about how much you've enjoyed the podcast and how many episodes you listened to, and consider if it is time to support the Patreon You can do so here. If you want more of this in your life you can subscribe by RSS , iTunes, Stitcher, or email. If you'd like to connect with Enrique go check him out on Facebook here.  Thanks for joining the conversation. Please share the podcast to help us grow and change the world.  Andrew You can book time with Andrew through his site here.  Transcription ANDREW: [00:00:00] Hello, my friends, welcome to The Hermit's Lamp podcast. I wanted to let you know that the new intro music here was composed by my daughter, Claire. I hope you dig it. I certainly am loving on her creativity. Also, this is episode 91 with Enrique Enriquez. And if you have not caught our past conversations, you should go check them out: Episode 13, Poetry, Magic, and Ice Cream, and episode 63 [00:00:30], Definitions and Silence. Both available in the archives, either on the website or in your podcast catcher.  [new music!] Speaker 2: [00:01:00] Let me start by saying thank you to all the Patreons who support this podcast in general, and specifically help the process of providing transcripts of every episode to the public so that anybody for any reason can access all this wonderful information. Those fine people are getting access to great bonus material and they make this happen. If you are listening to this podcast, think about how many episodes you've listened to, how much you've appreciated it [00:01:30], and please consider heading on over to Patreon.com/TheHermitsLamp, and pitching something in to continue supporting this work. It is truly a situation where every dollar helps.  Welcome back to The Hermit's Lamp podcast. I'm here today with Enrique Enriquez, who is a card reader, poet, and artist, and you know was featured in a wonderful movie called Tarology, which [00:02:00] you can find on many places online right now. [Here's the trailer on YouTube: https://youtu.be/A5UR3VesQGo] This is the third time that Enrique has been on the show, and if you haven't checked out the other episodes, check the show notes for them. I'll provide links, so people can go back and hear our previous conversations. Enrique, for people who are meeting you for the first time, who are you? What are you about? What's going on?  ENRIQUE: Well, you know, the other day I went to a bookstore that is across the street. And first of all, Andrew, it's always [00:02:30] so good to hear you and always so good to talk to you.  ANDREW: Mm-hmm. ENRIQUE: But anyway, you know, I have this book store across the street and I went there. And there was this voice, they were doing something on the floor, I was talking to the guy. And then as I was about to leave, the woman on the floor stood up to say, "Wait!" and then I turn around and say, "What?" And say, "Are you the guy who talks like a bird?" And I say, "Yes, as a matter of fact [00:03:00], I am," and she say, "Yes, a friend told me about you," and I . . . That made me very happy, you know?  ANDREW: Mm-hmm.  ENRIQUE: So, I guess, I am the man who speaks like a bird. ANDREW: Excellent. ENRIQUE: And at the moment, that seems to be plenty.  ANDREW: I think that's wonderful. I mean, for me, listening to the birds and, and trying to speak with them is definitely one of my, one of my favorite things these days. You know, I've been spending, for [00:03:30] years now, really spending a lot of time trying to engage with them, and more and more over time I've found myself drawn deeper and deeper into . . . into the world of birds. So yeah, it's wonderful.  ENRIQUE: Yes. Yeah, if you know, I suspect that birds are some sort of [Amic? Homic?] knowledge religion that is universal. I only know one person, a friend of mine, who says that birds are jerks and he hates birds. And [00:04:00] he say, "I know you like birds, but I hate birds," and but also always ... ANDREW: (laughing) That's a lot of strong feeling for birds!  ENRIQUE: Yes, exactly. ANDREW: Why does he hate birds?  ENRIQUE: Yes, but usually, I don't know, I mean, I guess, we said, you know, a bird is somehow that the embodiment of a long [garbled at 4:28] We [00:04:30] look at a bird, we think of birds, we listen to birds. You know, it's just about survival. They go around trying to find something to eat. There is no, no Romanticism in this view of birds, which is fine. I mean, I think it's a great exception, because usually as soon as you . . . You know, the other day, I was talking to . . . having a beer with these poets, a poet from Turkey and a poet from New Zealand and [00:05:00] they asked me, "What do you think about Trump?" And I told him what I believe, which is that Trump has no place in my reality. I don't care. And then, as soon as I mentioned birds, they told me all kinds of fantastic stories about their own relationship with birds. And about 45 minutes into the conversation, I say, "See, that's why I don't think about Trump." ANDREW: Right. ENRIQUE: I mean, there are better things to talk about, your, your mind. [00:05:30] Yes, so I think that that that's how, birds account for that common longing we have, for some sort of transcendence that I don't want to, I don't want to put a name to it. But then when you actually make a bird sound, you realize that you are, you are enacting this form that is at once transparent and opaque, you know, because you're not really saying anything, and even so, everybody understands you. ANDREW: Mmm.  ENRIQUE: So I end up realizing [00:06:00] that I like to speak like a bird, and that basically means that since the beginning of this summer I started actually recording myself using all these bird calls, like these wooden artifacts or metal artifacts that imitate the sound of birds, and then sending my friends bird messages instead of text or voice messages, right? And by speaking like a bird, what I actually accomplish is, I avoid misunderstandings. ANDREW: Mmm. ENRIQUE: Everybody [00:06:31] seems to understand the form of a bird sound. ANDREW: I like it. I feel like we must have talked about this on the podcast previously. You know, in the Orisha tradition, Osain, who is . . . He's responsible for all the knowledge of all the plants and all the magic that comes from that. He's sort of the wizard who lives in the forest, who's been . . . ENRIQUE: Beautiful. ANDREW: Broken down and, you know, scarred [00:07:01] by various conflicts and battles he's had over the years, and Osain speaks like a bird. And you know, when we . . . when we do certain ceremonies and we sing, there are . . . There are these parts where we sing, where we're singing not any words, but just to imitate the sound of the birds and to acknowledge the way in which Osain speaks to us, right?  ENRIQUE: Ah, that's fantastic.  ANDREW: Yeah, so, you know ... You're in [00:07:31] good company.  ENRIQUE: Yes, of course, and, no, it's amazing when you start looking into it, that the amount of effort and time that people have put into trying to imitate birds or talk like birds or understand birds, through history. And there is a, just as you say, there was a sort of pre-Koranic poetry that was all based on imitating the cooing of a mourning dove. And then you have the same in New Guinea. There is a tribe there that all their poetry is [00:08:01] based on the idea of imitating the cooing of a mourning dove, that wailing sound.  But, I mean, there are countless examples and, of course, thousands of poems about birds, but I guess I . . . Something clicked or shifted this summer. So, I started working with that because I understood that the moment I started sending these bird sounds to people, I went from somebody who could interpret signs [00:08:31] to somebody who was just delivering signs, so they became the interpreters, they were the ones telling me: "Yes. Thank you. I really needed this today." Or, like happened the other day with this, this man. He sent me a recording of a bird that he hears out of the window and then I just mimicked it. I just imitated the same . . . I sent him back the same thing, but I made it and then he say, "Oh, I love yours because I can hear my own name in it."  ANDREW: (chuckling) ENRIQUE: And [00:09:01] you know. And that, like a friend from Finland who say, you know, "Birds are only quiet when there are earthquakes or tsunamis or something horrible is about to happen." ANDREW: Mm-hmm. ENRIQUE: "So whenever I hear your bird voice, I just feel that everything is okay." And to me that's . . . I mean in a sense, yeah, something shifted, because I think that, in a sense, turning the other person into the auger, into the interpreter, it [00:09:31] has something to do with the idea of an oracle as something that should poetize life instead of giving answers.  ANDREW: Well, and I think that, you know, let's be honest about, you know . . . I mean, I won't even bring my clients into this, about myself. There are times where I go to the oracle, hoping that the oracle will tell me that everything's going to be okay. And, you know, the prospect of thinking that well, as long as . . . as long as I can hear the birdsong, [00:10:01] or as long as I can go into my, my messenger and find a note of you playing, and play that song, the answer is the birds are singing, there's no tsunami. There's no earthquake.  ENRIQUE: Exactly.  ANDREW: There's no predator here, right? You're good. Take it easy. (laughs) ENRIQUE: Exactly. That's exactly one of the ways of seeing it, yes. ANDREW: Mm-hmm. ENRIQUE: And, so, yeah, it has been a really, you know, at some point I started to suspect or to . . . Or maybe I decided [00:10:31] to start acting as if all these enterprises of divination, as if we already got it backwards. . . ANDREW: Mm-hmm. ENRIQUE: You know, and usually we have this idea of this image of the person, the reader, the diviner, who's sitting waiting for the client or the, you know, consultant to come. And then I decided, no, it should be the other way around, right? Because in . . . I was reading The Iliad, you know, and there is this moment, which is a rather irrelevant moment, [00:11:01] when it is said that when a person arrives to the city, he fills everybody with excitement because of course, there is still the potential of what this person may be bringing, you know, news, things, a weird fruit, something, right? ANDREW: Mm-hmm. ENRIQUE: And then I thought about that in relationship with angels, and the idea of the angel. And of course, angel is a word that comes from a Greek word for messenger, [00:11:31] right? So, the idea of the messenger. The messenger brings news, like the birds that come and, as you say, everything is okay. The birds are singing. ANDREW: Mm-hmm. ENRIQUE: Or look over there, because the bird, you know, flew that way.  So, I decided, I think it's better to become the angel, or to imitate, you know, dreams and angels, which are the only oracles that actually visit people. ANDREW: Mm-hmm. ENRIQUE: And obliterate the reading on the table and just be . . . appear on people's lives and [00:12:01] then disappear, which is something you can now do, thanks to all these little gadgets we have, and social media, and all that, so you can really become, or have, a virtual presence. So that's where I am at now.  ANDREW: You've become the psychopomp, right?  ENRIQUE: Yeah, somehow, yeah in a sense. It's this idea of . . . I mean, I . . . You know, I am a witness, and I look at things, you [00:12:31] know, and, at some point, I guess I . . . what I understand is that I, in terms of giving answers to people, solving people's problems, giving them solutions, healing, all that stuff. I don't do that. I don't know how to do that. ANDREW: Mm-hmm. ENRIQUE: But I know how to pay attention. I know how to be a witness. So, at some point it may be that I find a place and form. Right? I look at something that is worth [garbled] or worth sharing and then [00:13:01] maybe that sound, that word, that form could be the answer to somebody's question or the solution to somebody's problem. It could even bring some sort of healing to them, but it's not me. It's not me doing it. ANDREW: Mm-hmm. ENRIQUE: It's . . . They are the ones interpreting the sign. ANDREW: Well, and I think that . . . You know, I think that one of the things that's really interesting and that, you know, I certainly appreciate about you and about all of our dialogues because, [00:13:31] you know, I think that the delivering of more concrete messages is also great and it's a thing that I certainly enjoy.  But I'm also really interested in this space where, where we, revoke the expectation of meaning in a concrete way. You know? And like, I made this deck earlier in the year, which I shared with you when I was in New York, you know, the Land of the Sacred Self Oracle.  ENRIQUE: Yes.  ANDREW: And you know, I created . . . [00:14:02] I initially wanted to say nothing about it. And like, I was like, I just want to make it and put it out there. But everybody, almost everybody that I talked to was like, "I don't know what I'm . . . I don't know what to do with this. So, I need you to tell me stuff." And I was like, "All right." So, I created this course for it and . . . which is, which is now, it's just basically a PDF. And the first lesson is, these images are nothing but ink on paper, [00:14:32] they don't mean anything. They have no concrete meaning in and of themselves. What do you actually see? You know? Because I think that leading people back to themselves is so profound and so powerful.  ENRIQUE: Yes. ANDREW: And so, against the nature of our culture, right? The nature of . . .  ENRIQUE: Yes. ANDREW: . . . the Modern Age, right?  ENRIQUE: Well, but that . . . What is interesting about that is that, that is exactly what contemporary art brought about. ANDREW: Right. [00:15:02]  ENRIQUE: You know? All . . . today, beginning of the 20th century, art basically showcased a common narrative and that could be . . . You know, you go to Italy to see all these paintings of the Virgin Mary or Christ, or the, the, you know, the Book of Genesis or whatever. You have this idea of okay, we all understand what we are seeing because we share these references. ANDREW: Mm-hmm. ENRIQUE: And then came, you know, Malevich or Kandinsky [00:15:32] or even Donald Judd or all these people and say, "No, now you have the possibility to understand that thing before you on your own terms." ANDREW: Mm-hmm. ENRIQUE: And that's exactly what you're saying. Forget about what that is for the other person standing next to you. What is that to you? And of course, we still abhor that, I mean, most people put a lot of resistance to that, because they want to be told what it is. One is . . . like the other day, I had this, you know, I had [00:16:02] been reading the cards this woman finds out on the sidewalk. I have talked to you about this. For more than 10 years. And I stopped the other day because she, she sent me a card, and I told her about Nikolai Gogol, the Russian writer, and I . . . There is this wonderful little book a friend gave me about the dreams of Joseph Cornell. ANDREW: Mm-hmm. ENRIQUE: So, this woman pulled out all the dreams of Joseph Cornell [00:16:32] from his diary. And the amazing thing is that when you read his dreams you realize that they are not extraordinary in any way, right? ANDREW: Mm-hmm. ENRIQUE: Which is beautiful, because you realize the dreams are these material things available to all of us and a plumber can have dreams that are as extraordinary as the dreams of a fantastic artist as Joseph Cornell. But what was really interesting is at the end . . . She also wrote about all these people that Cornell was influenced by. [00:17:02] Not in terms of his work, but in terms of his relationship to dreams. And that I found fascinating. He had like the lineage of others like Blaise Pascal or you know, Freud. And then he spoke, or he took notice of Nikolai Gogol, and there was this rich lady who wrote to Gogol, saying, "Can you please interpret this dream for me?" Right? ANDREW: Mm-hmm. ENRIQUE: And Gogol wrote back and say, "Only your soul can tell you what the dream means." ANDREW: Mm-hmm. ENRIQUE: "Don't [00:17:32] ask any wise man, because they won't tell you. They are not able to. They won't be able to say what it means. You have to find a quiet space. You have to. Within yourself you will find the meaning of the dream." So, I said that to this woman, right, who had sent me a little card she found somewhere. And she got enraged. She told me, "No, you have the obligation of telling me what it means." Because of course, we don't want to be within ourself. That's a . . . [00:18:02] It's a . . . it's a very tall order. ANDREW: Mm-hmm. ENRIQUE: And, in theory, we don't have time, right? We are always under this imaginary constraint of time. And she said that "You have the obligation of telling me." Of course, I dropped communication immediately because I feel I have no obligation. I have two kids, that's obligations enough.  ANDREW: Yeah. ENRIQUE: Other than that, you know. But in a sense, I understand, there is a . . . what you're saying, in terms [00:18:32] of your own deck. I mean, people have an extraordinary resistance of coming to terms with their own experience, because actually, most people are looking for mythology, not for experience. ANDREW: Mm-hmm. ENRIQUE: You know. They want a little story. They don't want an experience.  ANDREW: Well, and exactly. You know, and I . . . a friend of mine who I was sharing the art with as I was making it, you know, they would have this reaction where they would be obviously fascinated by it, and then . . . But they'd be like, [00:19:02] "But I don't know what it means." And I'm like, "Well, just look at it. Do you have a feeling?" And they're like, "Yeah. I really have a feeling when I look at this." I'm like, "Great, then it's perfect. Go with that feeling!" You know? And even if their reactions were not, not articulatable, right? They would . . . I might have, you know, had I known then, I might have been like, "Just sing me a bird song about it. And we'll see what it says," you know?  ENRIQUE: Yeah. Well because if something [00:19:32] is really hitting home, the only possible responses are either laughter or silence.  ANDREW: Yes.  ENRIQUE: You know, that's the moment when we are completely impacted by something. We laugh, which is almost like a defense mechanism or we are quiet, because of this, we are taking it deep, you know. ANDREW: Mm-hmm. ENRIQUE: So, and of course, we still think that we have to feel special and important when we are having an experience.  ANDREW: Yeah. Yeah. Because people aren't comfortable sitting in [00:20:02] that. So, I was at this conference and, as the culmination of the workshop that we were doing, we were to sit and gaze into the other person's eyes, and sort of allow all that had been exchanged between us to sort of settle in. And the person that I was sitting with was uncomfortable with this and started to laugh every time we looked and tried to look away a bit or whatever. And so, I just sort of sat there and said to myself, "Well, I [00:20:32] can laugh with them, we can laugh together."  And so, so I started to laugh and as soon as I started to laugh, they continued, but were able to sort of sit with me with it. And so, we sat there, you know, in the midst of several hundred people. Everyone else dead silent and gazing solemnly into everybody else's eyes and having their own experience. And the two of us laughing so hard the tears were rolling down our face, because it just kept escalating, the longer we did it, the funnier [00:21:02] it got, right? And you know, I mean . . . ENRIQUE: That's brilliant. ANDREW: One of the . .  . one of the more magical experiences of it, you know, and I don't remember what the rest of the reading was. I have no idea what we said to each other. I mean, I might . . . I think I made some notes, I could go and look, but for me, the real significance was that we both changed something in that moment through our engagement and our laughter, right?  ENRIQUE: Yes, and that's actually . . . That was an actual communication, you know, where you had your communication, [00:21:32] communicating through laughter, which is in a way communicating through form. ANDREW: Mm-hmm. ENRIQUE: And not through words. I mean words are wonderful. And I love words, but words are also overrated. You know, there is a whole field of experience that exists outside of words.  ANDREW: Sure. Yeah. ENRIQUE: And, and when you really have a profound experience, you are usually in the space outside of language, then comes the problem of sharing it, right? And then you have to find the right words, which is a whole other thing. But with the actual experience is not in the space mediated by language. [00:22:03]  ANDREW: Mm-hmm.  ENRIQUE: No matter what the French say.  ANDREW: Yeah. I completely agree with you. I think that that that sort of moment where you're just engaged with something beyond words is . . . is really where, where things are wonderful. Right? ENRIQUE: Yes. Absolutely. ANDREW: I mean, it's, it's an experience that I'm always seeking out, you know, in one way or another right? In my relationships. In my relationship with nature, through the art that I make, even, even through my hobbies, like going rock climbing. One of the things I like about rock climbing is [00:22:33] that, you know, when you're 25 feet off the ground, and you know, working on a climbing problem, there's no . . . There's nothing but the sort of sense of trying to figure out how to move in space in relationship with the wall and it's not . . . it's not words. ENRIQUE: Exactly. ANDREW: It's not anything. It's just . . . it's just a feeling and it's the feeling of being in that relationship with the wall itself and the puzzle, you know? ENRIQUE: Yeah, I mean that's, that's actually a beautiful example because the wall is there, [00:23:03] speaking in stone. ANDREW: Mm-hmm.  ENRIQUE: And then . . . and your body has to reply in your negative space for the stone.  ANDREW: Yeah. ENRIQUE: Otherwise, you basically fall and die.  ANDREW: Right. ENRIQUE: So, you have to become endowed with that form and that's a . . . yeah, that's an excellent example.  ANDREW: Yeah, and it's definitely one of those things where you know, you can make your mind up. You know, I mean, especially, you know, like I'm not the world's best climber by any means, but you know, I climb [00:23:33] sort of relatively challenging, for most people, kind of things. You can decide all sorts of things before you start the climb, but once you put your hand or your foot or you know, whatever on the, on the hold then it tells you, if you're listening, what it wants you to do or needs you to do.  ENRIQUE: Yes.  ANDREW: And everything that you thought ahead of time kind of can go completely out the window where you're like, "Oh. I thought I'd be able to hold it from that angle. But in fact, I have to hold it from the other side now," or "I have to do this [00:24:03] or that," or "Oh, wow. That space is so much broader than I thought it was. I don't know how to, how to cross that gap now." And then you . . . then you have to sort of feel it and feel the motion and it really becomes a process of .  . . Most of the problem-solving comes not so much from even thinking about it, but from being there and saying, "Okay, where do I feel the most settled in this position? And where do I feel like I can move from?"  ENRIQUE: Yes. ANDREW: And then you're like, "Okay, now, now, now I [00:24:33] can see my way forward."  ENRIQUE: Yeah, any embodied knowledge that you have, that we all have, and of course you acquire with experience the more you speak or you are in dialogue with the rock and the mountain, but at the same time, somehow, that's also dream. That's some sort of thing which, just letting the symbolic world, meaning the world of forms, guide you upwards. ANDREW: Mm-hmm. For sure. Well, [00:25:03] I mean, I feel like this this brings us into something that you and I have been, you know, discussing, you know, kind of . . . I mean over the last, last year or so, over the last six months, you know, this question of what does it mean to live with the oracle versus to sort of learn and work the oracle. I'm not sure if I'm articulating it quite right in those words, but it's a good starting point, right?  ENRIQUE: Yes, and I think [00:25:33--a little garbled here] that that's extraordinary. It's really an important question, I think. Then . . . I mean, for example, there are ways to tackle it, but this year, I finally managed to stop doing tarot readings for . . . which means that I finally managed to say no, which is really hard because usually what you want to say, "Yes," but I decided that it had no, I mean, I decided that there is a . . . You [00:26:04] know, honesty is prophecy. And then, when you actually give an honest look at anything, you know the future. And it's only when we fool ourselves, you know, we say, "Yeah, let me invite my alcoholic friend to the party. I'm sure this time he's going to be okay." ANDREW: Mm-hmm. ENRIQUE: That's when we, you know, get derailed and then we get surprised by something that in theory, we say [00:26:34] is unexpected, but it isn't, you know, we are just fooling ourselves. But so, I decided okay, if you really remove things from the table, the only thing you can do is be present, you know, and pay attention.  ANDREW: Mm-hmm. ENRIQUE: But of course, I can only accept that because whatever effect extended exposure to the tarot had on me, [00:27:04] allows me now to see that way, you know, and for . . . I see it.  At some point you realize that the reason why we place two cards and put a space in between them, right, and at some point, then, we realize that we think of that in terms of space only because we are very slow, but it's not really space, it's time. And then we [00:27:34] realize, oh, that time is equivalent to the time that exceeds between the two, [garbled, some words may be lost] somehow you realize, you discover, and you inhabit the space in between. You live, we live in the world all the time, cards or no cards, right? And I think that the, the, I mean the ultimate effect, I guess, is to be able to have a beautiful life and I think [00:28:04] that has to do a lot with being able to be present and to contemplate what is around and then you let . . .  I find myself in a very strange position, because I now work with all these people who are interested in language of the birds. So, we work with, you know, words, fundamentally, we break words apart and we turn them into little clouds, and we are actually looking for the void [00:28:34] within the words, right? And the letters become pegs that are holding the void in place. So, we go beyond meaning into form and then I will feel that it's almost like, sometimes, it's almost like seeing an angel. Like seeing a, you know, you see this beautiful thing that you know you found it when you see it, but you can't even define it, right?  And it has been one thing to do that for years and years on my own and another very [00:29:04] different one to . . . to share that work with other people and then to see the effect that work has on them. Right? And one of the beautiful things, of course, is that people feel very grounded, very centered, when they do this work, but then you have it. So, these are the people that . . . (ringing phone) ANDREW: I'm sorry.  Let's pause for a second, Enrique, until my phone stops ringing. ENRIQUE: And we can see that could be . . . Absolutely.  ANDREW: All right. [00:29:34] Apparently, I can't make the phone stop either. (laughing) Oh, boy.  ENRIQUE: Yes. You don't have superpowers.  ANDREW: I don't have superpowers. Yeah, okay.  ENRIQUE: So yeah, so, in any case, when you start sharing the work with other people, and they start doing that work, and you realize, oh, now people are talking about how their dreams change, right? And they have all these different beautiful [00:30:04] dreams that somehow follow the forms they are putting on the paper, right? Or, or people who feel grounded. And then you realize well, this is what living with the oracle is. It finds expression in anything you arrange . . . ANDREW: Mm-hmm. ENRIQUE: Around you. And, you know, Gaston Bachelard, the French writer, talks about poetic [00:30:34] reverie, right? And he says, literally that, he says, we can't actually . . . We have to discount dreams because we don't have control over them. But then, if you submerge yourself in a constant state of poetic reverie, you change your own dreams. ANDREW: Mm-hmm. ENRIQUE: Because you are learning to be beautifully in the world, to think beautifully, right? And in a form . . . in a way form begets form. So, if you learn to move in a certain way, then that can [00:31:04] raise an echo, right? And all that . . . I know that all this may sound very abstract and probably useless, but it all accounts for basically being in the world in a beautiful way and living a beautiful life. Eventually, you can share those things with other people. And . . .  For example, the other day I was talking to this very young woman. Her name was Natasha. And I showed her how her name . . . You know that if you separate the variables, which are the soul of a word [00:31:34] from the body, which is the consonants. She basically . . . the three As on Natasha form a triangle, right? With them . . . like an inverted triangle.  ANDREW: Mm-hmm. ENRIQUE: And then the consonants form a square. So, when I show her that as forms, we saw how her soul, the triangle, was a little bit off-center to the square, the body, and she was really concerned about appearing or being too [00:32:04] predictable. So that gave her great comfort. Because of course, having an off-center soul is not being predictable. And, in a sense, I had to explain that. I just saw something. I say, "Oh, well, this makes me feel better." And I don't know what that is. And again, I never know what that can do for anybody. But I also think that there is some comfort for me [00:32:34] in thinking that something so abstract cannot be named, right? Because if you cannot really name it, then you probably cannot trivialize it.  ANDREW: Hmm. I think it's . . . I think it's . . . You know, my . . . So many things. All my thoughts are colliding now! (laughing) And it's like, how do I put all this into words that make any sense to anybody else? Right? It's just . . . ENRIQUE: Yes. ANDREW: So, [00:33:04] we talked about how . . . you know, being . . . we need to, we need to sort of see things as they are, right? And that when we're surprised by circumstance in readings, possibly, probably, we've been fooling ourselves on some level, you know? Because I think that, I think that that's certainly my experience, right? There are . .  . there are surprises, life is surprising at times, but most of the things that people ask [00:33:34] questions about aren't really surprising and people generally have a notion about what's going on. They just don't like it, don't want to say it, don't want to face it, or whatever.  You know, and for me, you know this sort of Stoic idea of it's always better to know what's real then to sort of live in any other kind of version of reality, you know, or to cover it up. I think that that's something that I sort [00:34:04] of really have valued over a long time. And I think that the kind of Stoic notions, if you can kind of work with them outside of the macho bullshit, that's so much stuff that gets layered on them today, I think that they really can be helpful. And then I think that once we know what's real or what's, you know, closest to what's real, for whatever we want to say about that. That's a whole other episode, but . . .  ENRIQUE: Yes. ANDREW: Then we can start to understand [00:34:34] and engage with this other world that doesn't need to have concreteness attached to it per se, right? And I think about my walk in the woods talking to the birds. I think about . . .  People always ask me, you know, like, "Well, do you do daily readings? What do you . . . How do you read the cards for yourself?" And you know, these days, a lot of what I do is, I just sit with the cards. And I put out some Marseilles cards and then I put out my, you [00:35:04] know, my Sacred Self Oracle, and I look for, look for the patterns that emerge between those. And especially because I'm often taking notes on my iPad, I'll take a picture of that card, and then I'll draw on top of it. And I've moved outside of the notion of reading in any sense that anybody means by that. And . . .  ENRIQUE: Yes. ANDREW: And it is so grounding, and so centering, and sometimes there's a message that emerges, [00:35:34] sometimes it filters back down into language or words or whatever. And often the words that come out don't even really matter. They don't even necessarily make sense in any sort of overt way, but the flow of them, the practice of making them or arranging them, the practice of thinking them, is the message and is the oracle. ENRIQUE: Yes. ANDREW: And the consequence of that oracle is not tangible and direct in an overt way, but [00:36:04] it somehow modifies myself and my relationship to the world, my day, whatever it is that's going on, in ways that allow me to move forward in a different manner. ENRIQUE: Yes. That's the dialogue in the day. The hand and the wall rock, you know, when your hand gets caught, to match the rock wall, your climb, it's the same thing. It's form speaking to form. And that in itself is [00:36:34] the message. And of course, that doesn't have an intellectual effect, because you can't just even talk about it. It has an emotional effect . . . ANDREW: Mm-hmm. ENRIQUE: Which is something that a lot of people miss. When you are in contact with an oracle, you're basically exposing yourself to, to have, to that, for that thing to have an emotional impact on you. And, and maybe, there is something also, that may be very silly, you know, but oracle is a word that basically accounts [00:37:05] originally, at least, for an opaque or oblique utterance, right? A phrase, a bunch of words that don't have a clearer meaning.  ANDREW: Mm-hmm.  ENRIQUE: So, it requires thought and, and in the way I see it, there is an experience that let's say, is a little common still. A person, any person, opens a poetry book, finds a line in the poem, and thinks, "Ah, this [00:37:35] speaks to my condition right now." Right? ANDREW: Mm-hmm. ENRIQUE: And we know that that poet didn't write that for her, or not even about, it's not even about that, that the person is experiencing. But the person can see how that speaks to her. You know, "Yes, this accounts for this experience I'm having." ANDREW: Mm-hmm.  ENRIQUE: And that's an experience that most people feel or know, understand, and even our culture at large values [00:38:05] it, that. We respond to it, we pride ourselves on being a culture that generates that kind of experience. So, we can take that one step further, and say, well this is a . . . Fal'e Hafiz, you know, the divination with a poet by Hafiz, the Iranian poet, which is basically the same thing, only that it's not any book of poetry, but only a book of poetry by Hafiz. You think about a problem you have, you open it up, the [00:38:35] first line you read, that's the answer . . . ANDREW: Mm. ENRIQUE: To your problem. And the thing is, that Hafiz was a very very obscure poet. So, it's never like, "come back on Tuesday," or, you know, play the 36."  ANDREW: Right!  ENRIQUE: So, it's a really really contrived sentence. So, you have to meditate upon it. It is the same as meditating upon form. And then eventually say "Yes, I understand how this is speaking to my condition." [00:39:06]  And we can take that one step further and say the I Ching, right? Which is still a book and still full of lines, literally and metaphorically. But then, now, we don't say, "Okay, open it in any page and the first thing you see, that will be it." We say, "No, we're actually engaging with chance." So, we take all these sticks or the coins and we start going through a process that renders this idea of the odd and the even. [00:39:36] So we, you know, we get to the hexagrams. And then from the hexagrams to some sort of commentary on the hexagrams. So, we are again left with some sort of obscure phrase that in theory is responding to our situation, right? ANDREW: Mm-hmm. ENRIQUE: And then the next step, of course, is get rid of the book.  ANDREW: Yeah. ENRIQUE: And keep the sticks. And right there, we have all the divination [00:40:06] systems we know, right? We have the shells with the bones, throw the cards, or the coffee stains or grinds or the clouds. And the funny thing is in our culture, the moment we get rid of the book, we step into what people define as superstition, right? ANDREW: Mm-hmm. Yeah. ENRIQUE: It's no longer this poetica pursuit, basically, because we have this very old-fashioned idea of poetry as something that is anchored on the word, words, and [00:40:36] not on form. But of course, every time you look at an oracle you're reading, and that reading is a poetic reading. It's as opaque and obscure as the poetry by Hafiz or the I Ching commentary or the poem that you read and . . .  ANDREW: Well in the . . . ENRIQUE: You know, I was talking about this with . . . yeah, yes, go ahead.  ANDREW: In a sense, you know, when we . . . You know, not in a literal sense, because from within the tradition, we have a different dialogue [00:41:06] about it, but from the point of view of our conversation, when we are divining with the cowrie shells and we say that the, the Odu has arrived, right? Like the living energy of the Orisha that is the sign that came out in this divination. And the belief is that the arrival of that Odu changes the person's life. It is . . . it is just that process of invoking that energy through [00:41:36] the shells, and looking at it and seeing it and it being there, and then afterwards the diviner's job is more so to manage that dialogue and make sure that the person understands enough of what has been said so they can go away and think about it, right? I mean and there are other sort of literal pieces too but, but that idea of the energy of the oracle arriving, and us receiving it, and that being the thing that changes our life . . . You know, it comes with the notion that we don't understand [00:42:06] what that is, exactly. We can't articulate it clearly.  And even, even when we're interpreting the Odu in a traditional way, we can't necessarily, on any level, understand all of the implications and so on of that. We are merely just making sure that we've, you know, read the appropriate lines that are relevant to it and marked the right things. And after that, it's up to the person to sit with it and allow that to unfold with them and through them and so on, in a way that [00:42:36] is certainly energetic and otherwise, but also definitely poetic, and goes back to that sort of obtuseness of Hafiz, or other things, the I Ching, where it's like, "Huh? What does this really mean? How does this apply? How does this apply today? How does this apply while I'm at the butcher's? How does this apply when I pick my kids up from school? You know? It's that living with it that is the . . . that is where we get the most out of it and where it is the most transformational. You know? ENRIQUE: Yes. Yeah, and [00:43:06] I mean, I was talking about this with my wife the other day, and she say that the problem, really, the moment you get rid of the book or the moment that you step into the oracle is the other person, the interpreter, you know? There is this, the moment you need the other person to tell you how to relate to the oracle. And I thought that was really interesting because again, it's brought me back to the woman who say, "You are in the obligation of telling me because I'm not going to do any thinking."  ANDREW: Mm-hmm. ENRIQUE: And [00:43:36] of course, I mean, again, it is really interesting to, for me at the moment to think again that by delivering an open object, turn the other person into the interpreter. They have to come to terms with forms and understand what those forms are saying to them. ANDREW: Mm-hmm. ENRIQUE: Because at least I don't know. I don't know what, who they are. I don't know what they are, you know, feeling, and I must certainly have no, [00:44:06] nothing to say about anybody's life, but they know. I think they always know. And you say, also a few minutes ago, they have an idea of what's going on. And basically, they may not like it. So, they're trying to find almost like a second opinion. That's why . . . I mean the other day, somebody was asking me about the ethics of readings and divination and I told her, well, there is an ethical problem, because in my experience [00:44:36] most clients are dishonest. They want to hear what they want to hear.  ANDREW: Mm-hmm. ENRIQUE: And they will twist your words. They will, you know, re-ask the question again and again until they get what they want, and even if you don't give it to them, they will hear every word you say as if you say what they want to hear. So, of course, there is a lot of dishonesty in the profession, but it mostly come from the clients. Of course, [00:45:06] there are dishonest readers. But even the honest reader has to put up with that person who has decided beforehand what they want to hear. ANDREW: Mm-hmm. ENRIQUE: And I see that as way more . . . I mean, and again, it's really . . . Do you know, I think that there is a love for the majority for example of the cards or any oracle, at some point you want to really share that beauty with other people. And that takes you so far. It [00:45:37] comes to a point at which you understand: "Yes, but I'm speaking of a beauty and this woman's still speaking about this [garbled] on Thanksgiving. You know? ANDREW: Mm-hmm. ENRIQUE: I really don't care. It's not really my problem.  ANDREW: Mm-hmm. Yeah, I think, yeah. I think too, like, somebody . . . Somebody was asking me if . . . Somebody was . . . I was posting about my . . . So, my journey for, with [00:46:07] rock climbing. You know, I was, I set myself a goal for the year. This is the only resolution I made for 2018. And my resolution for 2018 was to still be climbing at the end of the year. That was my, my entire goal. No achievement attached to it. No, you know, anything else, just still be going and doing it. Just keep returning if you go away, and be, and still be there at the end of the year. Because [00:46:37] I think that, you know, like the oracle, you know, if we, if we promise to keep showing up, you know, the oracle reveals things to us over time. ENRIQUE: Yes. ANDREW: We don't know when or how that comes, and so if we endeavor to be with it, then, then we will hear what we need to hear as we go, to a large extent. And somebody, somebody was posting . . . somebody posted in response to that, that if they, they wondered if the universe challenged us whenever we set an intention, you [00:47:07] know, if it deliberately brought stuff up, you know. And I think that for me, and I'll let you answer for yourself. But for me, living with the oracle in this open-ended way and living, in a, for lack of a better term, kind of more Stoic way with a real sort of working to, to see things as clearly as possible all the time and face the things that I might rather put in the closet or leave [00:47:37] for another day.  I don't . . . I don't feel like the universe has a lot of agency in the way that that question implies, you know? There are surprises that are . . . that happen, you know? You know, in relationship to me climbing this year, there were two surprises: One, I dislocated my collarbone in the winter, tobogganing with my daughter. And that took like [00:48:07] four months to really fix. It's horrible. I don't recommend it to anybody. And two, you know, I'm getting divorced this year and, you know, although that is amicable and, and going well, relatively speaking, it takes a lot of time and attention and doesn't always leave energy for other things. But I don't think that any of those have any relationship to . . . to my intention or my desire to climb or do other things. I think that those are, those [00:48:37] are just the inevitable stories of being alive, right? We are alive, and things happen and we get sick and . . . ENRIQUE: Yes. ANDREW: Life comes up and things change and so on and we don't need to, or I never need to, arrange a narrative around that in a bigger way. So, I'm curious. I'm curious for you. Do you . . . What agency do you feel comes back from the universe? Do you think that there is something organizing it or testing us or . . .  ENRIQUE: No, I actually, no, I always say the same thing. I think that [00:49:07] the universe doesn't care about us. Or maybe I will say it doesn't care about me. And I know that people want to be, to feel otherwise, you know, but you know when I was a kid . . . and this image has been coming back a lot recently. I watched this documentary about Africa, right? And there was this method of catching monkeys, which consisted of filling up a hollow tree with grain. ANDREW: Uh huh. ENRIQUE: And then, you know, the monkey will stick his hand into the hollow [00:49:37] tree, grab the grain, but then couldn't take the handful, the fistful out. The hole was only big enough for the empty hand to come in. But if he had grain in his hand, in his hand, he couldn't take it out. ANDREW: Yeah. ENRIQUE: And basically, these guys just will walk up to the monkey and grab it because the monkey will never let go of the grain.  ANDREW: Yes.  ENRIQUE: And I mean, it's insane, right? But I think that in terms of daily life, we are all monkeys with our hand [00:50:07] stuck in a hollow tree.  ANDREW: Yes. ENRIQUE: And most of the time, you realize, yeah, but can you just open the hand and let go? ANDREW: Yeah. ENRIQUE: Life works the way it works. And in that sense, there is no mystery, even if it takes you by surprise all the time, basically because we think that there is a mystery there. And yes, sometimes we catch a cold and sometimes we get divorced and sometimes we, you know, we're surprised by somebody giving us a loaf of bread. ANDREW: Mm-hmm.  ENRIQUE: I . . . I [00:50:38] don't think that actually, at least I understand that that's not the way people think, but I never thought of any kind of oracular work where oracles had any dealings with daily life in that sense, of letting me know if I should change the oil of my car today or next week, you know? ANDREW: Mm-hmm. ENRIQUE: I think it's more about transcending daily life and finding some sort of center, true beauty [00:51:08] through some sort of . . .  ANDREW: Yeah. ENRIQUE: Through some sort of sublime condition in life. ANDREW: For sure.  ENRIQUE: Yeah, but all day, even the other day I was talking about, you know, people, people talk about sigils, and then I realized, first, the first mistake you make when you make a sigil is wanting something? ANDREW: Mm-hmm. ENRIQUE: And then you realize when you make a sigil to, I don't know, lose weight. Let's [00:51:38] say. And another sigil to get a red car. You're basically making the same operation, right? You make, you take the words, you eliminate certain letters, and you consolidate everything into one small or smaller emblem. ANDREW: Mm-hmm. ENRIQUE: And then you realize, oh, but what you're doing there, it doesn't matter what you want. What you're doing again and again and again is a reduction. That's what then . . . In the world of forms, [00:52:08] what you are actually spelling is a reduction. Which means that in time, it doesn't matter how many things you wanted, you end up with your mind drinking.  ANDREW: Hmm. ENRIQUE: And of course, people don't like that, because, besides you can't sell a book saying this stuff, right? You can't sell any books and don't want stuff. They only want books that say, I'm sorry, I want to say you're entitled [00:52:38] to want everything, and I can tell you how to get it.  ANDREW: Mm-hmm. ENRIQUE: But you realize there is something really silly about trying to control daily life, especially because daily life is not even that interesting, you know, and it takes care of itself.  ANDREW: Mm. Yeah. I think that . . . I mean it's kind of why, over the years, I've sort of moved to . . . My [00:53:08] magic that I do tends to tends to be most often orientated towards what I, what I kind of now often call as identity magic, which is how do I, how do I change myself so that I can be more like more like what seems fruitful, more like what, you know, remove those obstacles in myself to doing the things that I need, you know, it's not so much about changing the world as it is about [00:53:38] shifting myself in relationship to it so that . . . If there's desire attached to it, so that what I desire is more accessible, or so that I'm more, more at ease and more in the flow around whatever it is that I need to work on and change, you know? ENRIQUE: Yes.  ANDREW: Yeah.  ENRIQUE: Yeah, I don't know. I think it's a song. At some point, I understood or I [00:54:08] have been made to understand that presence is meaning . . . ANDREW: Mm-hmm. ENRIQUE: And presence is also performance.  ANDREW: Mm-hmm. ENRIQUE: Whatever you are, you're performing, you're enacting, you are projecting something, and causing an effect. And I'm at the moment more interested in just being, you know, and be present and play along with the fact that causes. ANDREW: Mm-hmm. ENRIQUE: It's like when this woman started laughing, looking at [00:54:38] your eyes, and you laughed with her, you know, you said that's a reaction in the moment and that's what there, you know? ANDREW: Mm-hmm. ENRIQUE: And trying to make her chop or, I don't know, levitate, will be useless. So, yeah, it's . . . I'm finding a lot of pleasure in walking around by with my pockets empty. And of course, I don't know what magic is. I think that, in other words, I think that magic or [00:55:08] some experience of mystery that I actually pursue or often feel works best when you don't want anything, when you don't want it, and it appears and surprises you, gives you something. It's like a gift, you know, but it's not something you pursue in terms of how can I command for this to happen at will. ANDREW: Mm-hmm. ENRIQUE: And again, I understand that when you say that magic . . . When . . . the moment I speak [00:55:38] of magic without will, I'm almost like undefining magic in terms of what people think magic is, right? They all seem to be convinced it's about will, exerting our will, and I think it's more about stepping aside, letting things happen.  ANDREW: Mm-hmm. Well, I think it's definitely about . . . for me, it's definitely about making space so that [00:56:08] I can be engaged and present with the subject of the magic in a way that it allows it to unfold, to some extent without control, to a large extent without control, because I think that the idea of, you know, "Oh, I really want this person to fall in love with me." I mean, I think the minute that you're fixated on, on one person is the minute that you've already kind of drifted into a problematic territory and should go back to . . . ENRIQUE: Yes. ANDREW: Why that person? [00:56:38] Why do you want them when they are not reciprocating? What is it you're looking for? What is it you could do without magic to make this . . . ? You know, I mean, many questions, right? But, but rather, what could I . . . What could I do to have more, more romance in my life? What could I do to have better connections? And is there a magical act that, that feeds and supports that in an open-ended and sort of allowing the universe to show us, allowing ourselves to witness and notice it in an open, open [00:57:08] and present way as the opportunities float around us, rather than sort of exerting a massive amount of control, which I think is, which is very rarely fruitful, you know.  ENRIQUE: Yes. Well, you know, my . . . This year, one of my favorite moments is . . . I have this friend, who about 12 years ago, he was named the godfather of a child, right? And he decided beautifully that his gift to this kid will be the gift of language. ANDREW: Mm-hmm. ENRIQUE: So, he set up an account, a bank account and he has [00:57:38] been putting money there for years, assuming that at some point, maybe this kid will want to learn, you know, Italian so he can go to Rome and live there and learn the language. But then this summer, he spent a morning with me by the river and we were playing with all these bird voices, you know, and talking like birds and the birds will come and all this and that. So, and he went, he bought a box full of birdcallers and sent it to this kid.  Yeah, so there is something extraordinarily beautiful in [00:58:08] inspiring a person to complete this crazy act of gifting a kid a set of birdcallers, and then he wrote this note, saying, "I believe this is a good first language for you to learn. And, and then for that gesture not to fall flat, you know, and for the kid to actually embrace this, and then this is a kid I don't know, I probably will never see in my life, but somehow, it's beautiful to think that there [00:58:38] is some residual effect of what I do that is part of that kid's life, and I don't know. I'm . . .  The other day, for example, this woman wrote to me and she said that she wanted to speak like a hawk. And it's beautiful. We saw this at [Brawn's?] we saw that actually allows her to do so. And she say, "Well, I have a problem, and the problem I have is that I'm surrounded by [00:59:08] sparrows." So, I told her, "Well, you know, the problem is that the only way you have for you to know if you are actually doing it right is that all those sparrows are going to fly away, because you've become a predator, right? ANDREW: Mm-hmm. ENRIQUE: And she say, "Oh, but, I mean, I love the sparrows. Do you think they were going to trust me?" I said, "Yes. I mean, they are going to trust you as much as a sparrow trusts a hawk." Okay. So yeah, it's fantastic to think you can . . . A, this faith [00:59:38] when a person can ask you that question, can talk about this [garbled] bird's nest to still be close to the birds. And at the same time, like a little bit . . . We are really not just talking about talking like a hawk, or talking about voice, we are talking about the consequences of having a certain voice and being responsible for what we say, what we put out in the world. And I . . . being full of all of the [garbled] but I can [01:00:08] see the poetry or of living a poetic life through embracing the form of a bird voice and the bird language. So yeah. ANDREW: That's wonderful. Well, maybe we should wrap up the us talking part of the conversation here, and there were definitely some questions that came through, through Facebook. And I think at this point, I'd love to, I'd love to hear you give like a one word [01:00:38] or a one phrase answer to them, rather than us sort of go into a big long conversation or . . . kind of like we did in one of them where . . .  ENRIQUE: Yes. ANDREW: I did the rapid-fire questions at you. Let's look at these rapid fire . . . ENRIQUE: Yes. ANDREW: And see what comes, okay? So, one person asks . . .  ENRIQUE: Okay.  ANDREW: So, with your children, are they interested, would you teach them these things about card reading? What are your thoughts on children and cards? [01:01:08]  ENRIQUE: Well, I have three kids. The middle kid already asked me to teach him and I did so. And then yesterday, my daughter told me that, and she's 10. One of his friends, his classmates, actually asked: Did your father ever taught you, told you how to read tarot and [garbled] in the French way, in such a beautiful way, that I think she already knows everything she needs to know.  ANDREW: Yeah, my [01:01:38] youngest got a Sibilla deck and reads that for me sometimes . . . ENRIQUE: I have Sibilla, yes. ANDREW: And it's just, you know, she's so great at it. It's just, she's like, "Oh, look at this. Somebody's going to do something you don't like, but this is going to happen. But there you go. It's so wonderful," right? They have a sense of it, I think, which is great and . . . ENRIQUE: Yes. ANDREW: It's less about teaching and more about just . . . ENRIQUE: Yeah. I mean my son, when I explained . . . Yeah, when I explained [01:02:08] it to my son in after 15 minutes, he told me, "Oh, I understand. This is all about transformations." And I realized, "Oh, it took you 15 minutes, it took me 15 years."  ANDREW: Right?  ENRIQUE: Okay.  ANDREW: Yeah. ENRIQUE: You know, that's that. Yeah.  ANDREW: All right. Next question. What is the poem that the world needs in these times?  ENRIQUE: I don't know. I mean, I guess my [01:02:38] issue is that I don't have any faith in the poem. ANDREW: Mm. ENRIQUE: As you know, in the actual poem. I guess there's poetry, and poetry's everywhere in a sense. But I will say in terms of poetry, yes, yes, you just need to listen to the sparrows. You know, the sparrows have this beautiful thing, that is, they are like Zen monks. A sparrow only makes a, like a little sound, you know, over and over and over, so it says everything it needs to say in one syllable. It's [01:03:08] almost like tasting water, you know. So . . . ANDREW: Yeah, yeah. ENRIQUE: Yeah, the voice of the sparrow. ANDREW: What has surprised you regarding tarot in the last couple of years? ENRIQUE: You know, the tarot world is like that movie, Groundhog Day. ANDREW: (bursts out laughing) ENRIQUE: It's the same day again, over and over.  ANDREW: (still laughing) Yes, Bill Murray. ENRIQUE: So, we're all Bill [01:03:38] Murray.  ANDREW: Perfect. Yeah. ENRIQUE: And that's . . . Every day the same deck is being published, the same book is being published, the same conversation about the origin of tarot is being published, the same theory about the secret behind it is being discussed.  ANDREW: Mm-hmm. ENRIQUE: And that's how we go, you know, it never ends.  ANDREW: Perfect. Do you consider tarot magic? And do you practice any forms of magic?  ENRIQUE: Oh, every morning, [01:04:08] I sit at a café, in the same place next to a window. I look at words in my notebook. And if something appears [garbled--black?], in terms of form, I share it with some people and then that snowballs into something. ANDREW: Mm-hmm. ENRIQUE: And that's the magic I do. And, yeah, I mean, everything can be, I guess, magic, but I do feel that for something to be magical, there has to be an otherness.  ANDREW: Mm-hmm.  ENRIQUE: Meaning it has to take you to another [01:04:38] place. It's, I don't know. It's hard to imagine doing magic with something that is completely like a daily thing, you know, but it could be. I mean, I think that, yeah. In any case, I don't know if magic. I think that the world has a poetic influence, meaning that forms speak to each other through analogy. Maybe that's magic. I don't know if magic is an intelligence. I don't [01:05:08] know again, if there's an agency, like a big finger that is invisible and it's swirling things behind. I don't know. ANDREW: Yeah. Fair. And last question: What would, what would it take for you to put your tarot deck again right now? Given that you're not really doing readings and such any more. ENRIQUE: Every time I make an exception.  ANDREW: Yes. Yeah. ENRIQUE: Every time I make an exception, [01:05:38] I end up confirming that it's pointless.  ANDREW: Hmm.  ENRIQUE: So, no, I don't think so. I'm not, you know, I have nothing to sell, and I'm not in a crusade for people, not to do readings or to any kind of ideas I may have, I'm just trying to get by finding my own language. I will do all these things, which is a way of saying to find my own. You know, I think that that's what the philosopher's stone is. To find your own language. ANDREW: Right. ENRIQUE: And your own language is not English or Spanish or Italian. It's how [01:06:08] you organize forms around you. And that's why they . . . you know, the, the alchemists say, that's a great work, you know, and they say the philosopher's stone cannot be handed down, you know, passed to another person. You have to find it yourself. It's because of that. You have to find your own language. ANDREW: Mm-hmm. ENRIQUE: Otherwise you're just living in the shadow of another person's language.  ANDREW: Right. Perfect.  ENRIQUE: And yeah, so, so and well. Yeah. Okay.  ANDREW: I think that's a great place [01:06:38] to leave it. Go find your language, everybody!  ENRIQUE: Perfect.  ANDREW: Perfect. And if it sounds like birds, let us know. (laughs)  ENRIQUE: Exactly. ANDREW: Perfect. Well, thank you so much for hanging out with me this morning and especially for fighting through all the Skype up and downs. It's what I get for recording during Mercury retrograde.  ENRIQUE: Oh, it's okay. It's always great.  ANDREW: Perfect.  ENRIQUE: Thank you. It's always great to talk to you. ANDREW: Thank you, you too.  ENRIQUE: I hope to soon.  [music] ANDREW: [01:07:09] I hope you love this conversation, as always, I hope that. Enrique did all the Patreons the pleasure of recording a bird song just for them. So if you are a supporter of the Patreon in the $5 and up category, you can go find that recording now at Patreon.com/TheHermitsLamp, and if you're not a supporter: Well, what are you waiting for? The birds are waiting to speak to you. Talk to you next time.

Barbara and Andrew catch up on their 4th annual check in to discuss the state of the world. They talk about the way death has been a force in Barbara's life. How maybe being real is more important that being upbeat. The role of social media in both their lives. And Andrew's claiming of the term Magnificent Weirdo.  If you missed the previous interviews go check out episodes 44, 58, and 72 first.  Think about how much you've enjoyed the podcast and how many episodes you listened to, and consider if it is time to support the Patreon You can do so here. If you want more of this in your life you can subscribe by RSS , iTunes, Stitcher, or email. Barbara can be found at her website here.  Thanks for joining the conversation. Please share the podcast to help us grow and change the world.  Andrew You can book a reading or private lesson with Andrew through his site here.  Transcript ANDREW: [00:00:02] Welcome to The Hermit's Lamp podcast, everybody. I am here today with Barbara Moore, and this is essentially our fourth annual check in and hang out. We started these conversations a number of years back, and just sort of fell into the habit of kind of following up and seeing where life has gotten to and what's going on. And you know, I think it's going to be an interesting episode because we're … For both of us, it's been a year of a lot of change, and, you know, a lot of transformation and [00:00:32] you know, so yeah, let's get to it.  Hey Barbara, what's going on? What's new?  BARBARA: (laughing) What's new … We have just celebrated our one-year anniversary in our new home. It's, like you said, been a year of a lot of change, you said transformation. I don't think that my stuff is actually in the transforming (laughs) [00:01:02] stage yet. It's still in the … Feels like it's still in the breaking down phase. ANDREW: Mm-hmm. BARBARA: And I really think it would be more the end of the transformation, like the butterfly stage by now, but that has not happened.  ANDREW: Uh-huh.  BARBARA: But I suppose, what's new? The biggest newest thing that's been kind of a theme this year for me has been death. Death has been new to me. I have not had a lot of death in my life. [00:01:34] And so, I've had a lot of it pretty close and intimate, really intimate, this year. In fact, the most intimate … wow, we're going to start right off with the big stuff … the most intimate connection with death on one level, I had just one week ago today. ANDREW: Mm-hmm. BARBARA: And that was when …? Okay. So, the … how ... the place we live in is attached to a house on [00:02:04] property owned by a couple named Carol and Noel. I did mention them last year. And, and Noel died on Friday. And this is not unexpected. He was quite old, and was in hospice and dying for quite some time. And Carol knows that I have done a little bit of priestess work, little bit of ritual stuff. And so, the hospice caregiver was preparing Noel's [00:02:34] body. Oh, because they didn't take the body away to a mortuary or anything like that. They kept him at home, and—for a week—and he just went away on Thursday, and so he wasn't going to be embalmed or anything.  And so, the hospice caregiver asked, and Carol asked, if I would help prepare his body, which (laughs) was really freaky for me because I've never done anything [00:03:04] like that. I've never been a good, you know … Some people are good caregivers, you know, like if someone's sick, they're good at taking care of them and comforting and cleaning. ANDREW: Mm-hmm. BARBARA: I've never been that. It's just not something that has been a strength for me. And, you know, but part of this whole year is doing things that scare me. And so, yeah, so I helped wash [00:03:34] him, and then we crumbled up lavender into some oil and anointed his whole body, and dressed him, and I … It's been a week and I still, I've told people I can't really talk about it yet, because I haven't fully processed what I think or feel about that situation, and even just talking about it, I can feel the fluttering in my chest, you know, like a sign of anxiety that [00:04:04] I haven't really finished processing that experience. ANDREW: Mmm. BARBARA: But I guess we could say that that's really metaphoric for what this past year has been. I've been getting up close and personal with death in many forms and still sorting out my relationship with it. ANDREW: Death is one of those things that we don't … I mean, I consider [00:04:34] myself a person who's comparatively really comfortable with death. I'm very, you know, close and aware of death. You know, I mean, I've been through a lot of very close loss in my life, you know, my … Two of my brothers passing away, and, you know, the people that I've known passing away, and I think that … Death is always an uncomfortable companion. Even if you are, [00:05:04] relatively speaking, comfortable with it being around, you know, it's always … It's never, it's never entirely settled, and I think that, you know … Like grief, grief is never entirely settled, you know, it might be 20 years and some conjunction of things will kick some little pocket of it back up into the foreground again, you know. So. BARBARA: Yeah, yeah. I think what [00:05:35] has driven me for most of my life is making things, producing things, working, and I think whenever any kind of loss comes to me, into my life, I would just kind of pat it down and run over it and just keep going. ANDREW: Mm-hmm. BARBARA: You know, like it's not affecting me. It happened. It's done, move on, move on, and this [00:06:05] year, the kinds of death have been really much larger, and I've been not working much. I mean, I've been doing my regular work like I explained in the last podcast. I did kind of have the year off, except for, you know, just the basic work, just keep feeding myself, but I've had a lot more downtime and quiet time, and it's almost like I needed training wheels to feel, [00:06:35] cause I'm not, I wasn't used to, what am I feeling? Even just even letting the feeling come to the surface, and then the next step, identifying it, and what you do with it, and how does it fit in with where you want to go with your life, or whatever, and cause I don't even know what order I should tell all the stories. But just this example of feeling the feelings associated with death, just met ... [00:07:05] my father also died. He died in September, and I just started … just like last night, actually. I started feeling the feelings of grief, you know, like, oh my God, I miss him so much, and you know, so it's been almost two months, and I … And it's just happening now, you know.  And my beloved [00:07:35] companion Whiskey, my golden retriever, died in June and I wasn't home to say goodbye to her. I was in Minnesota at the time. And you know, it took like a couple months for those feelings to come up. So, you know, I feel like even though I'm into my 50s, I have had little practice with this compared to most people my age. So, it has been real interesting.  Oh, and that [00:08:05] reminds me too, right before I moved, my friend Nancy and I were messing around with our cards and stuff, and she's like, “Well, let's pull a card and see, you know, what big theme you can expect from this move.” And she pulled the Death card, of course, and was like, “Oh, wow, this is going to change your life in more ways than you think!” And she pulled another card. And it was the Emperor. And she's like, you know, because I'm a very structured person, a very organized person. She's like, “It's going to really blow that part of you [00:08:35] to bits.” But what she couldn't have known, and of course hindsight is, you know … The Emperor, for a lot of people, is associated with a father figure, you know, so it's like “your father will die.” Okay, but again, it's all metaphor, and it's all tied together, and bigger themes, and then I was writing to one of my pen friends and I was giving her my new P.O. box number and she's like, “Oh, your P.O. box numbers add up to 13. It's a Death year for you.” I went, “Oh, wow. Okay.” So, [00:09:05] yeah.  ANDREW: Do you, do you follow the year card system? Are you ... For, you know, birth cards and year cards? Is that a thing for you?  BARBARA: I do ... My birth cards and the year cards, I don't, I do some years, and some years I don't. And I don't even know if I know what mine was. I didn't think I needed another one. Okay, I think I'll just ... The Death card wants to be my card this year. I think we'll just go with it. Of course, knowing ... You know, when you don't have a real [00:09:35] experience with it, it can feel like, “Ooh, it's exciting, things are going to change,” because in the past, in my life, when things have changed, it's always been like, good, and pretty easy, and exciting, and not involving all of this that we're having here. Yeah.  ANDREW: Well, you know, I think that death, death, death on all those levels is always such a complicated [00:10:07] companion, right? You know? I mean, coming to the endings of things is, you know, in some ways, a relief, especially for Noel. Right? I mean that's a, that's a relief, right? of that sort of, you know, slow movement across that line, you know? But the kind of change that it tends to bring isn't really, you know, it … Even if it's sudden, even if the change is sudden, [00:10:37] the energy of it sort of lingers, right? You know, like Crowley talks about the Death card as sort of … Sometimes it's the fall of the scythe and sometimes it's this, like, putrefaction, this slow breaking down and rotting of things, right? BARBARA: Yeah. ANDREW: And hang out and sort of watch elements of yourself or your life kind of decompose, right? Like we were talking about before we got on the line today, you know? It's like that black [00:11:07] phase, that nigredo phase, in alchemy, right? Where, you know, everything just starts to like, break down, and it's, you know, that's the long dark night of the soul time, right? Where all of a sudden, you're like, “I don't know where anything was going. I don't know what any of this means anymore. Does any of this matter?” Right?  BARBARA: Yeah. Yeah. The “does any of this matter?” has been a really strong push, or no, it's been a strong question in me this [00:11:37] year. You know, whenever I think of doing something or ... maybe I should take up a project, maybe I should get back to work, maybe I should do something, and like what, what's worth … What does it matter? ANDREW: Mmm. BARBARA: And I really truly hope I don't stay in this space for much longer because it is not comfortable. ANDREW: Yeah. I remember when … In the months after my brothers died. And for those who don't know, two of my brothers passed [00:12:07] within six weeks of each other, it's about nine years ago now, and so it was … It was really intense the first time, and then it was just, double down, you know, sort of six weeks later. And you know, like, I spent a lot of time thinking about it and trying to make sense of it. Trying to, you know, like underst-, what does any of it even mean any more after this kind of situation? And all those kinds of questions. [00:12:37] And the thing I kind of kept coming back to was, Well, I've got to do something with my time regardless. So, what is it I want to do? (laughing) What is it ... Like, is it just eat a bucket of ice cream? That's fine too. Right? Is it, you know, something else? What is it? Cause I've got to do something with my time other than just sit and wonder if any of it means anything, you know? You know? You know? And so, that kind of ultimately, you [00:13:08] know, led me, led me out of most of it, you know, and back into sort of being in the world and being engaged in things, you know, so.  BARBARA: Yeah, yeah, hopefully that will start happening with me. I have spent my fair share of time just laying on the bed, you know, being all angsty and eating ice cream and whatnot. [00:13:38] But I've also done, you know, I've been reading more fiction, nothing that's, you know, enlightening my mind or anything, and painting nothing worth showing anybody. I have stacks and stacks and stacks of stuff that is completely pointless, and I'm like, why am I doing this? It's the only thing I feel like doing so I'm doing it. ANDREW: Mm-hmm. Yeah. BARBARA: It feels really [00:14:08] indulgent in a weird way.  ANDREW: But isn't that part of what life is about? Like, I think that life as opposed to death is about indulgence, right? BARBARA: (laughing) ANDREW: No, maybe I'm too Sagittarian and too Jupitarian in that regard. But, you know, I think that life really is about indulging those things and you know, somewhat like the Fool, right? If we indulge those things, whatever meaning [00:14:38] there is will emerge over time. BARBARA: Mm-hmm. ANDREW: You know, as opposed to this idea that I think that we often have that we can determine what the meaning is and then, you know, set on a course of embodying that. You know, I mean, it's like a thing that I think I said to you a long time ago, right? Like, you know, the road knows what star is yours, but you can't figure it out before you leave the house, right? You know? BARBARA: Right. ANDREW: Yeah.   BARBARA: Yeah. That's so contrary to the way I've lived [00:15:08] my life, and, as you're speaking those words again, I can feel the truth and beauty in them; at the same time, I feel part of myself resisting. ANDREW: Sure.  BARBARA: So. ANDREW: Yeah. BARBARA: Yeah, it is definitely the black phase of alchemy, man. This breaking down, this breaking down, like when I left social media, a lot of it was fueled by, I was shaping my self-image based [00:15:38] on how people on social media saw me or responded to me. And so, I wanted to not let that be driving how I was shaping myself. But, and so, taking that away, what's left? What's take what shaping myself is my work? It's always been my work. What am I doing? What am I putting out there? How much am I teaching, how many books am I publishing, how many decks am I creating, what am I doing? And [00:16:08] like you said, we can't always set the outcome and move toward it and embody it and manifest it. Sometimes it's just all something my friend Ricardo says, similar to what you said, is, you can't see the path in the woods until you're in the woods, you know? It's dark and you can't see it until you're there. And yeah, so, you know, what are all the [00:16:38] paintings? They're mostly portraits of strangers, people I don't know ... ANDREW: Mm-hmm. BARBARA: You know, just like stock images or, you know there are these sites that, where people post pictures for artists to use as reference ... ANDREW: Mm-hmm. BARBARA: And it's all I'm doing is painting these strangers. It's just very weird. ANDREW: Well, I think that's really interesting, cause you never really know what's gonna come back around. I have this painting on the wall in the shop that I did. [00:17:09] I don't even know how long ago. It has no date on it. Seven or eight years ago maybe? And it's of a ... it's of a red-wing blackbird. And you know, I I've been thinking about making art again and showing art. I was in a show recently and sort of thinking about sort of the idea of not just making sort of decks and stuff like that. I mean still making those things as well, but also making [00:17:39] art for the sake of making art to show and share, you know, and ... And I was looking at this painting which has been, you know, in my reading room the whole time since I made it, so for a long time now. And I was like ... And I was talking to an artist and talking about how inspired I was by Basquiat and their really large works that they painted. You know, [00:18:09] they had a showing here in Toronto awhile back and some of the paintings are like six-foot square and stuff like that. And I'm feeling this urge to work big, I'm like, but I don't really have space to work big, you know, all the excuses come in, and then like I was looking at this painting of a bird and I was thinking, and then immediately I was like, you know what I'm going to do, I'm going to photograph that, I'm going to blow it up, and then I'm going to paint on top of it and make it into a new painting through that process. And so, I [00:18:39] just got the prints, so they're two by two by three feet big, as opposed to like, five by eight or something like that, which the small thing is originally, and I'm going to mount it to some kind of board and then I'm going to start reworking on top of it, stuff like that. So, you just never know what comes back around, you know, like those strangers may emerge in some really new way or lead to something else, you know?  BARBARA: Are you going to use acrylics on top of that, or ... ? ANDREW: [00:19:10] I'm going to ... I'm going to use ... I have these acrylic markers. So, I'm going to use those. And I'm going to use ink, so I'm going to like go in and I want to do a mix of big scale stuff on it and really really super intimate things, like, you know, like the branch at the bird is sitting on because [00:19:40] it was painted small is essentially just a few very simple strokes of simple colors, right? But I'm going to go in embellish that, and then I'm going to go in and work with some varnish and stuff. So, some stuff will be really varnished and shiny from certain angles, and like I have a bunch of ideas about it. And then I feel like I can also feel there's some other birds like, “Hey, do me next. Do me next!” BARBARA: (laughing) ANDREW: So, you know, I feel like it's going to become a body of something, right? [00:20:10] But what that is, I don't really know, but you know, they've always been my companions, right? You know, I mean, I have this habit of I just go and follow the birds through the woods until they stop and then I realize where I need to be and stop and hang out with the Earth and that place and things like that, right? So, I have a very like strong connection to them. So, yeah. BARBARA: God, I can't wait to see. It sounds like it's going to be really really cool. I'm feeling excited for the process for you just hearing about it. ANDREW: Yeah. It's been [00:20:45] a long time since I ... since I had a sir purely process-driven thing and it's been a long time since I made ... Like I'm not even sure the last time I made a piece of art that wasn't for a deck, you know girls. It's been quite some time since I've since I did that. So. Yeah. Yeah.  BARBARA: I was just thinking, you know, we kind of led with the heavy stuff, which seems natural, it's been on my mind, [00:21:15] but I wonder maybe it wouldn't be nice to have a little interlude of a few happy or positive things that have already been kind of coming out of the ashes.  ANDREW: Yeah! BARBARA: Just so people don't get too depressed and quit listening. (laughs) But, you know, one of the things is ... I have two examples I'd love to share. The first is regarding my father's death. ANDREW: Mm-hmm. BARBARA: So, my father. He had [00:21:45] five kids: me and two sisters from my mom, and then my sister and brother from my stepmother. So there's five of us. And out of the five of us, three of us are really close, me and two of my sisters, and then the other two live in Michigan still and not quite as close. And one of the things my dad always said was he wished that we were all closer. ANDREW: Right. BARBARA: That was super important to him and [00:22:15] he ... When things started getting bad for him in July, my siblings and I started a sibling text chain just so we could ... and just so we could keep up on stuff .... ANDREW: Mm-hmm. BARBARA: And all be fully informed. And throughout the process between July and October, that ... the time when he was like actively dying and in hospice and then planning the funeral and whatnot, my siblings and I worked [00:22:46] together, not like a well-oiled machine cause that sounds so cold, but like a bunch of dancers who know their steps and that complement each other. And so that was just really super amazing. And then when the funeral, which was in Michigan, all my siblings were already there and I was flying in, like the day before, and so I get to the Detroit airport and my [00:23:16] siblings text me and they're like, we're all here. Like, so it was just us five siblings, without spouses, without kids, without anything, just the five of us and I don't remember the last time the five of us were alone together and all in one place. So we stopped for a drink on the way home, and just you know, toasting dad and sharing stories, sharing intimate moments that we had with our dad that we'd never told anyone before .... ANDREW: Right. BARBARA:  You know and just got really really [00:23:46] close. And in that weekend of the funeral, it was like my dad's last gift to us. ANDREW: Mm-hmm. BARBARA: He made a situation where we all fell in love with each other. ANDREW: That's wonderful. BARBARA: It really, it really is wonderful. And you know, so I'm so grateful for that because we still have that text chain going and you know, at least once a week we're, you know, sharing things about our lives and you know, encouraging each other, so that was super awesome. ANDREW: Mm-hmm. BARBARA: And [00:24:18] a real blessing. Then the other was, it's a little bit still close, but it was still like such a remarkable experience, was you know, like I said, Noel died. And so we kept him at home and people would come, you know, to just sit with him and be with people, you know, kind of like a wake kind of thing.  ANDREW: Yeah. BARBARA: Oh, oh, but I do need to tell you this little local flavor thing, you know cause I do live here in this little tiny valley [00:24:48] and the technology is pretty sketchy. And you know, there's no like Potter Valley Facebook group or anything where people share what's going on. They do it the old-fashioned way. Like when the fires were happening this summer, there's this one kind of a park area where everyone who comes in and out of the valley drives past, and they had a big like a sandwich board sign where they had updates on the fire and a map of the evacuation areas and [00:25:18] stuff. You know, and that's how people found out stuff.  ANDREW: Mm-hmm. BARBARA: And so, for Noel's funeral, we wanted--or whatever. It wasn't really a funeral, we'll call it a funeral. We wanted to let people know, and so, Dylan and I made, you know, two really big cardboard signs saying, just saying, that Noel passed away. Community visiting at his home and the hours and hung one up at the corner store [00:25:48] and one on the corner of the street where we live. And that's how we communicated the information. ANDREW: Mm-hmm. BARBARA: And one time, you know, we were walking, Dylan and I were out walking out to visit the Pigs who live on the corner where the sign was, and you know a man was driving up the mountain. He stops and he's like, “Oh so, you know, Noel died.” Yeah, yeah, you know, just people talk more, it's more face-to-face or, very old school.  ANDREW: Mm-hmm. BARBARA: Well anyways, back [00:26:18] to the cool part was: when you're getting cremated, apparently, they give you this cardboard box that's, you know, you put the body in and so we left it out in a large area of the house with a bunch of art supplies and people decorated it.  ANDREW: Mmm. BARBARA: You know, so he ... By the time it was done, it was just like covered in pictures and symbols and Sufi prayers and all kinds of other prayers and blessings [00:26:48] and gratitude and things for him. So, you know, he was sent off to his, you know, final physical whatever before he got cremated in this, not a beautiful wooden brass box, but this cardboard, little, holy, humble, cardboard box decorated with all this love and amazement. It was just really different than anything I'd ever experienced before and just how loved he was by the community and it [00:27:19] was just a really really awesome experience. It's amazing.  ANDREW: Mm-hmm.  BARBARA: Okay, happy interlude's done.  ANDREW: Happy interlude's done! (laughing) ANDREW: You know, I mean I guess, I think that there's something that I'm curious about. Now you're talking about social media again, right? You know? And like, are you going to go back? Do you ... is there anything [00:27:49] that you need from it? If you go back, how does it ... how does it impact your way of formulating your identity, you know and like those kinds of things? And I'm really, I'm really interested in this right now because .... Because in some ways, I feel like, you know, not, not recently but sort of historically, I've been somewhat absent from my social [00:28:19] media. You know, my social media has always been about the work or the things versus about me as a person. You know? And, not entirely but I mean, the podcast is definitely the place where, you know, I'm more visible, you know, or I'm more audible, I guess, as the case may be. And, you know, and I've been consciously changing that over the last while. You know? And changed [00:28:50] in part because of some conversations I had with, you know, Carrie and a few other people about stuff.  But mostly they're changing because I had this dream ... I often have dreams with Andy Warhol in them. And you know, he often comes to give me advice and tell me about stuff, and in some ways, my return to making art is also at his prompting. And the first dream that I [00:29:20] had, I was hanging out with Andy at his famous warehouse, you know, and we were there talking about making art and being seen and all of this kind of stuff. And he kind of like, we were talking, like, and he just stopped the conversation at one point in the middle of like something else, and he goes, “Andrew, you don't understand, you're a magnificent weirdo, and the world needs that right now. The world needs you to show everybody [00:29:50] your magnificent weirdness because that's what they're, what's important, and that's what's going to, you know, be significant about your work and your art and all of these things.” And I was like, in the dream I was like, “All right, Andy, I can do that. No problem,” right? And then we went on to talk about making art and other things and so on, right? And before we went on, though, he also turned around and sort of announced loudly to everyone's faces, you know, “Andrew's a magnificent weirdo, and you all should be paying attention to what he's doing,” right? [00:30:20] Something like that. And so, I've been thinking about Andy Warhol, and thinking about social media, and thinking about all of these kinds of things, and really endeavoring to sort of engage it on my own terms, you know, and really sort of share what I think is important or helpful. Helpful—helpful's the wrong word for it. Cause I'm not so interested in what's helpful. But share what [00:30:50] feels really real and what feels really particular to me, you know? And you know, I made this shirt up, that I started wearing around, that says “magnificent weirdo” on it.  BARBARA: Aw! ANDREW: Which I find particularly amusing. You know, it's kind of my talismanic t-shirt, so.  BARBARA: Oh! I love that! You ARE a magnificent weirdo. That's ... How wonderful to have Andy Warhol as your advisor and, well, maybe not muse, but your advisor ... (laughs) ANDREW: For sure. Yeah. For sure, right?  BARBARA: Mm-hmm. [00:31:21] Does that mean you're starting to engage your social media more as ... more personally, then?  ANDREW: Yeah, definitely more personally. Definitely, I'm showing up there more. I'm sharing more of my life, you know, definitely, it's definitely a thing that's sort of continuing to emerge, you know, and especially as I'm getting into making art, like I don't know what these bird things are going to be, but I'm going [00:31:51] to share that process and journey along the way, you know. And, yeah, sharing more of my personal story and that kind of stuff. So, whereas in the past, I would sort of have tended to just leave stuff alone until it felt resolved and then share the resolved story of it, you know, so.  BARBARA: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's something that I've always ... I haven't always successfully done but I've always tried. Like, I knew [00:32:21] this one teacher who was talking about, you know, public speaking, and writing, and you know, you and your audience and he said, “Don't work your shit out in front of your audience.” ANDREW: Mm-hmm. BARBARA: And you know, so I've always tried to not do that. You know, like these people aren't here to be my therapy session. They're here to learn what I learned, you know to get something helpful but--to use your word--but maybe [00:32:51] that's not the only way to think about sharing. Maybe the only purpose of sharing isn't only what you may deem as helpful or a nice clean process or technique that you can also use to change your life or fix your life or improve your life. Just sharing your unique and awesome weirdness might have value. I don't ... How would you say that? Because you said not [00:33:21] necessarily be helpful, cause you're not interested in that. So, what is the effect, then?  ANDREW: So, I mean, for me the effect is ... and you know, I think it'll be interesting what comes back for people who listen to this episode, right? You know, I think that what happens is there's this notion that people who are in positions like we're in, right? You know, like working as a [00:33:51] card reader, having a degree of success, having published and done other things, right? That somehow, we've all got our shit together and we don't struggle and nothing's difficult, you know, and I think that you know, sort of, “Wow, you know, I mean, Barbara Moore didn't just bounce right back after the death of her dad, I guess I can cut myself some slack.” Or, you know, look at that, we're all human, or you know, like these kinds of things, I think that that's [00:34:21] that that's part of it. And I also think that, particularly in the magnificent weirdo case, you know, I mean I was ... I hadn't realized that I used this phrase until someone started mirroring it back to me every time I used it, which is, you know, I would say, “Well, it's funny being me sometimes,” and then I would like say something [00:34:51] that was like, really really different about my life compared to many people's lives, right? And you know, and they were .... this person was always amused by it. But I started to realize that like, my, I don't see my life as a role model at all, but my life is super radically different than so many people's. You know? I mean, you know, we talked a little bit about but, before about this, I've mentioned before in the podcast, [00:35:21] I'm getting divorced right now, right? You know. Myself and Hanlon sort of both realized that you know, after quite a stretch of time, we've come to this place where what we want and who we've become is just different, you know? We really, you know, have a very different ... We have different goals and they don't really line up in ways that don't start to kind of curtail each other's possibilities, [00:35:51] right? Which is something that neither of us is really wanting to happen, right? You know. So, you know, so this year has been, has been, really, like the last six months has been working through that process and so on, right?  But, you know, I mean, I'm ... I've been in a non-monogamous relationship for, you know, the last three and a half, four years or something. And, you know, [00:36:21] before we had kids, almost the whole time of our relationship before that. So, I'm not ending this relationship and then figuring out who am I and how do I start dating again and you know, all of these kinds of things. You know, I mean, I have a relationship with, you know, this person, Sarah, who I've been seeing for two-and-a-half years, and there are other dates that I've gone on and other connections and so on. So, even just that: it's such a [00:36:51] different perspective than almost anybody that I know in that regard. Right? And doing what I do for a living, and you know, my religious practices, and like so many of the things that I do are just so radically different and, not that that is either a role model or the way in which people should see things or whatever, but I find that as I share those things, it's ... It [00:37:21] opens up people's ideas and sort of gives them permission to be like, huh? Well, what would I like to do that's maybe not the thing that's done. Or what would, you know, am I interested in these sort of ideas that I've been living? Do they serve me anymore? You know? Or maybe I've always wanted to be more this way or that way or whatever and so sort of seeing those things happen in other people's lives, you [00:37:51] know, to get ... It's a, it's a chance to inspire people not to be like me, but to be like themselves, right? So, yeah and again, not in a like, “I've got it figured out in this and that whatever way, cause it's not like that at all, right? But in a like, huh, you know, hang out with me as an invitation to be fully yourself, right? You know. [00:38:21] And for a lot of people, you know, that's not necessarily something that they get a lot of invitation to, right? So.  BARBARA: Yeah! Right. Probably not nearly enough people get that invitation. There's so many other forces helping tell us who we should be and how to live. ANDREW: Right? Yeah. And internalized forces too, right? Like even if, even if they're not around us now, you know, those older voices, they can still kick around, right?  BARBARA: Oh, [00:38:51] and maybe even like instinctual survival impulses, you know, like to survive in the world you have to be successful and you have to be this .... ANDREW: Yeah. BARBARA: You know, and so, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, there's a lot trying to box us in and very little inviting us out. ANDREW: Mm-hmm. Yeah. BARBARA: But then we have an awesome weirdo to help us! ANDREW: (laughing) Yeah. BARBARA: (laughing) Yeah, I definitely get and [00:39:21] appreciate the value of that approach, and its budding up against one of my older, and perhaps, just society's older idea. You know, if someone's going to write a book or teach, you expect them, or this used to be true, or maybe it was just true for me and people like me, you expect them to be masters of what they're teaching. And therefore, we get all worked out and you [00:39:52] know, when a book comes out or a kit or a deck comes out, it's usually a really happy excited moment, like, “Oh, my thing has hit the world and it's out there.” And I didn't really have that same experience with one of my recent books, The Modern Guide to Energy Clearing? ANDREW: Mm-hmm. BARBARA: Because, you know, I wrote the book based on my experiences. And now I'm, [00:40:22] this past year, I've been in a place where, I feel like, if I would have practiced everything I preached in that book, I'd be way further along than I am now, in terms of adjusting, and I don't know, not being in this black alchemical place. But it made me shy, maybe a little embarrassed, to go .... because there were a lot of publicity opportunities, unlike all my tarot stuff, [00:40:52] which there's hardly any, with this book there were invitations to radio shows and bookstores and all kinds of things, and I didn't do all of them. I did some of them because I felt like I owed it to the book and to my publisher. And you know, you have a responsibility when you're partnering with a publisher. It's not just your thing. It's their investment as well. And I think part of what made me really shy about it is cause I was in the midst of [00:41:23] “You guys, I have these tools, these techniques, these skills, this knowledge and I am too--I am too raw to do 'em.  ANDREW: Mm-hmm. BARBARA: And, it just felt almost hypocritical, and perhaps there needs to be another book, or maybe just an article that explains when you're doing energy work, sometimes you have to just let things sit and decompose and [00:41:53] you don't always get to control how fast that happens. So, yeah. ANDREW: I think that this idea of the ... like the wise teacher who's got their, all their stuff together. I think it's really a problem. I think it's really dishonest and [00:42:23] I think that it's why .... I think that it's one of the forces that allows so many problematic things to exist in a variety of communities, right? I think that it's one of the things that you know, at it ... at one of its worsts, right? encourages, you know, stuff that we could, you know, that the me too movement seeks to address, right? Because the perception is that these teachers [00:42:53] or leaders or community people or whatever, you know, in the spiritual communities have their stuff so together, right? And how could they not? And therefore this other person must be the problem? You know. I think it's one of the mechanisms which that happens under. And I think that ... I think that it sort of comes out of the sort of ... Well, I mean, I don't know where it originates from, but like in the ceremonial stuff in the more hierarchical [00:43:23] and initiatory things that I used to be involved in, in those ways. There was this notion that somehow, we would become perfect. Right? We would become enlightened. We would achieve these things. You know, but like, you know, my elders in, you know, in the Lukumí tradition, they're always like, “I'm just a person doing things. I'm doing my best, but like, I'm not perfect.” And there's no expectation to be perfect. [00:43:53] There's an expectation to cultivate character, to work on yourself, to you know, to grow, to be honest, and you know, and ideally to sort of continually seek out those things in yourself that you might need to work on in one way or another. But there's no expectation to sort of necessarily be perfect or, you know, be free of humanness, because it's not about transcendence, it's about living in this world, right? [00:44:23]  And I think that a lot of the, you know, especially the stuff that people might refer to as sort of the love and light movement, you know? It's so ... there's so much emphasis on sort of transcendence and so on that, you know, that we continually hear about these people whose humanness re-emerges or finally is seen in a certain way. And then ... and then what does that mean for those people, you know? From my point of view, It doesn't mean anything. Just like you being raw, of [00:44:53] course you're raw after all of these losses, right? Of course you are. Because you know, we shouldn't deny the reality or the shadow or you know, our suffering, because life is hard, but we can work at handling it easier, better, more consciously. You know? Maybe more consciously is the best way to frame it, but that doesn't mean that we're suddenly able to do everything, you know? I mean, I keep joking--and maybe it's not even a joke anymore, [00:45:23] maybe it's just a statement of what's going to happen. You know when the separation happens and we both have our own places and whatever. I'm like, I'm just gonna sleep for a week. It's going to  be like, the first week I'm just gonna be like, okay, shut everything off and just stay in bed and order pizzas and, you know, nap a lot and watch Netflix, cause, you know, I need some like nothing time. I need some recharging after all this work, you know? And I think that, you know, that's valid. [00:45:53] You know? That's not anti-spiritual. You know? Oh well. I feel like I'm ranting now so I'll stop. BARBARA: Yeah, no, you're preaching, preach it, brother! (laughing) I'm ... Congregation of one, right here!  ANDREW: Yeah. BARBARA: Yeah, no, it reminds me of a funny thing my ... one of my sisters would always say to me. Well, not always, it's happened a couple of times when I have like very obviously and [00:46:23] clearly fallen short of my own ideals and I'm all upset about it. And she's like, “I love it when this happens to you.” “What do you mean?” “Because you seem more human to me in these moments.” And this is my sister, you know, and I don't want any walls between her and I and I don't want to be on a higher place or on some transcendent plane or whatever. I [00:46:53] want to be with her. And so, when I screw up, that's when I'm with her more, at least on some level.  ANDREW: Yeah for sure. Well, it's, you know ... I've been doing ... For the last few years, I've been doing a lot of rock climbing. And you know, I've been sort of ramping back into it after being injured doing something else earlier in the year and climbing with some old friends, but some new climbing partners. And [00:47:23] the one, the guy was like, “It makes me so happy when I see you struggle on the wall. I'm sorry, but like usually you're just so graceful about it that I feel like it just looks so easy to you, and even though you come down and I can see that you're like panting cause it was so hard, you made it look so easy that it just makes me feel bad about myself. So, when you struggle it makes me feel better about myself!” And I'm like, that's fine. That's fair too. Right? Like, you know. I think that that's, that's part of it, right? [00:47:53] You know, when we get to see other people's humanity, then we get to see and make space for our own, in one way or another, right? So. BARBARA: Yeah. Yeah. Well, you said the idea of the wise old teacher has some inherent problem. And maybe people in general, or maybe a new idea of the archetypal teacher is starting to emerge, or maybe a new facet of it, as we're starting [00:48:23] to explore, you know, or maybe things will change, maybe we'll expect different things from our teachers.  ANDREW: Mm-hmm. Yeah, and I think that what I expect of my teachers are really kind of two things. You know, you used the word mastery earlier, right? And I think that certainly knowledge, right? You know, I mean, I expect them to really deeply know what they're, like, I'm there to learn knowledge from [00:48:53] them. And, so that's one part of it. And then the other part is, you know, is like honest relationships, you know? And having honest relationships debate what's going on and what's going on with them and space for me to be honest about what's going on for me and so on. You know, I think that those things together are what I really expect, you know, and like, you know, it's I've had the chance to meet a lot [00:49:23] of people who, you know, in one way or other, people would see as sort of wise masters or whatever, you know? And they're lovely human beings, and they're still human beings. You know? And I think that that's never not going to be the case, right? You know? Yeah. BARBARA: Well, I told you earlier one of the things that I ... the only thing I did really to prepare for today's conversation was to [00:49:53] relisten to last year's podcast.  ANDREW: Yeah. BARBARA: And, you were just ... sounded like you were just starting to explore something kind of new and interesting that I was excited to hear more about and now I'd love to hear more about the work with meteorites and moldavite.  ANDREW: Mm-hmm. Yeah, I think that ... I think in some ways that [00:50:23] work was precipitation of the separation and divorce stuff, right? You know? I mean, I think that the idea of ... I mean, you know, it certainly wasn't consciously formulated, but, you know, the sort of idea of possibly, you know, I mean, the metaphor that I was working with of was like the idea of moving to [00:50:53] a bigger space, right? Leaving the planet and being an interstellar traveler and sort of engaging a bigger world, a variety of planets, you know, like this kind of idea, right? And I think that one of the things that that energy supported me through was and is through the idea of separating from my partner of 21 years, so that's definitely been a part of it.  I [00:51:23] also feel like this one's harder to talk about it because I feel like it's still underway, but I feel like the shop that I have, my work as a deck creator and author, and my work magically have all been sort of escalating into new places. And I feel like, [00:51:53] especially sort of going into next year, I'm going to be really living a completely different reality. And I imagine there's going to be a lot more space for my spiritual stuff in that newer reality. So, I think that that's a part of what's come of that transition.  And also, I think the other thing that I've sort of ... I'm [00:52:23] still working on sorting it out on a practical level, but there's this ... There's this software company, or company that makes a software called Basecamp, and they structure their company work around these eight-week cycles. So basically, they, one of the things that I heard about what they do is that they have a six-week [00:52:53] work cycle, one week of cleanup and planning the next work cycle, and then they take a week off. And I've been really sort of starting to think about how do I, in order to make the arts and the magic and the other things that I would want to be doing and feel called to be doing, I need more space, right? I need more time. And you know, so I've been, I also [00:53:23] feel like that changing notion of what my space and time is going to look like is also kind of come out of that work, right? This idea that I can be somehow in between things. You know? Now's the time where I'm on Mars doing Mars things, and now I'm back floating in the space of my in-between time, doing whatever that is, and then go back to the next place, and you know, and the metaphor doesn't entirely hold but I think the idea, you know, makes [00:53:53] sense, right? That, so it's really ... It's about allowing. Allowing for the space and letting go of all those sort of structures and ideas that sort of hinder that possibility and making space for that to happen, you know? And I mean, I'm not sure how long it's going to take for me to completely reorganize my life and work and other things into that, into that direction. You know, it might take another year or whatever. But it doesn't really matter. But I feel [00:54:23] like all of those pieces kind of come out of, come out of that work that started with the meteorites, you know, a year or so ago. BARBARA: Cool, thanks. Thanks for sharing that. ANDREW: Mm-hmm.  ANDREW: Yeah, it's a work of shedding and becoming, right? You know, and I don't think that I was aware of the shedding of house. I was aware of the shedding at a sort of big picture level, but I wasn't aware of it as a sort of more personal [00:54:53] level when I started that. So, yeah. BARBARA: Yeah. ANDREW: So, are you ... Do you think you're gonna find your way back to the to the wider world or do you think that you're ... I feel like you've been on a hermitage in the valley in the mountains. BARBARA: Mm-hmm. ANDREW: You know, do you feel like that's something that's just going to continue? Or do you feel like it's time to shift that? BARBARA: That is a really good question, [00:55:23] really pertinent question at this point. I have just been starting to have, like, actual feelings about wanting to come out of my hermitage. It's super hard to do that cause it's my natural inclination. It's where I would be, always, if people who loved me weren't concerned about my mental and emotional health (laughs), but [00:55:55] living here, but like I said, it's so old school that it really feeds that. Like when I was in the cities and when I was involved in the wider world, it ... sometimes it felt like if it isn't seen by people on the Internet, it isn't real? ANDREW: Mm-hmm. BARBARA: And I'm sure that's just a me thing. I don't think it's like everybody has that feeling, but it was definitely affecting me like that. But there are, like there's [00:56:25] a women's circle here that meets every couple of weeks. It's, you know, not set, exactly, it's probably two or three weeks. And it's just some women who get together and just talk. And sometimes it's just casual talk, like book club level talk. And sometimes it's super deep. Then sometimes it's spiritual, sometimes it's scientific, and it's really great, but it's very small and it's just the valley, and it's not posted anywhere, and no one knows about it. It's not like [00:56:55] putting transcripts out for ... You know, it's not out there, it's just in, and like I said, just the cardboard signs, it's just all small and hidden away, kind of, and I really, it feels really safe, it feels really nice, it feels really authentic. It feels good to me. But, just over the past week or so, I have been like, I want to get out. I want to take a class. I want to [00:57:25] do something. But then I second-guess myself cause one of the things when I was in the midst of stuff this year, I kept wanting to sign up for a class or do this or do that and Dylan's like, “You know, you do have this tendency that whenever you're avoiding dealing with something, you want to take a class.” (laughs) You know, and ... ANDREW: Mm-hmm. BARBARA: Oh, okay, that makes sense. So now I'm in this space where I'm feeling this urge. Like I don't really know exactly what I want to do, but I want to get out of here. I want to have some [00:57:55] some regular contact with the outside world in some way. And I'm like, oh, does this mean I'm, you know, coming up against my emotions about my dad and haven't dealt with them yet and I'm trying to avoid that? So, yeah, I am feeling it. Yes. I think it's going to happen. I'm not exactly sure when or how it's going to happen. Earlier you had mentioned when you said you were gonna interview me and some people said to say hi and whatnot. It [00:58:25] make my heart really happy and also a little sad and very emotional. Many feelings were happening and it was like well, maybe I could be back on Facebook, and maybe I could just post about my life like I used to, and maybe that's okay. And I hadn't really been this close to thinking that in a couple of years. So.  And as far as like work, I mean I have still worked. Even though I said I [00:58:55] had the year off, I have written two books and designed a deck. So, it's not like I haven't been doing stuff to put out there, but I haven't been super publicity-oriented. I haven't been teaching. I've had invitations to workshops and to teach classes, which is more public, more connected with the world, and I keep turning them down. I still think I'm not interested in that. I think I did that a lot because it was expected. It was a natural part of this [00:59:25] work that you and I do, and I think I can be good at it. But I'm not sure if I love it. Yeah, so I'm still struggling about, you know, do I want to keep doing that or speaking at conferences or whatever. You know, especially these ones where it's like you have 50 minutes. Because I feel like a lot of the things I'm thinking about now .... They're not like, here's a simple technique that you can use. It's more like, here's a book [00:59:55] on what I thought about this one thing. You know, I just ...  So, yeah, but I would love to take an art class. I think that's what I would like. I think that's one thing my art is missing, is because I do love the process of it and that's more important than the outcome, but there's still something fulfilling about increasing your skill and being able to skillfully make what you're envisioning, you [01:00:25] know, so I would like that, and I think with that if I had some, you know, peers who are struggling as well as a teacher who's helping guide, that would probably be really good. So ... ANDREW: Mm-hmm. BARBARA: Of course, the nearest place to take art classes around here is an hour and a half away, but that's what happens when you live here in the mountains.  ANDREW: Right.  BARBARA: So.  ANDREW: I wonder if there are ... I wonder, are there are other artists in the community that you could hang out and have conversations with and so on, [01:00:55] you know? As somebody who went to art school, I'm always ... I'm cynical about art and art lessons and art school and formal training and all of those things because it basically, you know, in my experience, and my experience is very particular, but it basically just ruined all of that for me for a very long time, you know? So, but it depends on who you're working with and why, right? So.  BARBARA: Yeah. [01:01:31] Well, and this wouldn't be like an art school or even a college art course, it's just workshops held at the local art store. You know. I don't know how that is, cause I've never taken, you know, an art school class. So I don't know. Yeah. That or, or, the other thing I'd been excited about when we moved here was the idea of pursuing interfaith ministry. I haven't ... I thought I'd be a year into those studies already, back in the days when I thought everything was going to be fine. And I haven't done anything [01:02:01] with it and I'm still thinking about that. I haven't really ... The only work ritual designing I've done this year was had to do with Carol and Noel, because they ... when Noel's end was getting really close, they were like, well, you know, most marriage ceremonies say, have the words “until death do us part,” and the marriage ceremony itself is a ritual. And yet when one of the partners dies, there's [01:02:31] no ritual, you know, to wrap it up because if it's till death do you part, then what then? What, you know? And how do we untie this bond that we've made or do we, and to what extent or whatever? So, you know, we talked about that for a while and you know, kind of came to grips with what they wanted to do with each other. And then, of course, the challenge, because Noel by this time was not always with us mentally, you know, so keeping it [01:03:01] short and simple, you know, just a little ceremony for them to both release each other and to reaffirm their eternal love, in whatever way is appropriate, in the next life, perhaps, because they believe in reincarnation, you know, so you tie up all their beliefs into this ritual and knowing that was really satisfying and fulfilling, you know, just like other ceremonies I have done, so that's still there too.   ANDREW: [01:03:31] Yeah. At some point in the next little bit, Hanlon and I are going to go back to the place where we, where we performed our marriage ceremony, because we basically married ourselves, right? And we're going to ... and we're going to release the relationship, right? You know, and we're going to ... You know, we have these relatively simple silver rings. We're going to break them and then we're going to take this over and we'll have them melted down into stuff for the kids. So we'll [01:04:01] make a pendant for each of the kids, and then they can have that, but it won't be the ring anymore, you know. And you know, we have some other things that are sort of remnants of the original ceremony and stuff like that, which we're going to, you know, release in one way or another at the place where we did the ceremony as a way of just basically being like, you know, all right, you know, we signed the papers, we've done whatever, but also, I release everything, like this is just gone now, you know? And I think that that [01:04:31] kind of stuff is really important, you know? And I think that around death, around this, around all of it. It's really important, right? That's why these rituals matter, so.  BARBARA: Yeah. Well, that's beautiful. Good for you guys.  ANDREW: But first, it's also going to be winter, so it's out on the island in Toronto. It's gonna be very cold and it's not going to be inviting like when, you know, we got married in the summer and we went for a swim afterwards in the lake and stuff. I don't think any of that's going to be happening, but, yeah not really into hypothermia anyway. [01:05:01]   BARBARA: But, also, it's kind of symbolically significant.  ANDREW: For sure. Yeah. For sure. Well, maybe that's a good place to wrap this up for today. BARBARA: Yeah. ANDREW: Pursue things that are symbolically significant, people, be human. BARBARA: (laughing) That's right! ANDREW: Be weirdos! Hang out! Have fun! Thanks. Thanks so much for following up. I know, I know that this is a challenging time and I think that, I think [01:05:31] that what I've come to think about social media and about these kinds of things like the podcast and so on is, there's so much cynicism about it all, you know, people are so cynical and hear so many things about how meaningless it is and so on, and yet, personally I have some tremendously deep connections with people that are fostered, born, supported, or whatever out of, you [01:06:01] know, out of these things, and I think that if we're able to show up there consciously, then it can become something quite different. If we, if we do that. Otherwise, yeah, sure, we can share cat memes till the cows come home and they're funny, but you know, I'm not sure how many of them I remember down the road, right? BARBARA: Exactly, exactly! ANDREW: For sure. So, in case you decide to start blogging again, or whatever, where should people come and follow you, Barbara?  BARBARA: Yeah. Okay. My website is still the same, tarotshaman.com. My email is on there, BarbaraMoore07@comcast.net. [01:06:37] Please feel free to write, reach out. I may not be on social media, but I still do like hearing people and connecting, and even, keep your eyes open, you never know. I might come back and join the land of the living, join the the Magnificent weirdness that ... ANDREW: Come down off the mountain, Barbara! Come back to the city. (laughing) BARBARA: Yes. Yes. Yes. Come hang out! We can have market days or something. ANDREW: Yeah, exactly, exactly. Awesome. BARBARA: [01:07:10] Well, thank you so much for having me. I am already looking forward to next year. ANDREW: Perfect! 

Andrew and Peter explore the world of Thai magic and occultism. Talking about the importance of meta, self cultivation, personal growth and how they all relate to the intense practices of Thailands indigenous magic. Think about how much you've enjoyed the podcast and how many episodes you listened to, and consider if it is time to support the Patreon You can do so here. If you want more of this in your life you can subscribe by RSS , iTunes, Stitcher, or email. You can find Peter on FB here and at his website here Thanks for joining the conversation. Please share the podcast to help us grow and change the world.  Andrew You can book time with Andrew through his site here.  Transcript  ANDREW: [00:00:00] Welcome, everybody, to another installment of The Hermit's Lamp podcast. I am here today with Peter Jenx. And for those who don't know Peter Jenx, he is the author of a massive and intriguing tome, called Thai Occult. And it's really interesting to meet with somebody and talk with people who are involved in non-western [00:00:30] cultures and other ways of practicing magic that don't kind of come out of, you know, say, the Golden Dawn, or Wicca, or these other things, which are all lovely, but I think it's really interesting to get a dive into, you know, other kinds of worldviews and magic and all of those things. So really, that's why, you know, when Peter and I connected, I thought he'd be a great fit for being on the show. But for those who don't know you, Peter, who are you? PETER: And ... [00:01:00] Well, I'm an aging Englishman stuck in Chiang Mai at the moment. I've been here, been living in Thailand, since 2002, but first visited here in 1991. Which is kind of before its main economic explosion and everything else. And then, come from a musical background, working in music in Manchester, worked a lot with gigs, run rather interesting [00:01:30] night clubs in Manchester, and also been a practitioner of Tai Chi for like 20 years. So, I think everything's always pulled me East, which is why I really ... the first … on the first visit, I kind of knew I'd end up living here. It fits. ANDREW: Yeah, it's interesting how that works, right? You know, I was talking with somebody yesterday about, you know, I come from a Scottish background, [00:02:00] even though I was born and raised in Toronto, and they're like, “Oh, well, have you've been to Scotland?” And I'm like, “No, I haven't.” I mean, I'm curious, but I find I'm much more drawn to the East, you know? And I spent a bit of time in Thailand and a chunk of time in India, and you know, I was in China last year, and every time I return to the East, I always have this sense of ease that emerges that's quite different than what I experience, you know, living in Toronto. It's like, [00:02:30] that there are these places and cultures that are suited to our nature in ways that we might not even be able to explain or understand, you know? PETER: Well, I think it's working. I think at first when we come here, we are given space. And it's a space that we're not necessarily given in the West. Also, what I experienced when I first came here was a realization that what I'd always felt, regarding nature and regarding what [00:03:00] I perceive as magic in the West, was correct. It … Because here it is expressed in a much deeper way than it is in England, in particular. I don't know … And also, I think, you know, we need the strangeness to grow. Yeah, and sometimes part of any growth, as far as I'm concerned, is the process of change and [00:03:30] if you go to an alien culture, you are constantly challenged to change, and that can be astonishingly refreshing for us. And .... ANDREW: Mm-hmm. Yeah, I can see that, for sure, and also that that idea that, you know, I mean, there are other ways of looking at the world and nature, you know, I mean this … the word animism has been, you know, being kicked around a lot and sort of gained a lot of ground as sort of a word [00:04:00] for some of the kind of world view that we might be talking about. And you know, I think that that's, that's both part of it. You know, for me, going … they're going to other places, and you and my involvement in and initiation in Afro-Cuban Lukumí, there is this sort of world view at play where plants are alive and have energies and consciousness, and you know, there's this interconnectedness between everything that [00:04:30] isn't really common, even amongst magical practitioners, at least in my experience, kind of growing up. PETER: Yeah. Yeah. It's one of those … [sigh] You know, the funny thing is … Okay. I had to act like myself to do this book. I have not been able to read other but … other magical books at all. Otherwise, it would have kind of diluted or influenced what I was going to do. The whole time I've spent here has been really a time to learn how not to [00:05:00] think and influence what is around you, and if you do that, you gain the natural focus that comes with the occult practices of this land, and that allows the nature to come through. But I always perceived this as just the Thai occult. Everybody else calls it Thai animism. [laughing] So I'm just getting used to the fact that it is probably animism, but everybody … all the people I deal with [00:05:30] all refer to it as an occult practice, but as an animist practice, it dates back thousands of years and it is uninterrupted now, that's quite rare in the world, as far as I know. I haven't studied anything else in depth, deliberately. And because of that, the depth of what I've been able to write about and the depth of understanding that is available is really off the planet as far as I'm concerned, you know. ANDREW: Yeah. Yeah, [00:06:00] I mean, there's such a difference between, you know, living practices that date way back, you know, you know with the Buddha, Afro-Cuban Lukumí stuff in Orisha tradition, it's one of those things where … When we start talking about divination in those systems, often people are quite astounded, and I know I was really astounded at the kinds of things that are included in the wisdom and specificity and all of these kinds of things. And, [00:06:30] you know, it's … In the end, the explanation is simple. You've had a lot of very deep, intelligent, mystical people pondering the human condition and connecting to the spirit world for thousands of years and passing on that information and allowing it to accumulate. And it provides such a deep insight into human, you know, human nature and human problems because you [00:07:00] know, although the nature of the problems changes with modernity and, and so on, the nature of being human really doesn't, I don't think. PETER: Well, that actually depends on the culture, though, because if you look at the Thai system, the things that it offers are the things that people, because of this region require, right? So, you know, this has been a very dangerous region over the thousands of years, and [00:07:30] they've been lucky enough to have the influence of Buddhism, which always overrides ancient animist practices, so, things can … They can remain who they are, while attaining higher spirituality, if that makes sense.  And really because of, you know, the rough nature of the living in the wild, and the constant wars in the region, most of the things that they have worked out to offer, and create, for their devotees are [00:08:00] related to protection in many forms, impenetrable skin, invincibility, ways to bounce back black magic, ways to change your fate, ways to attract people, ways to become popular, ways to gain good fortune, and it's all about, at the core of it all, it's actually all about the person as well, because they're being given an advantage that [00:08:30] they've got to work with. So, it's not just abracadabra, like wham! Okay. Now you're popular. Yeah, they might give you the attribute of being popular. But if you're a bit of a twat it's not going to work. Right.  So everything that they create is all about the development of the person themselves, being given an advantage that they have to grow into, which is typical of what we were talking about earlier, whereby the constant process [00:09:00] of change is also, can be -- we go backwards sometimes, can be the process towards either becoming a better person or more magical or however you want to see it. Yeah? And throughout the thousands of years that they developed it here, they've discovered what is actually supernatural in nature, and they have their own versions of it. Which, how the hell did they discover that? I don't know, but you know, special people discover [00:09:30] special things. They discover what human products they can use for rather powerful spells, they discover all the plants independently, often, of other approaches. So, the odd time, I've shared a picture of a tree .... [ringing phone] ANDREW: Oh! Now the phone's going to ring, just let it finish. It's not gonna … [00:10:11] I think I can make it stop. All right. You know what I'm going to do? I'm just going to unplug the phone. How about that? Problem solved. PETER: [laughing] Yeah, that's easy. So, you need, you need, you need that stick I showed you earlier. ANDREW: I know right? You know, I do. Yeah, before we started, let's just continue. PETER: So I'll go back in … I'll let you edit that out later. I'll just go back into where it was. ANDREW: Yeah, perfect.  PETER: So like one time, I posted a picture of a particular tree that has, that produces a particular wood [00:10:41] that the Thais use in many magical amulets, called amudam. I mean there are legends, it's the tree that you'd climb to get out of hell, because it's impossible to climb, because of huge spikes on the trunk. And it was possibly … There was a fantastic discussion ensued, because it was also a magical wood in pretty much every other system that I was in contact with at that time through the Facebook page. And the incredulity [00:11:11] of that between everybody was really rather wonderful. You know, it kind of just pulled everybody together. And … ANDREW: That's animism, right? That's the tree telling you what it wants to do, right? You know, and  telling everybody like the same thing. It's like, hey, I can help you with this thing. You know, if you work with me, you know, and that's what's really profound about these things, I think. PETER: Yes, very much so. It's … And [00:11:41] the more kind of I've learned about things, you know, I just, we were discussing about a person earlier, about lightning, and how lightning can make things magical. And, you know, I was chatting with a particularly learned ajahm from a very old lineage called Ajahm [?], Ajahm Tiger. With the help of my partner, of course, and he was telling me, really, if a lightning strikes [00:12:11] a tree, its use depends on the effect of the lightning on the tree. Like, if it blows off the bark in the middle, that area is used for the handles of magical knives; if it strikes another area of the tree, it's used for something else. So, depending even on how a supernatural occurrence like a lightning strike hits something, it can produce all [00:12:41] sorts of different results. And they … At the time we were having this chat, it was really rather mind-blowing that people have spent generations upon generations studying the effects of these supernatural occurrences.  ANDREW: Well, and I think that … It's so foreign to people living in cities, you know, but I mean, when you start spending time in nature and start consistently spending time in nature, [00:13:11] you know, it really, it really can start to speak to you after a while, right? You know, I spent … There's a site where we used to go and do ceremonies, every month, for almost two years, and kind of towards the end of that time, I did a 10-day retreat by myself where I just hung out in the woods and fasted and did my own rituals and stuff like that. And the amount of things [00:13:41] that I learned from that land and from the plants and the kinds of things that got revealed to me ... and even just like sort of unexpected beautiful things, you know.  There was this cherry tree and you know, I knew it was a cherry tree, we'd seen the flowers, it was beautiful, and so on, but the thing that was amazing, because I was there all day, every day, for that period of time, when I [00:14:11] was there, the sap was coming out and so there were these little reddish golden amber blobs on the tree from the sap emerging, and the tree was in the west from where we ... where I usually was, and when I looked up, toward sunset, all of those were glowing like a stained glass window, right? And so there are these moments of profound beauty and profound transference of information, [00:14:41] and where those plants can speak to you, and if you're around them all the time, then … and you're paying attention, then you get to notice them, right? But ... PETER: Well, it's the attention. That's the thing.  ANDREW: Yeah.  PETER: And this is why, I think, in the modern world, governments are terrified of nature, because it calls people away from what they want to do, the people to do, you know, and to be a good little drone and all the other sayings that we [00:15:11] can come out with rather pithily. But, you know, it's ... and even the medical community is now turning around and saying look, you know, to fight depression, just go and walk in the hills, go and sit in the forest. You know, but this kind of … You know, I'm lucky enough to be of an age where it was more of an actual world at the time, and this is, you know, it makes me kind [00:15:41] of put my head in my hands that people are having to be reminded to do that. You know, and the beauty that is available, the wealth that is available is astonishing. Since we moved to Chiang Mai, me and my partner have been round looking at various, some of the interesting spiritual caves in this region. And you know how, if we have time when people visit, I might take them to one or two, but there's one that I've already decided, I [00:16:11] think there's only one or two people I'll take to that particular one. It's too wild. And if … You know, if we spend the time like you have, to be able to still the mind, and treat ourselves to a little bit of solitude, we start to see these things, you know. And maybe they become more special. ANDREW: Yeah. Mm-hmm. Well, and I also think that we really need to understand and [00:16:41] respect, you know, like if we're really going to going to go into the real wilderness, you know, or real spots in nature, you know, it's something quite different, right? You know, in … Again, in my tradition, the real woods, you know, like not just like a couple plants around your yard or the park but the actual forest is a place that's somewhat feared by practitioners, not in a ... that sounds wrong. It's a place [00:17:11] that's deeply respected because it's known to be a place of power, and because it's a place of power, it's also a place of danger. You know, and so you make offerings to make sure that you're protected while you're there. You make offerings, maybe when you leave, to make sure that nothing you didn't want comes with you, you know, you make … If you're going to take anything, then you make offerings to the plants that you're going to take from, you know, and you know, it's so rare for a lot of us to have contact [00:17:41] with that deep wilderness, you know, it's something completely foreign and it's astounding, right? PETER: Well, it's … Usually at least once or twice a month, I end up going off with an ajarn, often to graveyards for graveyard ceremonies. And … Which I'm starting to document more fully. And, you know, watching, the ajarn go into, I always [00:18:11] call it ajarn world. ANDREW: Yeah, and by … What's a good translation for ajarn? Is … practitioner? teacher? Yeah. PETER: Teacher … The ajarn is a higher teacher. Yeah, but it's more than that. Yeah. It's an occultist, really. And, and watching them deal with what is there, and become open to what is there ... And, you know, I asked Ajarn Su and I've also asked Ajarn Apichai. You know, [00:18:42] often they go there to choose a ghost to do a particular task, and, to which Ajarn Apichai would, you know, often say, “Well, we've come to this graveyard, because it's a graveyard where there are many soldiers and police.” So, I normally … He said he normally tries to choose a good-natured ghost, so they don't come home with you, even though he has strong protection. And the deal is made, you know, to [00:19:12] reward the spirit when the job is done. And he knows, he can tell, within five percent, really, how effective that particular spirit's going to be. And sometimes he will go back and repeat, or just say “No, it's worked.” You know? ANDREW: Mm-hmm. PETER: And then you go with Ajarn Su, and the same questions will be, you know, Ajarn likes to choose what are called Phi Thai Hong ghosts. And, which [00:19:42] are the ghosts of people who've died violently, before their time. And again, he said--some of them are really quite lovely--and you know, we were standing just in the graveyard, doing a love ritual, pulling a separated couple back together. And he's called, and he slaps on the side of the cremation pit. It's just two walls that focus the heat in to be [00:20:12] able to burn the body fully, in the open, in a thin, a bit of a wood, and he's calling ghosts. And you know, it was the time of year when leaves are on the floor--the leaves shed up here, some trees--and you could hear the ... something walking towards us, you know, from a particular direction.  So, he called that ghost over and came to a deal, and he said, “Oh, it's been successful and I'll come back in a [00:20:42] few days and bring the offering that I promised, and I will donate merit.” And merit is something we gain. It's a Buddhist, Thai Buddhist principle where we gain merit through good deeds, helping people. A basic form of it would be giving to charity, and, you know, these Phi Thai Hong ghosts need to collect merit to get out of hell. Eventually try and rise towards rebirth. [00:21:12] And Ajarn Su is very careful about the ghosts he chooses, only, he never forces them, he requests, he is very gentle. Otherwise, they can hurt you. Yeah. And then when we get back, both of the ajarns will always bless water, splash on feet, hands, top of head, back of neck, just to make sure nothing has been clingy, you know. So, I mean they all follow similar [00:21:42] patterns, where, you know, and if anything's taken, you request it to be taken and if you're going to work with anything, you're asking permission, and it's extremely similar all around the world except for the cultural differences. And the influences, like in this region, with Buddhism has been a particular influence. ANDREW: Mm-hmm. So, I have so many questions, so many questions! [laughs] I guess one of my, one of  [00:22:12] my questions, though, coming out of what you just talked about … We talked about … You mentioned somewhere along the way, changing your fate, right? And I'm really curious about the idea of fate as it as it exists in this practice, you know, can you ... Can you just answer that small question for us? Tell us what that's like. [chuckles] PETER: Okay. Well, the idea of fate is … Without, I don't study horusat, which is Thai astrology. [00:22:42] Okay, but what I would say is, that I think the Thai occult corresponds to people's state of mind. Yeah? And help to get people out of the state of mind to improve themselves again, as well as realigning their faith, there's a dual motion going on here. We are given a Qatar. We have to make offerings. We [00:23:12] have to take care of something. We have to structure our lives around it. We have to take the five precepts, which are the basic things. Don't kill anybody. Stop shagging around. Don't lie, you know, etcetera etcetera. And often, besides the help of something like Rahu, which, the Thai Rahu is not the same as the Indian one, but, we praise it in a different way, which really annoys the Indians. And we [00:23:42] gain his help now, if … to do that we have to order our lives around it. So, I think it's a dual road of choosing a better path, choosing the help of somebody who is smart enough and spiritual enough to help you, and then structuring your life in a different way, and the Rahu is considered to raise your general level of good fortune. ANDREW: And Rahu is [00:24:12] what exactly? PETER: Rahu is the god that eats the sun or the moon from Indian mythology. Yeah? He's the god of eclipses. In India, they do not praise him, they're trying to get rid of him. Hmm. Yeah. They think it's horrific that the Thai people praise Rahu but usually they often consider that a period of very bad fortune is sometimes, Rahu coming into somebody's lives and influencing it without being [00:24:42] asked to come in. So, by praising him, you're going to offer your foods, the correct foods, which always have to be black. They need the numbers of seven, nine, or 15, depending on the ajahm. Different black foods, usually on the four quarters of the moon, with the full moon being the most important. Normally, it's advised to wear the Rahu on the full moon when in which [00:25:12] case it kind of feels like he's bouncing around on your chest like going to a disco. He can't … he's extremely rewarding; many ajarns swear by Rahu, but he takes a lot of work. So, I think it's a dual, being very honest about this, I think it's a dual combination, whereby we get our shit together, and then the help offered by the Rahu offered by the ajarn, will start to improve the life. ANDREW: And when we're [00:25:42] talking about fate here, are we talking about … We can be a little simplistic too, maybe for the conversation. Are we talking about it as a sense of karma, like consequences for our actions, this life, other lives, or whatever? Are we talking about like a destiny or a thing that we're ... sort of came intact from somewhere or that we need to try and achieve maybe in our life. PETER: Well, we always [00:26:12] have influence. Actually, there's three forms of influence on the brain. Okay, there's three forms of influence we consider to be three forms of influence from life. One is an astrological influence. Astrology influences the person without any doubt at all. Yeah? The second one in Thai is the influence of ghosts. Yeah? And spirits directing your life without you knowing about it. And the third one is the influence of the mind and all the silly things that the mind does can [00:26:42] be destructive. Yeah? If you … Everybody goes through periods of bad fortune, but they can have very very different reasons. Sometimes even in the Thai practices, you know, we can have a real crash of fortunes, but I was just seeing it as, it's just a part of life, man. It can't be good all the time. Yeah? It's a readjustment of yourself and of your … the way you deal with yourself. I don't like to involve things [00:27:12] like karma. I'm very practical in that respect. It's about living an open and happy life and sometimes shit goes wrong. Yeah? Through bereavement and through everything else ... ANDREW: So, go ahead. PETER: And through bereavement and through everything else, but that period then we have to kind of realign ourselves. I think focusing in on what has actually caused the problem is one of the things that we need to get away from [00:27:42] and just deal with the fact that we're in the shit. Yeah? Yeah, so that also immediately stops all the stuff that goes around in the brain or at least helps with it. Yeah? So. ANDREW: Yeah. Yeah, in Lukumí divination we have kind of negativity, which we call Otonawa, which means … roughly means, that which you brought with you from heaven, and it's like, it's like, yeah, this is a thing that's, [00:28:12], you can't do anything about, maybe it's part of your destiny, maybe it's just come from, come to a place where the various forces in your life make this inevitable. But now you need to just, you know, appease it, ease it, support yourself, and get through it, and then, you know, but there's no making it go away, right? You know, like there's no perfect road, right? Where we never see these things.  PETER: Well there can't be, otherwise we get so spoiled that the smallest pebble on the road would become an absolute nightmare [00:28:42] if it got into our shoes. Right? You know, we need it. We need these things to happen in life, in my opinion. Otherwise, we don't have any understanding of what life is or can be about. ANDREW: And I also … I also think it's really interesting that ... the idea of easing the mind by stopping, asking why, and looking to explain it. You know, I think that that's a place where a lot of people ... you [00:29:12] know, I mean, I read cards for people, and you know, there are certainly folks who come in for card readings who are just like: “but why, why did this happen, why did this happen?” It's like, at a certain point, why does it matter? How about you do this to make it better, you know, and yeah, it's that practicality that I think is sometimes very unsatisfying to people in certain situations, you know? PETER: Well, it's a Western thing, you know? Our minds are way too busy. You know? I live, you know, one of the core elements of [00:29:42] Thai culture is samadhi, which is [? 29:45]  that is gained through Buddhism. It is an open and clear focus whereby we're trying to separate ourselves from the mind, so you end up in a position where you can watch your mind being a bastard. Yeah? Or being a bit barmy one day. Yeah? So, eventually when you actually … You know, but I always ask people what is watching the mind? Yeah? [00:30:13]  So in my opinion, what you are doing and what you are going to learn to do, is to find out who you are, which is not often what your mind is? You know, even in our … Even in our culture, we have sayings like, what does your stomach tell you? It's not the same as what does your mind tell you? They will say, what do you think? Yeah. So, one of the aims is to eventually secure yourselves and then when you get to that point, you can start to [00:30:43] see or feel astrological influences. You can have an idea about whether you're being influenced by something else. And you can watch your mind and attempt to behave and try and calm it down, so, it doesn't cause which as much trouble. Yeah? And all these are core practices within Buddhism and Eastern philosophies. ANDREW: Yeah. For sure. Yeah, that ability to step back [00:31:13] from what's going on in your head and basically be like, oh, take a look at that. My brain is … my brain is doing this thing in the same way that my stomach might be doing another thing in my … You know, my knee might be acting up or whatever. It's like, I'm not even those things, right, but sort of tuning down the emotions and the mind to kind of a place of somewhat lesser value or more specific value than the sort of overriding quality that we often associate with them. You [00:31:43] know, that's not easy, right? That's ... for a lot of people, especially Western people. PETER: You know, if you ever visit, an example of one of the wonderful things to do is to go and see someone like Ajarn Su, who was a monk for 18 years. So, this guy's got focus. Yeah? And recently, we went along with somebody who wanted a head tattoo. A head young [not sure if this is right? at 32:08] for metta. Yeah, for loving-kindness. Higher, the highest of the high Buddhist-style tattoos. You know, head tattoos [00:32:13] hurt. ANDREW: Yeah, I can imagine. PETER: This is done with a gun. Ajarn Su can only use a gun because he's got an arm that won't do as it's told, and, you know, the lad doing it had great difficulty controlling the screaming. And I was … I was helping out, being a bit of an assistant. And I was watching Ajarn, and he just went into his quiet place and not thought, but [00:32:43] no thinking, he was just chanting Qatar while he was doing the inside, while doing, while performing this tattoo, which took way longer than the recipient really wanted it to, and he pretty much screamed all the way through, so when we let … And then the worst thing was that if you have a tattoo with Ajarn Su, he will then give you his Yant Kru, which is, it gives … Everybody he gives tattoos to and it's a line [00:33:13] of script going along the front line at the bottom of the palm, and man, it's painful. Yeah? And as soon as, as soon as he said to me in Thai, “Oh, just hold his hand,” I thought, “Oh my God, he's really going to scream now.” And, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. He did. He really let go. Yeah, and then when, and then when we left Ajarn, after about 10 minutes, the guy just lit up, and he got the sun inside his face. And [00:33:43] he actually said, “Wow, now I know why I've had it done. I wasn't so sure for the last half an hour,” and it looked amazing, and we were actually leaving. But then once we left, Ajarn's neighbors from across the road came over to see him to make sure everything was okay. [laughing] ANDREW: Right? PETER: And Ajarn is such a sweet man. He kept stopping and going, “so [00:34:13] soo,” which means, you know, “you have to fight a little bit,” but doing it in such a cute way, it was like an anime, you know. And watching him not be drawn into somebody else's pain, not be influenced by somebody who is having difficulty, and retaining his own presence was a lesson in itself. It was quite astonishing, it was an amazing 30 minutes.  ANDREW: It's [00:34:44] such a … I mean, I hear in that story what I would call a profound sense of compassion that doesn't match what we normally, you know, people might go to as a sense of compassion, which is, a sense of that deeper purpose of what's at hand, a loving acknowledgment of the struggle, and a commitment to the outcome that was what was meant to ... like what was agreed to, as opposed to an avoidance of a kind [00:35:14] of suffering for that person, right? PETER: Yep, that's exactly right. And also, when he finished the tattoo, Ajarn told him, instead of keeping the five precepts, he only has to keep one. He said, “But you keep this precept,” and when he told him the one, I'm not going to say which one it is, I'm not going to divulge anything about what he said, but he said, “How does he choose the most difficult [00:35:44] one he could possibly choose for me?” I said, “Oh, he always does that!”  ANDREW: Of course.  PETER: I said, “Otherwise what's the point?” And the guy just fell around laughing? You know, he said, “How does he know?” I said, “He's an ajarn, my friend.” ANDREW: Yeah. PETER: “He probably knew as soon as you walked in.” And it was again one of those comical moments when we realize how much we have to grow in the situation we are in. But the [00:36:14] levels of metta, loving-kindness and the beauty of what they are trying to do is, it's just breathtaking. ANDREW: Mm-hmm. So, I mean I guess, let me ask this question, and I imagine there might be a few different answers to it. But, how does, how does a person become an ajarn? PETER: In the usual route.  ANDREW: [chuckling] PETER: Okay, those … From what I can see at the moment, and this is going to change over time, as [00:36:44] the more time I spend with them, but basically everybody starts off as being some sort of devotee, using their amulets, learning the Qatar, becoming kind of known as somebody who makes an effort towards those spiritual practices. They might go off and do a few weeks, or a month, or even three months as a monk. Yeah? Which is all [00:37:14] set up within the community, and most times men will be a monk at some point in their life, for a short period of time, and then they may start helping the ahjan with rituals and helping the people who visit the samyat, which is the place of work. It's like his spiritual shop, his temple, yeah? And then, the [00:37:44] studying begins. Now the studying, we discovered, has actually got levels. And each level, it's a bit like going and getting different degrees. Each level has got what is called the khan kru associated with it and the khan kru is a construction of various objects. Like sometimes swords, sometimes flags, and [00:38:14] they're always quite different, a lot of betel nut, flowers. It depends on the lineage of the ajarn that's giving it and there are various levels of the khan kru, depending on what you study. So, the earlier levels tend to be directed towards satyam, the Thai traditional tattooing, after which you tend to learn about sunay sunay magic, which is the magic for attraction. [00:38:44] Eventually … I'm trying to remember the levels. It's something like the 8, 12, 27 but it ends up at 108. There's men. There's about eight different levels of the khan kru, and at each level you attain a certain understanding, but the khan kru is actually considered to be alive. It's considered to have life, and it helps you teach [00:39:14] you, and it can also knock you back if you're not studying enough, or being erudite enough, or not trying enough or you're just getting it wrong. Yeah? So, I … it's weighed like everything in this system. The book kind of introduces the subject of the khan kru, but the khan kru in itself could probably be a book on its own.  Ajarn Su holdes the khan kru 108, which [00:39:44] is the full witcha, which comes from a similar root word as Wiccan, by the way, the witcha is the knowledge, and a very famous monk called Kru Badung Dev, still alive, but he's bedridden and 105 and his witcha collection, his book collection is really quite something, it's off the planet and his knowledge to go along with it. When he was a monk, he had the khan kru 227, [00:40:15] which only monks can have, and then you go back to the 108, when you stop being a monk. So, often you're going to see … In Ajarn Su's samyat, there's one khan kru and it's a 108, everything, and there are a certain color to show that his teacher is still alive and they change the color when he dies.  In other samyat, you go and they'll have like five or six khan kru [00:40:45] for different subjects from different ajarns. Yeah, so you have some that stick to a certain lineage and some that go around collecting different witchas, almost like create their own lineage to start their own path, which then they can help other people along as well. It involves learning at least three scripts. It involves learning an enormous amount of Qatar, understanding the Qatar, [00:41:15] and it involves practices such as various meditational practices, like the 32 parts of the body practice for which you need a teacher but there's a brief outline in the book of it. We're about … we get to know our physical body by traveling around it. And it's split into 32 parts. There is also various meditational practices [00:41:45] towards cutting four elements within the body, but all these kind of roll along through the different levels of study. ANDREW: And so, is the title conferred by the teacher then at some point? Is that the …? PETER: The teacher decides when you move to the next level. To become an ajahm, you know, you can say, I could now turn around and say, “I'm ajarn, I'm [00:42:15] an ajarn,” but I'd be a bit of an idiot to do so, because it's really obvious that I'm not, right? Yeah. Yeah, in the same way as mastership in martial arts. You know, you always get … there's always a number of [pillocks? 42:26] who call themselves a master and they have to go through the very painful process of being beaten up by an eight-year-old at some point. You know what I mean? Yeah. Similar, you prove yourself by being good at your ajarn. ANDREW: That's interesting. I also … I'm also really fascinated by … I mean, we were talking about nature [00:42:45] earlier. Do the ajarns, like, are there any living, like do they practice in Bangkok in the center of town? Do they out in the woods? PETER: Yes, woods. Yeah. Yes. They did. There is … There are some remarkable magicians in Bangkok. Normally, they will deal with the things that people who live in the metropolis need, will help them with the promotion at work, will help them find a lover. Yeah, and [00:43:15] be more attractive, and there is those … One ajarn called Ajarn Weaver Ted [? at 21:32] who's now very famous. He's the first photograph in the book. And he's got very rich clientele, that he does spiritual work for, whatever that may entail. Yeah, some of it will be aggressive. Some of it will be protective. Some of it, you know … because in Thailand basically, [00:43:45] it's really the rich and the poor that use magic, not necessarily the middle classes. Yeah. And there's also people like Ajarn Samat, [43:57] who is one of the most remarkable satyan ajahms I've ever met. Man, he has it. He has it. Yeah? And for me, he's the best satyan ajarn in Bangkok, but he's difficult to see, he has a mostly retired clientele. His work is not beautiful. It's very old [00:44:15] style. It's very ancient witcha, but man, he has it, whoo! You know, so all these things are available for people who need it, finding the very traditional Thai ones will only be done by the Thai people, but then there are other ones who become famous outside the country as well. ANDREW: So, let me ask you this question then. So, where does where does morality fit in these kinds of practices, you know? PETER: [00:44:45] In what respect?  ANDREW: So, if someone's coming to have work done to bring a relationship back together, is that … is that seen as both people should be there and consent? Is it seen as one person who wants this to happen can do the work and that could work? You know we talked about defense and aggression and these other kinds of things. Is there a morality in [00:45:15] there? Or is that sort of purely a Western question and not even relevant? PETER: Well, it's, well, there's a morality in everything in life. It just depends on your personal standpoint. And, many ajarns nowadays, a lot of the really heavy stuff has gone back in the cupboard, because it's not needed anymore, yeah? So, but I'd say Ajarn Cau, who's a particularly lovely ajarn who I got along very well with in towards [00:45:46] Doi Saket, the mountains to the east. He only pulls lovers back together who were already married, and they have to prove it to him. Yeah, he will ask them for impossible things to get. You know, if they can, the skin off the bottom of his foot or her foot, depending on which partner wants the other partner to come back, and, and he will help them get back together, because that is an act of metta, he [00:46:16] is helping keep the couple together.  At the same time, he will basically attempt to get the person who is bringing the ... paying for the ritual to understand that all the ritual does is bring them back. It's not going to fix your relationship problems. So, if you turn around and be angry, it's not going to keep them there. This is not making a slave out of somebody, [00:46:46] yeah? So there isn't really anything aggressive within that. I mean, really, you know, people often ask the question: What is black magic in Thailand? You know, yes, then you get a different answer from everybody, but when they ask the same ajarn, the ajarn always said, well, you know attraction. He said, I might use part of somebody's skull for attraction. Esanay, [47:12] we call it, and he said, but it's just an air magic. It's not … it's [00:47:16] not black magic. He said, you're just attracting somebody, where's the harm in that? You're not kind of turning them into a slave. You're just attracting them. ANDREW: Right? If the work isn't … The work isn't geared towards removing people's free will. The work is geared towards providing opportunity, and that opportunity, especially sort of based on what you said in the earlier part of the conversation too, that opportunity is both access [00:47:46] to the opportunity of that thing and also the opportunity to grow as a person to embody that thing. PETER: Exactly.  ANDREW: Yeah.  PETER: Yeah. So, you know other people think the use of any human materials is black magic in itself, which I don't, I don't consider it to be. There's all sorts of … We'll not get into the Thai thoughts about death, because you know, everybody does … they're not … well, you know, it's just part of life. And generally, most … some ajarns [00:48:16] think that anything with human materials is black magic. Some ajarns only think that anything that is forceful is black magic, anything that is cursing is black magic, and they really try not to do it nowadays. ANDREW: Hmm. PETER: Yeah, they will do something called a kong ritual, which is a ritual. It's like a controlling ritual you do in the graveyard and it's to rebalance [00:48:46] some sort of relationship. A work relationship, your boss is being a bit of a bastard to you, etc. You'll bring a kong ritual just to slap him down a little bit, slap him down for a few months, let the relationship become better between you, and then it wears off. And they are extremely effective, these. But then, you know, you get people coming forward wanting people hurt or dead or [00:49:16] forced into bankruptcy or something serious and to be honest nowadays, yes, it can be done, but most ajarns will say no. And the only … And there's some very knowledgeable people about cursing in this city. Terrifyingly knowledgeable, but they just choose not to do it unless it's for the right reason. Yeah, because you know, they're bringing … They're forcing something, they're bringing something [00:49:46] difficult to themselves. Everybody nowadays is now trying to strike the correct balance. ANDREW: Hmm. And do you see that shift as coming out of a shift in cultural values, or is it a shift in the difference in the quality of life now versus in the past? PETER: It's both, you know, the government's also … 10 to 15 years ago, they started clamping [00:50:16] down, they started stopping people who had died violently being buried. Yeah? Originally …. Only anybody who died a difficult death, which basically reflects like a really bad karma was buried, everybody else was burnt, right? So, these ground … And they're exactly the people that the ajarns want to use the [00:50:47] products from, yeah? And they basically stopped doing that 10 to 15 years ago. So, slowly but surely, that source is being exhausted. You know, Thailand is becoming a very developed country, access to the human materials is becoming extremely difficult, and, you know, it's not as wild here as it used to be, people need more, less protection in many ways, more metta, [00:51:17] more senay, … Because now you know the times have changed. Gone are the days where they could just chop a corpse's head off and leave a watermelon. You know, now they believe that a better protection is to have so much metta that somebody doesn't want to hurt you anyway, is to be such a lovely person that attracts other people, it makes you difficult to attack, you know, so as cultures develop the way they use [00:51:47] their magical knowledge develops, which is actually the sign of any living form of magic, isn't it? ANDREW: Well, it reminds me of martial arts practice, right? You know, I mean, a lot of people start off in you know, something a little harder like karate or whatever, and you know, they want to fight and use their muscles and whatever, and as you, you know, hopefully as you age and get a little wiser, you know, you move to something more circular and more soft and you know, like, you know, nothing … Not that you can't, you know, throw [00:52:17] that punch if you need to but it's often more like, oh, I can just redirect this and just flow with things in a completely different manner and therefore I won't have that problem any more. PETER: Oh, I always recommend running away. It's fucking great for avoiding problems. ANDREW: Yeah, exactly, right? Exactly. [laughing]  ANDREW: Just don't be there in the first place, right? PETER: And also … Exactly, the greatest defense! I mean, this is not counting somebody who comes up being an absolute idiot. In which case, finish it and then run away. Yeah? I mean, [00:52:47] I've [? 52:49] done martial arts for about 20 years. But really, it should just be about happiness, physical comfort, you know, nothing more difficult to attack than somebody who's happy, you know, and that relates to what we were just saying about the magic as well. You know, it's … As soon as you're aggressive, it gives people something to hang onto. ANDREW: Mm-hmm. Well, and possibly puts you off balance, then, right? PETER: Well, [00:53:17] everything goes to your head.  ANDREW: Yeah. Mm-hmm. PETER: And if what you're trying to do is not to let it go, though, because that raises your center of balance as well, and you become slow and you tense. ANDREW: Mm-hmm. Yep.  PETER: So, it's all … they're very interrelated in many respects, actually, you know, and just retaining that open clear mind rather than being pulled by your emotions all the time, you know. It's … and in many ways, to get the martial arts, is one of them. Meditation [00:53:47] works. You know, what have you found works, Andrew, for you? ANDREW: Yeah, I mean meditation. I did martial arts for a long time. Martial arts was a good road for getting over being angry, to me. You know, I sort of worked through my anger there in an environment where I could sort of explore power dynamics very openly. And yeah, just, you know, returning, you know, returning my attention back always to like, I [00:54:17] don't know how to put it. So, there's you know, there's that transcendent sort of samadhi kind of loss of attachment to yourself and your daily life. You know, so that piece of it combined with just very practical cultivation of self and a sustainable life, right? Like just, what do I need? What do I need to do? Where am I showing up? Where do I feel I'm lacking? Why do I feel I'm lacking there? Is [00:54:47] there something I actually need and just, you know, kind of cycling through those different patterns of, I guess, growth-orientated questions. And, you know, it's … It does wonders for removing unhelpful hungers and, you know, and sort of recognizing the own … my own internal bullshit for what it is, which, then, allows me to show up more, right?  PETER: Well, there's nothing like … Yeah, there's nothing like a good bit of bullshit within ourselves as well, you know? There's [00:55:17] many things that we can pull on.  ANDREW: Yeah. PETER: You know, there's many, many, there's many advantages to these things, but it's just knowing what they are … ANDREW: Mm-hmm. Yep. PETER: … Is the difficult thing and not being led by them, you know, and I'm sure you'd agree that when we get, you know, when you get past the monkey mind, as they call it here.  ANDREW: Yeah.  PETER: You know the relation … Your relationship with time changes, your relationship with people changes.  ANDREW: Mm-hmm.  PETER: You know, the way you can [00:55:47] sit with people changes … ANDREW: Yeah.  PETER: The way, you know, the joy of life changes. ANDREW: And the way in which people receive you changes.  PETER: Completely.  ANDREW: Right? Because when you … When you show up and you're genuinely present with other people, they feel that, you know, and if you have, you know, if you want to call it metta, it's not really a word I would use, but you know, but you know, compassion or you know, those … That sort of openness to other people and seeing them for who they are without judgments or overt attachments. That's a [00:56:17] completely different dynamic, right? That goes to a completely different place than, you know, when you show up and you're just like, oh my God, I so need this or that or whatever from you. Right? PETER: Well, it's also, I mean, I'm very lucky to be able to go anywhere in Thailand, literally, anywhere. You know? My partner's family, we were there a few months ago, and I said, “oh, I'm gonna go to Surat Veree [? 56:43] because I want to photograph this particular shrine for the book.” And I said, “Where is the bus [00:56:47] go from, the minibus? She said, “Oh, from there.” And so, I've got up at like 4:00 o'clock, I got the 5 o'clock bus, I was there by 6, and the driver dropped me off as close as he could to the temple. Ten seconds later, a motorbike boy came up, took me to visit the temple. We had a quick bit of breakfast together, which I paid for, of course, it was very nice. Then I did the photographs, he waited for me, he drove me back. I jumped on the next mini bus which arrived seconds later, and I rode back up to Bangkok and back to [00:57:17] family home in about four hours, three and a half hours. And the response was, “How have you done that? How?” Yeah, I said, well, it just kind of happens. If you just connect to people, you know, he's not the driver of a minibus. He's a man who's having to get through a day and hopefully support his family, you know? He is not just a motorbike guy, he might be an older [00:57:47] man who's had a very interesting life, and you treat him with some respect. You know, if you look, you look people in the eye, you make those connections, you open your heart. ANDREW: Yeah. Well when I was in India, I wanted to go to Bodghaya, where the Buddha was enlightened? Or, I'm sorry, where the Buddha first preached the dharma, right? And, you know, and I went … So I wanted to go to these places, but there's [00:58:17] nothing there, right, there's just temples. It's just a city of temples and a few restaurants, things to support people, but nobody … I don't think people really live there or whatever and there's definitely no trains or whatever. So I arrived in the nearest city and--which wasn't that far away--but there was this huge strike there that day, and I was trying to find somebody who'd be willing to take me, 'cause I was only there for a day because I left it to sort of towards the end of my trip, [00:58:47] because I was trying to kind of hit a couple of important places, and two things happened, which remind me exactly of this conversation.  So, one was, I was walking down the street, and it was a long street with a big park and government building, I think, on the other side, and it was just this huge fence that ran along this massive park all the way along. There's no easy way there, no gates, you would have to climb it and it was all houses on the other side and all the houses were basically [00:59:17] attached and there's no roads or alleys or whatever.  And I'm like mid-block, and then I hear this huge ruckus and the people who are protesting are coming down the street, and there's this mob of people, with sticks and signs, and they're yelling and screaming and whatever, and I look at the crowd and I turn around and I look and there's this gentleman standing in his door, and I just look at him and I point at myself and I point inside his house and he's just like, yes, [00:59:47] like just, waved with his hands, like yes, come in my house [laughing], and so we go in his house. He closes the door. We wait for everybody to pass. And he had no English, you know, my Hindi is not particularly, you know, I knew a few things like hello, and thank you, and whatever, and we just waited in his house and stood there and looked at each other very pleasantly and peacefully and whatever. And then you know, when it was obvious that this, the sound had passed and the people were gone. He opened the door, and looked out, and then he gave me a pat on the back [01:00:17] and you know, sent me on my way.  And then a few minutes later, I ran into this guy who was driving a, like one of those cycle rickshaws, this really older gentleman, and I got … I just like looked at him and I'm like, “I want to go here,” and he's like, “sure!” And so, he took me and we rode this bicycle through the countryside and stopped at a couple farms and all these amazing things. And then, when we got there, on top of paying him for his time, I also bought him lunch. And we just [01:00:47] sat there. He also had, you know, basically no English and we just sat there eating together and looking at each other and smiling. And you know, there's such a connection that can happen when you're open to those things, and like I say, when you're going for a purpose and when you go in with a certain way, that road can just open for you, right? You know? PETER: It just happens … and it really happens because you're not thinking …  ANDREW: Mm-hmm. PETER: And by not thinking, you're taking away the barriers that people can come, [01:01:17] that generally stop people relating to you… ANDREW: Yeah, for sure.  PETER: You know, it's a remarkable period of time here, you know, but, especially this last few years, going through the process of doing all this work, because it just, it just happened. Just, it was just, doors kept opening and things kept telling me what to do next, and you [01:01:47] know, and then we got to the point where this, you know, we managed to finish this work. ANDREW: Yeah. PETER: And yeah, there were bits where it wasn't easy, but it's still found a way to be done.  ANDREW: Mm-hmm. For sure.  PETER: And you know, it's … Even my partner sometimes says, “How have you done this?” [laughing] ANDREW: Mm-hmmm.  PETER: You know. “How have you done it?” Well it kind of just gave me the opportunity to do it and then it kind of did itself.  ANDREW: Yeah. They meet you [01:02:17] halfway. You know? Or more than halfway sometimes, right? Yeah.  PETER: Yeah, they do. And also, I've really been wanting, you know, I've kind of resisted it for the first, God, 20 years of coming here … ANDREW: Mm-hmm. PETER: Because that was apparent when I first came over.  ANDREW: Yeah. PETER: And kind of waited until I was ready to kind of do it. ANDREW: Yeah. PETER: You know, it's been quite old and extremely rewarding and rather wonderful. ANDREW: Mm-hmm. It's [01:02:47] fantastic. Well, I mean, maybe, we've been on the phone for a long time here. Maybe we should wrap this up, because I could talk to you all day. This is a wonderful conversation. So, first of all ... PETER: It'd be nice with a cup of tea and a biscuit, wouldn't it? [laughing] ANDREW: Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. Well, you know, I'll let you know when I'm going to be in Bangkok or Thailand, some time. And we'll make that happen. For people who want to check out this book, and you know, if this stuff really interests you, and you're, you know, you really should [01:03:17] check out the book. It's quite a, it's quite an amazing work. Where do people find you, and where do people find your book? PETER: I'm easy found in two places. One is on Facebook through the Thai Occult book page, and the easiest place to click on the book to get the Timeless editions would be through the Thai Occult.com, all one word.  ANDREW: Perfect.  PETER: I can't … And there's [01:03:47] two book pictures on the front cover, one from the Sak Yant book and then the new one on the Thai occult. Of the … to be honest, I'm very very very proud of the new one, the Sak Yant book and yes, we have some superb interviews with the guys, some of the makers in there, but having just produced something really good, I'd love to go back and rewrite it. ANDREW: Isn't [01:04:17] that always the way, right? Isn't that always the way? PETER: Though to be honest with you, I don't think I'm going to do … I don't think I'll be in that position, with the new one. I don't think I could have made a much better job, to be honest. There's always more, it's going to come up, but as a broad taste as a buffet of the Thai occult, I don't think … It'd be difficult to do a better job than this, in my opinion. ANDREW: Perfect. Well, go and check it out, and support [01:04:47] Peter's work and you know, thanks for being on, Peter and thanks to everybody, as always, for listening. PETER: It's been lovely. Thank you. 

Given the state of the world we need to find better ways to relate to each other and grow. This is exactly what Andrew and Siobhan talk abot in this episode. How to find our way towards grpowing and undoing the conditinoing of history. This converstaion is about finding posibilities, opening to others and working to change the world for the better.  The link Siobhan mentioned, an inquiry practice for allies: https://radicaltarot.com/7-questions-earnest-allies/   A link they wish they'd mentioned, where I'm talking about oppression and sliding scales in spiritual business:  https://radicaltarot.com/lets-talk-about-sliding-scales/   Their newsletter (best way to keep in touch): http://bit.ly/radicaltarotsubscribe   Think about how much you've enjoyed the podcast and how many episodes you listened to, and consider if it is time to support the Patreon You can do so here. If you want more of this in your life you can subscribe by RSS , iTunes, Stitcher, or email. Thanks for joining the conversation. Please share the podcast to help us grow and change the world.  Andrew You can book time with Andrew through his site here.    Transcript  ANDREW: Welcome to the Hermit's Lamp podcast. I am hanging out today with Siobhan, who is a card reader who I know through the tarot community, but who I really wanted to sort of have on the podcast and sort of talk about politics and identity, and how we interact with each other, and how we can try and have better, more humane, more open conversations about what's going on with each other and in the world right now.  Because I feel like in a lot of the spiritual communities, there are, you know, some awareness of these things, and then there are places where there's just no awareness, and so I thought that Siobhan would be a great person to have on and talk about some of this stuff and see what comes of it. But for people who don't know who you are, who are you? What are you up to?  SIOBHAN: [laughing] Well. I am, primarily, a tarot reader and writer. I write most often at LittleRedTarot.com, which is an intersectional alternative space, and I also write at my website at RadicalTarot.com. I spend a lot of time writing about the intersections that I live on. And so, that might look like writing about race, writing about other marginalized groups, writing about chronic illness, or mental health issues. And so, I spend a lot of time writing about political topics, although, you would never believe it, I'm not really as political of a person [laughing], not usually, but my writing does tend to be pretty authentic and pretty raw in talking about my experience in marginalized communities. So, that's a lot of what I end up doing. ANDREW: Mmmhmm. And -- so -- Siobhan and I have been talking for a while about being on the podcast, and for a variety of reasons it keeps getting nudged into the future, until today. But one of the things that sort of surfaced recently was sort of a conversation which we were both a part of, around ... Not to give away sort of personal information but, somebody was called out for a behavior, and, you know ... And, and, you know, sort of Siobhan and I were sort of both the voices in that conversation that kind of migrated towards, “Well, there is something to what they're saying, there's something that we could consider, right?”  SIOBHAN: Mmmhmm. Mmmhmm. ANDREW: You know, and so, it kind of reminded me that this was the conversation I wanted to have ... SIOBHAN: Mmmhmm. ANDREW: And, you know, I think that there's ... You know, we live in interesting times, right?  SIOBHAN: Right! [laughs] ANDREW: Where, the ways in which people have access to each other, the ways in which people treat each other, especially online but also in lots of other places, you know, it's often really unclear to me whether ... What's helpful and what's not, right?  SIOBHAN: Right.  ANDREW: You know, and so ... Yeah, I'm just wondering ... Because your response was so wonderful, I'm wondering, you know ... SIOBHAN: [laughing] ANDREW: If you could sort of share a little bit of what that idea was, you know?  SIOBHAN: It's so funny. Yeah, you know, the first thing that pops up when you talked about that, was a post I wrote, actually, a very similar time of year, maybe two years ago, and it was in response to Kelly-Ann Maddox's #TarotSoWhite discussion. I don't know if you saw any of that. But the dialogue came up around how many decks there are that have representation, how many diverse decks that there are, and so, it was an interesting time, because it was the first time I had ever heard anyone sort of call out this notion of the tarot space being predominantly white, predominantly occupied by a certain demographic. And I want to say, I had mentioned it briefly in a tarot chat, and then it came up later again and again, but the dialogue was pretty interesting and fruitful at the time. And it was funny, because the piece that I wrote in response, actually was contrary to the original callout. [laughing]  So, whereas the original assertion was, there aren't very many decks with people of color, I wrote, “Well, actually, there could be more, way more ...” At the time, it was two years ago. “But they do exist, and to reference them as if they don't is erasure.” And I remember at the time having a really sweet conversation with Kelly-Ann, where she realized how many different options were available that actually she hadn't seen yet, and it was really amazing to get closer to her and to dialogue in that way, and it went really well.  And so, at the time, I didn't have the concept of a call-in, versus a call-out, and you'll hear those terms more commonly in feminist spaces, people talking about drawing attention to a behavior or activity that they saw that could be problematic, in a way that may be perceived as shameful versus as an invitation to dialogue, to go deeper and to learn something. And so, I didn't even have a concept of that, at the time, I just responded with pure emotion. It was a very emotional summer, I want to say, there were a lot of acts of violence that had just happened, in the news. Perhaps the first of the series that kicked off all the -- I know it's hard to remember a time when it wasn't [laughing] -- all the time. ANDREW: Yeah. SIOBHAN: It was less visible then, so it was the first instance. And so, yeah, this conversation has just gotten bigger and deeper in the spiritual community and also in other communities, and now, people who have never encountered any sort of idea about their own privilege, or about the experiences of marginalized groups, are now encountering these experiences, and not everybody who calls people out necessarily has the space to do so in a way that is kind or compassionate, and not everybody who is called out or in necessarily knows that there is any information to glean from it.  And so, it's so interesting to watch these conversations happen. [laughing] It's a very primordial time for these discussions. It's very new to many people. And it's worth it and it's exciting, but there's also issues when it can be tender.  ANDREW: Mmmhmm. SIOBHAN: Times when it can be tender.  ANDREW: Yeah, I mean, I think it's ... I mean, it's challenging on many levels, right?  SIOBHAN: Mmmhmm. ANDREW: And I think that for people in all of the positions to have openness to where other people are coming from ... SIOBHAN: Mmmhmm. ANDREW: And openness to being present and sort of curious about the process. SIOBHAN: Mmmhmm. ANDREW: You know? I mean, it's really tough, and certainly, at times, not possible or not even appropriate.  SIOBHAN: Mmmhmm. ANDREW: But, it's one of the things that I dug about your, you know, your response in that conversation was, you really were like, “Huh. Well, that's really interesting. Okay, where are you coming from? What is that about? What does that mean?”  SIOBHAN: Right. ANDREW: You know, there was a curiosity to it, right?  SIOBHAN: Right.  ANDREW: And I think that it's such a powerful place to be, right? Like, curiosity and openness are so profound when we can find our way to those positions ... SIOBHAN: Right. ANDREW: But, you know, it's certainly not easy, right? Or, and you know ... and definitely not always possible or appropriate. SIOBHAN: Right. It's the edge of the cliff. ANDREW: Right?  SIOBHAN: It's that full space.  ANDREW: Yeah. SIOBHAN: And to even just -- I remember in that conversation, the topic we were talking about was so unfamiliar to me, in a way, I said to myself, it had never occurred to me to be mindful of this thing that even you're bringing up, now I can know, moving forward, to think about this marginalized group which I had not considered, when I create and when I collaborate and when I support. And to really be humble in that moment, and to notice my own privilege, having not had to think about it ... ANDREW: Mmmhmm. SIOBHAN: And owning that to. A lot of ... There's a lot of assumptions made about who has privilege to check, and it's so many more people than you would imagine, so many more kinds ... I've been really exploring the privilege of someone who -- if you're a person who, if you're photogenic, if you're pretty, if you're thin, if you have money, there's so many different ways to look at it. It's so much deeper than just well, there's a binary and everyone on this end is victimized and everyone on this other end is victimized and not everybody on both sides of it have that awareness. And so, once you realize [laughing] that fact, it behooves you to be curious, because there's so much to learn.  ANDREW: Mmmhmm. SIOBHAN: There's so many different angles to really realize where you have been blessed and where you continue to not be blessed based on things that are circumstances, perhaps. And it's very hard at times, but it can also be interesting, if a person has the space, you know.  ANDREW: Mmmhmm. Yeah, I remember, a couple of years ago now, I did this really long, like 100 or 150 question survey that sort of evaluated your privilege, right? SIOBHAN: Mmmhmm. ANDREW: And, you know, it wasn't like ... I've seen some shorter ones since then and I'm always kind of like, I look at them, and ah, it's like, it makes some sense, but this one was so in depth, and I remember, like, going through and sort of like answering the questions and seeing ... Seeing things that, you know, clearly highlighted my privileges, you know, for me. Like, oh yeah, that's totally me, I totally have, I have access to that, you know.  SIOBHAN: Right, right.  ANDREW: I went to university, right?  SIOBHAN: Right.  ANDREW: I did this, I did other things. And then all these other things that I never even -- I mean, many of which I was totally aware of but some of which I didn't even really consider part of the conversation, right?  SIOBHAN: Right.  ANDREW: You know, and things that I didn't have, that I was like, hmm, interesting.  SIOBHAN: Right. ANDREW: And then I started to think about the ways in which, you know, certain kinds of situations around family structures and other things, you know, and the historical family structures ... SIOBHAN: Right. ANDREW: You know, whether your families stay together or don't stay together ... SIOBHAN: Right.  ANDREW: How those ... like, so many layers of conversation ... SIOBHAN: Right. ANDREW: Can impact these experiences, you know?  SIOBHAN: Right. ANDREW: Yeah. And to me, that's where that curiosity comes in, right?  SIOBHAN: Mmmhmm, mmmhmm. ANDREW: How did this shape me or shape somebody else? How do these forces exist in our culture?  SIOBHAN: Right.  ANDREW: Why is one structure prioritized over another?  SIOBHAN: Right. Right. And then as consciousness deepens, and as awareness deepens, how do I transform or transmute all of the pain that I'm now aware of? [laughing] ANDREW: Right? Yeah. SIOBHAN: My own, and also society, because it's a lot. And it seems overwhelming at times when you really open up to that awareness, and which is why some people will choose, unconsciously or consciously, not to be aware of it.  ANDREW: Mmmhmm. Well, and that brings us to a topic we were chatting a little bit about before the call, which is this spiritual bypassing piece, right?  SIOBHAN: Mmm. ANDREW: You know. When do we suddenly try and use, you know, a spiritual tool to skip our pain or skip our privilege or skip something else? You know? Instead of, instead of actually digging into it, you know? When do we avoid that shadow work?  SIOBHAN: Right.  ANDREW: Instead of like, honoring the wholeness of our experience and dealing with it all ... SIOBHAN: Right.  ANDREW: And then what kind of things come from that, right?  SIOBHAN: Right. Is it at that moment of realization when you open to ...? How much is really happening, how many different layers ... First of all, if you're still in it, there's that space of, oh gosh, how do I hold this for myself, and if you aren't in it, if you have traversed and if you have some kind of mobility, and this is more common as we interact across the streams of privilege, you know. I have access to all kinds of things through people who have access even though I don't have the access, and now there's this opportunity for guilt, this sense of unworthiness, or even thinking about, oh my gosh, my ancestors, they had this thing, they did this thing, and now I feel this sense of guilt over that.  And so, there's an opportunity, or a ... More accurate to say, a tendency to say, with spiritual practice, to say, okay, being spiritual, having arrived, being enlightened, that means I don't get to feel those things any more. [laughing] I get to be somewhere other than those things, because it's not holy to feel guilty, unworthy, you know, anger, hostility, it's not holy to feel afraid of things that are different, they mean, these things are not spiritual things, and so ... ANDREW: Mmmhmm. SIOBHAN: We hear a lot of talk about quote, letting it go. ANDREW: Right.  SIOBHAN: I mean, it's so popular to talk about letting it go. This is a pet peeve of mine. [laughing] ANDREW: Uh huh. Tell me all about it!  SIOBHAN: [laughing] If you read my stuff, you'll hear me going on about it all the time cause it's like, we want to let the things go that are the darkest things, that are, they keep returning because they're very deeply embedded in our ancestral story or our own story or maybe just because it's a part of us, or we haven't integrated it, we reject it, and so there it is again.  And so, the notion that we can continuously keep trying to let something go, rather than just sit with it, you know, which is awful, and terrible, and we often don't want to do it, but, sometimes when we are able to just sit with it, without the judgement call, what this means, what this means about who I am, then, it has less of a pull, you know, even when it shows up. But it's counterintuitive, so instead of doing that, everybody ... You know, it's very popular in the spiritual community to want to let go, we're gonna let go, every full moon we're gonna let go! [laughing] And it's like all right, that's ... We can keep it up, I guess. [laughing] ANDREW: Yeah, I mean, I think that there comes a point, you know ... I have this body of work that I created called the Letting Go Work, right?  SIOBHAN: [laughing] I'm sorry.  ANDREW: And so, but the focus of the work is ... is actually to go and sit down with your shadow, right?  SIOBHAN: Right.  ANDREW: It's not ... It's not this process of like, you know, and then I'm gonna go into the spiritual bath and shower all this stuff off me, it'll go down the drain, it's gone forever.  SIOBHAN: Right. ANDREW: It's the process of building conscious communication with the shadow stuff ... SIOBHAN: Right. ANDREW: And then sustaining it on the regular ... SIOBHAN: Right. ANDREW: So that, you know, you're checking in with that, and so your shadow has a chance to say, hey, you're ignoring this crap over here.  SIOBHAN: Right! ANDREW: Hey, what about this? Hey, this is ... You know, you're being inauthentic or you're denying something, right?  SIOBHAN: Right. ANDREW: Or you're really mad, you've got to let it out, dude. Because if we can talk to that stuff, and sit with it and be present with it and engage with it, then we have a whole different relationship to it. Right?  SIOBHAN: Right. ANDREW: But like, Carl Jung did not say when we get through the process of individuation that our shadow is gone.  SIOBHAN: Right. Poof!  ANDREW: We're living in relationship with it then, right?  SIOBHAN: Poof!  ANDREW: It matters. SIOBHAN: [laughing] ANDREW: Exactly. SIOBHAN: Yeah! And it's like, if a person comes from a place where they're not wanting to do that work, that very needed work of upholding space for this thing, then there's no way they would be able to, when they actually encounter that shadow out in the world. So this person who is marginalized in ways they can't understand, the person who doesn't have the privilege they have, if that person calls out to them, in the same way their shadow calls out to them, why would they have a different reaction? They would do the same thing. It would encourage that person to let it go. It would encourage that person to speak in terms of love and light and always gravitate toward and pay attention to love and light and they would say, ignore the things that don't meet or match that paradigm, the same way they say to themselves, and so ...  I always, there's a little part of me that kind of dies, when I hear someone say, “Turn, you know, turn your attention entirely away from this thing that is so much a part of you and so much your struggle and that you're feeling.” Cause it's like, people need that space for themselves, before they can have and hold space for other people, they're very much linked, and the notion that we can get away is somewhat contrary to the notion that we're all part of one great big thing, which is underneath a lot of spiritual practices anyway. ANDREW: Right. Well, there's definitely that. Yeah. It's one of the best pieces of advice I got when I first started working as a reader, was a good friend of mine basically was like, “So dude, make sure you deal with all your crap.”  SIOBHAN: [bursts out laughing] ANDREW: Deal with it, deal with it all, stay clean, you know, stay clear about it, work to stay free of it, because otherwise you're going to sit down with somebody and try and work and their pain is going to trigger your pain ... SIOBHAN: Right. ANDREW: And then it's going to go all sorts of sideways, right?  SIOBHAN: Right.  ANDREW: Mmmhmm. SIOBHAN: Right. A business is amazing for really shining the light on every crevice that you thought ... [laughing] that you were done with! ANDREW: Right?  SIOBHAN: Oh, what about this? What about this here? [laughing] What about this thing that isn't finished?  ANDREW: Mmmhmm. SIOBHAN: Yeah. There's a ... a lot more compassion that could stand to be doled out in all directions. [laughing] ANDREW: Right? Inwardly as well, you know? All of it. Mmmhmm. SIOBHAN: In all the directions. ANDREW: Yeah. So. What, what ... I'm going to put you on the spot here, okay, so forgive me. SIOBHAN: [laughing] ANDREW: You can opt out if you need to. SIOBHAN: [laughing] ANDREW: But like, what would you hope somebody would do if they were ... If they run into something new that they weren't aware of ... Would be kind of a problematic thing? You know, whether it's ... whatever its focus is, gender, race, or any number of sort of different things, but like ... What would you hope that people, how would they react?  SIOBHAN: Oh, man! It's tricky. And I say that because the answer would depend in a large part on who that person was. And here's what I mean. There's a spectrum. If a person had an abundance of energy and awareness and privilege and time, it would be really nice if we could have that curiosity response like, Oh! Why is this coming up? you know? Is there something to learn here? Is there something I don't know? Is there ... You know. I acknowledge that this has nothing to do with me because anything anyone ever says generally has nothing to do with anyone, because they're all dealing with their projections, but at the same time, is there something I could learn, if they had that space, but the honest to god truth is that some people, whatever their sense of abundance or privilege or access or whatever they have, they may not have the space.  And a second-best thing, in that scenario, would be if they could actually see that they don't have the space. So that looks like, Wow, I don't know what to do with this, but I know at least that I'm feeling a defensive response that I want to prove something and so maybe I'll just pause, and that's it.  ANDREW: Mmmhmm. SIOBHAN: Just a pause where they can see and be with the fact that that's what they have the space for, they have the space for maybe, a pause, and even getting to the point of pause is HUGE. You know, cause the natural thing to do is just react ... ANDREW: Mmmhmm. SIOBHAN: Savor, be right or reassure, whatever the deal is, and it would be amazing to even have the choice in a moment, and so, having the choices coming from working on things before you were even in the situation [laughing]. So, it's really hard to say, oh man, curiosity, willing to be open to possibly having missed something, possibly not knowing something, possibly being wrong. And, it depends on the person and if they have space. I actually wrote an entire blog post about that very thing you just asked. [laughing] ANDREW: Well, perfect! We'll put a link in the show notes. SIOBHAN: It was the most viewed blog post I ever wrote, and I wrote it that summer that we were just talking about ...  ANDREW: Mmmhmm. SIOBHAN: Right before that whole discussion cause, it was just so painful to see so much death and to be reminded that no matter how much you progress, or at least in my instance, how much I had progressed and how much better I felt. Yet within, that there were still those dark things that were my reality, that may be my reality, without, and so in there it really encourages people to have a dialogue with what they need, really, first, because if they don't know, they can't, they can't offer anything. They have to come first, and they have to also acknowledge a reality in which they may be coming first many places without any effort on their part. ANDREW: Mmmhmm. SIOBHAN: They may be central, they may be primary, they may be the first thought for entire nations. [laughs] And so, there's the thought for: Do I have the space for the person who unlike me, doesn't come first, in my nation, in my society? And being honest about that. Because some people have a culture that is ingrained and it's very fragile, and they actually may not know all that they may be capable of, they may not have been invited to step into their fullness just yet. And so the kneejerk reaction, which is natural and human ... It might be much smaller than they're capable of being. And so it can be exciting to think about interaction with a person where they actually realize more their resilience. ANDREW: Hmm. SIOBHAN: And they say, Oh, I've felt defensive and offended every time this has ever happened in my whole life, and maybe I have room for more reactions.  ANDREW: Mmmhmm. SIOBHAN: You know?  ANDREW: Yeah. SIOBHAN: Maybe I have room for more than just my central and my primaryness. Maybe based on that solid self-care, you know, first step, I have more resilience than I thought. More capacity to notice when I'm expecting someone else to be resilient in my stead. And maybe perhaps a habit I have of doing that all the time. [laughs] ANDREW: Yeah. SIOBHAN: You know? ANDREW: Mmmhmm. Well, and I also think that pause is such a great notion. Because I think that ... I think that we don't always even understand what we might do, or how we might do it, or what could be possible?  SIOBHAN: Mmmhmm.  ANDREW: Or what might shift to make things possible over time. SIOBHAN: Mmmhmm. ANDREW: Like one of the things for me is, you know, I was aware for a while that this podcast was inaccessible to a bunch of people, right?  SIOBHAN: Mmmhmm, mmmhmm. ANDREW: You know, because they are unable to listen, you know? And, you know, and it took me awhile, like maybe six months of pondering that and then looking at what it would cost me to provide transcriptions. And then looking at my wallet and being like, “I can't do that.”  SIOBHAN: Right. ANDREW: And then thinking about it and looking at options, and then, you know, it wasn't until one day ... And I was aware of Patreon the whole time, you know, which is like this sort of people pay per episode to support stuff.  SIOBHAN: Right. ANDREW: I was aware of it the whole time, but I don't even remember what happened, but somebody talked about it in a certain way. And I was like, “I could use Patreon to make that happen,” you know?  SIOBHAN: Right. ANDREW: And then that took a little bit of time, you know? And then now, every episode comes out with transcriptions. SIOBHAN: That's cool! ANDREW: You know, which is, which is, exciting, right? But like, but, if I had gotten stuck at I can't do this -- I was stuck at I can't do anything about this today. And left it at that, then it wouldn't be where it is now. You know? And that's one of the things that can come from the pause, right? SIOBHAN: Right. ANDREW: It can come from, you know, it's just like, putting a little sign up on the wall that says this is a thing I'd like to do at some point, somehow. SIOBHAN: Right. ANDREW: I'd like to change this issue, and then, and then, hopefully, time and circumstance shift in a way that allows it to be resolved ... SIOBHAN: Right. ANDREW: You know? You get an idea to do something different. And maybe it doesn't, you know, I mean, because there are still times when offering stuff like that is beyond the means of whatever it is that I'm doing, you know?  SIOBHAN: Right. ANDREW: Some of the classes that I run are fairly small, and so it's not super possible, but, you know, we can set our intentions and we can ponder these things, and they can sort of open us up to other possibilities, right?  SIOBHAN: Right, right.  ANDREW: Yeah.  SIOBHAN: That's a powerful example. ANDREW: Mmmhmm. SIOBHAN: That's a really powerful example. Especially the notion of, even if I can't do this thing right this second, I have space to think about it. ANDREW: Yeah. SIOBHAN: You know, because some people, they file it away under, “I can't do that. The end.” And then they never have to think about it again. Like they're absolved. This is that bypassing coming up. It's like, “I couldn't in this one instance implement it, so I won't worry about it.”  ANDREW: Mmmhmm. SIOBHAN: But when there's a willingness to stay with it, to stay with this other reality that isn't yours, in that perfect example that you just gave, more is possible, eventually.  ANDREW: Yeah. And also, you know I think that it's also important to understand that perfect isn't the goal. Right? SIOBHAN: Mmmhmm. ANDREW: I mean, perfect would be lovely if it existed anywhere. Right?  SIOBHAN: Right. [laughing] ANDREW: But when we're working on these things, perfect can't be the goal. You know, because I think, at least for me, perfect equals immobilization. Right?  SIOBHAN: Right. ANDREW: Perfect equals this space where I just can't continue because, you know, because I can't get there. Right? You know? I mean, there's nothing about my life that allows me enough time and space to make anything perfectly ... SIOBHAN: Right.  ANDREW: So I pursue just sort of working on stuff, right?  SIOBHAN: Right. ANDREW: And I think that that's part of the ongoing sort of dialogue between curiosity and openness too, right?  SIOBHAN: Right. ANDREW: Recognizing I will do my best, or what I perceive to be my best now ... SIOBHAN: Mmm. ANDREW: And then we'll see what happens, and then I will engage with what happens afterwards, and then I will adjust, and improve, or change or whatever if I have space for that.  SIOBHAN: Right. ANDREW: Continue that process, right? Like it's not this sort of unfolding of this awareness of privilege in North America. SIOBHAN: Mmmhmm. ANDREW: I mean, I've been watching it flow for a while now, and it's not done, it's going to be done soon, it's going to continue, right?  SIOBHAN: [laughing] Right.  ANDREW: And that's, that's not even because ... Like, it would be tempting to be like, well, if everybody just accepted it, or was on board, or whatever, but I'm like, well no, because it's also a process of undoing, right? SIOBHAN: Right. ANDREW: And when you start moving stuff, you start having space to see other things. SIOBHAN: Right. ANDREW: And that doesn't mean that we shouldn't move anything because, you know, cause we'll find the dust bunnies under the couch, or, you know, whatever ... SIOBHAN: Right! [laughing] ANDREW: It's like, we should move those things and then we should move other things, and then we should see what's beyond that, right?  SIOBHAN: Right.  ANDREW: Mmmhmm. SIOBHAN: Exactly. Yeah. And the notion ... The notion of doing our best is interesting also when we consider that nothing ... there may not be an occurrence in our lives that actually calls on us to consider perspectives outside of our own. ANDREW: Mmmhmm. SIOBHAN: And that's where the notion of resilience can come in. For the person who is used to staying in their own perspective, they are only so large. There is only so much that is possible. Which is why tarot can be useful. When you come together with people over tarot, there's another perspective that's introduced. We do this in interpersonal relationships of all kinds, sure. And the person who doesn't have that playback, or the person who is isolated from cultures that they've never met, they're never going to come across a person with this worldview, their concept of their best might be limited. It may not even reflect the reality for them. And so it's exciting to think about people being expanded, and their notion of what's possible being expanded as a result of all these dust bunnies that we keep finding.  ANDREW: Mmmhmm. Yeah. Yeah, and when I grew up, I grew up in a suburb of Toronto. And, you know, when I went to high school, I think that, you know, in a school that probably had like 1000 students, there might have been a handful of people of color, you know?  SIOBHAN: Right. ANDREW: Like, one table at the lunchroom was like, people of color, and that was it, you know? And that was indicative of the whole town, right? And, you know? And now as we open to that stuff, you know, and as we open to other cultures, we can, you know, expand more and figure things out differently, right?  SIOBHAN: Right. ANDREW: And I think that it's easy to sort of look around, in, you know, and I always say, cause I live right in downtown Toronto now, right? Like one block from the gay village, and, you know, and in one of the most sort of diverse neighborhoods around, kind of thing.  SIOBHAN: Right. ANDREW: And, you know, it's easy to sort of think that this is also it, right? You know? And when I travel to other places, I'm like, oh no. I live in a little pocket that is SO different than everywhere else, right?  SIOBHAN: Right. ANDREW: And I mean not everywhere else, but like many other places, in a kind of a counterforce to that sort of living in the suburbs experience, you know, I now live the opposite, but both of them create their own limiting tunnels, right?  SIOBHAN: Mmmhmm. ANDREW: You know, I think it's ... I think it's really interesting to sort of try and understand what we're not living, wherever we're living, right? However we're living that, and sort of see what other people are actually up to.  SIOBHAN: Right. Right. And really honor our blinders.  ANDREW: Mmm. SIOBHAN: I ... Only in the last ten years, have I really appreciated the fact that I belong to the global majority. [laughs]  ANDREW: Mmmhmm! SIOBHAN: It's like, it's been the case for longer than that, but only in the last five to seven years, really, has that sat with me, and I had to go and seek out communities where they would discuss those things, for it to really become a part of my awareness.  ANDREW: Right. SIOBHAN: So, it's not even necessarily an appearance grants you access into different perspectives, you know?  ANDREW: Mmmhmm. SIOBHAN: It's a dialogue that you keep having, and keep needing to be willing to have in order to keep learning.  ANDREW: Mmmhmm. Well, and I think that willingness to have it is such an important thing, right? And from my perspective, for me personally, willingness to get out, you know?  SIOBHAN: Right. ANDREW: To look for it, and look for people who have the space to have that dialogue with me, right? SIOBHAN: Right. ANDREW: Because you want to be mindful that you're not sort of expecting ... SIOBHAN: Right. ANDREW: Somebody else to educate you, or whatever. Right? It's a thing that you should ask permission about, right?  SIOBHAN: Right. ANDREW: And, you know? Because otherwise we don't want to expect that I'm gonna run to this person and be like, so tell me all about this disability that you've got ... SIOBHAN: Right! [laughs] ANDREW: How does that happen, right? Tell me all about, your like, the color of your skin and how that impacts your life and your culture or whatever.  SIOBHAN: Right. ANDREW: You know, cause those things are ... That's problematic too, right? But like, looking for those permissions. And then being really really super willing to sort of, you know, if you're gonna ask, then listen. SIOBHAN: Right.  ANDREW: Like really listen, you know?  SIOBHAN: Right. ANDREW: As we're recording this, in September I have a tarot deck coming out through Llewellyn, which is the Orisha tarot deck, right? Which is a deck that sort of explores the overlap of my involvement with traditional Afro-Cuban Orisha practices ... SIOBHAN: Right. ANDREW: And my initiation into them, and my experiences for all these years playing with tarot and working with tarot. And one of the things that I did when I started, was I sat down with a friend of mine who is an activist and a person of color. And I showed them a bunch of the drawings that I was working on, and I was like, “What do you think? What do you feel? How does this hit you?” Right?  And not because I feel that they can speak for everybody, but because I felt like I needed somebody to talk to, and they were a person who was, you know, an artist as well as, you know, a spiritual person and so on. And we talked about it a bunch, and they liked what I was up to.  And then when I got to the end of the deck, I was like, you know, I'd made some artistic choices, I'd depicted a lot of people of color in the deck, and people with different bodies, and all these kinds of things, and I wanted to sit down and like, just sort of say, like, “Do you have thoughts and feelings about what was going on?” You know?  And so, I sat down with the same person and with somebody else, and I showed them the art work, again, and there were specifically a couple of choices that I made that affected about a dozen of the cards, right? And, and so, and I didn't bring up anything, I just sat down and showed them or whatever, and both people thought it was great. They really liked what I had been doing, they felt like ... They felt like it was good representation. You know, like one of them said, “I feel like I see my uncle in this card, and I feel like I see this person in this card, I really like it.” And I was like, “That's great.” Cause I was totally willing to redo a bunch of these cards. You know? And, and I think that we need to be, if we're going to enter into this, we need to consider that we might need to redo stuff. And it might be inconvenient. Or it might be a burden, right?  SIOBHAN: Right.  ANDREW: You know, and also, in terms of perfect, this is two people's opinion? Right? Like this is not everybody, and I am sure inevitably, you know, because that's the way the world is, people will have issues, some people will have an issue, or maybe not, but like, but I don't expect that it's perfect, you know? But I also couldn't poll the world, you know? And, and, so, we need to find our way to engage this stuff. And find our way to keeping moving forward and making things happen, you know? So. SIOBHAN: That's interesting. That's interesting, and it's interesting because it's a very popular notion in the public eye now. The African tradition is very very in the center of everybody's eye, and many people are new to it, and so, there are people that will see it, they won't know anything about you and then they'll say, “[sigh], It's that, it's that, how popular it is,” and then they'll jump to that conclusion, and then there are some that are traditionalists and they'll have their own reasons why, and it's interesting because the diaspora is so huge ... ANDREW: Mmmhmm. SIOBHAN: And people will have all different perspectives. And it's ... really hard to even try and get one consensus about what is right, what feels good, and I recently had an incident where I was taking a course and I asked about using some kind of Buddhist symbolism. I've been cultivating a practice of my own. And I said, “You know, I don't know how I feel about this, using this symbol. Does anyone practice, does anyone belong, does anyone come from this culture, how do you all feel?”  And I want to say, there were many people who said “Oh, it's probably fine,” or some that said ... I also thought it was really funny, they'd say, “Well, it's not the same when people of color do this thing.” And I thought, Oh! And that's interesting too, as if ... it's almost like a free pass moment? And I was like, that doesn't really resonate with me. Especially when you think about ... if you think about the question, you know, do I belong to a culture who has benefited from the oppression of this other culture whose symbolism that I'm engaging? If I were to say that as an American, and I were to think about Buddhist cultures that have been affected by American policy, the answer to that would be yes, regardless of my skin color, because I'm here. And I had to really decide for myself what felt appropriate to me ... ANDREW: Mmmhmm. SIOBHAN: Even with the endorsement of people in the culture, because there was this moment of what is the history? How have I benefited? You know.  ANDREW: Mmmhmm. SIOBHAN: And there's an opportunity ... I said to myself when I wanted to use the symbol: It's okay because I supported ... I supported Buddhists when I bought this. And I support them when I do this other thing. And I uplift this people in this way and that and then, there's a capitalist notion that I now own this symbol ... ANDREW: Mmmhmm. SIOBHAN: And I can do what I want with it. Because I engage it ... And in my case, because I engage it personally, because I have a practice and I've been cultivating. It's like, this is my culture! ANDREW: Mmmhmm. SIOBHAN: You know, I do it too! And it was tricky for me to sit with. The concept of even owning a symbol ... ANDREW: Mmm. SIOBHAN: Is somewhat capitalist and colonialist in nature. To have the rights to use it. And this is new for me to think about this, honestly. While I've thought about cultural appropriation before, I engaged it in depth this summer through that course that I was taking. And that was interesting to have that moment, because I had always thought, as long as I am engaging this culture, supporting this culture, and uplifting this culture, then it's fair game, the symbols are fair game. But I no longer necessarily believe that. It's totally case by case.  ANDREW: Do you use the symbol?  SIOBHAN: Did I use it? No. ANDREW: No?  SIOBHAN: I didn't. And I said to the people I was asking, I said, If I ever use images of my practice or Buddhist symbols that I engage, it will have the level of awareness in it that I've now garnered. It won't be an afterthought. It won't be like, Oh, I just used this symbol and then afterwards I think about it. It will be like, this is what I intend, I stand confident in this. And it will involve the foresight needed, just like you were talking about, sitting down with people and saying, “How do you feel about this? How do you feel about this? And ...” ANDREW: Yeah. SIOBHAN: And asking myself questions like, “What about this project, this representation, or this use of this symbol, amplifies further the voice of the people who have been disadvantaged ...”  ANDREW: Mmmhmm. SIOBHAN: In accordance to or in relationship to members' cultures that I belong to, and things like that, it won't be separate from that ... ANDREW: Mmmhmm. SIOBHAN: I will be having that awareness. If I do use the symbol, ever. ANDREW: Mmmhmm. Yeah, you know, and making this deck, I certainly talked to my elders. You know, I sat down and showed my elder all the work, you know, to make sure that they were happy with it and comfortable with it, you know, and again recognizing that they don't speak for everybody, you know, like it's... SIOBHAN: Right. ANDREW: You know? I mean, and ultimately, from my point of view, when it comes to this particular project, you know, it's a ... I would have used the word Lucumí as the title of the tarot, but it's already taken by another deck, but like it represents a very specific set of experiences which are mine and my story and my journey and my ... SIOBHAN: Right. ANDREW: Understandings and my lineage, you know? And it doesn't represent, and certainly it doesn't pretend to represent, all of these diasporic traditions or any of those things, because that's impossible. Because they are related but they are not the same.  SIOBHAN: Right. ANDREW: And, you know, and I'm also, I am not a Cuban, and I'm not a, you know, Yoruban or, you know, Brazilian or other things, you know? I'm not a person of color. I'm not any of those things.  SIOBHAN: Mmmhmm. ANDREW: And those people and the way in which those traditions are practiced in different communities are always going to be different.  SIOBHAN: Right.  ANDREW: And, you know, that's the end of the conversation, right, you know? SIOBHAN: Right. ANDREW: And for me, the problem arises when people don't understand those implications, right? You know, like you're talking about, you know? Well, I can just -- I'm a Buddhist -- Look at me, I've got a brass Buddha statue, I'm good, right?  SIOBHAN: Right! [laughing] Right. Right, there's a lot of ... harm can be done in the assumption that because a thing was purchased, you own the rights to the culture ... ANDREW: Mmmhmm. SIOBHAN: And you own the right to use that symbol, however you want, just cause you own it. And that's the capitalist way. ANDREW: Yeah. SIOBHAN: I bought that, it's mine, I can do whatever I want with it, and there's not a thought process about where did this fabric come from? What traditional weave is this? What are the conditions in the nation where they do this weave? And, are they in a situation where their culture is being eradicated?  ANDREW: Mmmhmm. SIOBHAN: I just heard about that recently. I can't remember the major design company that stole this technique from a region. And then another company came, went to that nation, and amplified the voices there, and created a school so they could continue teaching their cultural work. And there is an opportunity for more things like that to happen, the uplifting of voices that are fading away because of systemic oppression, but only if people get beyond their feeling of ownership of something ... ANDREW: Mmmhmm. SIOBHAN: And their feeling of glory about something. And ... And it's really easy to lose track of that.  ANDREW: Mmmhmm. Yeah. For sure. And I think it's a thing, you know, we live in ... Capitalism is such a thing, right? Says the person who runs a store, right?  SIOBHAN: [laughing] ANDREW: You know, but, I think that ... I was having this conversation with somebody recently about being anti-capitalist, right?  SIOBHAN: Mmmhmm. ANDREW: And they were talking about somebody else who was running a business who was anti-capitalist and was running into all these challenges and problems for the people that they had, that they would struggle and stuff. And, I'm like, I don't think I'm anti-capitalist per se, I mean, I think that there are better ideas, for sure, but I'm definitely anti-exploitation. You know? And for me, like, capitalism, when we talk about capitalism, I feel lost and daunted by the immensity of it. You know? I mean, like, what am I going to do about this? You know? I ... It just hits a thing where I sort of get stuck. But I definitely work to, in my interactions, be anti-exploitive. You know?  SIOBHAN: Right. ANDREW: And seeking to, you know, build and prioritize the independent people, independent deck makers that we're supporting, you know? Seeking to ask the questions about ... So I'm buying this thing, where did it come from? How is it made? You know? Is this palo santo sustainably harvested?  SIOBHAN: Right. ANDREW: Or is this like you're in there with a chain saw cutting them down? You know? SIOBHAN: Right. ANDREW: And seeking that ... it adds a layer of work, but I think it also ... Beyond just being like, good practice, I think it also adds a layer of power to stuff as well, you know, when we're talking about spiritual things, you know? When we know that there's a chain of connection that has consideration for the earth and people and spirit and so on, I feel like there's a flow through there that makes things better, you know?  SIOBHAN: Right.  ANDREW: Yeah. SIOBHAN: If the opportunity is taken. And I believe that chain is there even if we don't take the opportunity. And then what are we connecting ourselves to, is the question.  ANDREW: Well, for sure, right?  SIOBHAN: You know, when we don't investigate it, what are the conditions where they mine this? What does the earth look like as a result of this mining? What happens ... You know? When this degrades, this thing I use, this single use thing, and, one of the things that really flabbergasted me [laughing], when I became more active online, in the online spiritual community, was the notion that spiritual practices are concerned with nature, and concerned with the preservation of nature, and I'm still feeling like, if I were to divulge the level at which I'm thinking about things when it comes to sustainability, I mean, I would be that crazy person. Like -- And I mean that like in the sense that I would be the outlier in the way that I often am.  Not to mean, not to say that, not to put a judgement call on the person who thinks differently or the person who is othered because of their mental health status, because again, I'm coming from that place too, but the person who is othered because [sigh], this is just too weird, this is just too hard, this is just ... but at the same time, we're in a time where it's so important that really everybody kind of gets on the same page about that, or else.  ANDREW: I just don't get those people, though, right? I'm like, this is a person who is way more passionate about this than I have capacity to do.  SIOBHAN: Right.  ANDREW: So I'm gonna like, I'm gonna, I'm gonna pay them for their passion, for their intensity, for being out there, you know?  SIOBHAN: Right.  ANDREW: Cause there are these people out there, you know? I have the good fortune to meet them and I'm just like, Yes! You're the good chain. I want to support this.  SIOBHAN: [laughing] Right.  ANDREW: And other people, I'm just like, “Hmm, I'm not sure, we'll see,” you know?  SIOBHAN: Right.  ANDREW: You know, like, cause lots of people, I run into lots of people doing business, and lots of people importing stuff from wherever, and I'm always like, hmm, you know. SIOBHAN: Right. ANDREW: And then there's people who are doing great stuff, you know? Like some of my suppliers, they know exactly where their crystals are coming from cause they're paying the people directly to mine them. You know? SIOBHAN: Right.  ANDREW: And they go down and, you know, give those people money and support their families and connect with them and connect with sustainability of these things, cause they want them to keep coming, right?  SIOBHAN: Right. ANDREW: You know, and they want these people who have these abilities to keep doing it and to be supported, you know?  SIOBHAN: Right. ANDREW: And I think that that's amazing when that, when I see that, you know?  SIOBHAN: Right.  ANDREW: So. Yeah.  SIOBHAN: I continue to be surprised how many people own shops, metaphysical shops, that look at me sideways when I say “Do you support ethical mining? Are these ethically mined?” And I just get blank faces. [laughing] You know, like, “What does that even mean? What are you even talking about? Oh, well probably, you know,” and it's like, this isn't an insane notion, in the spiritual community, it's not this bizarre notion, but it is, it is a lot of places. ANDREW: Yeah, and it's tough because there's so many, you know, there's stuff, certainly, 100 percent of our stuff is not, it's not clear where a bunch of it comes from. SIOBHAN: Mmmhmm. ANDREW: Because there's so many disruptions in the points of connection, you know? SIOBHAN: Mmmhmm. ANDREW: You know, but I think it's important to be mindful of it and to try and work on that, right? Cause otherwise we'll never move further in that direction, you know? So. SIOBHAN: Right. ANDREW: Yeah. SIOBHAN: Right. I look at my collection [laughing] ... My collection I've amassed at this point of gems and minerals, and my awareness of even the concept of ethical mining started, really, when I got more active in the Little Red Tarot community. She's been very vocal -- Beth, the owner -- about ethical mining and through her I learned, Oh, I really have to look out for this. Cause you learn in little pieces. The gems. It's the food, where's the food coming from? This plastic, what's going to happen to it when I'm done with it? You, obviously, you don't become aware of it all at once, or at least hopefully not, you work piece by piece, and then to really think about, what am I going to do with this stuff now that I already have it?  ANDREW: Mmmhmm. SIOBHAN: What is the most powerful purpose that I could put this to, now that I do already own it and really, staying curious about that, rather than shutting down, and rather than going into a guilt that doesn't serve.  ANDREW: Mmmhmm. For sure. Well, I think that's a good spot to stop it and say, if you're curious about Siobhan, where do they come and find you? [laughing] SIOBHAN: [laughing] I'm at RadicalTarot.com.  ANDREW: Nice.  SIOBHAN: And, everything is there. I'm also everywhere else and they can find my Instagram. My Twitter is actually the most political place I am, ironically, that's the place I'm most vocal when it comes to how I feel. I am on Facebook, but it's only a matter of time, before, I think, I part ways with them. And my newsletter is definitely the safest way to make sure that you hear about anything that I'm putting forth, because I announce everything there.  ANDREW: Nice. Well, thank you so much for making some time and coming on the podcast today. It's been great.  SIOBHAN: Awesome! Thank you for having me!

TeeDee and Andrew talk about the values of initiation. How it changes a person and how that enhances ones talents. They also talk about Oshun and how Teedee understands her after 20 years of initiation.  Connect with TeeDee on her website. Think about how much you've enjoyed the podcast and how many episodes you listened to and think consider if it is time tosupport the  Patreon You can do so here. If you want more of this in your life you can subscribe by RSS , iTunes, Stitcher, or email. Thanks for listening! If you dig this please subscribe and share with those who would like it. Andrew   ANDREW: Welcome to another installment of The Hermit's Lamp podcast. I'm here today with T-D González, who I know from the Orisha community, and who has been making some wonderful product and really representing some of the things that I think are significant and important about both tradition and initiation. So, for folks who don't know you, T-D, who are you? What are you about? T-D: [laughing] So, I am an Olorisha of the Afro-Cuban Lucumí tradition, initiated to the Orisha Ochún. I was ordained in Cuba in 1999. I live in Los Angeles, California. I'm a mother of two little boys. I'm a widow. I have a lot going on. And I've enjoyed making spiritual baths, which was one of the first things that I learned, one of the first things that many of us learn in the religion. And I've been doing that for about 20 years now, and I just recently began to sell a dried spiritual bath utilizing the herbs that we use in Orisha worship, in Lucumí Afro-Cuban Orisha worship that pertain to Ochún, so it's an Ochún bath. And I'm really excited about it, I love making it, I love working with the herbs, and it's a lifelong learning process for me.  ANDREW: Mmmhmm, yeah, it's awesome. I think we need to definitely talk about the herbs but the first question that I want to kind of start with us talking about is, who is Ochún?  T-D: [laughing] ANDREW: Right? And I ask this because, you know, I had David Sosa on a while back, and we talked -- T-D: Mmmhmm, mmmhmm, my dear friend.  ANDREW: Local human. And, I think it's really important because I think Ochún is, possibly from what I see, one of the most popular of the Orishas, and yet so much of what I see, in general conversation from, you know, people outside of the tradition doesn't often jive very well with my understanding of her from a traditional context at all. T-D: Right. ANDREW: And even in the traditional context, you know, I mean, some of my elders basically say, well she's kind of unknowable.  T-D: Right. And she's a deeply misunderstood Orisha.  ANDREW: Right! T-D: She's very popular and well loved, probably because of her beauty and because of her dominion over some of the aspects of life that obviously all of us are striving to attain or to enjoy.  ANDREW: Mmmhmm. T-D: But she is deeply misunderstood. So -- And she means different things, probably, to different people, even among initiates. ANDREW: Yeah. T-D: I see Ochún as elegance and beauty, but maybe not necessarily in the most apparent ways or in the most superficial ways. And I definitely see Orisha as working through other people. So Ochún for me is a motherly figure -- ANDREW: Mmmhmm. T-D: And she's forgiving and she's understanding and she's compassion, but she also can be stern, and she also can teach us very difficult lessons. And she also demands respect. And she demands regard for the counsel that she gives us, you know.  ANDREW: Mmmhmm. T-D: So, in some ways I always say, you know, I'm a little bit afraid of Ochún. I'm dedicated to her, I'm crowned to her, I love her, obviously, I've dedicated my life to Ochún, and she's blessed my life in many many ways. But Ochún is not an easy crown to wear. People make lots of assumptions about her children and things of that nature. Ochún is a very complex Orisha. On, you know, in the most basic terms, you know, we can say Ochún is a healer, Ochún heals with fresh water, Ochún also makes herbal decoctions, Ochún is a diplomat, Ochún is an astute businesswoman, Ochún is multifaceted, she's an incredible cook, she's a wonderful and caring mother, she's a wonderful mate, there are many aspects of Ochún. And obviously, then there is the connective part of Ochún in terms of sparking human connection between one another.  ANDREW: Mmmhmm. T-D: One of the praise, Oríkìs or praise names for my aspect of Ochún, is Oneabede. A bede is that long brass needle that's used to sew nets. So we can say she knits together the fabric of families ... ANDREW: Mmmhmm. T-D: Or the web of societies. We could just go on and on.  ANDREW: For sure, yeah. And I think about Ochún in my life, who's been, ever since I, ever since I sort of entered the religion in about 2000, she's been a constant. Right? She's always standing up for me, always there to help me, you know, always showing up when I need something ... T-D: And she's a fighter! [laughing] ANDREW: She is a fighter, right? And like you said, she demands her respect in a way that is unquestionable, you know? So before we do a ... what's called a reading of entry ... T-D: Mmmhmm. ANDREW: Which is before you get crowned, there's a reading that gets done to make sure that everything's good for the ceremony space, right?  T-D: Right. Mmmhmm. ANDREW: Has everything been covered, do we have all the right things, is there some unexpected problem?  T-D: Right. Some call it the vista or the obo de entrada, or, you know.  ANDREW: Yeah. And Ochún, in my reading of entry, showed up and says, "So no matter who's marked as your mother this weekend, I'm always your mother."  T-D: Right. ANDREW: And I was like, "That's right, Mom, you are!" You know? And that continues. And it's definitely that respect piece, but, it's also ... There's a profound intelligence?  T-D: Absolutely. ANDREW: That I think that gets overlooked ... T-D: Absolutely. ANDREW: And that diplomat, that business piece, that ... T-D: That social intelligence, that's really really important. You know?  ANDREW: Yeah. Mmmhmm. T-D: It's really important. And the whole piece of love, love goddess, and that whole thing, procreation, productivity, which she kind of dovetails, obviously, with our supreme, you know, Obatala, is, I think that the element that has to do with love speaks to self-love. And self-acceptance. And self-forgiveness. As much as anything else. It's not always a sexual kind of thing, you know, and attracting the things that we want to -- Ochún has a lot to do with attraction, Ochún has a lot to do with transformation, but it's not always in a sexual way. It can sometimes be and obviously it is, but those aren't the only, you know, avenues for that element in our lives. ANDREW: Yeah, for sure. So, I think I'm just going to have to collect a bunch of children of Ochún speaking about her nature over time on this podcast.  T-D: And I'm sure you'll get 50 different answers -- ANDREW: Yeah! T-D: From 50 different children of Ochún, but -- ANDREW: It will be beautiful. T-D: I want to speak to this thing that you talked about, this whole thing of aché, that we know that we're born with aché, right, and so this aché is this divine, if you want to call it grace, if you want to call it energy, you know, different people call it different things, we're all born with this, right, and we're all made up of this. And some of Vershare's writings even allude to the idea that Oldumare is aché, that God Almighty is aché. We're born with it. And we have our gifts and our grace and our energy, but then to actually be ordained as a priest is to receive the specific aché that we require in order for us to ethically fulfill our destinies, right? That's this idea that we chose a path, that we chose a destiny before we were born. And that we require this aché of these Orishas that we receive aché of, in order to be whole, in a sense, right? Or to be fully aligned with our higher selves. ANDREW: Mmmhmm. T-D: And so when we receive this aché, this aché that we receive is not the same aché that we're born with. It's really an amplification, an augmentation of what we have. And then it's almost like, you know Willy talks about this in some of his classes, the oreate ritual specialist Miguel Ramos, talks about this idea that it's almost like you have a bank account deposited of aché. ANDREW: Mmm. T-D: And then you receive, you know, augmentations to that from ceremonies or initiations or additional rites that you undergo.  ANDREW: Mmmhmm. T-D: And then your behavior and your character help to augment that or to multiply that or deplete it depending on how we conduct ourselves. So those are kind of some avenues or some conversations about aché, and then obviously we have the aché of our, of the Orisha to whom we're primarily dedicated as priests.  ANDREW: Mmmhmm. T-D: And I think we work for the rest of our lives to kind of develop that and grow that thing, and -- ANDREW: Yeah. And I think there's one other piece that sort of falls into that as well, right? Is that we are initiated, and we receive the energy, the aché -- T-D: Mmmhmm. ANDREW: The grace, right?  T-D: Mmmhmm. ANDREW: The connection to the spirit and so on, right?  T-D: Yes.  ANDREW: But we also are initiated into a lineage. T-D: Absolutely!  ANDREW: And we are connected to this line of people and Orishas and aché that go back -- T-D: Absolutely. ANDREW: As far as we can remember. T-D: Absolutely. Absolutely. That's essential. ANDREW: And I think that this notion of, or this practice of, being initiated into a lineage also adds to it, because ... T-D: Absolutely. ANDREW: It gives us permission, or some people might use the word license -- T-D: Right, licencia. Mmmhmm. ANDREW: To work with these spirits, and it forms a contract or a ... you know, most often talked about, like a family bond, right?  T-D: Right.  ANDREW: Because we use the word egun, which means ancestors ... T-D: Right. ANDREW: And when we use the word egun, we mean our ancestors by blood, our family ... T-D: Right.  ANDREW: And our ancestors by initiations -- T-D: Or by lineage, right.  ANDREW: And I think that this conjunction of the two forces, right? The energy that we receive directly from people, from our ceremonies, and from the spirits themselves, and that energy that we can access and that we can work with through working with these ancestors, I think that that combination really is where the magic happens? T-D: Absolutely. I agree with you wholeheartedly, cause you're calling on that energy.  ANDREW: Yeah! T-D: You're calling on that energy before we do anything, right?  ANDREW: Yeah. T-D: When we recite our mouba, we're literally praising God and the deities and the elements and we're literally calling the names ... ANDREW: Mmmhmm. T-D: Of those who came before us, of our lineage, and we're calling the names of those exalted priests who existed before us even from outside of our lineage ... ANDREW: Mmmhmm. T-D: I think that's essential. And yeah, that absolutely speaks to that concept of ritual license. That aché that you receive as an initiate endows you with something that will develop in time with training into ritual license and the ability to perform and to function as a priest on behalf of yourself, on behalf of others, to benefit the community, absolutely. And that is an essential piece, and it speaks to what the Cubans call fundamento, because if you don't have that you're just kind of floundering, fooling around, and this is not that type of thing. And there are absolutely different spiritual traditions and there are people who are born with deep gifts ... ANDREW: Mmmhmm. T-D: With deep connections to their own ancestors, to their own spirit guides. There are people who have to do little to no work to have the things that they do flourish, but Orisha worship is different from those types of systems and traditions. ANDREW: Mmmhmm. T-D: This is absolutely a communal system that requires ordination, initiation, training at the foot of elders, recognition by one's elders. As I said, this is definitely a learning path ... ANDREW: Mmmhmm. T-D: That one sets their foot upon and they will continue to learn for the rest of their lives.  ANDREW: True. T-D: My mother in law lives with me. She's 85, she just celebrated her 60th year as an Olorisha of Ochún, she has crowned many godchildren, she's a wonderful Diloggún diviner, she is an incredibly knowledgeable herbalist, she's just an all-around Olocha of the type that was fairly common 60 years ago when people were kind of all living on that island in that environment and didn't have, didn't function or have to deal with some of the stresses of a modern life in a large place, you know? And she still reads, and she still studies, and she still learns, and she still asks questions in rituals. And she may be one of the -- she's definitely one of the most knowledgeable people, you know, functionally, in terms of ritual competence, that I know. And so it just tells me, this is a learning path, we're on this path for life.  ANDREW: Yeah, I think it's, I think that it's really a significant point, right? I think that a lot of people have a notion about spirituality, whether it's this path or another path, and I know when I was younger I had this notion, that we will at some point arrive. T-D: Right.  ANDREW: At some point we will get there, and we will be, we will know the things, we'll stop having questions ... T-D: Right. ANDREW: We'll stop whatever, right? And, you know, I mean, I look at the elders that I know, and they're always still asking questions, right?  T-D: Right.  ANDREW: And it's one of those things that the more I learn about these traditions, and even in my Western mystery stuff, even though I decided to walk away from that path ... T-D: Mmmhmm. ANDREW: I could see how much more there was to learn, and that it was infinite, right?  T-D: Right.  ANDREW: And I think that it's really important to cultivate that sort of curiosity and engagement, right? T-D: Absolutely. ANDREW: I also think it's interesting, cause you brought up, and I want to kind of talk about this for a bit, before we lose it in the flow of the conversation -- T-D: Okay. ANDREW: That distinction between like Espiritismo, and muertos, like spirits of the dead, right?  T-D: Mmmhmm. ANDREW: And, you know, what we would call, what more people might call spirit guides ... T-D: Right.  ANDREW: You know, guardian angels?  T-D: Mmmhmm. ANDREW: You know, in the sense of like, some spirit that looks over us, and, what do you see as the role of those spirits in your life or in people's lives in general? Because I often see people conflate them with Orisha or with other things, and I'm curious. T-D: Right. And it's -- it's easy to do, especially when we are in a tradition where many of us, and most of our elders even, will use the word egun for everything, right? Anything that's dead is egun. ANDREW: Right.  T-D: So, even if they're talking about spirit guides, which we would say muertos, or guías, or protectores, or even ... ANDREW: Ada Orun. T-D: Right, Ada Orun, or even Ada Orun, it's easy to flip that tongue. ANDREW: Yeah. T-D: But yeah. Or even where they, some people talk about -- sorry -- even they use the word egun, people who are practitioners of Palo. So it just kind of gets thrown across the board. So it's -- I think it's important for us to be able to kind of designate or understand the differences, so we don't have this kind of totally crucado kind of crossed up situation, but I think that they are important. I think that a lot of that kind of -- I don't want to call it confusion, but kind of mixed up language, comes from the fact that we are ... Our religious practices and our spiritual practices descend from multiple ethnic groups of people that intermixed together in one geographic location, and so we have people practicing multiple spiritual traditions, you know, again, there's a creolization, it's not just strictly this Yoruba thing, because this is not just a Yoruba religion any more, in terms of the ethnic group. And it hasn't -- it hadn't been that way in a long time in Cuba or Brazil either. And now even more so, it is not, because we've got this kind of universal religion now, where people of different races and ethnic groups and backgrounds are practicing these religions, so. Excuse me. But back to your actual question was, I think that spirit guides have a very important place, I think Espiritismo has an important place in the overall practice of Afro-Cuban religion, because I believe that it fills in some gaps that were missing, and this is one school of thought. There are many schools of thought; there are others who will disagree. And I don't necessarily think -- I don't think it's filling in gaps that have to do with egun or ancestral practices, the more I learn about traditional Yoruba religion and the more that I study and read about that, it seems almost like Espiritismo tape kind of fills in some gaps that are missing with Egbe worship, that did not transfer to the New World. ANDREW: Mmmhmm. T-D: And so, oftentimes you'll hear Yoruba scholars describe Egbe as Yoruba Spiritism.  ANDREW: Yeah. T-D: Because Egbe is not an Orisha, and it's not one entity, it's like a group of entities that exist in the spiritual realm, and so the more I read of that and learn of that, I see, or I believe, I'm led to believe, that perhaps this filled in a bit of a gap where that was concerned. But I think for all of us, I mean, I come from a house where a lot of Espiritismo is practiced. My elders are espiritistas. I was married to a Palero and espiritista, and I just see how it functions in the life. Once people become developed, it can just help you in so many ways, just in so many little practical ways. But it is a separate practice from Orisha.  ANDREW: Mmmhmm. T-D: And so I think what often happens is, people who are outside of the religion, who do not have elders, are being led by spirit guides to do things, and they believe that they are interacting with Orisha. And, I just don't think that's the case. So all these girls that you see on Instagram and other forms of social media building these empty altars, altar tables, or they're calling them shrines, that don't have any Orisha in them with all kinds of pretty little knick-knacks and afefedes and mirrors and compacts and things -- those are likely -- I believe the impetus for that is a spirit guide that's pushing them to do that. But they just think it's Ochún. Or they think it's Yamaya. And so they've set up their altar, you know. That's what they really believe, and I think that push is so strong coming from those guides that it's pushing them to do something and they are doing something. And these dreams that they have that they're ... ANDREW: Mmm. T-D: You know, that they may be misinterpreting cause they don't have elders to guide them.  ANDREW: Well, and I think that there's an important sort of magical concept at play that people lose track of, or they don't like it.  T-D: Okay. Mmmhmm. ANDREW: Which is, when spirit speaks to us, right? They can only speak to us through our conscious and our unconscious, right? And so that communication is very easily flavored. Right?  T-D: Okay. [nodding] ANDREW: By our ideas, by our hopes, by our aesthetics ... T-D: Right. ANDREW: By our concepts. And this ... The capacity to differentiate between different kinds of spirits or, you know, whatever, right?  T-D: Mmmhmm. ANDREW: I think is very difficult. And if a spirit shows up and wants to help you, and you're like, "Please be Ochún, please be Ochún, please be Ochún," and it's ... It's kind of in that neighborhood, you know?  T-D: Mmmhmm. ANDREW: Like, overlaps with that energy, of course that communication is going to get covered with that, right?  T-D: Right.  ANDREW: You know, it's gonna, it's gonna get clothed in those symbols and ideas, right?  T-D: Mmmhmm. ANDREW: You know? And I think that it's really interesting to sort of try and understand how those communications and how those things happen, right?  T-D: It does. ANDREW: And I think sometimes it's an ego piece. Sometimes it's an unconscious piece. Sometimes it's ... You know, sometimes it comes from the spirit too, right?  T-D: Mmmhmm. ANDREW: You know? But I think that it's really important for people who are exploring in directions like this to, you know, to try and be clear about it and to, you know, if you're looking to go in those directions, you know, considering looking for more traditional verification, you know?  T-D: Mmmhmm. ANDREW: Because that's gonna be way more fruitful over time. T-D: Yeah. ANDREW: You know? Because the challenge that I've noticed with a lot of people is, they get pulled into something and into working in a direction, and then they don't know where to go, and the spirit can't guide them further, and so then they get stuck and their life becomes, you know, not what they hoped it would be.  T-D: Right.  ANDREW: Or they have problems, and not because the spirit's necessarily making them, but because it can't take them anywhere else ... T-D: Right.  ANDREW: And then, and then they become disenfranchised, or bitter, or they get deeper issues kind of emerging from that, right?  T-D: Yeah. An important factor, I think, is [sigh]. I don't want to throw this all on millennials this or millennials that.  ANDREW: Uh huh. T-D: But, you know, different age cohorts do have some tendencies and so we may see a lot of this with millennials not wanting to, you know, follow the rules, or have guides, or submit themselves to elders, or this kind of thing, but I think it's important to just kind of lay it out on the line, that, number one, one factor that isn't necessarily specific to millennials, is that you have people who are kind of -- they may be rejecting, or seeking something outside of the Abrahamic traditions, and so when they find other religions or Afro-Caribbean spirituality, they may be operating under the misconception that because there's not a church per se, that these are not structured religions that have orthodoxy. ANDREW: Right.  T-D: And so that can create conflict and a lot of problems. Because these are very structured religions. There is orthodoxy. They are hierarchical religions. They are oral traditions, largely, even though now we have more learning resources that are not ... ANDREW: I think that that is actually, you know, I mean, I'm, I don't know about the millennialness of it ... T-D: Mmmhmm. ANDREW: I mean, you know, I think that the issues ... Every generation has their own ideas, right?  T-D: Right. ANDREW: But I certainly think that being ... Everybody in this day and age who has access to the Internet, right? has ideas.  T-D: Mmmhmm, mmmhmm. ANDREW: And the amount of people who show up in my orbit who have sort of notions that they've picked up from somewhere that are really quite not traditional, you know? I think it's because of this flood of information ... T-D: There is. ANDREW: And people want it, and so much of it is ... It's kind of half-baked, you know?  T-D: It is. There's a lot of incorrect. I mean there are people ... You can go on YouTube and there are people who have tens of thousands of followers who are not giving accurate information. Or who are giving information or who have a perception or what they're voicing is really not orthodox or traditional at all. And so then when someone comes in contact with people who are part of the community and they encounter that orthodoxy, it might throw them off.  ANDREW: Mmmhmm. T-D: Or even put them off. You know?  ANDREW: Right. T-D: Which I think is unfortunate. But I think, you know, there are some aspects of the religion that you can access, just in terms of historical facts, you know? This started out, you know, as an imperial religion that was a part of a culture that believed in the divine right of kings and that the kings are direct descendants of Orisha ... ANDREW: Sure.  T-D: And, you know, us, we're, our practice comes largely from the Oyo empire, and so there's lots of structure and strictures and all that kind of thing that exists. It's not just this free-flowing kind of whatever you feel type of thing. And so, I think it's important for people to kind of at least try to learn a little bit about the historical stuff. Just take bites of it, you know?  ANDREW: Mmmhmm. T-D: Cause that will kind of put you in a better place, really, than just watching lots of YouTube videos ... ANDREW: Mmmhmm. T-D: And things like that.  ANDREW: I also think it's interesting because I think that a lot of people who I run into who come into the tradition or are considering coming into the tradition, right, or are coming for a reading or something ... T-D: Mmmhmm. ANDREW: I feel like a lot of them don't know what to do with the reading that they get, right?  T-D: Mmmhmm, got it. ANDREW: Someone shows up and they get a reading, and they come in a sign, and it comes out that everything's firm and solid and good, you know?  T-D: [laughs] Mmm. ANDREW: And then the reader's like, "Well, the Orishas love you, hugs and kisses, see you later," and they're like, "What do you mean?" T-D: Wow. ANDREW: "What do you mean?" Right? "What do you mean?"  T-D: Right. That's problematic too, obviously.  ANDREW: Right?  T-D: Because those Odos, those divination pattern, which we call Odu, have inherent messages in them. ANDREW: Sure. T-D: And some of them admonish the diviner to speak the more -- I don't want to say negative, but negative side of the pattern, and to give warnings, and --it's a message -- ANDREW: Mmmhmm. T-D: That they're kind of -- As a priest, you know, we have Ita, which are a number of life divinations, but it's the same concept as a road map. One may be temporary while the other may be permanent ... ANDREW: Mmmhmm. T-D: But it's still a road map for you to follow for your life, and so even if it's just dealing with a specific point in time and a specific situation, I think, you know, obviously, a lot of people are performing readings [sigh] who just are not conscientious ... ANDREW: Mmmhmm. T-D: About the work that they're doing.  ANDREW: Right. T-D: It's not just about marking an ebbó or an offering or a sacrifice that you can then charge the person for you to perform. You're really -- It's a connection, right? Between the Ori of the person who's come to receive the reading and the diviner connecting with Elegua, and giving them this message that they require, and so I think that is really important in terms of fully exploring and investigating the message of the Odu that's fallen, and taking the time with someone who is not in the religion. You know? When someone comes for a first reading, it's really important to explain to them what that's going to involve, and what it means, and what to expect, on top of what the actual message is going to be.  ANDREW: Mmmhmm. T-D: Because as we know, it's easier to lose the blessings that are being foretold than it is to convert negativity that's being expected into blessings. ANDREW: Mmmhmm. T-D: You know, so, it's a highly responsible task to perform a reading for someone, whether it's a Diloggún reading or a spiritual reading. It's a highly responsible task and the person who's performing that reading needs to take it seriously and they need to convey that level of seriousness and sacredness to the person who's coming to receive the reading. It's not a game or a parlor trick. It's a connection with ... to the divine. ANDREW: Mmmhmm. Yeah. And it's also not ... although it has the appearance of fortunetelling sometimes ... T-D: Mmmhmm. ANDREW: Like, "hey, watch for this thing ..." T-D: Right. [nodding] ANDREW: It's also not fortunetelling, right?  T-D: And the diviner needs to make that clear, also. You know, that this is not fortunetelling.  ANDREW: Mmmhmm. And it's also ... The advice about what you don't do is SO important and ... T-D: It really is. ANDREW: Or maybe more important than what you do ... I mean … They're both important, right?  T-D: Right. ANDREW: And this notion of the way in which taboos are handed out, right?  T-D: Mmmhmm. ANDREW: "Don't do this thing, don't do that thing." I think is something that is also very complicated for people sometimes.  T-D: It is.  ANDREW: Especially because sometimes those connections are super obvious, right?  T-D: Right.  ANDREW: Like, you came in a sign that says your head's not very clear, don't drink. Right?  T-D: Right.  ANDREW: Eh, it's easy to understand, right?  T-D: Right. ANDREW: But some of the other connections are less clear, right?  T-D: Right.  ANDREW: And ... and yet ... they still need to be abided with, and that's sort of ... T-D: Right. And so maybe the diviner could help that person ... you know, kind of give them some insights into it. You may not hit on the exact thing, that that taboo or prohibition pertains to for that person, but it gets them thinking along those lines. ANDREW: Mmmhmm. T-D: You know. Don't eat this thing. You know, maybe that thing would make you sick, or maybe when you go to have it, you're going to be at someone's house and it's not going to be well-prepared ... ANDREW: Right. T-D: Or maybe you'll need to make that as an offering one day and it'll save you so it's more of a medicine.  ANDREW: Mmmhmm. T-D: You've got to kind of open the way that person perceives that prohibition. So that they can think about it differently than just, "I can't have that thing."  ANDREW: Mmmhmm. T-D: You know. ANDREW: People don't like to be told they can't have things.  T-D: Right. None of us like that, you know? [laughs] ANDREW: So, every time you sit on the mat, be like, "Please don't take away something I like."  T-D: Don't take away. Any time you receive another Orisha with any ties, like "oh, don't tell me I can't have this thing." ANDREW: Exactly.  T-D: But you know that it's important to observe those taboos because you've chosen this path as your life path ... ANDREW: Mmmhmm. T-D: But someone who's just going to receive a reading may not understand that, you know, for the next 30 days, or depending on, you know, how you were taught, the next however long amount of time, while this Odu, while the energy of this divination pattern is around you, you need to, you know, refrain from doing this thing or that thing or engaging in this or that or eating this or that.  ANDREW: Yeah. For sure. So, I'm going to switch topics a little bit here ... T-D: Okay. ANDREW: Kind of, kind of but not ... T-D: Uh oh! [laughs] ANDREW: So, we've been talking about aché, right?  T-D: Mmmhmm. ANDREW: And, one of the things that I've found fascinating was watching the way in which you described your process around making these new baths that you're offering. Right?  T-D: Okay. Yes.  ANDREW: You know? And, I mean, can you talk about it, because I think that the commitments to putting your energy into it, and the hands-on-ness of it, I think is fascinating to me, and so I'd love you to share some of that for people to understand.  T-D: Oh my goodness. So, I think it's -- There's obviously a little -- This is an unorthodox type of bath, the first bath that I'm offering as an Ochún bath. It's unorthodox in the sense that most people here in the States who practice the religion perceive Orisha herbs as just the herbs we use to consecrate heads and consecrate Orisha. And they're always fresh herbs that we work with. And the herbs that we use for spiritual baths -- Obviously people in Florida and other places, they may use fresh herbs. But in the Afro-Cuban practice, there are some herbs that get boiled. Plenty of herbs are dried, it's fairly common. It's very common for Paleros to work with dry herbs. And so, I'm using -- I'm making a dried herbal product. I'm growing most of the herbs myself. I'm washing them and drying them and confecting the baths with them. And because I'm a one woman show and I'm just starting to do this, I'm labeling all of my tea tins myself by hand, and some of the labels I kind of make, they're not really labels, I wanted it to look a certain way, and I wanted it to have kind of a vintage apothecary look, and I wanted there to be some texture. So I ended up doing a lot more kind of physical hands on -- ANDREW: Cause-- T-D: Crafting, then I had originally thought. ANDREW: You've skipped over a little bit, though, right?  T-D: I skipped over a lot! ANDREW: You're growing the herbs -- T-D: [laughing] Yes. ANDREW: And then you're picking them -- T-D: Right. ANDREW: And then you're hand washing them all, right?  T-D: Yes, and I'm drying them. ANDREW: And then you're hand drying them -- T-D: Right. ANDREW: So that they can them be properly dried -- T-D: Right. ANDREW: And cured. T-D: Right. Cause I want them to be properly dried and cured.  ANDREW: And not like moldy and disgusting, right?  T-D: Right. I didn't want them to be moldy or disgusting, and yes, I live in southern California where it's pretty dry, so it's not like I have a big issue with anything getting moldy or disgusting. ANDREW: Yeah. T-D: And I have some nice drying racks that I hang that are like the ones that people might use for tea or other herbs. And in terms of the confection of the baths, it's kind of an unorthodox thing cause there's a lot of praying and singing and not the same exact kind of ora that would go on to make omearo, but some of that, you know, a good little bit of that. There's not divining going on but there was some divining going on in terms of what my ingredients would be for the bath -- ANDREW: Mmmhmm. T-D: And there was consulting with my own elders about that. So -- And I do have some really good teachers. As I've mentioned, my mother in law, my madrina, I also work with my Olua here in Los Angeles who is actually a sustainable gardening specialist, and my other Olua teacher, Luis Marín who lives in Maryland who is an expert herbalist, and he practices achéche, traditional Yoruba Ifa but he's initiated to Elegua in the Lucumí system. So I do have some really knowledgeable teachers to confer with. But in terms of the actual process of it, yes, I'm [laughing] -- you know, I'm making it the way that I would make a bath for someone who came to me to make a bath for them. So, and I sing when I work. I sing when I do a limpieza or, you know, spiritually clean the house. And this is an Ochún bath, so I sing Ochún songs and I sing Osayin songs.  ANDREW: Mmmhmm. And -- T-D: And I open my work, I actually stand in front of my shrine and I ring my Ochún bell and I recite oríkì and I pray to her before I start my work, and then when I'm finished making the batch of the bath, and I do small batches, when I'm finished I go back and I pray to her and I sing, and I recite oríkì and prayer and once it's done I light a candle and I sing some more -- ANDREW: Mmmhmm. T-D: And I leave it there at the foot of my Ochún. ANDREW: Yeah. T-D: And sometimes I put my Ochún sopera on top of it! [laughs] ANDREW: [laughs] Just put a little extra of that energy in there! T-D: Yes!  ANDREW: Fire it up a little further?  T-D: I do. ANDREW: Yeah. T-D: I do, and so, and I want to say, you know, this concept of kind of making magical things, you know, I feel, obviously that the power is inherent in the herbs that I'm working with and inherent in the Orishas and I just have an unwavering faith in that.  ANDREW: Mmm. T-D: So, and I have an unwavering faith in my elders and in my lineage and that they put Ochún in my head and they did it properly and they've taught me, and I've conferred with them and that I'm doing this properly, and I do it with a lot of love, honestly. ANDREW: Mmmhmm. T-D: A lot of love, and heart, and I say a lot of prayers for -- I'm so emotional, you have to forgive me -- for the people who would use this bath, you know, I pray for them, that they should have good health and that they should have happiness and love in their lives and that they should love themselves and accept themselves, and that they should have prosperity and that goodness should flow to them and to their lives. And so I do a lot of that because that's what I know and that's what I've seen when rituals are performed for me, people pray for me, people pray for my children, and so I pray for the benefit of anyone who would touch anything that I put my hands on, you know.  ANDREW: Mmmhmm. Yeah. And I think that, to me, there's that, what I hear and see and what you're talking about is this sort of both the depth of experience, the history of the tradition, right?  T-D: Mmmhmm. ANDREW: And that sort of connection to aché and to lineage, right? And I think that, you know, it's -- it goes even beyond just some of those things, right, because it's also your aché, right?  T-D: Right. ANDREW: Like you can accomplish these things partly because it's in you from your destiny to do so as well, right?  T-D: Right. ANDREW: Like not everybody is meant to be an Ochunista or, you know, an herbalist, or whatever, right?  T-D: Mmmhmm. ANDREW: We all have different graces and strengths, and I think that that capacity and attention is so wonderful, right? And, you know, how many, if you count the growing of the plants, how long is it from start to finish before one of these comes out in a tin, right? It's a long time. T-D: It's a long time, it is. And I think that from the beginning, my godmother did always kind of try to motivate me to learn about the plants -- ANDREW: Mmmhmm. T-D: And I said, "oh, it's just too much, it's overwhelming, ah," you know, I like to make the baths, I'll use this, what I know, I'll use that ... But as, over time, you know, little by little, you look, and you have more and more plants, and then I married a guy who was a Palero, so there were more and more plants.  ANDREW: Mmmhmm. T-D: So you just learn, you don't take it all in one big bite, or one big gulp. ANDREW: Right. T-D: There's no way you can do it! And I don't know the Oju this is associated with, it's “bit by bit we eat the head of the rat,” you know ... ANDREW: Right. T-D: It's this idea, the head of the rat has very little sharp bones in it. And so if you're gonna eat that meat, which is a delicacy, right, for our ancestors, our spiritual ancestors, you have to eat it very very carefully. And so, it's a very slow and kind of careful process. And I don't perceive myself as being particularly knowledgeable. I perceive myself honestly as a rank and file Olorisha and I've been very fortunate and blessed to have some really knowledgeable elders who have shared with me and I will spend the rest of my life learning more about herbs and growing herbs and continuing to take classes, continuing to ask questions of other people older than me and younger than me. And maybe one day, you know, 30 years from now, I'll be an Oceanista ... ANDREW: Uh huh. T-D: But, you know, this project, if you will, is just an incredible, an extraordinary opportunity for me, and I love it, and [shrugs], that's all I can say, I love it, and I wish I had begun with more gusto 20 years ago and not felt ... not allowed it to make me feel so overwhelmed. And I also find it interesting that I've received lots of comments and feedback, you know, from elders who are espiritistas, who say "Oh, al fin tu estás haciendo trabajo de tu muerta principal," like, you know, "finally you're doing this work that, you know, that your primary muerta's been trying to get you to do for years and years." And, you know, I have been told of her, and I knew of her, but I didn't really understand that she was an herbalist. I saw her working over a pot, you know, a caldero, kind of bent over, sitting down, and her hands are moving. You know? And I would say that. And my madrino was like, "What did you think she was doing?" [laughs] "What did you think she was working on over that pot?"  ANDREW: [laughing] Yeah. T-D: You know, she was working with barks, and bottles, and ojas, and herbs, and leaves, and stuff, you know. ANDREW: Yeah. T-D: But it's a process and I think it comes to us when we're ready. When we're ready for it and open to it.  ANDREW: Yeah. T-D: And sometimes it has come to us little by little over time and we didn't even realize it and then we looked up and said, "Wow! Where did all these doggone plants come from?" ANDREW: Exactly, right? Yeah. Yeah. I think that -- I think that that idea of -- Back to this question about guides and spirits that walk with us, you know?  T-D: Yes!  ANDREW: I mean, I think that figuring out how to live with that, and work with them, I think is so important, you know?  T-D: It's essential but it is so hard for some of us. ANDREW: Yeah. T-D: And I'm gonna tell you this, my background, I'm an African American, my family is from New Orleans, so saints and Catholicism and all that was not foreign to me, but many African American people or others who have or Anglo Americans or others who come from a Protestant background, it seems very Catholic to them, and not only that, but it seems very Christian to those who may be looking for something outside of Christianity. And so, until people dig a little bit deeper and really understand about Espiritismo and that they're different and also different ways of working with these spirits, that's when you kind of get that depth or get that connection that, you know, this is something that's really important to me, and when you are surrounded by, or find yourself in the company of people who are really developed spiritually, and how it helps their lives and how it can help your life ... ANDREW: Mmmhmm. T-D: That's when you start to see the importance of that. And when you -- or the importance just of being able to distinguish between your own fears, or your own ego, and messages that are being sent to you from your guides, you know -- ANDREW: Mmmhmm. T-D: Is hard. And I can say, I lost my husband almost six years ago to cancer. I have struggled financially with two young children, living in a city where the schools were great when I was a child but aren't so great now and have to pay tuition for my kids and stuff like that, and make choices that I didn't think I'd have to make because I didn't think I'd be alone. You know, there's a big difference between two incomes and one income.  ANDREW: Yes. T-D: And I will give the credit 100 percent to my muertos, my spirit guides, my protectors, and my ancestors that even gave me the idea to sell these baths or make them available to the public, something that I love to do -- ANDREW: Sure.  T-D: And that I have been doing for years, and it never occurred to me, and I have been told, Andrew, so many times, you know, "You're going to have a business, you're going to do well at a business one day." Well, I'm not there doing well yet, you know, I'm just starting, but my parents were small business owners -- ANDREW: Yeah.  T-D: And I just never -- and we had a very comfortable life, but I just -- the only thing I was really good at was food things, and food businesses are very expensive and rigorous and require a tremendous amount of capital -- ANDREW: Mmmhmm. T-D: And I just couldn't see that. And so when this idea came to me -- This idea didn't come to me! The idea was given to me. It was a blessing that was given to me. And that just blows me away.  ANDREW: Well, you know, from a certain perspective, right?  T-D: Mmmhmm. ANDREW: So, I started working as a card reader, 15, almost 16 years ago.  T-D: Mmmhmm. ANDREW: You know, I quit my job in advertising and started ... T-D: Wow! ANDREW: Reading cards for a living, right?  T-D: Okay. ANDREW: And I decided that I wanted to make a product.  T-D: Mmmhmm, mmmhmm. ANDREW: And so I started making herbal baths. And this line of baths that I make now.  T-D: Mmmhmm. ANDREW: And, you know, I got them in some stores around town, and I did some things with it, and in some ways, that starting point is the starting point of the whole store I have now, where I have a full store now, right?  T-D: Mmmhmm. ANDREW: So, you know, and it comes from that listening in, and leaning in, and being like, "All right, spirits, I can do these things. Oh yeah, I can work on that," and, you know... T-D: Mmmhmm. ANDREW: What comes from that listening, in my experience, especially if we're faithful to it, right? Over time-- T-D: Mmmhmm. ANDREW: Is everything, everything comes from there, right?  T-D: Mmmhmm. ANDREW: And I think about, when I show up at the shop, or tonight's Saturday and we're recording and I'm gonna lock up later and go home -- T-D: Mmmhmm. ANDREW: I always lock up everything and sit here and check in with all my guides and my spirits and I thank them for this, and I thank the Orishas when I pray to them every day, because all of this comes from their guidance and their influence, and my work, but -- T-D: And it's a blessing. It's a degree of freedom for your family.  ANDREW: Mmmhmm. T-D: And when I was a young person, a teenager, I just saw the work, you know, my parents did. And they had multiple small business endeavors, and they were successful, but there was a lot of work.  ANDREW: Sure. T-D: But working for yourself, there's just a degree of freedom, a space for personal expression and creativity, independence -- ANDREW: Mmmhmm. T-D: That you'll never find in corporate America or corporate Canada or in the West, you know ... ANDREW: Corporate anything, right?  T-D: Anywhere, you're just not gonna find that.  ANDREW: It's just corporate Earth now. Isn't that the deal?  T-D: Right. That's what it is, right, globalization. But I just, if I could develop this in time, you know, in a few years or whatever, into something that I could do full time and have a small shop and grow some herbs on the roof, or in the back, or whatever, that is my ultimate goal, and to be able to kind of be there for my kids, and they can come into the shop and go in the back and do their homework and help me carry stuff or whatever ... ANDREW: Yeah. T-D: That's a beautiful way of life, because it allows you to engage in something that you value and something that you can share with the community, that you can share with others, and it allows you to continue to grow -- ANDREW: Mmmhmm. T-D: As a priest, and to grow in your spiritual practice and your knowledge and ultimately, you'll be able to pass that on to other people as well. So yes, definitely, you know, you're someone who I see as a shining example, you know, honestly. ANDREW: Well. Thank you. Well. So, let's see if people want to go and check out your stuff, they should know where to find you.  T-D: Oh, yes!  ANDREW: Where are you hiding out on the web there, T-D?  T-D: So, I have a website, it's https://www.spiritualbathtea.com, and you can order the bath there. It's an Ochún bath for love and prosperity. It has a lot of beautiful things in it. And Andrew, I'll send you one, I know that you're a master bath maker but I'm gonna send you my bath, because it's just like wine, maybe you have your vineyard and I have my vineyard ... ANDREW: Oh yeah, for sure.  T-D: You know, but we can enjoy each other's products of one another's labors ... ANDREW: Absolutely. T-D: And I'll definitely be sending you a bath.  ANDREW: Super. I can't wait!  T-D: But yes, it's got at least five of Ochún's herbs in it, it has more, and it's got some other really nice elements in it that ... it's got three different types of sandalwood in it, it smells really lovely, and it's a really beautiful bath and I've received a lot of really positive feedback about the bath from users, and I love making it and I put a lot of love and care into it. And it definitely gives a new meaning, and you know, the word art, or the word crafts, these have many different meanings, and what were the meanings, the original meanings, of, you know, these things.  ANDREW: Well, you know what, the really funny thing is, you're kind of actually doing what the millennials are doing. T-D: I am?  ANDREW: You are, cause I mean, what I see a lot in sort of the millennial culture, things that people see about that, is this return to hand crafted, to small batch, to stuff made with love, right?  T-D: Mmmhmm. ANDREW: So you see these sort of various things, food wise, and you know, clothing wise and otherwise ... T-D: Right. ANDREW: That, they're not corporate, they're not mass-produced.  T-D: Right. ANDREW: They come from people who have learned how to, you know, hand do things -- T-D: Right. ANDREW: In traditional ways or new ways. T-D: And this will never be mass-produced, ever. ANDREW: Yeah. T-D: It's just not that -- that's not my concept, it's not that kind of thing. So if I wake up tomorrow and you know, Amara la Negra or Beyoncé put me on their, you know, social media, there'll just be a back log, but the order will get filled, but you know, I might buy a couple of those labeling machines, to label my tins, [laughing] or you know, like I said, my dream is to be able to afford to buy 10,000 from China of those fancy tea tins that are already embossed and printed, but the bath is, it's always going to be something that is beautiful, that I'm going to put as much beauty and love and care into as I possibly can, and that my own hands have touched, because that's it, you know, that's where the magic is -- ANDREW: Yeah. T-D: It's multi-- it's multifaceted, right? It's got these different components. ANDREW: Mmmhmm. T-D: And so, you've got your spiritual license, your ritual license, your learning competencies, but it's also what you put into that thing, you know?  ANDREW: Mmmhmm. T-D: There are lots of people who are well-trained, who are very knowledgeable, and who are duly ordained, who just throw some shit together.  ANDREW: Mmmhmm. T-D: All day long. And I will never ever do that. Cause that's got a lot to do with personal integrity and accountability to Orisha, too! Why -- I mean, I'm going to try to make the most beautiful thing that I can if it has Ochún's name on it. And when I do my Obatala bath, it's gonna be the most incredible excellent thing that I could ever imagine. ANDREW: Yeah. Because I love Obatala, and he loves me, because he gave me a wonderful husband. You know, I just am always going to do the very best that I can.  ANDREW: Mmmhmm. T-D: And to try to make something, and plus we want to please people, right? We want people to feel that their money is well spent and that their effort in acquiring the thing is well spent.  ANDREW: Right. T-D: And is special to them.  ANDREW: Yeah. And I know for myself, whenever I'm in a position to represent the religion in one way or another, I feel a lot of pressure.  T-D: Absolutely!  ANDREW: Right? To get it right. T-D: Absolutely! ANDREW: I made an Orisha tarot deck, which is coming out in the fall through a major publisher, right?  T-D: Oh, wow! Okay. ANDREW: And-- through Llewellyn, it'll be out in September. T-D: Mmmhmm. ANDREW: And, it took me a long time to make it because I constantly felt this pressure, from me, right?  T-D: Yeah, it's from you, it's just like any overachiever ... ANDREW: Right?  T-D: You're not competing with other kids, you're competing with yourself. [laughing] ANDREW: There's nobody else, it's just me and the art, or you and the bath, or whatever. T-D: Right!  ANDREW: Yeah, no, it's fantastic. T-D: That's definitely what it is. I definitely put my best into it. And I hope that that shines through and that people will see that and just to add one more thing, you know, it's really important, this idea that we have, of that license [sighs]. I just can't really say enough about that, I kind of get emotional about it. You can't create an Orisha bath if you don't have Orishas. ANDREW: Mmm. T-D: You know? And they're certain herbs that belong to Orishas, and all the herbs belong to Osane, but if you don't have the ritual license to work with those entities, how are you creating a bath? How are you creating a ritual? You can certainly do a spiritual bath, you know, working with your spirit guides, and working with your muertos, your protectors and guides, but working with Orisha requires Orisha. Requires consecrated Orisha.  ANDREW: Yeah.  T-D: So.  ANDREW: For sure. T-D: Don't just throw some oranges and some -- ANDREW: [laughing] Cinnamon -- T-D: Yellow flowers and some honey and cinnamon in the bathtub and say that you're doing a bath with Ochún cause Ochún is not there in that bath with you. ANDREW: Yeah.  T-D: [laughing] Not to be snarky! ANDREW: No, I think, I think it's important conversations, right? And I think that one of the reasons why it's my intention to have you and David Sosa and, you know, other traditional practitioners on, is I think that it's really important to have a dialogue about what tradition actually has to offer, right? And I think that it's a thing that's hard to understand, it's a thing that is not obvious in sort of the more modern world ... T-D: Right. ANDREW: And it's not obvious if you didn't grow up in a magical tradition or in a magical, you know, I mean, I had the great fortune to not be raised with any religion ... T-D: Mmmhmm. ANDREW: And I discovered Western mystery tradition stuff, and Western esotericism when I was like, 11 and 12, right.  T-D: Mmmhmm, Mmmhmm. ANDREW: So I grew up self-educating myself in a magical approach to the world. T-D: Mmmhmm. ANDREW: And I think that's what has allowed me to step into it and into the Orisha tradition so well, is that the only traditions I've ever known have been magical. And spiritual in this way. And -- T-D: Yeah. ANDREW: And were also initiatory, right?  T-D: Mmmhmm, mmmhmm. ANDREW: Right? You know? They're all pieces that I understood from the beginning, kind of coming into this, right?  T-D: Right. ANDREW: I think it's important. T-D: And, it's very important. It's foreign to a lot of people, and, you know, it's important to say, you know, Orisha worship is not a self-initiatory system, it's a communal system, that has an intact priesthood, it has existed for many generations, for thousands of years if you go all the way back -- ANDREW: Mmmhmm. T-D: And it's an ancient religious system that has an orthodoxy and a priesthood and a specific path that one follows and that's very important. And that you cannot, even though the world changes, things change, things evolve, you can't fit Orisha into your own mold or -- ANDREW: Mmmhmm. T-D: Or mold Orisha to fit your lifestyle, in that type of way. It's not that type -- it's a religion, it's a structured religious system. ANDREW: For sure. All right. Well now we've given everybody something to think about!  T-D: Yes. ANDREW: Thank you for making time -- T-D: Thank you! Thank you so much for having me, I really appreciate it, it was very kind of you and I appreciate your time.  ANDREW: Oh, it's my pleasure, thanks.  T-D: Thanks. 

This week Andrew is joined by the one and only Aidan Wachter. We catch up a bit since our last Stacking Skulls Episode and the converstation flows from there. We discuss Aidan's book "Six Ways: Approaches & Entries for Practical Magic" (which has been very popular at the shop" and Aidan's Talisman work. We also dive into what it means to be open to spirit and the connections that can be made from there.  Connect with Aidan on his website, and look for "Aidan Wachter" on the social media outlet of your choosing! Think about how much you've enjoyed the podcast and how many episodes you listened to and think consider if it is time tosupport the  Patreon You can do so here. If you want more of this in your life you can subscribe by RSS , iTunes, Stitcher, or email. Thanks for listening! If you dig this please subscribe and share with those who would like it.   Andrew       ANDREW: Welcome to another instalment of The Hermit's Lamp podcast. I'm here today with Aidan Wachter, and, you know, I feel like Aidan's a person who needs no introduction, but in case this is the first time you've run across him, let me say: Aidan's been on before by himself, Aidan is part of the Stacking Skulls, which is the mythological magical band made up of a few of the people who come on here on the regular, and we get together and talk about magic, and Aidan is a talismanic wizard and genius who produces amazing jewelry, and Aidan just has a new book out, called Six Ways, which is, as I'm sure we'll talk about in the episode, the book that I wish that I had received when I was starting, and the book that I wish I had written if I was going to write a book on magic. So, it's all of those good things. You know, I gave you a bit of an intro, but for folks who don't know you, Aidan, who are you? What are you about?  AIDAN: [laughing] What am I about? I've just been at the magic thing for a long time, and in a kind of weird pattern that I can see from now, I can kind of, and I'd imagine this is true of a lot of people, I can see at this point kind of the whole chain that got me here [laughs], and on top of the jewelry work, the kind of intention that I have is to kind of transmit as much of that as is useful to people.  ANDREW: Mmmhmm. AIDAN: Without all the detours that really were just mostly time wasters. And, yeah, I live on a little micro-ranch in the mountains of New Mexico, where most of the time it's really windy, but not today, it actually rained for the first time in, like, months!  ANDREW: Uh huh. AIDAN: With a bunch of chickens and a duck who's about to hatch a pile of ducks if that works out. I think today or tomorrow. And some goats and some dogs and my wife. And I play music, I write some, and I make a lot of silverwork. So.  ANDREW: Nice. So, I mean, somebody was asking, before this episode was recorded, you know, what's the move like? Because, you know, you've been there for a while, but has it been a year yet?  AIDAN: We've been in this house for just a little bit over a year now. About a year and a third. Yeah, the last place was a kind of weird one, cause it was kind of in a high-end homeowner association zone, of kind of Santa Fe suburbs?  ANDREW: Mmmhmm. AIDAN: Which is really not our scene! [laughs] We laughed that that house was the house that all of our parents would have been really proud if we had actually acquired intentionally, cause it was huge, and ... ANDREW: Sure. AIDAN: Fancy. And was totally not us. So, we're in this tiny little 700 square foot casita here. I was thinking about that question, and it's a little strange because, due to just setting up the ranchita here, and getting everything set up, and then my surgery and all that, we haven't really been out a lot in this area. So, to answer kind of what New Mexico has done, is really, like, what has this two and a half acres done? And so, it's not super New Mexico-like ... ANDREW: Mmmhmm. AIDAN: Perhaps in a general thing. But it's been really good. It's really quiet and it's really full of animals, in a way that we didn't expect. There is more kind of songbird activity than I've ever seen anywhere that I've lived. We've got a huge raptor population, we're in like the essentially what is like ... appears to be the raven preserve part of New Mexico. There is probably 150 ravens that clearly live within, you know, 1/4 mile of us, so there's always ravens in the yard and they come and mess with our dogs. Yeah.  ANDREW: How did you find ... So, like, I think about where I live. Right? You know? I mean, where I live and where the shop is, you know? And the shop's been where it is ... I mean, I was across the street before this, so if we include that, I've been in the same ... in both places, about six or seven years, right? And, you know, for me, so many of my spiritual practices kind of end up being kind of connected to spirits of place and in places where the spirits that I work with like to show up. You know, so has there been a change in your spiritual practice with this move? You know, before you moved this way?  AIDAN: You know, that's a somewhat strange question. I was thinking about this a lot in relationship to the book, cause there's kind of a really big move toward kind of spirits of place and kind of the bioregional animism that Marcus McCoy's coined that term and brought up. And I have some sense of that. But having moved as much as I have, which I figured out a couple months ago, I've moved 37 times, and I'm 51, so [laughs]. And so, a lot of those I was all in the same place, so. It definitely changes my sense of things, like my overall perceptions change a lot when I move, but the spirits I work with are pretty consistent. And that's mainly, I think, because I do most of my work in trance.  ANDREW: Hmm. AIDAN: And so, things change over there, but that's not really related to place. The places that I go are fairly consistent, and the shifts that happen there, happen over really long periods of time.  ANDREW: Right.  AIDAN: And those things come with me, and that stuff doesn't change based on where I live so far that I've seen.  ANDREW: I can see that. I mean, for me, so much of my work, my work sort of out in the woods and whatever, is connected to the spirits of those places, for sure, but it's also as often as not connected to like, you know, I can go find a willow tree anywhere, I mean, you know, in the greater sense of Toronto and the surrounding areas and many other places, and once I'm hanging out with the willow tree I can do willow tree stuff, you know?  AIDAN: Right.  ANDREW: So, like it tends to be more tied to feature, and tied to species of plants or things like that than it tends to be, you know, like I want to go find somewhere really swampy, I want to go, you know like I really love the ... me and the redwing blackbirds have a thing, you know, so I need somewhere that's marshy and they're gonna be there then. But you know, the places that I tend to go tend to be predominantly because they are the most convenient to where I'm living or working ... AIDAN: Right. ANDREW: Versus explicitly tied to the land. AIDAN: Right.  ANDREW: So.  AIDAN: And then the ... yeah, and I kind of get that with the animals. So, for me, like, the ravens have always been a big deal for me anyway ...  ANDREW: Mmmhmm. AIDAN: And so that's a presence here. And we are ... we have lured in an insane rabbit population that is basically merging with our chicken flock now. And you'll look out and they're all hanging out at the feeders, or they'll be sharing the waters, and ... I have a thing with the rabbits too, so ... they're kind of my underworld creature. ANDREW: Nice. AIDAN: And then the other thing that did happen here, is, and I have to go back, I haven't spent enough time there, you know is there's this really ancient Guadalupe shrine here.  ANDREW: Mmm. AIDAN: That's, I don't know when that ... I mean, it's old. I want to say it's more than 300 years old, I think. And like that place is one of the most intense power spots I've ever been in. Like that's been continuous use for hundreds of years. And that's ... Yeah, that's an amazing place. That was ... I mean I know that that changed some of ... That certainly affected me, was spending a few hours in there. There's another church that's dedicated to St. Michael, but I haven't been up there yet, those are both in Santa Fe. And, yeah, I mean, New Mexico is really interesting cause it's such a different place than anywhere I've ever lived. And especially kind of down where we are, which is really rural. We're not in ...  ANDREW: Mmmhmm. AIDAN: You know, we're not in anything like hoity toity ... We have a Walmart, a gas station, and three or four feed stores. [laughs] ANDREW: Right.  AIDAN: You know, we live in the neighbourhood where you see, you know, somebody's escaped horse running down the road.  ANDREW: Right.  AIDAN: With people chasing it. [laughs] So it's ... I love the spaciousness and the open ... It does remind me a lot of trying to see where we were except that I'm not as wrecked by allergies as I was in Tennessee.  ANDREW: [10:04 crosstalk]  AIDAN: That openness definitely is really helpful. The clear skies, basically all the time, is really helpful for me.  ANDREW: Hmm. So, since you were last on the podcast ... AIDAN: Mmmhmm. ANDREW: So, you know, the Stacking Skulls crew was on, end of January, early February, you have this book that came out, and I don't usually do book episodes cause I think that they're not that exciting. AIDAN: Totally. ANDREW: But your book has been super fascinating to me. Because I think that it represents such a grounded introduction ... AIDAN: Mmmhmm. ANDREW: To magic, and such a grounded introduction that is not ... Not invested in making you believe something.  AIDAN: Mmmhmm. ANDREW: So many books are ... you know, they're like, "Sign up for the Golden Dawn, we'll give you the special apron, and you'll be a believer. Sign up for this, or sign up for that," you know, like, and not that there's anything wrong with having a belief system or expressing that belief system, but, I feel like your work is sort of devoid of that in an overt way that I think is very fascinating.  AIDAN: Yeah. I think that ... It was really interesting to me, and I'm glad that that comes through, cause that was certainly the intent, that when the book started, when the book kicked up, and it kicked up really fast -- the framework took about two weeks to write, and then it just took me another two years to finish, basically. Any time I would try and go even vaguely into "let's talk about how you should do something," [laughs] like I would just get kicked by the allies, like, "that is not why we want you to do this," like, "do what you would do."  ANDREW: Mmmhmm. AIDAN: And there wasn't a lot of that to begin with, but it really did get weeded out pretty aggressively, cause I don't think it's generally relevant to the practice of magic. I talk about the general and the specific in the book, in a few places, and I don't go incredibly deep into it, but that's kind of my take, is we tend to get lost in the specific in a lot of our conversations or books or whatever about magic. Which is great for the people that are doing the exact same kind of work. But it makes it kind of difficult for somebody that's not, that they don't really fit that mold, to figure out what parts you can use and what parts are really important. If it's really important that I know all these names or all these correspondences or all of these ... or that I work with these specific gods, does that mean that I can't do this work?  ANDREW: Mmmhmm. AIDAN: And I was definitely looking to counter that.  ANDREW: Yeah, I think it's great because ... You know, we have a lot of conversations going on around sort of appropriation, and, you know, what do we do with, you know, other people's histories, and other people's spirits, and other traditions, and stuff like that. And I think that it's really sticky to sort of go through and read a bunch of books and cherry pick all the pieces that you want, you know?  AIDAN: Yeah. ANDREW: And kind of put them together. Cause it might work, and you might unlock something, or you might end up with a lot of trouble, or you might be fooling yourself, or you might just rub all those spirits the wrong way, and it's really kind of arrogant of us as humans to sort of think that we can understand all of that in a way that kind of goes beyond that, you know?  AIDAN: Totally. ANDREW: And I say that as a person who at points in my past has been arrogant in those ways, you know?  AIDAN: Mmmhmm. Me too!  ANDREW: And I've discovered things and been like, "Huh. That would have been way better had I not done that thing..."  AIDAN: [laughs] ANDREW: Or whatever, right, you know?  AIDAN: Right.  ANDREW: Yeah.  AIDAN: Well and I think too, I think that there's a big part in there which is, you know, kind of, I keep blasting out this thing from Ido Portal, who's kind of a crazy movement guy with a capoeira background, but he's gone all over the place. Where he talks about that there's a point where information becomes too much, and it's no longer helpful. And he means that in a developmental sense, like learning more data, more or less, more systems, more theories, at some point actually stops helping you, and it kind of turns on you, and so, I think that that was a present thought in the book too, was like, what's ... how much can I give you, it's kind of why the title of approaches and entries is, how many different doors to interesting spaces that are helpful in my experience can I get you through?  ANDREW: Mmmhmm. AIDAN: And then, I don't want to give you much more information than that ... ANDREW: Right. AIDAN: Because if I do, that's going to color what happens when you walk through them.  ANDREW: Mmmhmm. AIDAN: And so, instead, I'd rather have you walk into that space, and go "Okay, what goes on in here?" And see. Cause what goes on in there for you is likely to be really different than what goes on in there for me or for Andrew or anybody else.  ANDREW: Sure. AIDAN: Unless we come in with such a clear picture of what is supposed to happen in there that that just shades everything. And we kind of get what we expect. Versus what might be way better for us to get in there.  ANDREW: Yeah. Yeah, it's amazing the shaping influence that our consciousness plays on things, right? and our preconceptions and so on, you know?  AIDAN: Mmmhmm. ANDREW: And I think that this sort of notion, you know, I shared a video the other day, I'm working on a new tarot deck, and it doesn't have a title, but, like, so I finished my Orisha tarot deck and handed it in to Llewellyn in April, and as I was doing the final steps of that, I created a ... and that, the Orisha deck was very very structured and very very thought out, you know, and inspired when I was actually doing the art, but like the, but so much of it ... Sorry for that brief interruption! And then I created this sort of surrealist, very dream-inspired black and white deck, and then I realized what I wanted to do was just like basically slop paint around and make something really bright and colorful, so I've been making this deck and I was working on the Judgement card, which is what I shared recently ... AIDAN: Mmmhmm. ANDREW: And, as I was sort of like working on it, and sort of allowing something to emerge, I was like, "Why do we have to see the angel? Why do we even think the angel looks like us?" AIDAN: [laughs] ANDREW: "Why is the angel anything other than, like, light and motion?" You know?  AIDAN: Right. ANDREW: It's sound, right? You know, and I think we have so many notions about, they look this way, they look that way, they, you know, have this shape or that shape, yet, in my experience it's not true. My experience is that they are so utterly other that we create that layer on top of them so that we can interface with it, but even that's not required. You know?  AIDAN: Right. Well, it's funny, I have this very, if we were to talk image, there's an entity that I visit in a southern place that's this fire spirit, and it's kind of like a traditional, I would think, positive view of Lucifer, as like look, this very fiery ...  ANDREW: Mmmhmm. AIDAN: Bright, intense being. Very masculine. And for the last, I don't know, five months, half the time if I go into that space, he looks like that, and half the time he looks like Gary Numan's daughter, Persia. There's like this 12-year-old blonde girl, that's in his, if you go and watch the "My Name is Ruin" video by Gary Numan, she's the girl in there. So obviously this came from me. There's no reason that this thing has watched this video. [laughs] And it clearly just kind of grabbed that image as something that it liked, to present as. Or, I just overlaid that image, that somehow there's energy there. It doesn't really matter ... ANDREW: Mmmhmm. AIDAN: But it was really helpful in some ways, I think, to just realize, yeah, this is my avatar, in the old RPGs or whatever ... ANDREW: Mmmhmm. AIDAN: Right, I've got like my little image, and that's what we're generally interacting with. I deal with a number of spirits that change all the time, and like, there's just, it's either like, there's something in the eyes, or if they speak I know, or sometimes there's just a vibe that they give off, but that they've never been the same thing twice. And if I come in thinking "oh, this is an angel that has wings" or whatever, I may not have been able to see all of these different aspects.  ANDREW: Mmmhmm. AIDAN: And I'm not sure whether those aspects are more important just as to my own self or to them or whatever, but it does leave it really ... It leaves it ... It kind of keeps you from instilling ... At least it keeps me from instilling dogma about it.  ANDREW: Mmmhmm. AIDAN: Whereas if I said you're going to walk into this space, and you're going to meet this, you know, fiery being, who's a slender man, six feet tall, well-muscled, right? the kind of standard shit you see in the old stuff ...  ANDREW: Mmmhmm. AIDAN: And you walk in and like, no, you see this 12-year-old girl in a kind of ratty shift, with, you know, white painted cross on her forehead, do you not realize that that's the thing that you're supposed to be? Probably, right? Cause that's not what it looks like.  ANDREW: So, how do you ... How do you verify, or do you verify, who you're talking to, then?  AIDAN: [laughs] Well, I'm a little weird on that sense from what I understand, talking to people. Almost nothing that I work with has a name.  ANDREW: Mmmhmm. AIDAN: And the few times that I've tried to get names out of most of them, they don't give them to me. They'll either give me a title ... ANDREW: Mmmhmm. AIDAN: Which they're really clear is a title. Or they'll just like make something up. [laughs] ANDREW: Call me Steve! AIDAN: Yeah, call me Steve! [laughs] Totally. I just look for how useful what I'm getting from them is, and then over time is it consistent with them? ANDREW: Right.  AIDAN: So, there's a being that I think I've mentioned before when we were talking that I work with called, that I call the Night Mother. And she's always functioning the same with me.  ANDREW: Hmm. AIDAN: But again, some of the kind of allies that I've met through her are also what I kind of refer to as collective or hive beings, we've talked about that before. So, I'm not certain that she's not, you know, kind of again an avatar to a collective. ANDREW: Right.  AIDAN: She doesn't feel that way. She feels very solid and there's links to a lot of different deities that I could say ... ANDREW: Mmmhmm. AIDAN: This is on the continuum with these other kind of particular goddess figures.  ANDREW: I think that's actually a really interesting point if you don't mind me segueing here for a second.  AIDAN: Yeah, go ahead.  ANDREW: You know, there's always this question that I run into, right? Because ... and let me start by saying, hey, whatever people do is whatever people do. Like, you know. Neither -- I don't think either of us are here to neither judge nor claim to know the ultimate truth, right?  AIDAN: Oh, hell no! [laughs] ANDREW: But like there's this ... But there's this sort of point of tension that happens, because I practice a traditional religious practice, and because I have such a background in magic and chaos magic and other traditions like that, and because I still practice spirit-based magic and stuff, mostly around my business and my clients, for my clients. But, you know, like, people have these experiences where they say, "this Orisha spoke to me," or "I saw this spirit," or whatever, right? And I think that there's this openness in your approach, which I really think is super smart, which is to sort of say, "Yeah, it's a spirit from like, that collection, or from that like, direction, or from those kinds of things," right?  AIDAN: Mmmhmm. ANDREW: As opposed to sort of leaping to this sort of assumption that, you know, Zeus himself strode out from Olympus, wherever that might be, and came to see you. Yeah, maybe it was Zeus. Maybe it was a Zeus-like thing. Maybe it was a spirit related energetically to that, you know? You know and because, so many people have interactions with these different spirits, and yet, and yet, you know, certainly from a traditional point of view, the belief is that they are not those spirits themselves. That the Orishas themselves only generally speak through their priest craft.  AIDAN: Right.  ANDREW: So, then what's going on with all these other people who are having some kinds of experiences? Especially where those experiences carry truth or carry through in some way, right?  AIDAN: Right.  ANDREW: And I think that this idea that there are, you know, there are certain spirits or deities or whatever you want to call them, and then there are, kind of like when we go read the Goetia and stuff, you know?  AIDAN: [laughs] ANDREW: There's this person, and then they've got 300 governors, and they've got 26 servants, and they've got, you know, this, that, and whatever, right?  AIDAN: Right.  ANDREW: And to think that we've gotten so cleanly and clearly to the top of that order, you know, is somewhat presumptuous, especially in the absence of clearly definable magical process to get there. You know?  AIDAN: Right.  ANDREW: Like, if you're going to call Balail, well, there are documents and there are ways to go about it, and there, you know, and then that seems way more likely. But to think that Balail's out just strolling around, and bumps into you on the street and wants to have a conversation with you, maybe not so much, but maybe a spirit from that crew, you know? Or do you disagree with me? What do you think?  AIDAN: No, I actually do, and I mean, that's where I kind of, that whole think is what led me into kind of what I refer to in the book as biological animism at one point ... ANDREW: Mmmhmm. AIDAN: And so, I go, "No!" Like, I've got, you know I'm made of these ungodly number of different types of cells and different structures ... ANDREW: Yeah. AIDAN: And a lot of them do basically the same thing, right? So, all my motor neurons are doing the same thing. They're doing it in different parts of my body and they're connected to different structures, so when they do that same thing, different things happen, right? But so, I began thinking about the entities that I was kind of interacting with in that sense, you know, again, this will probably not be comfortable for some folks, but, if we kind of view that the crossroads is this, extensively spread thing, whether we ... especially if we add in all the structures that are like it, so if we look at the tree, if we look at the center posts in some religions, and some forms of shamanism, and if we say, all these things are crossroads-like, they're kind of cognates of that ... ANDREW: Yeah.  AIDAN: They serve a similar function, right? And so, it makes sense to me that all of those beings that we find wed to that idea in all of these different cultures are probably of a type, to some degree.  ANDREW: Mmmhmm. AIDAN: And this isn't to say that you don't find individual things, I don't know enough to say that that's not the case, and I think it probably is. I'm not saying they're all the same, which is one of the things that you get in some arguments, which is not the one that I make at all. But ... Like, I know that my work is highly connected to that space.  ANDREW: Mmm. AIDAN: And, if I look at the kind of spirits that I operate with, a lot of them operate within that function. And they do show as very different, but yeah, it's like, there's a thing that I interact with that is very Woden-like, but I don't know that that's Woden. And you know, I had a really interesting experience in trance a couple years ago, in relationship to that specific thing, and the ... Another being that I dealt with told me to go find a Woden and ask my question to the Woden that I found. [laughs] And I kind of asked for clarity on that, and they were just like, really clear about it, like ... ANDREW: Yeah.  AIDAN: You just, you don't worry about it ...  ANDREW: You just, you go find one!  AIDAN: If you go find one, they all do the same thing, more or less, was the idea. Any of them will be able to help you out.  ANDREW: Yeah. AIDAN: And again, it depends on what you come with. I didn't come with something that said this is one deity is ... ANDREW: Mmmhmm. AIDAN: 100 percent discrete from all other beings. And therefore, you know, there is a lot of silversmiths. There is a lot of magicians. ANDREW: Sure. AIDAN: There is a lot of ... And it's not necessarily that you're always going to need that one in specific to help you.  ANDREW: And it's not like all magicians are of the same category either, right?  AIDAN: Right. ANDREW: You know? Yeah. AIDAN: Yeah. You know. But yeah, there's a certain point where someone's going to say "yeah, you should go talk to a goetic magician," or "you should go talk to someone that works with the Orishas." Cause they'll be able to help you the best in this particular situation ... ANDREW: Yeah. AIDAN: You know. To me that just seems pragmatic and in my experience, it's been consistent. I don't know that it's the truth or anything like that, but it's been consistent.  ANDREW: Who knows what that is, right? [laughs] I'm gonna leave that for another time! AIDAN: Yep, absolutely.  ANDREW: So, one of the questions though, since we're talking about going and visiting the spirits, right? Someone commented on one of the Facebook posts about this podcast that they were curious about how they could deepen their trance. You know?  AIDAN: Mmmhmm. ANDREW: How do you get deeper, you know, and I think that really, that's part of the whole spectrum of how do you get there faster, how do you get there easier, how do you go further, how do you stay there longer ... AIDAN: [laughs] Right.  ANDREW: What kind of advice do you have for people trying this out?  AIDAN: So, I only really can speak to my own experience and that I've helped a few people with this thing, I'm not ... ANDREW: Mmmhmm. AIDAN: I've done a little bit of teaching but not a lot. So I don't have a vast body of students where I could say, "This always works!" So, I have no idea if this always works. It might! The two things that ... The first thing I would say has to do with the speed issue, and that is to slow down. And that doesn't mean not to try and get deeper now, but as you go in, slow the whole process down, so like at the point that you get relaxed enough to go in, through whatever kind of induction you use, do that for a longer period of time and see if that will settle you further out.  So, for me I do almost all of my trance work flat on my back, and I mention it in the book, but one of the things that I find really helps is I lay pillows over my body, and that that weight kind of holding me down seems to do something to help me separate more from my body sensations. I don't have, it keeps me from wanting to kind of wiggle my toes and do stuff like that. It's not like I'm always buried or anything, but that definitely has helped. And so slowing that process of getting in, to me is always a good thing, and then once you get in, to really do what you can to kind of intensify the sensoria of whatever it is you're getting. And this may be visual, it may not be visual. I have both visual and nonvisual stuff that goes on this way.  And so, we'll just assume that this is a visual thing, that you've got it to the place where you actually can get a sense of things. And for me, this is not ... I always, I never know how to describe it, but it's "like" vision. I don't have the internal space that I'm always seeing everything, like I'm seeing you on the screen ... ANDREW: Sure. AIDAN: But, I have a clear sense of what things look like, and I don't know if that makes sense to anybody that's not been there, but ... ANDREW: Well, I find for me personally, I find that I was pursuing that sight piece a lot ... AIDAN: Mmmhmm. ANDREW: A long time ago, and got quite far with it, and to be honest now I've largely abandoned it.  AIDAN: Right.  ANDREW: I'm like, man, it's so much work to get to that place. I could actually ... I realized at some point that I could just kind of know, instead ... AIDAN: Yeah!  ANDREW: And I like that a lot better, because I'm like, I just kind of know, and if I need visual information, I can receive it as sort of a blending of sight and knowing, but it means, especially because I can do a lot of this work sort of sitting with clients and doing readings, and sliding in and out of these spaces, it's so much more convenient to just like know things and just be able to articulate them ... AIDAN: Right.  ANDREW: And I don't have to get to that place where I'm sitting looking at the thing and so on. And not that that's not interesting, but ... Yeah, it just seems less helpful to me over time.  AIDAN: It's ... The thing that I've found, which is, and I totally agree with that, and the thing that I've found that is helpful, and it's totally okay, this is one of the places where the kind of "fake it till you make it" actually works in magic ... ANDREW: Yeah.  AIDAN: Which is, what I talk about in the book, is kind of talk to yourself about what you would see. ANDREW: Mmmhmm. AIDAN: And part of what happens, I think, when we do this for people that aren't kind of super visual in that space, and I am not super visual in that space, and what it did for me was it began to kind of break that need to see everything.  ANDREW: Right. AIDAN: In technicolor. ANDREW: Mmmhmm. AIDAN: Cause it's like, I was proceeding anyway, so whatever part of me was resisting getting what visual information I do get kind of gave up. And so, to me once I get, if you get into a space, play with what's in that space rather than necessarily going "I want contact."  ANDREW: Mmmhmm. AIDAN: So for me, the majority of my work I do in the West, in the West where I go is very moist. ANDREW: Mmmhmm. AIDAN: A little bit of fog, but it's not foggy, but it's more like you see the wisps of fog through the trees and the forest sometimes kind of thing, and I try to, if I'm not kind of getting the feeling that I'm in super well, I'll start trying to get a little more about whatever, so if I notice that there's water running, what does that feel like? What does that ... What is my sensation on my skin feel like?  ANDREW: Mmmhmm. AIDAN: Do I want, am I cold? Am I ...? ANDREW: Yeah. AIDAN: Am I warm? Can I hear the water? Is the water like, drippy?  ANDREW: Mmmhmm. AIDAN: Can I find water that I could drink?  ANDREW: Mmmhmm. AIDAN: Which is, you know, if you're talking to the fairies, this is not recommended, but I'm always all for drinking the water when I can in the other world. But, and that type of process is the thing that's really worked well for me. And it kind of syncs up to kind of the main theme in the book I think which is kind of go as deep as you can with wherever you are ... ANDREW: Yeah. AIDAN: Rather than trying to add more to it.  ANDREW: Mmmhmm. AIDAN: And see what happens.  ANDREW: Yeah. For me I did ... I used to do this process a lot, which I still sometimes do. Which is, I would sort of as I start sliding into trance I would start picturing myself on this path into the woods, right?  AIDAN: Right.  ANDREW: And, as I was walking, I would sort of focus on the idea of walking the path in the woods until I could hear crunching of the gravel on the path under my feet. AIDAN: Right. ANDREW: And then I would pick up a set number of stones and drop them back and hear them dropping back. And then after I'd accomplished that, then I would put my hand on the tree and feel the bark and what that felt like. And then, at that point, I would turn and see that I was at the end of the path, and it was opening up to wherever I was going, which was usually the same place. AIDAN: Right. ANDREW: Like very structured pieces. It sort of emerged though, not from the notion that like, you know, I'm going to go, like, if you're going to visit somewhere very structured, there are structured ways to get there, right? Like ... AIDAN: Right. ANDREW: Like maybe path workings on the tree of life, like there's tons of great stuff on that, you can take a look at that, but for me it was like, there's this thing where I started to notice this stuff, and there was this dance back and forth between noticing what I was experiencing and then engaging back with it, back and forth ... AIDAN: Right.  ANDREW: And then that kind of solidified over a few months into that process. AIDAN: Right. And that's ... I would say that, yeah, very similar things, again like, if I go to the West and I'm not feeling like I'm at a place where I can connect with the things that I deal with yet, then I'll find a spring, that's kind of one of my things, it's like I want water running off of a rock.  ANDREW: Mmmhmm. AIDAN: And then that's a place where I can kind of wash my hands and bless myself with that water or drink some of that water, and then continue from there. And it kind of is this process of deepening that. You know, when the allies show up, not necessarily, I don't tend to go very hard with them if they do show up, it's just kind of like, what goes on here? [laughs] ANDREW: Yeah. AIDAN: You know, what ... is there anything you want to show me?  ANDREW: Mmmhmm. AIDAN: Is there ... cause usually I find that trance is not the place that I initially go for answers to questions unless I already have somebody that I know I can go visit to do that with, so it's really just about making those connections and like, what shows up for me in here?  ANDREW: Mmmhmm. AIDAN: Is there something going on for me in this space? And a lot of times it takes a long time. There's places that I go back to repeatedly, dozens of times, before anything really happens, that's of any, yeah, describable import. ANDREW: Mmmhmm. AIDAN: And so I think it's just time and yeah, seeing what happens, like it was really interesting, like, when I started traveling to the West, I would go to the ocean a lot. ANDREW: Mmmhmm. AIDAN: And for the last five years, there has been nothing for me to do at the ocean. [laughs] So I kind of don't go there! If I get called there, which happens, that's happened a couple times, but in general, like, this is kind of boring ... ANDREW: Mmmhmm. AIDAN: This is not my place, where there's other spaces that are far more interesting and where I actually have work to do and that's where the allies are generally waiting for me. ANDREW: Hmm. AIDAN: And again, I think it's probably different for everybody. I go to very few places. But I go to those places very frequently. And kind of the same thing on the entity front or deity front, I work with very few, but I tend to work with them as much as I can, to do the work that I want, like the idea of having 72 spirits or something to work with is like, WHY?  ANDREW: Yeah. AIDAN: What's the ... [laughs] what would I do with that? That's more friends than I have. [laughing] By a long shot! I don't know what to do with all of them! [laughing] ANDREW: Yeah. I think that's, I think that ... You know, people ask me, like, you know, what deck is the best, or whatever, like, and, I mean, I have one deck. I read with it. I have three unopened copies in a drawer because it's out of print, and if it doesn't come back in print I don't want to be sad down the road that I can't replace it. You know?  AIDAN: Mmmhmm. ANDREW: And like -- and before I worked with this deck, which has been the last number of years. You know, at some point I worked with another deck for like the better part of ... I don't know, somewhere between 15 and 20 years exclusively, and I think that there's something that ... there are different things that come, right? There's something that comes out of ... we talk about devotion, right? You know and sort of being devoted to a deck or to something particular, I think it brings about a different quality of change, than, you know, than having 72 friends or 72 decks or whatever, and I don't know that either is bad, but sometimes I don't understand what's on the other side of that equation, because it's so far from my journey with things ... AIDAN: Right.  ANDREW: That I don't know what to do with it. You know?  AIDAN: No, and I totally think that there is ... I don't ... I know folks that work extensively with, you know, whether it's Goetia or Enochian or all sorts of different systems that are incredibly involved, and it appears to work well for them, so it's not, I have no issue with it, but for me, that's definitely not my approach. You know. It's like I kind of covet another guitar, but I've got two acoustics and one electric, and I don't really need one to do what I do and so it's kind of like that just hangs out on the back burner, and I like to shop for them, but I don't like actually to pull the trigger for them. ANDREW: Right. AIDAN: And the same as you, even though I read with cards, very limited, you know, I recently found one deck that reads really beautifully for me and I have four copies of it, because it was going out of print.  ANDREW: Which one?  AIDAN: I use the, what is this guy? It's this guy, it's the Arcana deck from Dead on Paper. ANDREW: Okay. AIDAN: It's a playing card tarot deck.  ANDREW: Mmmhmm. AIDAN: So it's, you know, it's poker sized, but it has the full trumps. And court cards are all fully arted up, but all of the suit cards are playing cards.  ANDREW: Nice. AIDAN: And it reads really well for me. Yeah. I bought it, I got two of them and started reading with it, and was like "oh, hell, these are about to go out of print," and had to track down two more just in case.  ANDREW: Mmmhmm. AIDAN: So.  ANDREW: That's awesome. So, when you ... one of the other things we were talking about, we've been talking a lot about trance stuff, right? But I mean, one of the other things that we ... certainly is in your book, right? and I know is part of your practice, is also this process of like, doing work, right?  AIDAN: Right.  ANDREW: Do you do your work when you're in trance? Do you do your work elsewhere? AIDAN: [laughs] The answer is yes to all of those.  ANDREW: Mmmhmm. AIDAN: And this is the other thing I was thinking about this in response to the deepening trance work and so this is one of the methods that I do really like for that, and I forgot about it earlier, so thank you for the question, too. Most of what I do on the surface is offerings ... ANDREW: Mmmhmm. AIDAN: And then asking the people that I have a regular offering practice with for help. Which is just talking. And then I do a lot of kind of simple candle magic as I talk about in the book. And I do a lot of sigil magic.  I also do, that's almost the wrong approach, related to that, is that there's an aspect of all that work that I do in trance. There's very little that I do that I could define as being discrete work. Some of the sigils are, and some of the candle magic is, where this is the only thing I'm doing, is I'm going to ask this once for this one thing. Almost everything is done as an overview.  ANDREW: Hmmm. AIDAN: Or as a piece of a bigger whole. ANDREW: Yeah. AIDAN: Which is kind of the ship that I talk about in the book, is this whole magic thing in my life and all of its aspects are in general focused in one kind of coherent direction. ANDREW: Mmm. AIDAN: And I'll use different tools to sort out pieces that need to change, or to steer that, kind of the whole thing, but I'm rarely doing anything super specific that is separate from that. If we were just looking at kind of percentage wise, you know, maybe five percent of stuff is going, "hey, I want this," or "I need a little more oomph over here" or "can we make this stop?" ANDREW: Mmmhmm. AIDAN: And so, that tends to be that I'm getting information on the trance side, I'm getting what I kind of, what I refer to as body work over there, I get a lot of experiences with the things that I deal with in trance kind of putting themselves into my body and it's ... it feels kind of like physical body work. ANDREW: Mmmhmm. AIDAN: Too, and my experience of it is, is that they're kind of adjusting psychic structures, or clearing blocks, or removing kind of bad attachments. And so that's often one of the places where if I'm doing a lot of work for something, one of the allies will offer some assistance. Either in thinking about it or in this kind of body work approach. And that totally, so they're all, they're all very integrated.  And then the other piece, which is the one that I mentioned, is helpful for getting into trance that I do, is ... And I don't do this all the time, but it's a really useful technique that can be worked with if you've got a pretty solid trance space and ... If you're using the book, I would do this in the upper work space in the tower that I talk about, which is kind of just a mostly empty working room that has a table in it, and so that's the first place I would try this. And what you do is, in the waking world, get a box, get a wooden box, and clean it up, and then paint it in some way that's really clear, so, you know, mine is like blue or black and has big dark blue circles on all the sides and on the top, so it's really clearly this box. And I think it's important to make it -- there'll be no questions there. And it's really ... Mine is really simple cause again my visualization skills aren't that great. [laughs] And what I will do sometimes is if I know I need a little different angle of work, is I'll put the components for that work, I'll do whatever kind of ritual or spell work I'm going to do, and then all those pieces go into the box. So, if I'm going to do candle magic, I might, you know, inscribe two candles and prep one of them and burn one of them and the other goes into the box. And if there's a sigil that goes with it, that goes into the box. Or if there's a talisman that goes with it, that goes into the box. Or a crystal or something like that. And then put that box together, in whatever your working space is, closed up, and go on about your day or whatever, and then when you go into trance, go into, in this case, that tower space, and go in knowing that that box is going to be available to you. ANDREW: Mmmhmm. AIDAN: And so I'll walk into that space, if it's not already on the table, I kind of imagine that I'm going to reach into the box is usually in the shop here, into the shop from the tower, and bring that box in with me. And then I'll do that spell work from that space in trance. And that's one of the most useful things that I have found for really -- it doesn't necessarily improve your visualization or anything in trance, but as far as, it concretizes what's going on. ANDREW: Yeah. AIDAN: It builds a really solid link between your kind of more normal consciousness and that space that you get into in trance work.  ANDREW: That's awesome. Yeah, I think figuring out how to like, connect here to there in as many ways as possible is definitely the way to go. AIDAN: Yeah. [laughs] Definitely makes everything work better ... ANDREW: Yeah. AIDAN: In my experience, for sure.  ANDREW: Cool. So, we've been talking for a while here, so maybe we're at that point where we should say "Hey, go buy Aidan's book, it's fantastic. If you're not already following Aidan, go follow Aidan." You know? AIDAN: [laughing] ANDREW: Yeah. Where should people come find you?  AIDAN: I'm at aidanwachter.com. I'm Aidan Wachter on everything. Except you can probably find me as Aidan Wachter on Twitter too, but it's silfrsmith [rooster crowing in background] in the old Norse spelling on Twitter, but Aidan Wachter on Facebook, I've got a page, Aidan Wachter Talismanic Jewelry. The book is available generally all the online sources. I'm too busy with jewelry to try and deal with distribution, so, there's really no ... no stores have it as far as I know. And yeah, I'm just generally around, if you do a search for Aidan Wachter Talismanic Jewelry you will find something that will lead you to all the rest of it. [rooster crowing in background] ANDREW: That's awesome. Well, thank you for making the time to chat today. AIDAN: Absolutely.

Andrew Weiss has been a good friend of mine since college. We met through a film production group on the University of Oregon campus called Duck TV. Why should you care about Andrew? Well, he is a guy who is outgoing, likes to try new things all the time and is an all around inspiration. This podcast is filled with humor, stories and life tips. Andrew has recently published some blog post articles [link below] and also wrote a book filled with puns called "Toucan Play This Game" which can be found on Amazon [link below]. Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Toucan-Play-This-Game-Story/dp/0692933794 Medium: https://medium.com/@andrewweiss_13411 Twitter: @Aweiss1234

This week Andrew is joined by the wonderful Lucia! A fun, and artisticly rich episode with discussions of their Art, and practice and how it can move us all forward to the future.  Connect with Lucia on her website, and don't forget to check out the Oracle of Initiation while you're at it. Be sure to give her instagram as follow aswell: @mellissaelucia Think about how much you've enjoyed the podcast and how many episodes you listened to and think consider if it is time tosupport the  Patreon You can do so here. If you want more of this in your life you can subscribe by RSS , iTunes, Stitcher, or email. Thanks for listening! If you dig this please subscribe and share with those who would like it.   Andrew       ANDREW: Welcome to another episode of the Hermit's Lamp podcast. I am here today catching up with Mellissae Lucia. Who ... We've been ... I had Mellissae on ... five years ago? I didn't look it up before we started but it has definitely been awhile. And, a lot of things have changed for both of us during that time. But, as we've been going through our lives, I've been watching the amazing artwork, and the sort of interplay of artwork as magic, artwork as divination, artwork as life, that mirrors a lot of pieces of my own journey as well, and, you know, also, the conversations I had in a previous episode with Syrus Ware as well. So, I wanted to have Mellissae on to talk about this and to talk about a bunch of other stuff.  So, if you haven't listened to that first episode, there'll be a link in the show notes. Go find it and give it a listen and freshen up, because we're definitely going to reference a few things from it.  But, for those who haven't been following you, Mellissae, who are you?   LUCIA: Hi! ANDREW: What are you up to? What's going on? LUCIA: Hi Andrew, delighted, delighted to be here!  I am Mellissae Lucia, and I've changed a lot in the last couple years, and I'm very pro name changes [laughs]. ANDREW: Uh huh.  LUCIA: It drives some people insane! But I'm going by Lucia these days, partially because of the graffiti. Also, when I thought about, what's my graffiti name going to be? ANDREW: Uh huh. LUCIA: Lucia came up. ANDREW: Perfect. LUCIA: And so, I am Lucia, and, the people who have known me for so many decades, if you call me Mellissa or Mellissae, it's all gonna work. ANDREW: Mmmhmm. LUCIA: And I am an artist, and an oracle, an empath, an entrepreneur, and I am a person who follows the signs and follows the synchronicities, and has found this ability to have courage, but also joy, drive everything that I do. And, so there's a whole variety of things that I do, from having created a visionary deck in the New Mexico desert, down in graffiti tunnels, called the Oracle of Initiation. I teach online courses, I teach in person, and adventure is the greatest joy of my life. ANDREW: Mmmhmm. Well, so you mentioned one thing in passing here, which I want to sort of talk about first, right? What ... Tell me about the graffiti. [bursts out laughing] ANDREW: Like, what is it about graffiti for you? And even more so, how did that move you to change your name?  LUCIA: [still laughing] Ohhhhh ... Well, I've had a lot of different spiritual names, and Mellissae Lucia is my pen name, and when I was writing my oracle book in ... 2011, that I was writing the book ... to go with this six-year project of making my Oracle of Initiation deck. ANDREW: Mmmhmm. LUCIA: And [sighs], my legal name is Melissa Weiss Steele. So, that's my father's name, and my deceased husband's name, and I like that ... There's a very traditional side to me, actually, that likes the solidness of that name. But I wanted a more magical name and I wanted a name that was going to possibly ... What I found is that mystics, empaths, whatever words you want to call us ... That we struggle with being seen. That there have been so many lifetimes of being killed for who we were that there's some really pretty serious base chakra issues about: Am I going to be taken out in this lifetime for letting everybody know that I'm psychic? ANDREW: Hmm. LUCIA: And you know, creative, whatever, intuitive, words you want to use. And so, Mellissae Lucia--in some ways, it also was Tibetan numerology, so it was designed to be auspicious in abundance and connection. But I wanted it to be this public face, this filter for the woo woo side, of going out into the world. So, I like name changes. And the last couple of years, as I say, I'm gonna be, we're gonna talk about this, but I'm gonna be 50 this year. I'm the happiest I've ever been in my whole life! It's like things have landed. I've integrated. And all of my gifts are now available to me, a lot of them, in ways that I've dreamed of, that I've worked towards for decades. ANDREW: Mmm. LUCIA: So, the Lucia, for the graffiti ... I fell in love ... well, I fell in ... There's a song from ... I mean, there's a phrase from the movie Brown Sugar, about when did you fall in love with hip-hop? ANDREW: Mmmhmm. LUCIA: I fell in love with hip-hop when I was 12 years old, at the middle school. And I was in Seattle, Washington. And this was Grandmaster Flash. So, this was 1980. This gentleman walked behind me, this young guy in middle school, and started singing the words to the song "It's Nasty," which is amazing. And my whole body lit up! And, you know, I was pretty shy as a young one, and I went, "What the hell is that?!"  ANDREW: Uh huh. LUCIA: And, like, it owned me from then on. And I am an 80s/90s hip-hop fanatic, and talk to me about it any time. And to me that's our tribal roots. That's our ... That's the basis ... Those are our bards, our griots, those are our contemporary truth tellers. Hip-hop is one of those places, you know, the tribal beat and all of that. That's why it's worldwide because it's archetypal. So, graffiti is part of that. And when ... In the mid-80s, my mom took me to Paris, bless my mom, and in Paris, they had this stencil graffiti that was INsane.  ANDREW: Mmmhmm. LUCIA: The skill level was off the charts of this stencil graffiti that was all over Paris. And I, once again, I'm a very passionate person. I fell head over heels in love with the graffiti. And for some reason, it took me decades to do it myself, but I do wheat paste, and I do my collages, my digital physical collages. And they're very pop culturey, irreverent, punk rock. [laughs] We're both punk rock; that's part of one of our connections, and so ... ANDREW: Mmmhmm. LUCIA: But you need it. You need a name, you need a tag. I don't ... I'm not aerosol, so I'm not spraying my tag. But you want to ... This this is a conversation with "Oh, look at that, mmmhmm. There's some of my Andy Warhol..." I've collaged some of the Andy Warhol Polaroids cause they're brilliant.  ANDREW: Mmmhmm. LUCIA: But it ... So, the name change, I wanted to name a hashtag, so it's hashtag Lucia graffiti [laughs]. Go on Instagram; it's all over Instagram! ANDREW: Nice. LUCIA: But it's ... It's been this incredible joy, because ... You know Adam Ant, we're gonna bust out the 80s. [singing] "You don't drink, don't smoke. What do you do? You don't drink, don't smoke ..." I don't drink, I don't smoke, I don't generally do drugs, but I need some risk. I need some challenge. I need something that's disobedient, that's rebellious. But I choose to not be incarcerated. I choose to not have my life fall apart from addiction, so, I need things that are going to give me that risk, like trespassing, without taking my life. So, graffiti is that for me. It's sharing my art, a conversation with the other street artists, self-sanctifying myself. And I get my risk, my adrenaline risk and I love it. ANDREW: Is that a ... Do you think that's a punk rock thing? Is that also part of your empath stuff? Like where does that need for risk come from?  LUCIA: I am ... I'm a very ... It's funny, if you meet me I actually come across as pretty friendly.  ANDREW: Mmmhmm. LUCIA: I'm pretty sweet to a certain degree. I mean if you can read energy, you can tell that there's a lot going on, but generally my public face is pretty friendly. ANDREW: Mmmhmm. LUCIA: Which has its complexities to it. People judge that in some ways. But I can also burn paint off the walls. And so, I think there's always been a broad range of impulses within myself. Like the Martha Stewart side and then this hard-core mystic side. And so, I think that somehow that risk helps me to integrate some of these complexities. Like there's this part of me that's really ancient and doesn't want to become a junkie, but I want some of those feelings of what it might feel like. Or, you know, like have so many sexual partners that you get sexual diseases or whatever. I haven't done that. And so, but I need ... My level of intensity needs that sometimes. ANDREW: Hmm. LUCIA: But I think it is ... I think that's why I was drawn to punk rock, why I am drawn to hip-hop, is that they're very fierce ... ANDREW: Right.  LUCIA: Energies. And they're very rebellious maverick energies. ANDREW: Yeah. I ... Cause I have that adrenaline piece, right? Like I need that kick of adrenaline somewhere, you know? And when I was younger, it used to sort of be ... There was this moment. I went skydiving with a bunch of people I was working with ... LUCIA: [laughing] ANDREW: Everyone's like, "Let's go skydiving." I'm like, "Great, let's go, let's do it, I'm ready." And at the time, I was doing like, downhill mountain biking and full contact martial arts, and like all this stuff. And so, I climbed in the plane with everybody else, and as it took off, I had a little butterfly in my stomach, and then it got to be my turn, and I jumped out, the chute opens, and I sort of float to the ground and so on. And I remember landing and going, "Yeah, that was cool."  LUCIA: [laughing] ANDREW: And everyone else was like, "Oh my God, oh my God, that was the best thing ever!" And like a couple days later, I had this moment of like, I think I need to slow down. I think that I just have such a different relationship to adrenaline, to excitement, and to risk that ... That I was like, I don't know where else this goes, and I don't know that if I allow it to continue ... LUCIA: [laughing] ANDREW: That it doesn't end up unchecked in some really dangerous way, or, you know? The cost starts to get higher and higher, right? LUCIA: Right. ANDREW: So. Yeah. LUCIA: Well, and you're also ... You're a father. So, you're a father and you're a partner. ANDREW: Mmmhmm. LUCIA: And so, I would imagine ... I didn't get kids in this lifetime. But I would imagine that that could be a piece of it. But what do you do now for that need? ANDREW: I rock climb. Like at a gym. So, you know.  LUCIA: Mmmhmm. ANDREW: Relatively safe. But definitely sort of out there, pushing myself, and you know, it's ... You know, when I'm like 20, 30 feet up the wall at the gym, and I'm like, trying to make the next move and don't think I can make it, you know, or not sure I can make it. There's nothing else, right? There's no thoughts, there's no feelings, there's just this complete presence in the moment and the focus on that. LUCIA: Yeah! Yes. ANDREW: And then, either the elation of completion -- Oh, I did make the move! — Or the zing of adrenaline as I miss the move. And then the, and then the, like, oh, and the rope caught me, which is cool, and now I'm going to try it again next week, and next week I'll get it. You know? So. LUCIA: Well, and this is something, this is really beautiful. This is something that I've been thinking about a lot. As I alluded to earlier, I'm 50 this year. ANDREW: Mmmhmm. LUCIA: And I'm the happiest I've ever been. Like some thing, some critical mass, has happened. And being an empath, I've become an empowered empath, is the words that I'm using for it. Now, and I'm still working on articulating this, like I'm catching up with who I am. But there's some piece ... I've been ... Because I'm a teacher, I'm a systems maker, I design online courses, I teach workshops, I'm fascinated with the steps of how you create things. That's ... As I say, I have a very visionary mind. But I also have a very practical Capricorn systems mind: "What are the seven steps that we need? And what are the 14 steps that come off of each of the seven steps?" I love designing things, and so I've been thinking about what happened for me, that was applicable to other people, to have this critical mass of confidence?  ANDREW: Mmmhmm. LUCIA: Because what I found, with empaths, and with people who are pretty sensitive, and so pretty much anybody who's listening to this podcast is an empath, you're gonna be a highly sensitive person.  ANDREW: Most likely. LUCIA: And what I've found ... Right? Right? All of us. That's who we are. And so, I've been sitting with this ... I call it the confidence gap. And I had this for decades, so that's why I understand this. ANDREW: Mmmhmm. LUCIA: Is because we are such weathervanes for other people's issues, because we can feel them, depending on what type of an empath you are. We don't always know our own voice, or our own center, we're usually battered around by everything that's around us, and so what I found was, I became ... My controlling perfectionist would come up.  ANDREW: Mmm. LUCIA: And, what I've done over the last couple of decades ... The couple of things that I've come to at this point ... Like I say, I'm still working on articulating this ... Is courage and joy. But there's this ... For me, there's this critical mass where you have to be willing to step out of your comfort zone over and over and over again. It's like a training.  ANDREW: Mmmhmm. LUCIA: It's energetic cross training. But it has to be driven by joy. There has to be some passion at some points and sometimes it's hard. I'm not gonna say it's always a cakewalk. But, those two things ... If you don't have those two things, they work together, like there is this ... You gain the confidence, you gain the power, you gain the ability to trust yourself through doing those things that are out of your comfort zone, but it has to be fun as hell at some point too, to really enliven you and so. Just thinking about, you know, all these pieces that we're talking about, the risk, but also the presence, you know, it's like being in the zone. And everybody has different things that bring them into the zone, but that's what feeds one's ability to be more embodied and confident in yourself. And so, I think that's really important for revisionaries. We're the new myth makers and the visionaries. But so many empaths and incredibly creative people that I know are shut down and really not able to be or willing to be seen in the world and share their gifts because of this confidence gap. And so, you know, it's my soapbox to try to figure out how to help us become more embodied and confident. ANDREW: Mmmhmm. LUCIA: So, I love hearing your risk stuff. That was great. ANDREW: Yeah, and I think that that's ... I mean that's certainly been a lot of my experience, you know, when I was younger, I was definitely shy, and introverted, and so on, you know? LUCIA: Mmmhmm. ANDREW: And I don't even remember why it started, but at some point, I decided that if I was afraid of something, I should do it ... LUCIA: Yeah! ANDREW: And if I was really afraid of something, I should do it twice as fast, right? And that led me to the place where I then decided I needed to back off from that, too, but I think, you know, sort of looking at that kind of how do we step into our discomfort and work with that, right? How do we step into that and make magic in that space, right? Because ... LUCIA: Right! ANDREW: You know, it's one of the options that we can use to generate energy. To convert and change it into something else, right? You know? LUCIA: That is beautifully—I'm a big notetaker, I'm a scribe. And when — ANDREW: Uh huh. LUCIA: Because ideas are elusive. This is one of the things I teach people in my courses, is, you gotta write this stuff down — ANDREW: Yeah. LUCIA: Cause it floats through like the wind. ANDREW: Sure. LUCIA: So, I love that idea about how do you create—It's alchemy. I mean it's really, it's alchemy. This —When you step in, when you show up, and you say, "Okay, I'm going to do something that's out of my comfort zone," and you know, I believe we have this whole corporation of guides and ancestors and spirits around us who are supporting us. I ... ANDREW: Mmmhmm. LUCIA: You know some of us have the higher self idea that it's all our higher self, and we are in this ascension process, I believe, and becoming gods incarnate. And, I do believe that there are distinct beings that are helping to guide us. And so — and a destiny and all of that — and so, at least what I've seen, is, you show up, you make those leaps of faith, the universe will meet you. Now maybe not in the timeframe. That's another tricky thing, is timing. But you — this doesn't go unnoticed. Like you are building this ... this confidence bank account. ANDREW: Mmmhmm. LUCIA: And so, I, you know, I love that idea, about the magic, the alchemy, of showing up, and then doors opening. ANDREW: Well, you know, for me, one of the things that I've sort of — I've talked about in a few places, like in an episode I did where I was the guest recently with Fabeku, if people want to go back and look at it. But I was talking about these portraits that I do, these magical portraits, you know ... LUCIA: Mmmhmm. ANDREW: And how these magical portraits ... And working with portrait and image and you know, playing around with growing my Dali-esque mustache ... LUCIA: [laughing] ANDREW: ... and all these things. They're all acts of magic, right? They're all acts of transformation. They're all me turning this energy back towards myself, and working on that ... LUCIA: Mmm. ANDREW: And one way or another, to liberate that. You know, you're a person who's done a lot of portrait work and also, you know, other sorts of representative stuff with yourself. You know, what are you doing with that these days? How is that in your orbits? LUCIA: Oh, that's such a yummy yummy yummy yummy question. I like flipping paradigms. I think that that's the punk rocker in me! [laughs] ANDREW: Mmmhmm. LUCIA: I like this and the ... You know, the spiritual, mystical teacher/student in me. I like this, you know, it's Oden hanging upside down in Yggdrasil and getting runes, you know, and sacrificing things. I like this idea of flipping things and finding the power in them. And so, something that ... And in my oracle deck, the Oracle of Initiation, that photography series, the painted body, they look—If you haven't seen the Oracle of Initiation—the images look like petroglyphs coming alive off of a cave wall. They are these beings of light, particularly the graffiti tunnel ones. And there's no Photoshopping or editing to the images, and those were done between 2007 and 2008. And that was before the word "selfie" had come into the common lexicon ... ANDREW: Yeah. LUCIA: And, I — they're sacred selfies. There's somewhere between 40 and 50,000 images because it was a ritualistic ceremonial process. I—the camera became—I became one with it. It was held in my hand, but I was dancing between the worlds. They let me take pictures between the worlds. And so, that whole process, that was the enormous game changer, and, as I say, I like to try to figure out how to support other people's transformation. There's only a tiny percentage of people who want to go get nude and tribally painted in graffiti tunnels and on the land and do this. Now the people who want it, want it. But, there is this piece about becoming other through this witnessing process. And so, now I'm doing—you know, what is it, 12 years later? Am I doing the math right? Yeah, 12 years later. I've been ... I have an online class called Sacred Selfies. Now, so selfies get this bad rap. It's like this—it's everything that's wrong with social media. It's these young people, who are self-absorbed, aren't self-referenced, and are trying to get attention, and the duck lips and the tits and It's — no! This is self-portraiture, and witnessing of oneself is an ancient process. And it's a way of recognizing who you are, finding self-authority, self-agency, and it's fun! Like everything that I want to do is fun! It may be intense, but it also needs to be fun. And so, the sacred selfies ... ANDREW: Well, you could go to an art gallery, that has like— LUCIA: Yeah! ANDREW: A big selection of work from the last couple hundred years or the last hundred years anyway, maybe even more ...  LUCIA: Yeah!  ANDREW: You're going to see plenty of portraits of the artists doing portraits of themselves. Right? This impulse to be seen and to understand how we are seen or how we present ourselves in the world is part of the classic human conundrum, right? Like ... LUCIA: It's so simple! ANDREW: That's why we have an ascendant, right? In astrology. Like ... LUCIA: Right! ANDREW: It is an element that is a part of our nature of the world, right? LUCIA: Yes. ANDREW: You know, and I'd be curious, how does our ascendant influence our feeling about selfies? Now there's a wonderful inquiry to — LUCIA: Right! Well, that — ANDREW: Pass on to some of my astrological friends.  LUCIA: [laughing] Ask them! Well, and that's the sacred selfies piece. And Carolyn Myss, one of the teachers, interesting spiritual teachers. She said a really interesting thing some years ago that really struck me. She said, historically, as spiritual beings and guides and teachers, we've done this hollow bone thing. We've done this thing where we want to get out of the way, be an agent of spirit, and just like, the ego is gone. Like, we just are this hollow bone. You know, it's classic, you hear it. She said, particularly since the 80s, we've been doing this interesting thing where we're weaving, or merging, our ego selves, like our earth plane selves, the integrated ego, cause ego's not bad— Ego, if it's in a wounded state, it has its issues— ANDREW: Mmmhmm. LUCIA: But ego, unto itself, you wouldn't get out of bed or be able to interface with people on the earth plane if we didn't have an ego. So, she said what we're doing is, we're integrating this hollow bone, surrender sacrifice sort of a classic historic energy of the healer/transformer, and we're bringing our ego along with it, we're bringing the personality, in a really integrated beautiful expansive way. And I love that! So, to me sacred selfies — that's what you're doing when you're playing with it in a really intentional way like that. ANDREW: Mmmhmm. Well, and I think that, you know, this relationship to the ego and the idea that, you know, I mean, for me, the ego needs to be, to borrow a phrase from like kind of ceremonial magic about this stuff, right? It needs to be redeemed, right? By the higher self. LUCIA: Yes. Yes. ANDREW: But it doesn't get to be abandoned. Right?  LUCIA: No! ANDREW: You know, like if we think that we're going to ditch our shadow self at some point — LUCIA: [bursts out laughing] Good luck! ANDREW: Be free of that business! Right? LUCIA: [laughing]  ANDREW: But like, there's this notion that we'll somehow be complete and free of all of these things, but like, that's not what Jung meant by integration, right? Like, that integration process is a process of having a living, dynamic communication between all of those pieces, that is balanced, monitored, adjusted as it needs to be, and continuous, right? Like, we don't reach the end of the work. Right? You know? And I remember talking to my, you know, one of my Lucumí elders, and he was like, one of the biggest mistakes people make is that they think that being a priest means that this person's going to be perfect or that being a priest makes you perfect. And it's like, it doesn't. You know? It's just another layer of things. And all of your human foibles, and all of your need to do your taxes and all of these other things — LUCIA: [laughing] Ohhhh.... ANDREW: And all of your desire exists, you know? And you gotta roll with it. And you gotta balance it, and you know, work on it, and keep it where it needs to be. It's ... You know, you don't get to take your hand off the steering wheel, right? LUCIA: Right. I love that. I love how you said all of that, that piece is that you — Living, dynamic, communication, and that's what, you know, clearly, culture as we've known it is melting down because it's needed to. Right? Nobody can miss that. And I ... What you are talking about, you know, speaking to your elder about—I call that— This idea— It's very prevalent in our tribe, of spiritual perfectionism. ANDREW: Mmmhmm. LUCIA: And to me, there's this idea, that somehow, I'm supposed to be relaxed, and forgiving, and let anybody do anything, that's bullshit. There is discernment with relationships, with what is going on, and so, I feel, what we're seeing in the outer world and then working through in ourselves, is these last vestiges of these inherited — I called them lineage codes — but inherited shadows, you know, the ugliness of the racism, and the sexism, and all these sorts of things. And that we, you know, there's, we're throwing bombs into these things, and if we popped the boil, it's all out there, you know, it's all been there, but now, it's being seen in a way, in certain communities and certain cultures, it's not hidden anymore, the shit that's going down. And so, you ... Along with the bringing joy into the work that you do, there's also some points where you gotta get real, and figure out how to release and integrate some of this baggage, this, you know, epic baggage, that we've inherited of wounds. ANDREW: Sure. Yeah, I mean, we all come from cultures that have all sorts of unhealthy things in them. You know, I mean, there's no culture that I know of, that I would say is free of it, you know? And, you know, and as we become hopefully wiser, maybe more literate about how bias and prejudice and the, you know, all the effects of history and culture play out, you know, it becomes part of our work to cut that away. And to free ourselves from that, you know? And that's not easy either, right? LUCIA: Nope. ANDREW: Back to the courage piece, you know? It takes courage to look at that and say, "Huh, I was being an asshole there, huh, look at that, that's a really, you know, inappropriate notion, that I inherited from here, from there, from I don't even know where," right? LUCIA: Right. ANDREW: And to have the wherewithal to sort of look at that and try and chip away at that, but in the same way, as the integration process, that's also an ongoing piece of work because, you know, we can only understand as much as we understand and we can only work from what we know, and as we as individuals, and to some extent, you know, collectively, as well, have become clear, and have better models, and an understanding of these things, then we have the space to do more work and to become freer or better integrated still, you know. Yeah. LUCIA: Exactly! That, Andrew! That! [laughing] ANDREW: Just go and do that, everybody! Just go and do those things! [laughing] LUCIA: [laughing] ANDREW: So, one of the things I'm curious about, is, I've been seeing a lot of, in your work and in other places, a return of Dada, and a return of sort of surrealism, you know, and ... LUCIA: Yes.  ANDREW: I've been bringing it back around in my Land of the Sacred Self Oracle that I've been doing, and you've been doing it in your cutout work and in other places. Why do you think Dada is so important? Why is he coming back?  LUCIA: Well, that's a beautiful question. I grew up in a family of professional artists, and what I didn't realize when I was growing up, was that that was uncommon, that everybody didn't get this ... Everybody ... ANDREW: Uh huh!  LUCIA: And my family's amazing. I mean, my family is as amazing as they are wounded, and my family is epically amazing. ANDREW: Mmmhmm. LUCIA: And so, even as a kid, there was this ... What I found is that people who have embraced their curiosity, who have embraced their creativity ... This doesn't always mean your job is going to be being an artist. But this is about being alive, and curious, and full of wonder. This has a very childlike energy in it, in a wonderful way, and so I grew up with people who were always messing around and exploring and breaking outside of boxes and looking at things in different ways. So, we would— One of the classic surrealist Dadaist games is the exquisite corpse.  ANDREW: Mmmhmm. LUCIA: Which you can do with words and you can also — we would do it with drawings — and it's basically this process of taking a piece of paper, folding it into different sections, and deciding if you're going to do a human figure, or just something that's random, and each section that is folded ... A person in a group does some drawing and then continues the lines of that drawing down to the next folded section. Well, then they hide, they fold over their section, so that the next person just sees these leader lines ... ANDREW: Mmmhmm. LUCIA: And they start their drawing, you know, they were told they got, you know, the torso or the body. They do their torso of the body and their style with their vibe. And then you unfold it, and you have this miraculous montage, this collage, of everybody's goofy, strange, wonderful ideas of what this figure or open-ended thing was. And it's so delightful! And so interesting, and so strange. I love things that are odd. And I've always loved things that are odd. And odd connections, and so the Dadaists and the surrealists, who were— A couple of movements, if you don't know —Art, cultural movements in the early 20th century, early last century, into the, you know, probably, 40s, 50s — and they were groups who were very connected to dreams, very connected to randomness, they wanted to— I call it getting— I'm going to swear, is it totally bad if I swear here? ANDREW: You've already been swearing. Go ahead. Carry on. LUCIA: So, get the fuck out of the way! Like that's one of my tenets, Because as I said earlier, my empath became very controlling and perfectionistic to try to manage how scary the world was when I was younger, so for me, all of my art Is about getting the fuck out of the way.  ANDREW: Yeah.  LUCIA: And, because I believe that there is this dialogue, this incredible rich dialogue that the universe wants to play with us and co-create with us, and ... But you've got to get out of the way ... ANDREW: Yeah. LUCIA: You've gotta not be uptight. And, let randomness blow you away. And so, to me, I think that part of ... And also, historically ... But particularly the Dadaists were during the first world war. So, they were also reacting to this absolute horror that was happening in Europe, particularly across Europe, of all of that of the war. And so, they were trying to find a way to connect, to humanize, to not lose their humanity, and to try to bring some play and joy into a world that was horrific. And I feel like in some ways, we're there again, in some ways, we're a lot more — I don't know if we're more addicted — but we're more distracted, with the Internet, you know, they didn't have the Internet and things, you know, porn that you can access at any moment. And I'm not anti feminist porn, so don't go there, but I'm just saying this is a distraction for people, and so I think that we are looking, I think people are hardwired for magic, for ritual, for ceremony, for surrender, and I think most people have lost access to that.  So, to me, the surrealism and the Dadaness, and the things that I do where I ... You make your own handmade cards, and I called them funky fortunes, but I have also called them Dada divination, wild style divination ... Is that this is a way to get you out of the way and remind you that the world is enchanted, the world is magic, and there's actually clear directives and messages in that. So that, you know, like you… The Dadaists would cut up, take a poem, cut it up into all of the different words, shake it up in a bag, pull the words out one by one, and glue them back down onto a piece of paper to get this new thing. When you do that, really interesting, not random, NOT RANDOM, things occur. And so, to me, I've done a bunch of videos on unorthodox oracles ... ANDREW: Mmmhmm. LUCIA: I like to mess around. I am irreverent. That's the punk, that's the hip-hop in me. So, I think that we are trying to remember that the world is enchanted, trust that in ourselves, and we want that interface as a balm to the world blowing up.  ANDREW: Hm. [cross talking at 33:00] I mean, yeah, I think, I definitely think that ... Well, I think that this notion of re-enchanting the world right, that comes out, I've heard a variety of people talking about it. You know, I think that that's, that's an important thing, right? When people ... I like a quote from Terrence McKenna, right? When you find yourself lost or when the world doesn't make sense, or when horrific things happen or so on, right? When we find ourselves in what feels like it might be a dead end, we start looking backwards for some semblance of sanity somewhat, right? LUCIA: Mmmhmm. ANDREW: And, I feel like in this sort of, in the modern era in which we live, you know, there's this weird mix of scientific materialism and fake news and actual war and genocides and horribleness and, you know, all of the race and crimes against women, you know, and all of the things that are going on, as that stuff emerges, it's part of that sort of deconstructing what's going on and seeing what's really happening there, right? LUCIA: Mmmhmm. ANDREW: And, not that it hasn't been there all the time but it's more visible than it ever has been, for many people. LUCIA: Yes. ANDREW: Not for everybody.  LUCIA: Sure. ANDREW: Cause, obviously anybody who is the subject of those problems, and crimes, is fully aware. Many communities have always been aware. But ... But like a lot of people start looking backwards for what makes sense, right?  LUCIA: Mmm. ANDREW: And so, there's this sort of return to more magical ways, a lot of people are looking to get back to living magical lives, and the saints are returning to people, in a common practice, LUCIA: Mmmhmm. ANDREW: And art is regaining its magic, you know? It's shedding some of this sort of legacy of postmodernism and all that kind of stuff that for me, didn't go anywhere, you know? LUCIA: [laughs] ANDREW: You know, I went to art school and I was fully in all that stuff for a while, which is why I made no art when I left art school. I was like, this is all bullshit, I have no interest in this at all. LUCIA: Yeah. ANDREW: And, it's not that I don't see things in it that could be interesting, but it just wasn't me, right? And so, finding my way back to surrealism and to the magic of those dream and trance states and all of those things — to me that's where a lot of the power is, and that's where the power to change myself and others is, which is what I'm really interested in, you know? LUCIA: Yes. ANDREW: And so, like when I was working on my oracle deck, it would do these drawings, and I would start just by making a shape, right? On the page, or on the screen cause I was drawing digitally. And I'm like, "All right, what's inside the shape?" And then I would like, basically turn it inside out in my mind, and go inside the shape and find out what was in there, and I was like, "Oh! Is there something outside the shape now?" It was this sort of, almost perpetual Escher-like shifting between perspectives. LUCIA: Mmm. ANDREW: And then at the end I was like oh, and now the dream is finished revealing itself, all right, this one's done. Next. And, that lack of trying to control it ... LUCIA: Mmmhmm. ANDREW: I think is so important right? Kind of like your process with your Oracle of Initiation. You know, you didn't sit down and think, I'm gonna control all these things, you went and did a thing, and in that process, that, as you put it, the between the world's vision emerged, right? LUCIA: Oh, I just — Oh, Andrew, I love so many things about what you said. So, you know, part of what I feel really is a natural ability with all humans is ability to be much more intuitive, much more instinctive, and once again, you know, this gets back to the addictions in some ways, and the other people's voices that need to be clutter cleared. I believe that we really all have this ability to be very tuned in ... ANDREW: Mmmhmm. LUCIA: But only a certain percentage of people have apprenticed to that skill, and, you do need ... I mean, some people come in with a certain ... I came in obscenely psychic. I am super psychic. And very very very very empathic. For about 20 years, I had a hard time leaving the house. I was in the cave. I was in the mystic's cave for 20 years. But, I do believe that we naturally really have ... And that artists, that's part of what artists apprentice to is this, the muses, the getting the fuck out of the way, whatever you want to call it, and that you, what you're saying about, you do the circle, and then, you like merge into the circle. But like, what's in the circle? Like the circle is this field, this entity, this creation field, and I believe that everybody actually has access to that. You know, there'll be different mediums that people will use in different ways that you use it, but that's what I feel is really something that's lacking is that people's ability to access that because it's SO nourishing on a core level back to this zone.  You know, that's what I found when I made my oracle deck, was this— I went back to what I truly loved. I went back to what the core aspects of myself were and, as I say, this is why, at 50, when, in this culture, for women, you're supposed to be freaked out, because your value is going down, because I still believe, for women in this culture, the main ticket that we have, the main value, is attractiveness, and then that's a massive issue that, we won't go into all that. But I figured out how to tap into and source this massive curiosity and joy and creative passion— obsession, basically, that I have —And it feeds me like nothing else has ever fed me! And so, you know, what you're talking about, I feel like that's just really an enormous piece of everything that we're talking about about the integration and the finding our power, and the living our lives that we want to lead, is this access to this. ANDREW: Mmmhmm. Yeah. Well, it's one of the things that, because I have the store, and stuff like that, people are often asking me, like, "Well, how did you become successful? How did you make all this happen?" LUCIA: Mmmhmm. ANDREW: And nobody really likes the answer. LUCIA: [laughing] ANDREW: Cause the answer is mostly I made a lot of art, and I kept showing up. [Laughs] LUCIA: [laughing] ANDREW: And I'm telling them the answer. Right? Because for me, being in that zone and being creative and making things, everything that I need to do to support that shows up when I commit to that process. Right?  LUCIA: Mmmmmmm. ANDREW: And when I don't commit to that process, then everything that I, everything that I do— It isn't always more labored, but it can definitely be way more labored —And I'm like, "Oh yeah, I haven't made art in a couple weeks. Shut up and go make some art, Andrew." And then, all of a sudden, everything flows from there, right? LUCIA: Well, and this, I think that this is some, you know, a piece, we could go back to that piece about courage, courage/dedication is ... Nobody else ... Elizabeth Gilbert's recent book, Big Magic, I feel like it's the modern version of The Artist's Way. You know, it's the next step in this. And, right now I'm actually listening to Questlove, from the Roots. His book on creativity that I'm really excited about. But, part of what is happening, I think in, in the world, is this need to sanctify ourselves, is, you know, that's partly what Elizabeth says in Big Magic. She gives a lot of really, actually very practical good information about actually owning yourself as a creative person. And so, you did that. you said on some level — there is —I want to do this, there is value for it, I'm not going to let everybody else have ideas about why I shouldn't do this and I'm going to do it and I'm going to keep showing up. And that's a huge issue, I think, for a lot of people, and I think women, in the Western world, have had, not that men don't have their struggles, and I don't want to totally do a gender separation thing, ANDREW: Mmmhmm. LUCIA: But there are some messages that women have gotten about being very accommodating and taking care of everyone else. ANDREW: Sure.  LUCIA: So, what I found, working with women, and being, having the people pleaser in myself, is that there's this road to believing that your visions are worth pursuing. And then having the courage to keep showing up and showing up and showing up because it's a bit of magic and alchemy and then it's a bit of down and dirty doing it, doing it, doing it, doing it. And so, that's what you did! So that's so beautiful and so essential. So essential.  ANDREW: Well, and you know, and as somebody who is raising two female-identified kids, right? LUCIA: Mmmhmm. ANDREW: I see a lot of these things. I'm always looking at what are the messages they're getting, what are they being told, what's being reinforced, where can I give them a bit more punk rock to say fuck that shit, you know? Cause, like — LUCIA: Go, dad, go! ANDREW: You know, it's great! So, you know, my kids — we give them more freedom than many people are comfortable with, right? In our neighborhood and stuff like that. You know, we let them go to the playground by themselves and so on. You know, and I think that it's important, and I think that, from my perspective, and from a [garbled 42:40] perspective, it's not that dangerous, you know? It's not, you know, it's not a problem now. But it freaks parents out, right? LUCIA: Mmmhmm. ANDREW: It freaks adults out a lot to see, you know, kids out by themselves anywhere. You know? And if you're not, like, 15, they're like eyeballing you and be like, where's the parent, right? LUCIA: Right.  ANDREW: And so, last summer, my youngest was over going to the playground with her sister, and some adult was like, "Are you by yourself? Where are your parents?" And she gave the best answer, which is, "That's none of your business." And kept going! LUCIA: [bursts out laughing] ANDREW: And I'm like, yes, exactly! Right? Because, because we don't have to, we shouldn't, capitulate, you know, I mean, I might have been more graceful or polite or something about that, but you know, it's perfect! And it's clear and it's a firm answer and, you know, people want it both ways, right? They want, like, don't talk to strangers because it's dangerous, but let us intercede and you know, treat us with respect and talk to us, right? It doesn't work that way! You know? And that's not — that's not real, right? So. LUCIA: You are raising riot grrls, and I love you! ANDREW: [laughs] LUCIA: Thank you! Well, and, you know, part of it also is, I feel that, with this, because, you know, being 50, I was a kid in the 70s, and there was, depending on where you lived, there was a lot more freedom in the 70s, we didn't have media that was so sensationalized, and every parent didn't think constantly, "My child is going to be abducted." The amount of children that are abducted by strangers is like being hit by lightning. If children go somewhere, it's usually a disgruntled parent or a family member or something. And I'm not saying that that's okay. But ... But what, and in the 70s, we messed around in the ravine, in the gully, that was down the way, without adults around, you know? I studied the early childhood education and I was a nanny for years. And so, this is a — ANDREW: We — I lived at the edge of town— LUCIA: Yeah?  ANDREW: Where I grew up? And we would hike, I think it's five kilometers, five miles, something like that, to the summer camp, when it was closed, that was in the woods, a good hike there, and play on their playground and climb on the buildings and whatever, when I was like in public school. You know, like, I don't know, maybe 10 years old, probably less, you know? LUCIA: Yes!  ANDREW: Nobody knew where we were! LUCIA: No! ANDREW: You know we were so far in the woods, right? There was nobody around, and there was nobody there! You know? And nothing ever happened. And again, not to say that stuff didn't happen elsewhere that I wasn't a part of, but like, you know. LUCIA: But you — you know — I mean, really, you know, generally, the ... Like, a kid will break their arm or something. I mean, it was like — but that's not— That's not —What I learned in studying early childhood education is, what I feel is, we are creating weak people. We are creating people who don't understand their instincts, who don't have stamina, and when you leave, children are not supposed to be with adults 24/7. Adults don't want to be with children 24/7. No disrespect to children. ANDREW: True fact! [laughs] LUCIA: Nobody that, you know — that's — but, so, when kids are alone, there is a tremendous amount of social interaction and power and confidence and jockeying that they learn, that when adults are hovering around, they don't have, and there's things about their edges and their boundaries. It's one big long rite of passage that they need, and I'm actually fairly concerned about what this means that kids are sitting in front of a device shut up in a house, for their health, for their spiritual and energetic stamina.  And so, but what I love about your riot grrls, your beautiful riot grrls, is that they're— You're teaching them also to trust their instincts. We don't trust — particularly girls — to trust their instincts. And so, going to the park alone, your girls are going to be alert. You know, your girls are not going to be — they'll understand that this is a privilege that they have, and they're going to learn and hone their stamina to read the vibes. And that's what you have to do in life. And if, if something doesn't feel right, well, you run home! Your girls would run home! Right? ANDREW: Mmmhmm. No, for sure! LUCIA: Yeah that's — ANDREW: I mean, I think it's interesting. I don't worry about the digital age and the impact of tablets and things or whatever on people. I'm curious about what they're going to do with it. Because I think that sooner or later, right? LUCIA: Yeah.  ANDREW: All these impulses that you and I are talking about, that we've explored and brought out and whatever, those are just human impulses, right?  LUCIA: Mmmhmm. ANDREW: And, growing up in a more digital age or, you know, where stuff's happening in other ways, sooner or later, those impulses are going to gain enough momentum or have enough urgency that they're going to emerge from those people too, right? LUCIA: Right.  ANDREW: And then they're going to show us something we've never seen before. LUCIA: Yes!  ANDREW: I'm very fascinated about that. I have this— This oracle that I made for myself, and a lot of it's just sort of little things that I feel like I need to be reminded of. And one of the sayings on one of the cards is, "The youth know the way."  LUCIA: Oh!  ANDREW: And I'm like, all right! When it comes up, I always — it makes me think about, what are they know? You know, and like, not in a like, old man shaking their fist, what do they know? Although I have old man moments too, right? LUCIA: [bursts out laughing] ANDREW: But like, what do they know? What are they doing? What's going on? What is the meaning that they're perceiving in this? What is the value to them, right?  LUCIA: Right! ANDREW: And, you know, when we can run into those things with curiosity, you know, I think it's fascinating, and for me, then I get to sort of experience something new. And I get to think about things in a different way, and to me that's wonderful, it's not easy to always sustain that kind of approach and it's not always easy to access what's going on with those people. Because, you know, 16-year-olds don't, really don't want to talk to me necessarily? You know, certainly not random ones on the street, right? LUCIA: [laughing] ANDREW: But I'm curious, you know? And it's one of the great things — like I'm a scout leader for my kids' cub troop, right? And to spend time with those youth, and, you know, they're 8 to 11-year-olds. And then at bigger things, you know, there are teenagers and other ages there as well. For me I get to see what they're about and what they're doing and what they're interested in. And when I'm at my best, I get to be like, "Wow, what are you getting from that? What's inspiring about that?" You know? LUCIA: Yeah. ANDREW: "What need is that fulfilling in you? And how come I don't understand it at all?" You know? And it certainly, it can be fascinating. So. LUCIA: Well and I feel like, with some of the younger people, and some of the millennials that I've connected with, they came in with a different operating system than we did. That their whole structure of how they're wired is very different than what we got and what we inherited, what the cultural expectations, the boxes, the prejudices, that they — what I've seen— You know, they get bashed for being self-absorbed and all of that. But what I've also seen is that they have this visionary— These visionary aspects to them that are epic, that blow me away! The visionary in me goes, "Wow! I'm a model T car and you're a rocket ship!" And so I do, I wonder what, like you say, I don't even know, I feel like I came in to help anchor some of those folks and then the folks more of my age who are those in between, we're pretty visionary, particularly for our time frame, but we got nothing on what those younger people have, and you're right, they're going to do things, make the science fiction moods that we found of having a TV in our hands, they're gonna make that look like that's kindergarten.  ANDREW: Yeah.  LUCIA: And so, I'm pretty thrilled about it too.  ANDREW: Well and I think that that's a great mantra or you know, something to sort of both embody and keep the ego in check, right? I'm visionary for my generation, I'm visionary for my time, I'm visionary for my upbringing, you know? Because like, we look back and especially because like I've read a lot of stuff by, you know, cause I was into ceremonial magic and into sort of Crowley stream of stuff, you know, the guy was visionary for his time, in certain ways, in certain aspects. LUCIA: Yeah!  ANDREW: You know? And he was totally horrendous in many ways. LUCIA: [laughing] ANDREW: Because of his time, and because of his upbringing. And because of his personality, you know? LUCIA: Right.  ANDREW: And, you know, I hope that I never have as many downfalls is that dude had. But, to think that we don't have them, right, is just folly, right? You know? LUCIA: It is folly; it's all folly! I mean that— That— I mean that's really— It is— We, as humans, I think we get all caught up, and we get ... We get into all these spins. The reality is we're a bunch of goofballs. I mean, that's the reality of it, and were just stumbling around like toddlers, all of us, and anytime you think you really know, you're totally sure, good luck with that! How's that working for you? I mean, you know, that's— You gotta — You know, that's the thing, of being a recovering perfectionist, I can laugh at myself now. Before I judged myself. Judged myself terribly. Now I go, "Oh yeah, you're insecure there, oh you're, you know, being kind of neurotic or whatever it is. And then I like kind of laugh, and pat myself, like, "Oh, baby, you're so clay footed! Isn't that fun?" ANDREW: Uh huh. LUCIA: It's a miracle. So, I think— That's what I would hope for all of my brethren listening to this: Can you come to this place where you love and accept yourself enough, even laugh at yourself! ANDREW: Mmmhmm. So, this kind of brings it to one of the other things that I wanted to chat about with you though, right? It's been a real journey for you, right? LUCIA: Mmmhmm.  ANDREW: Like, you were saying 12 years ago was when you made the Oracle of Initiation, right? Or something like that? LUCIA: Yeah.  ANDREW: And now here you are living that in an embodied way, much more, you know, and with other people in a much more embodied way, right? LUCIA: Yeah. ANDREW: How did that journey happen? How did that go for you? LUCIA: [sighs] It's ... Never in a million years, could I have told you that I would have this life that I have now. And I think that's true for everybody— ANDREW: Yeah! LUCIA: But I went down some really alternative paths. You know, I took some paths that were not taken, some serious, right turns, left turns, off of where I was coming from. And it helped me have the life that I always dreamed of that I didn't even realize was possible, like, to tell — I've gone from a model T car, from a Big Wheels, you know, a Big Wheels toy, to a rocket ship, in the growth game that I've had.  And, part of it was not by choice. My own issues of safety and security and control—I wouldn't have left the life that I had at that point in Seattle. I grew up in Seattle in a family professional artists. And was always very creative and independent in my own way, but I also really wanted kids. I wanted kids more than anything. I loved kids. And I actually still love kids. I just don't want to give them the time that they deserve. I have another dialogue that I want. My creativity is my dialogue. And so, kids are not going to get that dialogue from me, you know. Other people think you can take some for the team and raise the kids. But ... My ... You know the journey of wanting to be married and have this Martha Stewart sort of a lifestyle— I come from a family of designers, and architects, and artists. And I love homemaking. I have a homemaker in me. I love food, I love beautiful design.  But that— I didn't realize how mystical I was. I didn't. I had forgotten. I had blocked a lot of it off. Of how intuitive I was, how psychic I was. And so, the universe and myself conspired to send me in this totally different trajectory than where I had been. And my husband died of cancer when he was 37. I was 33. And he was wonderful. And I'm not just putting him on a pedestal because he's dead. He was a gift from the angels. He was so much healthier than me. He was a very healthy, loving, integrated man. To be honest, I've only — I've met a small amount of men who have had the access to heart and love that he had. He was extraordinary. And, he died.  And I didn't have kids, and I had some resources, I didn't have to go get a 9-to-5 job, and I spent basically seven years on a quest to revitalize who I was, defined who I was, and I always knew that art was central to who I was. Like I, I breath, I, every cell in my body is art, I am living art. Adventure. I love exploring! That's the happiest ... I'm the happiest in my whole life when I'm exploring. And then, spirituality in the land. You know there was my spirituality, my mystical spirituality was evolving. But so, in that seven years on that quest, I did about 15 lifetimes worth of study, and engagement, and incredible teachers, and learning, and then I made the oracle deck. You know, I made this deck. And so, we're going to— After this, let's talk about the dreams. You know, the last interview that you and I did. I had had some dreams about you and your Orisha deck. ANDREW:  Yeah. LUCIA: But my oracle deck predominantly came out of dreams. I was having dreams, other people were having dreams, these amazing dreams of animals and humans shapeshifting. Of people getting up off of one divination card and moving to another, like being alive, and I followed the stepping stones. I followed the path, I courageously— And you know, here's another thing about courage and following your path— I will bet you, I would bet you money, I would bet you something, that if you paid a survey of people enough money to live two years, three years, five years, and follow their passion and go for theirs, there would still only be a small percentage. There's something that you have to click in to go for it. And people ... a lot of people say it's the money. And I have the mortgage and ... and kids do make it different. I'm humbly ... I don't have kids, I'm humbly saying that you make different choices when you're responsible for children, I'm very humble about that. And still, you still can make other choices and I, something in me had the ability to tap into this courage and this fierceness and this not knowing and follow these impulses and that's how I ended up in New Mexico with the structure— It took me six years to do the deck —But the structure of the deck was all in place. But the artwork of these dreams of the animals and humans shapeshifting and the light beings moving around. It wasn't happening in 2D art processes. I got a new camera. This was before my iPhone adventures. Now I'm obsessed with what iPhones can do. ANDREW: It's amazing. LUCIA: It's amazing. But, I had this epiphany, my work comes through epiphanies and I was driving along, and I had done this — I had been trained in this body of work called the Earth and Body series. They were sacred selfies. This was from 2005 to 7 that I took around the world. And I learned how to get out of the way and be drawn to locations. I would disrobe so that I would be vulnerable and connected to the earth, like becoming primal, back to the earth. I'd hold the camera in my hand, you know, it became an extension of my body, and I would take these mystical opening between the veils pictures. And so, when I got to New Mexico, found some new graffiti and tunnels, that was vibrating in a different way ... You know, like my mystical capacity had opened more, my conduit was more open, and then this epiphany came, of taking those nude Earth and Body photos, and there were 20 to 25,000 of those, and taking it to the next level and tribally painting myself and adorning myself. Which I had done, I had done sacred selfies since I was a kid with Polaroids, with photo booths. It's just one of my jams. It's one of my things. And so, I started doing ... in June 2006, I went down into this graffiti tunnel that I found, had gotten paint at the theater store, had all of these horns and scarves and amber necklaces and things. And I took these pictures with a new camera that you ... that would ... it was more sophisticated, and you could get pictures in lower light. As part of how my images happened is about ISO and about sparkly things and some ambient light in tunnels. And the graffiti. And, I took these photos and they blew me away. And so, this was this whole journey, this whole trust walk, and when I started it, I didn't know I could do such an epic project, and ... ANDREW: I think it's such an important thing to note, too, right?  LUCIA: Yeah.  ANDREW: I think that if people knew what it would be at the end ... LUCIA: Mmmhmm. ANDREW: They would probably never start. Right?  LUCIA: They wouldn't, cause it's too hard.  ANDREW: It's too hard. It's too far from where they are. The innovations and inspiration that the journey or the road provides aren't there in the beginning ... LUCIA: Yeah.  ANDREW: So, it's one of those things, right? You ... Starting the process and allowing and trusting that the process will come forward to something is the big ... is one of the biggest things, right? You know? And it's tough when you don't have history with it to trust it, right? It gets easier with time, but ... LUCIA: Mmmhmm. ANDREW: Yeah. LUCIA: Completely true. And that's it, I mean it's tough to trust it when you -- I'm writing this down -- when you don't have history, and that was the thing that gave me history. That was the thing that has changed my life, where I saw, because I'm, as I say, I was very insecure for many years, and I am a good synthesizer, I have a brain that is able to synthesize things well. I'm ... You know, we also have this culture where people are not supposed to be proud of what they have, particularly women, like you're supposed to be humble, people will think you're arrogant. No, fucking own what you're good at. So, I'm smart. I can synthesize and make connections. You know, that's the visionary plus the structure person. And I didn't realize how skilled I was at that because I was insecure. So, in, you know, in my oracle book, it's 300 pages and I'm so proud of it. It's my woo woo Ph.D. I got my Ph.D. You know, we don't get -- I should have a Ph.D. in the woo world behind my name from that deck.  ANDREW: I felt the same way when I made ... I did this ten week, two-and-a-half-hour class, course on the Thoth tarot, right?  LUCIA: Whoa.... ANDREW: I was like, when I finished that, I was like, that's my Ph.D.  That's it right there.  LUCIA: There it is! Right? The decades and decades that we've been studying with this. And so, that ... doing that project ... and as I say, it took me six years to physically make it and then publish the book, and then, we're 12 years in now, and there's always a learning curve with print on demand and self-publishing and all of that. But it ... it was the game changer. And as I say, not everybody's going to do that. But you've got to find something that is like that, that is your game changer if you really want to anchor in your visionary self. You're going to have to over and over again show up and do things that are out of your comfort zone, and you're going to need to love it on some level, or you won't keep doing it.  ANDREW: Yeah.  LUCIA: And so now, I'm at this point finally, I'd say probably 20, 25 years' worth of what I've visioned, what I've prayed for, you know, it's a combination of working for it, and then there's some grace. Like you don't earn it. Like somehow it just anchors in. It's both/and. And now it's just anchored in and now I finally ... like I feel myself in my body ... Cause empaths also have a hard time being in their body cause this world is really loud. But I'm finally in my body in a way, and I've come out of the cave, you know, I'm not in the mystic's cave anymore, that 20 years is over, and when I'd show up and teach at conferences and workshops and public speak, I kind of stand there in myself and go [gasps]: "Wow! This is so cool! Like, I'm in my skin. I'm happy with myself." And if I, you know, make a mistake, or I do something, or I say something, you know, I'll stick my foot in my mouth sometimes, I don't shame myself for months any more. I'm like, well that was kind of awkward. And we move on! ANDREW: Yeah.  LUCIA: It's so ... So, literally, I got the keys to the kingdom through following this path and now also I'm starting ... I didn't make a lot of money for a long time. You know, I had other money that I was living on. You know, this is also something that people don't talk about. If you don't have the confidence to feel that you're going to be able to magnetize other people, don't quit your day job. You will not have a thriving career as a woo woo person if you haven't sanctified yourself. And I work with people around this.  ANDREW: And it is, it is not easy. Right?  LUCIA: It is not fucking easy!  ANDREW: When I started ... you know, cause for a long time, I wasn't in the bigger tarot community or in the bigger spiritual community. I was just, you know, working at a shop in Toronto and just doing my thing, and when I started going around and meeting people, I was amazed at how few people were making their living ... LUCIA: Yes! ANDREW: Doing stuff ... LUCIA: Yes! ANDREW: And I was making my living doing it, and how many people were being supported by their partner ... LUCIA: Yep! ANDREW: Or had a day job or all these things, and no shame on that ... LUCIA: Yeah! No! ANDREW: You do what you gotta do ... LUCIA: Exactly. ANDREW: But the perspective that I had seen and that many people kind of cultivated was that they were ... that they were making it, but they weren't making a living, they were, you know, they weren't making enough money to support themselves. LUCIA: Solely on that work.  ANDREW: Solely on that work. And I think that that is a thing that very few people talk about, and a lot of people sell the dream and a lot of like, woo woo, blah blah marketing types and coaches or whatever sell people on that, and it's not that it's not possible,

Andrew Youderian is the founder of eCommerceFuel, a private community forum for six to eight figure eCommerce sites. After getting out of finance and buying and selling two eCommerce businesses, Andrew saw the need for a platform for the 7-figure eCommerce community. Looking for a space where this group of exceptional entrepreneurs could bounce ideas and information off one another, he started the website and has never looked back. In addition to the forum, eCommerceFuel holds a live annual event, publishes a yearly “state of the merchant” report, and now hosts a job board exclusively for the eCommerce domain. We spend this episode discussing the results of their 2018 state of the merchant eCommerce report. Episode Highlights: This year there were about 450 survey participants with an average store income of $2.3 million. Andrew shares the three big takeaways from the survey. Which niches are growing versus which are stagnant or shrinking, according to the survey. The fastest growing stores have a high component of Amazon revenue to them. A strategy that some bigger merchants are taking is to use Amazon as a way to help launch a brand, then taking the cash and momentum generated from Amazon to help build offline presence. We discuss top trends in shopping carts, email marketing, help-desks, and product reviews. We learn that eCommerce revenue values seem to be generally going up across the board. Which business models are experiencing the most growth and why dropshipping may have made a bit of a comeback last year. What the fastest growing eCommerce categories are among the survey takers. Who the favorite entrepreneur was from last year from among the top in the world. Transcription: Mark: Hey Joe, how are you? Joe: I'm good Mark! How are you doing today? Mark: I'm doing good, I've been busy these past week doing a few interviews. Joe: You have? You have been slacking and then picking up that slack and doing it more yourself. Thank you! Mark: I think anybody who's been listening to our show knows that you're not a slacking on this, but I'm just trying to play catch-up here to your three(3) episodes to everyone that I have done. But, I've been catching up this week and I'm really excited about the someone guest that we have coming up weeks. And one of the first ones is Andrew Youderian, whom we both know well from E-commerce field. Joe: I do! You know I tell the story often. The first time I went to an E-Commerce field event was in Nashville, I think it's 3 or 4 years. but I remember saying specifically that when I got back, you know, I talked about it. I heard more intelligent E-Commerce conversation in 24 hours than I heard in previous 24 months. It's an exceptional group of entrepreneurs and they help each other on a regular basis which is incredible. Mark: Yeah, I think, there are couple of groups out there which I have zero hesitation endorsing and have told people that they need to be a part of it. If anyone listening is in E-Commerce, E-Commerce Fuels is a private form that requires that you apply in order to get access to it, you have to have a business of a certain size to be able to get in. Some of the most intelligent that we know in the space and the most successful people that we know on the space are members of that form. It's a really, really good community. They have an event that they put on every year which is one of our favorite events to go to, all the E-Commerce feel alive. So, one of the things Andrew does every year though, because he's got all his members, you know, several hundred members who have successfully E-Commerce stores, is he surveys them and he puts together a full on report called ‘State of E-Commerce' or ‘State of the Merchant'. Can't remember the exact name of it. But this entire interview, he and I are talking about this report because the data in here is awesome! It's really, really cool! You get to see how fast are businesses is growing. What percentage of businesses are Amazon. We get to sift through (2.55) revenue side. What is the typical breakdown by channel. And one of the cool businesses data in the report this year was what niches are growing versus what's shrinking. For example, one of the cool things that got pointed out when we talked about a little bit is, men's clothing and accessories was among one of the fastest growing sectors. Conversely, women's clothing and accessories was one of the ones that was stagnant or declining. So, we go into, what's going on there! Lots of really cool data in that report. Joe: Interesting! Interesting! Andrew is a super nice guy! Full of integrity and character in the whole E-Commerce Fuel Group is a reflection of him. I believe so, let's just jump to it, see what he's got to say! Mark: Absolutely! Hey Andrew! Thanks for joining me! Andrew: Yeah! Thanks for having me here in Mark appreciated. Mark: Alright, you are joining me from a van obviously. Andrew: Yeah, look like a total sketch fall hair. It's kind of a old Mobil office I have. I'm on the road with the family and when I need to do podcast or interviews or phone calls, I usually come out here coz it's little quieter. As you know, we got kids, it can be tough to do inside with kids and ah.. Yeah, so here we are! Mark: I love it! Yeah, you're not the first guest to actually show up in the vehicle. We had Chad Annis on a while ago and he was on his RV. He's been doing it for nine months, just living the RV life for nine months. But I know you're out there, just kind of traveling around and on a vacation, so to speak, with your family, right? Andrew: Yeah! We're just kind of doing, doing a little trip. We love to get out of Montana. You're from—you'll appreciate this. I mean you're from Minneapolis, you know the winters can be a little brutal up north. We're in Montana and trying to get out of town and get us some more climate, you know, 2-3 months, the winter and work along the way but trying to get a little more vitamin D in the body, so that's what we do. Mark: Yeah! Our winters been super long here, my wife has told me that if it's goes on for a few more weeks, were leaving, she doesn't know where, were just going to go. Not move, were just going to go somewhere. I'm going to come home and she's just going to say, “get in the car.” So, see this, you and I know each other from E-commerce feel but I'm going to let you introduce yourself to our listeners and kind of your background and what you do. Andrew: Sure! So my background is- I'm trying to get from the beginning as brief of a story as possible at my points. Got on a school, working finance for couple of years and kind of invest in making world and learned a lot, got a lot of great experience but decided that didn't want to sell my soul to the corporate world, so quit and was looking for an opportunity to start a business and only enough, got into E-commerce, started selling CV Radios. I ran that business for a number of years, kind of two years into that. Start a second business, selling trolling motors, knowing E-commerce space, drop shipping business and couple years after that I just found that I was meeting a lot of people doing similar things that I was and it's kind of interesting very isolated, entrepreneurs in the E-commerce space. You know it'd be really cool if there was a community for these group of people so, started, it was called E-Commerce fuel which ended up evolving into a community for a high six (6) and seven (7) and eight (8) figure E-Commerce store orders. So I've since sold both of those moving E-commerce businesses. Now, my primary fulltime gig is running that community which in the ways, I try to add value in our team choice. To add value is through light events which Mark you and Quiet light has been generous enough to sponsor and support so thank you. Through live events, through a private forum that we have, kind of curated [inaudible 0:06:11.1] forum of people with experience in space and then through some proprietary software's that we've built. So that's my story and what I do. Mark: Yeah, and for anyone that is not familiar with the E-commerce fuel and the forum they're associated with, really, really valuable. I don't anybody who's a member of that forum who doesn't consider to be one of their top resources. And the conference put up every year, it is phenomenal. We go to a lot of conferences, absolutely love E-commerce fuel. Here in the E-commerce space we have a store that's six (6), seven (7), eight (8) figures. I don't know where you are with your registrations or what you're doing for accepting your memberships but tough work in the resource. Andrew: Well, thank you. I appreciate it. Mark: Yeah. So every year, you do a survey of the members, performance survey of the members of your forum and it's the State of the Merchant Report. Tell me a little bit about that and how you put those report together and what it talks about. Andrew: Yeah, so, I wanted to try to get a sense of what was happening with Merchants and that sudden figure range, 'cause you–Forbes will put up reports about, you know, the fortune five hundred (500) and you hear these stats about your target in Amazon and that's interesting but it's a very different world when you're in that kind of size business that I was in, that our members are in. And so every year, I put it together like you mentioned and just– it's a survey of about 50 questions. This last year we had about four hundred and fifty (450) people respond. The average size of the store owners responding was about two point three (2.3) million and we put together a lot of stats. Everything from— We put together everything together from: where the people are from, and what type of businesses they have , conversion rates, revenue growth, how Amazon is impacting their business, all those kind of things. So, yeah, that's the kind of the survey in a nutshell and there's kind of three big take aways that I can go into or if there's something else you wanted to talk about first , we can do that too Mark. Mark: Yeah, so let's go onto the three big takeaways and for anyone looking at this, there's –this is freely available online, the ecommercefuel.com and we'll link to it in the show notes. And probably, I hope for a member, I'll link to them an e-mail that I'll send out people as well about this podcast, but lot's are really good data in here. So you do this every year, you pour over the data and you take a look at the– you know, what's important, what were the big takeaways for you these year? Andrew: Yes! So the big takeaways, let's say for the last 2018, really 2017 but published 2018 was this incredibly strong year for growth for kind of that seven (7) figure store owner demographic. Revenue, year over year, revenue was up, thirty eight (38) % and only about eleven (11) % of stores didn't see any growth at all, so like last year- you know it was in it's high twenty's (20's) or twenty five (25), twenty six (26), you look at E-commerce in general it tends to grow in a twenty (20), twenty two-ish percent range. But this year was just an incredible year, really strong growth. That was one. The second thing was, was that Amazon was a driver for a lot [inaudible 0:08:57]. This isn't surprising but it's you see, how much Amazon is contributing to merchant's revenue. So, last year, the year before this, Amazon was supposed to be responsible for about twenty (20) percent of overall revenue so let's say, you know- of a someone who's near a million dollars in sales for an average store. Two hundred thousand of that would've been generated from Amazon. This year was up to twenty-eight (28) percent so this year, two hundred and eighty (280) thousands of their million dollars in revenue was coming from Amazon. So Amazon's definitely making up a bigger portion of merchant's pie. Counterpart of that though is, Amazon also is generating more headaches and complaints for people so we looked at the number of people every year who say that- you know, we ask them what their biggest challenge and struggle in their business is, and this last year, the number of people who said Amazon is the biggest struggle or one of them was to almost 3X. And this wasn't just people complaining that Amazon was killing their business, saying that they were drop-shipper and “Oh no, all my sales are dying because Amazon was stealing them” that was only a small fraction. Probably, you know, twenty (20) percent of people complaining, thus majority of them were complaining about things like Amazon's being more competitive, I'm too reliant to, I'm tired of dealing with some of their terms of service and policies or things like that. So Amazon's more up to a greyer revenue but also there's also additional overhead burden with that. And finally, the last big takeaway was that conversion rates increase dramatically across the board for all sellers. The rates were up about twenty five (25) percent- you know, year over year. So, last year conversion rate on average was at 2.10 percent this last year it jumped up to 2.664 percent, right on that range. And, you know that was, probably the most surprising step for me for the whole survey because, it's difficult enough to bump up your conversion rate by twenty (25) percent across a single site but to see that across a group of twenty (20), four hundred and fifty (450) stores on average and I thought maybe, you know maybe what we were saying was that you can be seeing more people shift to manufacturing or product labeling which tends to have a much higher conversion rate than let's say drop-shipping. But I saw that conversion rate boost across all different store types from drop-shipping to just reselling, to manufacturing and so, hard for me to explain, I kind of hypothesize that perhaps our community is getting a little bigger and merchants are maybe getting a little more advanced; the economy and the US particularly has done well this last year. Whatever the reason something back there, those were probably the three biggest takeaways that I have to work for. Mark: Alright, so one thing that I've always found interesting about your report is the percentage of sales that Amazon takes from some of your largest stores. What are the data show–if you remember of hand, I don't know if you have the report in front of you, but what are the data show from your largest stores and how much they are actually getting from Amazon? Andrew: Let me see here if we actually calculated that this year, so I don't think we actually– Let's see, we have– we measured a couple things, we didn't get the actual revenue from, you know, what percentage of the revenue Amazon was generated by stores that had a lot on Amazon but we did measure was kind of revenue growth for different stores if they weren't selling on Amazon, if they were selling on Amazon, or were Amazon was sixty (60) percent of their revenue. So when you break it down that way, Amazon, you know, stores aren't selling on all on Amazon, they're growing in about thirty (30) percent. Stores they're selling a little bit on Amazon, you know some of them are growing in about forty one (41) percent and stores where Amazon is, you know, makes up to sixty (60) percent plus of their revenue, they're growing at fifty one (51) percent. So, you're definitely seeing the fastest growing source, definitely have a very high component of Amazon revenue to and the same thing too for income growth, it follows kind of lock step with the income that people are seeing as well. Mark: Right, now I'm just going to go through this here, one chart that I see is the Amazon dominance trance. Amazon as a source number channel, looks like you have twenty six (26) percent there? Andrew: Yep, so that's twenty six (26) percent of merchants listed Amazon as their number one channel up from twenty (20) percent last year. Mark: See, that number right there, actually is almost staring 'cause it seems like with the restore I see, it may have started flying with the website and then they move over to Amazon and Amazon took up all of the revenue. This is showing what seventy four (74) percent are still have other channel as their dominant channels or maybe they're just so diversified, What's the story behind that? Andrew: That's good question! I think it's a lot of our members are, I would say probably three quarters of them for whatever reason don't– are not a primarily–they have a very good presence off of Amazon as well and maybe, I don't know if that's just culture or part of it's to the [inaudible 0:13:20.7] silver screening and who we kind of bring in to the community but I think that might be more of–a bias of our community as to maybe just a general market thing 'cause you see, as you said, a lot of–it's probably under what you've expect to see. So I'm not exactly sure, I think part of that might just be a demographic work community report. Mark: I think it's fast– I think it's useful data, especially for people that have an E-commerce businesses who're think that they want to make Amazon their pear play. I've talked to a few business owners they've said wildly, “I'm going to focus my attention to-on Amazon because, it's for the money, yes, and why would I take away my other efforts from Amazon and make as much money.” But it appears as if you do have a number of stores that are doing that seven (7) and eight (8) figure revenue almost, without Amazon being that dominant channel. Andrew: yeah definitely and I think what a lot of the savvy merchants that I see in our community doing in any kind of floss and secret to Amazon is, it's hard to pass up free money and easy money and granted that Amazon's getting harder but still it's a pre-power form and conquering opportunity even in 2018. But their mindset much of the time is use Amazon as a way to help launch a brand, to help generate some cash flow and then use the momentum you can generate from Amazon, Use the cash you can generate from Amazon to help build your off Amazon, your own dot com, your own web store presence, because all fully that's the asset that you own and i's much less rescue than being be-haunt by Amazon going forward so I think that's a strategy a lot of us, as bigger merchants are taking. Mark: That's absolutely see as well with Amazon is that launch process tends to be. You want to be testing your products and been able to launch a brand so much faster because of the size of the market place. Let's talk real quick about software. You guys have a very cool part of your community where your community rates software that they're using and it's feedbacks. So you have like a star rating. If somebody wants to find like a good shopping card or what shopping card they should use, or maybe help desk software. You guys have a whole record of software within the community that rates that, right? Andrew: We do, yeah, and so part of it is the ratings like you mentioned another part of it, and maybe more telling is– is the usage stats. We have about a thousand members in our community and our software goes out and crawls all of our member's stores on a weekly basis and uses an integration we've built with to be able to tell what all of the members are using. So we can tell in a real time that “Oh, you know, forty four (44) percent of our members are on Shopify this year versus, you know thirty seven (37) percent last year.” Whatever it is. So we can get stats on what people are using but also people– our members who rate the software as well as, with essence, what's– you know, what people like. Mark: That's– that's pretty cool. So what software would you say is really– sum of the people should be paying attention to in 2018? What's really been growing quite a bit over the past year? Andrew: I'd say, you know, search shopping biggest one's and that's probably become as a surprise to people but Shopify just dominates in this area, you look at that thousand-ish area in our community and I think probably about forty (40)– Four hundred and twenty (420), four hundred and thirty (430) of them succumb, you know, over forty (40) percent close to forty five (45) percent use Shopify and the number of people we've seen switch to Shopify from Magento over the last two (2)- three (3) years is just unbelievable, they've done a really good job capturing that market shares. So, on a shopping card side, that's when I'd say, the other four well kind of three that we have within the– still the merchant E-mail marketing, Mailchimp is the number one. They've got two hundred and eighty two (282) out of our top one thousand and Clivio's to seventeen of our top one thousand. So both those are kind of the leaders there. Fairly close. Help desks, we've got Zendesk- is the top to use, sixty one (61) out of a thousand use them, but help scouts pretty close behind there and they get slightly better ratings. And I would be surprised if we didn't see a flip-flop of that seen help scout come on the top over the next year. And for product reviews, Shopify parse based on the facts that people use, Shopify is reviewed, built on reviews the system has most popularly used. YAGPO used to be that number one spot but they dropped to number three (3) this last year. Partially, they got great functionality but I think a lot of the kind of experience that I've heard from stores is just their pricing is getting quite a bit more expensive. And so you see, companies like Stem Dot ayo who offers similar functionality at a much lower price might come in, they'd jump up significantly this year up to the number two (2) spot. So, those were kind of the trends I'm seeing. For disclosure we've had the Claygo sponsor of our podcast. YAGPO use to sponsor us and Shoprite sponsored us in the past. Mark: Right so that might be infusive but I'd want to share something, cause I think you'll actually appreciate this. I'm working on a client right now and hopefully, let's say business here soon, tell me last time you heard this: He's on Yahoo! shopping card. Andrew: Well occasionally we get somebody on the forum saying “Hey, I'm on Yahoo! stores, should I migrate or how do I migrate.” It's always an entertaining thread to read. Yeah, that's– curious people laugh. Mark: When they told me that, It's like “Woah, I haven't heard that for at least like five or six years. It used to be the gold standard that everybody used. Andrew: Well, I think- I mean, if you look in the cell that's probably a decent positioning stand point for someone who's careful of migrations and reason. I'd still say “Hey!” but you know, I'm sure there's some incredibly converting Yahoo! store sites out there but you can probably modernize and probably get thick enough conversion, it's a rebrand, it's a nice value out of your– if you're going to buy this thing. Mark: Yeah, that's an interesting listing, which I'm sure a lot of people will be looking at once it comes out but yeah. So , let's talk a little bit about Magento and fact that there's– I seem I heard a little bit, my only foreign in E-commerce that I wrote a blog post on this years ago but it was kind of disaster for myself. My foreign in E-commerce side, what with Magento and– My goodness, I had so much trouble with it. What do you think the problem is with Magento. Are they just losing out at Shopify or are there problems that are kind of inherent at Shopify. Andrew. It's– I think it really depends year-use case. It's–Magento's incredibly powerful. They've got a decent eco-system for a lot of their extensions but it's just so complex. Like I've been on multiple shopping cards; Zencard, Shopify, Magento. And by far, the hardest one to customize was Magento. Even just changing layouts around on the homepage was a nightmare and I– so I think, I think the problem is, is that it's-it's very powerful but it's much more complex than your average store owners specially in the seven (7) figures is going to need. When you look at the benefit of having full customization verse's the benefit of ease of administration and up key maintenance Shopify or another Host solution just makes, just makes more sense. And I think that there, when you think about it, if you do actually need to have access to the code base to be able to fully customize your site which is definitely–there are definitely stores out there that would be able to create custom functionality, be able to put together custom integrations that you can, with maybe some hosting solutions if the IPI's would allow it. If you need a hundred percent customization there are other cards out there that maybe– a little lighter way or quite as heavy and resource intensive and hard to customize as Magento that are probably a better option for people on that seven (7) figure range. Mark: Yeah, alright, cool. I want to go to the first point that you brought up, and that is, that revenues are up across the board from a review that you've seen, which this is something that is seen across the board as well with the business that were selling right? The business that you're selling, the values just seem going up, up, and up. And I don't know if this is a maturation or the industry just businesses that have been around longer and now are a richer skill or– really what's behind it? You make a point in your report here about– where is it? That would be the margins, the cross margins seem to hold up as well. Can you come on a little bit on the margins that you're seeing on E-commerce. I think the margins here– seen: growth margin, average of 39.2 percent and that margins of 17.4 percent. What is the trend to start with bend with that and over the past few of these revenues growing that's all same level? Andrew: Yeah, So this is something that surprise me, with how much Amazon is growing and how, you know much it's supposed to talk about. Our margin bends this opportunity. You would expect that margins to come on with more pressure this year. What I found was that they didn't slide as much as I thought they would've. Tiny bit but not very much, like you mentioned, the growth margin was 39.2 percent I think last year was a little bit higher, like 39.7 or 8 percent so it sled like a tiny bit but not much and same on the net merchant this year it was 70.4. I think last year it was 70.8 or 9. So it came down a little bit but nearly as much as I was expecting to see and if you look at the margins of stores for selling primarily on their own platform versus that are primarily selling on Amazon. This might be interesting for people, the growth margin for people primarily signed on Amazon is thirty six (36) percent versus 40.4 percent selling by their own store. And neither I expect that because Amazon takes a fee and new work fees that pays on top for Veer store. But even when you count for all the fees and the advertising you get bend your own store versus Amazon. You're still going to set a better margin selling on your own stores 17.7 percent after all said and done versus Amazon which is 16.6 so that's kind of hell of margins broke down this year. Mark: That's fascinating! Something that I feel being of interest with a lot of buyers is this average growth by business model and the format. So obviously with E-commerce you have a lot of different ways that you can do E-commerce and I'll get buyers sometimes say “Men, I want to buy a business.” “What are you thinking of?” “E-commerce.” “What type of the E-commerce?” I don't know. Okay– You have to understand like, in E-commerce there's some significant differences. Drop shipping had growth of 32.7 percent recently 27.6. I'm actually a little surprised to see more growth in the drop shipping category than in reselling category. Andrew: I was too. I was very surprised to see that. And one of my guesses about why that was, just a guess but this last year, Shopify bought Oberlo, I believe it's that pronounced, the integrator with Ali Express. You kind of have seen a significant up taken in people using that drop shipping from China via AliExpress model this year or last eighteen (18) months and I wonder if that– part of that is a responsible fact 'cause looking back at last year's report, if I remember correctly, drop shipping was– had the lowest growth. I think our selling beat it out. So, I wonder if that is what potentially changed the tides on things. Mark: Yeah, possible. And in all fairness you list here the percentage of stores that are also have flatten beckoning revenues and drop shipping seems to be just kind of split right down the middle here. You have thirty three (33) percent, basically growing thirty three (33) percent that are flat or declining so they're also– although they're doing okay there is a number that are also in a hurting category. Andrew: Exactly! yeah, Exactly, about a third of drop shipping business is at either flat or in declines. So last year, again surprisingly it's–I was– seeing the numbers, having a drop shipping business myself, whether reasons I sold that business was because I saw they had wins with drop shipping, it's pretty much more difficult with Amazon and with some other forces and last year you stated, the merchant fifty (50) percent of drop shipping stores were either flat or declining. And that's come down significantly where you're only thirty three (33) percent or in that category now. So I think part of that is potentially or below, I think part of that is just an improved year. But when you look at the stores in the other categories in rough shape, either stalled out or shrinking, you'll see much smaller numbers. Any more from fifteen (15) to twenty (20) percent for all the other categories, reselling private label, manufacturing. So yeah, so definitely some stronger areas, I think still drop shipping– there is still drop shipping business I think that work well. It's just a much harder nut to crack and you really have to be able to have a good way to add value outside of the product because you're resetting commodities and come on in and sell this as well. So it's just trickier to get right at it. Mark: Right! And I think there are some industries back with the shoverey I had into E-commerce with doing gun safes. It's going to be not very realistic to the warehouse. Gun safe in most cases once you're doing very large volumes just because the shipping cost or so, so high regardless what you're doing. Andrew: Right. Mark: So there are some businesses that land themselves to that. I think it should be no surprise to anybody that private label and manufacturing seem to be the biggest winners with forty three (43) and forty two (42) percent on every forty three (43) percent both the categories were growing and only twenty one (21) of fifteen (15) percent of those categories respectively were shrinking. Andrew: just to clarify mark, that's– so for private label and manufacturing that's the actual revenue growth rate per year. So private label will be growing like forty three (43) percent and manufacturing growing in about forty two (42) percent per year. Mark: Okay! Good! Good clarification. Fastest growing category. Is this something that we could ask all the time or what businesses are hot now? Which should I be looking for a buyer or looking to buy something? At the top of your list pet supplies which isn't a huge surprise whenever we get a business that deals with pets. Oh men, I think just flies out the shelf when I get someone with inquiries on that. But I'm well surprised about food. Andrew: And I'll put on a disclaimer on here. We have forum of fifty people respond, you break down, let's say twenty (20) or thirty (30) categories. We do not have growth bust to this as I would love and I imagine that if we got– if we have five (5) thousand, I'm sure that this numbers might be a little bit different. Take this with a little bit of a aggression that if we didn't have–we had almost no data points, these are coming off to history businesses to come off you know. It's nine (9) or ten (10) or more businesses so-. But yeah food is on there and I've seen, and I told you, a handful of businesses doing well in the food space over the last year so, That was little surprising but yeah, definitely nonetheless. It was coming in about fifty six (56) percent year over year. And again another carry up for this is again our stores are in a small in a high six (6), seven (7) figure range a lot of them so, you probably want to see high gross rates here than you would, just across the board for any businesses but still strong show food. Mark: Yeah! and probably one of the most eyed- piece of data that I've seen in to support in again. I'm focusing a lot on this one category because I think it's going to be interesting for a lot of our buyers. Men's clothing, thumbs up! Women's clothing, not growing as fast. Such an interesting this really. Andrew: Yeah! I mean it's not even-it's a huge gap. Fifty three (53) percent, men's clothing and accessories versus twenty eight (28) percent in woman's clothing and accessories and I think it's– I think part of that is just you have– I mean woman's fashion, I think is more saturated, more– just traditionally. And I think you're starting to see more interesting kind of men's apparel come out. Specially direct to consumer, men's apparel and– yeah it's almost current twice as fast 'cause I just think there's more room than there is much competition. There's still, I mean your apparel, not an easy place to be in but men's versus women, I think men's probably much easier place to make money right now. Mark: Yeah, absolutely! So, last, put them in a do with the steadily commerce– clocking pretty quickly, I think this is probably the funniest question I've seen, anybody ask on survery about your favorite entrepreneur. How did you select these four entrepreneurs. And the four that you choose likely just set anyone, let's see: Ian Moss, Richard Branson, Mark Cuban, and Jeff Basels. Some of those makes sense, how did you slot those four? Andrew: Oh, I got to have Basels on the right 'cause he's the you know, king of E-commerce. The other, I was just trying to come up with, with four well-known billionaires, the idea of being cool, do you know what billionaire who you want to have lunch with and just top up of my head once that came to mind that were worth the billion dollars at least is Ian and kind of just came to me quickly was those four, kind of those than that. Mark: I'm actually surprised Ian Moss by large margins. Andrew: (laughs) You want to be the– Almost thirty (30) percent it was Richard Branson, second was twenty five (25), Cuban twenty three (23), and Basels. Surprisingly or maybe not so surprisingly given this is an E-commerce survey and– some people in here, a little help with the others as well, was Basels with 22.2 so– Mark: I'm not surprised at all. I was really hoping back think we are can you get to it this time, so maybe we can do it at future episode, I was really hoping to talk a little bit about you're experiences on your own businesses, your own E-commerce businesses and what that was like because you self-sold, you didn't use appropriate off those and I think the first one you did– Didn't you do a public auction with that? Andrew: First one? I did and it was kind of strange and I think you were kind enough to retouch me after that and give me some tips and talk to me about it in a real gracious way. I did it was reverse auction, so the way it worked was like I listed the site– well first it was– everything was publicly transparent as you know most of the sales that you do, fairly quiet about the financials, the instance, the data. And I– the options, I published all the financials, all the key things, there was a few things I held back that might have been easy to rip-off the business with but ninety (90) percent, for PINO balance sheet, all I can have set, I made public and– so that was one part. Second part was I do the answer, reverse auction and so the price started at a hundred and ninety to eighty five thousand dollars, and then every week would drop by ten thousand dollars until somebody decide they wanted to buy it and I had someone, I think at the first week of before evening drop, and take it up. So it was kind of a very unorthodox way to sell a business and only the first one to say I think I lacked out on getting a great buyer from the out set that we work well together and close the deal. I very much could've blown it in my face, but -yeah. A little bit different. Mark: If somebody wants to look at that, you can do a search on Google for E-commerce fuel and sign E-commerce business. I believe it actually come up in the third results, if I'm not mistaken or we can make it easier and link up our show notes, and some one will like the post . Andrew: Also, new link for the show notes and also if you could Google E-commerce fuel reverse auction or reverse auction “trollingmotors.net” That's the name of the business that might pop-up as well. Mark: That's right, remember that new E-mail do you have? I mean it was completely selfish forums on my part, I just wanted to be in front of the audience so– Andrew: (laughs) Mark: But see you got a lot of really cool resources available in E-commerce field obviously there is a form which is you have to apply for in order to get in to say no that you're going to get high quality members there. You guys also have a job board that you release in week. I think it's so , discretion it's so often to people who buys site and who want to have fines with good confidence and help. I don't really recommend anything to people but you guys just recently started up a job org. Andrew: We did, yeah! That something we saw was a both kind of a gap in the market and also just like you said, something our members are having a hard time with was finding a really good quality E-commerce talent. and our job award is focused on E-commerce directors or managers kind of high level. You know people they can run an entire operations for an owner as well as exceptional marketers PPC, E-mail Mark any things like that and exceptional customer service reps so people that are really good on customer service over the phone or email or chats. So that's our job board list in the positions we really focus on, and try to– try to build a community, a job board that's healthier so that when you run a store, you know where you can go to get in front of an audience of people looking for dispositions and if you're lucky to get the E-commerce world it's a great place to going to be able to find an opportunity, hopefully to get plugged in and you can actually find that at ecommercefuel.com/jobs. Mark: you're going to owe me a lot of thanks, I'm going to send them, all on the show notes. Andrew: , So Mark, I will happily send you as many links– [inaudible 0:32:58.6] I bet that won't be a problem. Mark: Of course, it's been an awesome state of Merchant report, this is your second doing it, is that right? Andrew: Second year doing it, hope to do it every year. And yeah– this is the second year. Mark: It's also lot of work to put together but there's few things I look forward to. As one of those things I look forward to, I think there's actually really good data insights in this report. Anyway that's been invite, or anyone who's in E-commerce space in general. This is something that you want to check out for sure. If you are not familiar with the E-commerce fuel I would definitely recommend checking them out and I know I'm completely endorsing you, this is not something I normally do but I really do believe we should do in over there at E-commerce fuel. I know so many members there that they become friends of our company and personal friends as well. I like to brag about things that I think will actually help people and honestly your group is out there helping a lot of people in space. Andrew: well thank you, I appreciate the kind words, Mark. And one thing I wanted to mention just on a say the merchant if you're a daily geek and you want the add the numbers or your smarter than me which is almost certainly the case and one plots some more insights from these, we make all of the data just openly available so you can go to the webpage for this post and download the full data set so by all means a stats measure or try to do the best I can but if you want to -if you have insights you can plot of it we do make whole data set available for people so, Mark: Yeah! and if you pull on any insights send an email over to Andrew, just let him know. I'm sure he would love to see it. Andrew: I'd love to hear about it, yeah , please do. Mark: Cool, Andrew thanks, so much for coming on, I hope to have you on some time in the future. Really, really appreciate it. Andrew: Mark, thanks for letting me, you know, the invitation and for the support that you've given the- to our fans, to our community over the years. Appreciate that as well Mark: Cool, alright, well hey, enjoy that vacation! Andrew: Thanks appreciate that! Links and Resources: eCommerceFuel State of the Merchant 2018 Story of Andrew's first eCommerce site sale eCommerce fuel job board