Podcasts about barely

On this week's episode of Barely Famous, Kail sits down with Rei Clarke- the TikTok/IG creator known for breaking down reality TV chaos in real time. Kail asks the questions people actually want answered: where “tea” comes from, how you fact-check in a world of rumors, and what separates reporting from opinion.It's funny and unfiltered, but also surprisingly thoughtful especially when they get into internet accountability, why some scandals stick forever, and what it's like living on both sides of the headline.Follow Rei's Tik Tok and Instagram for more!For full video episodes head to patreon.com/kaillowryTo shop all merch head to kaillowry.comThanks for supporting the show by checking out the sponsors!Quince: Give yourself the luxury you deserve with Quince! Go to quince.com/famousTo find the right home for you head to apartments.comTalkiatry: Head to Talkiatry.com/famous and complete the short assessment to get matched with an in‑network psychiatrist in just a few minutes.Boll And Branch: Now's your chance to change the way you sleep with Boll and Branch. Get 15% off, plus free shipping on your first set of sheets at bollandbranch.com/barelyfamousTonal: Right now, Tonal is offering my listeners $200 off your Tonal purchase at tonal.com with promo code BARELY.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Barely legal. YouTube star Piper Rockelle turns to OnlyFans. Plus, Grammy-nominated artist Madison Beer on her new album. And Hilary Duff goes on tour. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Our guest today is hitting his record 6 time appearance on the pod which means we get him roughly once a year and even that blows my mind. You've seen him in countless Film and TV projects from The Great and Powerful OZ to Get Hard. He's one half of an iconic improv duo you can show to you parents and say “see, this is why I do it” to help make them understand with TJ and Dave and you can currently catch him in his new movie alongside Matt Trudeu, Meir Steinberg, and Michael Shannon called BULLS streaming on Apple TV+. Heck of card player, helluva a magnet fisherman, and one of the all time great improvisers, It's TJ Jagodowski. ⁠Join our Patreon for bonus scenes, back log episode, and exclusive premium content!Hosts:Hosts: ⁠Damian Anaya⁠, ⁠Tim Lyons⁠,Sound By Nick

War Room Bombshell New Docs Show Trump Called Police About Epstein in 2006: ‘Thank Goodness You're Stopping Him,' Lutnick Testifies He ‘Barely Had Anything' to Do With Epstein

Listen to this week's episode of Beach Weekly to hear about notable Grammy winners and concert tickets outrageous prices, especially for popular artists.

Barely out of his teens, Jim Kelly suffered a devastating and life changing accident that paralyzed him. His road to partial recovery helped him see life differently - and perhaps was the impetus behind his success as an educator and, eventually, writer. And, yes. I had a crush on him in high school. . .  This is part one of our recent conversation. You can find his books at jmkellyauthor.com

The Utah Jazz did everything they could to lose this game to the Atlanta Hawks and Quin Snyder and Jalen Johnson could BARELY beat the Jazz. Pretty pathetic stuff from the Atlanta Hawks and overrated Quin Snyder.Follow me on Twitch here: https://www.twitch.tv/hoops_nerdFollow me on Twitter here: https://twitter.com/hansenjamesFollow me on Bluesky here: https://bsky.app/profile/hoopsnerd.bsky.socialFollow me on Instagram here: https://www.instagram.com/hoopsnerdnba/#utahjazz #postgame #nba

A 19-year-old hitchhiker had just 12 hours to live when she escaped through a bathroom window — her captor, a NASA engineer with top-secret Pentagon clearance, had already drained nearly half her blood.IN THIS EPISODE: John Brennan Crutchley was no ordinary rapist and murderer. He added vampirism into his modus operandi. (The True Story of the Vampire Rapist) *** The spooklight phenomenon caused panic in a small Missouri community in the late 1800s – frightening many to the point of moving their family away. And today, the Joplin Spooklight is still a mystery that remains unsolved despite appearing several times a year. (The Mysterious Missouri Spooklights) *** Based on its name alone, you'd think the Gympie-Gympie plant is small, cute, and harmless. In reality, it's one of the most dangerous plants in the world – and you'll want to stay as far from it as possible. (The Deadly Gympie-Gympie) *** We'll end the broadcast with one of the strangest funerals you've likely ever heard! (Polly Wanna Tombstone) CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…00:00:00.000 = The Foreboding00:01:13.146 = Show Open00:02:53.503 = The True Story of the Vampire Rapist00:14:52.231 = Mysterious Missouri Spooklights ***00:19:13.226 = The Deadly Gympie-Gympie00:25:25.117 = The Entity That Followed Me (from a Weird Darkness listener) ***00:34:00.100 = Shared Worlds (from a Weird Darkness listener)00:43:37.225 = Polly Wanna Tombstone00:50:32.498 = Show Close*** = Begins immediately after inserted ad breakSOURCES and RESOURCES:“The True Story of the Vampire Rapist” by Cat McAuliffe for Unspeakable Times:https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/4erta5zb“The Mysterious Missouri Spooklights” from TulsaWorld.com: (Link no longer valid.)“The Deadly Gympie-Gympie” from TheScareChamber.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/skykszwa“Polly Wanna Tombstone” by Chris Woodyard for The Victorian Book of the Dead: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/vcd6me3n=====(Over time links may become invalid, disappear, or have different content. I always make sure to give authors credit for the material I use whenever possible. If I somehow overlooked doing so for a story, or if a credit is incorrect, please let me know and I will rectify it in these show notes immediately. Some links included above may benefit me financially through qualifying purchases.)= = = = ="I have come into the world as a light, so that no one who believes in me should stay in darkness." — John 12:46= = = = =WeirdDarkness® is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2026, Weird Darkness.=====Originally aired: July 01, 2021EPISODE PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/VampireRapistABOUT WEIRD DARKNESS: Weird Darkness is a true crime and paranormal podcast narrated by professional award-winning voice actor, Darren Marlar. Seven days per week, Weird Darkness focuses on all things strange and macabre such as haunted locations, unsolved mysteries, true ghost stories, supernatural manifestations, urban legends, unsolved or cold cases, conspiracy theories, and more. Weird Darkness has been named one of the “20 Best Storytellers in Podcasting” by Podcast Business Journal. Listeners have described the show as a blend of “Coast to Coast AM”, “The Twilight Zone”, “Unsolved Mysteries”, and “In Search Of”.DISCLAIMER: Stories and content in Weird Darkness can be disturbing for some listeners and intended for mature audiences only. Parental discretion is strongly advised.#WeirdDarkness #VampireRapist #JohnBrennanCrutchley #TrueCrime #SerialKiller #NASAEngineer #FloridaCrime #TrueCrimeStories #ColdCase #UnsolvedMurders #CriminalMinds #TrueCrimeCommunity #Kidnapping #SurvivorStory #CrimeDocumentary #TrueHorror #PentagonSecrets #BrevardCounty #CriminalPsychology #TrueCrimeYouTube

Was Joseph Smith's relationship with Fanny Alger an early plural marriage, a sexless sealing, or a scandalous sexual affair? Long before Nauvoo polygamy, secret sealings, or theological justifications, there was Fanny Alger; a teenage girl living in Joseph and Emma Smith's home in Kirtland, Ohio. When the relationship was discovered, it triggered scandal, apostasy, and… Read More »Joseph Smith & Fanny Alger: Barely Scraping By

Was Joseph Smith's relationship with Fanny Alger an early plural marriage, a sexless sealing, or a scandalous sexual affair? Long before Nauvoo polygamy, secret sealings, or theological justifications, there was Fanny Alger; a teenage girl living in Joseph and Emma Smith's home in Kirtland, Ohio. When the relationship was discovered, it triggered scandal, apostasy, and… Read More »Joseph Smith & Fanny Alger: Barely Scraping By The post Joseph Smith & Fanny Alger: Barely Scraping By appeared first on Mormon Discussions Podcasts - Full Lineup.

Was Joseph Smith's relationship with Fanny Alger an early plural marriage, a sexless sealing, or a scandalous sexual affair? Long before Nauvoo polygamy, secret sealings, or theological justifications, there was Fanny Alger; a teenage girl living in Joseph and Emma Smith's home in Kirtland, Ohio. When the relationship was discovered, it triggered scandal, apostasy, and one of the earliest crises in Mormon leadership. In this episode, we start by taking a look into the life of Fanny Alger sharing details of her life that are little known even to those familiar with Mormon history. We then examine every major historical source connected to the Fanny Alger story including letters, later reminiscences, church disciplinary records. Then onto the Apologetics and what they are trying to resolve. And lastly we share something that hasn’t been used by either side in this discussion and this you won’t want to miss. We ask the uncomfortable questions: • Why did Oliver Cowdery call the incident a “dirty, nasty, filthy scrape”? • Why did church leaders discipline Cowdery for accusing Joseph of adultery — without denying the accusation itself? • Why does Fanny Alger quietly disappear from official church records for decades? • And do apologetic claims that “we can't know what happened” actually hold up? We also follow Fanny's life after Mormonism; her marriage, property ownership, and long, stable adulthood and ask what her silence might tell us about power, authority, and who controls the narrative. This is not folklore. This is not anti-Mormon spin. This is history read carefully. RESOURCES: https://mormondiscussionpodcast.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2026/02/Fanny-Alger-Episode-Sources-1.pdf

By day, Amber Ivey uses big data to inform governmental policy decisions. Back in 2020, she was invited to tinker with a new tool from a young startup called OpenAI - two years before the public had ever heard the phrase "ChatGPT." She knew right away that the LLM would have huge ramifications for the way we relate to the Internet, and that kids would be particularly enraptured by it. She wrote a children's book about it, and her access to experts on the topic lead her to the next project: A podcast for kids and families about AI literacy - the risks, the potential, and the how we reckon with a digital world where nothing is what it seems. This week, Amber and Matt sit down to discuss what kids really understand when interacting with generative models, how to apply IRL critical thinking skills to the Internet, and why parents need credible and useful information now more than ever. Listen to "AI for Kids" wherever you get podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ai-for-kids/id1745917083 Connect with Amber and follow her work: https://www.ambermivey.com/ This show is made possible by listener support: https://www.patreon.com/influencepod Listen & subscribe wherever you get podcasts:

The AP's Alex Veiga reports with the latest on U.S. mortgage rates.

Welcome back to Everymum the podcast, I'm Aisling Keenan. My guest this week is the wonderful and always lovely Jen Carroll, who many of you will know as her online persona, Jen's Journey. Jen has lived more life than most of us and she's only in her 30s. She's gone from deeply unhappy and having no self-esteem in a difficult relationship, to being a happy, confident homeowner and mother of one, who is inspiring people every day on her social channels. We go through Jen's full journey in this episode, from having her son in London, changing her life and documenting it all online, coming back to Ireland and having a ten year old now who lights up her life. Her story is so inspiring and she's just one of the most authentic people you could ever meet which I know is why so many people love following her online. This is an episode that would give anyone they hope they need to get through adversity and come out the other side to a much happier, safer and more fulfilled life. This is our last episode for season 18, what a great one to finish on! After a few weeks break we'll be back again with season 19 with even more brilliant guests, so join us then and a huge huge thank you for listening, as always. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

What do you do when you keep praying for God to remove someone… and they're still here?In Episode 278, a listener writes in about dating a man who came in strong — intentional, consistent, saying all the right things, and claiming his goal was marriage and family. But once she finally became his girlfriend, the effort disappeared. No thoughtfulness. No intentional dates. Barely any engagement. He doesn't ask questions, doesn't remember what she shares, talks over her, talks down to her, and she's left wondering if he's even a kind person.What makes it harder is that it feels like no one in his world knows she exists — friends, family, everyone. She's prayed and prayed for God to remove him if he isn't meant for her… but instead of him leaving, they keep “working through it,” while going nowhere. Now she's trying to discern whether this is God telling her to stay, or whether God has already shown her enough — and she needs to choose clarity, boundaries, and peace.We talk about the danger of over-spiritualizing what's actually a decision, why you can't keep letting someone's indecision set the pace for your life, and what it looks like to stop waiting for a person to change when the reality is already loud.Have you ever stayed too long because you were waiting for God to make the exit obvious?Resources & LinksFather Yourself Firsthttps://www.amazon.com/Father-Yourself-First-Everything-Deserves/dp/1400252555Release Rest Remainhttps://a.co/d/ihBmSdOYvette's Email Listhttps://yvettehenry.com/join-the-listRelease Rest Remain Bible Reading Planhttps://www.bible.com/en/reading-plans/64646Premarital Advantagehttps://howmarriedareyoupodcast.mykajabi.com/offers/VAbsx8N2Black Men's Meetinghttps://partiful.com/e/kuXEBUC7PHfydRmI3sz4?HMAY Amazon Storefront (affiliate)https://www.amazon.com/shop/howmarriedareyou?ref_=cm_sw_r_apin_aipsfshop_0EGMQR9KJ94D8YGCDMV7&language=en-US

A fire swept through the Anwona Market near Afful Nkwanta in the Kumasi Metropolis, causing extensive damage to shops. It comes barely 24hours after a similar incident destroyed properties at a cluster of mechanic shops at Sofoline

Ever heard of a band that traveled to Egypt on a Goethe Institute tour, recorded street sounds in Cairo bazaars, then came home to Berlin and created one of the most mind-bending krautrock albums of the '70s? This week, we're digging into Malesch by Agitation Free—a 1972 experimental masterpiece that won our listener poll despite none of us having ever heard it before. This is pure discovery territory.In this episode, we explore how a Berlin rock band named themselves after playing a free show, lost their drummer to Tangerine Dream, then embarked on a two-week Middle Eastern tour that changed everything. Armed with field recorders and cutting-edge EMS Synthi A synthesizers, Agitation Free created an album that sounds simultaneously prehistoric and futuristic—cosmic krautrock fused with Egyptian street recordings, primal percussion, and space-age electronics.We discuss what makes Malesch so challenging yet compelling: the lack of traditional song structures, the subtle integration of Middle Eastern influences without clichés, the innovative use of early synth technology, and why this album works better as immersive background music than active listening. Is this metal? Barely. Is it original? Absolutely. Does it connect to modern bands like Blood Incantation? More than you'd think.If you love Tangerine Dream, Can, Cluster, early Pink Floyd, Grateful Dead jams, or experimental krautrock that defies easy categorization, this episode is for you.Episode Highlights0:00 – Intro & Poll Results – How an obscure 1972 krautrock album beat out Humble Pie for our January 70s poll4:32 – Band History – From “Agitation” to “Agitation Free” and the Tangerine Dream connection6:10 – The Middle East Tour – Goethe Institute sponsorship, field recordings in Egypt, Lebanon, Cyprus, and Greece9:21 – “You Play For Us Today” – Opening the album with phrases captured from a Middle East Airlines pilot13:17 – What Works – Atmospheric mood-setting, early synth innovation, and why this sounds like nothing else from 197219:00 – “Pulse” – The buzzing, bee-like synthesizer showcase that's both annoying and mesmerizing21:10 – Krautrock Context – How German post-war youth created experimental music that influenced decades of rock22:26 – The Blood Incantation Connection – Modern death metal's surprising embrace of ambient krautrock24:03 – The Jandek Tangent – Why Malesch is challenging but not that challenging28:05 – What Doesn't Work – Fragmented structure, lack of consistent grooves, and the “convincing metalheads this is metal” challenge30:39 – “Malesch” – The eight-minute title track that's the album's most mesmerizing moment34:01 – Final Ratings – Worthy Album vs. Decent Single debate37:40 – Band Legacy – Still active in 2023, Christopher Franke's Tangerine Dream career, and the Vertigo swirl label collectibilityJoin the Metal Union! Become a Patreon member at digmeoutpodcast.com to vote on future albums, access bonus episodes, and join our private Discord community. Visit dmounion.com to keep the metal ad-free and make the next episode happen.Explore more 70s and 80s metal deep cuts, forgotten krautrock gems, and underrated progressive rock classics. Subscribe wherever you get podcasts and follow us for weekly episodes covering everything from Humble Pie to Agitation Free—the albums you know and the ones you've never heard of.#AgitationFree #Malesch #Krautrock #GermanRock #1970sRock #ExperimentalRock #ProgRock #TangerineDream #VertigoRecords #DigMeOut #MetalPodcast #70sMetal #KrautrockClassics #PsychedelicRock #EMSSynthiA #MiddleEasternRock #CultClassics #ObscureAlbums This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.digmeoutpodcast.com/subscribe

Bassie Garelik shares about growing up in a Chassidic home in Pittsburgh and putting down roots with her Soviet-raised husband in far-off Italy, a task in which the Rebbe guided them every step of the way.

Adam, David, Neil and Steve wade into this episode with opinions and expectations for the resumption of MotoGP duty and the first of two official tests to start 2026. Sepang will have the curious backdrop of a manic silly season of rider contract talk…but will also provide the first views of the last MotoGP race bikes of the current era. Photo thanks to MotoGP.com

On this episode of Barely Famous Kail sits down with Dover, Delaware entrepreneur Bobby Jones the owner of Brightside for a raw conversation about what it really looks like to rebuild a life when your starting line is nowhere near everyone else's.Bobby opens up about growing up in poverty, navigating foster care, and how early decisions can shape the way you see yourself for years. We talk about the mindset shifts that helped him break cycles, what redemption actually requires, and why “starting over” doesn't always mean leaving town. If you've ever felt trapped by your past, overwhelmed by where to begin, or like you're carrying a story you didn't choose this one will stick with you.Listen in for a powerful, honest conversation about resilience, accountability, second chances, and building something you're proud of one decision at a time.Follow Bobby here and check out BrightSide For full video episodes head to patreon.com/kaillowryTo shop all merch head to kaillowry.comThanks for supporting the show by checking out the sponsors!Hiya: for 50% off their best selling children's vitamin head to hiyahealth.com/famousDripDrop: Right now, DripDrop is offering podcast listeners 20% off your first order. Go to dripdrop.com and use promo code famous. Talkiatry: Head to Talkiatry.com/famous and complete the short assessment to get matched with an in‑network psychiatrist in just a few minutesProgressive: To get your auto insurance quote head to progressive.comLeesa: Go to Leesa.com for 20% off PLUS get an extra $50 off with promo code BARELY, exclusive for my listeners.Shopify: Start your one dollar a month free trial period at shopify.com/famousSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

“Just wait it out. It's just a phase.”

Good Morning BT with Bo Thompson and Beth Troutman | Wednesday, January 28th, 2026. 6:05 Beth’s Song of the Day 6:20 Guest: Theresa Payton (Cyber Security Expert) - Duke Energy scam text circulating | TikTok transition issues 6:35 RAM Biz Update; Barely Manilow contest Preview | TastingTable.com names least favorite fast food restaurant in America 6:50 Guest: Ray Stagich (Weather Channel Meteorologist) - Winter Weather Weekend part 2: Electric Boogaloo 7:05 Bill Belichick snubbed from first HOF ballot vote 7:20 40 years ago today: Challenger tragedy 7:35 Mark Garrison Reports: National Kazoo day 7:50 Winterble Wednesday: Crossing the streams with Brett Winterble 8:05 Brooks Koepka talks LIV exit/PGA return 8:20 Barely Manilow Contest: Barry Manilow tickets 8:35 Barely Manilow Contest: Barry Manilow tickets cont. 9:05 Guests: Tariq Bokhari & Larken Egleston 9:20 Tariq Bokhari & Larken Egleston cont. 9:35 Tariq Bokhari & Larken Egleston cont. 9:50 Tariq Bokhari & Larken Egleston cont. | Show wrapSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

NFL cheerleaders. They're ubiquitous, famous, and their pay ranges from six figures to the change they can scavenge from the stands after the game. And then you've got the refs who make 200k and are being slowly replaced with robots. The whole league makes no sense.Topics:Names are hardNFL play-calling techNFL cheerleadersFamily FeudThe Big Game is coming upExpensive steaksSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

How would a Maye shoulder injury impact the Patriots' Super Bowl game plan? // Grab Bag // Clip Du Jour/Crossover with WEEI Afternoons //

Good Morning BT with Bo Thompson and Beth Troutman | Tuesday, January 27th, 2026. 6:05 Beth’s Song of the Day | GMBTeam back in studio 6:20 Replay: Mick Mulvaney pt 1 - Kristi Noem comments on 2nd ICE shooting in Minnesota 6:35 Replay: Mick Mulvaney pt 2 - Tom Homan headed to Minnesota 6:50 RAM Biz Update; TCM will house Warner-Bros Looney Tunes "shorts" 7:05 Super Bowl Preview with Jim Szoke 7:20 Next seasons ACC Championship scheduled for Noon kickoff 7:35 Barely Manilow contest for Barry Manilow tickets 7:50 Barely Manilow contest for Barry Manilow tickets cont. 8:05 Hornets winning continues! Beat 76ers for third straight win 8:20 Bo's version of Dry January | "No Spend" January 8:35 Dirty Restaurant Tuesday with Mark Garrison 8:50 Guest: "Breaking" Brett Jensen 9:05 Bo and Beth read WBT Text Line 9:20 Bo and Beth talk Barry Manilow contest 9:35 Barry Manilow History with Bo and Beth 9:50 Show wrapSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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In this episode of The Rebellious Healer, Jenny sits down with Amy — a graduate of the 8-month EVOLVE MBR program — to share her powerful healing journey.After years of living with chronic digestive symptoms, rashes, hair loss, exhaustion, anxiety, and relying on countless treatments — from restrictive diets and functional medicine to energy work, therapy, and Western medicine — Amy felt defeated and resigned to a life of managing symptoms. Nothing brought lasting relief until she addressed what was happening beneath it all: her subconscious patterns.You'll hear how Amy went from fearing her body and barely getting through her days to fully trusting herself again — releasing medications, reclaiming her energy, and training to walk 75 miles on the Camino de Santiago.If you've ever felt like you've tried everything and still wonder what you're missing, this conversation reveals what's possible when you stop chasing fixes and start leading your body with clarity and trust.------------------------------------------------------Ready to resolve your chronic symptoms and get your life back?

I went back and watched Donald Trump's speech at Davos after the reaction to it spiraled into calls for the 25th Amendment. Having seen it in full, I have to say, that response struck me as pretty overstated. The speech was odd, repetitive, and occasionally sloppy, but it was also entirely familiar. Trump no longer has multiple registers. He speaks the same way at Davos that he does in Greensboro, North Carolina. Rally Trump is the only Trump left.Yes, he mixed up Greenland and Iceland, and that matters if you believe he is on the brink of ordering military action. But once the Greenland panic subsided and the White House quietly declared the issue settled, the speech reads less like evidence of incapacity and more like evidence of stagnation. Trump told the same tariff stories, did the same accents, and framed global politics through the same lens of personal deal making. That consistency may be unnerving, but it is not new. If anything, the Davos speech underscored how little adaptation Trump feels he needs to make, even on the world stage.Politics Politics Politics is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.DHS Infighting and the Immigration Power StruggleThe most revealing domestic story was the open tension inside the Department of Homeland Security. Reporting that Kristi Noem and Corey Lewandowski are trying to force out CBP Commissioner Rodney Scott is not just palace intrigue. It exposes a deeper divide between political operatives and career enforcement officials.On one side are Stephen Miller's allies, filtering through Noem and Lewandowski, pushing for maximal optics and aggressive deportation numbers. On the other are figures like Tom Homan and Rodney Scott, who argue that certain tactics erode public trust and make enforcement harder, not easier. Homan's recent media blitz reflects that anxiety. He keeps stressing that deportations are happening, that priorities exist, and that blue state resistance is the real bottleneck. When enforcement professionals feel compelled to publicly justify their competence, it usually means politics has begun to overwhelm operations.Congress Moves, Barely, and Voters NoticeOn Capitol Hill, the House narrowly passed funding for the Department of Homeland Security, overcoming Democratic opposition tied to immigration enforcement concerns. It was not a clean win. Only seven Democrats supported the bill, and the compromises focused on oversight rather than substantive limits on ICE. Still, the broader takeaway is that Congress is moving more bills than expected for late January, even as shutdown deadlines loom.At the same time, new polling suggests Democrats are regaining momentum. An Emerson College survey shows Democrats leading Republicans by six points on the generic congressional ballot, alongside Trump's approval sitting well underwater. Six points is not a wave by itself, but it is the range where wave watching becomes justified. Voters are signaling frustration on affordability and foreign policy, and that dissatisfaction is beginning to register in the numbers. If that margin holds or grows, Republicans will not be able to dismiss it as noise.Chapters00:00:00 - Intro00:03:23 - Davos00:16:05 - Ryan McBeth on Venezuela00:43:29 - Update00:43:58 - DHS Infighting00:47:18 - DHS Funding00:48:28 - Midterms Polling00:50:13 - Ryan McBeth on Iran01:06:19 - Ryan McBeth on Russia-Ukraine01:14:44 - Wrap-up This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.politicspoliticspolitics.com/subscribe

On today's brand new episode, we discuss perhaps one of the most quoted movies of the 2000s.   Barely grossing $6 million in its original theatrical release, this film made over $50 million in DVD sales alone.  In fact, the CEO of Blockbuster has gone on record calling it the most stolen movie of all-time because it was never voluntarily returned.  We are of course talking about 2006's Grandma's Boy. •0:00:00 - Introductions •0:04:30 - Memories of first viewing •0:07:30  - Pertinent movie details  •0:11:15  -  Critical and fan reviews •0:24:00 - Scene by scene breakdown  •1:43:00 - Modern day ratings —————————————————————— Link to purchase Mike's book: https://a.co/d/0vx06Iq SPONSORS-  **BIG GROVE- Check out our beers of the episode here- http://BigGrove.com  **NordVPN-  Grab your EXCLUSIVE NordVPN Deal by going to http://nordvpn.com/breakfast to get a Huge Discount off your NordVPN Plan + 4 additional months on top! It's completely risk-free with Nord's 30-day money-back guarantee! —————————————————————— **Support us at http://patreon.com/confusedbreakfast for bonus weekly episodes, voting on upcoming movies, giving your modern-day ratings on our movies and much more. **Mail us something   The Confused Breakfast PO Box 10016 Cedar Rapids, IA 52402-9802 Special thanks to our executive producers- Josh Miller, Starling, Dylan Mick and NicMad. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

More of Mormonism's canonized revelations originated in or near Kirtland than any other place. Yet many of the events connected with those revelations and their 1830s historical context have faded over time. Barely twenty-five years after the first of these Ohio revelations, Brigham Young lamented in 1856: “These revelations, after a lapse of years, become mystified [sic] to those who were not personally acquainted with the circumstances at the time they were given.” He gloomily predicted that eventually the revelations “may be as mysterious to our children . . . as the revelations contained in the Old and New Testaments are to this generation.” Now, more than 150 years later, the distance between what Brigham Young and his Kirtland contemporaries considered common knowledge and our understanding of the same material today has widened into a sometimes daunting gap. Mark Staker narrows the chasm in Hearken, O Ye People by reconstructing the cultural experiences by which Kirtland's Latter-day Saints made sense of the revelations Joseph Smith pronounced. This volume rebuilds that exciting decade using clues from numerous archives, privately held records, museum collections, and even the soil where early members planted corn and homes. From this vast array of sources he shapes a detailed narrative of weather, religious backgrounds, dialect differences, race relations, theological discussions, food preparation, frontier violence, astronomical phenomena, and myriad daily customs of nineteenth-century life. The result is a “from the ground up” experience that today's Latter-day Saints can all but walk into and touch. Mark Lyman Staker was a senior researcher in the Church History Department of the LDS Church when this was written. He received his PhD in cultural anthropology from University of Florida. For more than fifteen years, Mark has been involved in historic sites restoration and nineteenth-century expressions of the Latter-day Saint experience. He received the J. Talmage Jones Award of Excellence for an Outstanding Article on Mormon History from the Mormon History Association, and he has been involved in numerous museum exhibits. He and his wife, Kimberly, are the parents of seven children and live in West Bountiful, Utah. The post Hearken, O Ye People: The Historical Setting of Joseph Smith's Ohio Revelations – Mark Staker – appeared first on The Cultural Hall Podcast.

Drummer Michael Shrieve's story reads like a rock-and-roll fairy tale — the kind of musical journey that blends youthful serendipity with restless creativity, and a lifelong appetite for pushing boundaries. Before he was a name on Santana's classic albums or a Rock & Roll Hall of Famer, he was a kid with sticks and big dreams.Born in California, Shrieve grew up deeply drawn to music. As a teenager he played in his first serious band and gigged around backing rhythm and blues acts — even sitting in with seasoned performers like B.B. King and Etta James.At just 16, a pivotal moment came when he sat in during a jam at San Francisco's famed Fillmore Auditorium. His playing caught someone's ear — Santana's manager Stan Marcum — setting the stage for his astonishing ascent.At 19, Shrieve met Carlos Santana in a studio and was invited to join the band on the spot. It was a leap that would change his life. Almost immediately after joining, Shrieve found himself at the center of one of rock's defining moments: Santana's performance at Woodstock in August 1969. Barely 20 years old, his explosive drum solo on “Soul Sacrifice” became one of the enduring visual and sonic highlights of the event's documentary.Between '69 and '74, Shrieve played on Santana's first seven albums: Santana (1969), Abraxas (1970), Santana III (1971), Caravanserai (1972), Welcome (1973) and Borboletta (1974), plus the live album Lotus (1974).He wasn't just a timekeeper. On Caravanserai he co-produced and co-wrote four tracks, helping guide the band into more experimental, jazz-infused territory. His work helped broaden the possibilities of rock percussion, drawing on influences from jazz greats and Latin rhythms alike.By the mid-'70s, Shrieve was ready to expand his musical palette beyond Santana. He left the band to pursue solo projects and relocated to London. One of his first ventures was Automatic Man , a group that blended rock with progressive and funk elements. He then joined the avant-garde fusion supergroup Go, alongside formidable musicians like Steve Winwood, Stomu Yamashta, Klaus Schulze and Al Di Meola. The band released multiple albums and toured, diving deep into jazz, electronic and world music textures.Throughout the late '70s and '80s Shrieve stayed busy, playing with Hagar Schon Aaronson Shrieve (with Neal Schon and Sammy Hagar) and contributing to albums by artists as diverse as The Rolling Stones (Emotional Rescue, 1980) and Roger Hodgson of Supertramp. He also collaborated on Richard Wahnfried projects with electronic composer Klaus Schulze and recorded his own electronic music.After leaving Santana, Shrieve didn't slow down — he reinvented himself again and again. Beyond rock and fusion bands, he became a composer and session player whose credits include work with Mick Jagger, George Harrison, Pete Townshend, Andy Summers, Jaco Pastorius and many others.He also ventured into film music, composing scores for movies including Tempest and Apollo 13, and continued collaborations with musicians across genres.In 1997 he reunited with former Santana members — Neal Schon, Gregg Rolie, José Areas and Michael Carabello — in Abraxas Pool, a project that revisited and re-imagined elements of the classic Santana sound.Shrieve's contributions were formally recognized when he was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1998 for his work with Santana, and later honored with Guitar Center's Lifetime Achievement Award in 2005. He's also been cited by Rolling Stone as one of rock's greatest drummers.In 2016, he briefly reunited with the original Santana lineup for the album Santana IV, again marking his deep connection to the music that made his name.Today, Michael Shrieve remains a vibrant artist. His band Spellbinder, blends jazz and improvisatory rock; he works on ambitious solo projects like Drums of Compassion; and continues to collaborate with forward-thinking musicians across genres.Michael joins us today to share his story.

On today's show: All schools closed again today because it's freezing! Barely anyone called or texted the show today and we understand why (your fingers are frozen). Is "The Pitt" an accurate medical drama? Good Vibes! Sometimes Bill has the same conversations with Alyssa that he has with his kids. Should we be worried about our pipes freezing? Alyssa's College of Knowledge! Spotify is getting even more expensive. Plus, Halle the rescue cat has been putting on some winter weight.

This is a classic session of Where Should We Begin? Barely a year into marriage, they're trapped in a cycle of explosive conflict. She can do no right, and he can do no wrong. Producer's Note: When our anonymous guests do a session with Esther for the podcast, it is an act of generosity for everyone who listens. These sessions are meant not only to support the people in the room with Esther, but all of us who learn from their stories. Our stories have many chapters, and what you hear is just one moment in someone's journey. So even though the sessions are anonymous, please remember that real people are behind them and they may be reading your comments. Also, please join me on Entre Nous, my new home on Substack for anyone who wants to live, love, and work with more connection and imagination. I invite you to sign up and become a free or paid member at estherperel.substack.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

President Donald Trump has given a new reason for this effort to annex Greenland. A church in Minnesota where a pastor is reportedly an ICE member has become a site of new tensions. Trump has invited some controversial world leaders to his so-called "Board of Peace" for Gaza. Barely any Americans are satisfied with the number of Jeffrey Epstein case files released. Plus, China's birthrate has shrank for the 4th year in a row. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In this powerful and wide-ranging episode of Gangland Wire, host Gary Jenkins sits down with Ken Behr, author of One Step Over the Line: Confessions of a Marijuana Mercenary. Behr tells his astonishing life story—from teenage marijuana dealer in South Florida, to high-level drug runner and smuggler, to DEA cooperating source working major international cases. Along the way, he offers rare, first-hand insight into how large-scale drug operations actually worked during the height of the War on Drugs—and why that war, in his view, has largely failed. From Smuggler to Source Behr describes growing up during the explosion of the drug trade in South Florida during the 1970s and 1980s, where smuggling marijuana and cocaine became almost commonplace. He explains how he moved from street-level dealing into large-scale logistics—off-loading planes, running covert runways in the Everglades, moving thousands of pounds of marijuana, and participating in international smuggling operations involving Canada, Jamaica, Colombia, and the Bahamas. After multiple arrests—including a serious RICO case that threatened him with decades in prison—Behr made the life-altering decision to cooperate with the DEA. What followed was a tense and dangerous double life as an undercover operative, helping law enforcement dismantle major trafficking networks while living under constant pressure and fear of exposure. Inside the Mechanics of the Drug Trade This episode goes deep into the nuts and bolts of organized drug trafficking, including: How clandestine runways were built and dismantled in minutes How aircraft were guided into unlit landing zones How smuggling crews were paid and organized Why most drug operations ultimately collapse from inside The role of asset seizures in federal drug enforcement Hit me up on Venmo for a cup of coffee or a shot and a beer @ganglandwire Click here to “buy me a cup of coffee” Subscribe to the website for weekly notifications about updates and other Mob information. To go to the store or make a donation or rent Ballot Theft: Burglary, Murder, Coverup, click here To rent ‘Brothers against Brothers’ or ‘Gangland Wire,’ the documentaries click here.  To purchase one of my books, click here. Transcript [00:00:00] well, hey, all your wire taps. It’s good to be back here in studio of Gangland Wire. I have a special guest today. He has a book called, uh, title is One Step Over the Line and, and he went several steps over the line, I think in his life. Ken Bearer, welcome Ken. Thanks for having me. Thanks for having me. Now, Ken, Ken is a, was a marijuana smuggler at one time and, and ended up working with the DEA, so he went from one side over to my side and, and I always like to talk to you guys that that helped us in law enforcement and I, there’s a lot of guys that don’t like that out there, but I like you guys you were a huge help to us in law enforcement and ended up doing the right thing after you made a lot of money. So tell us about the money. We were just starting to talk about the money. Tell us about the money, all those millions and millions of dollars that you drug smuggler makes. What happens? Well, I, you know, like I said, um, Jimmy Buffett’s song a pirate looks at 40, basically, he says, I made enough money to to buy Miami and pissed it away all so fast, never meant to last. And, and that’s what happens. I do know a few people that have [00:01:00] put away money. One of my friends that we did a lot of money together, a lot of drug dealing and a lot of moving some product, and he’s put the money away. Got in bed with some other guy that was, you know, legal, bought a bunch of warehouses, and now he lives a great life, living off the money he put away. Yeah. If the rents and stuff, he, he got into real estate. Other guys have got into real estate and they got out and they ended up doing okay. ’cause now they’re drawing all those rents. That’s a good way to money. Exactly what he did. Uh, my favorite, I was telling you a favorite story of mine was the guy that was a small time dealer used to hang out at the beach. And, uh, we en he ended up saving $80,000, which was a lot of money back then. Yeah. And then put it all, went to school to be a culinary chef and then got a job at the Marriott as a culinary chef and a chef. So he, you know, he really took the money, made a little bit of money, didn’t make a lot Yeah. But made enough to go to school and do something with his life. That’s so, um, that’s a great one. That’s a good one [00:02:00] there. That’s real. Yeah. But he wasn’t a big time guy. Yeah. You know what, what happens is you might make a big lick. You know, I, I never made million dollar moves. I have lots of friends that did. I always said I didn’t want to be a smuggler. ’cause I was making a steady living, being a drug runner. If you brought in 40, 50,000 pounds of weed, you would come to me and then I would move it across the country and sell it in different, along with other guys like me. Having said that, so I say I’m a guy that never wanted to do a smuggling trip. I’ve done 12 of them. Yeah. Even though, you know, and you know, if you’ve been in the DEA side twelve’s a lot for somebody usually. Yeah. That’s a lot. They don’t make, there’s no longevity. Two or three trips. No. You know, I did it for 20 years. Yeah. And then finally I got busted one time in Massachusetts in 1988. We had 40,000 pounds stuck up in Canada. So a friend of mine comes to me, another friend had the 40,000 pounds up there. He couldn’t sell it. He goes, Hey, you wanna help me smuggle [00:03:00] this back into America? Which, you know, is going the wrong direction. The farther north it goes, the more money it’s worth. I would’ve taken it to Greenland for Christ’s sakes. Yeah. But, we smuggled it back in. What we did this time was obviously they, they brought a freighter or a big ship to bring the 40,000 pounds into Canada. Mm-hmm. He added, stuffed in a fish a fish packing plant in a freezer somewhere up there. And so we used the sea plane and we flew from a lake in Canada to a lake in Maine where the plane would pull up, I’d unload. Then stash it. And we really did like to get 1400 pounds. We had to go through like six or seven trips. ’cause the plane would only hold 200 and something pounds. Yeah. And a sea plane can’t land at night. It has to land during the day. Yeah. You can’t land a plane in the middle of a lake in the night, I guess yourself. Yeah. I see. Uh, and so we got, I got busted moving that load to another market and that cost, uh, [00:04:00] cost me about $80,000 in two years of fighting in court to get out of that. Yeah. Uh, but I did beat the case for illegal search and seizure. So one for the good guys. It wasn’t for the good guys. Well the constitution, he pulled me over looking for fireworks and, ’cause it was 4th of July and, yeah. The name of that chapter in the book is why I never work on a holiday. So you don’t wanna spend your holiday in jail ’cause there’s no, you can’t on your birthday. So another, the second time I got busted was in 92. So just a couple years later after, basically I was in the system for two years with the loss, you know, fighting it and that, that was for Rico. I was looking at 25 years. But, uh, but like a normal smuggling trip. I’ll tell you one, we did, I brought, I actually did my first smuggling trip. I was on the run in Jamaica from a, a case that I got named in and I was like 19 living down in Jamaica to cool out. And then my buddies came down. So we ended up bringing out 600 pounds. So that was my first tr I was about 19 or [00:05:00] 20 years old when I did my first trip. I brought out 600 pounds outta Jamaica. A friend of mine had a little Navajo and we flew it out with that, but. I’ll give you an example of a smuggling trip. So a friend of mine came to me and he wanted to load 300 kilos of Coke in Columbia and bring it into America. And he wanted to know if I knew anybody that could load him 300 kilos. So I did. I introduced him to a friend of mine that Ronnie Vest. He’s the only person you’ll appreciate this. Remember how he kept wanting to extradite all the, the guys from Columbia when we got busted, indict him? Yes. And of course, Escobar’s living in his own jail with his own exit. Yeah. You know, and yeah. So the Columbian government says, well, we want somebody, why don’t you extradite somebody to America, to Columbia? So Ronnie Vest had gotten caught bringing a load of weed outta Columbia. You know, they sent ’em back to America. So that colo, the Americans go, I’ll tell you what you want. Somebody. And Ronnie Vests got the first good friend of mine, first American to be [00:06:00] extradited to Columbia to serve time. So he did a couple years in the Columbian prison. And so he’s the one that had the cocaine connection now. ’cause he spent time in Columbia. Yeah. And you know, so we brought in 300 kilos of Coke. He actually, I didn’t load it. He got another load from somebody else. But, so in the middle of the night, you set up on a road to nowhere in the Everglades, there’s so many Floridas flat, you’ve got all these desolate areas. We go out there with four or five guys. We take, I have some of ’em here somewhere. Callum glow sticks. You know the, the, the glow sticks you break, uh, yeah. And some flashing lights throw ’em out there. Yeah. And we set up a, yeah, the pilot came in and we all laid in the woods waiting for the plane to come in. And as soon as the pilot clicks. The mic four times. It’s, we all click our mics four times and then we run out. He said to his copilot, he says, look, I mean, we lit up this road from the sky. He goes, it looks like MIA [00:07:00] behind the international airport. But it happens like that within a couple, like a minute, we’ll light that whole thing up. Me and one other guy run down the runway. It’s a lot, it’s a long run, believe me. We put out the lights, we gotta put out the center lights and then the marker lights, because you gotta have the center of the runway where the plane’s gonna land and the edge is where it can’t, right? Yeah. He pulls up, bring up a couple cars, I’m driving one of them, load the kilos in. And then we have to refuel the plane because you don’t, you know, you want to have enough fuel to get back to an FBO to your landing airport or real airport. Yeah. Not the one we made in the Everglades. Yeah. And then the trick is the car’s gotta get out of there. Yeah, before the plane takes off. ’cause when that plane takes off, you know you got a twin engine plane landing is quiet, taking off at full throttle’s gonna wake up the whole neighborhood. So once we got out of there, then they went ahead and got the plane off. And then the remaining guys, they gotta clean up the mess. We want to use this again. So we [00:08:00] wanna clean up all the wires, the radios. Mm-hmm. Pick up the fuel tanks, pick up the runway lights, and their job is to clean that off and all that’s gonna take place before the police even get down the main road. Right? Mm-hmm. That’s gonna all take place in less than 10 minutes. Wow. I mean, the offload takes, the offload takes, you can offload about a thousand pounds, which I’ve done in three minutes. Wow. But, and then refueling the plane, getting everything else cleaned up. Takes longer. Yeah. Interesting. So how many guys would, would be on that operation and how do you pay that? How do you decide who gets paid what? How much? Okay. So get it up front or, I always curious about the details, how that stuff, I don’t think I got paid enough. And I’ll be honest, it was a hell of a chance. I got 20 grand looking at 15 years if you get caught. Yeah. But I did it for the excitement. 20 grand wasn’t that much. I had my own gig making more money than that Uhhuh, you know, but I was also racing cars. I was, there’s a [00:09:00] picture of one of my race cars. Oh cool. So that costs about six, 7,000 a weekend. Yeah. And remember I’m talking about 1980s dollars. Yeah. That’s 20,000 a weekend. A weekend, yes. Yeah. And that 20,000 for a night’s work in today’s world would be 60. Yeah. Three. And I’m talking about 1985 versus, that was 40 years ago. Yeah. Um. But it’s a lot of fun and, uh, and, but it, you kind of say to yourself, what was that one step over the line? That’s why I wrote the book. I remember as a kid thinking in my twenties, man, I’ve taken one step over the line. So the full name of the book is One Step Over the Line Con Confessions of a Marijuana Mercenary. That’s me actually working for the DEA. That picture was at the time when I was working for the DEA, so the second time I got busted in 1992 was actually for the smallest amount of weed that I ever got, ever really had. It was like 80, a hundred pounds. But unfortunately it was for Rico. I didn’t know at the [00:10:00] time, but when they arrested me, I thought, oh, they only caught me with a hundred pounds. But I got charged with Rico. So I was looking at 25 years. What, how, what? Did they have some other, it must have had some other offenses that they could tie to and maybe guns and stuff or something that get that gun. No, we never used guns ever. Just other, other smuggling operations. Yeah, yeah. Me, me and my high school friend, he had moved to Ohio in 77 or 78, so he had called me one time, he was working at the Ford plant and he goes, Hey, I think I could sell some weed up here. All right. I said, come on down, I’ll give you a couple pounds. So he drives down from Ohio on his weekend off, all the way from Ohio. I gave him two pounds. He drove home, calls me back. He goes, I sold it. So I go, all right. He goes, I’m gonna get some more. So at that time, I was working for one of the largest marijuana smugglers in US History. His name was Donny Steinberg. I was just a kid, you know, like my job, part of my [00:11:00] job was to, they would gimme a Learjet. About a million or two and I jump on a Learjet and fly to the Cayman Islands. I was like 19 years old. Same time, you know, kid. Yeah, just a kid. 19 or 20 and yeah. 18, I think. And so I ended up doing that a few times. That was a lot of fun. And that’s nice to be a kid in the Learjet and they give me a million or two and they gimme a thousand dollars for the day’s work. I thought I was rich, I was, but people gotta understand that’s in that 78 money, not that’s, yeah. That was more like $10,000 for day, I guess. Yeah. You know? Yeah. It was a lot of money for an 18, 19-year-old kid. Yeah. Donnie gives me a bail. So Terry comes back from Ohio, we shoved the bale into his car. Barely would fit ’cause he had no big trunk on this Firebird. He had, he had a Firebird trans Am with the thunder black with a thunder, thunder chicken on the hood. It was on the hood. Oh cool. That was, that was a catch meow back then. Yeah. Yeah. It got it with that [00:12:00] Ford plant money. And uh, by the way, that was after that 50 pounds got up. ’cause every bail’s about 50 pounds. That’s the last he quit forward the next day. I bet. And me and him had built a 12 year, we were moving. Probably 50 tons up there over the 12 year period. You know, probably, I don’t know, anywhere from 50 to a hundred thousand pounds we would have, he must have been setting up other dealers. So among his friends, he must have been running around. He had the distribution, I was setting up the distribution network and you had the supply. I see. Yeah. I was the Florida connection. It’s every time you get busted, the cops always wanna grab that Florida connection. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. You gotta go down there. I there, lemme tell you, you know, I got into this. We were living in, I was born on a farm in New Jersey, like in know Norman Rockwell, 1950s, cow pies and hay bales. And then we moved to New Orleans in 1969 and then where my dad had business and right after, not sure after that, he died when I was 13. As I say in the book, I [00:13:00] probably wouldn’t have been writing the book if my father was alive. Yeah. ’cause I probably wouldn’t have went down that road, you know? But so my mother decides in 1973 to move us to, uh, south Florida, to get away from the drugs in the CD underside of New Orleans. Yeah. I guess she didn’t read the papers. No. So I moved from New Orleans to the star, the war on where the war on drugs would start. I always say if she’d have moved me to Palo Alto, I’d be Bill Gates, but No. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I was so, uh, and everybody I knew was running drugs, smuggling drugs, trying to be a drug deal. I mean, I was, I had my own operation. I was upper middle level, but there were guys like me everywhere. Mm-hmm. There were guys like me everywhere, moving a thou, I mean, moving a thousand, 2000 pounds at the time was a big thing, you know? That’s, yeah. So, so about what year was that? I started in 19. 70. Okay. Three. I was [00:14:00] 16. Started selling drugs outta my mom’s house, me and my brother. We had a very good business going. And by the time I was got busted, it was 19 92. So, so you watched, especially in South Florida, you watched like where that plane could go down and go back up that at eventually the feds will come up with radar and they have blimps and they have big Bertha stuff down there to then catch those kinds of things. Yeah. Right, right. Big Bertha was the blimp. Uhhuh, uh, they put up, yeah. In the beginning you could just fly right in. We did one trip one time. This is this, my, my buddy picked up, I don’t know, 40 or 50 kilos in The Bahamas. So you fly into Fort Lauderdale and you call in like you’re gonna do a normal landing. Mm-hmm. And the BLI there. This is all 1980s, five. You know, they already know. They’re doing this, but you just call in, like you’re coming to land in Fort Lauderdale, and what you do is right before you land, you hit the tower up and you tell ’em you wanna do a [00:15:00] go around, meaning you’re not comfortable with the landing. Mm-hmm. Well, they’ll always leave you a go around because they don’t want you to crash. Yeah. And right west of the airport was a golf course, and right next to the golf course, oh, about a mile down the road was my townhouse. So we’re in the townhouse. My buddies all put on, two of the guys, put on black, get big knives, gear, and I drive to one road on the golf course and my other friend grows Dr. We drop the guys off in the golf course as the plane’s gonna do the touchdown at the airport. He says, I gotta go around. As he’s pulling up now, he’s 200 feet below the radar, just opens up the side of the plane. Mm-hmm. The kickers, we call ’em, they’re called kickers. He kicks the baskets, the ba and the guys on, on the golf court. They’re hugging trees. Yeah. You don’t wanna be under that thing. Right. You got a 200, you got maybe a 40 pound package coming in at 120 miles an hour from 200 feet up. It’ll break the bra. It’ll yeah. The [00:16:00] branches will kill you. Yeah. So they pull up, they get out, I pull back up in the pickup truck, he runs out, jumps in the back of the truck, yells, hit it. We drive the mile through the back roads to my townhouse. Get the coke in the house. My buddy rips it open with a knife. It’s and pulls out some blow. And he looks at me, he goes, Hey, let’s get outta here. And I go, where are we going? Cops come and he goes, ah, I got two tickets. No, four tickets to the Eddie Murphy concert. So we left the blow in this trunk of his car. Oh. Oh, oh man. I know. We went to Eddie Murphy about a million dollars worth of product in the trunk. Oh. And, uh, saw a great show and came back and off they went. That’s what I’m trying to point out is that’s how fast it goes down, man. It’s to do. Yeah. Right in, in 30 minutes. We got it out. Now the thing about drug deals is we always call ’em dds delayed dope deals because the smuggling [00:17:00] trip could take six months to plan. Yeah. You know, they never go, there’s no organized crime in organized crime. Yeah. No organization did it. Yeah. And then, then of course, in 1992 when I got busted and was looking at Rico, a friend of mine came up to me. He was a yacht broker. He had gotten in trouble selling a boat, and he said, Hey, I’d you like to work for the DEA. I’d done three months in jail. I knew I was looking at time, I knew I had nothing. My lawyers told me, Kenny, you either figure something out or you’re going to jail for a mm-hmm. And I just had a newborn baby. I just got married three weeks earlier and we had a newborn baby. I said, what are you crazy? I mean, I’m waiting for my wife to hear me. You know, he’s calling me on the phone. He goes, meet me for lunch. I go meet him for lunch. And he explains to me that he’s gonna, he’s got a guy in the, uh, central district in Jacksonville, and he’s a DEA agent, and I should go talk to him. And so the DEA made a deal with the Ohio police that anything that I [00:18:00] confiscated, anything that I did, any assets I got, they would get a share in as long as they released me. Yeah. To them. And, you know, it’s all about the, I hate to say this, I’m not saying that you don’t want to take drugs off the street, but if you’re the police department and you’re an agent, it’s about asset seizures. Yeah. Yeah. That’s how you fund the dr. The war on drugs. Yeah. The war begets war. You know, I mean, oh, I know, been Florida was, I understand here’s a deal. You’re like suing shit against the tide, right? Fighting that drug thing. Okay? It just keeps coming in. It keeps getting cheaper. It keeps getting more and more. You make a little lick now and then make a little lick now and then, but then you start seeing these fancy cars and all this money out there that you can get to. If you make the right score, you, you, you hit the right people, you can get a bunch of money, maybe two or three really cool cars for your unit. So then you’ll start focusing on, go after the money. I know it’s not right, but you’re already losing your shoveling shit against the tide anyhow, so just go after the goal. [00:19:00] One time I set up this hash deal for the DEA from Amsterdam. The guy brought the hash in, and I had my agent, you know, I, I didn’t set up the deal. The guy came to me and said, we have 200 kilos of hash. Can you help us sell it? He didn’t know that I was working for the DEA, he was from Europe. And I said, sure. The, the thing was, I, so in the boat ready to close the deal, now my guy is from Central. I’m in I’m in Fort Lauderdale, which is Southern District. So he goes, Hey, can you get that man to bring that sailboat up to Jacksonville? I go, buddy, he just sailed across the Atlantic. He ain’t going to Jacksonville. So the central district has to come down, or is a northern district? I can’t remember if it’s northern or central. Has to come down to the Southern district. So, you know, they gotta make phone calls. Everybody’s gotta be in Yep. Bump heads. So I’m on the boat and he calls me, he goes, Hey, we gotta act now. Yeah. And I’m looking at the mark, I go, why? He [00:20:00] goes, customs is on the dock. We don’t want them involved. So you got the two? Yeah. So I bring him up, I go, where’s the hash? He goes, it’s in the car. So we go up to the car and he opens the trunk, and I, I pull back one of the duffle bags I see. I can tell immediately it’s product. So I go like this, and all hell breaks loose, right? Yeah. I could see the two customs agents and they’re all dressed like hillbillies. They, you know. So I said to my, my handler, the next day I called them up to debrief. You know, I have to debrief after every year, everything. I goes, so what happened when customs I go, what’d they want to do? He goes, yep. They wanted to chop the boat in threes. So they’re gonna sell the boat and the 2D EA offices are gonna trade it. Yeah. Are gonna shop the money. Yeah. I remember when I registered with the DEA in, in, in the Southern district, I had to tell ’em who I was. They go, why are you working for him? Why aren’t you working for us? I’m like, buddy, I’m not in charge here. This is, you know? Yeah. I heard that many [00:21:00] times through different cases we did, where the, the local cop would say to me, why don’t you come work for us? Oh yeah. Try to steal your informant. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So how about that? So, can you get a piece of the action if they had a big case seizure? Yeah. Did they have some deal where you’d get a piece of that action there? Yep. That’s a pretty good deal. Yeah. So I would get, I, I’d get, like, if we brought down, he would always tell everybody that he needed money to buy electronics and then he would come to me and go, here’s 2000. And to the other cis, he had three guys. I saw a friend of mine, the guy that got me into the deal. Them a million dollar house or a couple million dollar house. And I saw the DEA hand him a suitcase with a million dollars cash in it. Wow. I mean, I’m sorry, with a hundred thousand cash. A hundred thousand. Okay. I was gonna say, I was thinking a million. Well, a hundred thousand. Yeah, a hundred thousand. I’ve heard that. I just didn’t have any experience with it myself. But I heard that. I saw, saw Open it up, saw money. I saw the money. It was one of those aluminum halla, Halliburton reef cases and Yeah, yeah. A [00:22:00] hundred thousand cash. But, uh, but you know, um, it’s funny, somebody once asked me out of, as a kid I wanted to be a cowboy, a race car driver, and a secret agent. Me too. Yes. Yeah. I didn’t want, I wanted to be a, I grew up on a farm, so I kind of rode a horse. I had that watched Rowdy, you got saved background as me, man. Yeah. You know, we watched, we watched, we grew up on westerns. We watched Gun Smoke, rowdy. Oh yeah. You know, uh, bananas, uh, you know, so, um. So anyway, uh, I got to raise cars with my drug money, and I guess I’m not sure if I was more of a secret agent working as a drug dealer or as the DEA, but it’s a lot of I, you know, I make jokes about it now, but it’s a lot of stress working undercover. Oh, yeah. Oh, I can’t even imagine that. I never worked undercover. I, that was not my thing. I like surveillance and putting pieces together and running sources, but man, that actual working undercover that’s gotta be nerve wracking. It’s, you know, and, and my handler was good at it, but [00:23:00] he would step out and let, here’s, I’ll tell you this. One day he calls me up and he goes, Hey, I’m down here in Fort Lauderdale. You need to come down here right now. And I’m having dinner at my house about 15 minutes away. Now he lives in Jacksonville. I go, what’s he doing in Fort Lauderdale? So I drive down to the hotel and he’s got a legal pad and a pen. He goes, my, uh, my, my seniors want to, uh, want you to proffer. You need to tell me everything you ever did. And they want me to do a proffer. And I go, I looked at him. I go, John, I can’t do that. He start, we start writing. I start telling him stuff. I stop. I go, I grew up in this town. Everybody I know I did a drug deal with from high school, I go, I would be giving you every single kid, every family, man, I grew up here. My, I’m gonna be in jail, and my wife and my one and a half year old daughter are gonna be the only people left in this town, and they’re not gonna have any support. And I just can’t do this to all my friends. Yeah. So he says, all right, puts the pen down. I knew [00:24:00] he hated paperwork, so I had a good shot. He wasn’t gonna, he goes, yeah, you hungry? I go, yeah. He goes, let’s go get a steak. And right across the street was a place called Chuck Steakhouse, which great little steak restaurant. All right. So we go over there, he goes, and he is a big guy. He goes, sit right here. I go, all right. So I sit down. I, I’m getting a free steak. I’m gonna sit about through the steak dinner, it goes. Look over my shoulder. So I do this. He goes, see the guy at the bar in the black leather jacket. I go, yeah. He goes, when I get up and walk outta here, when I clear the door, I want you to go up to him and find a talk drug deal. See what you can get out of him. I go, you want me to walk up to a complete stranger and say, he goes, I’m gonna walk out the door. When I get out the door. You’re gonna go up and say, cap Captain Bobby. That was his, he was a ca a boat captain and his nickname, his handle was Captain Bobby. And he was theoretically the next Vietnam vet that now is a smuggler, you know?[00:25:00] Yeah. And so he walks out the door and I walked out and sat with the guy at the bar and we started, I said, hi, captain Bobby sent me, I’m his right hand man, you know, to talk about. And we talked and I looked around the bar trying to see if anybody was with him. And I’m figuring, now I’m looking at the guy going, why is he so open with me? And I’m thinking, you know what? He’s wearing a leather jacket. He’s in Florida. I bet you he’s got a wire on and he’s working for customs and I’m working for the DEA, so nothing ever came of it. But you know, that was, you know, you’re sitting there eating dinner and all of a sudden, you know, look over my shoulder. Yeah. And, you know, and I’m trying to balance all that with having a newborn that’s about a year old and my wife and Yeah. Looking at 25 years. So a little bit of pressure. But, you know, hey and I understand these federal agencies, everybody’s got, everybody is, uh, uh, aggressive. Everybody is ambitious. And you just are this guy in the middle and right. And they’ll throw you to the [00:26:00] wolves in a second. Second, what have you done for a second? Right? It’s what have you done for me lately? He’s calling me up and said, Hey, I don’t got any product from you in a minute. I go, well, I’m working on it. He goes, well, you know, they’ll kick you outta the program. Yeah. But one of the things he did he was one of, he was the GS 13. So he had some, you know, he had level, you know, level 15 or whatever, you know, he was, yeah. Almost at the head of near retirement too. And he said, look, he had me, he had another guy that was a superstar, another guy. And we would work as a team and he would feed us all the leads. In other words, if David had a case, I’d be on that case. So when I went to go to go to trial or go to my final, he had 14 or 15 different things that he had penciled me in to be involved with. The biggest deal we did at the end of my two years with the DEA was we brought down the Canadian mob. They got him for 10,000 kilos of cocaine, import 10,000 kilos. It was the Hell’s Angels, the Rock something, motorcycle [00:27:00] gang, the Italian Mafia and the, and the Irish mob. Mm-hmm. And the guy, I mean, this is some badass guys. I was just a player, but. The state of Ohio, they got to fly up there and you know, I mean, no words, the dog and pony show was always on to give everybody, you know. Yes. A bite at the apple. Oh yeah. But I’ll tell you this, it’s been 33 years and the two people that I’m close to is my arresting officer in Ohio and my DEA handler in Jacksonville. The arresting officer, when he retired, he called to gimme his new cell phone. And every year or so I call him up around Christmas and say, Dennis, thank you for the opportunity to turn my life around, because I’ve got four great kids. I’ve started businesses, you know, he knows what I’ve done with my life. And the DEA handler, that’s, he’s a friend of mine. I mean, you know, we talk all the time and check on each other. And, you know, I mean, he’s, [00:28:00] they’re my friends. A lot of, not too many of the guys are left from those days that will talk to me. Yeah, probably not. And most of them are dead or in jail anyhow. For, well, a lot of ’em are, maybe not even because of you, I mean, because that’s their life. No, but a lot of them, a number of ’em turned their lives around, went into legal businesses and have done well. Yeah. So, you know, there really have, so not all of ’em, but a good share of ’em have turned, because we weren’t middle class kids. We were, my one friend was, dad was the lieutenant of the police department. The other one was the post guy. We weren’t inner city kids. Yeah. We weren’t meeting we, the drug war landed on us and we just, we were recruited into it. As young as I talk about in my book. But I mean, let’s talk about what’s going on now. Now. Yeah. And listen, I’m gonna put some statistics out there. Last year, 250,000 people were charged with cannabis. 92% for simple possession. There’s [00:29:00] people still in jail for marijuana doing life sentences. I’ve had friends do 27 years only for marijuana. No nonviolent crimes, first time offender. 22 years, 10 years. And the government is, I’ve been involved with things where the government was smuggling the drugs. I mean, go with the Iran Contra scandal that happened. We were trading guns for cocaine with the Nicaraguans in the Sandon Easterns. Yeah. Those same pilots. Gene Hassen Fus flew for Air America and Vietnam moving drugs and gun and, and guns out of Cambodia. Same guy. Air America. Yeah. The American government gave their soldiers opium in Civil War to keep ’em marching. You know, I mean, we did a deal with Lucky Luciano, where we let ’em out of prison for doing heroin exchange for Intel from, from Europe on during World War II and his, and the mob watching the docks for the, uh, cargo ships. So the government’s been intertwined in the war on drugs on two [00:30:00] sides of it. Yeah. You know, and not that it makes it right. Look, I’ve lost several friends to fentanyl that thought they were doing coke and did fentanyl or didn’t even know there was any. They just accidentally did fentanyl and it’s a horrible drug. But those boats coming out of Venezuela don’t have fentanyl on ’em. No. Get cocaine maybe. If that, and they might be, they’re probably going to Europe. Europe and they’re going to Europe. Yeah, they’re going, yeah. They’re doubt they’re going to Europe. Yeah. Yeah. And so let’s put it this way. I got busted for running a 12 year ongoing criminal enterprise. We moved probably 50 tons of marijuana. You know what? Cut me down? One guy got busted with one pound and he turned in one other guy that went all the way up to us. So if you blew up those boats, you know, you’re, you need the leads. You, you can’t kill your clients. Yeah. You know, how are you gonna get, not gonna get any leads outta that. Well, that’s, uh, well, I’m just saying [00:31:00] you right. The, if they followed the boat to the mothership Yeah. They’d have the whole crew and all the cargo. Yeah. You know, it’s, those boats maybe have 200 kilos on ’em. A piece. Yeah. The mothership has six tons. Yeah. That’s it. It’s all about the, uh, the, um, uh, optics. Optics, yeah. That’s the word. It’s all about the optics and, and the politic, you know, in, in some way it may deter some people, but I don’t, I I, I’ve never seen anything, any consequence. In that drug business, there’s too much money. There is no consequence that is really ever gonna deter people from smuggling drugs. Let me put it this way, except for a few people like yourself, there’s a few like yourself that get to a certain age and the consequence of going to prison for a long time may, you know, may bring you around or the, all the risk you’re taking just, you know, you can’t take it anymore, but you gotta do something. But no, well, I got busted twice. Consequence just don’t matter. There is no consequence that’s gonna do anything. Here’s why. And you’re right. [00:32:00] One is how do you get in a race car and not think you’re gonna die? Because you always think it’s gonna happen to somebody else. Exactly. And the drug business is the same. It’s, I’m not, it’s not gonna happen to me tonight. And those guys in Venezuela, they have no electricity. They have no water. Yeah. They got nothing. They have a chance to go out and make a couple thousand dollars and change their family’s lives. Yeah. Or they’re being, they’re got family members in the gar, in the gangs that are forcing them to do it. Yeah. It’s the war on drugs has kind of been a political war and an optics war from the seventies. I mean, it’s nobody, listen, I always say, I say in my book, nobody loved it more than the cops, the lawyers and the politicians. No shit. In Fort Lauderdale, they had nothing, and all of a sudden the drug wars brought night scopes and cigarette boats and fancy cars and new offices. Yes. And new courthouses, and new jails and Yep. I don’t have an answer. Yeah. The problem is, [00:33:00] you know what I’m gonna say, America, Mexico doesn’t have a drug problem. Columbia doesn’t have a drug problem. No. America has a drug problem. Those are just way stations to get the product in. In the cover of my book, it says, you don’t sell drugs, you supply them like ammunition in a war. It’s a, people, we, how do we fix this? How do we get the American people? Oh, by the way, here’s a perfect example. Marijuana is legal in a majority of states. You don’t see anybody smuggling marijuana in, I actually heard two stories of people that are smuggling marijuana out of the country. I’ve heard that. I’ve heard that. Yeah. They’re growing so much marijuana in America that it’s worth shipping to other places, either legally or illegally. Yeah. And, and, and you know, the biggest problem is like, what they’ll do is they’ll set up dispensaries, with the green marijuana leaf on it, like it’s some health [00:34:00] dispensary. But they, they just won’t it’ll be off the books. It just won’t have the licensing and all that. And, you know, you run that for a while and then maybe you get caught, maybe you don’t. And so it’s, you know, it’s, well, the other thing is with that dispensary license. It’s highly regulated, but you can get a lot of stuff in the gray. So there’s three markets now. There’s the white market, which is the legal Yeah. Business that, you know, you can buy stocks in the companies and whatnot. Yeah. There’s the black market, which is the guy on the street that Kenny Bear used to be. And then there’s the gray market where people are taking black market product and funneling it through the white markets without intact, you know, the taxes and the licensing and the, the, uh, testing for, you know, you have to test marijuana for pesticides. Metals, yeah. And, and the oils and the derivatives. You know, there’s oil and there’s all these derivatives. They have to be tested. Well, you could slide it through the gray market into the white market. So I know it’s a addiction, you know, whether it’s gambling or sex or Right. Or [00:35:00] there’s always gonna be people who are gonna take advantage and make money off of addiction. The mafia, you know, they refined it during the prohibition. All these people that drink, you know, and a lot, admittedly, a lot of ’em are social drinkers, but awful lot of ’em work. They had to have it. And so, you know, then gambling addiction. And that’s, uh, well here’s what I say. If it wasn’t for Prohibition Vegas, the mob never would’ve had the power and the money to build Vegas. No, they wouldn’t have anything. So when you outlaw something that people want, you’re creating a, a business. If, if somebody, somebody said the other day, if you made all the drugs legal in America, would that put out, put the drug cartels in Mexico and Columbia and out of business? Yeah, maybe. How about this statistic? About 20 to 30,000 people a year die from cocaine overdose. Most have a medical condition. Unknown unbe, besides, they’re not ODing on cocaine. Yeah. Alright. 300,000 people a year die from obesity. Yeah. And [00:36:00] another, almost four, I think 700, I don’t know, I might be about to say a half a million die from alcohol and tobacco. Mm-hmm. I could be low on that figure. So you’re, you probably are low. Yeah. I could be way more than that. But on my point is we’re regulating alcohol, tobacco, and certainly don’t care how much food you eat, and why don’t we have a medical system that takes care of these people. I don’t know that the answer if I did, but I’m just saying it, making this stuff more valuable and making bigger crime syndicates doesn’t make sense. Yeah. See a addiction is such a psychological, spiritual. Physical maldy that people can’t really separate the three and they don’t, people that, that aren’t involved and then getting some kind of recovery, they can’t understand why somebody would go back and do it again after they maybe were clean for a while. You know, that’s a big common problem with putting money into the treatment center [00:37:00] business. Yep. Because people do go to treatment two and three times and, and maybe they never get, some people never, they’ll chase it to death. No, and I can’t explain it. And you know, I, I’ll tell you what, I have my own little podcast. It’s called One Step Over the Line. Mm-hmm. And I released a show last night about a friend of mine, his name is Ron Black. You can watch it or any of your listeners can watch it, and Ron was, went down to the depths of addiction, but he did it a long time ago when they really spent a lot of time and energy to get, you know, they really put him through his system. 18 months, Ron got out clean and he came from a good family. He was raised right. He didn’t, you know, he had some trauma in his life. He had some severe trauma as a child, but he built one of the largest addiction. He has a company that he’s, he ran drug counseling services. He’s been in the space 20 or 30 years, giving back. He has a company that trains counselors to be addiction specialists. He has classes for addiction counseling. He become certified [00:38:00] members. He’s run drug rehabs. He donates to the, you know, you gotta wa if you get a chance to go to my podcast, one step over the line and, and watch this episode we did last night. Probably not the most exciting, you know, like my stories. Yeah. But Ronnie really did go through the entire addiction process from losing everything. Yeah. And pulling himself out. But he was also had a lot of family. You know, he had the right steps. A lot of these kids I was in jail with. Black and brown, inter or inner city youth, whatever, you know, their national, you know, race or nationality, they don’t have a chance. Yeah. They’re in jail with their fathers, their cousins, their brothers. Mm-hmm. The law, the war on drugs, and the laws on drugs specifically affect them. And are they, I remember thinking, is this kid safer in this jail with a cement roof over his head? A, a hot three hot meals and a bed than being back on the [00:39:00] streets? Yeah. He was, I mean. Need to, I used to do a program working with, uh, relatives of addicts. And so this mother was really worried about her son gonna go to jail next time he went to court. And he, she had told me enough about him by then. I said, you know, ma’am, I just wanna tell you something he’s safer doing about a year or so in jail than he is doing a year or so on the streets. Yeah. And she said, she just looked at me and she said, you know, you’re right. You’re right. So she quit worried about and trying to get money and trying to help him out because she was just, she was killing him, getting him out and putting him back on the streets. This kid was gonna die one way or the other, either shot or overdosed or whatever. But I’ll tell you another story. My best friend growing up in New Orleans was Frankie Monteleone. They owned the Monte Hotel. They own the family was worth, the ho half a billion dollars at the time, maybe. And Frankie was a, a diabetic. And he was a, a junk. He was a a because of the diabetic needles. [00:40:00] He kind of became a cocaine junkie, you know, shooting up coke. You know, I guess the needle that kept him alive was, you know, I, you know, again the addict mentality. Right, right. You can’t explain it. So he got, so he got busted trying to sell a couple grams. They made it into a bigger case by mentioning more product conspiracy. His father said, got a, the, the father made a deal to give him a year and a half in club Fed. Yeah. He could, you know, get a tan, practice his tennis, learn chess come out and be the heir to one of the richest families in the world, all right. He got a year and a half. Frankie did 10 years in prison. ’cause every time he got out, he got violated. Oh yeah. I remember going to his federal probation officer to get my bicycle. He was riding when he got violated. Mm-hmm. And I said, I said, sir, he was in a big building in Fort Lauderdale or you know, courthouse office building above the courthouse. I go, there’s so many cops, lawyers, [00:41:00] judges, that are doing blow on a Saturday night that are smoking pot, that are drinking more than they should all around us. You’ve got a kid that comes from one of the wealthiest families in America that’s never gonna hurt another citizen. He’s just, he’s an addict, not a criminal. He needs a doctor, not a jail. And you know what the guy said to me? He goes but those people aren’t on probation. I, I know. He did. 10 years in and out of prison. Finally got out, finally got off of paper, didn’t stop doing drugs. Ended up dying in a dentist chair of an overdose. Yeah. So you, you never fixed them, you just imprisoned somebody that would’ve never heard another American. Yeah, but we spent, it cost us a lot of money. You know, I, I, I dunno what the answer is. The war on drugs is, we spent over, we spent 80, let’s say since 1973. The, the DEA got started in 73, let’s say. Since that time we’ve, what’s that? 70 something years? Yeah. We’ve done [00:42:00] no, uh, 50, 60. Yeah. 50 something. Yeah. Been 50. We spent a trillion dollars. We spent a trillion dollars. The longest and most expensive war in American history is against its own people. Yeah. Trying to save ’em. I know it’s cra it’s crazy. Yeah, I know. And it, over the years, it just took on this life of its own. Yeah. And believe me, there was a, there’s a whole lot of young guys like you only, didn’t go down the drug path, but you like that action and you like getting those cool cars and doing that cool stuff and, and there’s TV shows about it as part of the culture. And so you’re like, you got this part of this big action thing that’s going on that I, you know, it ain’t right. I, I bigger than all of us. I don’t know. I know. All I like to say I had long hair and some New Orleans old man said to me when I was a kid, he goes, you know why you got that long hair boy? And this is 1969. Yeah, 70. I go, why is that [00:43:00] sir? He goes, ’cause the girls like it. The girls didn’t like it. You wouldn’t have it. I thought about it. I’m trying to be a hippie. I was all this, you know, rebel. I thought about it. I go, boy, he’s probably right. Comes down to sex. Especially a young boy. Well, I mean, I’m 15 years old. I may not even how you look. Yeah. I’m not, listen, at 15, I probably was only getting a second base on a whim, you know? Yeah. But, but they paid attention to you. Yeah. Back in those days you, you know, second base was a lot. Yeah. Really. I remember. Sure. Not as, not as advanced as they are today. I don’t think so. But anyway, that’s my story. Um, all right, Ken b this has been fun. It’s been great. I I really had a lot of fun talking to you. And the book is 1, 1, 1 took over the line. No one, no, no. That’s a Friday slip. One step over that. But that was what I came up with the name. I, I believe you, I heard that song. Yeah. I go, I know, I’m, I’ve just taken one step over the line. So that’s where the book actually one step over the line confessions of a marijuana mercenary. [00:44:00] And I’ll tell you, if your listeners go to my website, one step over the line.com, go to the tile that says MP three or the tile that says digital on that website. Put in the code one, the number one step, and then the number 100. So one step 100, they can get a free, they can download a free copy. Yeah, I got you. Okay. Okay. I appreciate it. That’d be good. Yeah, they’ll enjoy it. Yeah. And on the website there’s pictures of the boats, the planes. Yeah. The runways the weed the, all the pictures are there, family pictures, whatever. Well, you had a, uh, a magical, quite a life, the kinda life that they, people make movies about and everybody watches them and says, oh, wow, that’s really cool. But they didn’t have to do it. They didn’t have to pay that price. No. Most of the people think, the funny thing is a lot of people think I’m, I’m, I’m lying or I’m exaggerating. Yeah. I’m 68 years old. Yeah. There’s no reason for me to lie. And you know, the DEA is, I’m telling that. I’m just telling it the way it [00:45:00] happened. I have no reason to tell Phish stories at this point in my life. No, I believe it. No, no, no. It’s all true. All I’ve been, I’ve been around to a little bit. I, I could just talk to you and know that you’re telling the truth here I am. So, it’s, it’s a great story and Ken, I really appreciate you coming on the show. Thank you for having me. It’s been a very much a, it is been a real pleasure. It’s, it’s nice to talk to someone that knows both sides of the coin. Okay. Take care. Uh, thanks again. Thank you, sir. Thank you very much. Appreciate it.

Alex and Chris talk about the history of Voyage of the Little Mermaid, a reimagined version of The Little Mermaid - A Musical Adventure. Learn everything from the Walkaround Muppets to the differences between the two shows. For more Dizneyverse, head over to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Dizneyverse.com⁠⁠⁠⁠ or check us out on Instagram @Dizneyverse ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Check out our shirts on our Tee Public store. T-Shirts by Into the Dizneyverse | TeePublic

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Blown Off Part One (011526) - Barely Decorated by Maine's Coast 93.1

Guest: Jonathan Schanzer. Syria's new central government remains extremely fragile, with authority barely extending beyond Damascus as factions clash in Aleppo. Schanzer describes a "Sunni jihadist regime" facing retribution from sectarian minorities. Meanwhile, regional tensions escalate as Israel and Iran reportedly narrowly avoided direct conflict, prompting Russia to evacuate its embassy.1979 TEHRAN

A young woman studying abroad accepts help from a stranger she meets in a repair shop—housing, a job, a sense of safety in an unfamiliar place. But something feels wrong. His behavior shifts. The comments turn disturbing. The attention won't stop. She leaves before things go too far. Months later, she recognizes his face on the news... Follow Be. Busta on Insta: @Be.Busta To listen to the podcast on YouTube: http://bit.ly/BeScaredYT Don't forget to subscribe to the podcast for free wherever you're listening or by using this link: http://bit.ly/BeScaredPod If you want to support the show, and get all the episodes ad-free go to: https://bescared.supercast.com/ If you like the show, telling a friend about it would be amazing! You can text, email, Tweet, or send this link to a friend: http://bit.ly/BeScaredPod. If you would like to submit a story for the chance to have it narrated on this channel, please send your story to the following email: Bish.Busta@gmail.com Music: All music was taken from Myuuji's channel and Incompetech by Kevin Mcleod which can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/user/myuuji http://incompetech.com/. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The truth is out—and it's horrific. In this episode, we examine what U.S. taxpayer money funneled to Iran actually delivered: 12,000 dead civilians, mass executions, and a regime openly mowing people down in the streets. ☠️ While the mainstream media barely whispers and the UN remains silent, uncensored footage tells a different story. We break down how decades of appeasement, pallets of cash, and unenforced sanctions empowered one of the most brutal regimes on Earth—and why that era may finally be ending. ⚖️

Barely two weeks into 2026 and already it seems clear that this is going to be a historic year. That's as Donald Trump, emboldened by recent events in Venezuela, ramps up his rhetoric on Greenland and on Iran. What might this mean for long-standing alliances like Nato, for Ireland and the world as we know it? Host: Fionnán Sheahan | Guests: John O'Brennan + Gregg CarlstromSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Dr. Debi breaks down the fundamental differences between betrayal and other types of trauma, explaining why traditional trauma recovery approaches often fall short for betrayal survivors.  Key Insights  The Three Core Discoveries from Dr. Debi's PhD Research:  Betrayal is a different type of trauma that requires a different approach to heal  Most people who've been betrayed experience symptoms of Post Betrayal Syndrome®  There are five predictable stages of recovery, with most people getting stuck at Stage 3  Why Betrayal Trauma Is Unique  The Dual Rebuilding Process Unlike other traumas where you rebuild your life, betrayal requires you to rebuild both your life AND your sense of self. The core aspects that get shattered include:  Confidence  Worthiness  Trust  Belonging  Sense of safety  Complete Reality Disruption With other traumas (car accidents, natural disasters, loss), your perception of reality stays intact. With betrayal:  Your entire worldview gets destroyed  Past memories become tainted and questioned  Every moment you shared is reexamined through a new, painful lens  Your trust in the person who was supposed to be your safest person is shattered  The Self-Trust Crisis When the person you trusted most proves untrustworthy, you immediately question yourself:  "How did I not see this?"  "What's wrong with my judgment?"  "Can I ever trust my own decisions again?"  This creates a paralyzing fear about moving forward and engaging with others.  Identity Destruction Betrayal triggers a complete identity crisis:  Your roles are questioned  Your sense of self is shattered  You take it personally, wondering if you're lovable, worthy, or deserving  Everything you thought you knew about yourself comes into question  Why Traditional Trauma Treatment Fall Short When it Comes to Betrayal  Standard trauma approaches focus on:  Processing the event  Reducing fear  Building coping skills  Increasing sense of safety  But these don't address:  The shattering of self-trust  The identity crisis  The complete disruption of reality and worldview  The unique isolation that comes with betrayal  The Isolation Factor  Unlike other traumas where communities rally together (like natural disasters or loss of a loved one), betrayal creates unique isolation:  People don't know what to say, so they say nothing  Friends and family may distance themselves out of discomfort  Some may minimize the betrayal to avoid dealing with it  The betrayed often suffers in silence, embarrassed and ashamed  Many cover for the betrayer to maintain appearances, suffering at their own expense  The Impossible Burden  After betrayal, people who've been betrayed are expected to:  Continue caring for children and elderly parents  Maintain their careers  Keep up with daily responsibilities  Function normally in society  All while their entire world has been shattered and they're questioning everything about themselves and their reality.  For Coaches and Practitioners  This is what your clients may be experiencing even if they haven't explicitly told you about a betrayal. They may be:  Struggling and suffering in silence  Unable to hold coherent thoughts  Barely functioning day-to-day  Covering for their betrayer while dealing with the devastation alone  Understanding these unique aspects of betrayal trauma is essential for providing effective support and guidance.    About Dr. Debi Dr. Debi Silber is the Founder and CEO of The PBT Institute, a two-time TEDx speaker, and holds a PhD in transpersonal psychology. Her groundbreaking research on betrayal led to the discovery of Post Betrayal Syndrome® and the 5 Stages from Betrayal to Breakthrough™.  Resources  Learn more about becoming a PBT-Certified Coach or Practitioner at ThePBTInstitute.com  Listen to the "From Betrayal to Breakthrough" podcast (top 1.5% globally) 

Why do science projects exist? I think it's really strange that, once a year, teachers are allowed to assign homework to our parents. Who made this rule? Why do they get to make our parents slap together a project at the last minute and then pretend that we did it? I guess there are some mysteries that aren't meant to be solved.

In this episode of Green Room, Sydney and Chloe talk about the all-too-uncomfortable topic of spiritual bypassing. They go through a list of different ways we use spirituality to skirt around “negative” emotions or avoid pain. They look at a few examples in the Bible where Jesus and others did the opposite. Known & Beloved: Re-Membering Your Story: A Guide to Exploring Our Core Stories: https://a.co/d/eXkDdX1 This episode was recorded in the winter of 2025.

Andy Furman and Bucky Brooks recap NFL Wild Card Saturday with the Bears beating the Packers and the Rams squeaking by the Panthers. Andy and Bucky also discuss which QB's have the most pressure to win throughout the playoffs and how Curt Cignetti turned Indiana from a dumpster fire into a dynasty. Andy and Bucky also discuss John Harbaugh's possible next destination + new editions of Ask Bucky and The Blame Game! See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Instagram can be a minefield of powerful influencers making you feel terrible about not having millions of dollars and a glamorous lifestyle, or, OR, it could be filled with odd things like banjo players plucking away in National Parks. Writer, comedian, filmmaker, and podcaster Akilah Hughes has published a memoir, Obviously: Stories From my Timeline, written for Steven Soderbergh's Command Z television series, and hosted shows on the Crooked Media network. Most importantly for us, she knows how to manipulate social media to get to the good stuff, the weird stuff, and the good weird stuff. No Mr. Beast here but plenty to put you to sleep right away and arm you with new sleep tools tomorrow. Akilah and John Moe also talk about Bigfoot and the alleged interdimensionality of Bigfoot, because if you get John talking long enough he's bound to come around to Bigfoot. He cannot help it.Listen to Akilah's new podcast, How Is This Better?, from Courier Newsroom on their website or on the podcatcher of your choice.Hey Sleepy Heads, is there anyone whose voice you'd like to drift off to, or do you have suggestions on things we could do to aid your slumber?Email us at: sleepwithcelebs@maximumfun.org.Follow the Show on:Instagram @sleepwcelebsBluesky @sleepwithcelebsTikTok @SleepWithCelebsJohn is on Bluesky @JohnMoeJohn's acclaimed, best-selling memoir, The Hilarious World of Depression, is now available in paperback._________________________________________________________________________Join | Maximum FunIf you like one or more shows on MaxFun, and you value independent artists being able to do their thing, you're the perfect person to become a MaxFun monthly member.

Happy New Year 2026! I love January and the opportunity to start afresh. I know it's arbitrary in some ways, but I measure my life by what I create, and I also measure it in years. At the beginning of each year, I publish an article (and podcast episode) here, which helps keep me accountable. If you'd like to share your goals, please add them in the comments below. 2026 is a transitional year as I will finish my Masters degree and continue the slow pivot that I started in December 2023 after 15 years as an author entrepreneur. Just to recap that, it was: From digitally-focused to creating beautiful physical books; From high-volume, low cost to premium products with higher Average Order Value; From retailer-centric to direct first; and From distance to presence, and From creating alone to the AI-Assisted Artisan Author. I've definitely stepped partially into all of those, and 2026 will continue in that same direction, but I also have an additional angle for Joanna Penn and The Creative Penn that I am excited about. If you'd like to join my community and support the show every month, you'll get access to my growing list of Patron videos and audio on all aspects of the author business — for the price of a black coffee (or two) a month. Join us at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn. Joanna Penn writes non-fiction for authors and is an award-winning, New York Times and USA Today bestselling thriller author as J.F. Penn. She's also an award-winning podcaster, creative entrepreneur, and international professional speaker. You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below. Leaning into the Transformation Economy The Creative Penn Podcast and my Patreon Community Webinars and live events Finish my Masters in Death, Religion, and Culture Bones of the Deep — J.F. Penn Add merch to CreativePennBooks.com and JFPennBooks.com How to Write, Publish, and Market Short Stories and Short Story Collections — Joanna Penn Other possible books Experiment more with AI translation Ideally outsource more marketing to AI, but do more marketing anyway Double down on being human, health and travel You can find all my books as J.F. Penn and Joanna Penn on your favourite online store in all the usual formats, or order from your local library or bookstore. You can also buy direct from me at CreativePennBooks.com and JFPennBooks.com. I'm not really active on social media, but you can always see my photos at Instagram @jfpennauthor. Leaning into the Transformation Economy I've struggled with my identity as Joanna Penn and my Creative Penn brand for a few years now. When I started TheCreativePenn.com in 2008, the term ‘indie author' was new and self-publishing was considered ‘vanity press' and a sure way to damage your author career, rather than a conscious creative and business choice. It was the early days of the Kindle and iPhone (both launched in 2007), and podcasting and social media were also relatively new. While US authors could publish on KDP, the only option for international authors was Smashwords and the market for ebooks was tiny. Print-on-demand and digital audio were also just emerging as viable options. While it was the early era of blogging, there were very few blogs and barely any podcasts talking about self-publishing, so when I started TheCreativePenn.com in late 2008 and the podcast in March 2009, it was a new area. For several years, it was like howling into the wind. Barely any audience. Barely any traffic, and certainly very little income.  But I loved the freedom and the speed at which I could learn things and put them into practice. Consume and produce. That has always been my focus. I met people on Twitter and interviewed them for my show, and over those early years I met many of the people I consider dear friends even now. Since self-publishing was a relatively unexplored niche in those early years, I slowly found an audience and built up a reputation. I also started to make more money both as an author, and as a creative entrepreneur. Over the years since, pretty much everything has changed for indie authors and we have had more and more opportunity every year. I've shared everything I've learned along the way, and it's been a wonderful time.  But as self-publishing became more popular and more authors saw more success (which is FANTASTIC!), other voices joined the chorus and now, there are many thousands of authors of all different levels with all kinds of different experiences sharing their tips through articles, books, podcasting, and social media. I started to wonder whether my perspective was useful anymore. On top of the human competition, in November 2022, ChatGPT launched, and it became clear that prescriptive non-fiction and ‘how to' information could very easily be delivered by the AI tools, with the added benefit of personalisation. You can ask Chat or Claude or Gemini how you can self-publish your particular book and they will help you step by step through the process of any site. You can share your screen or upload screenshots and it can help with what fields to fill in (very useful with translations!), as well as writing sales descriptions, researching keywords, and offering marketing help targeted to your book and your niche, and tailored to your voice. Once again, I questioned what value I could offer the indie author community, and I've pulled back over the last few years as I've been noodling around this. But over the last few weeks, a penny has dropped. Here's my thinking in case it also helps you. Firstly, I want to be useful to people. I want to help. In my early days of speaking professionally, from 2005-ish, I wanted to be the British (introvert) Tony Robbins, someone who inspired people to change, to achieve things they didn't think they could. Writing a book is one of those things. Making a living from your writing is another. So I leaned into the self-help and how-to niche. But now that is now clearly commoditised. But recently, I realised that my message has always been one of transformation, and in the following four areas.  From someone who doesn't think they are creative but who desperately wants to write a book, to someone who holds their first book in their hand and proudly says, ‘I made this.' The New Author. From someone who has no confidence in their author voice, who wonders if they have anything to say, to someone who writes their story and transforms their own life, as well as other people's. The Confident Author. From an author with one or a handful of books who doesn't know much about business, to a successful author with a growing business heading towards their first six figure year. The Author-Entrepreneur. And finally, from a tech-phobic, fearful author who worries that AI makes it pointless to create anything and will steal all the jobs, to a confident AI-assisted creative who uses AI tools to enhance and amplify their message and their income. The AI-Assisted Artisan Author. These are four transformations I have been through myself, and with my work as Joanna Penn/The Creative Penn, I want to help you through them as well. So in 2026, I am repositioning myself as part of The Transformation Economy. What does this mean? There is a book out in February, The Transformation Economy by B. Joseph Pine II, who is also the author of The Experience Economy, which drove a lot of the last decade's shift in business models. I have the book on pre-order, but in the meantime, I am doing the following. I will revamp TheCreativePenn.com with ‘transformation' as the key frame and add pathways through my extensive material, rather than just categories of how to do things. I've already added navigation pages for The New Author, The Confident Author, The Author-Entrepreneur, and The AI-Assisted Artisan Author, and I will be adding to those over time. My content is basically the same, as I have always covered these topics, but the framing is now different. The intent is different. The Creative Penn Podcast will lean more heavily into transformation, rather than just information — And will focus on the first three of the categories above, the more creative, mindset and business things.  My Patreon will continue to cover all those things, and that's also where I post most of my AI-specific content, so if you're interested in The AI-Assisted Artisan Author transformation path, come on over to patreon.com/thecreativepenn I have more non-fiction books for authors coming, and lots more ideas now I am leaning into this angle. I'll also continue to do webinars on specific topics in 2026, and also add speaking back in 2027. It's harder to think about transformation when it comes to fiction, but it's also really important since fiction books in particular are highly commodified, and will become even more so with the high production speeds. Yes, all readers have a few favourite authors but most will also read a ton of other books without knowing or caring who the author is. Fiction can be transformational. Reader's aren't buying a ‘book.' They're buying a way to escape, to feel deeply, to experience things they never could in real life. A book can transform a day from ‘meh' into ‘fantastic!' My J.F. Penn fiction is mostly inspired by places, so my stories transport you into an adventure somewhere wonderful, and they all offer a deeper side of transformative contemplation of ‘memento mori' if you choose to read them in that way.  They also have elements of gothic and death culture that I am going to lean into with some merch in 2026, so more of an identity thing than just book sales. I'm not quite sure what this means yet, but no doubt it will emerge. I'll also shape my JFPennBooks.com site into more transformative paths, rather than just genre lists, as part of this shift. My memoir Pilgrimage always reflected a transformation, both reflecting my own midlife shift but I've also heard from many who it has inspired to walk alone, or to travel on pilgrimage themselves. Of course, transformation is not just for our readers or the people we serve as part of our businesses. It's also for us. One of the reasons why we are writers is because this is how we think. This is how we figure out our lives. This is how we get the stories and ideas out of our heads and into the world. Writing and creating are transformative for us, too. That is part of the point, and a great element of why we do this, and why we love this. Which is why I don't really understand the attraction of purely AI-generated books. There's no fun in that for me, and there's no transformation, either. Of course, I LOVE using Chat and Claude and Gemini Thinking models as my brainstorming partners, my research buddies, my marketing assistants, and as daily tools to keep me sparkly. I smiled as I wrote that (and yes, I human-wrote this!) because sparkly is how I feel when I work with these tools. Programmers use the term ‘vibe coding' which is going back and forth and collaborating together, sparking off each other. Perhaps that I am doing is ‘vibe creation.' I feel it as almost an effervescence, a fun experience that has me laughing out loud sometimes. I am more creative, I am more in flow. I am more ‘me' now I can create and think at a speed way faster than ever before. My mind has always worked at speed and my fingers are fast on the keys but working in this way makes me feel like I create in the high performance zone far more often. I intend to lean more into that in 2026 as part of my own transformation (and of course, I share my experiences mainly in the Community at patreon.com/thecreativepenn ). [Note, I pay for access to all models, and currently use ChatGPT 5.2 Thinking, Claude Opus 4.5, and Gemini 3 Pro). So that's the big shift this year, and the idea of the Transformation Economy will underpin everything else in terms of my content. The Creative Penn Podcast and my Patreon Community The Creative Penn Podcast continues in 2026, although I am intending to reduce my interviews to once every two weeks, with my intro and other content in between. We'll see how that goes as I am already finding some fascinating people to talk to!  Thank you for your comments, your pictures, and also for sharing the episodes that resonate with you with the wider community. Your reviews are also super useful wherever you are listening to this, so please leave a review wherever you're listening this as it helps with discovery.  Thanks also to everyone in my Patreon Community, which I really enjoy, especially as we have doubled down on being human through more live office hours. I will do more of those in 2026 and the first one of the year will blearily UK time so Aussies and Kiwis can come. I also share new content almost every week, either an article, a video or an audio episode around writing craft, author business, and lots on different use cases for AI tools.  If you join the Patreon, start on the Collections tab where you will find all the backlist content to explore. It's less than the price of a coffee a month so if you get value from the show, and you want more, come on over and join us at patreon.com/thecreativepenn My Books and Travel Podcast is on hiatus for interviews, since the Masters is taking up the time I would have had for that. However I plan to post some solo episodes in 2026, and I also post travel articles there, like my visits to Gothic cathedrals and city breaks and things like that. Check it out at https://www.booksandtravel.page/blog/  Webinars and live events Along with my Patreon office hours, I'm enjoying the immediacy and energy of live webinars and they work with my focus on transformation, as well as on ‘doubling down on being human' in an age of AI, so I will be doing more this year. The first is on Business for Authors, coming on 10 and 24 January, which is aimed at helping you transform your author business in 2026, or if you're just getting started, then transform into someone who has even a small clue about business in general!Details at TheCreativePenn.com/live and Patrons get 25% off. In terms of live in-person events, it looks like I will be speaking at the Alliance of Independent Authors event at the London Book Fair in March, and I'll attend the Self-Publishing Show Live in June, although I won't be speaking. There might be other things that emerge, but in general, I'm not doing much speaking in 2026 because I need to … Finish my Masters in Death, Religion, and Culture This represents a lot of work as I am doing the course full-time. I should be finished in September, and much of the middle of the year will be focused on a dissertation. I'm planning on doing something around AI and death, so that will no doubt lead into some fiction at a later stage! Talking of fiction … Bones of the Deep — J.F. Penn The Masters is pretty serious, as is academic research and writing in general, and I found myself desperate to write a rollicking fun story over the holiday break between terms. I've talked about this ‘tall-ship' story for a while and now I'm committing to it. Back in 1999, I sailed on the tall-ship Soren Larsen from Fiji to Vanuatu, one of the three trips that shaped my life. It was the first time I'd been to the South Pacific, the first time I sailed blue water (with no land in sight), and I kept a journal and drew maps of the trip. It also helped me a make a decision to leave the UK and I headed for Australia nine months later in early 2000, and ended up being away 11 years in Australia and New Zealand. I came home to visit of course, but only moved back to the UK in 2011, so that trip was memorable and pivotal in many ways and has stuck in my mind. The story is based on that crossing, but of course, as J.F. Penn my imagination turns it into essentially a ‘locked room,' there is no escape out there, especially if the danger comes from the sea. Another strand of the story comes from a recent academic essay for my Masters, when I wrote about the changes in museum ethics around human remains and medical specimens i.e. body parts in jars, and how some remains have been repatriated to the indigenous peoples they were stolen from. I've also talked before about how I love ‘merfolk' horror like Into the Drowning Deep by Mira Grant, All the Murmuring Bones by A.G. Slatter, and Merfolk by Jeremy Bates. These are no smiling fantasy mermaids and mermen. They are predators. What might happen if the remains of a mer-saint were stolen from the deep, and what might happen to the ship that the remains are being transported in, and the people on board?  I'm about a third in, and I am having great fun! It will actually be a thriller, with a supernatural edge, rather than horror, and it is called Bones of the Deep, and it will be out on Kickstarter in April, and everywhere by the summer.  You can check out the Kickstarter pre-launch page with photos from my 1999 trip, the cover for the book, and the sales description at JFPenn.com/bones Add merch to CreativePennBooks.com and JFPennBooks.com I've dipped my toe into merch a number of times and then removed the products, but now I'm clear on my message of transformation, I want to revisit this. My books remain core for both sites, but for CreativePennBooks, I also want to add other products with what are essentially affirmations — ‘Creative,' ‘I am creative, I am an author,' and variants of the poster I have had on my wall for years, ‘Measure your life by what you create.' This is the affirmation I had in my wallet for years! For JFPennBooks, the items will be gothic/memento mori/skull-related. Everything will be print-on-demand. I will not be shipping anything myself, so I'm working with my designer Jane on this and then need to order test samples, and then get them added to the store. Likely mid-year at this rate! How to Write, Publish, and Market Short Stories and Short Story Collections — Joanna Penn I have a draft of this already which I expanded from the transcript of a webinar I did on this topic as part of The Buried and the Drowned campaign. It turns out I've learned a lot about this over the years, and also on how to make a collection, so I will get that out at some point this year. I won't do a Kickstarter for it, but I will do direct sales for at least a month and include a special edition, workbook, and bundles on my store first before putting it wide. I will also human-narrate that audiobook. Other possible books I'm an intuitive creative and discovery writer, so I don't plan out what I will write in a year. The books tend to emerge and then I pick the next one that feels the most important. After the ones above, there are a few candidates. Crown of Thorns, ARKANE thriller #14. Regular readers and listeners will know how much I love religious relics, and it's about time for a big one! I have a trip to Paris planned in the spring, as the Crown of Thorns is at Notre Dame, and I have some other locations to visit. My ARKANE thrillers always emerge from in-person travels, so I am looking forward to that. Maybe late 2026, maybe 2027. AI + religion technothriller/short stories. I already have some ideas sketched out for this and my Masters thesis will be something around AI, religion, and death, so I expect something will emerge from all that study and academic writing. Not sure what, but it will be interesting! The Gothic Cathedral Book. I have tens of thousands of words written, and lots of research and photos and thoughts. But it is still in the creative chaos phase (which I love!) and as yet has not emerged into anything coherent. Perhaps it will in 2026, and the plan is to re-focus on it after my Masters dissertation.  I feel like the Masters study and the academic research process will make this an even better book, But I am holding my plans for this lightly, as it feels like another ‘big' book for me, like my ‘shadow book' (which became Writing the Shadow) and took more than a decade to write! How to be Creative. I have also written bits and bobs on this over many years, but it feels like it is re-emerging as part of my focus on transformation. Probably unlikely for 2026 but now back on the list … Experiment more with AI translation AI-assisted translation has been around for years now in various forms, and I have experimented with some of the services, as well as working with human narrators and editors in different languages, as well as licensing books in translation. But when Amazon launched Kindle Translate in November 2025, it made me think that AI-assisted translation will become a lot more popular in 2026. AI audiobook narration became good enough for many audiobooks in 2025, and it seems like AI-translation will be the same in 2026. Yes, of course, human translation is still the gold standard, as is human narration, and that would be the primary choice for all of us — if it was affordable. But frankly, it's not affordable for most indie authors, and indeed many small publishers. Many books don't get an audiobook edition and most books don't get translated into every language. It costs thousands per book for a human translator, and so it is a premium option. I have only ever made a small profit on the books that I paid for with human translators and it took years, and while I have a few nice translation deals on some books, I'm planning to experiment more with AI translation in 2026. More languages, more markets, more opportunities to reach readers. More on this in the next episode when I'll cover trends for 2026. Ideally outsource more marketing to AI, but do more marketing anyway You have to reach readers somehow, and you have to pay for book marketing with your time and/or your money. Those authors killing it on TikTok pay with their time, and those leaning heavily on ads are paying with money. Most of us do a bit of both. There is no passive income from books, and even a backlist has to be marketed if you want to see any return. But I, like most authors, am not excited about book marketing. I'd rather be working on new books, or thinking about the ramifications of the changes ahead and writing or talking about that in my Patreon Community or here on the podcast. However, my book sales income remains about the same even as I (slowly) produce more books, so I need to do more book marketing in 2026. I said that last year of course, and didn't do much more than I did in 2024, so here I am again promising to do a better job! Every year, I hope to have my “AI book marketing assistant” up and running, and maybe this will be the year it happens. My measure is to be able to upload a book and specify a budget and say, ‘Go market this,' and then the AI will action the marketing, without me having to cobble together workflows between systems. Of course, it will present plans for me to approve but it will do the work itself on the various platforms and monitor and optimize things for me. We have something like that already with Amazon auto-ads, but that is specific to Amazon Advertising and only works with certain books in certain genres. I have auto-ads running for a couple of non-fiction books, but not for any fiction. I'd also ideally like more sales on my direct stores, JFPennBooks.com and CreativePennBooks.com which means a different kind of marketing. Perhaps this will happen through ChatGPT shopping or other AI-assisted e-commerce, which should be increasing in 2026. More on that in trends for the year to come in the next show. Double down on being human, health and travel I have a lot of plans for travel both for book research and also holidays with Jonathan but he has to finish his MBA and then we have some family things that take priority, so I am not sure where or when yet, but it will happen! Paris will definitely happen as part of the research for Crown of Thorns, hopefully in the spring. I've been to Paris many times as it's just across the Channel and we can go by train but it's always wonderful to visit again. Health-wise, I'll continue with powerlifting and weight training twice a week as well as walking every day. It's my happy place! What about you? If you'd like to share your goals for 2026, please add them in the comments below — and remember, I'm a full-time author entrepreneur so my goals are substantial. Don't worry if yours are as simple as ‘Finish the first draft of my book,' as that still takes a lot of work and commitment! All the best for 2026 — let's get into it! The post My 2026 Creative And Business Goals With Joanna Penn first appeared on The Creative Penn.

In this bonus episode, Jim adds a track to the Desert Island Jukebox—one of Steve Albini's many obscure recordings from the legendary engineer's vast production discography.Join our Facebook Group: https://bit.ly/3sivr9TBecome a member on Patreon: https://bit.ly/3slWZvcSign up for our newsletter: https://bit.ly/3eEvRnGMake a donation via PayPal: https://bit.ly/3dmt9lUSend us a Voice Memo: Desktop: bit.ly/2RyD5Ah Mobile: sayhi.chat/soundopsSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.