Podcast appearances and mentions of Darren Johnson

John and Jim welcome John Craemer from the Green Bay Press Times in their weekly segment "Headlines with The Press Times." John brings in as they dive into the vibrant historical tapestry of Brown County with guests from the Neville Public Museum and Packers Hall of Fame. They explore the upcoming Brown County History Days—a week-long celebration highlighting the region's rich past with free public events. The episode transitions into a lively chat with Darren Johnson and Kevin Van Ess, the dynamic duo behind Daddy D Productions' Star-Spangled Salute to America. They discuss the power of patriotic music, the essence of live performance, and the camaraderie within their talented ensemble. Expect humor, heartfelt stories, and a dash of local flair! Maino and the Mayor is a part of the Civic Media radio network and airs Monday through Friday from 6-9 am on WGBW in Green Bay and on WISS in Appleton/Oshkosh. Subscribe to the podcast to be sure not to miss out on a single episode! To learn more about the show and all of the programming across the Civic Media network, head over to https://civicmedia.us/shows to see the entire broadcast lineup. Follow the show on Facebook and X to keep up with Maino and the Mayor! Guests: John Craemer, Kevin Van Ess, Darren Johnson

Darren concludes our talk series 'Restore', looking at how keeping our eyes fixed on God helps us to stand firm in our faith during all the seasons of life.

For Easter Sunday, Darren continues our Easter talk series, looking at how Jesus' resurrection gives us peace and a hope for the future.

Darren continues our talk series 'Restore', looking at how focusing on the Bible and engaging in the discipline of fasting and prayer brings about changed lives.

Darren continues our talk series 'Restore', looking at how serving God as a church together means that everyone has a part to play.

Darren continues our talk series 'Restore', looking at how Nehemiah's lifestyle of prayer gave him the courage to risk his life in order to follow God's plan.

Darren continues our talk series 'Restore', looking at how discouragement can cause us to lose focus and stop us from following God's plan.

Darren continues our talk series 'Restore', looking at how God keeps His promises as we play our part in prayer and worship.

Darren continues our talk series 'Restore', looking at how when we allow God to deal with the hurts of the past He gives us a hope for the future.

Darren begins a new series of talks called 'Restore', this week looking at our Verses for 2025 and how God is anointing us to be like a fruitful orchard, reaching other for Him.

Darren continues out talk series 'Great, Greater, Greatest', looking at how when we put Jesus above every situation we gain a heavenly perspective, allowing us to live without fear.

Darren continues our talk series 'Great, Greater, Greatest', looking at how an encounter with Jesus brought about a changed life and a vision for the future.

Darren Johnson is a Midlands based Mountain Leader who is currently the Chair of the  BMC Midlands committee. Darren has a lifetime of diverse experience and a passion for bringing people together, he brings more to the outdoors than a love for adventure. Over the years, he's built a multi-faceted career, spanning local government management, social services, and business ownership, which has given him a unique perspective on fostering resilience and connection. Darren runs a mental health charity which offers counselling and psychotherapy. Darren is keen to create spaces—whether in the wild or in conversation—where people feel understood and supported.

Darren concludes our talk series 'Grace Reigns', looking at how we can live transformed lives, standing confidently before God because of His grace, not our own merit.

Darren continues our talk series 'Grace Reigns', looking at how we are loved and accepted by God through the power of grace, giving us the strength we need to live His way.

Darren continues our talk series 'Grace Reigns', looking at how through grace the burden of the law becomes power inside us to live for God.

Darren continues our talk series 'Grace Reigns', looking at how when we have been saved by grace we are free to obey God, no longer ruled by the power of sin.

Darren begins a new series of talks called 'Grace Reigns', looking at how the grace of God allows us to have peace with God.

Darren continues our talk series 'Knowing God', looking at how accepting the Lordship of Jesus in our lives gives our relationship with Him room to flourish.

Darren begins a new series of talks, 'Knowing God', looking at how the relationship of the Trinity impacts how we love others.

For Pentecost Sunday Darren looks at how when we encounter the Holy Spirit He gives us power to change the world.

Darren continues our talk series 'The Apostle Paul: A Life Transformed', looking at how Paul faithfully proclaimed the gospel in spite of many hardships and setbacks.

Episode 76 with Marbie Miller, skateboarder and artist from Oakland, California. Together we discussed her life and career, from growing up in La Porte, Iowa where she picked up her first board at the age of 11 to turning pro for There Skateboards in 2020, her art practice, fingerboarding and much more through surprise questions from friends of hers: Jeff Cheung, Nick Lyle, Una Farrar, Shari White, Cher Strauberry, Tom Mull, Preston Moses Clopton, James Pitonyak, Darren Johnson, Shag, Ben Venom, Matt Price, Lorien Stern, Jae Matthews and Augustus Muller from Boy Harsher, Eunice Chang, Chris Colbourn, Andrew Schoultz, Kristin Ebeling, Evan Smith, Jaime Reyes, Carolina Rey, Victor Valdez, Akiko Scott aka Kiki, Katherine Hamilton, Jim Thiebaud and Jessyka Bailey.(00:13) – Intro (01:25) – Jeff Cheung shoutout (01:46) – Nick Lyle(04:46) – Una Farrar (06:25) – Shari White(07:14) – Cher Strauberry(09:10) – Tom Mull(09:33) – Preston Moses Clopton(11:32) – James Pitonyak (14:19) – Darren Johnson(16:13) – Shag (20:01) – Ben Venom(21:59) – Matt Price(23:28) – Lorien Stern(24:14) – Jae Matthews(27:34) – Augustus Muller(30:06) – Eunice Chang(30:58) – Chris Colbourn(34:32) – Andrew Schoultz(35:40) – Kristin Ebeling(36:39) – Evan Smith(37:40) – Jaime Reyes(39:50) – Carolina Rey(45:00) – Victor Valdez(46:06) – Akiko Scott aka Kiki(47:11) – Katherine Hamilton(48:57) – Jim Thiebaud(49:51) – Jessyka Bailey(55:09) – Upcoming projects(57:23) – ConclusionFor more information and resources: https://linktr.ee/beyondboardsHosted by Ausha. See ausha.co/privacy-policy for more information.

I'm lucky enough to get together again with Darren Johnson on this episode today! Our conversation today covers a wide variety of topics from the labels we have put on us in life and the issues that come with them, to understanding when what you're feeling isn't quite 'normal' and how to move forward to get help with that and move into your own success in life.  Darren made himself a promise to work for online and for himself and dove into using hypnosis to make that happen. He finds such joy and excitement in his clients success, and has a wonderful goal of helping at LEAST 100 people be free from the grip of anxiety by the end of 2024. (I know he'll do that and more!)  He is from the UK and now living in Bulgaria with his busband and three dogs, and has been there for the last 7 years. His background was in SEO content, and finance, and because of his personal experience with anxiety, PTSD, trauma and more he has now trained and been certified in hypnotherapy.  You can find Darren at his website: Darren Johnson Hypnosis And you'll find him on his socials right here: Darren Johnson Facebook Darren Johnson LinkedIn   I look forward to connecting more with you, as well!  Please come join me in The Change Gang Group! Change Gang Group   Grab yourself a freebie made just for YOU here: Fun FREEBIES!   And I have a brand new one that's not even on the website yet. If you'd like to boost your happiness and increase your sleep, this one's for you!  Sleep Better and Live Happier!   And I'm also always happy to connect on Instagram: Laura Ordile   Thank you so much for joining me in the fun. I'd be very grateful if you would be willing to take a moment and rate and review the show for me. And I hope you have a great week!   Happy day to you,   Laura 

For Easter Sunday, Darren looks at how Jesus has made a way for us to receive forgiveness and become a part of God's family.

Darren continues our talk series 'Family on Mission', looking at how through the Father, Son and Holy Spirit we are called to demonstrate God's love in community, in serving and in telling others about Jesus.

Darren continues our talk series 'Family on Mission', looking at how Jesus led the disciples in different ways in different phases of their journey with Him.

I LOVED talking with Darren Johnson on this episode today! He's so open and easy to relate to. If you've ever lost a job, you'll know the impact it can have, yet some might not understand that it can actually be rather traumatic. Having that happen in his life, it brought a realization that there may have been other things considered 'trauma' in his life that were affecting how he moved forward. He shares so honestly about his own earlier very traumatic experiences in his younger years,  such as losing him mom and a horrible experience of violence, and how the work he's doing for others now actually helped him heal from those difficult times in his life. Darren is from the UK and now living in Bulgaria with his busband and three dogs, and has been there for the last 7 years. His background was in SEO content, and finance, and because of his personal experience with anxiety, PTSD, trauma and more he has now trained and been certified in hypnotherapy.  You can find Darren at his website: Darren Johnson Hypnosis And you'll find him on his socials right here: Darren Johnson Facebook Darren Johnson LinkedIn   Please come join me in the Change Gang Group on Facebook! Change Gang Group And I'd love to connect on Instagram, too: Laura Ordile Remember to grab some wonderful freebies before you go!  Fun Freebies   OH! And I just put the perfect one out there for those of you that want to sleep better and live happier! It's not on the website yet, so you can get that one right here: Sleep Better and Live Happier!   Have a happy week! I'll meet you right here same time, next week!    Laura 

Darren continues our talk series 'Family on Mission', looking at how Jesus is the Way, Truth and Life, and we are called to live as He did, knowing God and leading others to Him.

Darren continues our talk series 'Family on Mission', looking at how having a lifestyle of spending time with God allows Him to move in our circumstances.

Darren begins a new series of talks 'Family on Mission', looking at how the River of the Holy Spirit brings refreshing and puts our focus on God.

Darren begins our Christmas series, looking at how God's grace allows us to have a relationship with Him and gives us peace in times of trouble.

Darren closes our talk series 'The Armour of God', looking at how prayer allows us to take part in the conversations of heaven.

Darren continues our talk series 'The Armour of God', looking at how knowing God's word and trusting in His promises gives us protection during times of challenge.

Darren continues our talk series 'The Armour of God', looking at how the gospel is a firm foundation for our walk with God.

Welcome to Carlisle Cult Cinema Club presents: The Lads! I'm your host, PD, and I'm here with the lads Andrew Waugh, Darren Johnson, and our newest lad, Steve McCormick. In this podcast, we gather around to have lively discussions about what we've been watching and what we're excited to see in the future. We delve into the world of cult cinema with our own unique and unforgettable style.Whether you're a seasoned cinephile or just dipping your toes into the world of cult films, this podcast is the perfect place to discover new favourite's, So sit back, relax, and join us as we take you on a journey like no other.Get ready for a dose of creativity, smart insights, and a whole lot of friendly banter and if you believe that you'll believe anything. So kick back and grab your headphones and enjoy the Ramblings of us four idiots in Carlisle Cult Cinema Cast presents: The Lads.

Darren begins a new series of talks called 'The Armour of God', looking at how knowing the truth of our identity in Christ allows us to stand strong in times of adversity.

Darren continues our talk series 'Devoted', looking at how being undivided in our commitment to God allows His blessing to flow through us.

Darren continues our talk series 'Devoted', looking at how when we recognise that God is holy and awesome, He gives us the power and authority to do miracles in His name.

Co-hosts Alex Moss and Burton DeWitt are back with a new episode ahead of the World Seniors Championship. Alex and Burton look ahead to another busy week in the world of darts, which includes the second staging of the World Seniors Championship, a Premier League night in Cardiff, and the start of the new ProTour season. Stephen Burton (15:46) joins Matthew Kiernan, The Darting Nerd, to look back on his success at UK Q-School, winning back his PDC tour card, and looks ahead to his return to the tour this weekend. Darren Johnson (32:21) calls in to discuss his upcoming debut in the World Seniors Championship this week, as well as look back at his last 18 months playing on the WDF and World Seniors circuits, and qualifying for Lakeside later this year. *** Thank you to Dartwolf for sponsoring this podcast. Follow Dartwolf on Twitter @Dartwolf180 and check out dartwolf.tv for more #DynamiteDartsContent  *** Sponsorship available! Want your business advertised on the show? Email weeklydartscast@gmail.com for more details and a free copy of our new sponsor brochure! *** Enjoy our podcast? Make a one-off donation on our new Ko-Fi page here: ko-fi.com/weeklydartscast Support us on Patreon from just $2(+VAT): patreon.com/WeeklyDartscast Thank you to our Patreon members: Phil Moss, Gordon Skinner, Connor Ellis, Bill Richards

Welcome to Dev Game Club, where this week we elaborate our series on Rogue by looking at one that continues its legacy, that is, Rogue Legacy 2. It's right there in the name! Dev Game Club looks at classic video games and plays through them over several episodes, providing commentary. Sections played: A few hours (well, about a dozen for Brett) Issues covered: Rogue-likes and Rogue-lites, comparing it a bit with Spelunky, the journal in Spelunky, games like it Tim has played, getting something out of runs, unlocking character types, bespoke levels vs tiled spaces and level generation, kitchen sink design, the clarity of the legacy, the punishment of starting over from scratch, not feeling like I got any further, quality of life improvements, the many ways you can make choices, terrific music, seeing your life flash before your eyes, humorous traits, saying yes to everything, sequel polish, the verb mix, grinding here vs JRPGs, improving skills, wrapping Rogue elements, multiple currencies, maintaining the Rogue with taking the gold, psychology of gold, removing a pillar and losing some enjoyment, knowing someone who beat Rogue, beating Darth Vader, an emergent property of Rogue, making a game you could play yourself, the cleverness and wondering how deep it can go, the punishment of Dark Souls and the progression layer, preferring an endpoint, long-term commitment, other Rogues to check out, a discussion of kit-bashing, kit-bashing and the art department, model kits and the origin of the term, kit-bashing in film, learning to parry. Games, people, and influences mentioned or discussed: Spelunky, Clue (obliquely), Colin Northway (obliquely), Dead Cells, Castlevania, Darius Kazemi, Oliver Uv, Cellar Door, PlayStation Vita, Dark Souls, Hades, Humphrey Bogart, Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Darren Johnson, TIE Fighter, Derek Yu, Boss Fight Books, Sebastian Deken, Final Fantasy VI, Civilization, Paul Pierce, Haden Blackman, Diablo, njallain, Roguelike Celebration, International Roguelike Convention, Brogue, Caves of Qud, Gamma World, Cogmind, Michael Brough, 868-HACK, mysterydip, Maas Neotek Prototype, Ian Milham, Dead Space, Bethesda Game Studios, Fallout (series), Skyrim, Republic Commando, Star Wars, Industrial Light & Magic, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Bloodborne, Kirk Hamilton, Aaron Evers, Mark Garcia. Next time: TBA! Links: Darius Kazemi on Generating Spelunky Caves of Qud and Wave Function Collapse Brogue's Mechanisms Michael Brough on Roguelikes Twitch: brettdouville or timlongojr, instagram:timlongojr, Twitter: @timlongojr and @devgameclub Discord: https://t.co/YVZOe7ZygI DevGameClub@gmail.com

The investment management industry has the power to direct large amounts of capital into companies creating change. Yet, many social entrepreneurs are not familiar with this sector. Today's guest is Darren Johnson, Chief Operating Officer and a member of the Executive Committee at Impax Asset Management. In this episode, Darren speaks of his experience as a minority in a sector where only about 1 percent of asset managers are Black. Darren also shares how social enterprises can benefit from engaging with asset management organizations, and provides his advice for leaders looking to scale. -- Learn more about Spring Impact. Follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram.

While I'm still on hiatus, I invited questions from listeners. This is an hour-long podcast answering some of them. (Another hour-long Q&A for Patreon backers only will go up next week). Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ There is a Mixcloud of the music excerpted here which can be found at https://www.mixcloud.com/AndrewHickey/500-songs-supplemental-qa-edition/ Click below for a transcript: Hello and welcome to the Q&A  episode I'm doing while I'm working on creating a backlog. I'm making good progress on that, and still hoping and expecting to have episode 151 up some time in early August, though I don't have an exact date yet. I was quite surprised by the response to my request for questions, both at the amount of it and at where it came from. I initially expected to get a fair few comments on the main podcast, and a handful on the Patreon, and then I could do a reasonable-length Q&A podcast from the former and a shorter one from the latter. Instead, I only got a couple of questions on the main episode, but so many on the Patreon that I had to stop people asking only a day or so after posting the request for questions. So instead of doing one reasonable length podcast and one shorter one, I'm actually doing two longer ones. What I'm going to do is do all the questions asked publicly, plus all the questions that have been asked multiple times, in this one, then next week I'm going to put up the more niche questions just for Patreon backers. However, I'm not going to answer *all* of the questions. I got so many questions so quickly that there's not space to answer them all, and several of them were along the lines of "is artist X going to get an episode?" which is a question I generally don't answer -- though I will answer a couple of those if there's something interesting to say about them. But also, there are some I've not answered for another reason. As you may have noticed, I have a somewhat odd worldview, and look at the world from a different angle from most people sometimes. Now there were several questions where someone asked something that seems like a perfectly reasonable question, but contains a whole lot of hidden assumptions that that person hadn't even considered -- about music history, or about the process of writing and researching, or something else. Now, to answer that kind of question at all often means unpacking those hidden assumptions, which can sometimes make for an interesting answer -- after all, a lot of the podcast so far has been me telling people that what they thought they knew about music history was wrong -- but when it's a question being asked by an individual and you answer that way, it can sometimes, frankly, make you look like a horribly unpleasant person, or even a bully. "Don't you even know the most basic things about historical research? I do! You fool! Hey everyone else listening, this person thinks you do research in *this* way, but everyone knows you do it *that* way!" Now, that is never how I would intend such answers to come across -- nobody can be blamed for not knowing what they don't know -- but there are some questions where no matter how I phrased the answer, it came across sounding like that. I'll try to hold those over for future Q&A episodes if I can think of ways of unpicking the answers in such a way that I'm not being unconscionably rude to people who were asking perfectly reasonable questions. Some of the answers that follow might still sound a bit like that to be honest, but if you asked a question and my answer sounds like that to you, please know that it wasn't meant to. There's a lot to get through, so let's begin: Steve from Canada asks: “Which influential artist or group has been the most challenging to get information on in the last 50 podcasts? We know there has been a lot written about the Beatles, Beach Boys, Motown as an entity, the Monkees and the Rolling Stones, but you mentioned in a tweet that there's very little about some bands like the Turtles, who are an interesting story. I had never heard of Dino Valenti before this broadcast – but he appeared a lot in the last batch – so it got me curious. [Excerpt: The Move, “Useless Information”] In the last fifty episodes there's not been a single one that's made it to the podcast where it was at all difficult to get information. The problem with many of them is that there's *too much* information out there, rather than there not being enough. No matter how many books one reads on the Beatles, one can never read more than a fraction of them, and there's huge amounts of writing on the Rolling Stones, on Hendrix, on the Doors, on the Byrds... and when you're writing about those people, you *know* that you're going to miss out something or get something wrong, because there's one more book out there you haven't read which proves that one of the stories you're telling is false. This is one of the reasons the episodes have got so much longer, and taken so much more time. That wasn't the case in the first hundred episodes -- there were a lot of artists I covered there, like Gene and Eunice, or the Chords, or Jesse Belvin, or Vince Taylor who there's very little information about. And there are some coming up who there's far less information about than people in the last fifty episodes. But every episode since the Beatles has had a surfeit of information. There is one exception -- I wanted to do a full episode on "Rescue Me" by Fontella Bass, because it would be an interesting lens through which to look at how Chess coped with the change in Black musical styles in the sixties. But there was so little information available about her I ended up relegating it to a Patreon bonus episode, because she makes those earlier artists look well-documented. Which leads nicely into the next question. Nora Tillman asks "Forgive this question if you've answered it before: is there literally a list somewhere with 500 songs you've chosen? Has the list changed since you first composed it? Also, when did you first conceive of this list?" [Excerpt: John Reed and the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company, "As Someday it May Happen"] Many people have asked this question, or variations upon it. The answer is yes and no. I made a list when I started that had roughly two hundred songs I knew needed to be on there, plus about the same number again of artists who needed to be covered but whose precise songs I hadn't decided on. To make the initial list I pulled a list out of my own head, and then I also checked a couple of other five-hundred-song lists -- the ones put out by Rolling Stone magazine and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame -- not because I wanted to use their lists; I have very little time for rock critical orthodoxy, as most of my listeners will likely have realised by now, but because I wanted to double-check that I hadn't missed anything obvious out, and that if I was missing something off their lists, I knew *why* I was missing it. To take a ludicrous example, I wouldn't want to get to the end of the 1960s and have someone say "Wait a minute, what about the Beatles?" and think "I *knew* I'd forgotten something!" Then, at the start of each fifty-episode season, I put together a more rigorous list of the fifty songs coming up, in order. Those lists *can* still change with the research -- for example, very early on in the research for the podcast, I discovered that even though I was completely unfamiliar with "Ko Ko Mo" by Gene and Eunice, it was a hugely important and influential record at the time, and so I swapped that in for another song. Or more recently, I initially intended to have the Doors only have one episode, but when I realised how much I was having to include in that episode I decided to give them a second one. And sometimes things happen the other way -- I planned to do full episodes on Jackie Shane and Fontella Bass, but for both of them I couldn't find enough information to get a decent episode done, so they ended up being moved to Patreon episodes. But generally speaking that fifty-song list for a year's episodes is going to remain largely unchanged. I know where I'm going, I know what most of the major beats of the story are, but I'm giving myself enough flexibility to deviate if I find something I need to include. Connected with this, Rob Johnson asks how I can be confident I'll get back to some stories in later episodes. Well, like I say, I have a pretty much absolute idea of what I'm going to do in the next year, and there are a lot of individual episodes where I know the structure of the episode long before we get to it. As an example here... I don't want to give too much away, and I'm generally not going to be answering questions about "will artist X be appearing?", but Rob also asked about one artist. I can tell you that that artist is one who will not be getting a full episode -- and I already said in the Patreon episode about that artist that they won't -- but as I also said in that episode they *will* get a significant amount of time in another episode, which I now know is going to be 180, which will also deal with another artist from the same state with the same forename, even though it's actually about two English bands. I've had the structure of that episode planned out since literally before I started writing episode one. On the other hand, episode 190 is a song that wasn't originally going to be included at all. I was going to do a 1967 song by the same artist, but then found out that a fact I'd been going to use was disputed, which meant that track didn't need to be covered, but the artist still did, to finish off a story I'd started in a previous episode. Patrick asks:"I am currently in the middle of reading 1971: Never a Dull Moment by David Hepworth and I'm aware that Apple TV have produced a documentary on how music changed that year as well and I was wondering what your opinion on that subject matter? I imagine you will be going into some detail on future podcasts, but until recently I never knew people considered 1971 as a year that brought about those changes." [Excerpt: Rod Stewart, "Angel"] I've not yet read Hepworth's book, but that it's named after an album which came out in 1972 (which is the album that track we just heard came from) says something about how the idea that any one year can in itself be a turning point for music is a little overstated -- and the Apple documentary is based on Hepworth's book, so it's not really multiple people making that argument. Now, as it happens, 1971 is one of the break points for the podcast -- episodes 200 and 201 are both records from July 1971, and both records that one could argue were in their own way signifiers of turning points in rock music history. And as with 1967 it's going to have more than its fair share of records, as it bridges the gap of two seasons. But I think one could make similar arguments for many, many years, and 1971 is  not one of the most compelling cases. I can't say more before I read Hepworth's book, which won't be for a few months yet. I'm instinctively dubious of these "this year was the big year that changed everything" narratives, but Hepworth's a knowledgeable enough writer that I wouldn't want to dismiss his thesis without even reading the book. Roger Pannell asks I'm a fairly recent joiner-in too so you may have answered this before. What is the theme tune to the podcast please. [Excerpt: The Boswell Sisters, “Rock and Roll”] The theme song to the podcast is "Rock and Roll" by the Boswell Sisters. The version I use is not actually the version that was released as a single, but a very similar performance that was used in the film Transatlantic Merry-Go-Round in 1931. I chose it in part because it may well be the first ever record to contain the phrase "rock and roll" (though as I've said many times there's no first anything, and there are certainly many records which talk about rocking and/or rolling -- just none I know of with that phrase) so it evokes rock and roll history, partly because the recording is out of copyright, and partly just because I like the Boswell Sisters. Several people asked questions along the lines of this one from Christopher Burnett "Just curious if there's any future episodes planned on any non-UK or non-North American songs? The bonus episodes on the Mops and Kyu Sakamoto were fascinating." [Excerpt: Kyu Sakamoto, "Sukiyaki"] Sadly, there won't be as many episodes on musicians from outside the UK and North America as I'd like. The focus of the podcast is going to be firmly on British, American, Irish, and Canadian musicians, with a handful from other Anglophone countries like Australia and Jamaica. There *are* going to be a small number of episodes on non-Anglophone musicians, but very few. Sadly, any work of history which engages with injustices still replicates some of those injustices, and one of the big injustices in rock history is that most rock musicians have been very insular, and there has been very little influence from outside the Anglophone world, which means that I can't talk much about influential records made by musicians from elsewhere.  Also, in a lot of cases most of the writing about them is in other languages, and I'm shamefully monolingual (I have enough schoolboy French not to embarrass myself, but not enough to read a biography without a dictionary to hand, and that's it). There *will* be quite a few bonus episodes on musicians from non-Anglophone countries though, because this *is* something that I'm very aware of as a flaw, and if I can find ways of bringing the wider story into the podcast I will definitely do so, even if it means changing my plans somewhat, but I'm afraid they'll largely be confined to Patreon bonuses rather than mainline episodes. Ed Cunard asks "Is there a particular set of songs you're not looking forward to because you don't care for them, but intend to dive into due to their importance?" [Excerpt: Jackie Shane, "Don't Play That Song"] There are several, and there already have been some, but I'm not going to say what they are as part of anything to do with the podcast (sometimes I might talk about how much I hate a particular record on my personal Twitter account or something, but I try not to on the podcast's account, and I'm certainly not going to in an episode of the podcast itself). One of the things I try to do with the podcast is to put the case forward as to why records were important, why people liked them at the time, what they got out of them. I can't do that if I make it about my own personal tastes. I know for a fact that there are people who have come away from episodes on records I utterly despise saying "Wow! I never liked that record before, but I do now!" and that to me shows that I have succeeded -- I've widened people's appreciation for music they couldn't appreciate before. Of course, it's impossible to keep my own tastes from showing through totally, but even there people tend to notice much more my like or dislike for certain people rather than for their music, and I don't feel anything like as bad for showing that. So I have a policy generally of just never saying which records in the list I actually like and which I hate. You'll often be able to tell from things I talk about elsewhere, but I don't want anyone to listen to an episode and be prejudiced not only against the artist but against the episode  by knowing going in that I dislike them, and I also don't want anyone to feel like their favourite band is being given short shrift. There are several records coming up that I dislike myself but where I know people are excited about hearing the episode, and the last thing I want to do is have those people who are currently excited go in disappointed before they even hear it. Matt Murch asks: "Do you anticipate tackling the shift in rock toward harder, more seriously conceptual moves in 1969 into 1970, with acts like Led Zeppelin, The Who (again), Bowie, etc. or lighter soul/pop artists such as Donna Summer, Carly Simon or the Carpenters? Also, without giving too much away, is there anything surprising you've found in your research that you're excited to cover? [Excerpt: Robert Plant, "If I Were a Carpenter"] OK, for the first question... I don't want to say exactly who will and won't be covered in future episodes, because when I say "yes, X will be covered" or "no, Y will not be covered", it invites a lot of follow-up discussion along the lines of "why is X in there and not Y?" and I end up having to explain my working, when the episodes themselves are basically me explaining my working. What I will say is this... the attitude I'm taking towards who gets included and who gets excluded is, at least in part, influenced by an idea in cognitive linguistics called prototype theory. According to this theory, categories aren't strictly bounded like in Aristotelian thought -- things don't have strict essences that mean they definitely are or aren't members of categories. But rather, categories have fuzzy boundaries, and there are things at the centre that are the most typical examples of the category, and things at the border that are less typical. For example, a robin is a very "birdy" bird -- it's very near the centre of the category of bird, it has a lot of birdness -- while an ostrich is still a bird, but much less birdy, it's sort of in the fuzzy boundary area. When you ask people to name a bird, they're more likely to name a robin than an ostrich, and if you ask them “is an ostrich a bird?” they take longer to answer than they do when asked about robins. In the same way, a sofa is nearer the centre of the category of "furniture" than a wardrobe is. Now, I am using an exceptionally wide definition of what counts as rock music, but at the same time, in order for it to be a history of rock music, I do have to spend more time in the centre of the concept than around the periphery. My definition would encompass all the artists you name, but I'm pretty sure that everyone would agree that the first three artists you name are much closer to the centre of the concept of "rock music" than the last three. That's not to say anyone on either list is definitely getting covered or is definitely *not* getting covered -- while I have to spend more time in the centre than the periphery, I do have to spend some time on the periphery, and my hope is to cover as many subgenres and styles as I can -- but that should give an idea of how I'm approaching this. As for the second question -- there's relatively little that's surprising that I've uncovered in my research so far, but that's to be expected. The period from about 1965 through about 1975 is the most over-covered period of rock music history, and so the basic facts for almost every act are very, very well known to people with even a casual interest. For the stuff I'm doing in the next year or so, like the songs I've covered for the last year, it's unlikely that anything exciting will come up until very late in the research process, the times when I'm pulling everything together and notice one little detail that's out of place and pull on that thread and find the whole story unravelling. Which may well mean, of course, that there *are* no such surprising things. That's always a possibility in periods where we're looking at things that have been dealt with a million times before, and this next year may largely be me telling stories that have already been told. Which is still of value, because I'm putting them into a larger context of the already-released episodes, but we'll see if anything truly surprising happens. I certainly hope it does. James Kosmicki asks "Google Podcasts doesn't seem to have any of the first 100 episodes - are they listed under a different name perhaps?" [Excerpt: REM, "Disappear"] I get a number of questions like this, about various podcast apps and sites, and I'm afraid my answer is always the same -- there's nothing I can do about this, and it's something you'd have to take up with the site in question. Google Podcasts picks up episodes from the RSS feed I provide, the same as every other site or app. It's using the right feed, that feed has every episode in it, and other sites and apps are working OK with it. In general, I suggest that rather than streaming sites like Google Podcasts or Stitcher or Spotify, where the site acts as a middleman and they serve the podcast to you from their servers, people should use a dedicated podcast app like RadioPublic or Pocketcasts or gPodder, where rather than going from a library of podcast episodes that some third party has stored, you're downloading the files direct from the original server, but I understand that sometimes those apps are more difficult to use, especially for less tech-savvy people. But generally, if an episode is in some way faulty or missing on the 500songs.com webpage, that's something I can do something about. If it's showing up wrong on Spotify or Google Podcasts or Stitcher or whatever, that's a problem at their end. Sorry. Darren Johnson asks "were there any songs that surprised you? Which one made the biggest change between what you thought you knew and what you learned researching it?" [Excerpt: The Turtles, "Goodbye Surprise"] Well, there have been a few, in different ways. The most surprising thing for me actually was in the most recent episode when I discovered the true story behind the "bigger than Jesus" controversy during my reading. That was a story I'd known one way for my entire life -- literally I think I first read about that story when I was six or seven -- and it turned out that not one thing I'd read on the subject had explained what had really happened. But then there are other things like the story of "Ko Ko Mo", which was a record I wasn't even planning on covering at first, but which turned out to be one of the most important records of the fifties. But I actually get surprised relatively little by big-picture things. I'll often discover fun details or new connections between things I hadn't noticed before, but the basic outlines of the story never change that much -- I've been reading about music history literally since I learned how to read, and while I do a deep dive for each episode, it's very rare that I discover anything that totally changes my perspective. There is always a process of reevaluation going on, and a change in the emphases in my thought, so for example when I started the project I knew Johnny Otis would come up a fair bit in the early years, and knew he was a major figure, but was still not giving him the full credit he deserved in my head. The same goes for Jesse Belvin, and as far as background figures go Lester Sill and Milt Gabler. But all of these were people I already knew were important, i just hadn't connected all the dots in my head. I've also come to appreciate some musicians more than I did previously. But there are very few really major surprises, which is probably to be expected -- I got into this already knowing a *LOT*, because otherwise I wouldn't have thought this was a project I could take on. Tracey Germa -- and I'm sorry, I don't know if that's pronounced with a hard or soft G, so my apologies if I mispronounced it -- asks: "Hi Andrew. We love everything about the podcast, but are especially impressed with the way you couch your trigger warnings and how you embed social commentary into your analysis of the music. You have such a kind approach to understanding human experiences and at the same time you don't balk at saying the hard things some folks don't want to hear about their music heroes. So, the question is - where does your social justice/equity/inclusion/suffer no fools side come from? Your family? Your own experiences? School/training?” [Excerpt: Elvis Costello and the Attractions, "Little Triggers"] Well, firstly, I have to say that people do say  this kind of thing to me quite a lot, and I'm grateful when they say it, but I never really feel comfortable with it, because frankly I think I do very close to the absolute minimum, and I get by because of the horribly low expectations our society has for allocishet white men, which means that making even the tiniest effort possible to be a decent human being looks far more impressive by comparison than it actually is. I genuinely think I don't do a very good job of this at all, although I do try, and that's not false modesty there. But to accept the premise of the question for a moment, there are a couple of answers. My parents are both fairly progressive both politically and culturally,  for the time and place where they raised me. They both had strong political convictions, and while they didn't have access to much culture other than what was on TV or in charting records or what have you -- there was no bookshop or record shop in our town, and obviously no Internet back then -- they liked the stuff out of that mix that was forward-thinking, and so was anti-racist, accepting of queerness, and so on. From a very early age, I was listening to things like "Glad to be Gay" by the Tom Robinson Band. So from before I really even understood what those concepts were, I knew that the people I admired thought that homophobia and racism were bad things. I was also bullied a lot at school, because I was autistic and fat and wore glasses and a bunch of other reasons. So I hated bullying and never wanted to be a bully. I get very, very, *very* angry at cruelty and at abuses of power -- as almost all autistic people do, actually. And then, in my twenties and thirties, for a variety of reasons I ended up having a social circle that was predominantly queer and/or disabled and/or people with mental health difficulties. And when you're around people like that, and you don't want to be a bully, you learn to at least try to take their feelings into consideration, though I slipped up a great deal for a long time, and still don't get everything right. So that's the "social justice" side of things. The other side, the "understanding human experiences" side... well, everyone has done awful things at times, and I would hope that none of us would be judged by our worst behaviours. "Use every man to his desert and who should 'scape whipping?" and all that. But that doesn't mean those worst behaviours aren't bad, and that they don't hurt people, and denying that only compounds the injustice. People are complicated, societies are complicated, and everyone is capable of great good and great evil. In general I tend to avoid a lot of the worst things the musicians I talk about did, because the podcast *is* about the music, but when their behaviour affects the music, or when I would otherwise be in danger of giving a truly inaccurate picture of someone, I have to talk about those things. You can't talk about Jerry Lee Lewis without talking about how his third marriage derailed his career, you can't talk about Sam Cooke without talking about his death, and to treat those subjects honestly you have to talk about the reprehensible sides of their character. Of course, in the case of someone like Lewis, there seems to be little *but* a reprehensible side, while someone like Cooke could be a horrible, horrible person, but even the people he hurt the most also loved him dearly because of his admirable qualities. You *have* to cover both aspects of someone like him if you want to be honest, and if you're not going to be honest why bother trying to do history at all? Lester Dragstedt says (and I apologise if I mispronounced that): "I absolutely love this podcast and the perspective you bring. My only niggle is that the sound samples are mixed so low. When listening to your commentary about a song at voice level my fingers are always at the volume knob to turn up when the song comes in." [Excerpt: Bjork, "It's Oh So Quiet"] This is something that gets raised a lot, but it's not something that's ever going to change. When I started the podcast, I had the music levels higher, and got complaints about that, so I started mixing them lower. I then got complaints about *that*, so I did a poll of my Patreon backers to see what they thought, and by about a sixty-forty margin they wanted the levels to be lower, as they are now, rather than higher as they were earlier. Basically, there seem to be two groups of listeners. One group mostly listens with headphones, and doesn't like it when the music gets louder, because it hurts their ears. The other group mostly listens in their cars, and the music gets lost in the engine noise. That's a gross oversimplification, and there are headphone listeners who want the music louder and car listeners who want the music quieter, but the listenership does seem to split roughly that way, and there are slightly more headphone listeners. Now, it's literally *impossible* for me to please everyone, so I've given up trying with this, and it's *not* going to change. Partly because the majority of my backers voted one way, partly because it's just easier to leave things the way they are rather than mess with them given that no matter what I do someone will be unhappy, and partly because both Tilt when he edits the podcast and I when I listen back and tweak his edit are using headphones, and *we* don't want to hurt our ears either. Eric Peterson asks "if we are basically in 1967 that is when we start seeing Country artists like Johnny Cash and Waylon Jennings - the Man who Survived the Day the Music Died - start to bring more rock songs into their recordings and start to set the ground work in many ways for Country Rock ... how do you envision bringing the role they play in the History of Rock and Roll into the podcast?" [Excerpt: The Del McCoury Band, "Nashville Cats"] I will of course be dealing with country rock as one of the subgenres I discuss -- though there's only one real country-rock track coming up in the next fifty, but there'll be more as I get into the seventies, and there are several artists coming up with at least some country influence. But I won't be looking at straight country musicians like Jennings or Cash except through the lens of rock musicians they inspired -- things like me talking about Johnny Cash briefly in the intro to the "Hey Joe" episode. I think Cocaine and Rhinestones is already doing a better job of covering country music than I ever could, and so those people will only touch the story tangentially. Nili Marcia says: "If one asks a person what's in that room it would not occur to one in 100 to mention the air that fills it. Something so ubiquitous as riff--I don't know what a riff actually is! Will you please define riff, preferably with examples." Now this is something I actually thought I'd explained way back in episode one, and I have a distinct memory of doing so, but I must have cut that part out -- maybe I recorded it so badly that part couldn't be salvaged, which happened sometimes in the early days -- because I just checked and there's no explanation there. I would have come back to this at some point if I hadn't been thinking all along that I'd covered it right at the start, because you're right, it is a term that needs definition. A riff is, simply, a repeated, prominent, instrumental figure. The term started out in jazz, and there it was a term for a phrase that would be passed back and forth between different instruments -- a trumpet might play a phrase, then a saxophone copy it, then back to the trumpet, then back to the saxophone. But quickly it became a term for a repeated figure that becomes the main accompaniment part of a song, over which an instrumentalist might solo or a singer might sing, but which you remember in its own right. A few examples of well-known riffs might include "Smoke on the Water" by Deep Purple: [Excerpt: Deep Purple, "Smoke on the Water"] "I Feel Fine" by the Beatles: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "I Feel Fine"] "Last Train to Clarksville" by the Monkees: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Last Train to Clarksville"] The bass part in “Under Pressure” by Queen and David Bowie: [Excerpt: Queen and David Bowie, “Under Pressure”] Or the Kingsmen's version of "Louie Louie": [Excerpt: The Kingsmen, "Louie Louie"] Basically, if you can think of a very short, prominent, instrumental idea that gets repeated over and over, that's a riff. Erik Pedersen says "I love the long episodes and I suspect you do too -- thoroughness. of this kind is something few get the opportunity to do -- but have you ever, after having written a long one, decided to cut them significantly? Are there audio outtakes you might string together one day?" [Excerpt: Bing Crosby and Les Paul, "It's Been a Long, Long Time"] I do like *having* done the long episodes, and sometimes I enjoy doing them, but other times I find it frustrating that an episode takes so long, because there are other stories I want to move on to. I'm trying for more of a balance over the next year, and we'll see how that works out. I want to tell the story in the depth it deserves, and the longer episodes allow me to do that, and to experiment with narrative styles and so on, but I also want to get the podcast finished before I die of old age. Almost every episode has stuff that gets cut, but it's usually in the writing or recording stage -- I'll realise a bit of the episode is boring and just skip it while I'm recording, or I'll cut out an anecdote or something because it looks like it's going to be a flabby episode and I want to tighten it up, or sometimes I'll realise that because of my mild speech impediments a sentence is literally unspeakable, and I'll rework it. It's very, very rare that I'll cut anything once it's been recorded, and if I do it's generally because when I listen back after it's been edited I'll realise I'm repeating myself or I made a mistake and need to cut a sentence because I said the wrong name, that sort of thing. I delete all the audio outtakes, but even if I didn't there would be nothing worth releasing. A few odd, out of context sentences, the occasional paragraph just repeating something I'd already said, a handful of actual incorrect facts, and a lot of me burping, or trying to say a difficult name three times in a row, or swearing when the phone rings in the middle of a long section. Lucy Hewitt says "Something that interests me, and that I'm sure you will cover is how listeners consume music and if that has an impact. In my lifetime we've moved from a record player which is fixed in one room to having a music collection with you wherever you go, and from hoping that the song you want to hear might be played on the radio to calling it up whenever you want. Add in the rise of music videos, and MTV, and the way in which people access music has changed a lot over the decades. But has that affected the music itself?" [Excerpt: Bow Wow Wow "C30 C60 C90 Go!"] It absolutely has affected the music itself in all sorts of ways, some of which I've touched on already and some of which I will deal with as we go through the story, though the story I'm telling will end around the time of Napster and so won't involve streaming services and so forth. But every technology change leads to a change in the sound of music in both obvious and non-obvious ways. When AM radio was the most dominant form of broadcasting, there was no point releasing singles in stereo, because at that time there were no stereo AM stations. The records also had to be very compressed, so the sound would cut through the noise and interference. Those records would often be very bass-heavy and have a very full, packed, sound. In the seventies, with the rise of eight-track players, you'd often end up with soft-rock and what would later get termed yacht rock having huge success. That music, which is very ethereal and full of high frequencies, is affected less negatively by some of the problems that came with eight-track players, like the tape stretching slightly. Then post-1974 and the OPEC oil crisis, vinyl became more expensive, which meant that records started being made much thinner, which meant you couldn't cut grooves as deeply, which meant you lost bass response, which again changed the sound of records – and also explains why when CDs came out, people started thinking they sounded better than records, because they *did* sound better than the stuff that was being pressed in the late seventies and early eighties, which was so thin it was almost transparent, even though they sounded nowhere near as good as the heavy vinyl pressings of the fifties and sixties. And then the amount of music one could pack into a CD encouraged longer tracks... A lot of eighties Hi-NRG and dance-pop music, like the records made by Stock, Aitken, and Waterman, has almost no bass but lots of skittering high-end percussion sounds -- tons of synthesised sleighbells and hi-hats and so on -- because a lot of disco equipment had frequency-activated lights, and the more high-end stuff was going on, the more the disco lights flashed... We'll look at a lot of these changes as we go along, but every single new format, every new way of playing an old format, every change in music technology, changes what music gets made quite dramatically. Lucas Hubert asks: “Black Sabbath being around the corner, how do you plan on dealing with Heavy Metal? I feel like for now, what is popular and what has had a big impact in Rock history coincide. But that kind of change with metal, no? (Plus, prog and metal are more based on albums than singles, I think.)” [Excerpt: Black Sabbath, “Sabbath Bloody Sabbath”] I plan on dealing with metal the same way I've been dealing with every other subgenre. We are, yes, getting into a period where influence and commercial success don't correlate quite as firmly as they did in the early years -- though really we've already been there for quite some time. I've done two episodes so far on the Byrds, a group who only had three top-twenty singles in the US and two in the UK, but only did a bonus episode on Herman's Hermits, who had fourteen in the US and seventeen in the UK. I covered Little Richard but didn't cover Pat Boone, even though Boone had the bigger hits with Richard's songs. In every subgenre there are going to be massive influences who had no hits, and people who had lots of hits but didn't really make much of a wider impact on music, and I'll be dealing with the former more than the latter. But also, I'll be dealing most with people who were influential *and* had lots of hits -- if nothing else because while influence and chart success aren't a one-to-one correlation, they're still somewhat correlated. So it's unlikely you'll see me cover your favourite Scandinavian Black Metal band who only released one album of which every copy was burned in a mysterious fire two days after release, but you can expect most of the huge names in metal to be covered. Though even there, simply because of the number of subgenres I'm going to cover, I'm going to miss some big ones. Related to the question about albums, Svennie asks “This might be a bit of a long winded question so just stick with me here. As the music you cover becomes more elaborate, and the albums become bigger in scale, how do you choose a song which you build the story around while also telling the story of that album? I ask this specifically with the White Album in mind, where you've essentially got four albums in one. To that end, what song would you feel defines the White Album?” [Excerpt: The Beatles, “Revolution #9”] Well, you'll see how I cover the White Album in episode one hundred and seventy-two -- we're actually going to have quite a long stretch with no Beatles songs covered because I'm going to backfill a lot of 1967 and then we're getting to the Beatles again towards the end of 1968, but it'll be another big one when we get there. But in the general case... the majority of albums to come still had singles released off them, and a lot of what I'm going to be looking at in the next year or two is still hit singles, even if the singles are by people known as album bands. Other times, a song wasn't a single, but maybe it was covered by someone else -- if I know I'm going to cover a rock band and I also know that one of the soul artists who would do rock covers as album tracks did a version of one of their songs, and I'm going to cover that soul artist, say, then if I do the song that artist covered I can mention it in the episode on the soul singer and tie the two episodes together a bit. In other cases there's a story behind a particular track that's more interesting than other tracks, or the track is itself a cover version of someone else's record, which lets me cover both artists in a single episode, or it's the title track of the album. A lot of people have asked me this question about how I'd deal with albums as we get to the late sixties and early seventies, but looking at the list of the next fifty episodes, there's actually only two where I had to think seriously about which song I chose from an album -- in one case, I chose the title track, in the other case I just chose the first song on the album (though in that case I may end up choosing another song from the same album if I end up finding a way to make that a more interesting episode). The other forty-eight were all very, very obvious choices. Gary Lucy asks “Do you keep up with contemporary music at all? If so, what have you been enjoying in 2022 so far…and if not, what was the most recent “new” album you really got into?” [Excerpt: Stew and the Negro Problem, "On the Stage of a Blank White Page"] I'm afraid I don't. Since I started doing the podcast, pretty much all of my listening time has been spent on going back to much older music, and even before that, when I was listening to then-new music it was generally stuff that was very much inspired by older music, bands like the Lemon Twigs, who probably count as the last new band I really got into with their album Do Hollywood, which came out in 2016 but which I think I heard in 2018. I'm also now of that age where 2018 seems like basically yesterday, and when I keep thinking "what relatively recent albums have I liked?" I think of things like The Reluctant Graveyard by Jeremy Messersmith, which is from 2010, or Ys by Joanna Newsom, which came out in 2006. Not because I haven't bought records released since then, but because my sense of time is so skewed that summer 1994 and summer 1995 feel like epochs apart, hugely different times in every way, but every time from about 2005 to 2020 is just "er... a couple of years ago? Maybe?" So without going through every record I've bought in the last twenty years and looking at the release date I couldn't tell you what still counts as contemporary and what's old enough to vote. I have recently listened a couple of times to an album by a band called Wet Leg, who are fairly new, but other than that I can't say. But probably the most recent albums to become part of my regular listening rotation are two albums which came out simultaneously in 2018 by Stew and the Negro Problem, Notes of a Native Song, which is a song cycle about James Baldwin and race in America, and The Total Bent, which is actually the soundtrack to a stage musical, and which I think many listeners to the podcast might find interesting, and which is what that last song excerpt was taken from. It's basically a riff on the idea of The Jazz Singer, but set in the Civil Rights era, and about a young politically-radical Black Gospel songwriter who writes songs for his conservative preacher father to sing, but who gets persuaded to become a rock and roll performer by a white British record producer who fetishises Black music. It has a *lot* to say about religion, race, and politics in America -- a couple of the song titles, to give you some idea, are "Jesus Ain't Sitting in the Back of the Bus" and "That's Why He's Jesus and You're Not, Whitey". It's a remarkable album, and it deals with enough of the same subjects I've covered here that I think any listeners will find it interesting. Unfortunately, it was released through the CDBaby store, which closed down a few months later, and unlike most albums released through there it doesn't seem to have made its way onto any of the streaming platforms or digital stores other than Apple Music, which rather limits its availability. I hope it comes out again soon. Alec Dann says “I haven't made it to the Sixties yet so pardon if you have covered this: what was the relationship between Sun and Stax in their heyday? Did musicians work in both studios?” [Excerpt: Booker T. and the MGs, "Green Onions"] I've covered this briefly in a couple of the episodes on Stax, but the short version is that Sun was declining just as Stax was picking up. Jim Stewart, who founded Stax, was inspired in part by Sam Phillips, and there was a certain amount of cross-fertilisation, but not that much. Obviously Rufus Thomas recorded for both labels, and there were a few other connections -- Billy Lee Riley, for example, who I did an episode on for his Sun work, also recorded at the Stax studio before going on to be a studio musician in LA, and it was actually at a Billy Lee Riley session that went badly that Booker T and the MGs recorded "Green Onions". Also, Sun had a disc-cutting machine and Stax didn't, so when they wanted to get an acetate cut to play for DJs they'd take it to Sun -- it was actually Scotty Moore, who was working for Sun as a general engineer and producer as well as playing RCA Elvis sessions by 1962, who cut the first acetate copy of "Green Onions". But in general the musicians playing at Stax were largely the next generation of musicians -- people who'd grown up listening to the records Sam Phillips had put out in the very early fifties by Black musicians, and with very little overlap. Roger Stevenson asks "This project is going to take the best part of 7 years to complete. Do you have contingency plans in case of major problems? And please look after yourself - this project is gong to be your legacy." [Excerpt: Bonzo Dog Doodah Band, "Button Up Your Overcoat"] I'm afraid there's not much I can do if major problems come up -- by major problems I'm talking about things that prevent me from making the podcast altogether, like being unable to think or write or talk. By its nature, the podcast is my writing and my research and my voice, and if I can't do those things... well, I can't do them. I *am* trying to build in some slack again -- that's why this month off has happened -- so I can deal with delays and short-term illnesses and other disruptions, but if it becomes impossible to do it becomes impossible to do, and there's nothing more I can do about it. Mark Lipson asks "I'd like to know which episodes you've released have been the most & least popular? And going forward, which episodes do you expect to be the most popular? Just curious to know what music most of your listeners listen to and are interested in." [Excerpt: Sly and the Family Stone, "Somebody's Watching You"] I'm afraid I honestly don't know. Most podcasters have extensive statistical tools available to them, which tell them which episodes are most popular, what demographics are listening to the podcast, where they are in the world, and all that kind of thing. They use that information to sell advertising spots, which is how they make most of their money. You can say "my podcast is mostly listened to by seventy-five year-olds who google for back pain relief -- the perfect demographic for your orthopedic mattresses" or "seven thousand people who downloaded my latest episode also fell for at least one email claiming to be from the wallet inspector last year, so my podcast is listened to by the ideal demographic for cryptocurrency investment". Now, I'm lucky enough to be making enough money from my Patreon supporters' generosity that I don't have to sell advertising, and I hope I never do have to. I said at the very start of the process that I would if it became necessary, but that I hoped to keep it ad-free, and people have frankly been so astonishingly generous I should never have to do ads -- though I do still reserve the right to change my mind if the support drops off. Now, my old podcast host gave me access to that data as standard. But when I had to quickly change providers, I decided that I wasn't going to install any stats packages to keep track of people. I can see a small amount of information about who actually visits the website, because wordpress.com gives you that information – not your identities but just how many people come from which countries, and what sites linked them. But if you're downloading the podcast through a podcast app, or listening through Spotify or Stitcher or wherever, I've deliberately chosen not to access that data. I don't need to know who my audience is, or which episodes they like the most -- and if I did, I have a horrible feeling I'd start trying to tailor the podcast to be more like what the existing listeners like, and by doing so lose the very things that make it unique. Once or twice a month I'll look at the major podcast charts, I check the Patreon every so often to see if there's been a massive change in subscriber numbers, but other than that I decided I'm just not going to spy on my listeners (though pretty much every other link in the chain does, I'm afraid, because these days the entire Internet is based on spying on people). So the only information I have is the auto-generated "most popular episodes" thing that comes up on the front page, which everyone can see, and which shows the episodes people who actually visit the site are listening to most in the last few days, but which doesn't count anything from more than a few days ago, and which doesn't count listens from any other source, and which I put there basically so new listeners can see which ones are popular. At the moment that's showing that the most listened episodes recently are the two most recent full episodes -- "Respect" and "All You Need is Love" -- the most recent of the Pledge Week episodes, episodes one and two, so people are starting at the beginning, and right now there's also the episodes on "Ooby Dooby", "Needles and Pins", "God Only Knows", "She Loves You" and "Hey Joe". But in a couple of days' time those last five will be totally different. And again, that's just the information from people actually visiting the podcast website. I've deliberately chosen not to know what people listening in any other way are doing -- so if you've decided to just stream that bit of the Four Tops episode where I do a bad Bob Dylan impression five thousand times in a row, you can rest assured I have no idea you're doing it and your secret is totally safe. Anyway, that's all I have time for in this episode. In a week or so I'll post a similar-length episode for Patreon backers only, and then a week or two after that the regular podcast will resume, with a story involving folk singers, jazz harmony, angelic visitations and the ghost of James Dean. See you then.

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Rachel Green is Director of Institutional Sales at Nuveen. She started her career in risk management and moved into a sales role in 2014.  She has been a prominent voice in the City of London on issues of diversity and inclusion and is the founder of The Skills Workshop, to help women and young people understand their career options, share stories and to identify with others as well to create a sense of belonging. Our conversation starts with Rachel's upbringing in the Caribbean and her move to London as a teenager.  She describes her entry into the world of finance as a "crash landing", which proves to have been a very fortuitous one. We discuss how she started to thrive in the industry and her move to sales.  The most extraordinary part of our discussion is the vision behind The Skills Workshop (https://diversityproject.com/theskillsworkshop) which Rachel launched in 2021, which involved over 60 seminars and 8,000 participants as part of a massive, concerted, volunteer effort. Rachel's description of how a simple gesture and exposure changed her life, and the hope that this effort will have the same, exponential, effect on thousands of life is a true definition of impact. One of the mentor's in Rachel's career has included Justin Onuekwusi, whose own podcast featured in the 2021 Fiftyfaces Podcast (https://www.podomatic.com/podcasts/fiftyfaces/episodes/2021-04-08T11_02_52-07_00) and who now has his own podcast series with the extraordinary Darren Johnson (see his own profile here: https://www.podomatic.com/podcasts/fiftyfaces/episodes/2021-09-08T01_56_57-07_00) The Rolling Start Podcast (https://audioboom.com/channels/5060750).Series 1 of the 2022 Fiftyfaces Podcast is brought to you with the kind support of Heard Capital, a Chicago-based asset manager invests in public equities in the technology, media, telecommunication, financial and industrial sectors.  The firm was founded in 2011 and manages assets via a long/short fund and a long-only fund. 

Darren Johnson is Chief Operating Officer in Listed Equities and Executive Director at Impax Asset Management, where he is responsible for Global Operations, including Portfolio Services, Technology, Change/Project Management and Client Onboarding. He previously worked in a series of accounting and operations roles.  Our conversation starts with his upbringing in South London and why he was born with a “silver spoon in his mouth”. We talk about the unlikely role model that emerged for him even at a very young age and how that character sowed the seeds for a career in the corporate world.  We turn then to his education and early career and reflect on the lack of empowerment that young professionals sometimes have and how this can deter engagement and motivation. We examine his career path, and the individuals who made it possible, as well as the choices made throughout that path.  In particular we look at the evolution of the asset management firm of today, and how remote working has changed it as well as the changes yet to come, which may shape the power centers of asset managers.  We also discuss the dramatic impact that ESG integration will have and the effect of regulation in this area. In our reflection section we look at how the investment industry and the practice of "mining for talent" can be compared to football (soccer) and the need to look outside the academy for talent.  We reflect on the importance of making excellence a habit and the wisdom of The Four Agreements, which are: don't take things personally, don't make assumptions, always try your best and be impeccable with your word.  Darren was the source for many guests on this podcast series as well as the Diverse Founders and VC series.  He is an active participant on the conference circuit as well as industry affinity groups designed to address low levels of diversity in finance. Series 4 is brought to you with the kind support of Federated Hermes, Inc., a leading global investment manager. Guided by their conviction that responsible investing is the best way to create wealth over the long term, their investment solutions span equity, fixed-income, alternative/private markets, multi-asset and liquidity strategies and a range of separately managed accounts, distributed through intermediaries worldwide.

0 (2s): Well, good morning harvest family. How's everybody doing today? Lots of good smile and hello to everyone watching on campus and at home online. We're so glad as always to come together and worship. So why don't you find some worshiping space and stand up? And you're able, I'd love to just get our bodies, our minds, our soul, everything. Just focus on those this morning. 1 (31s): Why don't we pray 0 (35s): His presence here today? Lord, thank you that we're two or three or more are gathered in your name that you promised to be in our midst. And so we know that you are here today. I just pray that your presence would stretch out all over this County, all over the world, wherever anyone might be tuning in and watching, we are one body connected Lord by your spirit. And I just thank you for what you're doing in our midst. I pray that you would continue just to meet us as we draw near to you, would you draw near to us? How would you lift our weariness? 1 (1m 16s): How would you 0 (1m 16s): Just put your yoke upon us? That is easy and light 1 (1m 20s): Today. 0 (1m 22s): Thank you that you carry our burdens. You lift our sorrows. 1 (1m 30s): You give us 0 (1m 32s): Joy instead of mourning and laughter instead of tears. 1 (1m 37s): Yes. 0 (1m 41s): So God come and be here in our midst or get our hearts. 1 (1m 53s): too deep or too dark. 1 (7m 52s): Thank you for your presence here today. Thank you for the price that you paid. You laid down your life for us in the midst of all of our faults and our scars. There's nothing that we could do to be good. We all fall short and that we all are in need of a savior. 1 (9m 33s): 0 (16m 43s): Know. Sometimes you put a new song in our hearts, so thank you, Jesus. Just for the wind in our sail this morning. Yeah. Sprayer read hearts this morning that are weary, are achy. Any bodies that are bruised and broken any healing. So you continue to come and move by your spirit and power. Set our feet upon a rock, a new song in our hearts. May we need walking, living testimonies of your faithfulness and of your power. 0 (17m 30s): When people see us, you're like, Oh man, what was different about this person? It's just joy radiating from their soul. There's a piece that's beyond my comprehension. They go through all they walk through and still have joy and peace in the mess because we have a savior. And if he's for us, who could be against us, I continue to just put those the deep in our heart, your amazing grace available to us each and every moment of every day Just like gets spread. 1 (18m 22s): 0 (19m 7s): Right. 1 (19m 13s): 0 (23m 12s): It was eyes to see years, 1 (23m 17s): No more. 0 (23m 26s): Would you open our hearts to receive all that you have for us this day? 1 (23m 34s): Okay. 0 (23m 34s): Heart's desire to be more like you got to be a reflection of your love in this world. So would you continue that good work in our hearts today? And we ask all of this in a name. Jesus. Oh, so sweet, such a sweet spirit in the house the day. Well, we're going to spread some of that sweet spirit to spread his peace this morning to one another. Would you greet someone around you and say, hello, let some announcements. And just a few moments. 1 (24m 4s): 2 (26m 48s): Find a seat. That'd be great. Thank you so much. Hey, I want to welcome everyone. Who's 3 (26m 55s): Sanctuary. And those of you who are in the loft and the patio area, and those who are tuning in online, thank you for being with us. My name is Ron. I'm one of the pastors here and this is a highlight of the service, the announcements, right? Yes. So today's a special day for many reasons. One is it's family Sunday. So family Sunday, we do every fourth, Sunday of the month. And the purpose is to kind of get families together, worship together. So kids that are first grade and up will be with mom and dad sitting in with, with them in the service. And if you have children younger than that, we do have classes available for them. 3 (27m 37s): And then in addition, another highlight of today is the fact that it is communion Sunday. And so when you came in to all the different venues, there were some community communion elements there, and you may have grabbed one already. If you didn't. One of the ushers will come around. When we get to communion part of the service and you can grab one then, and we're going to have communion together as well. But the other reason today is, is amazing is because it's donut Sunday. So if, if you head up the driveway to the info center area, you're going to find a whole bunch of donuts. So help yourself. And because we all need healthy food in our lives, don't we? Yes, we do. 3 (28m 19s): By the way, everything I'm mentioning right now this morning, you're going to find on our, on our website, on our harvest app and also at the info center, if you want to talk to somebody face to face about anything, that's going on, feel free to go up to the info center and there'll be there to help you out. Easter is coming up. So Easter is one of those things that happens every year. So unlike Christmas, Christmas is always on December. What does it? December 25th. That's right. So Easter changes. The date just kind of moves around. And so I'm never really sure what month or day or all, but it's this year. It, what is it? April 4th. Thank you. So April 4th, this year is Easter. So what we're doing a little different because of COVID things we're actually having Easter right here on the premises. 3 (29m 3s): It's going to be one service. It's going to be at 10 o'clock and we're going to be outside. Everybody's going to be outside up at the upper parking lot area. We're going to be setting a big, a big stage, can have live bound band out there. We're going to be doing baptisms. And so if there's somebody that if you want to get baptized or someone that you know, then let us know, you can either send us an email stop by the info table. You can sign up and you'll you, we will contact you and meet with you about, about, about getting baptized. And then in addition, we're going to be setting up about 600 chairs up there. All right. So with that, we're going to be needing help. You'll be hearing about this, going to be needing help to do set up and clean up and just different things, greeting and things for the service. 3 (29m 43s): So Easter is one of those annual times of year where it's a great time to invite people that don't normally come to church. And you know how some people, when you invite them to church, they're like worried that the, the roof is going to cave in on them. So this is an outdoor service. So they're not to worry about that. Although there are some eucalyptus trees kind of close by. So that might be a concern, but, but invite friends, family, those who, who, you know, really would benefit from an Easter service. So there's some other things going on. I'll just make mention of a few of them. There's a golfing group. That's going to be gathering at Cypress Ridge next Sunday at one o'clock stop by info center. They'll let you know about that. 3 (30m 24s): There's a good yarn club, so that they're going to be gathering March 13th at five o'clock. And there's a men's event coming up. It's the M six evening gathering. It's kinda been put on hold through COVID but now it's starting up again. So the date on that is, is March 15th. And it's going to be out at thousand Hills ranch where it's always been in the past. So guys, I would encourage you to take the opportunity to get involved in that. All right. So the last thing I want to make mention of this morning is so throughout this year, on the fourth, Sunday of every month, family Sunday, we're having a, another, a new missionary come. So these are missionaries that we support we've supported. 3 (31m 5s): So this morning, in fact, Darren, go ahead and make your way up. Let's welcome, Darren. This is Darren Johnson. So Darren Johnson is from child evangelism fellowship. And he's my baby brother in Christ. Yes. Yes. So we've been supporting harvest church has been supporting financially and prayerfully CEF for many, many years. So you might be familiar with the good news clubs. So they're, they're under the umbrella of child evangelism fellowship. So Darren's here with us this morning. Gonna share a little bit about the ministry. He's got a table set up outside. If you want more info, go talk to him and Darren, really happy to have you with us today. 4 (31m 47s): Okay. Thank you so much proof once more, that good things come in, small packages. 1 (31m 52s): 4 (31m 55s): We're close enough where I can teach you. Right. Okay. Good. All right. So we just want to thank you guys so much. You've been such a blessing to this ministry and all the kids that reaches. And a lot of, you know, we were in over two thirds of the elementary schools before this whole COVID thing came down the pike and we are just pivoting and scrambling to, to do our very best to reach kids, right where they're at. So right now we, we have 20 clubs going, 11 of them are online and nine are in person and we're just setting up in parks, church, parking lots, wherever we can to, to, to reach these kids. But I, one thing I just want to mention know, this is a hard time, especially for kids, it's our time for everybody, you know, no matter where you're at and how things should be handled, we all know that, you know, it's rattled a lot of people and there's a lot of fear going on in the world right now, a lot of confusion. 4 (32m 44s): And if you think about what that looks like from a child's perspective, you know, they're looking at the people that normally have it all together for them, their security, even though we know we're supposed to get our security from God, you know, kids do draw that from their parents and adults and, and, and they're looking at their parents and they're seeing them nervous and confused, and that just kind of feeds into their lives in a pretty big way. So, you know, I was kind of reminded of this. I've got a little five-year-old daughter, you know, and she just asked me point blank, one day, she goes, dad, are you scared of COVID? I thought, Oh, Whoa. Like I never told her that. But you know, she could pick up on things because her life is very different. Now, you know, kids are being told you can't go to the park. You can't go to school. 4 (33m 26s): You can't go to the water park or the play structure, or all these things are normally used to doing. And for a child, like my daughter is five. And you think about what a percentage of that life, this whole Corona confusion has been over her, right? She's five. I mean, this has been going on for like a year and a half and probably about two years back as far as she can really remember. So this is pretty much her normal at this point. So there's kids that just are growing up with this and we have this huge need and opportunity to, to anchor them to what really matters, right? God, his truth, eternal things that their hope. I mean, once our hope is in this world, we're in big trouble. Aren't we, our hope has to be in Jesus Christ. 4 (34m 9s): There's nothing else that we'll be able to, to get us into heaven or to give us a hope in this world. There's nothing else that can really make us secure. So that's our mission is to take that message of hope to the kids. We're so thankful for your partnership in that. And we just appreciate all you guys do. A lot of you have gotten involved over the years and we'd love to, to keep that going and just please feel free to come by and talk with me. If you have any questions, I've got a great little tool. I'd love to hand out to you guys. I wished I'd. I realized after my daughter said that I should sit down with her and go over this because it's just a little, you know, a little booklet to go on a child's level to take them through, Hey, you know, why is the world confusing? 4 (34m 51s): Where does our hope really lie? Help them know they don't have to be alone, right? God will go through everything with us. And he'll, he loves you. He'll, he'll help you through whatever challenge you're facing. So thank you guys for your support and partnership. And please keep us in prayer. We we've, we are excited about what God has opened the door to us to do even admits these challenging times, but we're never satisfied, right? We want to keep reaching every child and make sure the gospel is going out to all of them. So thank you so much. 5 (35m 31s): Thanks Darren. Appreciate coming in Sharon for us. Hey, my name is Jeremy. I'm the youth 6 (35m 38s): And family pastor here at harvest church. And pastor Steve is headed back from his step-mom's Memorial service in Colorado. So he's not with us this morning. So he asked me to step up. And so I get to open up the word of God. A few will be in acts chapter 14 today, but man, I really appreciate what Darren is doing in the schools and what that ministry is doing. You know, a number of years ago, I, when my family and I were living in Santa Santa Barbara, I interviewed for the director position of CF down there and actually came up and met Darren and shouted him for a day. And it's just amazing. The door that the Lord has opened in the schools, even, even during COVID I know things have changed, but he's really, they shifted to adjust for those things. 6 (36m 26s): But God has an amazing thing happening in the life of our students. And I may have shared this with you before you may have heard this, but I think it's worth repeating, you know, DL moody came back from a, a revival and they asked him, well, how did it go? You know, how many people were saved? And he, his response was two and 5 (36m 46s): A half. And that was met with 6 (36m 49s): Kind of a blank stare. What do you mean two and a half? You mean two adults and a child. 5 (36m 52s): He said, no, two children and an adult. And he said, when you, 6 (36m 58s): You save a child, you save a life a whole life. And that's why I believe in student ministry is like the utmost important. Whether you're in schools, whether here at church, it is so important. 5 (37m 11s): And you know, these, 6 (37m 14s): Those pouring into the life of the youth are making a change to a life a whole life. And it's not an insult to those who are older when they come to Christ. But God, because God is calling you to walk with him, no matter how long you have walked in your own path, he's calling you to join him in his path. So the encouragement is parents, grandparents keep the course, keep loving on these students, keep teaching them the truth. And that is what we're going to discuss today is the truth in our culture. And really to be aware of that 5 (37m 45s): Isn't as was 6 (37m 48s): Pairing this week. And, you know, I got asked on Wednesdays, Steve asked if I was able to, to share today. And he said, Hey, it'd be really cool to get some testimonies of some youth students to come up. And so I approached a few, used a few students on Wednesday and said, Hey, would you be willing to come and give your testimony on Sunday? And it was met with like this deer in the headlight look like, Oh, this is only a few days away. I don't know if I can do that. And off, and to the response that I got was, I don't really have a testimony. I don't have a, I don't have a car. I don't have this kind of crazy story. And I think often our minds, a testimony is when God's turned us away from crazy gnarly stuff, and then we've walked with him. But what about the testimony of a simple walk of obedience to God and his word? 5 (38m 31s): What about that testimony? And these, these students, as you give your life 6 (38m 36s): To the Lord and you walk with him, I look at the adults out here, think of the pain and the suffering and the struggle that you'll be saved from. If you just simply 5 (38m 47s): Walk with the Lord, that's right. That's 6 (38m 50s): An amazing testimony to simply walk with the Lord. Can I get an amen on that one? 5 (38m 54s): All right, let me pray. And then I'm gonna jump in Lord. You are on the move Lord and display 6 (39m 10s): Right with our culture. Despite what are the things that around us sort of, we trust in you. We trust 5 (39m 14s): The truth of your word, or do you speak to us this morning? Will you reveal our condition, Lord? And will you show us who you are, Lord and what you came to do in Jesus name? We pray. Amen. So let me tell you a little bit about my youth. 6 (39m 34s): Now, had you told me I would have a, a job in public speaking 5 (39m 38s): When I was in grade 6 (39m 40s): School, I would have ran away from my life. Like public speaking was never on my radar. It was the worst thing. It was the last thing in the world I wanted to do because I was pretty, I was pretty much a nerd. Okay. Our family genetics, we had bad eyesight. Okay. So you can imagine Jeremy with glasses. And in fact, my brother's eyesight was a little bad. I'm going to throw him under the bus. He was getting really bad grades at school. So the teacher said, well, maybe Brian needs to sit in the front of school. And so he sat in the front of class and that helped. And then the teacher saw, man, he's still struggling. He's this bright, smart kid, what what's going on? So she said, Hey, she talked to my parents, you should have his eyes checked out. So sure enough, he goes to the eye doctor and his eyes would bad. 6 (40m 22s): So he gets a pair of glasses and he goes into the classroom and he looks up and he's like, Oh, I never knew this. The flag had stars on it, poor kid. Right? That's the eyesight that I haven't. And at one point in my youth, I was actually given bifocals to where like, they like not the hidden bifocals, but the ones with the lions, you know? And so you can only imagine how much 5 (40m 48s): Flack I got from, from other students. 6 (40m 51s): So I was that kid. I was never the cool kid. I was, I was that kid. And I grew up in a really loving, awesome family. And, you know, we, we had a pet dog, but being the first born being one to have responsibility, I thought, man, I want to have my own animals are my own things to take care of. And I looked around different animals, like turtles, whatever. And I narrowed the search down to ants. I wanted one of those. And from you remember those and farms, how cool are those little and farms? You know, like you get to observe the aunts and what they're doing underground and those tunnels and how strong they are. They can lift up heavy things and move things around. And, and it was pretty easy to care for. So ants made the perfect thing and I would take a little droplets and add drops 5 (41m 35s): Of water and I would add their food as necessary. But you just got to observe these things. Well, one day I returned after being out of the house and I looked and I said, huh, there's what is that little thing in my aunt farm? I don't recognize that. And I could see that the answer very attractive 6 (41m 54s): Into it. And they were starting to bite off little pieces and take it down into their tunnels. 5 (41m 60s): And they were dying. I was like, that was weird. So I got tweezers pulled that thing out of there. And I started asking around and sure enough, my brother had snuck in and put ant poison into my ant farm. 6 (42m 17s): Am I answering or dying? So how do I stop this? Like, do I yell at them a little and from stop eating the poison, stopping the poison. Don't do it. It's going to hurt you. It tastes good. I know, but don't do it. I, as a human, I can't yell down to my aunt. So what do I do? I want to become an aunt so I can tell my aunts don't eat the 5 (42m 39s): Now, before you really get mad at me and my brother for poison my ass. That's actually just a story. Okay. I made the story up, 6 (42m 47s): Never had an ant farm. My brother never poisoned them, but it speaks to something true. There speaks to this poison. That's in, been inserted 5 (42m 55s): For our lives. And what do we do with it? 6 (43m 1s): Poison can come in many different 5 (43m 4s): Ways, many different attractive 6 (43m 5s): Packaging. Some poison makes us feel good. Some poison looks fun. Some poison, everyone else has taken. 5 (43m 13s): Why don't we, some poison makes us feel better about ourselves 6 (43m 20s): Came to this passage of scripture in acts chapter 14. And this is actually where we were on Wednesday night. How to do with that story, that, okay. All right. I repeated the story. They heard it on a Wednesday such. So acts chapter 14, let's check it out. 5 (43m 37s): It's 6 (43m 38s): Paul and Barnabas Barnabas, his first missionary 5 (43m 40s): Trip, the first mystery 6 (43m 42s): Journey. And they come to this town of Iconia. Now it says in acts chapter 14, verse one, 5 (43m 49s): It happened 6 (43m 50s): In, I conium that they went together to the synagogue of the Jews. And so spoke that a great multitude, both of the Jews and of the Greeks believed verse two, but the unbelieving Jews stirred up the Gentiles and poisoned their minds 5 (44m 3s): Leans against the brethren. 6 (44m 6s): The work was happening. Paul and Barnabas were having amazing ministry that it was stirring up the whole town. And so then the gent, the Jews, the unbelieving Jews then snuck in and began to poison the minds of the Gentiles. They began to insert something other than 5 (44m 21s): Truth, other than the word of God. So what was that poison for them 6 (44m 27s): Specifically say, but I believe it's this workspace, religion, Judaism. They wanted Judaism to flow back into the church 5 (44m 35s): And they 6 (44m 36s): Were against what Paul and his message. 5 (44m 40s): There is a workspace based religion. Wasn't the gospel, 6 (44m 44s): Wasn't the gospel based on grace by 5 (44m 46s): Faith. 6 (44m 48s): And so if that was their poison, what is the poison that we can take in as well? 5 (44m 55s): What is the poison that we can take in as well? 6 (44m 59s): Same, right? That, that, that, that poisonous meshes is still around. That that we can add to what Jesus did in the cross. That when Jesus said to tell us it is finished on the cross, that it wasn't actually done. I have to be a good person to earn my way I have to do this 5 (45m 14s): Or that. That is still some 6 (45m 16s): Of the poison that flows in our culture. One of the things I hear a lot about now is my truth. Have you heard the claim? My truth, 5 (45m 28s): That 6 (45m 28s): The truth no longer, there's not a truth. There's not one truth. There's multiple truths. And you can come to a conversation. Well, that conflicts with my true, see my truth says this. Oh, but, but my truth, no, there's no, there's this, this battle for truth in our culture 5 (45m 45s): World. One of the things, 6 (45m 50s): The things I think plaguing the youth to his age is go try everything first and see if you like it. See if it sticks, good, try everything first as if it won't harm you there 5 (45m 60s): Your life. 6 (46m 4s): What about being young and dumb? That's like one of the things going around, 5 (46m 9s): It's a poison they'll hurt 6 (46m 12s): The rest of your life. Cause choices that you make now can affect you the rest 5 (46m 15s): Of your life. What about our 6 (46m 18s): Culture? Where socialism and communism is becoming praised in our culture. It's being taught in our schools of critical theory and cultural Marxism, or where companies, big tech companies have the ability to, to monitor what we and I read and how we get our news and all these things of just the censorship 5 (46m 40s): And the truth 6 (46m 40s): I feel is getting harder and harder to find big pharmaceutical companies are making millions, if not billions, on telling us how our health 5 (46m 50s): Need to do 6 (46m 53s): One of the lies, our cultures, there's more than two genders. God said, let there be male and female man, and woman that, 5 (47m 2s): That God that wasn't it. We have to have more genders now. 6 (47m 7s): Jesus, isn't returning and so much more. There's so much that's being attacked in our culture. And I often ask the question, how much poison is too much. 5 (47m 19s): And what do we do 6 (47m 21s): When we find this poison, that's kind of come into our, our thoughts in our heads, in our, in our culture. What do we do? This is what, this is what Paul and did verse three. It says, therefore, they stayed there a long time. Speaking boldly in the Lord who was bearing witness to the word of his grace granting signs and wonders to be done by their hands. What was the antidote in their day? 5 (47m 47s): It was the truth. The word of God, the word of his grace, that was 6 (47m 52s): The serum, the antivenom. It was the word of God or the logos, 5 (47m 58s): The truth, you know, 6 (48m 0s): As we continue, you know, we've always been marching towards the end 5 (48m 4s): Times, 2000 years. 6 (48m 6s): We've always been more, but you start to read Jesus's words about end time deception. You start to look at the book of revelation. You realize that deception is only going to get harder and harder. So it makes truth all the more important, 5 (48m 22s): Yeah. 6 (48m 22s): Verse four says, but the multitude of the city was divided part sided with the Jews and part with the apostle. And that's the truth. That truth divides. And it's a hard message. These 5 (48m 33s): Culture trues divides, the gospel brings division. 6 (48m 39s): I only read about Matt in Matthew chapter 10, how Jesus talks about even that division can come into homes. 5 (48m 44s): The families between loved ones, 6 (48m 50s): Favorite statements in the Bible, favorite words in the Bible. 5 (48m 53s): But God, because 6 (48m 57s): The what's happening around us, we look at the culture. We look at the situations we are, Oh my what, what is happening? What is going on? What can be done and yet reread, but 5 (49m 8s): God Romans 6 (49m 10s): Five eight, but God demonstrates his own love towards us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us, it really looked really, really dark for us. But God, and I want to say that God is on the move in the life of our youth. And that's what I'm so excited to share with you this morning. 5 (49m 27s): You know, you think of 6 (49m 28s): Different use in the time of Bible. Think about the youth and time of when Daniel was 5 (49m 31s): Living. These young men were taken out of their Homeland and placed in a very dark idolatrous, poisonous culture in Babylon, in the thing 6 (49m 48s): That surrounded them and their friends and the pressures. And yet Daniel and his friends, even in their youth, were able to recognize the poison and abstain from those things. Daniel chapter one verse eight says, but Daniel purposed in his heart that he would not defile himself with the portion of the King's delicacies, nor with the wine, which, which he 5 (50m 9s): Drank. Therefore he requested 6 (50m 12s): Of the chief of the Unix that he might not defile himself 5 (50m 16s): Meet 6 (50m 16s): And drink that were offered to idols to fake gods. He said, he didn't ask the question. How much can I have and still be 5 (50m 23s): Okay if I just have a once a week, 6 (50m 28s): Twice a week, he didn't say that. He said, I don't want any of that thing. I don't want any of that. So impressive by Daniel. And I asked, I wonder if I would have what I would have been like, I think we all do. What if we wouldn't like, if we've been dropped in that culture, Daniel had the thought like he could have said, well, you know, God abandoned me. So I'm going to do what feels good to me. He could have said, well, there's no parents around. So I'll do what I want. He could've said new location. I'm going to live my best life ever. But he didn't. He said, no, I don't want any of it. Even if I had it even at a cost because he knew the truth in this poison or live comes so often in the form of idols as well. 6 (51m 18s): I do idols. I would define as things that we prop up to look at to save us, to look for help in our situations acts chapter 14, verse 15, Paul would say those things are useless things. I mean, we could think of a list of the different idols that we have in our culture. The adultery that goes on, we don't have those little things on our shelf any longer, but we have these icons or statuses around us, money, wealth, Hey, those things are going to save me. If everything goes South in our economy, those, the money that I got, my bank account, that's going to save me. 6 (51m 58s): We looked at different political parties to save us. We look for self, for health. We have often so often put comfort and safety as idol on our shelf. If you think about it, comfort and safety. What about status or appearance or success or business? Can we put others on that place? Can we lift them up maybe as a spouse, boyfriend, girlfriend, maybe a prospective boyfriend or girlfriend. What about different public figures? Can we put them in a place in our lives to speak into us or to, or to idolize? 6 (52m 42s): What about sports actors? Musicians, you know, I hope I'm not taking this out of context, but Billie Eilish, right? That's how you may say her name. Okay. I got it wrong on Wednesday. Totally got wrong in a, in a commercial for her documentary that was coming out. She is at a concert of young fans who really idolized her, who put her in this place because of her, the words, her lyrics. And they put her in this place of like, Oh man, sh I, I just got to come and relate to her words. And she says this to her, her concert. She says, Hey, you guys need to be okay because you are the reason that I'm okay. 6 (53m 27s): Think about the young people that are going to listen to a concert and saying, okay, I relate to her songs. I relate to her music. I need, I feel good when I listened to her stuff makes me feel good about myself. And then they go to a concert and the, and the person who's singing these songs who wrote these words says, well, I'm going to be okay. But only if you're okay. So if you're not okay, that I'm not okay, it's dangerous. What we lift up in our culture. So if that is the poison, that's around us, what is the remedy to that poison? And what do we do? Well, it's the truth. Not a truth, not my truth. Right? 6 (54m 7s): Jesus says, I am the way the truth and the life. Steve has been asking the question all month and made me think about this morning. He says, the question was, do you want me, what do you want me to do today? What do you want me to do today? My encouragement was looking at a fusion six. What does the fusion six say? He says, put on the full armor of God. What is the first thing? What is the first bit of armor that God asks us to put on the belt of truth? It all starts with truth. 6 (54m 49s): What is truth? Because as we look around and we see all this craziness in our culture, Ephesians six, six verse 12 says we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against these powers against these principalities, right? Tim Mackie would say that humanity's real problem is not merely another human. It's the spiritual powers that animate our cultural idols that inspire hatred, division and violence. Those are the things that we have to put on our armor for Were Adam and Eve wearing their armor in the garden. When the lies came against them. 6 (55m 31s): When the deceiver came up and began to speak these words about the truth, 1 (55m 35s): 6 (55m 41s): Genesis three verse four says, then the serpent said to the woman, you will not surely die for. God knows that in the day that you eat of it, your eyes will be opened and you will be like, God knowing good and evil. He brought the light to Adam and Eve in the garden. St. Well, God's actually withholding. God's actually not good. He's withholding something good from you. Even though man, and woman were created to be image bearers, right? Made in the image of God. Even though there are image bears, he said, nah, that God's still holding something back. And actually this, I can offer you what God's holding back. And that's the knowledge of good and evil. And you can actually elevate your status. 6 (56m 22s): You can actually become something than what God has called you to be by eating of this tree of the fruit. He said, you will be like, God. And that is the basis of the, of the, of the foundation of evolution that, that we were created to be something. And then we can somehow elevate ourselves beyond that. What did, what would humanity be like if, if we were not living out the effects of that choice in there in the garden, 5 (56m 55s): Jesus, in the wilderness, 6 (56m 59s): That same deceiver, that same, you surfer that same serpent came and spoke to Jesus out in the wilderness, tempting him as well that Jesus could have sustenance outside of God, that glory, without the crown of thorns, that there could be a kingdom without the cross draw, all the lies, all the poison that Satan brought before Jesus and Jesus, every time he used the word he used the truth. Matthew records, Jesus saying every time it is written, he always went back to that foundation of it is written. 6 (57m 43s): We have to go back to that foundation. You know, Luke chapter six talks about a man building a house who had to dig deep and go all the way to the foundation. He had to place that foundation on the rock. And that foundation is what was he had to build his house on. He had to build his life on and that when storms came, that house wouldn't move because it was on the rock. And that is hard work to dig down until you get to the rock. 5 (58m 15s): But we have to stand on that rock. 6 (58m 20s): I believe God is on the move. And let me see, see that even even stronger. I know God is on the move because I've seen it in our, in our youth. You know, it's crazy as you look around what the internet has done to the global youth community, all of a sudden all the youth around the world because of the internet are being influenced by the same musicians, the same social media influencers, by the same things in they're all coming together. And it's often not for good, but I can tell you what is happening here in our five cities area in our harvest youth group. Let me tell you quickly about that harvest Corps started a couple of weeks ago. 6 (59m 5s): And we started for those students who want to go a little bit deeper in their faith. And we started by taking a w Tozer knowledge of the Holy, a book that I read in college 20 years ago. And we started by taking that book and then becoming, going into these discussion. So the students go home, they have 5 (59m 23s): Their own book, they read 6 (59m 25s): A couple of chapters. And then every other week we discuss those chapters 5 (59m 30s): And 6 (59m 31s): The conversations, the discussions that we have in those, those rooms 5 (59m 36s): Are amazing. You know, I bought 6 (59m 38s): Twenty-five books thinking, okay, this is a step of faith. Thinking that 25 students are going to want to read AWS Tozer and discuss it. 5 (59m 46s): You know what? There's 25 students 6 (59m 51s): And there's more students I wanted to come. They just had sports and other activities. So it's amazing to see that these students are wanting to press in and pursue God. And it's been, it was phenomenal conversation. I'm looking forward that to go for continually, do you know, harvest gathering or Wednesday night youth groups we have between 50 and 60 students each week show up here. 5 (1h 0m 12s): Sometimes even a couple of weeks, we've even had over 70 students 6 (1h 0m 17s): That want to meet in person. They want to fellowship. They want to hang out with their friends. 5 (1h 0m 22s): They want to play 6 (1h 0m 23s): A few fun activities games. And then we have worship bands, student led, worship bands that come up and lead the other students in worship. And it is phenomenal. We have three worship bands. We have to rotate each 5 (1h 0m 35s): Week. These students 6 (1h 0m 38s): Are leading each other in worship. And then I get up and say, Hey, open up your Bibles. And we go verse by verse through a book of the Bible, we started out in the book of John and now we're going through our working our way through acts. And it is phenomenal because they listened to me for 20 to 25 5 (1h 0m 52s): Minutes. That's 6 (1h 0m 54s): Amazing. Right? And on a Wednesday night, and there's a hunger, I see this hunger for the 5 (1h 1m 2s): Truth, 6 (1h 1m 6s): Hunger for a truth in our generation. The other question that Steve's been asking, his second question was, what do you want me? What, what do you want to do through me today? What do you want to do through me today? 5 (1h 1m 20s): Fusions 6 (1h 1m 21s): Chapter four, verse 15 says, but speaking the truth in love may grow up in all things to him who is the head Christ and God has called us to speak the truth in love. 5 (1h 1m 38s): You know, I, I 6 (1h 1m 40s): Start out this conversation, this message about truth by lying to you, right by lying about my aunt farm. Somebody pointed out the irony of that between services. You start out a message about truth by line. I see how it is Jeremy, but like my pretend little and farm, you can't yell down on those poor sick little ants. God calls us to go down. I mean, Jesus ultimately was the one who came down to our condition. And if the bridge between us and ants is this much, the bridge between God and man is infinitely more. And he came to speak the truth and love to a hurting and lost world. 5 (1h 2m 20s): And as we transitioned now into this into a time of communion, I see this communion cups as the truth serum says, if you did not get a cup yet you can raise your hand into the ushers and greeters can pass out some cups. Let me pray. While we buy. Those are passed out heavenly father and a culture that is anti-God anti truth. 5 (1h 3m 1s): You pray that your truth would just flood us would just invade us. Lord, your love for us. You're coming to earth to die for us Lord. And that you pay the ultimate price with your body. So you can welcome us into your kingdom. Pray that the truth of speaking is just speak and sink down deep into our hearts. Lord Jesus name. We pray. Amen. This is verses actually after Paul gives the communion verses, he says this, he says, therefore, whoever eats of this bread or drinks of this cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty of the blood, the body and the blood of the Lord, but let a man examine himself. 5 (1h 3m 50s): And so let him eat of the bread and drink of the cup for you, eats and drinks in an unworthy manner, eats and drinks judgment to himself, not discerning the Lord's body. So before we partake, let's take this next song to really dwell on what poison have we partaken of what poison have we allowed into our hearts and our minds? Are there any lies that we believe? Was it like I conium where morality and works have entered into us. We pray that the Holy spirit, I now would just reveal those things to you. And after the first song, we'll take of the drink in the cup. 0 (1h 4m 31s): You'll stand together as a worship. We're cheeses. 0 (1h 4m 44s): 6 (1h 6m 50s): So delivered to you. Does the Lord Jesus on the same night in which he was betrayed, took bread. And when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, take eat. This is my body, which is broken for you. Do this in remembrance of me. So together let's take up the bread. And in the same manner, he also took the cup after supper saying, this is the cup of the new covenant of my blood. This do, as often as you drink it in remembrance of me, for as often as you eat of this bread and drink of the cup, you proclaim the Lord's death till he comes. 1 (1h 7m 40s): Thank you, Lord 0 (1h 12m 55s): Thank you that we are your sons and daughters. We belong to you. There's a place for us. We belong. Just let that soak in for just a moment. Do you belong as a place for you? There's a place for you here. There's a place for you and God's kingdom and your father's house. Those who felt like outcasts all their lives. Like you never fit in, like, something's wrong with you? The Lord says you belong. I've chosen you. I've called you by name. 0 (1h 13m 36s): I just pray Lord that all this week that we would be reminded of these trues again and again, that we've heard today, that they would take root deep in our hearts and bear good fruit that we love people with your kind of love that we would be examples. Hope in a world. That's feeling pretty hopeless right now in so many ways, which you shine through us, make people know we're Christians by our love reflect. 1 (1h 14m 8s): Thank 0 (1h 14m 8s): You for your presence here with us. We love you. Jesus. Thank you so much for joining us today. If anyone would like prayer this morning, we would love to pray with you. If you want to head on towards the front, we'll have some volunteers and staff that would love to come alongside. You have a wonderful day, say hello to someone, grab a doughnut. If there's any laptops and more copy, and we'll see you again next Sunday, bye to everyone watching online. We'll see you real soon.

Lambpardy is back, but not as you know it! It's the dawn of a new age of Lambpardy. Gone are the previous contestants, gone is the winner-stays-on format, replaced instead with shiny new contestants and an even shinier, even newer tournament-style championship! The winner from today's show will not be back for the next one, they'll face off against the next two winners, then we'll reset back to square one until there's three champions, who will face off against each other and so on and forever until every film fan in the world has been defeated and then, and only then, will we truly know the Lambpardy champardy.First on the podiums of this terrifying new order are Aaron Neuwirth, Cameron Kanachki and Darren Johnson. Who will ascend to the next level? Listen to find out who wins, as well as hear us discuss Hamilton (many times), Possession, David Byrne's American Utopia, Mad Max and Blackbird, amongst others!00:00 Introductions04:12 Lambpardy Round 125:23 Get to know the contestants30:32 Double Lambpardy51:08 Final Lambpardy54:47 Rants, Raves & Reviews68:52 The Rambling Ramblers' Movie Game84:29 Plugs91:14 Out-takesThe show can be found on iTunes, but the Lambcast archives are now also available on YourListen.com, so head over there to find all the past shows available for downloading and listening too! If you're interested, you too can be a LAMBcaster - we love new blood! For more information on the LAMBcast, check out the topic at the LAMB Forums. Music provided royalty-free by Kevin MacLeod's Incompetech website. Big thanks to Kevin for providing this service. Opening song by Cake. The LAMBcast loves feedback, too, so if you've got any suggestions for the show, leave it in the comments section at the LAMB or contact us on Twitter, @lambcast. Please visit and like our Facebook page, and finally, we're on iTunes, and would still love a review, even if it's a bad one. Thanks for listening!