Podcasts about cuny hunter college

Superpowers for Good should not be considered investment advice. Seek counsel before making investment decisions. When you purchase an item, launch a campaign or create an investment account after clicking a link here, we may earn a fee. Engage to support our work.Watch the show on television by downloading the e360tv channel app to your Roku, AppleTV or AmazonFireTV. You can also see it on YouTube.Devin: What is your superpower?Cameron: Ability to foster collaboration and build meaningful connections.Peter: Courage to speak truth, even when facing potential backlash.A major obstacle to global prosperity is the chronic underfunding of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), especially in emerging markets. In this episode of Superpowers for Good, Cameron Neil, CEO of LendForGood, and Peter Rostovsky, CEO of Raiseway, discussed their new collaboration that aims to close that gap. Together, they're making it easier for impact-driven businesses to raise capital and for everyday people to lend across borders.LendForGood is already empowering impact enterprises in places like Asia, Africa, Latin America, and beyond to access much-needed debt financing from a global pool of lenders. Now, with Raiseway's support, these entrepreneurs will have access to tools that make running a crowdfunding campaign simpler, more efficient and more likely to succeed.Peter explained, "There are so many elements to a crowdfunding campaign...this is super challenging even for large organizations...we want to be that platform that supports the campaign throughout the process."The two companies align not just in function, but in values. Cameron emphasized that "the gap for small business capital access is significant...it's a real growing problem" that requires global infrastructure and collaboration to solve. The World Bank and UN have estimated that SMEs in emerging markets face an annual $5 trillion funding shortfall. The traditional financial system simply isn't built to serve them effectively. As banks consolidate, smaller loans become less profitable and more scarce.Raiseway and LendForGood aim to fill that void. Their shared belief in the potential of debt crowdfunding—versus equity financing, which isn't ideal for most small businesses—fuels their work. As Peter noted, "Your community is never going to foreclose you."Though not currently raising capital through a regulated investment crowdfunding campaign, both platforms are building the infrastructure and momentum for an ecosystem where everyday investors can meaningfully support small businesses doing good in the world.This collaboration underscores the power of mission-aligned tech partnerships to tackle some of the world's most stubborn problems. By streamlining access to impact capital, they're helping to rewrite the rules of small business finance—on a global scale.tl;dr:LendForGood and Raiseway collaborate to simplify cross-border impact crowdfunding and support small businesses globally.Cameron explains how LendForGood connects global lenders with impact enterprises needing debt financing.Peter shares Raiseway's role in streamlining campaigns and making crowdfunding more accessible and effective.Cameron and Peter discuss the massive global SME funding gap and why crowd lending is a vital solution.They reveal their superpowers—collaboration and courage—and offer tips on using them to drive meaningful impact.How to Develop Collaboration and Connectivity As a SuperpowerCameron Neil's superpower lies in his ability to foster collaboration and build meaningful connections. Reflecting on his approach, he shared, “I have found an ability to… build collaborative initiatives, to build posses… or a network to form.” Cameron's knack for bringing people together with shared goals and inspiring them to work collectively has been a cornerstone of his success. He credits this skill with driving impactful projects like LendForGood's partnership with Raiseway.Illustrative Anecdote:Cameron's collaboration with Peter Rostovsky is a testament to his superpower. By recognizing the synergy between LendForGood and Raiseway, Cameron initiated a partnership that equips impact enterprises with tools to succeed in crowdfunding. Reflecting on this collaboration, he explained, “Peter and I connected and we took it somewhere… bringing our organizations and others on this journey.”Tips for Developing the Superpower:Visualize Outcomes: Identify a future state or goal that requires collective effort to achieve.Seek Alignment: Find individuals or organizations that share your objectives and values.Inspire Participation: Use your vision to motivate others to join and contribute meaningfully.Build Trust: Focus on integrity and mutual respect to strengthen collaborative relationships.Embrace Diversity: Collaborate with people who bring complementary skills and perspectives.By following Cameron's example and advice, you can make collaboration and connectivity a skill. With practice and effort, you could make it a superpower that enables you to do more good in the world.How to Develop Courage to Speak Truth As a SuperpowerPeter Rostovsky's superpower is his courage to speak truth, even when facing potential backlash. Reflecting on a life-changing moment, Peter shared, “Something drastic really changed… I started being far more open about my views.” This courage to express his convictions, even at the cost of venture investor interest, has strengthened his connection with supporters and colleagues. His openness has inspired others, creating a space for dialogue and solidarity.Illustrative Anecdote:Peter's courage was tested following October 7th, when he began publicly sharing his views on Israel's policy in Gaza. Despite knowing that his candidness would alienate venture investors, Peter chose integrity over business interests. This bold stance not only demonstrated his values but also attracted a supportive community that shares his vision for Raiseway.Tips for Developing the Superpower:Find Supportive Allies: Surround yourself with people who encourage and respect your honesty.Prioritize Integrity: Focus on values over short-term gains to build lasting trust.Practice Courage: Start by sharing your beliefs in safe spaces before expanding to larger platforms.Embrace Vulnerability: Accept the risks of being open as a necessary part of authentic communication.By following Peter's example and advice, you can make courage to speak truth a skill. With practice and effort, you could make it a superpower that enables you to do more good in the world.Remember, however, that research into success suggests that building on your own superpowers is more important than creating new ones or overcoming weaknesses. You do you!Guest ProfileCameron Neil (he/him):Co-Founder and CEO, LendForGoodAbout LendForGood: LendForGood is a global impact loan syndication platform mobilising millions in impact finance for the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Entrepreneur support organisations, accelerators, incubators, venture studios and early stage investors use LendForGood to run campaigns and raise impact debt from both our individual and organisational lender community and the supporters of their portfolio enterprises who are borrowing. Investors use LendForGood to efficiently discover and deploy capital to courageous impact enterprises helping to deliver the SDGs around the world. Website: lendforgood.ioBiographical Information: Cameron Neil is the co-founder, director and CEO of LendForGood, an impact loan syndication platform that is mobilising millions of dollars to help achieve the Sustainable Development Goals. Has has three decades of experience in the impact sector, working across and between finance, business, technology, international development, corporate advisory and startups. Cameron played a pioneering role in the Fairtrade movement in the region, as well as the early days of B-Corp and Shared Value. His work now focuses on capital entrepreneurship and innovative finance to meet the challenges of the 21st century. As demonstrated through LendForGood, Cameron believes strongly in the power of people to come together in solidarity and through collaboration to create the communities and world that they want - 'all of us' is the largest untapped impact investment fund in the world!Linkedin: linkedin.com/company/lendforgoodGuest ProfilePeter Rostovsky (he/him):Co-Founder and CEO, RaisewayAbout Raiseway: Raiseway is developing an affordable SaaS platform to equip businesses with AI-enabled tools to execute effective crowdfunding campaigns on platforms like LendForGood.Website: raiseway.appCompany Facebook Page: facebook.com/raisewayappBiographical Information: Born and raised in St. Petersburg, Russia, Peter moved to New York at the age of 16. Peter studied political science and economics at CUNY Hunter College. Before joining the crowdfunding industry, he worked as a capital markets intelligence salesman. Personal Facebook Profile: facebook.com/peter.rostovsky.7Linkedin: linkedin.com/in/peter-rostovskyInstagram Handle: @pool_breadSupport Our SponsorsOur generous sponsors make our work possible, serving impact investors, social entrepreneurs, community builders and diverse founders. Today's advertisers include FundingHope, KribSavUp, SuperCrowd25, and Crowdfunding Made Simple. Learn more about advertising with us here.Max-Impact MembersThe following Max-Impact Members provide valuable financial support:Carol Fineagan, Independent Consultant | Lory Moore, Lory Moore Law | Marcia Brinton, High Desert Gear | Paul Lovejoy, Stakeholder Enterprise | Pearl Wright, Global Changemaker | Ralf Mandt, Next Pitch | Scott Thorpe, Philanthropist | Matthew Mead, Hempitecture | Michael Pratt, Qnetic | Sharon Samjitsingh, Health Care Originals | Add Your Name HereUpcoming SuperCrowd Event CalendarIf a location is not noted, the events below are virtual.Impact Cherub Club Meeting hosted by The Super Crowd, Inc., a public benefit corporation, on May 20, 2025, at 1:00 PM Eastern. Each month, the Club meets to review new offerings for investment consideration and to conduct due diligence on previously screened deals. To join the Impact Cherub Club, become an Impact Member of the SuperCrowd.SuperCrowdHour, May 21, 2025, at 1:00 PM Eastern. Devin Thorpe, Champion of Social Good and CEO of The Super Crowd, Inc., will lead a session on "The Secret to Higher Investment Returns via Impact Crowdfunding." He'll share powerful strategies and real-world examples that show how aligning your investments with your values can lead to strong financial and social returns. If you're an investor looking to maximize impact or curious about the growing world of impact crowdfunding, this is a session you won't want to miss! Don't miss it!SuperCrowd25, August 21st and 22nd: This two-day virtual event is an annual tradition but with big upgrades for 2025! We'll be streaming live across the web and on TV via e360tv. Soon, we'll open a process for nominating speakers. Check back!Community Event CalendarSuccessful Funding with Karl Dakin, Tuesdays at 10:00 AM ET - Click on Events.African Diaspora Investment Symposium 2025 (ADIS25), Wednesday–Friday, May 28–30, 2025, at George Washington University, Washington, D.C., USA.Regulated Investment Crowdfunding Summit 2025, Crowdfunding Professional Association, Washington DC, October 21-22, 2025.Call for community action:Please show your support for a tax credit for investments made via Regulation Crowdfunding, benefiting both the investors and the small businesses that receive the investments. Learn more here.If you would like to submit an event for us to share with the 9,000+ changemakers, investors and entrepreneurs who are members of the SuperCrowd, click here.We use AI to help us write compelling recaps of each episode.Manage the volume of emails you receive from us by clicking here. Get full access to Superpowers for Good at www.superpowers4good.com/subscribe

The Outer Realm - Fan Favourite Peter Panagore Returns Hosts: Michelle Desrochers, Amelia Pisano Date: January 23rd, 2025 Episode: 515 Discussion: Peter was an early guest on the show, and shared the story of his unbelievable NDE. We have asked him to return and share it again ! Our listenership/viewership has grown so much over the years, that we wanted to formally introduce you all ( re-introduce for some) to Peter. His Journey has been and continues to be one of inspiration and growth. - Peter Panagore went ice climbing with his partner on the world-famous Lower Weeping Wall, along the Ice Fields Parkway in Alberta, Canada. On their descent, they became trapped on the side of the mountain. As the sun set, he was overcome by exhaustion and hypothermia. He died on the side of that mountain. And in those minutes on the other side, he experienced hell, forgiveness, and unconditional love. Heaven was beautiful. Contact for the show - theouterrealmcontact@gmail.com Rumble: TheOuterRealm X - MicheleDerocher Website: www.theouterrealmradio.com Please support us by Liking, Subscribing, Sharing and Commenting. Thank you all!! About Our Guest: Rev. Peter Panagore was recruited to TV as the fifth minister of America's oldest religious broadcast. Peter's two-minute spot aired for 15 years just before the morning weather on NewsCenterMaine on two NBC stations reaching 80k viewers a day. Previously, Peter served in New England as a United Church of Christ minister. His Audible Best Seller, Heaven Is Beautiful, has been optioned for a film. His first book, Two Minutes for God, is a nondenominal devotional drawn from his 1700 TV stories. He is working on his third book build around his talk and provides mentoring to spiritual seekers worldwide. BOOKS: Heaven Is Beautiful: How Dying Taught Me That Death Was Just The Beginning Two Minutes for God: Quick Fixes For The Spirit (2008) (Anthology) Chicken Soup For The Veterans Soul: Stories to Stir the Pride and Honor the Courage of Our Veterans WEBSITE/LINKS: https://www.peterpanagore.love/ TWITTER: @pbpanagore BEYOND The Outer Realm UNCENSORED - Guest: Micah Dank Hosts: Michelle Desrochers Date: January 21st, 2025 Episode: 513 Discussion: Exploring the hidden world of Symbolism . Micah picks up where his dear friend Jordan Maxwell left off. (RIP) Micah is continuing Jordan's research and today will be speaking about Symbols. Symbolism is a huge art of Society and our every day life. Many are hidden in plain sight, often going unnoticed. There is so much that we don't know, and Micah will be blunt and thorough. Things are NOT what the seem. He will also talk about his incredible friendship with Jordan Maxwell. Contact for the show - theouterrealmcontact@gmail.com Rumble: TheOuterRealm X - MicheleDerocher Website: www.theouterrealmradio.com Please support us by Liking, Subscribing, Sharing and Commenting. Thank you all About Our Guest: Micah T. Dank was born in 1983 in Oceanside New York. From a young age he had wanted to be a writer, coming from a family of writers. His father was a producer and radio news editor at CBS News in Manhattan and his grandfather was a Producer at CBS News. Micah was an actor in High School and became interested in writing from his 12th grade English teacher Russell Reid. From there he majored in English at SUNY Albany and transferred down to CUNY Hunter College in Manhattan to earn his Bachelors degree in ‘Language Literature and Criticism'. It wasn't until he moved to Boston for a new job that he became interested in all the esoteric sciences including the astrology and astrotheology prevalent through his book series Links: WEBSITE: https://www.micahdank.com/

BEYOND The Outer Realm UNCENSORED - Guest: Micah Dank Hosts: Michelle Desrochers Date: January 21st, 2025 Episode: 513 Discussion: Exploring the hidden world of Symbolism . Micah picks up where his dear friend Jordan Maxwell left off. (RIP) Micah is continuing Jordan's research and today will be speaking about Symbols. Symbolism is a huge art of Society and our every day life. Many are hidden in plain sight, often going unnoticed. There is so much that we don't know, and Micah will be blunt and thorough. Things are NOT what the seem. He will also talk about his incredible friendship with Jordan Maxwell. Contact for the show - theouterrealmcontact@gmail.com Rumble: TheOuterRealm X - MicheleDerocher Website: www.theouterrealmradio.com Please support us by Liking, Subscribing, Sharing and Commenting. Thank you all About Our Guest: Micah T. Dank was born in 1983 in Oceanside New York. From a young age he had wanted to be a writer, coming from a family of writers. His father was a producer and radio news editor at CBS News in Manhattan and his grandfather was a Producer at CBS News. Micah was an actor in High School and became interested in writing from his 12th grade English teacher Russell Reid. From there he majored in English at SUNY Albany and transferred down to CUNY Hunter College in Manhattan to earn his Bachelors degree in ‘Language Literature and Criticism'. It wasn't until he moved to Boston for a new job that he became interested in all the esoteric sciences including the astrology and astrotheology prevalent through his book series Links: WEBSITE: https://www.micahdank.com/ TWITTER: @RealMisterDan The Outer Realm: If you enjoy the content on the channel, please support us by “Liking, Subscribing, Sharing and Commenting: Thank you All A formal disclaimer: The opinions and information presented or expressed by guests on The Outer Realm Radio are not necessarily those of the TOR Hosts, Sponsors, or the United Public Radio Network and its producers. We will however always be respectful and courteous to all involved. Thank you, we appreciate you all!

What are borders, and why do we have them? And how is violent border enforcement at the U.S.-Mexico border connected to Israel's brutal assault on Gaza? And what happens when borders cross living land and communities? We'll dig into these questions in this week's episode with the help of Heba Gowayed, sociology professor at CUNY Hunter College and Graduate Center. And then we'll hear a story brought to us by In Confianza, with Pulso about one time when the natural boundary between two countries changed,  and what happened to the people caught on the other side. GUESTS: Heba Gowayed, sociology professor at CUNY Hunter College and Graduate Center and author of Refuge: How the State Shapes Human Potential and the forthcoming The Cost of Border. Charlie Garcia, writer and producer of the story “The Border is Alive!,” from In Confianza, with Pulso.   The post Dividing Lines: What Are Borders and Why Do We Have Them? (encore) appeared first on KPFA.

What are borders, and why do we have them? And how is violent border enforcement at the US-Mexico border connected to Israel's brutal assault on Gaza? And what happens when borders cross living land and communities? We'll dig into these questions on this week's episode with the help of Heba Gowayed, sociology professor at CUNY Hunter College and Graduate Center. And then we'll hear a story brought to us by In Confianza, with Pulso about one time when the natural boundary between two countries changed – and what happened to the people caught on the other side. Featuring: Heba Gowayed, sociology professor at CUNY Hunter College and Graduate Center and author of "Refuge: How the State Shapes Human Potential" and the forthcoming "The Cost of Border" Credits:  "The Border is Alive!" from In Confianza, with Pulso** Written and produced by Charlie Garcia  Edited by Liz Alarcón Original Music by Julian Blackmore Audio engineering and mixing by Charlie Garcia and Julian Blackmore Special thanks to Gina Hernandez at Chamizal National Memorial Making Contact Staff: Host: Lucy Kang Producers: Anita Johnson, Salima Hamirani, Amy Gastelum, and Lucy Kang Executive Director: Jina Chung Editor: Adwoa Gyimah-Brempong Engineer: [Jeff Emtman](http://www.jeffemtman.com/)  Digital Media Marketing: Anubhuti Kumar Music Credits: "Documentary" by AlisiaBeats via Pixabay Learn More:  Making Contact website: [www.radioproject.org](http://www.radioproject.org/) Heba Gowayed: www.[hebagowayed.com](http://hebagowayed.com/)  In Confianza, with Pulso: [www.projectpulso.org/tag/podcast](http://www.projectpulso.org/tag/podcast) URL: https://focmedia.org/2024/05/borders-what-are-they-good-for/ Making Contact is an award-winning, nationally syndicated radio show and podcast featuring narrative storytelling and thought-provoking interviews. We cover the most urgent issues of our time and the people on the ground building a more just world.

We've touched on the theory of self-determination on the show before, but today, I'm thrilled to dedicate an entire episode to this important topic. Joining me for this deeper dive is Dr. Gina Riley, an expert in self-determination theory and motivation. This conversation will resonate with so many of you because it beautifully ties into themes we often explore here, like low-demand parenting and fostering our kids' natural passions and strengths. In this episode, Gina explains the theory of self-determination and dives into the science behind why it's so impactful, particularly for neurodivergent kids. We explore how it connects with autonomy-supportive parenting and discuss the three tenets of cognitive evaluation theory, which examines what fosters intrinsic motivation. We also tackle the hot topic of whether extrinsic motivators like stickers and rewards have a place and how to genuinely connect with our kids' interests—even when they differ from our own.   About Dr. Gina Riley Gina Riley, Ph.D., is an educational psychologist, Program Director, and Clinical Professor of Adolescent Special Education at CUNY – Hunter College. She has conducted significant research on homeschooling and unschooling, an educational method and philosophy that advocates student intrinsic motivation as a primary means for learning. In addition to her research on self-directed learning environments, Dr. Riley has expertise in Supported Decision Making, an alternative to guardianship for students with disabilities. She is a faculty advisor for Supported Decision Making New York, promoting autonomy and self-determination for individuals with disabilities.  Dr.Riley also has extensive experience in online, hybrid, and HyFlex education, having been actively involved in the field since 1998. Her contributions to educational psychology and alternative education models have been influential in shaping contemporary discussions on personalized and flexible learning approaches. Dr. Riley is the author of numerous academic articles and three books, including Unschooling:Exploring Learning Beyond the Classroom (Palgrave, 2020), The Homeschooling Starter Guide (Simon & Schuster, 2021), and The Joys of Self Determined Learning: A Collection of Essays (Ricci Publishing, 2022). She is the current President-Elect of the New York State Association of Teacher Educators.   Things you'll learn from this episode What self-determination theory is, and how it's connected to intrinsic motivation Why a sense of competence, autonomy, and relatedness, as outlined in the cognitive evaluation theory, are crucial for motivation Why it matters that parents focus on facilitating autonomy and decision-making in their children What the science says about how and why intrinsic motivation leads to better academic and social outcomes in adulthood How intrinsic and extrinsic motivations can coexist and why it's important that they're balanced   Resources mentioned Dr. Gina Riley's website Gina on Instagram Gina on Twitter Unschooling: Exploring Learning Beyond the Classroom by Dr. Gina Riley The Homeschooling Starter Guide: How to Create and Adapt the Best Education Action Plan for Your Needs by Dr. Gina Riley NYS Decision Making Curriculum (free decision making curriculum for schools and homeschools I Will Die on This Hill: Autistic Adults, Autism Parents, and the Children Who Deserve a Better World by Meghan Ashburn and Jules Edwards Meghan Ashburn and Jules Edwards on Autistic Adults, Autism Parents, and the Children Who Deserve a Better World (Tilt Parenting podcast) Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us by Dan Pink The intrinsic motivation of Richard Ryan and Edward Deci The Self-Driven Child, with William Stixrud and Ned Johnson (Tilt Parenting podcast) The Self-Driven Child: The Science and Sense of Giving Your Kids More Control Over Their Lives by Dr. William Stixrud and Ned Johnson Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Outer Realm Radio welcomes back Micah T. Dank Hosts: Michelle Desrochers, Amelia Pisano Date: November 21st, 2024 Episode: 495 Discussion: Micah T. Dank and he will be discussing Astrology within the Ancient Sumerian Texts. Micah has previously shared his research here on the show which covered the Bible, The book of Enoch. Contact for the show - theouterrealmcontact@gmail.com Rumble: TheOuterRealm X - MicheleDerocher Website: www.theouterrealmradio.com Please Support Us : Like, Subscribe, Share and Comment! Thank YOU!!! About Our Guest: Micah T. Dank was born in 1983 in Oceanside New York. From a young age he had wanted to be a writer, coming from a family of writers. His father was a producer and radio news editor at CBS News in Manhattan and his grandfather was a Producer at CBS News. Micah was an actor in High School and became interested in writing from his 12th grade English teacher Russell Reid. From there he majored in English at SUNY Albany and transferred down to CUNY Hunter College in Manhattan to earn his Bachelors degree in ‘Language Literature and Criticism'. It wasn't until he moved to Boston for a new job that he became interested in all the esoteric sciences including the astrology and astrotheology prevalent through his book series. Links: WEBSITE: https://www.micahdank.com/ TWITTER: @RealMisterDank If you enjoy the content on the channel, please support us by subscribing: Thank you All A formal disclaimer: The opinions and information presented or expressed by guests on The Outer Realm Radio are not necessarily those of the TOR Hosts, Sponsors, or the United Public Radio Network and its producers. We will however always be respectful and courteous to all involved. Thank you, we appreciate you all!

Heba Gowayed discusses her In These Times article, "Borders and the Exchange of Humans for Debt: Borders and debt are new instruments of violence in a system that has had many names." Heba is an Associate Professor of Sociology at CUNY Hunter College. She is author of, "Refuge: How the State Shapes Human Potential." "The Moment of Truth" with Jeff Dorchen follows the interview. Check out Heba's article here: https://inthesetimes.com/article/borders-exchange-humans-debt-asylum-global-south Help keep This Is Hell! completely listener supported and access bonus episodes by subscribing to our Patreon: www.patreon.com/thisishell

Welcome back as we continue our conversations with Professor Gina Riley and Dr Rebecca English.Professor Riley is an educational psychologist, Clinical Professor, and Program Leader of the Adolescent Special Education Program at CUNY – Hunter College. Professor Riley is recognised internationally for her research in the fields of homeschooling, unschooling and intrinsic motivation.We are also joined by the wonderful Dr Rebecca English. As a researcher, teacher and mother, Dr English's work is concerned with parenting and education. She holds a particular interest in the choice of non-mainstream education, especially democratic schools and home education.In part two of this episode, both Gina and Rebecca dive into some commonly asked questions about unschooling. We explore how unschoolers can access higher education, what the research tells us about future career paths taken and how the unschooling approach can support neurodivergent families.A BIG THANKYOU to both Gina and Rebecca who kindly offered up their time to share all of their valuable research and experience with the Sisters Who Homeschool Podcast.Show Notes!Gina Riley To learn more about Gina and her incredible research please visit her websitehttps://ginarileyphd.com/ Thanks for listening!We would love to answer your questions and help you share your stories.Write to us at:hello.sisterswhohomeschool@gmail.comFollow us at:FacebookInstagram

Welcome to Our Classroom! In this episode, we are thrilled to have Dr. JPB Gerald, an inspiring adult educator and theorist, join us to discuss his groundbreaking work and upcoming book, "Embracing the Exceptions: Supporting Neurodivergent Students of Color in Education."

We are very excited to announce the incredible Professor Gina Riley joins us today. Our very first international guest!Professor Riley is an educational psychologist, Clinical Professor, and Program Leader of the Adolescent Special Education Program at CUNY – Hunter College. Professor Riley is recognised internationally for her research in the fields of homeschooling, unschooling and intrinsic motivation. But, wait - there's more! We are also joined by the wonderful Dr Rebecca English. As a researcher, teacher and mother, Dr English's work is concerned with parenting and education. She holds a particular interest in the choice of non-mainstream education, especially democratic schools and home education. In part one of this episode, both Gina and Rebecca begin to unpack unschooling stereotypes, myths and what the research actually tells us both here in Australia, as well as in the US. Gina also shares her personal experience of unschooling her son.A BIG THANKYOU to both Gina and Rebecca who kindly offered up their time to share all of their valuable research and experience with the Sisters Who Homeschool Podcast.Show Notes!Gina Riley To learn more about Gina and her incredible research please visit her websitehttps://ginarileyphd.com/ Thanks for listening!We would love to answer your questions and help you share your stories.Write to us at:hello.sisterswhohomeschool@gmail.comFollow us at:FacebookInstagram

Send us a Text Message.You are going to love today's episode! Barbara Banacos is an inspiration. As a young pianist, she endured an injury that manifested itself as a form of dystonia. This is significant because it is not well-understood in the medical community. The Taubman Approach can help you if you are struggling with a devastating injury. Some of us are experiencing devastating injuries in regards to playing the piano. We are here to help! Go to Golandskyinstitute.org and we will get you connected to a teacher to help you. If you could list my website and social media in the show notes I'd greatly appreciate it!Website: www.barbarabanacos.comInstagram.com/barbara.banacosFacebook: Barbara Banacos Piano Studioyoutube.com/@barbarabanacosBarbara Banacos is the daughter of world-renowned jazz educator Charlie Banacos and pianist/educator Margaret Banacos. She began teaching in her mother's studio in 1997. Ms. Banacos teaches children and adults from beginner to advanced levels with a focus on classical music and offers advanced technical training in the Taubman Approach. While completing her undergrad and graduate degrees in music from CUNY Hunter College, Ms. Banacos ran a private studio in Millburn/Short Hills, NJ and taught at Montclair State University Preparatory School. Since returning to the Boston area in 2003, Ms. Banacos teaches in-home private lessons in Lexington and Winchester, MA and at her home studio in Hamilton, MA. She has also taught remotely since 2010, reaching students as far away as Malaysia and New Zealand.One of only three teachers in the Boston area certified in the Taubman Approach, Ms. Banacos has studied with Robert Durso of the Golandsky Institute since 1997. She is certified at the Associate level with the Golandsky Institute, is adjunct faculty for their annual summer symposiums at Princeton University and has led their support groups for many years. She has presented lectures on piano technique at the Golandsky Institute Boston Workshops and was invited to teach at the Danilo Pérez Foundation in Panama, assisting Edna Golandsky. Check out the Golandsky Institute and info/videos about the Taubman Approach here. Other significant teachers include Edna Golandsky, Charlie Banacos, Garry Dial and Lefteris Kordis.Ms. Banacos has performed as a soloist, accompanist and in numerous piano duos with her favorite duet partner, Margaret Banacos.(If you are looking to study the lessons of Charlie Banacos via online lessons taught by Garry Dial, click here for more information or inquire by emailing Barbara at charliebanacos@gmail.com)This Summer, Edna Golandsky, renowned pedagogue and leading expert on the Taubman Approach will release her first book with Amplify Publishing Group. Entitled ‘The Taubman Approach To Piano Technique: A Comprehensive Guide To Overcome Physical Limitations and Unlock Your Full Pianistic Potential.' Visit: www.ednagolandsky.com to learn more.The Golandsky Institute's mission is to provide cutting-edge instruction to pianists based on the groundbreaking work of Dorothy Taubman. This knowledge can help them overcome technical and musical challenges, cure and prevent playing-related injuries, and lead them to achieve their highest level of artistic excellence.Please visit our website at: www.golandskyinstitute.org.

What are borders, and why do we have them? How is violent border enforcement at the U.S.-Mexico border connected to Israel's brutal assault on Gaza? What happens when borders cross living land and communities? We dig into these questions with the help of Heba Gowayed, sociology professor at CUNY Hunter College and Graduate Center. Then we hear a story about one time when the natural boundary between two countries changed — and what happened to the people caught on the other side.   The post Borders: What are they good for? appeared first on KPFA.

What are borders, and why do we have them? And how is violent border enforcement at the US-Mexico border connected to Israel's brutal assault on Gaza? And what happens when borders cross living land and communities? We'll dig into these questions in this week's episode with the help of Heba Gowayed, sociology professor at CUNY Hunter College and Graduate Center. And then we'll hear a story brought to us by In Confianza, with Pulso about one time when the natural boundary between two countries changed – and what happened to the people caught on the other side. Learn more about the story and find the transcript on  radioproject.org. Making Contact is an award-winning, nationally syndicated radio show and podcast featuring narrative storytelling and thought-provoking interviews. We cover the most urgent issues of our time and the people on the ground building a more just world. EPISODE FEATURES: This episode features Heba Gowayed, sociology professor at CUNY Hunter College and Graduate Center and author of Refuge: How the State Shapes Human Potential and the forthcoming The Cost of Border; Charlie Garcia, writer and producer of the story “The Border is Alive!” from In Confianza, with Pulso. MAKING CONTACT: This episode is hosted by Lucy Kang. It is produced by Anita Johnson, Lucy Kang, Salima Hamirani, and Amy Gastelum. Our executive director is Jina Chung.  MUSIC: This episode features "Documentary" by AlisiaBeats via Pixabay. Learn More: Heba Gowayed In Confianza, with Pulso “The Border is Alive!” full episode

“We want to get people to recognize that there are better-for-you options in the alcohol world.” —Jennifer Roman-Matito   While a night of fun and frivolity is part of the social experience, the unpleasant physical effects of a hangover can leave us longing for a better way— a way to continue the party without the painful playoff.  In this episode, Justine sits down with Jennifer Roman-Matito, the co-founder of Mother's Milk, a coconut water cocktail company that offers a healthier alternative to alcoholic drinks. She created Mother's Milk to provide hangover-free beverage options made with natural ingredients for conscious drinkers. Jennifer shares how her interest in healthier alternatives was sparked by unwanted physical reactions to alcohol and how this led her to create a line of coconut water-based RTD cocktails designed for hydration without hangovers. Tune in to hear the challenges of launching and growing a female-founded business from the ground up, what conscious drinking means, plus, advice on choosing the right ingredients, building strategic partnerships, and fundraising as a small business.    Meet Jennifer:  Jennifer Roman-Matito is a dynamic entrepreneur and co-founder of Mother's Milk, a pioneering coconut water-based cocktail brand aimed at health-conscious individuals with a penchant for revelry. Armed with a degree in Communications and Media Studies from CUNY-Hunter College, Jennifer combines her passion for innovative products with her rich island heritage to craft beverages that resonate with a diverse and adventurous audience.   As a self-funded and female-founded initiative, Mother's Milk stands as a testament to Jennifer's entrepreneurial spirit and dedication to creating distinctive offerings in the beverage industry. Leveraging her expertise in hospitality, marketing communications, and event management, Jennifer spearheads the brand's distribution efforts, forges strategic partnerships, and orchestrates impactful marketing campaigns to propel Mother's Milk into the spotlight.   Through Mother's Milk, she not only offers refreshing libations but also cultivates a community of like-minded individuals who embrace wellness without compromising on enjoyment. With Jennifer at the helm, Mother's Milk continues to captivate taste buds, spark conversations, and carve its niche as a trailblazer in the beverage industry.   Website  LinkedIn Instagram     Connect with NextGen Purpose: Website Facebook Instagram  LinkedIn YouTube Episode Highlights: 00:29 Alt Drinks for Hangovers 05:05 Building a Lifestyle Brand 09:17 Challenges and Solutions for Female-FOunded  13:38 Finding Strategic Partners 18:09 Conscious Drinking  

When doing research for my last post about models of grief, it became clear that I needed to talk to an expert. Luckily, I knew just the one. In my first podcast episode, I talk with Dr. Saren Seeley about the neuroscience of grief. How does the brain adapt after loss? We discuss the “Gone but Everlasting” theory, how grieving is a learning process, and the surprisingly contentious climate around the study of grief. I so appreciate the humanity she brings to science and hope you'll enjoy her company too. The lightly edited transcript of our conversation is below.Chrissy Sandman (CS): Hello, Saren! Thank you for talking with me.Saren Seeley (SS): Of course, I'm so happy to do this.CS: Me too! I am so excited to talk with you. In particular, we have several interesting points of connection over the last nine or so years. So I'll go ahead and introduce you and then we can get into it.So, Dr. Saren Seeley is here with me today. She's a postdoctoral research fellow in the psychiatry department at Mount Sinai's Icahn School of Medicine. She completed her PhD in Clinical Psychology at the University of Arizona under the mentorship of Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor, where she conducted research on neuroscience of grief and trained as a clinician. She completed her clinical internship at the Pittsburgh VA Medical Center (my hometown!). And before then, she did her undergraduate studies at CUNY Hunter College in New York, which is where we met when I took over her job as a research assistant in the Regulation of Emotion of Anxiety and Depression (READ) lab there. And since then, we have sort of stayed in touch over email, usually when I was bugging you about different fMRI scanning methods and analysis over the years, and you've always been so generous to reply with such helpful and detailed responses. And then more recently, with the grief that I've been going through, I just so happened to pick up the book that was written by your grad school advisor that you are mentioned in the acknowledgement section of and I imagine some of the work you were doing in grad school is woven throughout the book. So I just thought that you would be the perfect person to talk to as I am getting interested in how we understand grief. What are the models that are out there, both in terms of what's empirically supported, and what we know about how people adapt and change after a loss of a loved one, but also what people resonate with and what's useful for people who are going through it themselves, which might be in a clinical setting, or just how people make sense of their experience. And the other aspect of what I wanted to talk with you about today is just how I feel you weave yourself into the work. And in some of the popular science communications I've read of yours, I just really admire how you've brought your own lived experience and perspective into understanding how we are humans studying the things that we go through, which I think - there's been a shift - but in my experience, there's been a bit of a stigma or taboo about acknowledging that we as humans go through some of the things related to mental health, but we're also studying or are working with us as therapists.SS: Absolutely. And that's one of the things that's been so nice for me by reading your Substack is a seeing how these ideas resonate with, you know, people who are not people in this very specific niche area, people are just coming to these ideas in the midst of having their own experiences of loss and grief. And then also, you know, the way that you can your writing connects your understanding of the science with what you're going through at that moment. That's been really beautiful to read. So I'm glad you're sharing that with the world.CS: Thank you. Yeah, I think in particular, the the book I was referencing by Mary-Frances, as you call her, Dr. O'Connor is the the grieving brain which sort of came out right when I was going through it or, and so I think a lot of the concepts as I was reading the book about just the freshness of the loss, and I guess the befuddlement or like disbelief, or just like sort of confusion about you know that someone's no longer here and yet, there's some process that goes on that was like nothing I had experienced quite in that way before about the searching. And I just couldn't believe that that exact experience was being described in this book about how our brain continues to search for people that are no longer here. And exactly why that is based on different aspects of memory and learning, which I know is is a big part of your research right about about learning and grieving.SS: Yeah, Mary-Frances and I have been working on our "Gone but also Everlasting" theory. That's kind of been our focus. I get to still work with her. Even since I've graduated, we're very close collaborators, which has been wonderful. We're both focusing on a little bit different things, aspects of this model. But really thinking about: Why do we have these weird experiences? Why does it feel like when we lose someone, we're kind of straddling these two worlds, one in which they exist, and one in which they don't? And how does our brain makes sense of that? And, you know, thinking about what do we know about attachment and how our brain encodes those attachments with people who are important to us?   That's one of the questions you'd asked is like, what, what is useful about, you know, this lens of understanding grief through the lens of the brain, and I certainly don't think it's the old way or even the best way. But it happens to be the way that A) I'm interested in and B) I actually have skills to do something about. But I think one of the things that offers is that it can help people understand some of these very weird, disorienting, bewildering experiences that they have. And often feeling like, "Is this happening just to me, is this you know, is this normal? Why am I having this experience, even though the logical part of my brain knows different information?" And I think that can at least hopefully offer some way of, I don't know, having a little bit more of a roadmap and way to orient to the world while you're having this really this experience of upheaval, in so many different ways.CS: Yes. So I believe, like you mentioned, you and Dr. O'Connor put out this theory paper on grieving as a form of learning. So you just mentioned, there's a part of our brain that logically understands and then there's another part that maybe takes time to update. Could you tell us a little bit more about how grieving is learning?SS: Yeah, absolutely. So this theory is really trying to address the big questions like: Why does grieving take so long? Why is it so painful? Why do we continue to yearn for someone who has died even long after we know they're gone, and, you know, our brain may make predictions that they are still here that they're coming back.And, and one of the key aspects of this theory in particular is that adaptation requires a person to reconcile these two conflicting streams of information that I mentioned, like this really firmly entrenched understanding and belief about the person as being alive and existing even when they're not in our immediate presence. And so that means the best prediction about them is when they're not here is that they're just somewhere else. They're coming back, we can go out and find them. But we also have these episodic memories or specific knowledge of the fact of their deaths. So I'm really curious about how do we learn over time to wait, the predictions based on this new model, this new information that we have more heavily than those based on the first model, the old model, given that the left given that that old model has been so strongly reinforced for so long, and that the new information that we have is usually information that we don't want things to be this way. So it can be really hard. It can be a very painful thing to accept the fact that those changes have occurred.And so we're curious about what's happening in the brain when we successfully do manage to reconcile those two streams of information and, you know, integrate grief, which, ultimately allows us to create this meaningful life that honors our relationship with a person who died. But we're no longer stuck in that wanting something we can't have and then continually slamming up against the fact that they're not here. And so yeah, so this idea of greeting is a learning process is that we have to learn at multiple levels. And three of the ones that are important are that, you know, there's a lot of habit learning that has to be overcome. We have to develop the ability to predict the absence of the person who died as opposed to their presence, at least sort of in this physical plane.And also developing ways to get your attachment and social support needs met, particularly when the person who died played a significant role in your life was as someone close to you. And so my interests in the of past couple of years - because I get very focused on details of things - Is like, okay, we're talking about learning, but like, that's like attention. In cognitive neuroscience, there's a million different types of learning. It's not a very specific term. And so what gets in the way of that? And so one of the directions that we're taking this "Gone but also Everlasting" theory that we've been working on is trying to use computational psychiatry or mathematical modeling of brain and behavior to try to use established formal models of learning that we have from cognitive neuroscience that are very well developed, like reinforcement learning. And can we use those to test out some of these ideas about what's happening in grief?CS: Gone but everlasting.SS: Yeah, "Gone but also Everlasting" is the name that - actually Mary-Frances came up with that. All credit goes to her for that one. Yeah, but it speaks to those dual streams of like: they're not here anymore, but their memory lives on and their impact lives on.CS: Right.SS: And we think that happens in that it's not just sort of a metaphor. I mean, our brains are changed by every experience that we have, and loving someone being loved by someone is an experience that changes our brain. We can't really cut open human brains, but some of the prairie vole research shows that there are specific neurons that fire specifically when the vole is approaching their partner that they're pair bonded to. And so that bond is literally encoded in our brains, which in some ways, is kind of a nice way to think about it. That is still there.CS: And for anyone who hasn't taken Intro to Psychology classes, the way that a lot of the research on bonding and pair bonding and connection, is based on these cute prairie voles who have lifelong relationships with their partners.SS: They are absolutely adorable. But my prairie vole colleagues tell me they also bite a lot.CS: Yeah, but I mean, that's incredible, I think, that the physical matter changes as a result of the experience of being loved and loving. And when you were describing the grieving as a form of learning, I was just jotting down a couple of other things that stood out to me. You said, part of the the habit learning, I imagine would be.... just as you're going about your day, the ways that you might interact with someone who's gone. Those are automatic. And so when you think about, "This is the typical time on the weekend that I usually call my dad" or whatever that might be cued by things in your environment, such as, I don't know, Saturday morning coffee, or whatever the case is, and then that doesn't happen anymore. And so, just as you were saying, predicting absence. It's like, instead of predicting or expecting their presence, the thing to learn is their absence. Or expecting the absence. Is that one way of understanding it?SS: Yeah, definitely. And so in terms like putting that in neuroscience terms, we can use the idea of prediction errors and how those help us learn. So, you know, when we're making decisions about things, we get feedback about the outcome. So we chose to go on this route versus this other route. Is the outcome of our choice, is that better or worse than expected? And so negative prediction errors are when something that is worse than expected. So you know if we reach for the phone expecting to call our loved one who died and then have that moment of realization, "Oh, that door is shut. I can't do that anymore." That's a big negative prediction error. And potentially that can be when those waves of grief occur that you experience. You're really confronted with that reality. Interestingly enough, the salience - or the sort of the strength and emotional content of a prediction error -  can drive learning. So when something is really acute and obvious. That is a big signal to us that we need to change our predictions, because this one is no longer working. And so the interesting thing about grief is, you know, it doesn't just take one time to have that prediction error and wave of grief. It really is something that you participate in, over and over and over again. And it's not necessarily a perfectly linear trajectory of like, those waves getting less over time. Sometimes they can be more, sometimes they can be less. But overall, most people do kind of integrate that new knowledge of the loss.CS: Yeah, I think I'm almost imagining, like the process of learning over time, and then different knobs that might assist that learning that you can turn up or different knobs that you can turn down that might hinder the learning.SS: Oh, I love that!CS: And I think acceptance, like you mentioned, or in other words, allowing that emotional wave of grief to actually be felt and acknowledged and attended to. You're absorbing that learning. SS: Yeah, I love that idea of like knobs that turn up or down your, you know, things that facilitate or inhibit your learning. I think that's actually how I've really been coming to think about this. You know, I really try to... Grief is already so stigmatized, I really tried to be very careful in my language. Psychologists are sometimes bad about this. Like saying, like, "Oh, this person is failing to adapt." Like, that's, that's very...CS: Not very compassionate.SS: And yeah, I think that terminology of like… so if we assume that grieving is this process of learning that unfolds over time, there are things that can get in the way of that and there are things that can make that easier. So, yeah, I like that.CS: Maybe this is a good segue into kind of the climate around the study of grief. So as I was mentioning to Saren, why I originally wanted to speak with you is to kind of check the temperature about what's going on amongst researchers in terms of how we talk about models of grief. I originally was sitting down to write my next post about models of grief and was interested in the most famous one that persists today, which is the Five-Stage Model of grief, developed by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, who actually studied people who were about to die of terminal illness themselves and the stages that they went through. So these common stages, which I actually don't have memorized fully in order. So I think that's another interesting thing to note is just like: okay, people are familiar with that there are stages of grief - they probably involve anger, denial, bargaining, depression, acceptance. I think those are the ones, maybe in that order. I can fact check this later. But that idea to me never, just as a person, seemed all that controversial until I started really diving into the literature and how people have absolutely torn down this model in some pretty strongly worded academic papers by proponents of other models, which seem well- supported by science and have good stuff to offer too. But I just noticed, aside from the content of the actual models of grief, that there seems to be like a lot of contention or intensity around the debates about what models should we be using to understand grief. SS: We see that same level of contention and the debates that have been ongoing for years now about grief related disorders. And is there is there a place that we can say that this is a clinical disorder that's related to grief? Or is that medicalizing normal human experience? And I think a lot of these debates about prolonged grief disorder, about five stages, really taps into a the impact that grief has on us, and the fact that everybody probably has their own experience of grief that may be shaping how they're coming to this debate, either through themselves or someone that they're close to. And also that a lot of these debates come down to what is normal and human experience? And how do we define normal grief? And so a lot of the debates are coming out of saying, "This is helpful because it is a way that people can understand their experiences better or that we can support people better," versus, you know, saying, "No, that drawing this really clear boundary doesn't adequately capture the diversity and variability of grief experiences that people have and is too prescriptive."So that is one of the concerns with the Five-Stage Model is that it presents people with this idea that in order to properly grieve, they must go through these stages in order. And that I don't think is helpful. But what I do think is helpful, and one of the reasons that this model is so sticky. I've worked in hospitals, and this is very popular with social workers, it seems like because A) like that roadmap, I mentioned. During a really weird, disconcerting, disorienting experience, it says, "This is what you're going to experience, then you're going to experience this, then you're going to experience this." And so you know, like, Okay, I have to get through this stage, this stage and this stage, and then there will be an end to that, and I know what's going to happen. And it also, I think, really allows people to feel validated and and experiencing some emotions, like anger or relief, that are very stigmatized, and not seen as acceptable. So I think, you know, thinking about not just like, what is the content or scientific premise of these models, but like, what function are these models serving in the lives of people who are grieving and the people who are trying to help them? There's like multiple layers going on.CS: Yes! I remember, in grad school, one of our professors saying, "A model is only as good as it is useful." And that really stuck with me, because no theory or kind of abstraction is perfect is going to capture everyone's experience. It's just not. And I think that's what I was most interested in is like, what do people connect with? Like, why has this model hung around? And I enjoyed that part of The Grieving Brain book that kind of talks about one reason why this model has - why the Five-Stage Model is so popular - is because it gives people that roadmap. And also related to the heroic cycle, which I hadn't thought about that since middle school English class or whatever. Going through like a heroic Odyssey where you have, you know, trials and tribulations that you overcome, and then ultimately, succeed. And wouldn't that be nice if we could have something like that for grief? I think that is what people long for is a way to navigate it and come out victorious, almost. But it's perhaps not exactly like that. It's not something that can be finished.SS: Yeah, I think it can set up expectations for what grief is going to look like or what it's going to feel like that then when those expectations are not met, can make someone feel like "Oh, I'm not doing this right." For some reason, at least in US Western culture, there are a lot of myths and like about what it looks like to "do grief right." There's one paper that is a survey showing that people think that expressing positive emotion within, I think it's one or two months of the loss, is inappropriate. But then like when you get to six months, expressing negative emotions is inappropriate. So it's just like grieving people can't win.CS: Yeah.SS: But yeah, what you were saying about models and their utility. As we were meeting with this researcher who published this preprint recently, a computational neuroscientist, who is getting into the area of grief. And I was, you know, making a reference to that statement, “All models are wrong, but some are useful.” He was saying, "I really like to put a spin on that and say: ‘All models are right, but some are useless.'" So it's really the idea of our models are not going to perfectly capture, especially in experience like grief. I mean, humans, for one thing, we're not just like six foot prairie voles. We have all this other stuff happening. And particularly when it comes to computational psychiatry, and we're trying to distill these experiences down to mathematical models and equations, this is not going to... like we're never going to come up with an equation that captures all of the different parameters and influences on grief. But I think, scientifically, where having a really well specified model can come in is it allows us to falsify our ideas and make more specific predictions, see if those predictions hold, see if they don't hold. A lot of ideas or theories and in psychology, you know, it's a lot of like, sort of fuzzy verbal descriptions.And so in some ways, the work with the "Gone-But-Also-Everlasting" theory that I'm interested in is like: Okay, how do we make this really, like, testable? And so maybe we can that can help us distill down to like: Okay, this is the essential part of the model like, this other part of the model might be interesting or useful in some ways, but might not be essential to our understanding of some of the core processes that are going on. It's something I'm always thinking about when I'm doing this work is like, how is this going to be perceived by people who are going through grief or know, people are going through grief? And how could this be used or interpreted by, you know, people who are not necessarily in science or people who are in science?I mean, I hope what people get out of this focus on learning in the brain is that grieving is a learning process that requires time and experience and a lot of both of those things. And it's really hard. And we need to respect and honor the effort that that takes and the time that that takes, and be compassionate with ourselves and with other people. For that time and experience that's needed. And, you know, it's something that you have to... yeah, it's, it's just going to take time. And it can't necessarily be like a one and done thing. One of the things I hear from participants most commonly that's really painful for them is like, feeling like people in their lives have expected them to move on. And they don't feel like moving on...that that is a thing. Like, how could they move on from this important thing that's had such an impact on their lives, both through the relationship and also the event of the death?CS: Yeah, time and experience. And I think that if we're not interested in a one-size-fits-all prescriptive model of grief....It's complicated, right? Because we want to capture the varied human experience and it's not gonna look the same for everyone. But are there still commonalities and principles? And I think what you just said is it: We need experience and time. I've talked with family members about this, the sort of like "Everyone keeps telling me that there's no one way to grieve and it looks differently for everyone," which, at times, I've personally found both comforting, and a little bit frustrating, because it's sort of like, well, what am I supposed to do then? Or like, what does it look like? I think it's both. I think it's a dialectic of both, right? There probably are some commonalities, and it is gonna look different for everyone. And that is hard to hold both. SS: Yeah, I can see in some ways, I would feel like, you know, just being told, like, "Well go figure it out for yourself!"CS: Yeah. But I guess that brings me to the Dual Process Model. I think it's one that is an alternative to the Five-Stage Model that has been more recently supported by research and is consistent with this idea of needing learning. And I think learning is almost like synonymous in a way with experience, like getting experience. Living. Continuing to live your life and experience your life. And I think there is something in there too. I mean, maybe this is my bias in terms of like, my own personal and research interests in acceptance and mindfulness-based approaches and compassion-based approaches of sort of allowing emotion to unfold even if it's uncomfortable. There's something about that, that seems important. So a long winded way of saying, Could you explain the Dual Process Model for us?SS: Yeah! So there's a lot of different models that people have developed to try to understand and provide a framework for organizing grief and the experience of grief. There's also a Meaning-Making model by Robert Niemeyer, which has been pretty influential in some circles. But the Dual Process Model of coping with bereavement. This was developed by Margaret Stroebe and Hank Schut to describe how people come to terms with the death of a loved one. It really comes out of Cognitive Stress Theory. But it's also one of the first models to emphasize that healthy grief is variable across time. And also it needs to address these two different sources of stress, loss-oriented stressors and restoration-oriented stressors. So loss-oriented stressors, these are things that require a focus on the loss experience. So the process of thinking about and coming to terms with the reality of the loss, dealing with ruminations and intrusive thoughts, but also positive reminiscing and participating in personal or communal rituals to remain close to them. And like this idea that there are these stressors that you have to tackle that are related to loss, this comes from the idea of like this older idea of of grief work and tasks of grieving. The idea that somebody has to actively participate in confronting the reality that loss in order to adapt.CS: So being in it? "Grief work" meaning you "should" be really reflecting on the person and like feeling sad. SS: Exactly, yeah. So you know, having emotions from loss is healthy. You need to have those. There are different ways to have them, but they serve a purpose. Even the ones that are really painful and may feel, you know, pretty debilitating, especially early on. Another loss oriented stressor is you also need to take time off from grief. So, grief is not only really taxing on your emotions and your mental health, but also physically on your body. There's cardiovascular stress, inflammatory and immune changes that are related to acute loss. So, you know, needing some times of avoidance or denial of that loss to give yourself a little bit of a break. So you can come back to the work of grief later. So you have these loss oriented stressors on one hand, and then the other hand you have these restoration oriented stressors, which role are things related to the process of reorienting to changes in the world that have occurred secondary to the bereavement so for example, common one is like interpersonal conflict. So family arguments or disagreement over what to do with a loved one stuff specifically like a parent when they have died, or like how funeral or burial arrangements should be handled. So having to navigate that conflict, that's a restoration-oriented stressor. Also, practical matters, like if the loved one was some was the person who handled the finances, or they were a caregiver or somebody who are major emotional support. One of the stressors is that you have to figure out what to do with the fact that they're no longer fulfilling that role that might require you to take on new responsibilities, learn new skills, cultivate other relationships where you can get those needs for closeness or support met. And then another sort of task on the restoration-oriented side could be thinking about how the absence of that person has changed your identity and like what that means for you going forward.So I think one of the advantages of the Dual Process Model is that it captures stressors on both the looking back and looking forward side of things. And so key to the Dual Process Model is that both of these are important, and we need both in order to adjust to this world. So how do we attend to both? Well, the Dual Process Model says that we oscillate or move back and forth flexibly between these two. Sometimes we are crying, thinking about the loss and how much we miss the person. Sometimes we are, you know, figuring out like, "Okay, what do I do with all of these financial documents?" or "I used to be a daughter, like, who am I now that I no longer have a parent?" So this moving back and forth, this experience over time is what facilitates integrated grief or the ability to hold that both the past and the present. And things that might inhibit learning is getting really stuck on one of those sides or the other. And I can explain a little bit about that, but so I'm not monologuing, I'd love to hear your reflections.CS: There's so much there. I think for me it's helpful to imagine the visual that goes along with this, which is a box on the left hand side, which is related to the loss-oriented, which my shorthand for understanding this is looking back for the past. And then on the right hand side, a box for restoration-oriented. Or kind of like, "What now, what next?" -  forward oriented. And then in between those two boxes, there's a bunch of jagged lines back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. And the oscillation between those two states is really central to the model, it seems. And it's so hard. So if anything, I think it's a little confusing, you know, it's a little less clear cut than like, oh, the five stages because it is messy in reality.SS: Right! What is the timescale of the oscillations? How fast are you supposed to like, go back and forth? How much time do you spend in one versus the other? Do you have to have that, like an even 50/50 split?  This is a beautiful model, but like, what does this actually look like for someone to try to apply it to their life? I think having your reflections that is is really interesting hearing what that's like.CS: I think one beautiful thing about it is the idea that we don't have to be really immersing ourselves or don't need to be or you know, the "shoulds" come in about how you should be grieving. You don't need to lock yourself away and like really force yourself to sit in this pool of grief all the time. That actually it is healthy and adaptive to give yourself a break. That's okay, too. And it's such a fine line, I think in all of psychology and in my own life and in clinical work with clients. It's just a fine line between avoidance that is pretty inflexible and can cause problems, so like totally avoiding any reminders of the loved one and like not talking about them or mentioning their name at family gatherings. You know, it can look like that a little bit. That might not be the type of avoidance you want to be engaging in. But on the other hand, that it is okay to dip your toe into it, and then allow yourself to like, watch a silly movie or like, do something new just randomly. You know, start a new tradition is okay. It doesn't have to always be what you did. But I think the balancing act of that...it is hard to imagine, in a way, it's like, it's very tricky, because you have to be present and constantly like sort of monitoring like, what is working and what is not working?SS: Yeah, and I think what you're attending to at any given moment is also heavily influenced, like how adaptive that is, is heavily influenced by how attuned to your current context is it. So avoidance may be particularly helpful, like you might have times at work where you really need to shut it off and just not think about that so you can get other things that are important to you done. Another issue that the Stroebe and Schut address in some of their later publications on the Dual Process Model, that I think is useful when we're thinking about how do we apply this to actual humans, is this concept of overload. So these loss and restoration-oriented stressors are not the only stressors that we have going on in our life. And often, bereavement-related stressors can happen on top of a bunch of other unrelated life stressors. This could be like additional losses, it could be major life changes, a job that's already stressful, a move that had been planned. And any other kind of contexts that is putting stress in your life. There's at least one review paper that found that financial stress is actually a predictor of having a harder time adapting to a loss and potentially developing a grief related disorder. And so they make the good point that oscillation is not necessarily going to help with overload. And so when you are feeling overloaded, you have more of these stressors than you can handle. Those probably need a different approach.CS: Right. In a way, it's a luxury to be able to let yourself fall apart in the more loss-oriented kind of way.CS: A I think context is another major, major, major thing that probably influences so much very variability in terms of how grieving looks in the context of the death. I think that was something that I was thinking about when learning about the trajectories research. So to my understanding, this is a lot of the work that comes from George Bonanno's lab at Columbia, who really examined a lot of the work about how resilient people are on the whole after really terrible things happen. Whether it is a loss of a loved one, or I think a lot of the research that perhaps you know and are involved with since you're in New York, has come from what happened after 911 and how people responded to that event, for example. So if you could maybe fill us in a little bit more on that world of research: the trajectories. What does it mean to have a trajectory of grief or recovery?SS: What does grief or trauma, post-traumatic responses, what do those look like over time? And there have been a number of studies in you know, in grief, in different disorders. George Bananno's work was really influential in that his work was one of the first to really emphasize that....Okay, in psychology, we focus a lot on what's going wrong. So a lot of our focus has been on, "Oh, look at all of the terrible things that can happen to someone after they experience trauma," but not taking into account that actually the modal response to really devastating events is that people are okay, over time. And even in that short term, not everybody develops PTSD. Most people go on to, you know, they still experience grief, but it's not debilitating in their lives and they're still able to do things that they want and need to. I think that is where we get some of that perspective about like, "Okay, this is this learning and healing." This is a natural process that happens for most people. But there are places where it can get stuck, or there are things that can happen on top of it that inhibit it.And so in grief research, one of the first, I believe to look at trajectories... It's very helpful in this work to have a group of people who've all been through the same event at the same time. So the Coconut Grove Fire was a fire at a nightclub in the early 1900s. And the researcher followed people who were in this or experienced the death of a loved one from it over time. And this was one of the first papers to show that people have very different, like, if you were to sort of draw out how they're doing over time, those lines look very different. Some look flat, some go down, and then go back up, and some go down and stay down. I think a lot of the trajectories research tends to find like three groups. My brain likes to call them mild, medium, and spicy. I think I got that from researcher. But essentially, that there's one group that does not have a severe psychological impact of whatever that event was. So they do okay in the short term and they continue doing okay in the long term. There's a group that's initially severely affected, but they do sort of rebound over time, they return to their normal baseline functioning. And there is a group that experiences a really hard time in the short term. And they continue to experience a really hard time.One of the more recent papers looking at prolonged grief symptoms, after loss, looked up to over two years. And they found in that group of people whose functioning goes down and stays down, there's a subgroup of those who do slowly, very slowly get better. Like at 12 months, you can't see a difference, but at 27 months, you can. You get two classes of people. And so that [study] came out a few years ago, and that sort of made people think about: Okay, so if we're saying that you can diagnose grief-related disorder, which we're currently calling prolonged grief, I have thoughts on that. It's another topic. You know, maybe we need to ask is 12 months and appropriate timeframe? Do we need to look a little further out? So yeah, I think just you know, this trajectories work helps us understand the real variability that we see in individual responses after loss. And that sometimes that has to do with what you're seeing in the short term. But also sometimes that what you're seeing in the short term doesn't predict how someone's going to do in the long term.CS: Yeah, and I think one study on trajectories was in the Lives of Older Couples dataset. So looking at mainly old white people in I think the Midwest.SS: The majority of our populations in grief studies, very sadly.CS: Yes...after the loss of a spouse. I found it very surprising that in addition to the three trajectories that you described, there was also a group in that particular study, where one spouse after the other one died, got better! They had been depressed, and then they were no depressed. And I think in that particular study, I was shocked at the percentages, it was like 10% of people. So you know, it's a particular sample that doesn't generalize to everyone. But I just found that to be really surprising. And I think I find the trajectories research on the whole very surprising because it's the vast majority of people, about I think over 60% in that particular study, who fit the more resilient trajectory where over time, they they didn't have long term, debilitating, I think depressive symptoms was the main way they measured that in that particular study. But I couldn't I kind of couldn't believe that.SS: Yeah, I think that, you know, that goes back to context. Like I can imagine, you know, I don't recall or know exactly why people were doing better but you can certainly imagine If somebody's in a really bad relationship, or if somebody has a lot of really heavy duty caregiving responsibilities, that is severely impacting their mental health, then things could get better after that loss. Yeah, I think it's good to examine some of the assumptions we have about what we expect people to look like and how we expect them to react after loss.CS: Yeah, so I think the heartening takeaway is that like, most people are adaptable and can change. And even for those, like you mentioned that maybe two years, it took two years like that's, you know, time and experience that they needed to then recover and adapt. And I think so much of it is cultural, too, because it reminds me, you know, I think just the messaging, we get around it is a whole other voice in the room. And we don't, typically in America, at least have traditions where you wear all black for a year, or have you know, that designated timeframe or space to do it. So then all those other questions creep in about, like, how should this be affecting me? And how for how long?SS: And you had asked about clinical work in grief. And, you know, one of the things thinking about is, is some of that one question I get sometimes is, does everybody need therapy after grief? It might seem like that would be a good thing. This is a distressing experience, maybe you need professional help. But we actually find that what's really critical is social support. Some people might need to get through that through therapy. Like you mentioned, being able to validate people in experiences that are very normal, but can be not talked about or stigmatized, that they're experiencing or emotions that might seem unacceptable. For a lot of people, they might get that social support through existing relationships that they have.But grief also changes our social network, the social environment we're in. So I had a research participant once who told me that like one of the really painful things for her about losing her husband was, she had this group of friends that used to like they were all couples, they would all go out on like this double or triple date, like once a week, and once her husband died, they stopped inviting her. And she was saying, like, "I think they're doing it because they think it would be too hard for me to sit there with other couples," or, you know, "It might be painful to talk about, but I actually really miss that. I would love to be there. I would love to, you know, be around other people who knew my husband and be able to talk about him and remember him." And it's unfortunate that there is so much discomfort about grief, both wanting to just and potentially wanting to distance yourself from someone who's going through something so hard, or, you know, in this in this case, like maybe thinking about the fact that their own husbands might die in the case of these couples and not wanting to think about that. But but also not knowing what to say or feeling like, I don't want to bring it up, because I don't want to make it worse. You're not going to remind the person that their loved one has died, they are probably very aware of that. It's not like they just forget, if you don't talk about it. I forget where I was going with that. Yeah, so the idea that, you know, the event of bereavement can ironically distance us from some of our social supports at the time that we need it most.And that can be where therapy can be helpful. Either strategizing, like how do I talk to people in my life and let them know what how to support me better, or getting support if you don't have support from other contexts or, you know, learning to deal with thoughts that might get in the way of that experience. Like, a common thought is like, "If I allow myself to feel happy if I allow myself to stop grieving, it means I'm being disrespectful or disloyal, or somehow trivializing my relationship with that person. Like, if they really mattered to me, wouldn't I be upset all the time?" So, using CBT techniques can sort of challenge some of the thoughts, or how do you accept really difficult emotions without avoiding them and continue to do do things that are important to you? CS: Yeah. That's really interesting there about this idea of like an attachment to like, being actively grieving - not that grieving stops - but this idea of being in distress of mourning, and that that maintains your relationship to the person or loyalty to them. That is something I've also encountered clinically. And it's interesting. I think a lot of people's actually helpful response from friends and family is like, “Oh, well, that person that you lost would want you to be happy and would want you to move on.” And I actually think that's meaningful. It's like, okay, your joy that you're still living out can be a dedication to the person you lost. And I think that's a part of the restoration-oriented end of things that I wanted to come back to about identity, and how figuring out who you are now in the absence of this other person is a process of, of creating again, or making meaning out of it. One thing that I have personally found helpful for that is sort of thinking about, like, you know, over the holidays and noticing the absence of my dad, who is a very fun loving, like, gregarious person, like, he would be the person like, you know, you walk in the door, and he asks, If you want, like some champagne, or you know, is very welcoming, and that way. And over Christmas, all of us were kind of like, obviously, down in the dumps, it was pretty fresh. But just noticing there wasn't someone to like usher along the events of the evening, as much. It wasn't like, okay, let's have like, drinks now. And like, cheers. And like, then we'll like have dinner like it like the just the transitions of the evening, I noticed were a little bit absent. And I was like, "I can do this!" I can be the person to like, not exactly fill his shoes, but like to step up in this moment and try to embody that quality of like, "Let's toast to being together and like everything we've been through" or you know, just like trying take on those qualities that I miss about him, myself. SS: That's such a lovely way to really bring the things that you learned from him in your relationship from him into the present and into your current relationships.CS: Yeah, it's a work in progress, for sure. But I think that idea that like, joy or positive emotions... giving yourself permission to continue on with that is part of the grieving process too.SS: Reminiscing is really important. Being able to share remembrances and revisit those times, not in the hopes that if we spend enough time there that somehow we will get into that counterfactual reality where the death didn't happen. But really saying this happened, this matters. I'm going to spend time thinking about and enjoying that this happened.CS: Totally. I mean, there's been so many things that like... one thing that I do appreciate when I've been with my family since my dad died is that there have been times when someone but usually my sister or me or my mom would have said like, "Dad would have loved this thing." And like, of course, that put paints like a really bittersweet tone to it, but it's sort of just like, oh, that's what things feel like now. And like, I would rather feel all of it rather than like not doing anything that reminds me of him anymore. These are the examples that are coming to mind as I think about like what this oscillation means or like, I don't know think feel different, for sure. It's more mixed emotions a lot of the time.SS: Yeah, it's that that flipside, like pain is the other side of love. You can't really have one without having the other.CS: Well, this has been a lot of food for thought. Maybe I'll kind of move us into final thoughts. So I suppose, are there any other aspects of these models that you would want people to carry with them? Aside from what we've talked about - or even from what we've talked about - what are the takeaways? SS: I think one of the takeaways for me is just thinking about how learning happens. We don't unlearn things. Actually, Mary-Frances and I talk a lot about your your grad mentor's Inhibitory Learning [theory]. Like, you don't you don't unlearn things, but new learning has to happen on top of it. So I think that's, that's one important piece for me. And that really challenges the idea that in order to be healthy after loss or healthy adaptation means that you're detaching or that you're moving on.Somehow, I think other aspects of models that I appreciate are, I think a lot of them converge on the idea that you don't have to lose your relationship or give up your relationship with that person. But the relationship has to change in a way that allows it to accommodate what is currently happening. And when that model cannot change, that's where we see problems. But you don't have to throw out your relationship with that person. You just need to... It needs to be a little bit different than it has been before.CS: Yeah, so I'm just letting that sink in. That's a really nice connection to my own research in grad school. And I just think that's worth repeating: we don't unlearn things. We have to learn new things if we want to change. And so some some of that idea comes from my graduate mentor, Michelle Craske, who's done a lot of work on how do we overcome fears and anxiety disorders in particular. And how she has adapted exposure therapy to be consistent with the ways that we know that our brains learn best. And specifically that if we're not erasing our old fears, we actually can't get rid of them, we just have to learn enough new experiences to soak that in so that we can continue to move forward. Which I think is really interesting and I think has made me think of like other metaphors that are similar to this, that I've just, like, popped up through my mind about like, just in my own experience of when I've been feeling the worst, and like thinking about, like plants that I've forgotten to water, and how like, yeah, there will be like, you know, a part of the plant that then like looks a little scraggly for a time, but then you can water it again, and the new part on top will continue to grow. So it doesn't get rid of the part that has been through that really hard experience. But you have to kind of build on top of that or keep going. That was just one image that came to mind. I was also thinking of like, I don't know, just going to nature for other ideas like lizards who can regrow their tails. How does that work? Does it does the tail grow back in the same exact way? No! It probably will be a little smaller and like there's going to be evidence of what has happened to it still. But does that new new tail help it balance or do whatever tails do? Sure. So you can't erase what's happened, but you have to figure out how to continue. The new learning that has to occur.SS: Absolutely. What is it been like for you reading all of these sort of like scientific potentially sort of dispassionate and debates about something that you are personally going through. Like at that moment? That might be a hard question.CS: Well, I think it intersects with how I cope with things. Going an intellectual route is natural for me. And it's easier in some ways to be in that headspace. I think I have an insatiable curiosity for things. So I think a big part of me was like, this is interesting. And that made me want to read more about it. And I would say I didn't necessarily feel invalidated reading about all these different models. Moreso I was just sort of like, "Whoa, like, I'm stepping into a whole swirling, intense realm." And I think then at that point, I was, I was kind of like, okay, like, I want to take a step back now, because this is getting in the weeds of what I ultimately don't love about academia is like getting too carried away with like, what's "right" and kind of losing sight of like, what matters, at times. But like, I think it's, I'm most interested in marrying the two: What can we learn and study? And then what can we kind of take away that like, actually has heart to it? So that was my experience reading through the literature on this.  And I appreciated how you mentioned earlier, and so does Dr. Mary-Frances O'Connor, that neuroscience is one lens through which you can understand grief. It's certainly an interesting one. Like, that's kind of how I also got into [research]. Originally, I did more like fMRI research and have gone on to other ways of looking at psychology, but I just find it interesting. But it's certainly not the only or not the best way. It's one lens.So I think it's so important to just be like, humble. I like have a really strong value of humility that I think I've developed - and I didn't always - but through the study of such heavy topics, I guess I would say that really like impact people's lives. It's like I think that's so important.SS: Yeah, I really feel that especially coming to grief research as.... I have lived experiences of a whole lot of other things. Grief is like the one thing that significant loss is not something I actually have personal lived experience of contrary to like, a million other things I could be studying right now. So it's been really interesting to me to try to keep that humility in mind. I get a lot out of, you know, what do research participants say like, how do they describe their experience? How do people that I talk to describe their experience the philosophy like phenomenology papers about first person subjective nature of grief? Yeah, really coming to that and trying to think, at the end of the day, like all of this brain stuff is really cool. I think it's, I think it's interesting. I think it's useful. Not only just because the pursuit of knowledge and knowing stuff about the world is useful, but I think there are ways that it can be helpful. Especially because grief is this pretty small research area, at least in the neuroscience like relative to depression and or PTSD, being really like okay, what I say is going to probably be pretty influential. Because there's not a lot of like other voices and so really trying to I don't know hold all of my ideas lightly and be open to other perspectives.CS: Yes, I think more more voices like that in the field of psychology or anything related to mental health is very needed. Well, it's been so lovely to talk with you about this. I found it very validating for you to email me and say like, yeah, it is complicated, like, thinking about all of these things. And I think like talking with you helped me understand. I think so many things, but I think I'm just left with like this idea of like, time and experience. “Time and new experience” is one of the phrases that's hanging around right now.SS: Yeah, this has been so much fun to connect with you about this and about something that is not about fMRI troubleshooting! That's been especially fun. But also, yeah, just really, as I said before, I really value your your perspective as a scientist and a human being going through this.CS: Thank you.Thank you again to my guest Saren Seeley. You can find her work at sarenseeley.github.io including some really great science writing that she's done. This podcast is for informational and educational purposes and is not intended to replace professional medical advice. Thank you to Grant Carey for helping to mix and edit this episode. Music is the song "Escape" by Sandwoman, which you can find on your favorite streaming services. Thank you so much for listening, and see you next time. Get full access to Emotion Lotion at emotionlotion.substack.com/subscribe

Weekly Shoutout: Friend of the show Alvaro Saar Rios on The Scene Podcast, give it a listen! -- Hi there, Today I am so excited to be arts calling author Effy Redman! (www.effyredman.com) About our guest: Effy Redman's writing investigates the intersection of disability and identity. She has work published in The New York Times, Vice, Ravishly, Chronogram, Berkeley Poetry Review, and Iron Horse Literary Review, among other places. She holds an MFA in Memoir from CUNY: Hunter College, where she received an Honorable Mention for the Helen Gray Cone Fellowship, and a BA in Literature/Drama from Bennington College, where she was an Ellen Knowles Harcourt Scholar and a Bennington Scholar. effyredman.com. Twitter: @effyredman Facebook: Effy Redman Instagram: @effyredman38 Thanks for this wonderful conversation, Effy! All the best! -- SAVING FACE, now available from Vine Leaves Press! https://www.vineleavespress.com/saving-face-by-effy-redman.html ABOUT SAVING FACE: What's in a smile? Or the absent smile? Saving Face is Effy Redman's thought-provoking answer. Born with a rare condition of facial paralysis called Moebius Syndrome, Redman's grit and eye for beauty help her survive childhood bullying and adolescent doldrums. Her physical transformation at age thirteen via plastic surgery eviscerates her concept of image, just in time for her and her family to immigrate from hardscrabble Manchester, England to America's disorientingly scenic upstate New York. Not until diagnosis in young adulthood with bipolar disorder does Redman come out of the closet as a lesbian, finally claiming her most inherent identity. Saving Face is a searing personal tribute to anybody who has ever felt like an outsider. This memoir honors the grace of a face that stands out in a crowd, defying societal beauty norms. Disability meets transcendence, suffering becomes hope, and the individual expands into community. The inability to smile, in Redman's book, lights a window onto the human capacity for redemption. ★★★★★ “This author goes where no other might dare.” Catherine Filloux, award-winning playwright -- Arts Calling is produced by Jaime Alejandro (cruzfolio.com). HOW TO SUPPORT ARTS CALLING: PLEASE CONSIDER LEAVING A REVIEW, OR SHARING THIS EPISODE WITH A FRIEND! YOUR SUPPORT TRULY MAKES A DIFFERENCE, AND I CAN'T THANK YOU ENOUGH FOR TAKING THE TIME TO LISTEN. Much love, j

“When one person makes the decision to be more mindful, more conscious, it starts to have a little bit more of a ripple effect.” —Jennifer Roman-Matito Conscious drinking is gaining popularity as people recognize that alcohol consumption is a choice where informed decisions matter. Younger generations especially are looking for drinking experiences to satisfy their desire to socialize without sacrificing how they feel. This trend speaks much about the mainstreaming of preventative health habits and considering ingredients in all areas of life, including how we enjoy social beverages. Jennifer Roman-Matito is the co-founder of Mother's Milk, a groundbreaking coconut water-based cocktail brand designed for health-conscious individuals who enjoy vibrant experiences. With a passion for creating unique products that reflect her island heritage, Jennifer utilizes her expertise in hospitality, marketing communications, and event management to distribute the brand, foster partnerships, and generate excitement within a diverse and adventurous audience. The conversation explores the growing trend of conscious drinking. Tune in as Justine and Jennifer define conscious drinking and discuss how conscious drinking is impacting the food and beverage industry, social gatherings, and the overall health and wellness of consumers. They also talk about the rise of ready-to-drink cocktails and non-alcoholic options, as well as collaborating on future events and partnerships to further the conversation around mindful alcohol consumption. Meet Jennifer:  Jennifer Roman-Matito is a dynamic entrepreneur and co-founder of Mother's Milk, a pioneering coconut water-based cocktail brand aimed at health-conscious individuals with a penchant for revelry. Armed with a degree in Communications and Media Studies from CUNY-Hunter College, Jennifer combines her passion for innovative products with her rich island heritage to craft beverages that resonate with a diverse and adventurous audience.   As a self-funded and female-founded initiative, Mother's Milk stands as a testament to Jennifer's entrepreneurial spirit and dedication to creating distinctive offerings in the beverage industry. Leveraging her expertise in hospitality, marketing communications, and event management, Jennifer spearheads the brand's distribution efforts, forges strategic partnerships, and orchestrates impactful marketing campaigns to propel Mother's Milk into the spotlight.   Through Mother's Milk, she not only offers refreshing libations but also cultivates a community of like-minded individuals who embrace wellness without compromising on enjoyment. With Jennifer at the helm, Mother's Milk continues to captivate taste buds, spark conversations, and carve its niche as a trailblazer in the beverage industry.   Website  LinkedIn Instagram Connect with NextGen Purpose: Website Facebook Instagram  LinkedIn YouTube Episode Highlights: 00:46 What is Conscious Drinking 04:28 Conscious Drinking and Its Growing Popularity 11:06 Conscious Drinking and Its Impact on Social Gathering 19:45 Conscious Drinking and Collaboration with Brands 24:15 Conscious Drinking and Mindfulness  

Welcome back to ARTMATTERS: The Podcast for Artists. Today i speak with the LA-based artist Jen Hitchings. Jen's work investigates the tenuous relationship between humankind and nature and in recent years she has embarked on a deeply self-reflective investigation of the psyche, relationships, erotic desire, and cosmic forces. Her influences range from the rural Japanese landscape, the Hudson River School painters, science fiction film posters, spiritualist archetypes, and contemporary surrealist painting.On today's episode: Jen and I discuss vertical vs horizontal compositions, deadlines, negotiation skills, her upcoming 21 ft-mural commission for Mailchimp, starting a painting, building a painting  and potential new directions in her painting practice. and a whole lot more. About Jen Hitchings:Jen Hitchings (1988, New Jersey) received her BFA in Painting & Drawing from SUNY Purchase College in 2011 and a certificate in Small Business & Entrepreneurship from CUNY Hunter College in 2018. She has attended residencies at Adventure Painting (Yellowstone National Park), DNA (Provincetown, MA), the Vermont Studio Center (Johnson, VT), and Studio Kura (Itoshima, Japan). Solo presentations of her work have taken place at Anat Ebgi (Los Angeles, CA) in 2023, Taymour Grahne (London, UK) in 2023 and online in 2022, One River School (Englewood, NJ) in 2019, MEN Gallery (New York, NY) and PROTO (Hoboken, NJ) in 2018, and Ideal Glass (New York, NY) in 2017 which was accompanied by a 16 x 30' outdoor mural. In 2021, she completed two large-scale outdoor murals at The Wassaic Project, on view through 2023. In 2023, she was commissioned by Mailchimp to produce a 9 x 21' indoor permanent office mural at their new headquarters in Atlanta, GA. Recent group exhibitions have taken place at Richard Heller, Anat Ebgi, Good Mother (Los Angeles), Kutlesa (Goldau, Switzerland), Chen Projects at Louisa Art Center (Taipei, Taiwan), Taymour Grahne (London, UK), Ana Mas Projects (Barcelona, Spain), Gaa Gallery, Cindy Rucker, Pierogi (New York, NY), and The Wassaic Project (Wassaic, NY) among others. She was a recipient of the Queens Council on the Arts' New Works Grant in 2018. Between 2013–2020, Hitchings co-directed Transmitter and Associated Gallery in Brooklyn, NY, is the founder of artist-focused consulting agency Studio Associate, and Director of Career Services at California Institute of the Arts (CalArts). She lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.You can now support this podcast by clicking HERE where you can donate using PATREON or PayPal!If you're enjoying the podcast so far, please rate, review, subscribe and SHARE ON INSTAGRAM! If you have an any questions you want answered, write in to artmatterspodcast@gmail.com host: Isaac Mann www.isaacmann.cominsta: @isaac.mann guest: Jen Hitchings www.jenhitchings.com insta: @jenjonesjones

In this unique episode, Patricia and her writing mentor, Catherine Filloux, interview Effy Redman about the gestational process for her memoir, Saving Face.   About Effy, our featured memoirist: Effy Redman's writing investigates the intersection of disability and identity, building bridges in minority communities. Drawing from her journey as a lesbian with Moebius Syndrome (a rare condition of facial paralysis), she writes into the experience of otherness, finding resilience beyond the shadows. Her first book—SAVING FACE—a memoir of living with physical disability—will be published by Vine Leaves Press in March 2024. Redman has  published work in The New York Times, Vice, Ravishly, Chronogram, Berkeley Poetry Review, and Iron Horse Literary Review, among other places. She holds an MFA in Memoir from CUNY: Hunter College, where she received an Honorable Mention for the Helen Gray Cone Fellowship, and a BA in Literature/Drama from Bennington College, where she was an Ellen Knowles Harcourt Scholar and a Bennington Scholar.   About Catherine Filloux, our cohost: For the past three decades, French Algerian American award-winning playwright, librettist and activist Catherine Filloux has been traveling to conflict areas writing plays that address human rights. Filloux's new play “How to Eat an Orange” opens this season at La MaMa Theatre in New York City, and her new musical “Welcome to the Big Dipper” (composer Jimmy Roberts, “I Love You, You're Perfect, Now Change”) premieres Off-Broadway this season at the York Theatre in New York City; a National Alliance for Musical Theatre finalist. Catherine's new play “White Savior” is nominated for The Venturous Play List. Her many plays have been produced around the U.S. and internationally. She is the librettist for four produced operas, broadcast on Cambodian national TV, on Broadway on Demand, chosen for Opera News Critic's Choice; and “Orlando” is the 2022 Grawemeyer award winner--the first opera by a woman composer and woman librettist in the history of the Vienna Staatsoper. Catherine has traveled for her plays to countries including Bosnia, Cambodia, Guatemala, Haiti, Iraq, Morocco, Northern Ireland; and to Sudan and South Sudan on an overseas reading tour with the University of Iowa's International Writing Program. Filloux received her French Baccalaureate in Philosophy with Honors in Toulon, France, and is the co-founder/co-director of Theatre Without Borders. www.catherinefilloux.com   How to Buy Effy's Book: You can pre-order Saving Face at https://www.vineleavespress.com/saving-face-by-effy-redman.html. There are options here to purchase Effy's book on bookshop.org, Amazon, and Barnes and Noble. Effy encourages readers to use bookshop.org, because this venue supports local bookstores.   Connect with Effy: Website: www.effyredman.com Instagram @effyredman38 Facebook: Effy Redman   ****   Ready to make a change? Book your free Explore Call with Patricia.   Patricia's 1:1 and group coaching programs are about becoming the active designer of your life through any transitional phase. Learn more at https://www.patriciacosulich.com.   Share this episode and tag us on social media! @patricia.cosulich & @the_transitions_podcast  

February 8. 2024 Allen Kwabena Frimpong, Co-founder and principal cultural designer with ZEAL,, discusses Cooperative Economic Alternatives that Enable Artists and Creatives to Thrive. Allen Kwabena Frimpong is a cooperative entrepreneur, cultural designer, and conceptual artist. In addition to being a co-founder of Zeal, he is a founder of several powerful and influential social entrepreneurship endeavors. He was a managing partner of AdAstra Collective, which is a boutique consulting co-op whose vision is to transform power through networked movement building for a just, democratic, and liberating world. AdAstra Collective also anchored the work of the Old Money, New System community of practice 2016-2020, that supported movement resource mobilization initiatives that strengthened social movement ecosystems. He also co-founded Liberation Ventures and was a former Senior Fellow at PolicyLink, creating a field-building organization that takes a networked approach in building a culture of repair towards winning on reparations in the US. Allen has supported the capacity-building of many organizational efforts over the last 20 years with a unique interdisciplinary practice in community organizing, cultural strategy, transformative leadership advising, resource mobilization, and participatory planning within networked complex systems of communities. He is also the current board chair of one of the oldest social movement public foundations in the US, Resist. Allen has a master's degree in Urban Planning and Affairs from CUNY Hunter College and graduate certifications from the UPenn School of Social Policy in the Executive Program on Arts and Cultural Strategy as well as the Center for Popular Economics at Amherst College. He also studied at the New York City Jazz Workshop. ZEAL offers support with networks of creatives to reclaim their birthright as creatives who co-create cultural equity; cooperatively own, steward, and govern the means of their cultural production; and drive the economic vehicles and infrastructure necessary for arts and culture ecosystems in historically vulnerable communities to mutually thrive. ZEAL is most known for its critically acclaimed pop-up exhibition “Who Owns Black Art?” during Miami Art Basel 2019-2022 which has been featured in the New York Times, ABC Nightline, and Hyperallergic to name a few. As a conceptual artist he designs and produces multimedia anthologies. For more information about ZEAL or other initiatives Allen is involved in visit the following websites: · www.zeal.coop · www.oldmoneynewsystem.net · www.oldmoneynewsystem.net

In part three of our Disability & Sexual Health Series, we chat with Laura Graham Holmes, Ph.D., about health disparities, sexuality, and research. Dr. Laura Graham Holmes is a clinical psychologist and an Assistant Professor at CUNY Hunter College in the Silberman School of Social Work. She is a nationally recognized expert on sexuality and relationships for autistic people. She has published 30 peer-reviewed papers. Her passion is co-designing peer-facilitated interventions with and for autistic people on aspects of life that are important but under-supported, such as healthy relationships, sexual health, LGBTQIA+ identity, and substance use. LINK: https://sssw.hunter.cuny.edu/staff-members/holmes-laura-g/

In this episode, Tina speaks with Beth Terranova about her journey and how she got started working with people with scoliosis. Beth shares why strength training is important for people with scoliosis and the possibility of improvement for an adult with scoliosis. Beth discusses: - Why strength training is so important for people with scoliosis - The foundations of a healthy spine - Stability versus mobility - Methods for addressing pain - Are CrossFit, barbells, and running safe for those with scoliosis? - And more… Connect with Tina Haupert: https://carrotsncake.com/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/carrotsncake Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/carrotsncake YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/carrotsncake Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/carrotsncake/ About Tina Haupert: Tina Haupert is the owner of Carrots ‘N' Cake as well as a Certified Nutrition Coach and Functional Diagnostic Nutrition Practitioner (FDN-P). Tina and her team use functional testing and a personalized approach to nutrition to help women find balance within their diets while achieving their body composition goals. Connect with Beth Terranova: https://www.strengthandspine.com/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/strengthandspine Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/strengthandspine/ Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@strengthandspine About our Guest: Beth Terranova is a physical therapist and strength and conditioning coach with a passion for treating spinal conditions. Diagnosed with scoliosis as a teenager, she defied the odds to become a National Level Olympic Weightlifter. She completed her DPT from CUNY Hunter College in 2015 and became an Orthopedic Clinical Specialist in 2018. She pursued training in the Schroth Method for treatment of scoliosis and kyphosis and became Advanced Certified in 2019. Beth works with clients with scoliosis and other spinal conditions to improve their curves, reduce their pain, and progress their fitness for life. She also coaches injured weightlifters and powerlifters back to training. Beth spends her free time with her husband, Travis, and dog, Marlin. She enjoys being a National Referee for Olympic Weightlifting and competing recreationally in weightlifting and powerlifting.

Devin: What do you see as your superpower?Peter: It's grit—grit and values. Grit comes from values. Grit comes from having an aim, a mission.Peter Rostovsky's fintech startup, Raiseway, grew out of his personal experience helping a friend raise money for his startup. Exploring the possibility of investment crowdfunding, he was flummoxed by the sheer number of portals to choose from. At the time, there were over 40, a count that has now topped 70.“That kind of started this very long exploration into the execution problem with investment crowdfunding for founders of startups and small businesses,” he says, having learned that crowdfunding can be difficult.Last year, Peter asked me to serve as an advisor to Raiseway, and I was honored to accept. He is an advisor to The Super Crowd, Inc., a public benefit corporation.Raiseway is potentially game-changing because the vast majority of businesses in the country that can benefit from crowdfunding are small and can't afford expensive consultants but can afford to use an app that will guide them through and, using AI, help them execute their crowdfunding campaigns.Peter has two critical tips for folks looking to crowdfund:* Assess your community. Before you launch, assess your community to determine how large, accessible and warm it is. * Don't bet on “if you build it, they will come.” To get people to invest, you need to drive people to the investment opportunity thoughtfully and strategically. They won't find it on their own.In building Raiseway, Peter leverages his superpower: grit.AI Podcast Summary* Devin Thorpe interviews Peter Rostovsky, the founder and CEO of Raiseway, a crowdfunding app for entrepreneurs.* Raiseway is designed to streamline the crowdfunding process and help entrepreneurs accelerate their fundraising journey.* The alpha version of Raiseway is currently available for free use.* Peter's work with Raiseway could completely alter the investment crowdfunding landscape.* Raiseway aims to make crowdfunding more accessible and affordable for small businesses and startups.* Peter's key tip for entrepreneurs considering crowdfunding is to thoroughly prepare and evaluate their community and connections before starting.* Peter's superpower is his grit and determination, which he developed through his experiences as an immigrant and in running his own business.* Peter believes that being okay with failure and having a few wins under your belt can help develop grit.* Raiseway can be accessed through the app; contact Peter directly.How to Develop Grit As a SuperpowerPeter developed grit as he grew up. Born in St. Peterburg, his family moved first to Moscow and later to Bryansk, a city he describes as a “hellhole.” Later, still a teenager, he immigrated to the United States, facing a fresh set of cultural challenges.The difficulties adapting to new situations, cultures and individuals helped him develop the grit he deploys to build his business.Peter faced a challenge recently. After publicly announcing the launch of the alpha version of the software would happen on April 15, the startup missed the deadline. He admits feeling ashamed due to missing the self-imposed but now public due date.After worrying that he couldn't possibly recover, he took responsibility for getting the process back on track and, within weeks, got the product launched. It is now available as a free download for a limited time for those interested in help with their crowdfunding campaigns, willing to provide feedback.Peter offers some advice for developing grit. “I am a former F-student through and through,” he says. He acknowledges that the learned helplessness phenomenon applied to him. The key to overcoming it is to “get a couple wins under your belt.” “You can point to them in your life and say, ‘Well, no, I'm not a failure. I did this, this and that.' It's not only professional, it's personal as well,” he says.By following Peter's example and advice, you can make grit a superpower that enables you to do more good in the world.Guest-Provided ProfilePeter Rostovsky (he/him):Founder & CEO, RaisewayAbout Raiseway: Raising money with crowdfunding is prohibitively hard for businesses that need it the most - small businesses and startups. Raiseway is a software service to make investment crowdfunding easy and affordable to execute. From the moment of learning about crowdfunding through campaign preparation, execution, and reporting to investors, Raiseway provides businesses with digital tools to increase their chances of successfully raising capital with crowdfunding for a monthly subscription fee. Website: raiseway.appBiographical Information: Born and raised in St. Petersburg and Moscow, I moved to New York in 2011 to finish high school. After graduating with a B.A. in Economics and Political Science from CUNY Hunter College with a focus on geopolitical risk analysis and the work of the UN, I sold and serviced capital markets intelligence services. After working at Panjiva, Roubini Global Economics, Debtwire, and Preqin, I decided to apply the learnings to serve small businesses that need access to capital the most. Twitter Handle: @peter_raisewayPersonal Facebook Profile: fb.com/peter.rostovsky.7Linkedin: linkedin.com/in/peter-raisewayInstagram and Threads Handle: @pool_bread Superpowers for Good is a reader-supported publication. To receive early access, top-secret rewards and support my work, consider becoming a paid subscriber.On July 19, 2023, we'll hold the first-ever SuperCrowdHour with an extraordinary panel I'll moderate, discussing “The Power of the Purpose Round.” The panel will include Parker Clay CEO Ian Bentley, DealMaker CEO Rebecca Kacaba and Renew VC founder Mark Hubbard. You're entitled to a 50 percent discount as a Superpowers for Good reader! Join us for just $5 when you use the discount code SUPERCROWD. Register here. Get full access to Superpowers for Good at devinthorpe.substack.com/subscribe

In episode 5 of The KindlED Podcast, hosts Kaity Broadbent and Adriane Thompson chat with Dr. Gina Riley, an educational psychologist, and expert in homeschooling, unschooling, and self-directed learning. Dr. Riley shares her experience and research on Self-Determination Theory and how it impacts students' motivation and well-being. Tune in to discover how you can create environments that support students' psychological needs, promote deeper respect for learners, and inspire lasting change in education systems. About the Guest: Gina Riley, Ph.D. is an educational psychologist, Clinical Professor, and Program Director of the Adolescent Special Education Program at CUNY Hunter College. Dr. Riley has over 25 years of experience in online, hybrid, and hyflex teaching and learning at the college/university level. She is known internationally for her work within the fields of homeschooling, unschooling, and intrinsically motivated, self-directed learning. She is currently the President-Elect of the New York State Association of Teacher Educators and a faculty advisor for Supported Decision Making New York (sdmny.org), which is an alternative to legal guardianship for individuals with disabilities. Her books include Unschooling: Exploring Learning Beyond the Classroom (2020); The Homeschooling Starter Guide (2021); and The Joys of Self Determined Learning (2022).

In this episode, Dr. Sarah Byosiere teaches us about how she studies dog cognition and ongoing research at the Thinking Dog Center at the City University of New York Hunter College. We discuss:Why study dog cognition?Ongoing research on enrichment and contrafreeloadingHow to introduce enrichment to your dogSurprising research about breed labels in animal sheltersDr. Byosiere's bio:Dr. Byosiere is the Director of the Thinking Dog Center and an Assistant Professor at CUNY Hunter College where she focuses on studying the behavior and cognition of companion animals. She is also a Certified Applied Animal Behaviorist. Dr. Byosiere has worked at various canine cognition and behavior research groups including the Duke Canine Cognition Center, the Clever Dog Lab and the Wolf Science Center. Dr. Byosiere earned her PhD at La Trobe University in Australia at the Anthrozoology Research Group, where her dissertation focused on evaluating whether or not dogs are susceptible to visual illusions. More recently at the Thinking Dog Center, her work has expanded to include applied research topics, including human-animal interactions, dog training methodologies and animal sheltering practices. Dr. Byosiere has published her research in peer-revived scientific journals, presented her findings at conferences, and has been featured on NPRs Science Friday, Getting Curious with Jonathan Van Ness, The New York Daily News, Gizmodo, WIRED Currents, and Curiosity Stream. Links:Thinking Dog Center Website Twitter Thinking Dog Center Instagram Thinking Dog CenterFacebook Thinking Dog CenterTheme music composed and performed by Andy SellsContact Behavior Vets tweet us @BehaviorVets follow us on Facebook email us at nyc@behaviorvets.com follow us on Instagram

Eddy Dacius host the Divine Purpose Podcast. DPPodcast is a platform for healthy conversations, interviews, and interactions with callers. We all have different opinions; however, the truth is the ultimate mediator. SPECIAL GUEST Inspiring and engaging at the time of her award, Assistant Principal Princess Francois positively impacted students, colleagues, and the school community at Math, Engineering, and Science Academy (MESA), a charter high school in Brooklyn, New York. She oversaw 70 staff and 500 students, holding direct responsibility for the professional growth of 22 teachers and two department leaders. Francois provided personalized teacher coaching, developing and following through on action plans that support educators' growth and effectiveness. Her high-leverage, targeted feedback leads to immediate implementation and tangible results. Francois initiated a schoolwide vertical alignment process, helped reorganize professional development efforts, and analyzed data to support at-risk students and struggling teachers. When she taught Algebra Remediation at MESA, 11 of her 17 students passed the New York State Regents Exam at the end of the year; in Earth Science, Regents pass rates rose 14%. Under her supervision, Regents pass rates have risen 20% for Algebra II and 17% for Chemistry.   Francois earned a Bachelor's in History from Columbia University in 2011, a Master's in Adolescent Special Education from CUNY Hunter College in 2013, and a Master's in Educational Leadership from the Bank Street Graduate School of Education in 2015. She is now a doctoral candidate at Fordham University for a Doctorate in Education. Title: Support BLACK Period: A Greenbook to Eliminate Your Ifs, And, or Buts Link: https://www.amazon.com/Support-BLACKTM-Periodt-Greenbook-Eliminate-ebook/dp/B0BGSY92YZ/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1665111522&sr=8-1  

Tonight's guest is Micah DankMicah T. Dank was born in 1983 in Oceanside New York. From a young age he had wanted to be a writer, coming from a family of writers. His father was a producer and radio news editor at CBS News in Manhattan and his grandfather was a Producer at CBS News. Micah was an actor in High School and became interested in writing from his 12th grade English teacher Russell Reid. From there he majored in English at SUNY Albany and transferred down to CUNY Hunter College in Manhattan to earn his Bachelors degree in ‘Language Literature and Criticism'. It wasn't until he moved to Boston for a new job that he became interested in all the esoteric sciences including the astrology and astrotheology prevalent through his book series.You can find Micah here:Web https://www.micahdank.com/

In this episode, we have special guest Hannah talk about her life at CUNY Hunter College, juggling two podcasts, radio show host, prioritizing her mental, and keeping herself involved at college. We also dive into some personal things such as confidence, not knowing what she wanted to do in college. It's a great episode that I think everyone can grab value from, as always thank you guys for your support, appreciation and love towards the podcast. Make sure you guys are growing today!!

Angel Eduardo (http://angeleduardo.com/) is a writer, musician, photographer, and designer based in New York City, who serves an Advisory Board member, FAIR in the Arts Fellow, and Director of Messaging & Editorial for the Foundation Against Intolerance & Racism (FAIR - https://www.fairforall.org/), where he helps shape the organization's pro-human approach to our often contentious and divided discourse. He is also a contributor to the Center for Inquiry's blog, where he writes on science, communication, skepticism, and morality for a column entitled Searching for Better Angels, and is best-known for coining and promoting the rhetorical concept of star-manning. Angel holds a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from CUNY Hunter College, and has had writing featured in Newsweek, Areo Magazine, Mr. Beller's Neighborhood, and The Caribbean Writer, among other print and online publications. Angel's photographs have been featured in various exhibitions and used as cover art for books—most notably in Personal Effects: Essays on Memoir, Teaching and Culture in the Work of Louise DeSalvo for Fordham University Press, which makes use of his photograph, “Early Bird.” Angel has been writing, performing, and recording music since the age of 15, and has been intimately involved in every creative facet of his projects, from songwriting, producing, mixing, and mastering, to designing and overseeing the creation of album artwork, concert posters, and merchandise. Be it with music, writing, photography, or design, Angel is an artist inspired to inspire. His hope is to pay it forward—providing others with the same solace, inspiration, perspective, and opportunity for personal and intellectual growth that the work of others has done for him. In the social realm, Angel advocates for a compassionate, honest, and civil approach to discourse, even when we're incentivized to bare our teeth and dig in our heels. Through his work he hopes to foster more productive conversations on the topics of the day, all bolstered by his own six words of advice: Be kind; we're all first drafts.

Tonight live, Micah Dank returns, and he will be discussing Astrology and how it is can found encoded basically everywhere. In past segments he has shown us where it was decoded in areas of The Bible and The Book of Enoch. Tonight we will be exploring the Quran. Micah T. Dank was born in 1983 in Oceanside New York. From a young age, he had wanted to be a writer, coming from a family of writers. His father was a producer and radio news editor at CBS News in Manhattan and his grandfather was a producer at CBS News. Micah was an actor in high school and became interested in writing from his 12th grade English teacher Russell Reid. From there he majored in English at SUNY Albany and transferred down to CUNY Hunter College in Manhattan to earn his Bachelor's degree in ‘Language Literature and Criticism'. It wasn't until he moved to Boston for a new job that he became interested in all the esoteric sciences including the astrology and astrotheology prevalent through his book series.

Tonight live, Micah Dank returns, and he will be discussing Astrology and how it is can found encoded basically everywhere. In past segments he has shown us where it was decoded in areas of The Bible and The Book of Enoch. Tonight we will be exploring the Quran. Micah T. Dank was born in 1983 in Oceanside New York. From a young age, he had wanted to be a writer, coming from a family of writers. His father was a producer and radio news editor at CBS News in Manhattan and his grandfather was a producer at CBS News. Micah was an actor in high school and became interested in writing from his 12th grade English teacher Russell Reid. From there he majored in English at SUNY Albany and transferred down to CUNY Hunter College in Manhattan to earn his Bachelor's degree in ‘Language Literature and Criticism'. It wasn't until he moved to Boston for a new job that he became interested in all the esoteric sciences including the astrology and astrotheology prevalent through his book series.

Thursday - 4/28/22We've got author, Micah Dank on with us tonight! Join us, won't you?Author Micah Dank talks about his new series “Into the Rabbit Hole” and the first book “Into the Veil” which is compared to the Dan Brown's “Davinci Code”. Micah explores astrology and the hidden codes in the bible and how it relates to what is real and what is possible related to politics, conspiracy, fringe medicine, history, language and what it means to survive in these times!Micah was born in 1983 in Oceanside New York. From a young age he had wanted to be a writer, coming from a family of writers. His father was a producer and radio news editor at CBS News in Manhattan and his grandfather was a Producer at CBS News. Micah was an actor in High School and became interested in writing from his 12th grade English teacher Russell Reid. From there he majored in English at SUNY Albany and transferred down to CUNY Hunter College in Manhattan to earn his Bachelors degree in ‘Language Literature and Criticism'. It wasn't until he moved to Boston for a new job that he became interested in all the esoteric sciences including the astrology and astrotheology prevalent through his book series.WEB SITE:https://www.micahdank.com/TWITTER:@RealMisterDankJoin us live on Odysy Radio, Abnormal Realities TV and iHeartRadio.###You can watch us live 8-9p ET: OdysyRadio.com, YouTube.com, Twitch.com, AbnormalRealities.com/ARTVFollow Us:https://abnormalrealities.comhttps://twitter.com/abnormalshowhttps://instagram.com/abnormalrealitieshttps://facebook.com/abnormalrealitiesSupport our Show:https://www.abnormalrealities.com/shophttps://www.abnormalrealities.com/donatehttps://www.romikadesigns.com/?ref=abnormalrealitieshttps://www.insanecustomtumblers.com/abnormal?ref=Abnormal#OdysyRadio #UFO #Paranormal #UAP #ShadowPeople #SpiritBox #GhostVoices #AbnormalRealities #RonPhillips #RocciStucci #OpsLens #Bigfoot #Conspiracy #ConspiracyTheories #WhatTheHellIsThat

Anne C. Richard, distinguished fellow and Afghanistan coordination lead at Freedom House, will lead a conversation on refugees and global migration. FASKIANOS: Thank you. Welcome to the final session of the Winter/Spring 2022 CFR Academic Webinar Series. I'm Irina Faskianos, vice president of the National Program and Outreach here at CFR. Today's discussion is on the record, and the video and transcript will be available on our website, CFR.org/academic. As always, CFR takes no institutional positions on matters of policy. We are delighted to have Anne Richard with us today to talk about refugees and global migration. Ms. Richard is a distinguished fellow and Afghanistan coordination lead at Freedom House. She has taught at several universities including Georgetown, University of Virginia, Hamilton College, and the University of Pennsylvania. From 2012 to 2017, Ms. Richard served as an assistant secretary of state for population, refugees, and migration, and before joining the Obama administration she served as vice president of government relations and advocacy for the International Rescue Committee. She has also worked at the Peace Corps headquarters and the U.S. Office of Management and Budget, and is a member of CFR. So, Anne, thank you very much for being with us today. With your background and experience, it would be great if you could talk from your vantage point—give us an overview of the current refugee trends you are—we are seeing around the world, especially vis-à-vis the war in Ukraine, the withdrawal from Afghanistan, et cetera. RICHARD: Thank you so much, Irina, for inviting me today and for always welcoming me back to the Council. And thank you to your team for putting this together. I'm very happy to speak about the global refugee situation, which, unfortunately, has, once again, grown yet larger in a way that is sort of stumping the international community in terms of what can well-meaning governments do, what can foundations and charitable efforts and the United Nations (UN) do to help displaced people. I thought we could start off talking a little bit about definitions and data, and the idea is that I only speak about ten minutes at this beginning part so that we can get to your questions all the more quickly. But for all of us to be on the same wavelength, let's recall that refugees, as a group, have an organization that is supposed to look out for them. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees is the title of the number-one person in the organization, but the entire organization is known by that name, UNHCR, or the UN Refugee Agency. It also has a convention—the 1951 Refugee Convention—that came about after World War II and was very focused on not allowing to happen again what had happened during World War II where victims of the Nazis and, as time went on, people fleeing fascism, people fleeing communism, couldn't get out of their countries and were persecuted because of this. And there's a legal definition that comes out of the convention that different countries have, and the U.S. legal definition matches very much the convention's, which is that refugees have crossed an international border—they're not in their home country anymore—and once they've crossed an international border the sense is that they are depending on the international community to help them and that they're fleeing for specific purposes—their race, their religion, their ethnicity, their membership in a particular social group such as being LGBTQ, or political thought. And if you think back to the Cold War, these were some of the refugees coming out of the former Soviet Union, coming out of Eastern Europe, were people who had spoken out and were in trouble and so had to flee their home countries. So what are the numbers then? And I'm going to refer you to a very useful page on the UN High Commissioner for Refugees website, which is their “Figures at a Glance” presentation, and we're going to reference some of the numbers that are up there now. But those numbers change every year. They change on June 20, which is World Refugee Day. And so every year it hits the headlines that the numbers have gone up, unfortunately, and you can anticipate this if you think in terms of the summer solstice, the longest day of the year. It's usually June 20, 21, 22. So June 20, that first possible day, is every year World Refugee Day. So if you're working on behalf of refugees it's good sometimes to schedule events or anticipate newspaper articles and conversations about refugees ticking up in—at the end of June. So if you were paying attention last June for World Refugee Day, UNHCR would have unveiled a number of 82.4 million refugees around the world, and so this upcoming June what do we anticipate? Well, we anticipate the numbers will go up again and, in fact, yesterday the high commissioner was in Washington, met with Secretary of State Tony Blinken, and they met the press and Filippo Grandi, the current high commissioner, said that he thinks the number is closer to ninety-five to ninety-six million refugees. So, clearly, a couple things have happened since last June. One is that so many people are trying to flee Afghanistan and another is so many people have fled Ukraine. So if we went back to that $82.4 million figure that we know we have details on, we would find that this is the figure of people who are displaced because of conflict or persecution around the world. The ones that count as refugees who have actually crossed an international border is a smaller number. It's 20.7 million people that UNHCR is concerned about and then another close to six million people who are Palestinians in the Middle East whose displacement goes back to 1948, the creation of the statehood of Israel, and upheaval in the Middle East region as Palestinians were shifted to live elsewhere. And so—and they are provided assistance by a different UN agency, UNRWA—UN Relief Works Administration in the Near East—and so if you see a number or you see two sets of numbers for refugees and they're off by about five or six million people, the difference is the Palestinian, that number—whether it's being counted in, which is for worldwide numbers, or out because UNHCR cares for most refugees on Earth but did not have the responsibility for the Palestinians since UNRWA was set up with that specific responsibility. So what's the big difference then between the eighty-two million, now growing to ninety-five million, and this smaller number of refugees? It's internally displaced persons (IDPs). These are people who are displaced by conflict or are displaced by persecution, are running for their lives, but they haven't left their own countries yet. So think of Syrians who, perhaps, are displaced by war and they have crossed their own countries and gone to a safer place within their own country but they haven't crossed that border yet. Others who have crossed into Lebanon or Turkey or Jordan or Iraq or have gone further afield to Egypt, those would be considered refugees. Who's responsible for the IDPs then? Well, legally, their own countries are supposed to take care of them. But in my Syria example, the problem is Syria was bombing its own people in certain areas of the country, and so they were not protecting their own people as they should be. People can be displaced by things other than war and conflict and persecution, of course. More and more we talk about climate displacement, and this is a hot issue that we can talk about later. But who's responsible then when people are displaced by changing climactic conditions and it's their own governments who are supposed to help them? But more and more questions have been raised about, well, should the international community come together and do more for this group of people—for internally displaced persons—especially when their own governments are unwilling or unable to do so? What about migrants? Who are the migrants? Migrants is a much broader term. Everyone I've talked about so far who's crossed a border counts as a migrant. Migrants are just people on the go, and the International Organization for Migration estimates there's about 281 million migrants on Earth today—about 3.6 percent of the world population—and one of the big issues I've pushed is to not see migrants as a dirty word. Unfortunately, it often is described that way—that migratory flows are bad, when, in fact, lots of people are migrants. Students who travel to the U.S. to take classes are migrants to our country. The secretary general of the United Nations, António Guterres, who was himself for eleven years the high commissioner for refugees, he says, I am a migrant, because he's a Portuguese person working in New York City. People hired by Silicon Valley from around the world to work in high-paid jobs, legally in the United States, they are migrants. More concerning are vulnerable migrants, people who are displaced and don't have the wherewithal to, necessarily, protect themselves, take care of themselves, on the march or where they end up, or also if they're seen as traveling without papers, not welcome in the places where they're going, that can be a very, very dangerous situation for them. So be aware that migrants is a really broad all-encompassing term that can include travelers, businesspeople, as well as vulnerable and very poor people who are economic migrants. Finally, immigrants are people who set out and migrate because they intend to live somewhere else, and when we were talking about the Trump administration's policies to reduce the number of refugees coming to the U.S. we also see that immigration to the U.S. also was decreased during that administration as well. So both the refugee program and a lot of the immigration pathways to the U.S. are now being examined and trying to be not just fixed, because a lot of them have needed care for quite some time, but also put back on a growth trajectory. And then asylum seekers are people who get to a country on their own, either they have traveled to a border or they pop up inside a country because they have gotten in legally through some other means such as a visitor visa or business visa, and then they say, I can't go home again. It's too dangerous for me to go home again. Please, may I have asylum? May I be allowed to stay here and be protected in your country? So that's a lot of different terminology. But the more you work on it, the more these terms—you get more familiar using them and understand the differences between them that experts or legal experts use. So ninety-five to ninety-six million people, as we see another eleven million people fleeing Ukraine and of that four million, at least, have crossed the borders into neighboring countries and another seven million are internally displaced, still inside Ukraine but they've gone someplace that they feel is safer than where they were before. When we looked at the eighty million refugees and displaced people, we knew that two-thirds of that number came from just five countries, and one of the important points about that is it shows you what could happen, the good that could be done, if we were able to push through peace negotiations or resolutions of conflict and persecution, if we could just convince good governance and protection of people—minorities, people with different political thought, different religious backgrounds—inside countries. So the number-one country still remains Syria that has lost 6.7 million people to neighboring countries, primarily. Secondly was Venezuela, four million. Third was Afghanistan. The old number from before last August was 2.6 million and some hundreds of thousands have fled since. And the only reason there aren't more fleeing is that they have a really hard time getting out of their country, and we can talk more about that in a moment. The fourth are Rohingya refugees fleeing from Burma, or Myanmar. That's 1.1 million, and the fifth was Southern Sudanese, 2.2 million, who have fled unrest and violence in that country. So we know that we have not enough peace, not enough solutions, and we have too much poverty, too, and dangers. In addition to the Venezuelans, another group that has approached the U.S. from the southern border that were in the paper, especially around election times, is from the Northern Triangle of Central America, so El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. These are people who could be fleeing because of economic situations and could also be fleeing from criminal violence, gangs, warfare, narcotraffickers. And so if they are fleeing for their lives and approaching our southern border, we are supposed to give them a hearing and consider whether they have a case for asylum, and the—unfortunately, that is not well understood, especially not by folks working at our borders. The Customs and Border Protection folks are more and more focused on, since 9/11, ensuring that bad guys don't come across, that terrorists don't come across, that criminals don't come across. And we heard in the Trump administration conversations about Mexicans as rapists, gang warfare being imported into the U.S. from Central America when, in fact, some of it had been originally exported, and this sense that people from the Middle East were terrorists. And so really harsh language about the types of people who were trying to make it to the U.S. and to get in. Some final thoughts so that we can get to the question and answer. The U.S. government has traditionally been the top donor to refugee and humanitarian efforts around the world. The bureau at the State Department I used to run, the Population, Refugees, and Migration Bureau, was a major donor to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees—UNRWA—the International Committee of the Red Cross, and also the International Organization for Migration, which used to be an independent organization and is now part of the UN since 2016. We were also the number-one resettlement location, the formal program for bringing refugees to the United States, and when I was assistant secretary we brought seventy thousand refugees per year to the United States, invited them to come through a program that took eighteen months to twenty-four months, on average, to get them in because they had to be vetted for security reasons. They had to pass medical tests. Their backgrounds had to be investigated to see that they were who they said they were. And that number went higher in the last year of the Obama administration to eighty-five thousand refugees and, in fact, the Obama administration proposed some very strong additional measures to help refugees. But the Trump administration threw that all into reverse with a completely different set of policies. So the numbers then became reduced every year—fifty-three thousand in the first year of the Trump administration, 22,500 the next year, thirty thousand in 2019, 11,814 in 2020, a similar number in 2021, and slow numbers coming today, this despite bringing so many Afghans through an evacuation exercise last summer. Many of the people who were evacuated were American citizens or green card holders. Afghans who had worked for the U.S. but did not have their formal paperwork yet were brought in under what's called humanitarian parole, and the problem with that program is that it's no guarantee for a longer-term stay in the United States. So there's a bill in Congress right now to address that. A lot of the people who worked on that, especially within the U.S. government, are proud that they've scrambled and brought so many people so quickly—120,000 people brought from Afghanistan. At the same time, those of us who are advocates for refugees would say too many people were left behind and the evacuation should continue, and that's a real concern. In terms of resettlement in the U.S., it's a program run—public-private partnership—and we've never seen so many volunteers and people helping as there are right now, and initiatives to help welcome people to the United States, which is fantastic. I would say the program should be one of humanity, efficiency, and generosity, and that generosity part has been tough to achieve because the government piece of it is kind of stingy. It's kind of a tough love welcome to the United States where the refugees are expected to get jobs and the kids to go to school and the families to support themselves. So let me stop there because I've been just talking too long, I know, and take questions. FASKIANOS: It's fantastic, and thank you for really clarifying the definitions and the numbers. Just a quick question. You said the U.S. government is the top donor. What is the percentage of DVP? I mean, it's pretty— RICHARD: Tiny. Yeah. FASKIANOS: —tiny, right? I think there's this lack of understanding that it may seem like a big number but in our overall budget it's minuscule. So if you could just give us a— RICHARD: Yeah. It's grown in the last few years because of all these crises around the world to ten to twelve million—I mean, ten billion dollars to twelve billion (dollars) between the U.S. Agency for International Development and the State Department, which was bigger. It was around seven or eight billion (dollars) when I was the assistant secretary five, six years ago. But the important part of it was it provided the whole backbone to the international humanitarian system. Governments, some of them, saw Americans sometimes as headaches in terms of we, Americans, telling them what to do or we, Americans, having our own ideas of how to do things or we, Americans, demanding always budget cuts and efficiencies. But the fact is the whole humanitarian enterprise around the world is based on American generosity, especially the big operating agencies like World Food Programme, UNHCR, UNICEF, UN Development Program. FASKIANOS: Great. Thank you. So now we're going to go to all you for your questions. Hands are already up and Q&A written questions. So I'll try to get to everybody as much as I can. I'm going to go—the first question from Rey Koslowski, and if you can unmute yourself and give us your institution that would be fantastic. RICHARD: Hi, Rey. Q: All right. Rey Koslowski, University at Albany. Hi, Anne. Good to see you. I'd like to pick up on the use of humanitarian parole. So, as I understand it, it's being utilized for Afghan evacuees, Afghans, who you mentioned, who didn't—weren't able to get on the flights and were left behind, but also for Ukrainians. You know, President Biden announced a hundred thousand Ukrainians. I mean, a very—we're using other channels but we've had, I believe, three thousand at the U.S.-Mexican border and, I believe, they're being paroled for the most part, right. As I understand it, we're—one DHS letter that I saw said that there were forty-one thousand requests for humanitarian parole for Afghan nationals. But I'm wondering about capacity of the USCIS to handle this, to process this, because, you know, normally, I think, maybe two thousand or so, a couple thousand, are processed, maybe a couple of people who do this, and also in conjunction with the challenges for processing all of the asylum applications. So, as I understand it, back in the fall there was some discussion of hiring a thousand asylum officers—additional asylum officers. I was wondering, what are your thoughts about our capacity to process all of the—the U.S. government's capacity to process the humanitarian parole applications and the asylum applications, and if you have any insights on new hires and how many— RICHARD: Well, you know, Rey, at Freedom House now I'm working on a project to help Afghan human rights defenders and— Q: Right. RICHARD: —the idea is that they can restart their work if we can find a way for them to be safe inside Afghanistan, which is very hard with the Taliban in charge right now, or if in exile they can restart their work. And so we're watching to see where Afghans are allowed to go in the world as they seek sanctuary and the answer is they don't get very far. It's very hard to get out of the country. If they get to Pakistan or Iran, they don't feel safe. They have short-term visas to stay there, and the programs that might bring them further along like resettlement of refugees are—take a much longer time to qualify for and then to spring into action, and so they're stuck. You know, they're afraid of being pushed back into Afghanistan. They're afraid of becoming undocumented and running out of money wherever they are, and so they're in great need of help. The humanitarian parole program sort of—for bringing Afghans into the U.S. sort of understood that our eighteen- to twenty-four-month refugee resettlement program was a life-saving program but it wasn't an emergency program. It didn't work on an urgent basis. It didn't scoop people up and move them overnight, and that's, really, what was called for last August was getting people—large numbers of people—out of harm's way. And so when I was assistant secretary, if we knew someone was in imminent danger we might work with another government. I remember that the Scandinavians were seen as people who were more—who were less risk averse and would take people who hadn't had this vast vetting done but would take small numbers and bring them to safety, whereas the U.S. did things in very large numbers but very slowly. And so this lack of emergency program has really been what's held us back in providing the kind of assistance, I think, people were looking for the Afghans. I was surprised we even brought them into the United States. I thought after 9/11 we'd never see that kind of program of bringing people in with so little time spent on checking. But what they did was they moved up them to the front of the line and checked them very quickly while they were on the move. So it was safe to do but it was unusual, and I think part of that was because the military—the U.S. military—was so supportive of it and U.S. veterans were so supportive of it and we had, for the first time in a while, both the right and the left of the political spectrum supporting this. So the problem with humanitarian parole is I remember it being used, for example, for Haitians who had been injured in the Haitian earthquake and they needed specialized health care—let's say, all their bones were crushed in their legs or something. They could be paroled into the U.S., get that health care that they needed, and then sent home again. So we've not used it for large numbers of people coming in at once. So what refugee advocates are seeking right now from Congress is the passage of the Afghan Adjustment Act, which would give people a more permanent legal status. They would be treated as if they were—had come through the refugee resettlement program and they'd get to stay. So you're right that the numbers being granted humanitarian parole at one time is just not the normal way of doing things. You're also right that the—this is a lot of extra work on people who weren't anticipating it, and more can continue with the hundred thousand Ukrainians who the president has said we will take in. And so the thing is when we have these kind of challenges in the United States one way to deal with it is to spend more money and do a better job, and that seems to be an option for certain challenges we face but not for all challenges we face. With these more humanitarian things, we tend to have tried to do it on the cheap and to also use the charity and partner with charities and churches more than if this were sort of a more business-oriented program. So we need all of the above. We need more government funding for the people who are working the borders and are welcoming people in or are reviewing their backgrounds. We need more assistance from the public, from the private sector, from foundations, because the times demand it. And it's very interesting to me to see Welcome US created last year with three former U.S. presidents—President Bush, President Clinton, President Obama—speaking up about it, saying, please support this, and people from across the political aisle supporting it. I wish that had existed in 2015 when we were grappling with these issues at the time of candidate Trump. So the needs are greater. Absolutely. But that doesn't mean we have to just suffer through and struggle through and have long backups like we do right now. We could be trying to put more resources behind it. FASKIANOS: I'm going to take the next written question from Haley Manigold, who's an IR undergrad student at University of North Florida. We know that the war in Ukraine is going to affect grain and food supplies for the MENA countries. Is there any way you would recommend for Europe and other neighboring regions to manage the refugee flows? RICHARD: The first part of that was about the food issue but then you said— FASKIANOS: Correct, and then this is a pivot to manage the refugee flows. So— RICHARD: Well, the Europeans are treating the Ukrainians unlike any other flow of people that we've seen lately. It goes a little bit back and reminiscent to people fleeing the Balkans during the 1990s. But we saw that with a million people in 2015 walking into Europe from Syria, Pakistan, Afghanistan—mix of economic migrants and real refugees—that Europe, at first, under Angela Merkel's leadership were welcoming to these folks showing up, and then there was a backlash and the walls came up on that route from the Balkans to Germany and to Sweden. And so in the last few years, Europeans have not been seen as champions in allowing—rescuing people who are trying to get to Europe on their own. You know, especially the Mediterranean has been a pretty dismal place where we see Africans from sub-Saharan Africa working their way up to North Africa and trying to get from Libya across the Mediterranean to Europe. These are mostly economic migrants but not solely economic migrants, and they deserve to have a hearing and, instead, they have been terribly mistreated. They get stopped by the Libyan coast guard, the Europeans push boats back, and they are offloaded back into Libya and they are practically imprisoned and mistreated in North Africa. So that's a terribly inhumane way to treat people who are trying to rescue themselves, their families, and find a better life. And another point to the Europeans has been, couldn't you use these young people taking initiative trying to have a better life and work hard and get on with their lives, and the answer is yes. Europe has this sort of aging demographic and could definitely use an infusion of younger workers and talented people coming in. But, instead, they have really pushed to keep people out. So what's happened with Ukrainians? They're seen as a different category. They're seen as neighbors. There's a part of it that is positive, which is a sense that the countries right next door have to help them. Poland, Moldova, other countries, are taking in the Ukrainians. The borders are open. If they get to Poland they can get free train fare to Germany. Germany will take them in, and that's a beautiful thing. And the upsetting thing is the sense that there is undertones of racism, also anti-Islam, where darker-skinned people were not at all welcome and people who are not Christian were not welcome. And so it's probably a mix of all the above, the good and the bad, and it's potentially an opportunity to teach more people about “refugeehood” and why we care and why it affects all of us and what we should do about it and that we should do more. FASKIANOS: Thank you. All right, I'm going to take the next question from Kazi Sazid, who has also raised their hand, so if you could just ask your question yourself and identify yourself. Q: Hello. So I'm Kazi. I'm a student at CUNY Hunter College and I happen to be writing a research paper on Central American and Iraq war refugee crises and how international law hasn't changed the behavior of a state helping them. So my question is, how does confusion and ignorance of migration and refugee terminology by state leaders and the general populace impact the legally ordained rights of refugees such as having identity documents, having the right to education, refoulement, which is not being sent back to a country where they are danger? One example is like Central Americans are termed as illegal immigrants by the right wing but the reality is they are asylum seekers who are worthy of refugee status because gang violence and corruption has destabilized their country and the judicial systems. I think femicide in El Salvador and Honduras is among the highest and—so yeah. RICHARD: Yeah. Thank you for asking the question, and I have a soft spot in my heart for Hunter College. Only one of my grandparents went to college and it was my mother's mother who went to Hunter College and graduated in the late 1920s, and as we know, it's right down the street from the Harold Pratt House, the home of the Council on Foreign Relations. So I think a lot of what you—I agree with a lot of what you've said about—for me it's describing these people who offer so much potential as threats, just because they are trying to help themselves. And instead of feeling that we should support these folks, there's a sense of—even if we don't allow them in our country we could still do things to ease their way and help them find better solutions, but they're described as these waves of people coming this way, headed this way, scary, scary. And if you follow the debates in the United States, I was very alarmed before and during the Trump administration that journalists did not establish that they had a right to make a claim for asylum at the border. Instead, they talked about it as if it were two political policies duking it out, where some people felt we should take more and some people felt we should take less. Well, the issue that was missed, I felt, in a lot of the coverage of the Southern border was the right to asylum, that they had a right to make a claim, that we had signed onto this as the United States and that there was a very good reason that we had signed onto that and it was to make sure people fleeing for their lives get an opportunity to be saved if they're innocent people and not criminals, but innocent people who are threatened, that we'd give them a place of safety. So I agree with you that the lack of understanding about these basic principles, agreements, conventions is something that is not well understood by our society, and certainly the society was not being informed of that by a lot of the messengers describing the situation over the past few years. FASKIANOS: Thank you. So I'm going to take the next question from Lindsey McCormack who is an undergrad at Baruch—oh, sorry, a graduate student at Baruch College. My apologies. Do you see any possibility of the U.S. adopting a protocol for vetting and accepting climate refugees? Have other countries moved in that direction? And maybe you can give us the definition of a climate refugee and what we will in fact be seeing as we see climate change affecting all of us. RICHARD: I don't have a lot to say on this, so I hate to disappoint you, but I will say a couple things because, one, I was on a task force at Refugees International, which is a very good NGO that writes about and reports on refugee situations around the world and shines a light on them. I was part of a task force that came out with a report for the Biden administration on the need to do more for climate migrants, and so that report is available at the Refugees International site and it was being submitted to the Biden administration because the Biden administration had put out an executive order on refugees that included a piece that said we want to do a better job, we want to come up with new, fresh ideas on climate migrants. So I don't know where that stands right now, but I think the other piece of information that I often give out while doing public speaking, especially to students, about this issue is that I feel not enough work has been done on it, and so if a student is very interested in staying in academia and studying deeper into some of these issues, I think climate migration is a field that is ripe for further work. It's timely, it's urgent, and it hasn't been over-covered in the past. I admire several people, several friends who are working on these issues; one is Professor Beth Ferris at Georgetown University who was, in fact, on the secretary general's High Level Panel on Internal Displacement and she made sure that some of these climate issues are raised in very high-level meetings. She was also part of this task force from Refugees International. Another smart person working on this is Amali Tower, a former International Rescue Committee colleague who started a group called Climate Refugees and she's also trying to bring more attention to this; she's kind of very entrepreneurial in trying to do more on that. Not everybody would agree that the term should be climate refugees since “refugees” has so much legal definitions attached to it and the people displaced by climate don't have those kind of protections or understandings built around them yet. But I think it's an area that there definitely needs to be more work done. So I think the basic question was, did I think something good was going to happen anytime soon related to this, and I can't tell because these crazy situations around the world, the war in Ukraine and Taliban in charge in Afghanistan—I mean, that just completely derails the types of exercises that the world needs of thinking through very logically good governance, people coming together making decisions, building something constructive instead of reacting to bad things. FASKIANOS: Thank you. I'm going to take the next question from raised hand Ali Tarokh. And unmute your—thank you. Q: Yes. OK, I am Ali Tarokh from Northeastern University. I came here in the United States ten years ago as a refugee. And I was in Turkey—I flew Iran to Turkey. I stayed there fourteen, sixteen months. So this is part of—my question is part of my lived experience in Turkey. So one part is humanitarian services, helping refugees move into the third country, OK? The one issue I—it's my personal experience is the UNHCR system, there is many corruptions. This corruption makes lines, OK, produce refugees—because some countries such as Iran and Turkey, they are producing refugees and there is no solution for it, or sometimes they use it as—they use refugees as a weapon. They say, OK, if you don't work with me—Turkey sent a message to EU: If you don't work with me, I open the borders. I open the borders and send the flow of refugees to EU. Even some—even Iran's government. So my question is, how can we in the very base on the ground—the level of the ground—how can we prevent all these corruption or how can we work out with this kind of government, countries that are—I named them the refugee producers. And by the time there is two sides of the refugees—one is just humanitarian services, which is our responsibility, United States playing globally there; and other side it seems refugees issue became like industry. In Turkey, the UNHCR staff, some lawyers/attorneys, they take money from people, they make fake cases for them. Even they ask them: Hey, what country—which country would you like to go, United States, Canada, Scandinavian countries? So what is our strategy? What is our solution to help real refugees or prevent produce refugees? RICHARD: Well, there's several things that are raised by your question. Turkey and, now we see, Russia have both been countries where we have seen instances where they can turn on the flow of refugees and turn it off. And Turkey was watching people walk through Turkey, cross the Mediterranean is very scary, dangerous trip between Turkey and Greece in these rubber boats in 2015, 2016, and then they would make their way onward, and then, because of this big EU-Turkey deal that involved 3 billion euros at the time, all of a sudden, the flow stopped. And then in further negotiations going on and on, Turkey would say things that seemed like it came right from a Godfather movie, like, gee, I'd hate to see that flow start up again; that would be a real shame. And so it was clear it was sort of a threat that if you didn't cooperate it could play this very disruptive role on the edges of Europe and deploying people, as you said, which is so cruel not just to the people who are receiving them but to the individuals themselves that they're not being seen as people who need care but instead as a problem to be deployed in different directions. And we saw that also with Belarus and Poland and now also it may have been part of the thinking of Vladimir Putin that by attacking Ukraine, by going to war with Ukraine that there would be exactly what is happening now, people scattering from Ukraine into Europe and that that would be a way to drive a wedge between European countries and cause a lot of not just heartache but also animosity between these countries. So what the Russians didn't seem to appreciate this time was that there would be so much solidarity to help the Ukrainians, and that has been a bit of a surprise. So you've also talked about corruption, though, and corruption is a problem all over the world for lots of different reasons, in business and it's embedded in some societies in a way that sometimes people make cultural excuses for, but in reality we know it doesn't have to be that way. But it is very hard to uproot and get rid of. So I find this work, the anti-corruption work going on around the world, really interesting and groups like Transparency International are just sort of fascinating as they try to really change the standards and the expectations from—the degree to which corruption is part of societies around the world. So UNHCR has to take great care to not hire people who are going to shake down and victimize refugees, and it's not—there's never a perfect situation, but I know that a lot of work is done to keep an eye on these kinds of programs so that the aid goes to the people who need it and it's not sidetracked to go to bad guys. And the way I've seen it is, for example, if I travel overseas and I go to someplace where refugees are being resettled to the U.S. or they're being interviewed for that, or I go to UNHCR office, there will be big signs up that will say the resettlement program does not cost money. If someone asks you for money, don't pay it; you know, report this. And from time to time, there are mini scandals, but overall, it's remarkable how much corruption is kept out of some of these programs. But it's a never-ending fight. I agree with you in your analysis that this is a problem and in some countries more than others. FASKIANOS: So I'm going to take the next question from Pamela Waldron-Moore, who's the chair of the political science department at Xavier University in New Orleans. There are reports in some news feeds that African refugees from Ukraine are being disallowed entry to some states accepting refugees. I think you did allude to this. Is there evidence of this, and if so, can the UN stop it or alleviate that situation? RICHARD: We saw before the Taliban took over in Afghanistan that some European countries were saying it was time for Afghans to go home again, and the idea that during this war it was safe for Afghans to go back—and especially for Afghans who are discriminated against even in the best of times in Afghanistan, like the Hazara minority. It's just—I found that sort of unbelievable that some countries thought this was the right time to send people back to Afghanistan. And so at the moment there's a weird situation in Afghanistan because it's safer in some ways for the bulk of the people because the active fighting has—in large parts of the country—stopped. But it's deadly dangerous for human rights defenders, women leaders, LBGTQ folks—anyone who tries to stand up to the Taliban—you know, scholars, thinkers, journalists. And so those are the folks that, in smaller numbers, we need to find some kind of way to rescue them and get them to safety while they are still inside Afghanistan or if that's outside Afghanistan and in the region. The borders—the border situations change from time to time. For a while they were saying only people with passports could come out, and for most Afghan families, nobody had a passport or, if they did, it was a head of household had a passport for business or trade. But you wouldn't have had passports for the spouse and the children. And so this has been a real dilemma. We also see a whole series of barriers to people getting out; so first you need a passport, then you need a visa to where you're going, and then you might need a transit visa for a country that you are crossing. And what has come to pass is that people who are trying to help evacuate people from Afghanistan—a smaller and smaller number as the months go on; people are trying to make this happen because it's so hard—that they will only take people out of the country if they feel that their onward travel is already figured out and that they have their visas for their final-destination country. So the actual number that's getting out are tiny. And the people who have gotten out who are in either Pakistan or Iraq are very worried. And they're afraid to be pushed back. They're afraid they will run out of money. They are afraid—I think said this during my talk before—they're afraid that there are people in Pakistan who will turn them in to the Taliban. And so it's always hard to be a refugee, but right now it's really frightening for people who are just trying to get to a safe place. FASKIANOS: And in terms of the discrimination that you referenced for refugees leaving the Ukraine, I mean, there have been some reports of EU—discrimination in European countries not accepting— RICHARD: Well, like African students who are studying in Ukraine— FASKIANOS: Yes. RICHARD: —who were not treated as if they were fleeing a country at war— FASKIANOS: Correct. RICHARD: —but instead were put in a different category and said, you know, go back, go home. FASKIANOS: Yes. RICHARD: Yeah, that's—that is quite blatant— FASKIANOS: And there's— RICHARD: And that was happening at the borders. FASKIANOS: Is there anything the UN can do about that, or is that really at the discretion of the countries—the accepting countries? RICHARD: Well, the—yeah, the UNHCR has these reception centers that they've set up, including between the border of Poland and Ukraine, and I think the other neighboring countries. And so if one can get to the reception center, one could potentially get additional help or be screened into—for special attention for needing some help that maybe a white Christian Ukrainian who spoke more than one language of the region would not need. FASKIANOS: Great. So let's go to Susan Knott, who also wrote her question, but has raised her hand. So Susan, why don't you just ask your question? And please unmute and identify yourself. KNOTT: OK, am I unmuted? FASKIANOS: Yes. KNOTT: OK. I am Susan Knott, University of Utah, Educational Policy and Leadership doctoral program. I am also a practicum intern at ASU, and I'm also a refugee services collaborator. And I'm engaged in a research project creating college and university pathways for refugees to resettle. I'm just wondering what your feel is about the current administration efforts in seeking to establish the pathway model similar to ASU's Education for Humanity Initiative with Bard, and is there helping lead the Refugee Higher Education Access program that serves learners who require additional university-level preparation in order to transition into certificate and degree programs. And I just—I'm not just—and all of this buzz that's going on since all of terrible crises are occurring, I'm not seeing a whole lot that—based on my own experience working with refugee education and training centers at colleges—on the college level, and learning about the Presidents' Alliance on Higher Ed and Immigration. I'm just wondering—and they're saying let's have this be more of a privately funded or partnerships with the university scholarships and private entities. What about a federally-funded university sponsorship program for refugee students given that the numbers or the data is showing that that age group is the largest number of just about every refugee population? RICHARD: That's a really fascinating set of issues. I'm not the expert on them, so I'm going to disappoint you. but I appreciate that you took a little extra time in how you stated your intervention to add a lot of information for this group, which should very much care about this. I get a lot of questions every week about university programs that Afghan students could take advantage of. I don't have a good handle on it, and I'm trying to do that with—I'm overdue for a conversation with Scholars at Risk in New York. Robert Quinn is the executive director of that, I believe. And so I'm glad you raised this and I'm not going to have a lot of extra to say about it. FASKIANOS: Anne, are there—is there—there's a question in the chat in the Q&A about sources for data on U.S. initiatives toward refugees. Where would you direct people to go to get updates on the latest programs, et cetera? RICHARD: Sometimes I'm embarrassed to say the best summaries are done by not-for-profits outside the government than by the government. The best source for data on resettlement of refugees to the U.S. is a website that is funded by the U.S. government called WRAPSNET.org—WRAPS spelled W-R-A-P-S-N-E-T dot-O-R-G. And in double-checking some of the things last summer, I felt that DHS had better descriptions of some of the programs than the State Department did, and that's my bureau that I used to—run, so—but they are responsible for determining who is in and who is out of these different programs, so maybe that's why they do. So there's a lot on the DHS website that's interesting if you are looking for more information. And one of the things the Council does, it has done a number of these special web presentations: one on refugees that I got to help on a couple of years ago, and I think there's one up now on Ukrainians. And this is the type of public education function that the Council does so well I think because they fact-check everything, and so it's very reliable. FASKIANOS: Thank you for that plug. You can find it all on CFR.org—lots of backgrounders, and timelines, and things like that. So we don't have that much time left, so I'm going to roll up two questions—one in the Q&A box and one because of your vast experience. So what role do NGOs play in refugee crises and migration initiatives, particularly in resettlement? And just from your perspective, Anne, you have been in academia, you've worked in the government, you worked at IRC, and now are at Freedom House. And so just—again, what would you share with the group about pursuing a career in this—government, non-government perspectives and, what students should be thinking about as they launch to their next phase in life. RICHARD: Yeah, that we could have a whole ‘nother hour on, right? That's—(laughs)— FASKIANOS: I know, I know. It's unfair to, right, do this at the very end, but— RICHARD: NGOs play really important roles in both the delivery of humanitarian assistance overseas and the help for resettlement in the United States. In the U.S. there are nine national networks of different groups; six are faith-based, three are not. They are non-sectarian, and they do amazing work on shoe-string budgets to—everything from meeting refugees at the airport, taking them to an apartment, showing them how the lights work and the toilet flushes, and coming back the next day, making sure they have an appropriate meal to have, and that the kids get in school, that people who need health care get it, and that adults who are able-bodied get jobs so they can support themselves. The other type of NGO are the human rights NGOs that now I'm doing more with, and I guess if you are thinking about careers in these, you have to ask yourself, you know, are you more of a pragmatic person where the most important thing is to save a life, or are you an idealist where you want to put out standards that are very high and push people to live up to them. Both types of organizations definitely help, but they just have very different ways of working. Another question for students is do you want high job security of a career in the U.S. government—say, as a Foreign Service Officer or as a civil servant where maybe you won't move up very quickly, but you might have great sense of satisfaction that the things you were working on were making a difference because they were being decisively carried out by the U.S. or another government. Or do you prefer the relatively lean, flatter organizations of the NGO world where, as a young person, you can still have a lot of authority, and your views can be seen—can be heard by top layers because you're not that far away from them. And so, NGOs are seen as more nimble, more fast moving, less job security. Having done both I think it really depends on your personality. Working in the government, you have to figure out a way to keep going even when people tell you no. You have figure out—or that it's hard, or that it's too complicated. You have to figure out ways to find the people who are creative, and can make thing happen, and can open doors, and can cut through red tape. In NGOs you can have a lot of influence. I was so surprised first time I was out of the State Department working for the International Rescue Committee one of my colleagues was telling me she just picks up the phone and calls the key guy on Capitol Hill and tells him what the law should be. That would never happen with a junior person in the U.S. government. You have to go through so many layers of bureaucracy, and approvals, and clearances. So, really, it depends on the type of person you are, and how you like to work, and the atmosphere in which you like to work. I can tell you you won't get rich doing this type of work, unfortunately. But you might be able to make a decent living. I certainly have, and so I encourage students to either do this as a career or find ways to volunteer part-time, even if it's tutoring a refugee kid down the block and not in some glamorous overseas location. I think you can get real sense of purpose out of doing this type of work. Thank you, Irina. FASKIANOS: Thank you very much. And I have to say that your careful definitions of the different categories—and really, I think we all need to be more intentional about how we explain, talk about these issues because they are so complex, and there are so many dimensions, and it's easy to make gross generalizations. But the way you laid this out was really, really important for deepening the understanding of this really—the challenge and the—what we're seeing today. So thank you very much. RICHARD: Thank you. Thanks, everybody. FASKIANOS: So thanks to all—yeah, thanks to everybody for your great questions. Again, I apologize; we're three minutes over. I couldn't get to all your questions, so we will just have to continue looking at this issue. We will be announcing the fall Academic Webinar lineup in a month or so in our Academic Bulletin, so you can look for it there. Good luck with your end of the year, closing out your semester. And again, I encourage you to go to CFR.org, ForeignAffairs.com, and ThinkGlobalHealth.org for research analysis on global issues. And you can follow us on Twitter at @CFR_Academic. So again, thank you, Anne Richard. Good luck to you all with finals, and have a good summer. (END)

Host: Sophia Kornienko, writer/ animation artist/ unschooling mom Co-host: Marta Obiols Llistar, unschooling mom of three, educator, author of the book 18, An Unschooling ExperienceResources:The Matt Walker Podcast https://www.sleepdiplomat.com/podcastMatt Walker: Sleep | Lex Fridman Podcast #210 https://youtu.be/Hc4XvHTlW3sAutomated Morningness-Eveningness Questionnaire (AutoMEQ), New York State Psychiatric Institute Juliann Garey, Teens and Sleep: The Cost of Sleep Deprivation: Lack of adequate sleep is linked to moodiness, risky behavior and injuries. Child Mind InstituteDanielle Pacheco, Can you Change Your Circadian Rhythm? Sleep FoundationMolly Worthen, ‘When You Get Into Unschooling, It's Almost Like a Religion', The New York Times, September 25, 2020Gina Riley, Ph.D. is an educational psychologist, Clinical Professor, and Program Leader of the Adolescent Special Education Program at CUNY – Hunter College. She is known internationally for her work in the fields of homeschooling, unschooling, and self-directed learning. Check out her publications here: https://education.hunter.cuny.edu/about/faculty-staff/gina-riley/

Rose Gottemoeller, the Steven C. Házy lecturer at the Center for International Security and Cooperation in Stanford University's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and research fellow at the Hoover Institution, leads a conversation on international security and cooperation. FASKIANOS: Welcome to today's session of the Winter/Spring 2022 CFR Academic Webinar Series. I'm Irina Faskianos, vice president of the National Program and Outreach at CFR. Today's discussion is on the record, and the video and transcript will be available on our website at CFR.org/academic. As always, CFR takes no institutional positions on matters of policy. We are delighted and honored to have Rose Gottemoeller with us today to talk about international security and cooperation. Rose Gottemoeller is the Steve C. Házy lecturer at Stanford University's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and its Center for International Security and Cooperation. She is also a fellow at the Hoover Institution. From 2016 to 2019, she served as the deputy secretary-general (DSG) of NATO, where she advanced NATO's adaptation to the new security challenges in Europe and the fight against terrorism. And before that, she served as the undersecretary for arms control and international security at the State Department. In 2009 and 2010, she was the assistant secretary of state for arms control, verification, and compliance, during which time she served as chief U.S. negotiator of the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty with the Russian Federation. So, Rose Gottemoeller, thank you very much for being with us. I can't think of anybody better to have this conversation with us than you. When we planned this webinar, we knew it was the sixtieth anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis, but what we did not know was Russia would invade Ukraine and that there would be a war going on. So perhaps you can put this in context, talk about the lessons learned from the Cuban Missile Crisis, and where we are now, given what's going on in Ukraine. GOTTEMOELLER: Thank you so much, Irina. And it's wonderful to be with you, and with everyone who was able to join us today from across the country. I know there are many impressive institutions who are dialing in, and I really appreciate the chance to have a conversation with you and look forward to talking with the students and hearing what your questions are as well. Let me indeed begin talking today about the Cuban Missile Crisis, which happened sixty years ago this coming October. It was a time—I was a fourth grader at the time. And I remember, I was going to a Catholic school in Dearborn, Michigan. And the nuns said to us: You really must get home quickly tonight, children, there might be a nuclear war. You need to be with your parents. None of us knew exactly what was going on, but we knew that nuclear war was a really bad thing. We'd been through many drills, hiding under our desks or out in the hallway with our head between our knees. I have to tell you, even as a third grader, during one of those drills I thought to myself: If we get hit by a nuclear weapon, putting my head between my knees is not going to help one bit. So even as a third grader, I knew that nuclear weapons were weapons of mass destruction. So, we did manage to solve that crisis, with a secret deal, as it turned out. President Kennedy agreed quietly to withdraw intermediate-range nuclear missiles from Turkey. Never made public, until much later. And Khrushchev agreed to withdraw what were equivalent missiles from Cuba. And we got back to the negotiating table. In fact, the Cuban Missile Crisis dealt not only the United States and the Soviet Union, but other countries around the world, what I call a short, sharp shock. We recognized how devastating would be the effect of nuclear war, and we decided we really did need to talk together about how we were going to control and limit those risks. So, it led to a blossoming of negotiations on all kinds of limitations and controls. First, the Limited Test Ban Treaty. It was a test ban on nuclear testing in the atmosphere that was very quickly agreed after the Cuban Missile Crisis. President Kennedy gave an important speech at American University in June of 1963, when he said we really must control this most dangerous of weapons. And he proposed at that time a test ban treaty limiting testing in the atmosphere. And that was agreed rather quickly. It's amazing to me, as an arms control negotiator, that that treaty was then agreed by August of that very year. So record time. The U.K. also joined in those negotiations. But one thing that's very interesting, the Limited Test Ban was the first, I would say also, environmental arms control treaty. It was inspired by the fact that countries around the world and publics around the world were recognizing that testing in the atmosphere was producing a lot of strontium-90 and other radioactive pollutants that were getting into the food supply. Again, I remember from that period my own mother saying, “We've got to be worried about the milk we're drinking because it's got strontium-90 in it from testing in the atmosphere.” So even then, there were some environmental pushes that led to, I think, in part the quick negotiation of the Limited Test Ban Treaty. After that, we went to the step of controlling tests also under the sea and underground, starting with the Threshold Test Ban Treaty, that did not enter into force until the early 1990s. It was a long negotiation, but it was negotiated through that period of the 1960s into the 1970s. We also negotiated what has been the foundational document of the nonproliferation regime: the [Nuclear] Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT). That was negotiated through the late 1960s and entered into force in 1972. It did basically designate five nuclear weapon states. These days they are U.S., U.K., France, China, and Russia. But at that time, those nuclear weapon states were the only states that would be permitted to possess nuclear weapons. All other states around the world would give up their right to nuclear weapons. But there was a grand bargain there. The nuclear weapon states agreed to proceed with total nuclear disarmament, under Article 6 of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, and in return for which the non-nuclear weapon states under the NPT would, again, not build their own weapons. They would prevent proliferation of nuclear weapons. And everyone would work to promote peaceful uses of the atom, whether in nuclear energy, or agriculture, manufacturing, mining industry, et cetera, promoting—or medical uses as well—promoting peaceful uses of the atom. So those are what are called the three pillars of the NPT: disarmament, nonproliferation, and peaceful uses. So that was agreed in 1972. And working in that multilateral way was important, but there was also an impetus given in this commitment to disarmament for the United States and the Soviet Union to get together and to begin to negotiate bilaterally the two together on limiting their nuclear weapons. We built up a tremendous nuclear arsenal during the Cold War years. At the time that we were beginning to talk to the Soviets about limiting nuclear weapons and nuclear weapon delivery systems, missiles and bombers, submarines—at that time, in the late 1960s, we had about 32,000 nuclear warheads, if you can imagine that. And the Soviets built up their stockpile to be about 40,000 nuclear warheads. So there were tremendous numbers of nuclear weapons being held in storage, but there were also tremendous numbers that were deployed. So we worked steadily from that period, the 1970s into the 1980s, to try to limit nuclear weapons. Didn't work so well. There are various reasons why. Most specifically, I think, we were just driving harder and harder with more effective missiles to deploy more warheads on those missiles. And so, by the time we got into the 1980s, we had about 12,000 warheads deployed on missiles and deployed or designated for deployment on bombers. The Soviets the same, about 12,000. Now, remember those numbers I gave you, 32,000 total, 40,000 total in the USSR. We held a lot of weapons in storage, not on top of missiles, not on top of delivery vehicles, as we called them. They were just held in storage. But we also then had 12,000 deployed on missiles and pointed at each other in a very high-readiness state. So we had got through the 1970s and 1980s not blowing each other up, but we also didn't have much success limiting those systems because there was this technological jump ahead, being able to put more warheads on individual missile systems. So, that's when Reagan and Gorbachev entered the scene. In the mid-1980s they got together. Reagan had not been very easy on the USSR when he came into office. He declared the USSR the “evil empire.” And he drove hard military modernization that included some nuclear modernization as well. The sclerotic Soviet leadership at that time, they were dying off one by one. First it was Brezhnev, then it was Andropov, then there was a third fellow. They all went very, very quickly. And Gorbachev took over in the mid-1980s. And he and Reagan actually then got together and began to talk about how they might reduce—not try to limit, because limit wasn't good enough. The technology was always pushing ahead. But how could we actually begin to reduce nuclear weapons and their delivery systems, and the missiles we put them on? So that was the negotiations that began in the 1980s for the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty and also the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, which finally entered into force in 1994. And that treaty, once again, took the number of deployed warheads on both sides down from 12,000 deployed warheads on each side to 6,000 deployed warheads on each side. If you think about one of these warheads, a single warhead is enough to destroy a city. It's nothing like what we're seeing in Ukraine today. Sadly, such horrible destruction and the really barbaric attacks on civilian targets like this maternity hospital yesterday. I'm just heartbroken about this, as I'm sure many of you are. But that was a big bomb that was really directed at a single facility and was very destructive. But if you can imagine a nuclear weapon, that could really pulverize—pulverize—the center of a city. And that's what happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, when the United States was the only country to use nuclear weapons in wartime. And that is what has led to this nuclear taboo that has been pretty clear, because it was recognized these are weapons of mass destruction. They completely pulverize, and many, many lives lost. And those who are left living, as it was said at the time of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, would envy the dead because of the severity of their injuries. So, people were recognizing that we had too many deployed warheads. We had 12,000 pointed at each other on a high state of alert. So getting them down to 6,000 on each side was important. That was the goal of the START treaty. Then in the early 2000s, in 2002, President Bush and President—believe it or not—Putin at that time decided in the Moscow Treaty on a further reduction. That took us down to 2,200 deployed warheads on both sides. And then the treaty that I worked on negotiating, the New START treaty in 2009 and 2010, took us down to 1,550 deployed warheads on both the U.S. and Russian sides. So 12,000 down to 1,550. That's a pretty good disarmament record. And it all sprang from that short, sharp shock of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Now, sixty years later, it's a tragedy, but we seem to be facing another crisis on par with the Cuban Missile Crisis. Vladimir Putin has been rattling the nuclear saber. We are very concerned, not necessarily about a big nuclear exchange between the United States and the Russian Federation, but about some smaller strike, perhaps use of a nuclear weapon on Ukrainian territory, perhaps a so-called demonstration strike, where Russia would launch a nuclear explosion over the Black Sea, for example, just to prove that they're willing to do it. And so, at the moment, we are facing these nuclear threats out of the Kremlin with a lot of concern, but also very serious attitude about how we sustain and maintain nuclear deterrence at this moment of supreme crisis in Ukraine, and ensure that we continue to deter Russia from taking these disastrous actions with weapons of mass destruction. But also think about ways—how can we go forward from here to preserve what we have achieved in these sixty years since the Cuban Missile Crisis. This great foundation of big nuclear international regimes that we have been able to put in place—such as the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, that means the only country that has tested nuclear weapons in this century is North Korea. There is a taboo against nuclear testing that is strongly held, the taboo against nuclear use has held since Hiroshima and Nagasaki over seventy-five years ago. And now, we are looking at ensuring that we sustain and maintain the Nonproliferation Treaty regime so that we do not see a lot of new nuclear weapon states emerging across the globe. Just one thing I forgot to mention—President Kennedy spoke quite a bit about these things. I think the Cuban Missile Crisis really for him personally was a big shock, and really provoked his thinking quite a bit—but he said, “We need this Nonproliferation Treaty because otherwise we're going to end up with twenty, twenty-five nuclear weapon states around the world. And that will be hugely destabilizing.” So the Nonproliferation Treaty regime, although we pay attention to the rogue states, the DPRKs [Democratic People's Republic of Koreas], the Irans, of course. It looks like we may be now returning to the Iran nuclear deal. I certainly hope so. We also need Iranian oil at this moment, which is another matter. But we have a couple of nuclear rogues out there. But, in general, we have prevented the proliferation of nuclear weapons, thanks to the Nonproliferation Treaty regime. We need to do everything we can at this moment to preserve and protect these important big regimes. And that goes not only for nuclear, but also the so-called other weapons of mass destruction. The Chemical Weapons Convention bans the use of chemicals in wartime. Not only chemical weapons, that is chemical designed to be used as weapons, but also what we've been seeing in Syria, the use of chlorine gas in wartime. That is forbidden by the Chemical Weapons Convention as well. So we need these big regimes to continue—the Biological Weapons Convention, the same. So I really wanted to stress this point as we get to our discussion period, because it's going to take a lot of attention and effort if Russia is now turning its back on playing a responsible role in the international community. If Russia is turning into a very big pariah state, as I argued yesterday in a piece in Foreign Affairs, we need to figure out what we are going to do, losing Russia as a partner. Because Russia has actually been a great player in negotiating all these treaties and agreements. But if Russia is turning its back on a responsible role in the international community, then the United States has to look for other partners. I would argue that we should be really approaching Beijing. They are, after all, a nuclear weapon state under the Nonproliferation Treaty. And historically they have been a rather responsible nuclear weapon state under the Nonproliferation Treaty, joining in efforts to advance the goals of nuclear disarmament. So it's hard, because at the moment, as you know, Beijing and Washington have been at great odds over any number of issues—Taiwan, trade and investment, human rights with the Uyghurs. So many issues we've been at odds over. But I think the moment has come where we need to think about how we are going to preserve these weapons of mass destruction regimes, the nuclear regimes, the testing—the ban against nuclear testing. How are we going to preserve it in the face of Russia as a pariah state? And that means, I think, we must partner with China. So those are my remarks to begin with. I see we have a few questions already. And I'm really looking forward to our discussion. Irina, back over to you. FASKIANOS: Rose, thank you very much. So let's start with a raised hand from Babak Salimitari. And please state your institution and unmute yourself. Q: Good morning. My name is Babak Salimitari. I'm a third-year economics major at University of California, Irvine. And my question really pertains with NATO as a force for international security. I was looking at the list of countries that were not paying the 2 percent of their necessary GDP for defense. And these are some rich countries, like Norway, and the Netherlands, and Germany. These aren't poor, third-world countries. I don't understand why they don't pay their fair share. So when you were in NATO, what did you tell these people? GOTTEMOELLER: That's a very good question, Babak. And, honestly, it's been great for me to watch now with this otherwise terrible crisis in Ukraine—it's been great for me to watch that countries who were very resistant of paying their 2 percent of GDP are now stepping forward and saying they are ready to do so. And Germany is the prime example. President Trump was very insistent on this matter, and very much threatening dire action by the United States, including that the United States would fail to honor its so-called Article 5 commitments to NATO, which that is—under the founding document of NATO, the so-called Washington Treaty of 1949, Article 5 states that if a single country in the NATO alliance is attacked, then all countries must—and it asks for help, there's that important point too—if it asks for help then other NATO countries are obliged to come to its assistance in defending it. So President Trump was threatening that the United States would not fulfill its Article 5 commitments. He was very tough on this matter. I was the deputy secretary-general at NATO during the years of the Trump presidency. My boss and I, Jens Stoltenberg and I, always welcomed President Trump's pressure on these matters, because every single U.S. president, again, since Jack Kennedy—I'll go back to him. There's a great—now in the public domain—a great report of a National Security Council meeting where John Kennedy says, “I am tired of these NATO European freeloaders. We spend all the money on defense; they take our defenses and don't build up their own. And they're freeloading, they're freeriding on us.” So every single U.S. president has raised this issue with the allies. But it was Donald Trump who got them to really sit up and take notice in the first instance. So President—I'm sorry—Secretary-General Stoltenberg and I always supported his efforts, although we were not supportive of his drawing any question about U.S. obligations with regard to Article 5. But we supported his efforts to push the allies on paying 2 percent of GDP. A number of them did step up during the Trump years, and so more were paying 2 percent of GDP now with this crisis. Unfortunately, again, it's taken a dire crisis in Ukraine. But we see even Germany stepping up. Just one final word on Germany. At the time, when I was DSG, they kept saying, well 2 percent of our GDP, we are the most enormous economy in Europe. And if we spend 2 percent of GDP, then other countries are going to start worrying about casting back to the past and remembering Nazi Germany, and thinking about the big military buildup in the 1930s. So we don't want that to happen. So that was very deeply ingrained in the political elites in Berlin. But now, we're seeing that 180-degree switch just in the last ten days. I think it's remarkable. But I welcome it, for one, that they are now willing to spend 2 percent of GDP on defense. FASKIANOS: Great. I'm going to take the next question, a written question, from Caleb Kahila, undergraduate student at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. One issue that I don't hear much about is the actions of individuals involved in nuclear weapons. An example is Abdul Qadeer Khan, who leads the Pakistani nuclear program but is also believed to have given nuclear information to Iran, North Korea, among others. With examples like Khan, should the international community take the issue of individual nuclear proliferation more seriously? GOTTEMOELLER: That is a great question. And indeed, certain individuals have had a profoundly malignant effect on nuclear nonproliferation. It is worthwhile to note that the Nonproliferation Treaty—the membership is very wide, but there are a few outliers. And India and Pakistan are both outliers. And I think for some weird reason, Khan felt justified in being an outlier to share nuclear weapons information with a number of countries, including also Libya, as I understand. So there was this notion I think that he had, almost an ideological notion—he's dead now—but an ideological notion of producing an Islamic bomb to counter both the Indians, their mortal enemies, but also to ensure that the rest of the world did not mess with Pakistan, and also did not mess with the rest of the Muslim world, the Islamic world. So it was, I think, very clear that this one malignant individual had an enormous deleterious effect on the nonproliferation regime. We have been able to, I think, place constraints and dial back in many ways from some of his export activities, including when the Libyans were willing to give up their weapons of mass destruction programs. But you're absolutely right that it necessary to pay attention to individuals—powerful individuals, they have to be—who have that kind of access. And luckily, they are fairly rare. But we have to pay attention to the individuals who could make a very big problem for the nonproliferation regime. I do worry nowadays about the North Koreans, about the DPRK. The trouble is, they are themselves bent on acquiring nuclear bombs. And if they give away their fissile material, for example. One of the big barriers to getting a bomb is you need a significant amount of either highly enriched uranium or plutonium. And it's rather difficult to acquire. So if the DPRK were going to get into this business of giving away their expertise, the next question would be, well, how about some fissile material to back that up? And I dare say, they'd rather keep all their fissile material for themselves. But that's a very good question, Caleb. Thank you for that. FASKIANOS: I'm going to go next Mojúbàolú Olúfúnké Okome at Brooklyn College. Q: Thank you very much. Mojúbàolú Olúfúnké Okome. And I teach political science at Brooklyn College. And I have two issues that are kind of bothering me. One is, what are the chances that Russia will turn its back on the NPT in totality, and on other weapons regimes in this war? And then, besides an alliance with China, what are the other options for the U.S.? The second thing is, would Russia have been so bold to invade Ukraine if Ukraine hadn't destroyed its weapons—it's nuclear weapons and joined the NPT? I remember a Mearsheimer article in Foreign Affairs, I think, where he was giving a very unpopular view at that time that nuclear—destroying nuclear weapons in the Ukraine was a bad idea, because there was a need to kind of have a defense against Russia's potential invasion of the Ukraine. This was in the 1990s. And now it seems like he was right. So I'm just wondering what you think of these two issues. GOTTEMOELLER: Very good questions, Dr. Okome. And very difficult ones. But let me start on your first question. I argued yesterday in my Foreign Affairs article that I don't think it's so much that Russia would actually leave the regimes. I don't believe that they would turn their backs on the regimes by leaving them. What I believe, though, is that they will just prove to be not the good partner they have been historically. Historically they have really been, as I put it in the article, a giant of the nonproliferation regime, always looking for solutions for problems. Helping to drive forward top priorities, not only in the Nonproliferation Treaty but in what I call the wider regime, which includes these other treaties and agreements, including our bilateral treaties, the New START treaty is currently still in force, thank God. So I do worry that now they would instead turn to a more negative role, perhaps a wrecker role, in trying to stymie decision making in the regime implementation bodies, and trying to be mischievous in the way they interact with the rest of the regime members. And for that reason, I think we will need to have strong leadership. And the United States will need allies. And so that is why I have been emphasizing looking to China as a possible ally in what will be a very difficult, very difficult time going forward. But I do feel very sure that we must have as a top objective, a top priority preserving these regimes and agreements. Your second question, let me say a few words about the so-called Budapest Memorandum. I was involved in negotiating it. I worked for President Clinton in the 1990s. I was convinced at the time, I remain convinced, that what the Budapest Memorandum bought Ukraine was thirty years of peace and stability to build itself up as an independent and sovereign nation. We, in the Clinton administration, argued to Ukraine at the time that if they tried to hang on to the nuclear weapons that were left on their territory after the breakup of the Soviet Union, that they would end up in an immediate conflict with Russia that would be destabilizing and would not allow their fragile, young democracy to take root. And I still believe that very strongly. For those of you who don't remember those years, when the Soviet Union broke apart, over a thousand warheads were left on Ukrainian territory, over a thousand warheads were left on Kazakh territory, Kazakhstan, and approximately a hundred warheads were left in Belarus. So there—and there were strategic delivery vehicles. There were intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) deployed in all three countries, and there were bombers deployed in Ukraine. So there were weapon systems that needed to be destroyed and eliminated. And in this case, we got the Ukrainians to agree to join the Nonproliferation Treaty as a non-nuclear weapon state. Their warheads were returned to Russia for down-blending to low-enriched uranium, which was then used in—(laughs)—it's ironic—but it was used for power plant fuel for the nuclear power plants in Ukraine. I do want to stress that at that time there was a very cooperative negotiation going on. And our assumption working—it was with the Russians and the Ukrainians and the Americans together. We were all working on this problem together in good faith. And it was a very, very positive effort overall. I still believe that Ukraine would have been caught immediately in the maelstrom of conflict with Russia if they had tried somehow to hang onto those weapons. And technically, it would not have been easy, because the command and control of all those missiles was in Moscow. It was not in Ukraine. They would have had to try to guillotine themselves from the command-and-control system in Moscow and build up a command-and-control system in Ukraine for these nuclear weapon systems. And it was our judgment, it remains my judgment, that it would have been very destructive for the young Ukrainian state, the young Ukrainian democracy to try to hang on to them. And I do think that they have taken shape as an independent power, not entirely healthy economically but, before this terrible crisis, their economy was growing. And so I do think that what we are seeing today, with the brave—very brave defense of Ukraine by the Ukrainian public, and its armed forces, and first and foremost its president—that was all born out of the thirty years that the Ukrainians got to build up their country as an independent and sovereign state. And, again, they would not have had that if they had insisted in the 1990s on holding onto nuclear weapons. FASKIANOS: Great. I'm going to take a written question from Michael Strmiska, who is associate professor of world history at Orange County Community College in New York State. I'm going to shorten it. In essence, the Biden administration has said they will not impose a no-fly zone, as have other nations. And then we recently saw the Polish fighter jets via the U.S. to Ukraine. They have declined on that. So at what point do you think—there's been a lot of talk that either one of those will trigger a nuclear war. And in his question he says: Putin says “nuke” and we run and hide. If the death toll in Ukraine approaches the levels of the Holocaust, do you think the calculus will change? And do you think that this—that would trigger nuclear war? GOTTEMOELLER: Well, it's a complex question, Dr. Strmiska. Let me—let me try to give you my point of view on it. I'll just say, first of all, that I don't think we're running and hiding at all. We have sustained—and when I say “we” I'm still talking as if I'm NATO DSG. (Laughs.) But what I mean is the United States and its NATO allies have been providing a steady stream of military assistance to Ukraine, and a steady stream of humanitarian assistance to Ukraine, and also to the countries bordering Ukraine—Moldova, Hungary, Poland—that are—that are sheltering refugees from Ukraine. So we are really, I think, continuing to support them in, so far, pretty amazing ways. I have been talking to some military experts this morning, retired military officers here in the United States. And they think Putin and the Russians may be running out of ammo. We'll see to it that the Ukrainians do not run out of ammo. And so we are doing a lot to help them. And in terms of the deterrence messaging that's gone on, I've actually been rather admiring of the way that the administration has been clear about, and firm, about the dangers of rattling the nuclear saber, but also has been very clear that we are not taking steps ourselves to up the readiness of our nuclear forces, nor will we do so. They, the White House and the Department of Defense (DOD), basically postponed an ICBM test this week to ensure that there was no hint of a message that we, ourselves, are escalating. But we've been very firm and clear that nuclear use of any kind would be crossing, for us, a redline that is significant. So now let me get to your question about the no-fly zone, because I think this is—this is a complex question. It's turned into this kind of cause célèbre in the media, the press. You're watching the twenty-four-hour news cycle. All of us are, like, glued to our televisions right now, it's so horrible what is unfolding before us in Ukraine. So everybody's saying, no-fly zone, no-fly zone, no-fly zone. But when you look at it, the Russians aren't actually flying aircraft very much in Ukraine. These missiles are being delivered from Russian territory, from Belarusian territory, from ships in the Black Sea, and some now from Ukrainian territory in Donetsk and Luhansk in the eastern part of the country. But the vast majority—yesterday, the count was over 670 missiles. The vast majority of them have come from Russia. The Ukrainians don't need a no-fly zone right now. They need missile defenses. And so some of the actions that have been taken, for example, by the—by the U.K. government, for example, to get into their hands some handheld capability—now, these are not going to go after those big missiles, like the terrible explosion at the maternity hospital yesterday. That was caused by a very big missile. But some—they can be useful to defend their skies against some smaller—some smaller projectiles. And I think that's going to be important, those kinds of steps. I wish there were a way to get the Ukrainians the Israeli Iron Dome system. That's the best missile defense system around for short- to medium-range missiles. But I have my doubts that—(laughs)—the Israelis are going to want to get involved in this thing. But that's the point. This is not an air superiority problem at the moment. It is a problem of missile attacks. And so we need to do, I think, what we can to, again, get some help to the—to the Ukrainians. But we've got to be clear in our own mind what kind of help they really need. We'll see. This could change. And the Russians are upping their activity, so it may turn into more of an air battle than it has been up to this point. But I think it's really good to think harder about what the actual threat to Ukraine is today, rather than just being so fixated on a no-fly zone. FASKIANOS: Thank you. That's an important clarification. Let's go now to Kazi Sazid, who has raised his hand. Q: Hello. So I'm a political science student at CUNY Hunter College, just right next to CFR, actually. So my question is, we've seen in the past in how geopolitics and geopolitical biases obscures if not manipulates the reality of certain threats to international security and cooperation. One example is Nixon destabilizing the Allende government because there's a fear that socialism triumphed the narrative that socialism can only happen through dictatorships basically falls flat. So my question is, what avenues and mechanisms are available to ensure that security situations are not sensationalized to the point where people believe it is a bigger threat than it truly is? Sorry if that's a loaded question. GOTTEMOELLER: Well, it's a good question because it points to the information/misinformation space. And I think we've all been thinking about that a lot right now. And the United States and its NATO allies I think in the run up to the invasion actually were doing a pretty good job controlling the information space by, for example, undoing these false-flag operations that the Russians were trying to launch in the run-up to the invasion. They were actually apparently on the cusp of trying to replace the Zelenskyy government with their own puppet government. All of this was outed by some very astute use of intelligence by, again, the U.S. and the U.K., and getting it out into the information space. So in the run-up to the invasion, we were actually winning the misinformation war. Nowadays, I'm a little concerned about a couple of things. First, I'm concerned—well, there's so much to talk about here, but let me—let me just give it a shot, Kazi. We have to be concerned about the fact that Vladimir Putin is closed up in his bubble with his small cohort and is not getting sources of information that may cause him to think twice about what he's doing. And that is of concern when you're trying to deter the man, when you're trying to ensure that he knows that there will be a firm response. I don't think he had any idea—and maybe even today doesn't have any idea—at the strong pushback and the very capable pushback he's getting from the Ukrainian armed forces. They are defending their country well. And the Ukrainian public is joining in on that effort. Putin, in his bubble, just did not realize that. And now I'm not sure he's getting the information that would really help him to understand the situation that his armed forces are in right now. If, as my military experts conveyed this morning, they're beginning to run low on missiles, they're beginning to run low on ammunition, it's going to be a problem. They're going to start doing worse, rather than being able to pick up the pace, as we were talking about a moment ago, and as many people expect. So that's number one problem, is how is that deterrence messaging thing working with the Kremlin right now? The second thing I'd point to, though, is how do we reach the Russian people? Everybody takes note of the fact that all the—the internet backbone is closing down now in Ukraine. Harder and harder for Russians who are interested to get independent news that is not the product of state TV and state radio, state propaganda outlets. So how to get that message across is one that is really, really important. But I note at the same time, there was a poll that came out yesterday that was so interesting to me. It said, 58 percent of Russians support the war. And they say, well, that's pretty good. 58 percent of Russians support the war? But then when you think about it, there were a lot of “I don't knows” in that—in that poll as well. And when people don't want to say publicly what they really think they may say “I don't know,” or “I don't have an opinion on this matter.” Fifty-eight percent, when you juxtapose it against the support for the invasion of Crimea in 2014, is extraordinarily low. There was over 90 percent support for the invasion of Crimea in 2014. And now we're looking at 58 percent against the war—no, I'm sorry—it's 58 percent support the war. Sorry about that. And then a bunch of “I don't knows” in there, or “I don't want to comment” in there. So I think that there is an issue here about trying to talk directly to the Russian people. And the president has discussed that already in public. And I think we need to do better about figuring out how to reach the Russian people, especially now that social media's being shut down, other, I would say, more open forms of internet communications are being—are being shut down. We need to figure out how to message the Russian people as well. And finally, I'm not sure I'm actually answering your question, but I think—I think it's time that we start pivoting. We, the United States and NATO, to a more positive overall message of global leadership. That this is about our values and this is about what we want the world to be like in the years going forward. Let's talk about what we would need to support an independent Ukraine, no matter what. And let's talk about how we see the necessity of democratic principles and the rule of law being reenergized, restrengthened by this terrible crisis. I think we need to get a message out there about how we have a positive agenda, and we will push to pursue it, come what may. FASKIANOS: Thank you. Our next question is from Susie Risk, a first-year economics student at West Virginia University. Do you believe economic sanctions from the West on Russia is a viable way to slow Russia's advance on Ukraine? From my understanding they are mostly affecting civilians in the country, not those attacking Ukraine. And what are the other ways states like the U.S. could affect Russia in a nonviolent way? GOTTEMOELLER: I actually think the coherence of these sanctions across the board have turned them into a powerful instrument to both convey to the Kremlin, to the Russian government, and to the Russian people that they are on the wrong course. The coherence of them—there aren't any workarounds left. And in fact, even in the case of the Europeans, for example, saying that they can only cut back partially on their purchases of Russian oil because they cannot—they can't do without Russian oil and gas at the moment, but they say they're going to cut by 65 percent by the end of the year. OK, that's great, but what I'm hearing is, again, this status of the Russian Federation now as being the invader, being the country that has taken these wrong steps and is so deserving of these coherent sanctions across the board, that it is leading—like, the insurance industry—to think twice about insuring tankers that are picking up Russian oil. And so it's leading to ports messaging that they will not offload Russian oil. So despite the fact that they are still selling oil, the overall behavior of the Russian Federation and the way it is now wrapped in this coherent sanctions regime, is leading, I think, to a situation where, yeah, sure, they're going to continue to put some oil through—gas and oil through the pipelines into Europe. And they, I think, may be more likely to continue pushing that, rather than trying to turn the tap on and off, as they've done historically to try to pressure the Europeans. I think they'll be wanting to sell their gas and oil. But I think increasingly, on the stock market and in other settings, they are going to have a harder and harder time pushing oil sales, gas and oil sales. So you see this coherent sanctions regime as having knock-on effects that I think will have an even greater effect on the Russian economy, even on the Russian oil economy. FASKIANOS: It's been pretty amazing to watch the sanctions both from governments and from private—as you said—private companies and social media companies pulling out. Starbucks, Coca-Cola, and all of that, to try to—and the ruble has devalued. I think it is pretty much devalued to the very bottom. GOTTEMOELLER: Well, that's a great—that's a great point too, Irina. And particularly mentioning the sanctions against the central bank have had a profound effect. Russian rating has gone to junk—it's gone below junk bond status now, and so they're not rated anymore by the big rating companies. So it's had a profound effect on the Russian economy overall. And so, I'm wondering about—they've got very good technocrats running their banking system. That was always, I think, one of the things Putin was very proud about in coming out of the 2014 invasion of Crimea with a lot of sanctions slapped on him. He basically turned his country inward and said we are going to be more self-sufficient now and you, the bankers, you do what you can to ensure that we have lots of reserves, a rainy-day fund, that we are protected from shocks in future. Well, what happened in sanctioning the central bank is 70 percent of that rainy-day fund is held in Western financial institutions, and those now have placed blocks on the Russians getting their hands on their—on their financial reserves. So I think those steps have been coherent and very strong and have led to this really tanking of the Russian economy. FASKIANOS: Right. And with the sanctions now affecting the oligarchs and the well-to-do in Russia, that also could bring pressure on Putin—assuming they can get close enough to him—because, as you said, he is very much in a bubble that probably has been exacerbated by the two-year pandemic that we all have been living through. I'm going to go next to Nancy Gallagher, with a raised hand. Nancy, over to you. There we go. Q: I'd love to go back to the history that you started with briefly as a way of thinking about the future. And you've spent your entire career, basically, thinking about what mix of toughness and cooperation is appropriate for our relations with Russia or the Soviet Union at any given time. And even during the worst periods that you talked about, there was still some tacit cooperation that was going on to make sure—or to try to reduce the risks of a nuclear war that neither side really wanted. So it's never been 100 percent confrontation. And I'm just wondering, as you think about our relationship with Russia now, whether you've essentially written Russia off for the indefinite future or if you think that we should be continuing to think about ways of simultaneously being as tough as we need to right now, but also not completely closing the door on cooperation either to keep the risks of escalation under control now or to improve the prospects for reengagement with Russia in the future. GOTTEMOELLER: Thank you for that question, Nancy, and thank you so much for joining this call. The other half of my Foreign Affairs piece yesterday talked about this and really stressed, as strongly as I could, that we need to do everything we can to keep Russia at the nuclear, both arms control and also nonproliferation regime tables, that we need to do everything—for one thing, Russia, as I mentioned, has been a giant of these regimes. They are really very good diplomats and negotiators who work these issues, and they can help to find solutions. They have helped to find solutions throughout the fifty years since we began seriously negotiating bilaterally in the Strategic Arms Limitation agreement of the 1970s, agreed in 1972. From that time forward to the present day, fifty years we've had this great relationship at the negotiating table. We haven't agreed by any means at every step of the way, and sometimes we've been in negative territory, but we've always slowly and steadily driven forward on nuclear disarmament objectives. So I think we need to do everything we can to preserve that, and I am hopeful that we can do so. Even in the depths of this horrendous crisis, the Russians have been continuing—although with some issues coming up in recent days over sanctions—but they've been continuing to try to resuscitate the Iran nuclear deal. And I've got my fingers and toes crossed that, in fact, we will resuscitate the Iran nuclear deal. Now, the Russians maybe were reluctant at the moment because I think the United States is seeing the potential for Iranian oil to start to flow again, which would help with this cutoff that we've embraced of our purchases of Russian oil and gas. So there's a whole bunch of issues there. But the point I wanted to make is, despite this severe disagreement and a really dire crisis over Ukraine, in this particular case we've been able to continue to work together more or less positively, and that has been the history of this. Nuclear weapons are an existential threat to our survival and to the survival of Russia, clearly, but also to humankind. If we suddenly have a massive nuclear exchange, the effect on humankind overall is going to be dire. So for that reason, that existential threat has continued to place us together at the negotiating table to try to find solutions here. So I do hope that we can work our way through this and find ourselves back at the table with the Russians before too long to negotiate a replacement for the New START Treaty, which goes out of force in 2026, and to work on other issues, such as a replacement for the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, which we withdrew from after Russian violations in 2019. But I think there are actually some good proposals on the table about how we return to constraints on intermediate-range ground-launched missiles. The Russians initiated some of those. Again, they are good diplomats and they are good policymakers in this realm, so I would hate to do without them. But what spurred my concern in the first place and what led to the article was this message that Dmitry Medvedev put out two weeks ago when he said, well, maybe we ought to, just withdraw from the New START Treaty and maybe we ought to just kick the embassies out of Moscow and hang—kick all the diplomats out and hang big padlocks on the embassies. Maybe we don't need the world was his message, and that's what alarmed me, so that's why I was talking about the worst case. But I do hope we can keep the Russians at the table. FASKIANOS: And just to pick up, Doru Tsaganea, an associate professor at the Metropolitan College of New York, has a question about China. And there have been reports that Xi asked Putin to hold off the invasion until after the Olympics in Beijing. There seems to be alliance between China and Russia, and now some—maybe China coming back can be—I mean, the way to bring—to give Putin an off ramp is via China. You just wrote this article in Foreign Affairs about—and you've mentioned how we can leverage—really get China in the mix to help give Putin an off ramp. Can you talk a little bit more about that dynamic? GOTTEMOELLER: Yes. Again, I started thinking about this—well, I was thinking about it during their appearance together at the Olympics—at the Olympics opening ceremony. Doesn't that seem like twenty years ago now? February 4, it was. FASKIANOS: It does. (Laughs.) GOTTEMOELLER: But, clearly, they have a joint agenda. They'll be working together on some things. But I was actually—at the time, I was actually quite positively impressed that what they did talk about—the one thing they talked about in the arms-control realm was beginning to put in place constraints on ground-launched intermediate-range missiles not only in Europe, but also in Asia. And I thought, wow, now that's interesting. If there's going to be, you know, generally Eurasian constraints on ground-launched intermediate range missiles, that's a really interesting development. And so I came away from February 4, rather positively impressed that we might be able to do something with both Russia and China in that regard. But fast forward to the 24 of February and the invasion of Ukraine, and here in—just a few days after that terrible day, the foreign minister of Ukraine, Mr. Kuleba, phoned his counterpart in Beijing and asked for facilitation again of diplomacy with Russia. And at least from the readouts of that meeting, slightly less forward-leaning on the Chinese side but not contradicting anything Kuleba said, the Chinese seemed to indicate a willingness to facilitate diplomacy. It does—I don't know what's going on behind the scenes. In diplomacy, it's always better if you don't know what's going on behind the scenes—(laughs)—if it is quiet diplomacy, if it's not out in public, if it's not this—one of the reasons why I was pretty—well, we all hoped against hope regarding no invasion. But, the Russians seemed to be in bad faith from December on because they kept playing at megaphone diplomacy—putting out their proposals to the public and the press, and even leaking U.S. answers in some cases. So they were clearly not playing a proper diplomatic game, which is quiet diplomacy behind the scenes trying to make quiet progress. So I hope that this Chinese facilitation has begun. I have no hint of it at the moment, but I certainly think that it could be—it could be a productive way to begin to develop some new off ramp. We've tried a lot off ramps with Putin and it hasn't worked, but maybe the Chinese can help us develop another way of approaching this matter. Finally, I will just take note of the fact that there are other facilitators in the game. For example, President Erdoğan of Turkey has been very active, and today there is a meeting between the foreign ministers of—again, Kuleba, foreign minister of Ukraine, and Foreign Minister Lavrov of Russia in Turkey. I, for one, I haven't seen any reports of it. You may have seen reports of the outcome, Irina, but I think that that—that kind of facilitation is important, and I hope it will continue. We all want to see diplomacy taking precedence over the bombing of innocent civilians in Ukraine. FASKIANOS: Right. There are a lot more questions, and I—we can't get to them. I apologize. But I don't want to—and we are at the end of our time, but I just want to give you an opportunity and give the students to hear your thoughts on public service. You've devoted your—mostly your entire career to it. You're now teaching. You have a lecturer spot at Stanford, so you're clearly working with students. And what you would say about public service. GOTTEMOELLER: I was so privileged to have the opportunity to serve both President Clinton and President Obama. I think if you can in your career do a stint of public service it will be absolutely a wonderful experience for you. Now, sometimes bureaucracies can be pretty frustrating, but it's worth—it's worth the price of admission, I would say, to begin to operate inside that system, to begin to figure out how to make progress, and it is the way you put ideas into action. You know, from the outside I can write all the op-eds I want to, and, yeah, some of them may get picked up by somebody inside the government. But when you're working inside the government, you can really put ideas into action from the lowest levels, even if you have a chance to be an intern at the State Department or in one of the other agencies of government, you can begin to get a flavor for this. But you might be surprised that they're asking for your opinion because you all at the, I would say, less-old—(laughs)—end of the spectrum have a lot of good new ideas about how the world should work going forward. And particularly I think this problem I talked about, how to communicate now directly with the Russian people, for example, you've got the skills and savvy to help people inside government to understand how to—how to do that effectively. So you've got some special skills, I think, that are much needed at the present time. So I would not shy away from some time in government. People often ask me, well, won't I get trapped there? I think your generation will not get trapped there just because you already think about the world of work differently. You're not going to be a lifer in any organization. You don't want to start in the State Department and work there for forty years. You'll be working, in—maybe in Silicon Valley; and then you go work for Capitol Hill, the Congress; then you may go into government for a little while, the executive branch; and then back to—back to the corporate world. So I know that you'll be thinking quite differently about how to build your careers, but don't shy away from public service. It's a very good experience and it's where you can make a difference. FASKIANOS: Well, with that, Rose Gottemoeller, thank you very much for being with us today and for sharing your expertise and analysis. We really appreciate it. And giving us a historical context, which is so valuable to understanding where we are today. You can follow Rose on Twitter at @gottemoeller. Our next Academic Webinar will be on Wednesday, March 23, at 1:00 p.m. Eastern Time. Jody Freeman at Harvard University will talk about global climate policy. We will send out the link to this discussion—the video, transcript—as well as the link to Rose's Foreign Affairs article so you can read it if you didn't have a chance. It was in yesterday's background. And I encourage you to follow us on Twitter at @CFR_academic, and go to CFR.org, ForeignAffairs.com, and ThinkGlobalHealth.org for research and analysis on global issues. So thank you all again and thank you, Rose. GOTTEMOELLER: Thank you. Thanks for a great discussion. (END)

Micah T. Dank was born in 1983 in Oceanside New York. From a young age, he had wanted to be a writer, coming from a family of writers. His father was a producer and radio news editor at CBS News in Manhattan and his grandfather was a Producer at CBS News. Micah was an actor in High School and became interested in writing from his 12th grade English teacher Russell Reid. From there he majored in English at SUNY Albany and transferred down to CUNY Hunter College in Manhattan to earn his Bachelors's degree in ‘Language Literature and Criticism'. It wasn't until he moved to Boston for a new job that he became interested in all the esoteric sciences including astrology and astrotheology prevalent through his book series.Micha is an author with his new series “Into the Rabbit Hole”. His first book is “Into the Veil” which he compared to Dan Brown's “Davinci Code”. Micah explores astrology and the hidden codes in the bible and how it relates to what is real and what is possible related to politics, conspiracy, fringe medicine, history, language and what it means to survive in these times!SOCIAL LINKS:WEBSITE:https://www.micahdank.com/TWITTER:@RealMisterDankBOOKS:https://www.amazon.ca/Micah-T-Dank/e/B08CLT5JQC/ref=dp_byline_cont_pop_book_1#UFO #Paranormal #Consciousness #UFOTwitter ***************************Beyond The Tinfoil Hat is a weekly podcast brought to you by The Experiencer Support Association. Every week we dive into topics that are deep into the realm of the unknown. Ranging from topics between #ufos, #ghosts, and #monstersThis podcast is hosted by Ryan Stacey and is designed to educate and assist the public in understanding the blend of every phenomenon happening in the world. Our guests often include eyewitness testimony. www.experiencersupport.org

In this episode, I switch it up with our guests! I interview journalist, activist and academic, Juan Gonzalez and his amazing daughter Gabriela Gonzalez who is following in her father's footsteps. The motivation is to gain insight on how history influences our young generations and how they impart that wisdom to continue to do the work needed for social justice. They tag team this interview and we discuss Juan's storied life as a student activist, his time with the Young Lords Party, and his passion for journalism and story-telling. For over 30 years, Juan González has been a staff columnist for the New York Daily News and he can be seen as co-host of the radio and television news program, Democracy Now! He is a founding member of the Young Lords Party and also founded the National Congress for Puerto Rican Rights. Juan also received accommodations and praises for his work and won awards like the Lifetime Achievement Awards from the Hispanic Foundation, the National Council of La Raza, and the National Puerto Rican Coalition. He is a two time winner of the George Polk Award for commentary and was the first reporter in New York City to have exposed the health effects and cover up by government officials surround the Sept. 11 attacks. Gabriela Gonzalez is a second-generation American of Puerto Rican and Dominican descent. She holds a B.A. in Clinical Psychology from CUNY Hunter College and is currently pursuing her MSW. Driven by her passion for child and adolescent mental health, and values surrounding anti-racism and decolonization, Gabi hopes to become a psychotherapist and practice therapy in service of social justice. Her work is inspired by the resilience of the communities that raised her, as well as by her parents, who've used organizing, teaching, and literature as mechanisms for change. Historical Audio/Video Courtesy of Democracy Now Youtube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=If03xPilSII --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/joseph-colon34/message

Join Denese and Ann as they discuss all things social justice, pop culture, and current events. This episode touches upon ethnic identifiers, student protests, and diversity in afro-latinx culture. This show features a panel discussion with Sasha Fountain. Sasha Fountain is the creator of Afro Latinx of NYC, and is 1/3 of the Cozy Chat Podcast. Sasha M. Fountain is a Afro-Latinx creative based out of NYC. She is Panamanian/Afro-Costa Rican by way of her mother and African-American on her father's side. She holds a BA in Media Studies from CUNY Hunter College and a MA in Social Journalism from the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. Her work spans the mediums of photography, videography & editing, writing, and audio. She spends a lot of time talking about Blackness, Afrolatinidad and the ways in which media informs our perspectives. Follow Sasha Fountain's Links Instagram: @sash_marguerite Website: smarguerite.co --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/podcypher/support

Author Micah Dank of the series Into The Rabbit Hole joins us to give an absolute Master Class on Astrotheology in the Bible.Micah Dank was born in 1983 in Oceanside New York. From a young age he had wanted to be a writer, coming from a family of writers. His father was a producer and radio news editor at CBS News in Manhattan and his grand father was a Producer at CBS News. When Dan Rather wrote his autobiography he listed Micah's grandfather by name as the person he told at the news station about Kennedy's death. Micah was an actor in high school and became interested in writing from his 12th grade English teacher Russell Reid. From there he majored in English at SUNY Albany and transferred down to CUNY Hunter College in Manhattan to earn his Bachelors degree in ‘Language Literature and criticism'.  It wasn't until he moved to Boston for a new job that he became interested in all the esoteric sciences including just to name a few that can be found in his books Astronomy, astrology, astrotheology, out of body experiences, Akashic records, remote viewing, religions, capstones of the pyramids, secret societies and their secrets, channelers, dmt monitoring, lucid dreaming, acoustic levitation, Alzheimer's, conspiracy theories, jet pack propulsion, physics, quantum physics, psychology, computer hacking, Antarctica, and spiritual guides. For the next 6 years he read 4 hours a day about them all and has interwoven all of them into a series of thrillersmicahdank.comSupport the show (http://Patreon.com/3beardspodcast )

Micah Dank joins TruthSeekah as the two discuss Illuminati hand signs, symbols and their meanings. The truth may shock you!Micah has been a guest on Coast to Coast am as well as many other podcast and radio shows discussing his work.Micah T. Dank was born in 1983 in Oceanside New York. From a young age, he had wanted to be a writer, coming from a family of writers. His father was a producer and radio news editor at CBS News in Manhattan and his grandfather was a producer at CBS News. Micah was an actor in high school and became interested in writing from his 12th grade English teacher Russell Reid. From there he majored in English at SUNY Albany and transferred down to CUNY Hunter College in Manhattan to earn his Bachelor's degree in ‘Language Literature and Criticism'. It wasn't until he moved to Boston for a new job that he became interested in all the esoteric sciences including the astrology and astrotheology prevalent through his book series.TruthSeekah's Book Spirit Realm: Angels Demons, Spirits and the Sovereignty of God (Foreword by Jordan Maxwell) https://amzn.to/31g9ydRTruthSeekahs Guided Meditation | The Throneroom Visualization https://www.TruthSeekah.com/MeditationsHelp Keep The TruthSeekah Podcast On The Air!⭐️ Become A Patron And Support TruthSeekah

Micah Dank joins TruthSeekah as the two discuss Illuminati hand signs, symbols and their meanings. The truth may shock you!Micah has been a guest on Coast to Coast am as well as many other podcast and radio shows discussing his work.Micah T. Dank was born in 1983 in Oceanside New York. From a young age, he had wanted to be a writer, coming from a family of writers. His father was a producer and radio news editor at CBS News in Manhattan and his grandfather was a producer at CBS News. Micah was an actor in high school and became interested in writing from his 12th grade English teacher Russell Reid. From there he majored in English at SUNY Albany and transferred down to CUNY Hunter College in Manhattan to earn his Bachelor's degree in ‘Language Literature and Criticism'. It wasn't until he moved to Boston for a new job that he became interested in all the esoteric sciences including the astrology and astrotheology prevalent through his book series.TruthSeekah's Book Spirit Realm: Angels Demons, Spirits and the Sovereignty of God (Foreword by Jordan Maxwell) https://amzn.to/31g9ydRTruthSeekahs Guided Meditation | The Throneroom Visualization https://www.TruthSeekah.com/MeditationsHelp Keep The TruthSeekah Podcast On The Air!⭐️ Become A Patron And Support TruthSeekah

**Special Webinar!** Innovation and Adaptation in Climate Awareness, a New Approach. Film Screening of Robert Lundahl's "Climate Change is Here: The Movie," Discussion among luminaries, leaders and elders. Issues related to climate and its impacts are explored from several different perspectives, Climate, Environment, Human Rights, and Health. Featuring Silicon Valley and International Business Luminaries John Gage, (Sun Microsystems/Kleiner Perkins Caulfield and Byers), Scott Nisbet (ArionBio), and Jeff Hallowell (Biomass Controls). Native American elders and leaders include Shl Vendiola of the Swinomish Tribe Protect Mother Earth Subcommittee, Tlingit Elder Patrick Anderson/CEO Alaska RurAL Cap, and Board Member Sealaska Corporation, plus Tribal Governance Administrator and CEO, John Howard Miller. Noted Educators include Enrique Lanz Oca, Ph.D. and professors from CUNY/Hunter College and Pratt Institute, along with their students in the Department of Geography and Environmental Science, Hunter College. On the Non–Profit, NGO side is Mary Munk, leader and Executive Director, The Walter Munk Foundation for the Oceans, and the Walter Munk Global Ocean Think Tank in La Jolla, California. This constellation of Business, Tribal, Non–Profit, and Educational leadership offers a unique multi-dimensional perspective, and systems/solutions oriented overview of our Climate Crisis today. Produced by Robert Lundahl and Agence RLA, LLC. ### Introduction Film 01:00 Discussion 24:22

On today's episode we talk to Aliza Katz about parenting anxious children. Although I am not a parent myself, I recognize the pressure to be “perfect” and to have all of the answers. Aliza shared some ways parents can model working with emotions to their children, as well as some helpful tips and tricks when it comes to helping children work through anxiety and see it as a teammate instead of an enemy. If you are a caregiver, teacher, parent - this episode is for you. Aliza Katz is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker (LCSW) in NY and NJ and is a Registered Play Therapist (RPT). She received her Masters in Social Work from the Silberman School of Social Work at CUNY Hunter College. Aliza specializes in trauma therapy for creative children, teens, and young adults. She's loved children for as long as she can remember. Their sense of wonder, pursuit of adventure and playful nature has kept me seeking out more interactions. She is trained in EMDR, ACT and CBT. and also trained in multiple methods of Play Therapy, including Child-Centered Play Therapy, Theraplay (Levels One and Two), and Sandtray Therapy. Aliza also trained in multiple parenting methods such as The Nurtured Heart Approach, Collaborative and Proactive Solutions, Parent Management Training, and others. To find out more about Aliza, go to alizakatzlcsw.com Aliza mentions several resources in the podcast, including her blog, which you can find here: https://www.alizakatzlcsw.com/blog/

Have you ever had a conversation with someone and came away thinking, if the world had more thinkers such as this, the world would be a much calmer and better place for everyone? The deep thinker I'm talking about is Angel Eduardo and I'm grateful this week for having the opportunity to speak with Angel on the Derate the Hate podcast.I recently read a piece by Angel published in Newsweek, “Stop calling me “white” for having the wrong opinions”, which stood out to me as something that seems to happen with much greater frequency these days. It seems if people of color don't have the “correct” ideas or opinions, they are said to be “acting white” or called “white” as a pejorative. This is not only a disgusting form of racism and bullying, but it's a nonsensical attempt by some to keep us divided. Angel has more than a little to say about this so you're not going to want to miss this conversation!Who is Angel Eduardo?Angel Eduardo is a writer, musician, photographer, and designer based in New York City. He is a staff writer and content creator for idealist.org, as well as a columnist for the Center for Inquiry, where he writes on science, communication, skepticism, and morality. He also serves on the Advisory Board for the Foundation Against Intolerance & Racism (FAIR).His writing has been featured in Newsweek, Areo Magazine, Mr. Beller's Neighborhood, and The Caribbean Writer, among other print and online publications. He holds a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from CUNY Hunter College, and is currently working on a book-length memoir project. Read his complete bio by clicking here…Angel Eduardo Articles mentioned in this episodeStop calling me “white” for having the wrong opinionsStop Telling Critical Race Theory Critics We Don't Know What It IsHow to Star Man: Arguing From CompassionWhat have you done today to make your life a better life? What have you done today to make the world a better place? The world is a better place if we are better people, and that begins with each of us leading a better life. Be kind to one another, be grateful for everything you've got, and make each and every day the day that you want it to be!Please follow The Derate The Hate podcast on Facebook, MeWe, Instagram, Twitter . Subscribe to us wherever you enjoy your audio. Please leave us a rating and feedback. Send me a message on any media platform or subscribe directly from our sites. Let us know about someone you think should be on our podcast, and if we book them for a conversation, I'll send you a free gift! Not on social media? You can share your thoughts directly with me at wilk@wilksworld.comI look forward to hearing from you!Please check out our affiliates page by clicking HERE!

NotesWe had audio issues at the beginning of the show which have been edited out. The result is a shorter than usual show. Apologies.Micah presented a slideshow on the live show. You can view that here on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tTCZOawASQBioMicah T. Dank was born in 1983 in Oceanside New York. From a young age he had wanted to be a writer, coming from a family of writers. His father was a producer and radio news editor at CBS News in Manhattan and his grandfather was a Producer at CBS News. Micah was an actor in High School and became interested in writing from his 12th grade English teacher Russell Reid. From there he majored in English at SUNY Albany and transferred down to CUNY Hunter College in Manhattan to earn his Bachelors degree in ‘Language Literature and Criticism'. It wasn't until he moved to Boston for a new job that he became interested in all the esoteric sciences including the astrology and astrotheology prevalent through his book series.You can find Micah here:Web https://www.micahdank.com/

Karissa Gonzalez, M.Ed., founder of Explore Learn Transform, is an Education Consultant and Professional Development Coach who works with K-12 Teachers that wish to make their Professional Development more personal in an effort to transform their “teacher story” (and the lives of others). Karissa believes that when teachers have access to Professional Learning resources and experiences that meet their needs and interests, the positive impacts on students and the school community are many.  Karissa has over 8 years of experience teaching in NYC and New Orleans Public High Schools, where she served as an Algebra Teacher, Department Chair, Instructional Coach, and Instructional Leader.  She is also a former Master Teacher Fellow at Math for America, a Professional Development Fellowship of Math and Science teachers considered to be experts in their fields and models for professional engagement and development. Karissa has a Masters in Mathematics Education for Grades 7-12 from CUNY Hunter College. 

Upperline Code has a mission to train the next generation of computer science leaders and empower students to change their world with code. We aim to transform education by making computer science accessible to all students regardless of race, gender, or income. Above all, we value inclusiveness, curiosity, rigor, collaboration, and quality. "I think you created a culture of mutual learning and respect and demonstrated your commitment to the process over the end goal and that was very empowering. I think that it was the best PD I've engaged in so far." - Maha HasenMaha HasenMaha has an undergraduate degree in Applied Mathematics and Philosophy from The George Washington University. When she graduated in 2016, she was placed as a High School Math Teacher in her hometown, Bronx, NY, and earned her Master of Arts in Teaching from Relay Graduate School of Education. After consistently being made aware of the lack of female representation in STEM, Maha joined Upperline Code to gain the tools she needed to bring Computer Science to her school, which has a student body makeup of 71% female. She believes that all students should have access to computer science and that it is particularly imperative to empower female students to pursue a coding education!Jorge TorresJorge Torres is in the middle of his third year teaching high school Chemistry and Physics in the South Bronx. He earned his undergraduate degree at CUNY Hunter College in Biochemistry, and continued there for his Master’s Degree in Chemistry Education. Jorge’s interest in Computer Science teaching came from both the interest his students seemed to have in the subject, as well as his own early experiences taking AP Computer Science in high school. He aimed to make the material more accessible for students like himself, and began to seek out institutions with the same goals as him. Jorge is excited to continue building his Computer Science skills, and at the same time bring all the knowledge acquired back to his classroom and continue to encourage students to pursue STEM careers. Daniel FenjvesCEO Upperline CodeDanny Fenjves has spent almost 10 years living and teaching computer science. He is an alumnus of Teach for America, worked at Google, and was head of K-12 computer science instruction at Flatiron School before founding Upperline Code. In his career, he's trained over 200 teachers to lead immersive coding courses in schools across the country, built extensive coding curriculum, and taught software development to hundreds of high school students. As a former middle school science teacher, he's deeply committed to the art of instruction and discovering the best methods to recruit, train, and retain top teaching talent in the field of K-12 computer science education.Mentioned in this episode:Upperline FellowshipThe Six Flaws of “Traditional” Professional Development from Katya Rucker, Getting SmartEducation Week, Teacher PD Gets a Bad Rap. But Two Approaches Do Work, by Heather C. Hill See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

EPISODE #570 ASTRO-THEOLOGY AND THE BOOK OF REVELATION Richard welcomes a researcher/author who presents an argument that the Book of Revelation in the  Bible is really an astrological allegory that describes the relationship between the Sun and the twelves signs of the Zodiak. For an overview of Astro-theology please listen to EP. # 478 GUEST: Micah T. Dank was born in 1983 in Oceanside New York. From a young age, he had wanted to be a writer, coming from a family of writers. His father was a producer and radio news editor at CBS News in Manhattan and his grandfather was a producer at CBS News. Micah was an actor in high school and became interested in writing from his 12th grade English teacher Russell Reid. From there he majored in English at SUNY Albany and transferred down to CUNY Hunter College in Manhattan to earn his Bachelor's degree in ‘Language Literature and Criticism'. It wasn't until he moved to Boston for a new job that he became interested in all the esoteric sciences including the astrology and astro-theology prevalent through his book series. Books:  Beneath the Veil (Into the Rabbit Hole) The Sacred Stones (Rabbit Hole Book 2) The Secret Weapon (Rabbit Hole Book 3)   SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS!!!   C60EVO -The Secret is out about this powerful anti-oxidant. The Purest C60 available is ESS60.  Buy Direct from the Source.  Buy Now and Save 10% – Use Coupon Code: EVRS at Checkout! Life Change and Formula 13 Teas All Organic, No Caffeine, Non GMO!  More Energy!  Order now, use the code 'unlimited' and ALL your purchases ships for free! Strange Planet Shop - If you're a fan of the radio show and the podcast, why not show it off?  Greats T-shirts, sweatshirts, mugs, and more.  It's a Strange Planet - Dress For It! BECOME A PREMIUM SUBSCRIBER FOR LESS THAN $2 PER MONTH If you're a fan of this podcast, I hope you'll consider becoming a Premium Subscriber.  For just $1.99 per month, subscribers to my Conspiracy Unlimited Plus gain access to two exclusive, commercial-free episodes per month. They also gain access to my back catalog of episodes. The most recent 30 episodes of Conspiracy Unlimited will remain available for free.  Stream all episodes and Premium content on your mobile device by getting the FREE Conspiracy Unlimited APP for both IOS and Android devices... Available at the App Store and Google Play. To become a subscriber CLICK HERE or go to www.conspiracyunlimitedpodcast.com and click on GET ACCESS TO PREMIUM EPISODES.    

EPISODE #570 ASTRO-THEOLOGY AND THE BOOK OF REVELATION Richard welcomes a researcher/author who presents an argument that the Book of Revelation in the  Bible is really an astrological allegory that describes the relationship between the Sun and the twelves signs of the Zodiak. For an overview of Astro-theology please listen to EP. # 478 GUEST: Micah T. Dank was born in 1983 in Oceanside New York. From a young age, he had wanted to be a writer, coming from a family of writers. His father was a producer and radio news editor at CBS News in Manhattan and his grandfather was a producer at CBS News. Micah was an actor in high school and became interested in writing from his 12th grade English teacher Russell Reid. From there he majored in English at SUNY Albany and transferred down to CUNY Hunter College in Manhattan to earn his Bachelor's degree in ‘Language Literature and Criticism’. It wasn’t until he moved to Boston for a new job that he became interested in all the esoteric sciences including the astrology and astro-theology prevalent through his book series. Books:  Beneath the Veil (Into the Rabbit Hole) The Sacred Stones (Rabbit Hole Book 2) The Secret Weapon (Rabbit Hole Book 3)   SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS!!!   C60EVO -The Secret is out about this powerful anti-oxidant. The Purest C60 available is ESS60.  Buy Direct from the Source.  Buy Now and Save 10% – Use Coupon Code: EVRS at Checkout! Life Change and Formula 13 Teas All Organic, No Caffeine, Non GMO!  More Energy!  Order now, use the code 'unlimited' and ALL your purchases ships for free! Strange Planet Shop - If you're a fan of the radio show and the podcast, why not show it off?  Greats T-shirts, sweatshirts, mugs, and more.  It's a Strange Planet - Dress For It! BECOME A PREMIUM SUBSCRIBER FOR LESS THAN $2 PER MONTH If you're a fan of this podcast, I hope you'll consider becoming a Premium Subscriber.  For just $1.99 per month, subscribers to my Conspiracy Unlimited Plus gain access to two exclusive, commercial-free episodes per month. They also gain access to my back catalog of episodes. The most recent 30 episodes of Conspiracy Unlimited will remain available for free.  Stream all episodes and Premium content on your mobile device by getting the FREE Conspiracy Unlimited APP for both IOS and Android devices... Available at the App Store and Google Play.To become a subscriber CLICK HERE or go to www.conspiracyunlimitedpodcast.com and click onGET ACCESS TO PREMIUM EPISODES.   

JOIN us tonight as I welcome Micah T. Dank to the show! Tonight we will talk about his new series “Into the Rabbit Hole” and the first book “Beneath the Veil” (now available on Amazon) as it explores astrology and hidden codes plus what is real and what is possible encountering the way of politics, conspiracy, fringe medicine, history, language and what it means to survive! Micah T. Dank was born in 1983 in Oceanside New York. From a young age he had wanted to be a writer, coming from a family of writers. His father was a producer and radio news editor at CBS News in Manhattan and his grandfather was a Producer at CBS News. Micah was an actor in High School and became interested in writing from his 12th grade English teacher Russell Reid. From there he majored in English at SUNY Albany and transferred down to CUNY Hunter College in Manhattan to earn his Bachelors degree in ‘Language Literature and Criticism’. It wasn’t until he moved to Boston for a new job that he became interested in all the esoteric sciences including the astrology and astrotheology prevalent through his book series. BOOK: Into the Rabbit Hole Series Beneath the Veil The Sacred Stones The Secret Weapon Pangaeas Pandemic The Hidden Archives The Final Type Website: https://www.micahdank.com/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Govt.Assburgers TWITTER: @RealMisterDank Are you ready? Better be Ready! Powered by Public Streaming Network To listen live remember check out first! www.psn-tv.com www.publicstreamingnetwork.com https://www.youtube.com/psnradiotv www.twitch.tv/psntvlive www.dlive.tv/PSNTV www.twitter.com/PSNBroadcast Share this podcast pages... Also check out Angels Patreon page over at www.patreon.com/angelespino

Micah T. Dank was born in 1983 in Oceanside New York. From a young age he had wanted to be a writer, coming from a family of writers. His father was a producer and radio news editor at CBS News in Manhattan and his grandfather was a Producer at CBS News. Micah was an actor in High School and became interested in writing from his 12th grade English teacher Russell Reid. From there he majored in English at SUNY Albany and transferred down to CUNY Hunter College in Manhattan to earn his Bachelors degree in ‘Language Literature and Criticism’. It wasn’t until he moved to Boston for a new job that he became interested in all the esoteric sciences including the astrology and astrotheology prevalent through his book series.You can find Micah here:Web https://www.micahdank.com/

EPISODE #545 MK-ULTRA PT. 2 Richard welcomes a writer and researcher of esoteric and occult knowledge to talk about the CIA's mind control program, MK Ultra. Guest: Micah Dank  was born in 1983 in Oceanside New York. From a young age, he had wanted to be a writer, coming from a family of writers. His father was a producer and radio news editor at CBS News in Manhattan and his grandfather was a producer at CBS News. Micah was an actor in high school and became interested in writing from his 12th grade English teacher Russell Reid. From there he majored in English at SUNY Albany and transferred down to CUNY Hunter College in Manhattan to earn his Bachelor's degree in ‘Language Literature and Criticism'. It wasn't until he moved to Boston for a new job that he became interested in all the esoteric sciences including the astrology and astrotheology prevalent through his book series. Beneath the Veil (Into the Rabbit Hole) The Sacred Stones (Rabbit Hole Book 2) The Secret Weapon (Rabbit Hole Book 3) SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS!!! C60EVO -The Secret is out about this powerful anti-oxidant. The Purest C60 available is ESS60.  Buy Direct from the Source.  Buy Now and Save 10% – Use Coupon Code: EVRS at Checkout! Life Change and Formula 13 Teas All Organic, No Caffeine, Non GMO!  More Energy!  Order now, use the code 'unlimited' and ALL your purchases ships for free! Ancient Life Oil - High Quality CBD Oil helping you reach your ideal well-being. Strange Planet Shop - If you're a fan of the radio show and the podcast, why not show it off?  Greats T-shirts, sweatshirts, mugs, and more.  It's a Strange Planet - Dress For It! Strange Planet's Fullscript Dispensary- an online service offering hundreds of professional supplement brands, personal care items, essential oils, pet care products and much more. Nature Grade, Science Made!  BECOME A PREMIUM SUBSCRIBER FOR LESS THAN $2 PER MONTH If you're a fan of this podcast, I hope you'll consider becoming a Premium Subscriber.  For just $1.99 per month, subscribers to my Conspiracy Unlimited Plus gain access to two exclusive, commercial-free episodes per month. They also gain access to my back catalog of episodes. The most recent 30 episodes of Conspiracy Unlimited will remain available for free.  Stream all episodes and Premium content on your mobile device by getting the FREE Conspiracy Unlimited APP for both IOS and Android devices... Available at the App Store and Google Play. To become a subscriber CLICK HERE or go to www.conspiracyunlimitedpodcast.com and click on GET ACCESS TO PREMIUM EPISODES.

EPISODE #545 MK-ULTRA PT. 2 Richard welcomes a writer and researcher of esoteric and occult knowledge to talk about the CIA's mind control program, MK Ultra. Guest: Micah Dank  was born in 1983 in Oceanside New York. From a young age, he had wanted to be a writer, coming from a family of writers. His father was a producer and radio news editor at CBS News in Manhattan and his grandfather was a producer at CBS News. Micah was an actor in high school and became interested in writing from his 12th grade English teacher Russell Reid. From there he majored in English at SUNY Albany and transferred down to CUNY Hunter College in Manhattan to earn his Bachelor's degree in ‘Language Literature and Criticism’. It wasn’t until he moved to Boston for a new job that he became interested in all the esoteric sciences including the astrology and astrotheology prevalent through his book series. Beneath the Veil (Into the Rabbit Hole) The Sacred Stones (Rabbit Hole Book 2) The Secret Weapon (Rabbit Hole Book 3) SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS!!! C60EVO -The Secret is out about this powerful anti-oxidant. The Purest C60 available is ESS60.  Buy Direct from the Source.  Buy Now and Save 10% – Use Coupon Code: EVRS at Checkout! Life Change and Formula 13 Teas All Organic, No Caffeine, Non GMO!  More Energy!  Order now, use the code 'unlimited' and ALL your purchases ships for free! Ancient Life Oil - High Quality CBD Oil helping you reach your ideal well-being. Strange Planet Shop - If you're a fan of the radio show and the podcast, why not show it off?  Greats T-shirts, sweatshirts, mugs, and more.  It's a Strange Planet - Dress For It! Strange Planet's Fullscript Dispensary- an online service offering hundreds of professional supplement brands, personal care items, essential oils, pet care products and much more. Nature Grade, Science Made!  BECOME A PREMIUM SUBSCRIBER FOR LESS THAN $2 PER MONTH If you're a fan of this podcast, I hope you'll consider becoming a Premium Subscriber.  For just $1.99 per month, subscribers to my Conspiracy Unlimited Plus gain access to two exclusive, commercial-free episodes per month. They also gain access to my back catalog of episodes. The most recent 30 episodes of Conspiracy Unlimited will remain available for free.  Stream all episodes and Premium content on your mobile device by getting the FREE Conspiracy Unlimited APP for both IOS and Android devices... Available at the App Store and Google Play.To become a subscriber CLICK HERE or go to www.conspiracyunlimitedpodcast.com and click onGET ACCESS TO PREMIUM EPISODES.

Join us this Monday 3/15 @ 7pmPST as we speak with Author/Researcher, Micah T. Dank. We'll be exploring Micah's books, his ideology and how his writing style pertains to today's culture. Also open lines in the second hour and more. Stay Strange!Micah T. Dank was born in 1983 in Oceanside New York. From a young age he had wanted to be a writer, coming from a family of writers. His father was a producer and radio news editor at CBS News in Manhattan and his grandfather was a Producer at CBS News. Micah was an actor in High School and became interested in writing from his 12th grade English teacher Russell Reid. From there he majored in English at SUNY Albany and transferred down to CUNY Hunter College in Manhattan to earn his Bachelors degree in ‘Language Literature and Criticism’. It wasn’t until he moved to Boston for a new job that he became interested in all the esoteric sciences including the astrology and astrotheology prevalent through his book series.Learn more about Micah T. Dank on Facebook under Micah Dank and his Facebook Group, Into The Rabbit Hole

Radio and Podcast Series Episode 3 Nature's Touch: Climate Change is Here Radio Series. Episode III. Robert Lundahl, Filmmaker, Journalist interviews Enrique Lanz Oca Ph.D., and Howard Sprouse, CEO, The Remediators Inc. 1. Host Robert Lundahl introduction 2. Introduction, Dr. Enrique Lanz Oca professor, City University of New York Hunter College, Department of Geography and Environmental Science, Founder the Greenbelt Society. His dissertation details the social, political and ecological foundations of the Elwha River Dam Removal and Ecosystem Restoration in Washington State. And the influence of Climate Change on Dam Infrastructure. 3. River Restoration, Energy Resource Conflicts, Energy Landscapes, and Traditional Irrigation Communities. Host Robert Lundahl introduces Howard Sprouse, CEO of the Remediators 1. His work provides remediation of petroleum hydrocarbons, biological agents, pathogen degradation, and biofiltration of agricultural run-off 2. He is a well known lecturer on the topic of fungal ecology 3. Howard created the Integrated Biological Approach, combining Mycoremediation and Phytoremediation. In Alaska, melting permafrost causes oil storage facilities to lean and leak. 4. Fungi are natures' recyclers. They secrete enzymes into their environment that break down organic compounds. 5. These compounds are chemically divided into simpler ones which then become available to the growing fungi and other organisms. 6. How Enrique and Howard began to exchange information on the Elwha River Restoration 7. How Howard's Alaska projects are putting many issues on the table for the Greenbelt Society at CUNY Hunter College, including Climate Change. 8. Thanking Howard for providing this “Arctic Experience” 28:30 Continues... Music Credits: FREE MUSIC ARCHIVE ©Copyright, Agence RLA, LLC, Robert Lundahl, All Rights Reserved Across the Known Universe, All Media 28:30. ECO Capacity Bank™ and Climate Change is Here™ are properties of Agence RLA, LLC and Robert Lundahl.

Micah T. Dank was born in 1983 in Oceanside New York. From a young age he had wanted to be a writer, coming from a family of writers. His father was a producer and radio news editor at CBS News in Manhattan and his grandfather was a Producer at CBS News. * Micah was an actor in High School and became interested in writing from his 12th grade English teacher Russell Reid. From there he majored in English at SUNY Albany and transferred down to CUNY Hunter College in Manhattan to earn his Bachelors degree in ‘Language Literature and Criticism’. * It wasn’t until he moved to Boston for a new job that he became interested in all the esoteric sciences including the astrology and astrotheology prevalent through his book series. * * Links To Micah's Books: * Beneath the Veil (Into the Rabbit Hole): * https://www.amazon.com/.../dp/1645402533/ref=mp_s_a_1_1... * * The Sacred Stones: Into the Rabbit Hole - Book 2: * https://www.amazon.com/Sacred-Stones-Into.../dp/1645402843 * * The Secret Weapon: * https://www.amazon.com/Secret-Weapon-Micah.../dp/164540353X * * You Can Find Micah Here: * Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Govt.Assburgers * * Book Suggestion: A lawyers case for the afterlife * Podcast Suggestions: Chrissie Mayr Podcast & The Tin Foil Hat Podcast * * Please Help Support My Vision Here: * If you like what I'm doing and creating and have been wondering how you can get involved and help support my vision. Head over to my Patreon page and check out the perks & benefits you receive by becoming a monthly subscriber. You can also learn more about the nonprofit organization that my team and I are building for transitional age youth in my county that are re-entering the community from incarceration. As a subscriber you would be helping to build and support my ability to work on this project full time, while still being able to bring you the engaging content that you enjoy listening to or watching. * https://www.patreon.com/user?u=19859993&fan_landing=true * * If you like the streaming platform that I am using called StreamYard use the link below to sign up with and receive a $10 credit for signing up. I will get a credit as well and that of course will help the show. * StreamYard Affiliate Link: https://streamyard.com?pal=5045291231739904 * * Live-Stream Locations: * https://www.facebook.com/nowheretogo.butupnow.9/videos/772241473694301/ * https://youtu.be/9pO7--Ex6aY * * Here is where you can find Sean Dustin: * Linktree: * https://linktr.ee/Nowheretogobutup * To support the show through Patreon: * https://www.patreon.com/user?u=19859993 * You can also tip me through PayPal: * www.paypal.com * recipient: nowheretogobutupnow@gmail.com * The Cash App: * https://cash.app/ * Recipient: $nwtgbupod * Show Notes Writer: Sean Dustin * *

Micah T. Dank was born in 1983 in Oceanside New York. From a young age he had wanted to be a writer, coming from a family of writers. His father was a producer and radio news editor at CBS News in Manhattan and his grandfather was a Producer at CBS News. * Micah was an actor in High School and became interested in writing from his 12th grade English teacher Russell Reid. From there he majored in English at SUNY Albany and transferred down to CUNY Hunter College in Manhattan to earn his Bachelors degree in ‘Language Literature and Criticism'. * It wasn't until he moved to Boston for a new job that he became interested in all the esoteric sciences including the astrology and astrotheology prevalent through his book series. * * Links To Micah's Books: * Beneath the Veil (Into the Rabbit Hole): * https://www.amazon.com/.../dp/1645402533/ref=mp_s_a_1_1... * * The Sacred Stones: Into the Rabbit Hole - Book 2: * https://www.amazon.com/Sacred-Stones-Into.../dp/1645402843 * * The Secret Weapon: * https://www.amazon.com/Secret-Weapon-Micah.../dp/164540353X * * You Can Find Micah Here: * Facebook:

Gina Riley, Ph.D. is an educational psychologist, Clinical Professor, and Program Leader of the Adolescent Special Education Program at CUNY – Hunter College. Dr. Riley has over fifteen years experience working with teens diagnosed with learning disabilities and emotional/behavioural disorders. She is also a seasoned academic, with years of teaching, research, and supervisory experience within the fields of special education, psychology, school psychology, and mental health counseling. In addition, Dr. Riley has extensive experience in online education and distance learning at the college/university level. She is known internationally for her work in the fields of homeschooling, unschooling, and self-directed learning. Her book Unschooling: Exploring Learning Beyond the Classroom, was published by Palgrave Macmillan in July 2020. Dr. Riley has one son, who she unschooled. I was first introduced to the work of Dr. Gina Riley quite a few years ago through a study that both she and Dr. Peter Gray did on the challenges and benefits of unschooling. Little did I realize at the time that Dr. Riley was an unschooling parent herself. An unschooling parent, researching unschooling and alternative learning, that also worked in secondary education as a teacher to teachers. (You can see why I was excited that she accepted an invitation to the show.) I knew that the information Gina has to share as a researcher, professor and parent is more important than ever. Unschooling: Exploring Learning Beyond The Classroom In this episode Dr. Riley begins with sharing her own personal experience as a parent choosing to unschool over 20 years ago. We talk about why she made the decision, the fears she had to overcome and how that decision actually prepared her well for the world we find ourselves in today. In the academic arena, there is not a lot of work on unschooling. I think this is also why some have a hard time believing that unschooling is a valid way to learn and live life. Everyone always wants to reference the research and if there is not a lot of research to be found, people begin to doubt. This is one reason why Dr. Riley's new book, Unschooling: Exploring Learning Beyond the Classroom, is important. It is the first academic book published on Unschooling and self directed learning. Gina says that she wrote this book for "the 24 year old Gina (the single mom choosing this unfamiliar path) so that she could give it to her mom, who is also an educator, and say -here's the research." "The Kids Are Going To Be Fine" I also took the chance to ask Dr. Riley a few questions that I often hear from parents interested in unschooling but that are uncertain because it looks so different from school. How will they learn without school or if I don't teach them? How will they learn math or to read? What opportunities will be open to unschoolers when they become adults? Dr. Riley answered all of these but it was one statement that said it all for me. "It's not so much how do we do this, it's more, let's trust ourselves in doing this." She said, "The kids are going to be fine. Unschoolers know how to learn." We ended the episode talking about a question that for many are wondering because of the shift in our current world, whether they are in traditional education or not. That is, What is the future of education? I hope that you get a chance to tune in to the episode to hear what Dr. Riley has to say. Resources Unschooling: Exploring Learning Beyond the Classroom published by Palgrave Macmillan The Journal of Unschooling and Alternative Education (published paper by Dr. Gina Riley and Dr. Peter Gray) Alliance For Self Directed Education Learning By Living Podcast- Gina Riley and Kevin Currie-Knight High Tech High Self Determination Theory- Richard M. Ryan and Edward L. Deci Rethinking Learning To Read: The Challenge From Children Educated At Home: Harriet D. A. Pattison If you enjoyed this episode, you'll also want to listen to my interview with Dr. Peter Gray http://imhomeschooling.com/free-to-learn-peter-gray/ Other ways to help support the podcast? Become a patron~ https://www.patreon.com/honeyimhomeschoolingthekids   See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

EPISODE #531 MK ULTRA PT. 1 Richard welcomes a writer and researcher of esoteric and occult knowledge to talk about the CIA's mind control program, MK Ultra. Guest: Micah Dank  was born in 1983 in Oceanside New York. From a young age, he had wanted to be a writer, coming from a family of writers. His father was a producer and radio news editor at CBS News in Manhattan and his grandfather was a producer at CBS News. Micah was an actor in high school and became interested in writing from his 12th grade English teacher Russell Reid. From there he majored in English at SUNY Albany and transferred down to CUNY Hunter College in Manhattan to earn his Bachelor's degree in ‘Language Literature and Criticism'. It wasn't until he moved to Boston for a new job that he became interested in all the esoteric sciences including the astrology and astrotheology prevalent through his book series. Beneath the Veil (Into the Rabbit Hole) The Sacred Stones (Rabbit Hole Book 2) The Secret Weapon (Rabbit Hole Book 3) SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS!!! C60EVO -The Secret is out about this powerful anti-oxidant. The Purest C60 available is ESS60.  Buy Direct from the Source.  Buy Now and Save 10% – Use Coupon Code: EVRS at Checkout! Life Change and Formula 13 Teas All Organic, No Caffeine, Non GMO!  More Energy!  Order now, use the code 'unlimited' and ALL your purchases ships for free! Ancient Life Oil - High Quality CBD Oil helping you reach your ideal well-being. Strange Planet Shop - If you're a fan of the radio show and the podcast, why not show it off?  Greats T-shirts, sweatshirts, mugs, and more.  It's a Strange Planet - Dress For It! Strange Planet's Fullscript Dispensary- an online service offering hundreds of professional supplement brands, personal care items, essential oils, pet care products and much more. Nature Grade, Science Made!  BECOME A PREMIUM SUBSCRIBER FOR LESS THAN $2 PER MONTH If you're a fan of this podcast, I hope you'll consider becoming a Premium Subscriber.  For just $1.99 per month, subscribers to my Conspiracy Unlimited Plus gain access to two exclusive, commercial-free episodes per month. They also gain access to my back catalog of episodes. The most recent 30 episodes of Conspiracy Unlimited will remain available for free.  Stream all episodes and Premium content on your mobile device by getting the FREE Conspiracy Unlimited APP for both IOS and Android devices... Available at the App Store and Google Play. To become a subscriber CLICK HERE or go to www.conspiracyunlimitedpodcast.com and click on GET ACCESS TO PREMIUM EPISODES.

EPISODE #531 MK ULTRA PT. 1 Richard welcomes a writer and researcher of esoteric and occult knowledge to talk about the CIA's mind control program, MK Ultra. Guest: Micah Dank   was born in 1983 in Oceanside New York. From a young age, he had wanted to be a writer, coming from a family of writers. His father was a producer and radio news editor at CBS News in Manhattan and his grandfather was a producer at CBS News. Micah was an actor in high school and became interested in writing from his 12th grade English teacher Russell Reid. From there he majored in English at SUNY Albany and transferred down to CUNY Hunter College in Manhattan to earn his Bachelor's degree in ‘Language Literature and Criticism’. It wasn’t until he moved to Boston for a new job that he became interested in all the esoteric sciences including the astrology and astrotheology prevalent through his book series. Beneath the Veil (Into the Rabbit Hole) (https://www.amazon.com/Beneath-Veil-Into-Rabbit-Hole/dp/1645402533/ctoc) The Sacred Stones (https://www.amazon.com/Sacred-Stones-Into-Rabbit-Hole/dp/1645402843/ctoc) (Rabbit Hole Book 2) The Secret Weapon (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08KFHBDZ3/ctoc) (Rabbit Hole Book 3) SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS!!! C60EVO (https://www.c60evo.com/richard-syrett/) -The Secret is out about this powerful anti-oxidant. The Purest C60 available is ESS60.  Buy Direct from the Source.  Buy Now and Save 10% – Use Coupon Code: EVRS at Checkout! Life Change and Formula 13 Teas (http://www.getthetea.com/) All Organic, No Caffeine, Non GMO!  More Energy!  Order now, use the code 'unlimited' and ALL your purchases ships for free! Ancient Life Oil (https://ancientlifeoil.com/) - High Quality CBD Oil helping you reach your ideal well-being. Strange Planet Shop (https://teespring.com/stores/strange-planet-3) - If you're a fan of the radio show and the podcast, why not show it off?  Greats T-shirts, sweatshirts, mugs, and more.  It's a Strange Planet - Dress For It! Strange Planet's Fullscript Dispensary (https://us.fullscript.com/welcome/strangeplanet) - an online service offering hundreds of professional supplement brands, personal care items, essential oils, pet care products and much more. Nature Grade, Science Made!  BECOME A PREMIUM SUBSCRIBER FOR LESS THAN $2 PER MONTH If you're a fan of this podcast, I hope you'll consider becoming a Premium Subscriber.  For just $1.99 per month, subscribers to my Conspiracy Unlimited Plus gain access to two exclusive, commercial-free episodes per month. They also gain access to my back catalog of episodes. The most recent 30 episodes of Conspiracy Unlimited will remain available for free.  Stream all episodes and Premium content on your mobile device by getting the FREE Conspiracy Unlimited APP for both IOS and Android devices... Available at the App Store and Google Play. To become a subscriber CLICK HERE (https://my.libsyn.com/show/view/id/125771) or go to www.conspiracyunlimitedpodcast.com (https://www.conspiracyunlimitedpodcast.com/) and click on GET ACCESS TO PREMIUM EPISODES.

Hunter College Head Softball Coach Ralph Moroni talks to us about Hunter College, the CUNY system and his recruiting process.  Learn about playing softball for a school in NYC with low tuition and high expectations.

Today's guest is Micah Dank. He is the author of the book series Into The Rabbit Hole. We discussed Astrotheology and how it relates to the bible. We discussed the possibility of the the Holy Bible being a secret coded book of astrology and possibly more. Watch and Decide! Micah T. Dank was born in 1983 in Oceanside New York. From a young age he had wanted to be a writer, coming from a family of writers. His father was a producer and radio news editor at CBS News in Manhattan and his grandfather was a Producer at CBS News. Micah was an actor in High School and became interested in writing from his 12th grade English teacher Russell Reid. From there he majored in English at SUNY Albany and transferred down to CUNY Hunter College in Manhattan to earn his Bachelors degree in ‘Language Literature and Criticism'. It wasn't until he moved to Boston for a new job that he became interested in all the esoteric sciences including the astrology and astrotheology prevalent through his book series. #Bible

The CommonPod Queens Podcast has a Special Series, working with the Commonpoint Queens Ladders for Leaders (L4L) youth employment program! Throughout the Internships with Impact Podcast, we will be discussing the experiences of the ambitious students who participated in our program and the amazing employers we have partnered with. For the third episode, we interviewed one of our former participants, Leticia Antwi. Throughout her time with Ladders for Leaders, Leticia has interned at a law firm, a local newspaper, the NYC Office of Chief Medical Examiner and finally, at Queens Hospital! Prior to joining the Ladders for Leaders program, Leticia initially thought she wanted to become a lawyer. Her internship experiences allowed her to explore different careers which ultimately made her realize she wanted to join the medical field someday. Leticia just graduated from CUNY Hunter College with her Bachelor's in Human Biology and Sociology. She is currently applying to graduate school to get her masters in public health. Listen along to learn more about Leticia's experience with Ladders for Leaders! The 2021 Ladders for Leaders application is now open - you can apply here until February 28. For more information, please email L4L@commonpointqueens.org.

Caitlyn Piccirillo is a New York based actress and singer. She received a BFA (Acting) from Adelphi University, and a MA (Theatre) from CUNY Hunter College. Recent (pre-COVID) credits include “Ragtime” (Ensemble) with Village Light Opera Group, and “Home” (Mortimer/ Puppeteer) with Evolve Puppets. Some of her favorite quarantine Zoom readings have included: “Dance Nation” (Brittany), “The Music Man” (Marian), “The Little Mermaid” (Ursula), “The Wild Party” (Kate), and “Guys and Dolls” (Sarah Brown). Caitlyn now lives in New York City, with her partner, her books, and her cats. She is currently auditioning for projects as well as freelancing as a SFX makeup artist, production assistant, and dramaturg for different projects. Find Caitlyn At: Website: www.caitlynpiccirillo.com Instagram: @caitlynpicc TikTok: @caitlynpicc Instagram: @sopranonextdoor --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/unemployed-actor/support

EPISODE #515 HAND SIGNS OF THE ILLUMINATI Richard speaks with an author and researcher of esoteric science to discuss the meaning and origin of Illuminati signs and symbols. GUEST: Micah Dank was born in 1983 in Oceanside New York. From a young age, he had wanted to be a writer, coming from a family of writers. His father was a producer and radio news editor at CBS News in Manhattan and his grandfather was a producer at CBS News. Micah was an actor in high school and became interested in writing from his 12th grade English teacher Russell Reid. From there he majored in English at SUNY Albany and transferred down to CUNY Hunter College in Manhattan to earn his Bachelor's degree in ‘Language Literature and Criticism'. It wasn't until he moved to Boston for a new job that he became interested in all the esoteric sciences including the astrology and astro-theology prevalent through his book series, Into the Rabbit Hole. SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS!!! C60EVO -The Secret is out about this powerful anti-oxidant. The Purest C60 available is ESS60.  Buy Direct from the Source.  Buy Now and Save 10% – Use Coupon Code: EVRS at Checkout! Life Change and Formula 13 Teas All Organic, No Caffeine, Non GMO!  More Energy!  Order now, use the code 'unlimited' and ALL your purchases ships for free! Strange Planet Shop - If you're a fan of the radio show and the podcast, why not show it off?  Greats T-shirts, sweatshirts, mugs, and more.  It's a Strange Planet - Dress For It! Strange Planet's Fullscript Dispensary- an online service offering hundreds of professional supplement brands, personal care items, essential oils, pet care products and much more. Nature Grade, Science Made!  BECOME A PREMIUM SUBSCRIBER FOR LESS THAN $2 PER MONTH If you're a fan of this podcast, I hope you'll consider becoming a Premium Subscriber.  For just $1.99 per month, subscribers to my Conspiracy Unlimited Plus gain access to two exclusive, commercial-free episodes per month. They also gain access to my back catalog of episodes. The most recent 30 episodes of Conspiracy Unlimited will remain available for free.  Stream all episodes and Premium content on your mobile device by getting the FREE Conspiracy Unlimited APP for both IOS and Android devices... Available at the App Store and Google Play. To become a subscriber CLICK HERE or go to www.conspiracyunlimitedpodcast.com and click on GET ACCESS TO PREMIUM EPISODES.

EPISODE #515 HAND SIGNS OF THE ILLUMINATI Richard speaks with an author and researcher of esoteric science to discuss the meaning and origin of Illuminati signs and symbols. GUEST: Micah Dank (https://speakingvolumes.mybigcommerce.com/micah-t-dank/) was born in 1983 in Oceanside New York. From a young age, he had wanted to be a writer, coming from a family of writers. His father was a producer and radio news editor at CBS News in Manhattan and his grandfather was a producer at CBS News. Micah was an actor in high school and became interested in writing from his 12th grade English teacher Russell Reid. From there he majored in English at SUNY Albany and transferred down to CUNY Hunter College in Manhattan to earn his Bachelor's degree in ‘Language Literature and Criticism’. It wasn’t until he moved to Boston for a new job that he became interested in all the esoteric sciences including the astrology and astro-theology prevalent through his book series, Into the Rabbit Hole (https://speakingvolumes.mybigcommerce.com/micah-t-dank/) . SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS!!! C60EVO (https://www.c60evo.com/richard-syrett/) -The Secret is out about this powerful anti-oxidant. The Purest C60 available is ESS60.  Buy Direct from the Source.  Buy Now and Save 10% – Use Coupon Code: EVRS at Checkout! Life Change and Formula 13 Teas (http://www.getthetea.com/) All Organic, No Caffeine, Non GMO!  More Energy!  Order now, use the code 'unlimited' and ALL your purchases ships for free! Strange Planet Shop (https://teespring.com/stores/strange-planet-3) - If you're a fan of the radio show and the podcast, why not show it off?  Greats T-shirts, sweatshirts, mugs, and more.  It's a Strange Planet - Dress For It! Strange Planet's Fullscript Dispensary (https://us.fullscript.com/welcome/strangeplanet) - an online service offering hundreds of professional supplement brands, personal care items, essential oils, pet care products and much more. Nature Grade, Science Made!  BECOME A PREMIUM SUBSCRIBER FOR LESS THAN $2 PER MONTH If you're a fan of this podcast, I hope you'll consider becoming a Premium Subscriber.  For just $1.99 per month, subscribers to my Conspiracy Unlimited Plus gain access to two exclusive, commercial-free episodes per month. They also gain access to my back catalog of episodes. The most recent 30 episodes of Conspiracy Unlimited will remain available for free.  Stream all episodes and Premium content on your mobile device by getting the FREE Conspiracy Unlimited APP for both IOS and Android devices... Available at the App Store and Google Play. To become a subscriber CLICK HERE (https://my.libsyn.com/show/view/id/125771) or go to www.conspiracyunlimitedpodcast.com (https://www.conspiracyunlimitedpodcast.com/) and click on GET ACCESS TO PREMIUM EPISODES.

https://www.lightingthevoid.comLive Weeknights Mon-Fri 9 pm, PacificOn The Fringe FMhttps://thefringe.fmMicah T. Dank was born in 1983 in Oceanside New York. From a young age he had wanted to be a writer, coming from a family of writers. His father was a producer and radio news editor at CBS News in Manhattan and his grandfather was a Producer at CBS News. Micah was an actor in High School and became interested in writing from his 12th grade English teacher Russell Reid. From there he majored in English at SUNY Albany and transferred down to CUNY Hunter College in Manhattan to earn his Bachelors degree in ‘Language Literature and Criticism’. It wasn’t until he moved to Boston for a new job that he became interested in all the esoteric sciences including the astrology and astrotheology prevalent through his book series.https://www.amazon.com/Micah-T.-Dank/e/B08CLT5JQC?ref_=dbs_p_pbk_r00_abau_000000DJ Steezy Stevie https://www.steezymusic.com/Music by Chronox at https://www.chronoxofficial.com

Hi, I am Marmee Regine, your host in Pandemic Podcast Coronavirus. Today is the 8th episode where we will discuss the recent Presidential election in the USA during the coronavirus pandemic. This is part one of this episode title. This title came from an older version that goes, "Love in the Time of Cholera." Ironically, we will not talk about love, for we will discuss the opposite of love: the hate and the politics among Americans dividing them as a nation this pandemic time. Even among the set of friends on my social media, they blocked me, cursed me, and argued with me because I voted for President Donald Trump, along with my Jewish partner, Nat Bloom. Since my Republican friends continued to discuss our shared views and scenarios, the division was apparent why we all voted for the incumbent president.  Since I became a US citizen in 2017, I returned to school by studying at CUNY Hunter College and successfully graduated early this year, January 23, 2020. I was lucky to experience a winter 2020 graduation in Hunter College auditorium before the dawn of the pandemic. Then the Spring 2020 graduates started the social distancing graduating class. I never voted in the past until last November 3, 2020, when Nat woke me up to remind me to vote during the election day last week. Then we celebrated my 51st birthday last November 10, 2020, and still discussed in our dinner date the chaos of this pandemic's presidential election that is affecting our lives in the US. Power of the mainstream media to brainwash the people So, the New York Times released the news last November 7, 2020, that President Trump ranks as the third elected president since World War II to be turned out of office by the voters. That is why they think it is a big deal. But they do not understand that President Trump gained more voters in this 2020 elections. As a result, when President Trump's campaign made allegations about voter fraud in the mail-in ballots, the media reported that even there would be a recount, it will not change the numbers. Of course, President Trump has the right to say that this election is not over. The fact remains several millions of Americans (more than 70 million-plus) voted for President Trump. It is exciting how this will play to the media in the end, but this is stealing the election away from the Republican Party for President Trump's supporters. According to my course last Spring, Introduction to Media & Podcasting, Rudy Giuliani, former mayor of New York City, works for President Trump to dig into the opponents' dirt. As a result, Rudy Giuliani, along with Trump's campaign, filed lawsuits. One of the lawsuits I downloaded from Twitter is on my Patreon page as proof that there is election fraud. It is the same reason why Americans are convinced that this election was stolen against President Trump.  We can infer that this will complicate the former Vice-President Joe Biden's position to take his so-called presidential seat of power. The media of the New York Times believes it will poison the relationship between the two parties in the future.  There is an effect on the transition of power. Of course, the Republican Party has the right to create the narrative of a stolen election full of bias and unfairness. Worse, the media denies that President Trump had stimulated new voters, for they say it was Joe Biden who had the most number of voters in history? Duh, it was because a lot of dead people voted for Biden, which increased his voters. How can someone dig into the graveyard to ask these dead voters to have ballots vote for Biden? It makes the Republican voters angry at the idea that this is a disgrace in the history of the USA Presidential election. They referred to President Trump as irresponsible to declare on social media, especially Twitter, that he won the election because the truth remains he did win this election. But the Democrats will not face that truth. They accused President Trump

A lot of you are getting exposed or considering non traditional forms of education, and I know many of you are really wondering what is hype, and what really works. Well today, we’re going to pull back the curtain, and take an academic research point of view at one of the lesser understood schooling options. Unschooling. It’s a fundamentally opposite approach to traditional education as the name suggests. My guest today Gina Riley is known internationally for her work in the fields of homeschooling, unschooling, and self-directed learning. In addition, Dr. Riley has extensive experience in online education and distance learning at the college/university level. She is an educational psychologist, Clinical Professor, and Program Leader of the Adolescent Special Education Program at CUNY – Hunter College. Dr. Riley has over fifteen years experience working with teens diagnosed with learning disabilities and emotional/behavioral disorders. She is also a seasoned academic, with years of teaching, research, and supervisory experience within the fields of special education, psychology, school psychology, and mental health counseling. Fasten your seat belt everyone - we’re about to pull back the curtain and examine the world of unschooling and more through the lense of academic research.

A lot of you are getting exposed or considering non traditional forms of education, and I know many of you are really wondering what is hype, and what really works. Well today, we’re going to pull back the curtain, and take an academic research point of view at one of the lesser understood schooling options. Unschooling. It’s a fundamentally opposite approach to traditional education as the name suggests. My guest today Gina Riley is known internationally for her work in the fields of homeschooling, unschooling, and self-directed learning. In addition, Dr. Riley has extensive experience in online education and distance learning at the college/university level. She is an educational psychologist, Clinical Professor, and Program Leader of the Adolescent Special Education Program at CUNY – Hunter College. Dr. Riley has over fifteen years experience working with teens diagnosed with learning disabilities and emotional/behavioral disorders. She is also a seasoned academic, with years of teaching, research, and supervisory experience within the fields of special education, psychology, school psychology, and mental health counseling. Fasten your seat belt everyone - we’re about to pull back the curtain and examine the world of unschooling and more through the lense of academic research.

Gareth speaks with Gina Riley, an educational psychologist, Clinical Professor, and Program Leader of the Adolescent Special Education Program at CUNY – Hunter College, about self-directed learning, self-determination theory, and the challenges and benefits of unschooling or homeschooling children.

EPISODE #478 ASTRO-THEOLOGY Richard welcomes a researcher/author who presents an argument that the Bible is really an astrological allegory that describes the relationship between the Sun and the twelves signs of the Zodiak. Guest: Micah Dank was born in 1983 in Oceanside New York. From a young age he had wanted to be a writer, coming from a family of writers. His father was a producer and radio news editor at CBS News in Manhattan and his grand father was a Producer at CBS News. When Dan Rather wrote his autobiography he listed Micah’s grandfather by name as the person he told at the news station about Kennedy’s death. Micah was an actor in high school and became interested in writing from his 12th grade English teacher Russell Reid. From there he majored in English at SUNY Albany and transferred down to CUNY Hunter College in Manhattan to earn his Bachelors degree in ‘Language Literature and criticism’.  It wasn’t until he moved to Boston for a new job that he became interested in all the esoteric sciences including just to name a few that can be found in his books Astronomy, astrology, astrotheology, out of body experiences, Akashic records, remote viewing, religions, capstones of the pyramids, secret societies and their secrets, and more. For the next 6 years he read 4 hours a day about these subjects and has interwoven all of them into the series of thrillers, Into the Rabbit Hole. SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS!!! STRANGE PLANET SHOP - If you're a fan, then show it off! Get A hugs selection of fabulous t-shirts, mugs, tote bags and more. It's a Strange Planet - Dress for it! C60EVO.COM The Secret is out about this powerful anti-oxidant. The Purest C60 available is ESS60.  Buy Direct from the SourceUse the Code RS1SPEC for special discount. Strange Planet's Fullscript Dispensary- an online service offering hundreds of professional supplement brands, personal care items, essential oils, pet care products and much more. Nature Grade, Science Made!  Life Change and Formula 13 Teas All Organic, No Caffeine, Non GMO!  More Energy!  Order now, use the code 'unlimited' and ALL your purchases ships for free! BECOME A PREMIUM SUBSCRIBER FOR LESS THAN $2 PER MONTH If you're a fan of this podcast, I hope you'll consider becoming a Premium Subscriber.  For just $1.99 per month, subscribers to my Conspiracy Unlimited Plus gain access to two exclusive, commercial-free episodes per month. They also gain access to my back catalog of episodes. The most recent 30 episodes of Conspiracy Unlimited will remain available for free.  Stream all episodes and Premium content on your mobile device by getting the FREE Conspiracy Unlimited APP for both IOS and Android devices... Available at the App Store and Google Play. To become a subscriber CLICK HERE or go to www.conspiracyunlimitedpodcast.com and click on GET ACCESS TO PREMIUM EPISODES.

Sarah-Elizabeth Byosiere brought her lifelong love of dogs to college and found her niche through decoding dog behavior and cognition. She continued these studies in graduate school and she shares her love and knowledge with lucky listeners in today's podcast. Listen and learn Why dog play is considered interesting from an evolutionary standpoint and what Dr. Byosiere's research about the dog-play bow indicates, What dog behaviors are explained by relatively new research, such as their vision, abilities to discern context-specific cues, and communication, and How her group is working on improving the lives of shelter dogs and other current projects. Dr. Byosiere is the director of the Thinking Dog Center at CUNY Hunter College. She brings a tremendous amount of knowledge to this podcast, sharing a variety of findings sure to interest dog lovers and listeners interested in animal behavior. Her initial research centered on dog social behavior as she explored the dog-play bow and what it might indicate. This classic dog pose is one of several familiar dog behavior signs thought to indicate play, but her work found it also indicates a pause or transition of activity.  She discusses other fascinating dog traits and understandings of dog body language. Listeners may not realize that dog cognition and behavior studies really only started booming in the last 20 years, she adds, so there's much to learn. For example, dogs are really proficient at reading human cues that we might think are simple but require a complexity. This complexity is manifested in their ability to figure out context-specific cues, which even young children aren't able to do. They've evolved to be highly attentive to our human body language, not just to other dog signals and dog facial expressions. She and Richard explore numerous behaviors observed in their own dogs, comparing them to what research indicates, covering topics like the flehmen response, their neophilic tendencies, their scent capabilities and vapor wakes, and their vision. She discusses current projects as well, such as improving the lives of shelter dogs—they're investigating easy and inexpensive methods to implement in shelters to improve the dog's experience. For more, follow her on Twitter as @sebyosiere and see the website for the Thinking Dog Center at Hunter College. The center is also active on Instagram and Twitter. Available on Apple Podcasts: apple.co/2Os0myK

Allen Kwabena Frimpong is a cultural strategist, serial cooperative entrepreneur, resource mobilizer, and artist who organizes through social movements for a just transition in philanthropy towards a solidarity economy. He is a co-founder and Managing Partner of AdAstra Collective. Through this consulting cooperative, he is a co-host of the Old Money, New System community of practice that supports resource mobilization initiatives that strengthen social movement ecosystems to be relational, center community healing, and redistribution of wealth through learning and innovation. He is also a co-founder of ZEAL, a black arts studio cooperative. He holds an interdisciplinary practice rooted in the Black radical tradition through community organizing, cultural strategy, transformative leadership coaching, resource mobilization, and participatory planning within complex systems. Allen's body of work as a harm reductionist has been providing capacity-building in philanthropy within the public health sector and drug policy field internationally with organizations such as Justice Funders, the Harm Reduction Coalition, Community Foundation of New Jersey, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Movement NetLab, and the Start Network in the UK. He also mobilized resources for the national ride to Ferguson that led to the formation of the Black Lives Matter National Network along with other local responses to state sanctioned violence nationally. He is currently a board member of one of the oldest public foundations for social movements in America, Resist. Allen is also an activist advisory member of the Solidaire Network's Movement Research & Development Fund as well as a giving circle member of ThriveAfrica. His body of work and contributions have been featured on NPR, WNYC, the Stanford Social Innovation Review, Chronicle of Philanthropy, Inside Philanthropy, and the New York Times. Allen Kwabena Frimpong received his Master's Degree in Urban Planning and Affairs at CUNY Hunter College. He also has attended the Center for Popular Economics Summer Institute at Amherst College and has received his graduate certification at Cornell University ILR School in Labor Leadership Skills. He is currently a fellow with the Bridging Studio in New York City and a graduate candidate with the UPenn's School of Social Policy: Arts & Cultural Strategy executive program. Payment links: paypal: press.zeal@gmail.com Social Media: IG: @blackstar1984 Twitter: @a_kwabena ZEAL- Black Artist Cooperative: IG/Twitter: zeal_press Website: https://www.zeal.press/ --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/the-full-set-podcast/support

Parent-teacher organizations have historically been an in-person organization but this method of operating just isn't feasible in light of the pandemic and many schools being 100% virtual. So how does a PTA adapt? Hear from a PTA leader about how their PTA revamped their website, meetings, and membership communications to facilitate the 2020 school year and beyond. About Deb & Wes' Guest: Selma Avdicevic is a financial services professional and an entrepreneur, with an extensive background in commercial real estate finance and investment, structured finance, CMBS, portfolio management, project management, entrepreneurship, retail, small business management, non-profit management, fundraising, marketing, and communications. In her free time, she is an active member of the local PTA council, and a strong advocate for public education, as well as an active Impact100 Essex chapter member. Selma is a proud graduate of CUNY Hunter College and New York University. She lives in Montclair, NJ, with her husband and two kids.

JPB Gerald began his career as an English language teacher.  Bothered by the inherent racism he saw in the field, and reflecting on his own upbringing in predominantly White, "good" schools, he broadened his academic interests to race and Whiteness.  Currently a doctoral student at CUNY — Hunter College, JPB has been writing and doing interviews for many outlets in the midst of conversations about school in the fall.  While he has great insights into the challenges to equity presented by COVID, he also brings a deep understanding of many of the issues we address at Integrated Schools.  This conversation was going to be about "Pandemic Pods" and equity, but we quickly found ourselves zoomed out to a broader conversation about meritocracy, "THE SYSTEM", and Black Lives Matter signs in gated communities.  With insight, humor, and authenticity, JPB helps us think about what it means to take care of our kids in a way that doesn't harm other kids.  LINKS: Unstandardized English - JPB Gerald's Podcast (and you can support his work on Patreon)The Ezel Project - JPB Gerald's course on whitenessJPB on TwitterCombatting the Altruistic Shield - JPB Gerald's article describing the conceptJPB Gerald and Mira Debs on Pandemic Pods in The Washington PostCheryl I. Harris - Whiteness as Property (1993)JPB was inspired by Nelson Flores and Jonathan Rosa who have written several pieces together, including Undoing Appropriateness, and Unsettling Race and LanguageJoin our Patreon to support this work, and connect with us and other listeners to discuss these issues even further.Let us know what you think of this episode, suggest future topics, or share your story with us - @integratedschls on twitter, IntegratedSchools on Facebook, or email us hello@integratedschools.org.The Integrated Schools Podcast was created by Courtney Mykytyn and Andrew Lefkowits.This episode was produced, edited, and mixed by Andrew Lefkowits.Music by Kevin Casey.

Micah Dank;Micah Dank was born in 1983 in Oceanside New York. From a young age he had wanted to be a writer, coming from a family of writers. His father was a producer and radio news editor at CBS News in Manhattan and his grandfather was a Producer at CBS News. When Dan Rather wrote his autobiography he listed Micah's grandfather by name as the person he told at the news station about Kennedy's death. Micah was an actor in high school and became interested in writing from his 12th grade English teacher Russell Reid. From there he majored in English at SUNY Albany and transferred down to CUNY Hunter College in Manhattan to earn his Bachelors degree in ‘Language Literature and criticism'. It wasn't until he moved to Boston for a new job that he became interested in all the esoteric sciences including just to name a few that can be found in his books Astronomy, astrology, astrotheology, out of body experiences, Akashic records, remote viewing, religions, capstones of the pyramids, secret societies and their secrets, channelers, dmt monitoring, lucid dreaming, acoustic levitation, Alzheimer's, conspiracy theories, jet pack propulsion, physics, quantum physics, psychology, computer hacking, Antarctica, and spiritual guides. For the next 6 years he read 4 hours a day about them all and has interwoven all of them into a series of thrillers.http://micahdank.comMusic Submit Playlist:1. Clean Break by Johnny Neel2. My Worth (Instrumental) by See your shadow Songwriting. Outro:All the Way on Love by Douglas Coleman Available on Itunes, Apple music and spotify. Complete Radio Promotional Package: The Douglas Coleman Show is now offering a complete radio promotional package for music artists. 1. Your track aired for 4 weeks over ALL of our online platforms.2. Your track will always be played at the very beginning of the show before commercials or interviews. 3. A 15 minute interview to promote your album, single, upcoming gigs or anything you wish to talk about.4. Your photo, bio and links to your website and music on our website featured music artists section.5. Permanent archive of your interview and track play on Spreaker, Tune in, Stitcher, Itunes, Spotify, and other online platforms. This is a great opportunity for up and coming music artists to get exposure and airplay without any subscription or long term commitments. You get all of this for a one-time fee of $49.99https://douglascolemanmusic.com/crpp/ Complete Video Promotional Package:The Douglas Coleman Show VE (Video Edition) is now offering a complete music video promotional package for music artists. This package includes the following;1. We will play and promote your music video on our new VE (Video Edition) of The Douglas Coleman Show.2. A 10 minute video interview via Skype to promote your album, single, upcoming gigs or anything you wish to talk about.3. Your photo, bio and links to your website, video and music on our website featured music artists section.4. Permanent archive of your video interview and music video on our Youtube channel and Website.This is a great opportunity for up and coming music artists to get exposure for your band and music video without any subscription or long term commitments.You get all of this for a one-time fee of $49.99http://www.douglascolemanmusic.com/cvpp/ Sponsorship:If you're interested in being a sponsor on The Douglas Coleman Show, please contact us directly. douglascolemanshow@gmail.comOR if you'd prefer to make a one-time donation, please check out our GoFundMe. http://gofundme.com/the-dcs-needs-you...Also check out our great line of merchandise.http://www.douglascolemanmusic.com/merchandise/

Micah Dank;Micah Dank was born in 1983 in Oceanside New York. From a young age he had wanted to be a writer, coming from a family of writers. His father was a producer and radio news editor at CBS News in Manhattan and his grandfather was a Producer at CBS News. When Dan Rather wrote his autobiography he listed Micah's grandfather by name as the person he told at the news station about Kennedy's death. Micah was an actor in high school and became interested in writing from his 12th grade English teacher Russell Reid. From there he majored in English at SUNY Albany and transferred down to CUNY Hunter College in Manhattan to earn his Bachelors degree in ‘Language Literature and criticism'. It wasn't until he moved to Boston for a new job that he became interested in all the esoteric sciences including just to name a few that can be found in his books Astronomy, astrology, astrotheology, out of body experiences, Akashic records, remote viewing, religions, capstones of the pyramids, secret societies and their secrets, channelers, dmt monitoring, lucid dreaming, acoustic levitation, Alzheimer's, conspiracy theories, jet pack propulsion, physics, quantum physics, psychology, computer hacking, Antarctica, and spiritual guides. For the next 6 years he read 4 hours a day about them all and has interwoven all of them into a series of thrillers.http://micahdank.comMusic Submit Playlist:1. Clean Break by Johnny Neel2. My Worth (Instrumental) by See your shadow Songwriting. Outro:All the Way on Love by Douglas Coleman Available on Itunes, Apple music and spotify. Complete Radio Promotional Package: The Douglas Coleman Show is now offering a complete radio promotional package for music artists. 1. Your track aired for 4 weeks over ALL of our online platforms.2. Your track will always be played at the very beginning of the show before commercials or interviews. 3. A 15 minute interview to promote your album, single, upcoming gigs or anything you wish to talk about.4. Your photo, bio and links to your website and music on our website featured music artists section.5. Permanent archive of your interview and track play on Spreaker, Tune in, Stitcher, Itunes, Spotify, and other online platforms. This is a great opportunity for up and coming music artists to get exposure and airplay without any subscription or long term commitments. You get all of this for a one-time fee of $49.99https://douglascolemanmusic.com/crpp/ Complete Video Promotional Package:The Douglas Coleman Show VE (Video Edition) is now offering a complete music video promotional package for music artists. This package includes the following;1. We will play and promote your music video on our new VE (Video Edition) of The Douglas Coleman Show.2. A 10 minute video interview via Skype to promote your album, single, upcoming gigs or anything you wish to talk about.3. Your photo, bio and links to your website, video and music on our website featured music artists section.4. Permanent archive of your video interview and music video on our Youtube channel and Website.This is a great opportunity for up and coming music artists to get exposure for your band and music video without any subscription or long term commitments.You get all of this for a one-time fee of $49.99http://www.douglascolemanmusic.com/cvpp/ Sponsorship:If you're interested in being a sponsor on The Douglas Coleman Show, please contact us directly. douglascolemanshow@gmail.comOR if you'd prefer to make a one-time donation, please check out our GoFundMe. http://gofundme.com/the-dcs-needs-you...Also check out our great line of merchandise.http://www.douglascolemanmusic.com/merchandise/